FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 4, 2007
College Park, MD -- American Studies at the University of Maryland is pleased to announce the addition of two new faculty members to the Department and Program. Dr. Christina Hanhardt (Ph.D., American Studies, New York University) and Dr. Jeffrey McCune (Ph.D., Performance Studies, Northwestern University) are joining the Department in fall 2007 as tenure-track assistant professors.
The recruitment of these scholars came out of this spring’s LGBT Studies faculty search. Dr. Hanhardt will have a joint appointment in American Studies and LGBT Studies, while Dr. McCune will have a joint appointment in American Studies and Women’s Studies. Dr. Bonnie Thornton Dill, professor and chair of Women’s Studies, and Dr. Nancy Struna, professor and chair of American Studies, actively pursued the support of the Provost and College of Arts and Humanities Dean James Harris to be able to bring both of these outstanding scholars to campus.
Drs. Hanhardt and McCune will bring exciting and high quality scholarship and teaching to American Studies at Maryland. Dr. Hanhardt’s research and teaching interests include media studies, cultural geography, urban studies, sexual minority social movements and counter publics. Her dissertation is entitled “‘Safe Space’: Sexual Minorities, Uneven Urban Development, and the Politics of Violence.” She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.
Dr. McCune’s foci include popular culture, critical race/gender/sexuality theory, masculinities, whiteness studies, and 20th-century African American culture. He is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass Institute, and his dissertation was entitled “Doin’ the Down Low, Remixin’ the Closet: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Sexual Passing.”
The American Studies, Women’s Studies and LGBT Studies communities look forward to welcoming these exemplary young scholars in the fall.
The American Studies Department and Program at the University of Maryland is one of the oldest such programs in the United States, having operated continuously since 1945. For much of its history, the Program has been nationally recognized for its contributions to the field, which initially entwined history and literature. The Department offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees.
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