Emeriti

James Fenimore Cooper; Literature and Culture; Literature and History

I spent my entire professional career in Cal State Fullerton 's American Studies Department, beginning when I was fresh—very fresh--from graduate school in 1972. I taught two of our general education classes, Introduction to American Studies and American Character, throughout my years here, enjoying the diverse backgrounds and aspirations typically found among students in GE courses. I enjoyed teaching tremendously at every level, however--in large classes and small ones, from an introductory course to a graduate seminar.

Several characteristics of my teaching changed over the years, but one thing remained the same: from my first semester in the department until my retirement, I told my students that I wanted them to have many more questions at the end of a course than they had at the beginning. I continued to be guided by a belief, nicely expressed by the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, that “criticism is a form of optimism. Only silence is pessimistic.”

I began my career specializing in the topic of ethnic diversity in our society, in particular the culture of Americans with an Irish Catholic heritage. I long ago set aside that specific research interest, turning my research to issues of gender and sexuality, especially meanings of masculinity in America 's past and present. Despite that shift in focus, there was continuity in my concerns: I remained interested in cultural diversity and cultural conflict, in the various ways that Americans have negotiated their differences and occasionally have found common ground. Lately, in both my courses and my research, I added to this longtime concern for diversity an interest in the history of the emotions, the history of the body, and visual culture, especially vernacular (or everyday) photography.

The American Studies Department was a very different, certainly a much smaller, operation when I arrived in 1972.  Over those years I had great experiences as the first adviser to our student association, the department chair, and the graduate program adviser.  As the senior member of the department, my greatest single source of pride was the fact that I had a hand in hiring nearly all of my outstanding full-time colleagues.

Full of unknown territory--with surprises, discoveries, and new ideas likely to be just beyond the horizon—teaching, research, and writing have given me abundant opportunity for refreshment, reflection, and renewal. That itself was a refreshing thought as I neared the end of five decades at CSUF.

Degrees

• 1976, Ph.D., Brandeis University
• 1970, M.A., Brandeis University
• 1966, A.B., University of California, Davis

Curriculum Vitae  

Gender and sexuality, especially American men's history and men's relationships with each other

Visual culture, especially vernacular photography

American literature and culture

• AMST 201  Introduction to American Studies  
• AMST 301  American Character  
• AMST 377  Prejudice in America   
• AMST 401T Literature and Culture  
• AMST 401T The Body and American Culture  
• AMST 401T  War and American Culture  
• AMST 407  American Humor  
• AMST 413  The American Male  
• AMST 439  American Photographs as Cultural Evidence  
• AMST 468  Culture in Turmoil:  1960s America  
• AMST 473 Sexual Orientations and American Culture  
• AMST 502 American Prejudice in Theory and Actuality 
• AMST 502 Visual Culture  

Books

• Will  the  World  Break  Your  Heart?   Dimensions  and  Consequences  of   Irish-American Assimilation  (New York:  Garland Publishing, 1990).
• Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography  (Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
• Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  2019).

Articles, Book Chapters, and Essays

• "Virgin Land or Virgin Mary?    Studying  the  Ethnicity  of  White  Americans,"American Quarterly,   XXXIII   (Bibliography Issue, 1981),  284-308,   reprinted as Chapter  Nine of  George E.  Pozzetti, editor,  Ethnicity, Ethnic Identity, and Language Maintenance  (New York:  Garland Publishing, 1991),  160-184.
•  "Masculinity   Under   Fire:     LIFE's   Presentation   of   Camaraderie   and Homoeroticism  Before,  During,  and  After the Second World War,"   in Erika Doss, editor, Looking at LIFE: Framing the American Century in the Pages of  LIFE Magazine, 1936-1972,  (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian  Institution Press, 2001).  Chapter 9, 178-199. 
• "Antiwar Movement," "Irish-American Manhood," "James Dean," "Male Friendship," "Self-control," " 'Sensitive Male,' " "Rebel without a Cause," and "Rock Hudson," in Bret Carroll, editor, American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications, 2003).
• “Gay Movement,”  “Iowa,” “Minnesota,” “Thurber, James,” “Vietnam War,” in Bill Marshall, editor, France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2005).
• “Seeing Males Together: Brokeback Mountain and Picturing Men,” The Chicago Blog, University of Chicago Press, March 1, 2006.
•   “One of the Guys: The Distraction of ‘Sexual Orientation’ and the Lost World of the American Male,” National Sexuality Resource Center (NSRC), SexLiteracy.org, February 2007, Reprinted as “Don’t Look Gay:  Why  American Men Are Afraid of Intimacy with Each Other,”  AlterNet, July 4, 2007.  
• “Picturing Boys: Found Photographs and the Transformation of Boyhood in 1950s America,”  THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies 1:1 (Spring 2007), 68-83.
•  “Lessons Learned on Brokeback Mountain: Expanding the Possibilities of American Manhood,”  in Jim Stacy, editor, Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2007), 188-204.

Book Reviews

• Review of Rosemarie Garland Thompson, editor, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body.   New York: New York University Press, 1996, in American Studies  39:3 (Fall 1998), 185-187.
• Review of John W.M. Hallock, The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000,in Journal of American History  88:2(September 2001), 640-641.
•  Review of Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, in Journal of American History, 90:1(June 2003), 230.
•  Review of David McCarthy. H. C. Westermann at War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 2005, in American Historical Review111:4 (October 2006), 1217.
• Review of Pierre Borhan, Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography.  New York: The Vendome Press, 2007, in Archivaria: The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, 68(Fall 2009),  320-323.
•  Review of Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, in Journal of American History,97:2 (September 2010),  581-582.
•  Review of Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America.Manchester, England:Manchester University Press, 2110, in  American Historical Review, 117:2(April 2012),  556-557.
• Review of Niobe Way, Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011, in Men and Masculinities,17:2(June 2014),  221-223.
• Review of John D. Fair, Mr. America: The Tragic History of a Bodybuilding Icon.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015,   American Historical Review,  121:1(February 2016), 271-272.   
• Review of Philip E. Muehlenbeck, editor, Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective. (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2017).  Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 48:4 (Spring 2018), 556-558.

Work in Progress

• Men by Themselves: Interpreting the Neptune Ceremony and the Womanless Wedding
• An Imagined Archive?  eBay Photographs and Gay History

Papers Delivered

• "Life as Theater:   Playing  the  Role in  Irish-American  Culture,"  Bicentennial Meeting  of  the  American  Studies  Association,   Philadelphia,   April 3,  1976.
• "Diversity as  Madness:   The  American  Irish  and  'Mental  Illness,' “   National Association of Interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies, Far West Regional Conference, Arcata, California, October 27, 1979.
•    "Comrades-in-Arms:   John Horne Burns   and the Awakening and Suppression of  Homosexual  Desire  during  World War II  and Its Aftermath," California /Rocky Mountain American Studies Associations Meeting, Reno, May 2, 1993.
•  "Masculinity   under   Fire:     LIFE's   Presentation   of   Camaraderie   and Homoeroticism  before,  during,  and  after the Second World War," Conference on "Looking at LIFE: Rethinking America's Favorite Magazine, 1936-1972," University of Colorado, Boulder, September 14-17, 1995.
• "Picturing Men in World War II: Narratives of Liberation in Fiction, Autobiography, and Vernacular Photography," The Photograph: An International Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, March 13, 2004.
• "The Morning After: Vernacular Photography and the Shifting Boundaries of Male Sexuality in Postwar America," North American Sexualities, Post World War II, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, April 24, 2004.
•  “Cold War, Cold Photographs:  Male Relationships in the Everyday Photographs of 1950s America,”  Vernacular Reframed: An Exploration of the Everyday, Boston University, November 5-6, 2004.
•  “Picturing Boys: Found Photographs and the Transformation of Boyhood in 1950s America,”  American Studies Association National Conference, Washington, D.C., November 3-6, 2005.
• “Snapshots at Sea: A Half Century of Shipboard Culture in American Sailors’ Photos,”  Symposium on the Art of the American Snapshot, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 10, 2007.
• “The Space between Men: Same-Sex Affection in 1950s Snapshots,” “Feeling Photography” Conference,  University of Toronto, October 17, 2009. 

Appointments

• Instructor of English and American Literature, Carleton College, 1971-72
• Teaching Associate & Instructor, American Studies, Univ. of Minnesota, 1973-74. 
• Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor, California State University, Fullerton Department, 1975-present.
• Graduate Advisor, 1989-95. Department Chair, 1995-1998, Department Graduate Advisor, 2009-2012.

Degrees

• 1978, Ph.D in American Studies , University of Minnesota
• 1971, M.A. in American Studies, University of Minnesota
• 1969, B.A in English, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

American regionalism, folk culture, architecture, environmental history, and the built environment. Relationship between cultural geography, Americna studies, and theories of space and place. History and culture of the American West and California; International American Studies. 

• AMST 201: Introduction to American Studies
• AMST 301: The American Character
• AMST 350: Seminar in Theory and Method California Cultures
• AMST 401: American Culture and Nature
• AMST 404: Americans and Nature
• AMST 416: Southern California Culture
• AMST 440: American Folk Culture
• AMST 444: The Built Environment
• AMST 502: Graduate Seminar: American Space, Place, and Architecture
• Honors 201A:Honors Seminar: American Institutions and Values to 1900
• Honors 201B: Honors Seminar: American Institutions and Values Since 1900

Courses Taught as Distinguished Fulbright Chair, 1998-99, and as Visiting Lecturer, January 2001, North American Studies Department University of Debrecen:

• American Regionalism American        
• Folk Culture American Architecture
• American Culture & Nature                
• Theories and Methods of AMST: Doctoral
• Frontier & Region in Am. History: Doctoral (Jan. 2001)

Courses Taught as Distinguished Fulbright Chair, Lublin, Poland, Spring 2004:

• American Culture and Nature
• California Cultures
• American Regionalism

• Region and Regionalism in the United States: A Source Book for the Humanities and Social Sciences. New York: Garland Publishers, 1988. Coauthored with Clarence Mondale.
• Mapping American Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Coedited with Wayne Franklin.
• Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Coedited with David Wrobel.
• Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices From the American West.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 
• "The Significance of Turner's Sectional Thesis." Western Historical Quarterly 10 (October, 1979): 437-66
• "Regionalism in the Great Depression." Geographical Review 73 (October, 1983): 439-46.
• "From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History."Pacific Historical Review, 64 (November 1995): 479-501.
• "Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney's Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West," Montana; The Magazine of Western History, 48 (Spring 1998): 2-17.
• “Knowing the Place for the First Time: Discovering America by Teaching American Studies Abroad,” America Studies Association Newsletter, 23 (December 2000), 1, 10-11.
• “Parables of Stone and Steel: Architectural Images of Nostalgia and Progress at the Columbian Exposition and Disneyland,” American Studies, 42 (Spring 2001): 39-67.
• “Robert Hine, Sense of Place, and the Terrain of Western History,” Pacific Historical Review, 70 (August 2001): 453-63.
• "Frederick Jackson Turner and Western Regionalism,” in Richard Etulain, ed. Writing Western History: Essays on Classic Western Historians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991, 103-35.
• “The Politics of Place: Carey McWilliams and Radical Regionalism,” in Jeff Roche, ed.The Political Culture of the New West. Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2008, 135-65.
• "Regionalism," in John Mack Faragher, ed., American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1998, 774-76.
• "Sectionalism," in Faragher, ed., American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1998, 833-34.
• “The Frontier Thesis,” in George Kurian, general editor, The Encyclopedia of American Studies, New York: Grollier Publishers, 2001, Vol. II, 217-18.
• Preface to Lance Bernard, Architecture and Regional Identity in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1870-1970 Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, i-ix.
• "Pleasures and Perils of Nostalgia in Local History."  Journal of Orange County Studies 2 (Spring, 1989): 46-48.      
• "Reading the Citrus Landscape."  California History, 74 (Spring 1995): 112-17. 
• “Teaching California with Carey McWilliams, Ray Bradbury, and Yi-Fu Tuan,”California History 87 (Winter 2009).
• “Region, Regionalism, and Place,” in Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott Casper eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, Vol 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 275-288.
• "Utopias West: Or the Trouble with Perfection,"  American Studies, 53 (2014): 183-193.
• "Mary C. Turpie,"  Encyclopedia of American Studies.  (1,500 word biographical entry).

• Mary C. Turpie Award, 2006, American Studies Association, national award for outstanding achievement in teaching, advisement, and program building in American Studies.
• Oscar O. Winther Award, Western Historical Association, 1979, for the best article of the year, Western Historical Quarterly.
•  Vivian A. Paladin Award, Montana Historical Society, 1998, for best article of the year, Montana: The Magazine of Western History.
•  President, California American Studies Association, 1991-92.
• President, California American Studies Association, 2006-7.
• Associate Editor, American Quarterly, 2012-present. 
• CSU Fullerton, campus-wide Alumni Distinguished Faculty Student Service Award, 1994-95.
• Member, Graduate Education Committee, American Studies Association, 2011-present.
• Member, International Committee of the American Studies Association, 2003-2006.
• Member, Yasua Sakakibara Prize Committee, of the American Studies Association, 2003-4.
• Chair, Mary C. Turpie Award Selection Committee, 2007-2010.
• Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies, Debrecen, Hungary, 1998-1999.
• Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies, Lublin, Poland, Spring 2004.
• Keynote Addresses: Austrian Fulbright Annual Seminar, Altenmarkt, Austria, November 1998; Montana State Historical Society, October 1999; Conference for Teachers of American Studies in Torun,Poland, April 2004; Second Annual Yiddish Conference, Fullerton, California, October 2012; American Studies Student Association Colloquium, Fullerton, California, April 17, 2013. 
• Faculty advisor for four graduate students MA theses that won Fullerton’s campus-wide Giles T. Brown Award for outstanding thesis of the year: 1993, 1997, 2002, and 2010.
• NCAA College Division All American Cross Country runner, 1968.

DEGREES

• 1987, Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures, University of California, Irvine
• 1980, Master of Arts in American Studies, California State University, Fullerton
• 1978, Bachelor of Arts in American Studies, California State University, Fullerton

Public Memory; Literature and Culture; Images of Crime and Violence; Cultural Theory

Book

• In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Post-WWII American Character. 2000: Ohio State University Press. Paperback edition 2002

Other Publications

• Editor and Area Essay: "Children's Television." The Guide to United States Popular Culture. 2001: Bowling Green University/Popular Culture Press; 160-165, 374-75, 623, 731-32.
• Area Essay and Book Review: "The Art of Viewing Off-Center: Television and the Intellectual Enterprise." American Quarterly (September 1998) 679-686. Survey of current television scholarship in American Studies and review of Reviewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture by Lynne Joyrich (1996: Indiana University Press)
• Article: "On the Construction of Cultural Knowledge: The Next Generation Asks 'Why Vietnam?'" Vietnam Veterans Institute Journal, special issue on "Vietnam in Academe" (November 1995) 43-54.
• Article: "Ideological Animations: Television Programming for (of) Children," Popular Culture Review (August 1994) 105-121.
• Book Chapter: "The Fall-Out Over The Catcher in the Rye: A Contemporary American Conflict." In Beyond the Lonely Crowd: Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, Larry Bennett and Ronald Edsforth, Eds. (1991: SUNY Press) 127-136

Scholarly Appearances

• National/International Broadcast Appearances
• BBC (June 2, 2009): interviewed by Max Pearson for the BBC's morning radio news program "The World Today" regarding enduring public and critical interest in J.D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye.
• NPR (July 18, 2001): interviewed by Juan Williams on NPR's "Talk of the Town" regarding The Catcher in the Rye censorship controversies.

New Courses (proposed and developed)

• AMST 401TWar and Culture (AMST 401T)
• AMST 401T: Adolescent America: Cultural History and Contemporary Study of the Teenager in American Culture
• AMST 403: Telling American Studies: Creative Representations of Cultural Study
• AMST 442: Television and Culture
• AMST 489: America 2.0: Electronic Culture & Community
• AMST 502T: Contemporary American Culture: Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Post-WWII America

Additional Seminar Courses Frequently Taught :

• AMST 101: Introduction to American Cultural Studies
• AMST 301: American Character
• AMST 405: Images of Crime and Violence
• AMST 502T: Public Memory

1986, Ph.D, University of Pennsylvania

• Institutions and Ideals
• Consumption and Leisure

Books

• Measuring Minds:  Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Paperback 2001).
• Editor and Introduction, Recycling the Past: Popular Uses of American History (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978).

Book in Progress

• Finding the “Class of 1933”:  Studying Culture, Personality, and Nationality in an Age of War

Articles and Book Chapters

• "Social Science as a 'Weapon of the Weak':  Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice.'"  Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society 104:4 (December 2013): 742-772.
• “Representing German Sociology in 1930s America:  Willy Gierlichs and Walter Beck at Yale.” In Transnationale Vergesellschaftungen  [Transnationalism and Society: 100th Anniversary of the German Sociological Association]. Frankfurt, Germany: Springer VS,  2012.
• “Constructing American Studies: Culture, Identity, and the Expansion of the Humanities.” In David Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since 1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, pp. 273-313.
•  "The Parable of the Kallikak Family: Explaining the Meaning of Heredity in 1912.”  In Steven Noll and James Trent, Jr., eds., Mental Retardation in America:  A Historical Reader.  New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2003, pp. 165-185.
•  "Contextualizing Documents, Data, and Controversies: Working with the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers." In David Baker, ed., Thick Description and Fine Texture: Studies in the History of Psychology.  Akron: University of Akron Press, 2003, pp. 76-107.
•  "Biblical Biology: American Protestant Social Reformers and the Early Eugenics Movement." Science in Context, 11: 3-4 (Fall and Winter 1998), pp. 511-525.
•  "The Bell Curve and the Shape of History." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33 (Spring 1997), pp. 135-139. 
•  "On Interpreting Photographs, Faces, and the Past." American Psychologist, 43 (September 1988), pp. 743-744.
•  "Education, Evangelism, and the Origins of Clinical Psychology: The Child Study Legacy." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 24 (April 1988), pp. l52-l65.
•  "The Debate over Diagnosis: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Medical Acceptance of Intelligence Testing." In Michael Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987; paperback, 1990).

• Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for the History of Psychology, American Psychological Association, 2014
• Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014-15
• Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies, 2007-2008
• Fulbright Professor of American History, University of Bremen, Germany, Spring 2002
• Rockefeller Archive Center Research Grant, Summer 1999
• National Science Foundation Research Grant, Summer 1991
• National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant, Summer 1988