American Studies Graduate Alumni

Alex Chambers

2019

Alex Chambers is the host and producer of WFIU’s Inner States, a podcast and radio show about art, culture, and ideas in Southern Indiana and beyond. He is also the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about today from the perspective of tomorrow. How to Survive the Future is based in part on the ideas he explored in his American Studies dissertation, Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, which he completed in 2019. That year, he also published a book of poems about domestic life and empire, called Bindings: A Preparation. Alex teaches audio storytelling and critical listening at the IU Media School

Giselle Cunanan

2021

Giselle Dejamco Cunanan is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at Gonzaga University. Giselle earned a PhD in American Studies with a Minor in Sociology from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation, “Ethnic Studies Now: Racial Labor in a Multicultural Moment,” examines the social movements for Ethnic Studies in K-12 public schools in California and the Pacific Northwest. The dissertation argues that in today’s multicultural moment, institutions lock ethnic studies organizers in a liberal trap of inclusion, eliciting and requiring their work, and co-opting their efforts to transform schools. She also examines organizers’ care work, the excesses of their racial labor that cannot be absorbed by any institution.

Giselle earned a Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University where she also taught for Pin@y Educational Partnership, a service-learning organization that develops and trains teachers in ethnic studies critical pedagogy. At Gonzaga University, Giselle is currently teaching Intro to Ethnic Studies, Intro to Asian American Studies, and Critical Filipinx Studies. Her broader research pursuits include examining the afterlives of empire as it relates to US-based Filipinxs.

Jordache Ellapen

2015

Jordache is assistant professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media in the Women and Gender Studies Program in the Department of Historical Studies at UTM and holds a graduate appointment in the Women and Gender Studies Institute. His current book manuscript is tentatively titled Against Afronormativity: Queering Afro-Asian Intimacies, Sticky Erotics, and the Aesthetics of Race in South Africa. In 2017, Jordache accepted a tenure-track position in the English Department at the University of Oregon, with a specialization in the Literatures and Media of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Nzingha Kendall

2018

Nzingha Kendall is a post-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. She’s working on a research project that analyzes how experimental filmmaking allow for moments and spaces for liberation in a world that constrains black women’s expression and their ability to live. Titled “Imperfect Independence: Black Women & Experimental Filmmaking,” this project looks at black women across the diaspora, from the late 20^th century to the present, who use experimental techniques and practices. She argues that experimental filmmaking practices offer black women fleeting, yet profound sources of freedom; these moments of freedom constitute instances of imperfect independence.

Nzingha Kendall, and her collaborator Madeleine Hunt-Erlich, have been selected as inaugural fellows for the Undo Fellowship, sponsored by the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. Kendall and Hunt-Erlich join a cohort of three other artist/writer pairs in this initiative to expand radical filmmaking practices and research new languages of documentary cinema. During the fellowship they will explore alternative ways of telling stories by and about black people by delving into fragmented archives.

Jedediah Kuhn

2018

Jedediah Kuhn (Jed) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Dickinson College.  His research examines the intersections of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality in the American West through an interdisciplinary mix of historical and cultural studies approaches. He is currently working on a book manuscript that takes a relational look at Native American and Mexican American racialization in California and Nevada to understand how race and indigenous status inform one another.

In April 2022, he published an article titled “A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band: Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy” in American Studies. Redbone was a successful 1970s Native American rock band. Most band members, however, were of mixed Native American and Mexican American descent. The article examines how and why this mixed racial history often gets simplified in the band’s negotiation of their public image as well as in scholarship that seeks to locate the band within either Native studies or Chicanx studies.