William Cain
Professor Cain, the Director of the American Studies Program, is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he teaches courses in American literature, American Studies, Shakespeare, and composition. His intellectual interests include: Nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature; African American autobiography and fiction; slavery and abolition; and literary theory and criticism.

T. James Kodera
Professor Kodera joined the Wellesley faculty in 1976. He is currently Professor of Religion and Co-Director of Japanese Studies. During the 98-99 academic year, he served as Resident Director of the Associated Kyoto Program (AKP), a consortium of 16 liberal arts colleges that sent students to Kyoto, Japan for a year of Japanese Studies. As part of his work, he introduced the AKP Fellowship in American Studies. In the mid 1990s, Professor Kodera offered a course entitled Asian American Experience and organized an Ad-hoc multi-constituencey group on Asian American Studies, which began looking for ways to expand and consolidate Wellesley's Asian American Studies course offerings. They concluded that American Studies was the best context in which to pursue that goal. He believes that the study of the Asian experience is to come to terms with America's racist past and its present struggle to create a more diversified and yet equal society in thought, word and deed. Professor Kodera brings to American Studies a scholarly expertise in the historical and comparative study of religion, with a focus on Buddhist Studies. His publications include a book on Dogen, the 13th century Zen Buddhist monk who introduced the Soto School of Zen from China to Japan. He has written articles on Nichiren, another 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk, and Uchimura Kanzo, the 19th century Christian thinker and activist who introduced New England Puritanism to Japan at the time of Japan's increasing hostility toward the West and readiness for nationalism, imperialism and militarism. He is currently finishing another book project on Dogen, this time from the standpoint of modern Western philosophical perspective.

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Lawrence Rosenwald
Professor Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American literature and has been teaching at Wellesley College since 1980. His special intellectual interests include American diaries and the American literary representation of language and dialect; the theory and practice of translation; and the relations between words and music. He notes, "My involvement in the American Studies program has grown naturally out of my own work, out of finding, repeatedly, that to understand some American phenomenon that interests me - say, the way African American English is represented in Mark Twain's Huck Finn - I have to understand a lot of the American phenomena related to it: African American English itself, the views people have held of it, slavery, 19th-century American attitudes towards normative grammar and spelling and towards non-standard dialects, Twain's own ideas about "good English." American Studies is simply the formal recognition that we can't understand the American world through the lens of a single discipline." He believes that students who have made this observation will find American Studies shaped to meet their needs. Outside Wellesley, Professor Rosenwald is a performing artist.

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Susan Silbey
Professor Silbey, Chair of the Sociology Department, received her B. A. from Brooklyn College and went on to receive her M. A. and Ph. D. at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include (with Patricia Ewick): The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1998). She regularly teaches courses in the History of American Legal Thought, the Sociology of Law, The Social Construction of Conformity and Deviance, Power: Interpersonal, Organizational and Global Dimensions, and Criminology. Her research has involved the study of legal behavior in diverse organizational settings. It has included the enforcement of consumer protection regulations in an Attorney General's Office; criminal and civil matters in limited jurisdiction courts; and informal dispute processing through mediation and negotiation in schools, corporations, courts, and communities. These projects are bound by a common interest in understanding how legality is constructed through social interactions, among citizens, between citizens and officials, as well as among the formally designated legal authorities. She notes,"In my current work, I continue to map the law from the 'bottom up' but have been studying a broader terrain, having moved out of courts and administrative agencies to neighborhoods and homes. In this work, I try to identify and understand the events and interpretations which might prompt citizens to turn to these more formal legal institutions."

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Edward A. Stettner
Professor Stettner is the Ralph Emerson and Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of Political Science. He has taught at Wellesley College since 1966, and his special fields of interest are political theory and American political thought. As part of the American Studies curriculum, he teaches Political Science 340, American Political Thought, which is a chronological analysis of American thought, with a focus particularly on the Constitutional period, Progressivism, and contemporary thought. His research interest is in the Progressive period, and he has written a book on Herbert Croly, a leading progressive political theorist. Currently, Professor Stettner is working on a book on American Socialist thought in the period 1900-1920 and will be teaching the American Studies Seminar 317 in the fall, entitled "The Radical Tradition in America." He will also be looking at earlier writers such as Tom Paine and some of the Utopian socialists, and on the New Left movement of the 1960s and 70s.

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Elizabeth R. Varon
Professor Varon is an associate professor in the History Department. She is the author of We Mean To Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). She has also published articles and reviews in The Journal of American History, The Journal of Southern History, and other journals in her field. She notes, "The American Studies advisory committee has focused on expanding and enriching the curriculum, so that it better reflects the interests and serves the needs of our students and to insure that the program remains on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary studies."

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_{Maintained by William Cain
Date Created: April 21, 2000
Last Modified: September 18, 2000
Page Expires: September 1, 2001}