News
Anna Birtwell Badalament, winner of the Pauli Murray Award and the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Internship Research Prize.
Jessica Ashley Cocomazzi, winner of the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Essay Prize.
Adina Sarah Kalish Scheinberg, high honors and winner of the Lawrence Fuchs Award.
Seth Isaac Wulf, high honors.
Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn
2022: Meredith Farmer and Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, Editors
Afterword by Samuel Otter
Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. It makes a case for the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.
Paula Jo Musegades' Aaron Copland's Hollywood Film Scores is a pioneering study of how the famous American composer helped to shape the sound of Hollywood movies and the place of sound in American films.
Jerome Tharaud's Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape examines how white evangelical Protestants in the antebellum United States used print culture to shape Americans' understanding of a wide variety of secular and sacred issues.
David Aizenberg: Harry, Joseph and Ida Stein Memorial Award
To the outstanding male student-athlete. Aizenberg also earned All-American honors this year, Brandeis's first All-American since 1994.
Jessica Lauren Gedallovich: Justice Louis D. Brandeis Essay Prize
Kalianni Neal-Desatnik: Michael Kalafatas ’65 Admissions Prize
To an outstanding Brandeis senior who has greatly contributed to the admissions process throughout his/her/their time at the University.
Rachel Wang: Richard Kaufman ‘58 Memorial Prize
Student/s who demonstrates leadership in campus activities and who, through academic achievement, exemplifies the well-rounded student who is likely to have a lifelong interest in his/her/their fellows.
Donald Gerard Weisse III: Doris Brewer Cohen Award in Justice and Public Life, Lawrence Fuchs Award, Lester Martin Foundation Award in Legal Studies
Natalia M. Wiater: Pauli Murray Award
January 9, 2019
Dan Breen gave a talk, "Stories of Privacy: The Legal Boundaries of Public and Private Life," to the Tucson, Arizona, chapter of the Brandeis National Committee. His lecture was part of the BNC's University on Wheels program and was co-sponsored by the Tucson Jewish Community Center, which hosted the event.
Kaitlyn Xiaorong Decker-Jacoby: Lawrence Fuchs Award
Julianna Eleanore Scionti: Pauli Murray Award
November 11, 2018
"Stan Lee is one of those people that helped the field of American Studies look at bizarre material — he made comics and comic art worthy of critical intelligence," Thomas Doherty says.
October 22, 2018
Stephen Whitfield previews "The Power of Music" exhibition at Brandeis.
October 9, 2018
In Tablet article, Thomas Doherty examines how the architect of the Final Solution, an otherwise unremarkable bureaucrat, became a star character for film.
Valerie Achille: Justice Louis D. Brandeis Essay Prize
Ruaidhri Thomas Belfry Crofton: Michael Kalafatas '65 Admissions Prize and
Pauli Murray Citizen-Scholar Award in American Studies
Abigail M. Patkin: : Lawrence Fuchs Citizen-Scholar Award in American Studies
Lee Bloch
September 24, 2018
Lee Bloch has joined the university as the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies for 2018-20, and will serve as a lecturer in the departments of anthropology and American studies. Bloch, who holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Virginia, is working on his first book, "Sweetgum Archaeology: Mound Landscapes and the Unfinished Histories of the Native South." The book draws on community-based research with members of a small Native American community in the U.S. South who identify as of Muskogee (Creek) ancestry, focusing on indigenous knowledges about large-scale earthworks built by ancient peoples over the last 5,000 years.
April 13, 2018
A Washington Post review of Thomas Doherty's illuminating new book "Show Trial."
April 13, 2018
A Washington Post review of Eileen McNamara's new book on "the Kennedy who changed the world."
March 7, 2018
Joyce Antler writes about her forthcoming book on Jewish radical feminism.
January 23, 2018
From The Junto blog on American history: "Whether John Higham was correct in describing anti-Catholicism as the 'most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history' is a matter of debate. Not as disputed, though, is the reality that, until relatively recently, a great many Americans did view Catholicism as one of the principal threats to liberty and order in the United States. Maura Jane Farrelly’s masterful new volume, 'Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860, traces the development of anti-Catholicism in the United States (or what would eventually become that country) from the establishment of Plymouth Colony to the coming of the Civil War."
Herbert Fisher Award for Exceptional Achievement in American Studies:
Leah Margalit Newman and Jessica Robin Shinberg
July 18, 2017
Thomas Doherty wonders if today’s atmosphere on college campuses encourages, or even tolerates, the kind of unsparing reprimand from a professor that might be needed for a student’s growth.
December 2, 2016
Brian Donahue has been made an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, a national research library of American history and culture through 1876.
Carrie (’83) and Gail (’88) Fisher Award in American Studies:
Ellie Marie Driscoll, Sarah Anne Lemelman, Kaitlyn Julia Sever, and Zoe Joelle Waldman
Civil rights activist and Richman Fellow Julian Bond speaks in Rapaporte Treasure Hall on campus.
April 6, 2015
Julian Bond went into the segregated cafeteria of Atlanta’s city hall with a group of fellow college students in 1960 and when he was refused service, he refused to leave. It was the first time he was arrested and brought before a judge.
“After some back and forth, the judge asked me, 'How do you plead?' And I was panic-stricken,” Bond recalled. “On the one hand, I knew I was guilty – a policeman had asked me to leave and I had refused. But I didn’t feel guilty – I knew I had a right to eat in that tax supported cafeteria, and that any law that said I couldn’t was no law at all.”
The civil rights leader received a standing ovation upon being recognized as the 2014-15 Richman Fellow in a ceremony and speech March 31 at Rapaporte Treasure Hall.
January 2, 2015
In an interview with WGBH, Thomas Doherty discusses Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer's transformation from a "struggling scrap metal dealer" to a major player in the Hollywood industry.
November 21, 2014
In an article in the Boston Globe, Brian Donahue discusses his "elaborate report laying out a scenario in which New England, in the year 2060, has three times as much farmland as it does now—a full 6 million acres, or 15 percent of the entire landmass, upon which to raise crops and livestock that would be consumed by the local population. Under these conditions, the authors of the report argue, New England could grow 50 percent of its own food."
October 20, 2014
In an interview with the Boston Globe, Brian Donahue discusses "A New England Food Vision," a collaborative report that asserts Massachusetts should be growing half of its own food by 2060.
December 18, 2013
It is a with deep regret that we in the American Studies Program at Brandeis University have decided to discontinue our institutional affiliation with the American Studies Association. We view the vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly association should foster. We remain committed to the discipline of American studies, but we can no longer support an organization that has rejected two of the core principles of American culture: freedom of association and expression.