The Cultural Studies PhD Program at george mason university

Cultural Studies Director Roger Lancaster wrote the preface for and contributed an essay to New Landscapes of Inequality, a volume that grew out of a School for Advanced Research seminar. Contributors to this volume map the connections among neoliberalism, social inequality, and punitive governance.

Tim Kaposy joins the Cultural Studies faculty as an Assistant Professor in Fall, 2008. Kaposy received his PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is coeditor (with Imre Szeman) of Cultural Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell, forthcoming), and is presently Visiting Professor in the Department of North American Studies at the Universität Bonn in Germany.

Alison Landsberg will also be joining the program this fall as its first three-year faculty fellow. (The new faculty fellowships commit recipients to teaching half of their courses in Cultural Studies for a three-year period.) Landsberg is Associate Professor of History at George Mason; she received her PhD in literature and film from the University of Chicago. Her first book is titled Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Two Cultural Studies students, Elaine Cardenas and Ellen Gorman, have published a new book, The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture.

Cultural Studies professor Paul Smith's new book, Primitive America, is now available. This book examines the dialectic between cultural atavism and the seemingly inexorable and untouchable expansion of capitalism in American culture.

Student Pia Moller has published a chapter in The Politics, Economics and Culture of Mexican-U.S. Migration: Both Sides of the Border. Her chapter, "From the Margin to the Middle?: The Origin, Transformation, and Direction of the Minutemen" examines the American "nativist" mobilization, primarily the Minutemen and their influence in established conservative circles.

Student David Arditi's new book, Criminalizing Independent Music- The Recording Industry Association of America's Advancement of Dominant Ideology, is now available

Student Vicki Watts was invited to work as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University, the top ranked graduate program for dance in the USA. Alongside 2 classes of Labanotation, she is pioneering a new graduate seminar class called 'Theories for Dancing Bodies' in which students survey a range of scholarly work on the embodiment and representations of the body, and strive to connect them to creative and pedagogical practice in dance.

Student Robert Gehl has published a chapter in a book on Shakespeare and Tolkien. "Something is stirring in the East: Racial identity, confronting the other, and miscegenation in Othello and The Lord of the Rings" is available in Shakespeare and Tolkien: Essays on shared themes and language.

Student Randa Kayyali has published the award-winning book, The Arab Americans.

Student Cecelia Uy-Tioco has published an article, 'Overseas Filipino Workers and Text Messaging: Reinventing Transnational Mothering' in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (21.2, pp. 253-265). This essay is now available as a chapter in Mobile Phone Cultures, Routledge, 2008.

Cultural Studies graduate Bob Shepherd's latest book, When Culture Goes to Market, is now available.

Cultural Studies graduate Wendy Burns-Ardolino's new book, Jiggle: (Re)Shaping American Women, is now available.

Student Katy Razzano's book, Vulture Culture, co-edited with Christine Quail and Loubna Skalli, is available.