AMST in the News

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• Faculty Member: Gillespie, Angus K.

The American Studies department congratulates Prof. Angus Gillespie on the publication of Port Newark and the Origins of Container Shipping. This fascinating study traces the birth of containerization to Port Newark, New Jersey, in 1956 when trucker Malcom McLean thought of a brilliant new way to transport cargo. It tells the story of how Port Newark grew rapidly as McLean’s idea was backed by both New York banks and the US military, who used containerization to ship supplies to troops in Vietnam. Angus Gillespie takes us behind the scenes of today’s active container shipping operations in Port Newark, talking to the pilots who guide the ships into port, the Coast Guard personnel who help manage the massive shipping traffic, the crews who unload the containers, and even the chaplains who counsel and support the mariners. Port Newark shines a spotlight on the unsung men and women who help this complex global shipping operation run smoothly.

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• Faculty Member: Cevasco, Carla

The American Studies department congratulates Prof. Carla Cevasco on the publication of Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast. In the book Cevasco reveals the disgusting, violent history of hunger in the context of the colonial invasion of early northeastern North America. Locked in constant violence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Native Americans and English and French colonists faced the pain of hunger, the fear of encounters with taboo foods, and the struggle for resources. Their mealtime encounters with rotten meat, foraged plants, and even human flesh would transform the meanings of hunger across cultures. By foregrounding hunger and its effects in the early American world, Cevasco emphasizes the fragility of the colonial project, and the strategies of resilience that Native peoples used to endure both scarcity and the colonial invasion. In doing so, the book proposes an interdisciplinary framework for studying scarcity, expanding the field of food studies beyond simply the study of plenty.

“In this bold and original study, Cevasco punctures the myth of colonial America as a land of plenty. This is a book about the past with lessons for our time of food insecurity.”—Peter C. Mancall, author of The Trials of Thomas Morton

The American Studies department congratulates Gillian Dauer '22 for her award-winning outstanding senior thesis. Titled “‘Good and Useful Women’: The Rutgers Female College and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Higher Education Reform,” Dauer excavated the largely unknown history of Rutgers Female College. Founded as the Rutgers Female Institute in 1838, the Rutgers Female College was the first institution for women’s higher education in New York City and boasted a rigorous liberal arts education. In describing its rise and fall, Dauer charted not only the arguments in favor in offering women access to higher education but also the difficulty facing female students and the institutions that would serve them in the nineteenth century. Dauer is currently pursuing an M.S.Ed. in Higher Education & Student Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington.

The American Studies department debuted a new minor in Asian American Studies, with the first student to complete program graduating in Spring 2022.

The minor came in response, in part, to student activism on Asian American issues. In 2021, Jillian Cuzzolino, a student in the School of Arts and Sciences and a leader at the Rutgers Asian Student Council, approached Jeff Decker, then the undergraduate director of American Studies, about turning an existing certificate program into a full-fledged minor.

At the time, one year into the Covid-19 pandemic, attacks and harassment aimed at Asian Americans nationwide were surging and creating a climate of fear and distrust. “We weren’t thinking of the minor as a response specifically to anti-Asian violence,” Cuzzolino explained. “But we were living through a time when so many things were becoming salient to everyone, including the need for political empowerment and personal understanding. We were thinking about ways we could take back our narrative and channel our energy into something positive.”

The students found a receptive audience in Decker, who saw a chance to build on things that were already happening within the department. In the past decade, American Studies has added a minor in Critical and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies and has helped to support the Global Asias Initiative, a faculty collaborative for cross-regional and trans-national scholarship on Asia and its diasporas. Developing a new minor was also an opportunity to recognize Asian and Asian American students, who together make up 23 percent of the Rutgers student body, by creating a course of study centered on their experiences and identities.

While creating a minor is relatively easy, making sure that enough classes qualifying for the minor get offered each semester is much harder. While American Studies offers classes on the Asian American Experience, Asian American Literatures in English, and Islam In/And America, those are not enough to complete a minor on their own. Fortunately, the department was able to collaborate with the Department of History to develop a course on Asian American History and with the Political Science department to bring back its course on Asian American Identity Politics. By doing so, the new minor not only added course of study within the department but helped expand the course offerings on Asian American studies available elsewhere.

Allan Punzalan Isaac, a professor of American studies and English who had previously developed an Asian American studies certificate program, said the minor was long overdue. “I met with student leaders over the years who were vocal in their demands for more courses on the Asian American experience,” says Isaac, who is also an associate dean in the Division of Humanities. “Rutgers has now taken an important step to engage with the transnational complexity of our student’s experience and that of American culture as a whole.”