People

Core Faculty

Core Faculty

Carla Cevasco is a scholar interested in food, the body, gender, and race in early America and beyond. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her first book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (Yale University Press, 2022), explores how Indigenous peoples and colonial invaders confronted hunger in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is working on a second book, Young and Hungry, a history of feeding infants and children in the United States. Her scholarship has appeared in Early American Studies Studies, New England Quarterly, Art History, and Journal of Early American History. Her public writing has been featured in The Atlantic, TIME, Lapham's Quarterly, Nursing Clio, Common-Place, The Junto, and The Recipes Project. She received a PhD in American Studies and AM in American History from Harvard University, and a BA in English and American Literatures from Middlebury College.

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Jimmy Sweet (Lakota/Dakota) specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies with a concentration on interactions between American Indians and Euro-Americans. His current book project, “The ‘Mixed-Blood’ Moment: Race, Law, and Mixed-Ancestry Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest,” analyzes the legal and racial complexities of American Indians of mixed Indian and European ancestry with a focus on kinship, family history, land dispossession, and citizenship. Sweet is dedicated to Indigenous language revitalization and preservation. His research is driven by a need to understand the full effects of American colonialism on Indigenous Americans and how those consequences influence Native people today, doing so with the hope of contributing to the continued fight for Indigenous sovereignty and the healing of Indigenous communities.

Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, Sweet was a Henry Roe Cloud Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and served as managing editor of NAIS: The Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association from 2012 to 2017. He received his B.A. from the University of Tennessee, his M.A. from Montana State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in history.

  • Maria Kennedy
  • Maria Kennedy
  • Assistant Teaching Professor
  • Office: 203D
  • Office Hours: By Appointment
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  • Professor Kennedy Discusses Christmas Traditions

Maria Kennedy is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University New Brunswick where she oversees the certificate in Curation and Cultural Programming. She teaches classes on topics including American Folklore, Cultural Media Production (Podcasting and Sound Cultures); American Food, and Cultural Event Planning.

Dr. Kennedy studies the theory and practice of folklore and public humanities, with interests in landscape, agriculture, food studies, performance theory, festival, folk arts, and anthropology of media. Her upcoming book project explores the interplay of cultural heritage and environmental conservation in rural Britain through examination of orchard landscapes and the craft cider industry.  She continues ethnographic research on changing rural landscapes in Europe and North America. She is a member of the performing group Ukrainian Village Voices based in Manhattan and has emerging interests in Ukraine and its diasporas.

Dr. Kennedy received her PhD from Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in 2017.  She worked previously at The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, Traditional Arts Indiana, and WJFF Radio Catskill, and has moonlighted in the cider and wine industries. From 2018 - 2024, Dr. Kennedy served as Administrative Director and Co-Director of the New Jersey Folk Festival at Rutgers University, and she was a board member for New York Folklore from 2016 - 2024. For more about Dr. Kennedy's research and projects, visit www.ciderwithmaria.com

 

Dr. Sylvia Chan-Malik is a scholar of American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and religious studies. Her research focuses on the history of Islam in the United States, specifically the lives of U.S. Muslim women, Black American Islam, and the rise of anti-Muslim racism in 20th-21st-century America, and more broadly, the intersections of race, gender, and religion in struggles for social justice and racial liberation. Sylvia is a core faculty member in the Departments of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliate graduate faculty for the Department of Religion at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She teaches courses on Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., Islam in/and America, Race and Religion, Social Justice, Food Justice, and Islam and Gender.

She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam (NYU Press, 2018),  which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, as well as various scholarly essays in academic journals and anthologies. She is currently working on two book projects: (1) A Part of Islam: A Journey through Muslim America, which offers an essential history of Islam and Muslims in the U.S. for a general audience (Penguin Random House, forthcoming 2026), and, (2) The Soul of Liberation: Race, Religion, and Struggles for Freedom in America, which examines the roles of soul and spirit in 20th-21st-century U.S.-based racial liberation movements. An avid gardener, she is also interested in issues of food justice and food sovereignty, and is developing an online archive of Black farmers and other farmers of color in the U.S.

Professor Chan-Malik speaks frequently on issues of U.S. Muslim politics and culture, Islam and gender, and racial and gender politics in the U.S. Her writing and commentary have appeared in venues such as The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, Slate, Mic.com, The Intercept, Middle East Eye, PRI, HuffPost, Patheos, Religion News Service, and more. She was a primary academic advisor for the forthcoming PBS documentary American Muslims: A History Revealed (2024), which showcases her research on Black American Muslim women in the early 20th century. She is also featured in the 2020 PBS documentary The Black Church.

In 2023-24, she led a yearlong Sawyer Mellon seminar at Rutgers University-New Brunswick titled "Afterlives of Liberation: Anti-Racist Praxis for the 21st-Century," which brought scholars, artists, and activists from all over the world to campus to discuss what racial liberation means to them in the 21st-century. In 2021, she was the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University, and in 2018, she was recognized with the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education by Rutgers SAS.

She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2009) and an M.F.A. from Mills College in Creative Writing. 

Louis Masur is Board of Governors Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. He is a cultural historian whose publications include books on Lincoln and the Civil War, capital punishment, the events of a single year, the first World Series, a transformative photograph, and a seminal rock ‘n’ roll album. His most recent work is The Sum of our Dreams: A Concise History of America (2020). Other books include Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (2015), Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (2012), and The Civil War: A Concise History (2011). Masur’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Slate. He approaches culture as a text that must be unpacked and his courses draw on a range of primary sources—novels, memoirs, essays, images, movies, and music—and take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of American culture. Masur has been elected to membership of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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  1. Urban, Andrew T.
  2. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Ben
  3. Isaac, Allan Punzalan
  4. Decker, Jefferson