Bios of Current Hagley Fellows
Andy Bozanic received his B.S. in History, Technology and Society with a minor in Music from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 and his M.A. from the University of Delaware in 2005. He is currently at work on his dissertation, "The Acoustic Guitar in American Culture, 1880-1970," which examines the interplay between makers and users in the social construction of the acoustic guitar, an object that became the instrument of choice for the American masses in the 20th century. Andy is the winner of the 2008-2009 John Munroe Memorial Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching, and he will take up residence as a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow, for the 2009-2010 year at the National Museum of American History, Washington D.C. Among his other research interests are music recording technology, and historic preservation in the American Southwest. Andy's previous projects include studies in the sociology of music technology, the history of the recording industry in Atlanta, and the consumer culture of coal company stores. He also has a background in archaeology and has taken part in excavations in Italy as well as research projects for the National Park Service. After being awarded an E. Lyman Stewart internship with the Delaware Division of Parks and Recreation, Andy is currently contributing to a forthcoming institutional history of the Delaware State Parks. Outside of grad school he is an avid musician (voice, saxophone, guitar, bassoon, piano), tennis player, and softball coach.
Amanda Casper is currently exploring why and how people change their homes through repair, renovation, and remodeling for her dissertation. She comes to UD with a B.A. in History from Florida State University, a M.S. in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, and has also received a M.A. in History from the University of Delaware. Her degrees allow her to combine archival evidence with extant material in exciting ways. Her research interests include American social and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, urban development, vernacular landscapes, building technology and material culture. When she’s not rummaging around basements, attics, or archives, Amanda works as a historian for the National Park Service in the National Historic Landmarks Program through the Student Temporary Employment Program.
Christopher Chenier comes to Hagley with a background in both history and photography. Having spent three years in New York as a commercial photographic retoucher, he is now pursuing a PhD in History. In 2006 he received a BA in History and Art from Bard College. Christopher's research interests are rooted in the history of technology and fall somewhere between the social and cultural realms. He is particularly interested in looking at user experiences with technology and he hopes to find ways of infusing these stories into our current technological discourse. In addition to this work, Christopher continues to use photography as a means of discovery and exploration into the relationship of technology to landscape, history and culture. Christopher is pursuing the Certificate in Museum Studies.
Lucas R. Clawson is working toward a Ph.D. in the Hagley Program. His research focuses on the meaning of brass bands and popular music in pre-Civil War America. He earned both a B.S. and M.A. in Appalachian State University’s Public and Applied History Program. Lucas spends his copious spare time doing public interpretive programs with the National Park Service and Maryland State Parks as well as cycling throughout the beautiful Brandywine Valley.
Anastasia Day is currently in the Masters track program, and pursuing a certificate in Museum Studies. She received her B.A. in Philosophy, with minors in English and Latin from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 2012. While an undergrad, she participated in a semester-long program working and doing research at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her life-long commitment to and interest in the environmental movement collided with her academic interests in an American Environmental History course while and undergraduate, which led her to the Hagley Program. She hopes to explore ideas of consumerism, popular environmental and intellectual thought in America, and possibly where those intersect with women's history. She enjoys tea, knitting, cooking with local and organic foods, detective fiction and backpacking in her spare time, and one day hopes to do all those things while teaching at an undergraduate liberal arts institution.
Jennifer Fang earned her B.A. in History from Reed College and M.A. from the University of Delaware. Her research interests include constructions of ethnic identity and citizenship in twentieth-century America, and American and global consumer culture. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled, “Beyond Chinatown: Negotiating Chinese American Identity in Mainstream America, 1943-1982,” which examines the emergence of a middle-class, non-Chinatown-based Chinese American identity during the Cold War era. Her previous research projects have examined topics such as: tourism, identity, and the commodification of race in the American Southwest, public festivals and tourism in mid-twentieth-century Chinatowns, and the construction of hybridized Asian American identities after World War II. While at the University of Delaware, Jennifer has also held internships at the Hagley Museum and Library and the Oregon Historical Society. In 2009, Jennifer was a recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship in Material Culture Studies by the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. She was recently awarded a 2010-2011 doctoral fellowship by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Based in Taiwan with offices in North America and Europe, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation awards grants and fellowships to scholars around the world who are conducting research related to China.
Della Hall received her B.S. in History, Technology, and Society with a minor in French from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011. While there, she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the Navajo concept of Wind, which she presented at the Southwestern Historical Association annual conference. She is an M.A. student in the History department, also working toward a Museum Studies Certificate. Her research interests lie in 19th-century U.S. technology, the American West, and urbanization. She has worked in the Museum Studies department as a graduate assistant for an IMLS-funded grant. She recently held an internship at the Hagley Museum and Library in the Digital Archives department, and is currently working in the Delaware Museum of Natural History archives. In her spare time, Della enjoys practicing yoga, cooking, crocheting, and spending time outdoors.
Jennifer Jensen received her B.A. in History and in English Literature from the University of Idaho in 2008 and an M.A. in History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2010. Jennifer's Masters thesis explored the relationship between child laborers as consumers through their purchase of vice during the Progressive Era. Currently, Jennifer is working toward a Ph.D in 20th century history as well as the Museum Studies Certificate. She intends to focus her research interests on changing kitchen technologies in postwar America and how those transformations influenced notions of gender, community, and identity. In addition, Jennifer is interested in the history of food and how new kitchen technologies altered traditional methods of food production and consumption in the late 20th century. When she is not at school, Jennifer spends her time cooking, exploring the area, and playing with her cat.
Ai Hisano is a Ph.D. student in 20th-century U.S. history, with particular focus on food history. Before joining the Hagley program in 2009, she received her B.A. (2004) and M.A. (2006) in American Studies at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her research explores into the relations between food marketing and the development of “taste” in the U.S. by specifically exploring the political and cultural role of advertising, technological artifacts, and color. In her previous project, Ai examined gender politics in food marketing by focusing on Betty Crocker. Her articles on Betty Crocker were published in several academic journals. She has also conducted research on the alcohol industry. In 2010, as a summer intern at the Hagley Museum and Library, she examined Joseph E. Seagram papers and Ernest Dichter papers, Hagley’s two major collections related to the alcohol and food industries. Two articles in preparation based on the internship – one focused on the wine industry and the other broadly tracing the significance of food marketing research in the current food history scholarship – explore the making, embodiment, and negotiation of taste.
Michael Pospishil received his B.A. in History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2003. He spent several years at work including a year spent in transit between North America's largest factories and distribution centers as a tractor trailer driver for Schneider National Inc. – the largest private trucking company in the world. He returned to school and was awarded an M.A. in History from SUNY Albany in 2010. His thesis analyzed the interplay between technical needs and social expectations in the evolution of New York's steamboats, 1807-1840. Michael enters the Hagley program with a special interest in the proliferation of steam power in the 19th Century, the concomitmant materials shift from wood to coal and iron, and the relationship between technological development and environmental change. He spends his summers hosting natural history tours in Denali National Park in Alaska.
Gretchen Pruett earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Anthropology, with a minor in Ancient Greek Language and Literature in 2010 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also earned her M.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in the following spring. After graduating, Gretchen volunteered with Superior AmeriCorps in Calumet, Michigan for a year, teaching and mentoring socio-economically disadvantaged youth. Gretchen enters the Hagley program as a Master’s student and also pursues the Museum Studies Certificate. She is interested in studying labor history, consumerism, and the social and cultural changes that developed in the course of industrialization. A native of Flint, Michigan, Gretchen is particularly interested in examining the effects of deindustrialization on both the individual and the landscape.
John Sharpe is a 1993 distinguished graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in English, and emphases in political thought and history. Upon graduation he was awarded the Van Dyke Prize for standing highest in courses required to complete an English major, and received the Nancy R. Wicker Award for his Honours Essay on T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
Following graduation from Annapolis, he graduated from Naval Nuclear Power School (Orlando, Fla.), Naval Prototype Training (Charleston, S.C.), and Naval Submarine School (Groton, Conn.). He then served aboard the Los Angeles class nuclear-powered submarine USS Atlanta (SSN 712), where he filled various officer duties, and obtained certification as a Nuclear Engineer Officer. Having completed tours of duty in Italy, at the Pentagon, and in other major naval and joint headquarters, Sharpe returned to academic work, earning an M.A. in History at Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Va.) in 2010.
Sharpe's research interests focus upon anti-industrial social criticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (with a focus on England and the United States), interwar Catholic social and political movements in the English-speaking world, anti-Marxist socio-economic alternatives to liberal capitalism, and the evolution of the idea of property ownership in Western political and economic thought since ca. 1750.
In 2011, Sharpe completed his comprehensive exams and successfully defended his dissertation prospectus. Currently engaged in research and writing, he hopes to complete a substantive study on the activism and advocacy of small proprietorship in the English-speaking world from 1800 to 1940.
Cristina Turdean holds a M.A. degree in History Museum Studies from Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York, Oneonta and an M.A in American History and the History of Technology and Industrialization from the University of Delaware. Cristina is currently working on her dissertation, entitled "Betting on Computers: Digital Technology and the Rise of the Modern Casino Industry in the U.S." Cristina's research interests include the history of computers, high-tech entertainment, and communication technology. Since joining the Hagley Program in 2004, Cristina has been involved in numerous research, exhibit, and archival projects at Hagley Museum and Library. Most recently, Cristina presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association (2007) and the Society for the History of Technology (2006).
John Vanek earned a Bachelor of Science in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. While there, he hosted a radio show and worked on a committee to bring distinguished speakers to campus. After graduating, he interned at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, working with both public outreach and organizational aspects of Jazz Appreciation Month. More recently, John served as a researcher and the go-to music guru for the Minnesota Historical Society’s “1968 Exhibit,” including developing an interactive multimedia music quiz and producing a documentary radio program to air on 89.3 The Current.
John joined the Hagley Program in the fall of 2011 as a Ph.D. student. He intends to focus on the history of American popular music, specifically the transmission of ideas among the US, UK and other world cultures throughout the 20th century. Other historical interests include New World immigration patterns and the impact of technology and education on historical awareness. Outside of school, John enjoys spending time with his new wife, writing a music blog, biking, and cheering on the Minnesota Twins.
Jamin Wells received both his B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Rhode Island. His masters research project, “Professionalization and Cultural Perceptions of Marine Salvors, 1850-1950,” sought to combine his interests in maritime history and underwater archaeology. He has also worked on numerous archaeological projects in Lake Huron, Long Island Sound, and Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. Since joining the Hagley Program in 2007, Jamin researched and wrote "Building the Lydonia II," a digital exhibit for the Hagley Museum and Library. His current research interests include modern America’s relationship to the sea; particularly the relationship between the environment, culture, and shipwrecks. Jamin is a recipient of a 2009-2010 University Competitive Fellowship.
