Graduate Student Research Showcase

The graduate students in the American Studies program at Purdue produce forward-thinking original scholarship and creative productions that push the boundaries of American Studies as a field, as well as that of the various disciplines with which they engage. This page regularly showcases these young scholars and their current interdisciplinary research and also alumni from the program.

Lee Bebout

Dr. Lee Bebout (PhD ’07) teaches on and researches in the areas of race, social justice, and political culture. Earning his PhD from Purdue University’s Program in American Studies, Bebout is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies and the Program in American Studies.  His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. His book, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minnesota 2011), examines how narratives of myth and history were deployed to articulate political identity in the Chicano movement and postmovement era.  His second book, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White (New York University Press 2016) examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been used to foster whiteness and Americanness, or more accurately whiteness as Americanness. He has recently co-edited (with Philathia Bolton and Cassander Smith) Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom (Northwestern UP), a volume on the challenges of and strategies for teaching about race.