Advisory Board

Frank Cogliano
Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Cogliano runs the University's American Studies program and is currently Director of Studies for third and fourth year American Studies students. His teaching and research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history with particular emphasis on the revolutionary and early national periods.

Roselyn Jua
Chair of the Department of English, University of Buea, Cameroon. Dr. Jua carries out research in and teaches American and English Literature to both Undergraduate and Graduate students. She is working right now on a comparative analysis of Houses in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens. She writes poetry; has observed several elections in Africa as part of the AAI (African American Institute) team Dr. Jua is currently a Fullbright Visiting Scholar at Howard University.

Richard King
Richard King is Vaughn Fellow at the Warren Center for Humanities at Vanderbilt. Dr. King will be visiting professor of history at Vanderbilt next year. He's been finishing up an intellectual history of the attack on racism, anti-Semitism and western ethnocentrism in the 1940-1970 period. His interests cover European and American Intellectual History since 1900.

Emily Budick
Dr. Budick teaches at Hebrew University, Israel. She holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in American Studies. She has published numerous articles and several books on the American Romance tradition (Fiction and Historical Consciousness and Engendering Romance, both with Yale University Press and Nineteenth-Century American Romance with Twayne; Emily Dickinson and the Life of Language with Louisiana State UP; and Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation with Cambridge; she has edited a book on Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Jewish Literature (SUNY), and is now completing a project on Holocaust fiction in the US and Israel.

Anne Koenen
Dr. Koenen is professor at Leipzig University. After majoring in American Studies and Political Science, she worked on "Contemporary African-American Women's Literature" and completed her dissertation in 1981. While the interest in African-American literature and culture has remained a focal point of her teaching and research, she worked on the fantastic in her "Habilitation," a German degree that follows the dissertation, and published a book "Visions of Doom, Plots of Power: The Fantastic in Anglo-American Women's Literature." During the research for that book, she was a visiting scholar at Berkeley for three years. After her return to Germany, she was appointed full professor at Leipzig University in 1993. Her current project is on mail-order catalogs (mainly Sears Roebuck) as the primary media of modernization in the rural US, 1880-1930; other interests include popular culture and literature in general, as well as the Victorian US.

Jesus Velasco
Chair of the International Studies Department, CIDE, University of Mexico. Research: 1) U.S political development; 2) U.S history, and 3) U.S - Mexican relations. Publications: Jesus Velasco and Rodolfo de la Garza (Eds). Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-U.S. Relations. Boulder, Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. He has also published in The Journal of American History.

Dr. Padraic Conway
Dr. Conway has been Director of Development at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university, since October 1997. Since then, over $100m. has been raised from various sources, with major academic and capital developments which have added 25% to the UCD building stock. A recent outstanding success has been the acquisition of funding for the William Jefferson Clinton Centre for American Studies, Ireland's first dedicated American Studies Centre. UCD has also secured funding for Ireland's first Chair of American Studies which will be located in the Clinton Centre. Prior to UCD, Dr. Conway worked for Andersen Consulting. His PhD is in theology and he was secretary of the Irish Theological Association from 1992-96.

Dr. Maurice Bric
Dr. Bric is Director of the William Jefferson Clinton Centre for American Studies at UCD. He is a lecturer in the Modern History Department at UCD, specialising in 18th Century American and Irish History. Dr. Bric has been a senior adviser to government for many years on matters of higher education. In addition to his academic publications, he was the author of the seminal Bric Report on research in the humanities and social sciences which led directly to the establishment of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and the Social Sciences (IRCHSS). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the European Science Foundation.

Stella O'Leary
Ms O'Leary is consultant for the Clinton School of American Studies University College, Dublin. She is also the president of the Irish American Democrats, based in Maryland.

Gulriz Buken
Dr. Buken is Professor at Bilkent University, Turkey, also a delegate to and Board Member of EAAS (European American Studies Association). She has published numerous articles on art and popular culture in the United States, and is interested in Native American spirituality, art and culture. Her works in progress include a book-length project on the correlation between the economic policies and the development of consumer society and culture in America, Europe and Turkey entitled Globalization of American Popular Culture and Cultural Consumption: Cultural Internationalism or Transnational Acculturation of Europe and Turkey as a Case Study, 1945-1998. She also concentrates on the critical discourse embodied in Native American art as the reaffirmation of the Native American culture and identity.

Francois Weil
Dr. Weil is Professor and Director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Higher Education in the Social Sciences) in Paris, and a member of the Center for American Studies in France. He has published on French-Americans, the emergence of urban and industrial America, and US-Canada relations since 1770. Dr. Weil is also advisor for the French Ministry of Higher Education.