Explore a sample list of dissertations written by past Department of Educational Policy Studies graduate students.
EPS Alumni Dissertations
| Year | Alumni | Title | Faculty Advisor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | Alexandra Alleiss | Chuj Youth Organizing, Indigenous Education, and Decolonization Across Borders | Kathryn Moller |
| 2018 | Andrew Knudsen | American Teachers, American Workers: AFT, NEA, and the Politics of Performance, 1945-2015 | Adam Nelson |
| 2020 | Ashley Smith-Purviance | Everyday Anti-Black Girl Violence: Surviving and Learning Amidst Persistent School Violence Against Middle School Black Girls | Bianca Baldridge |
| 2018 | Eujin Park | Community-Based Education Spaces, Educational Opportunity, and Racial Positioning in a Korean Immigrant Community | Linn Possey-Maddox |
| 2021 | Eleni Schirmer | Changing Structures, Structuring Change: The Political Economy of Education and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, 1964-201 | Erica Turner |
| 2020 | Jesus Renteria | Latinx College Students in STEM: An Ethnographic Study that Explores Institutional and Student Related Factors of Academic Success and Struggle | Stacey Lee |
| 2020 | Juan Medina | The Politics of Language and Race: Latinx Youth’s Racial Identity Development in Community-Based Educational Spaces. | Bianca Baldridge |
| 2018 | Julissa Ventura | Spaces of Nourishment for Latinx Youth: Bridging School and Community Contexts | Linn Possey-Maddox |
| 2019 | Lee Rensimer | Going Global: Representation and Sense-Making in the British International Branch Campuses of the United Arab Emirates (2019 Dissertation) | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2019 | Mercy Ageypong | Blackness and Africanness: Black West African immigrant students’ experiences in two New York City high schools | Linn Possey-Maddox |
| 2019 | Nick Strohl | The Truman Commission and the Unfulfilled Promise of American Higher Education | Adam Nelson |
| 2019 | Rachel Silver | Sex, Schooling, and Moral Triage in Malawi. | Nancy Kendall |
| 2018 | Stefanie Wong | White Dominance in Diverse Schools: The Possibilities and Limits of Multicultural and Social Justice Education | Stacey Lee |
| 2022 | Regina Fuller | Politicizing Sexuality: Making Sex Education Policy in Ghana | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2022 | Minhtuyen Mai | Not Your Asian Nerd: Listening to Southeast Asian American Youth in Computer Science | Nancy Kendall |
| 2022 | Caitlin Brecklin | District at the Edge: Policy, Community, Place and Belonging in a School Closure Debate | Erica Turner |
| 2022 | Joan Jaejin Hong | Relative (Dis)Privilege: Complicating Ideas Regarding East and South Asian American Youth | Stacey Lee |
| 2022 | Rachel Johnson | Black Homeschooling: A Site of Freedom and Constraints for Black Families | Linn Posey-Maddox |
| 2022 | Lena Marie Batt | How Do School Leaders Conceptualize, Garner, and Allocate Resources: Using Multiple Methods to Examine School-Level Resource Decision Making | Erica Turner |
| 2022 | Jennifer Otting | Imaginations of a Democratic Future: The Changing Landscape of Higher Education in Burma | Erica Turner |
| 2022 | Rosie Miesner | Compliance Amid Complexity?: How People, Policies, and a Pandemic Shape Special Education in Practice | Erica Turner |
| 2022 | Jonathan Berhanu | Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: The Gendered Experiences of Black Men at a Predominantly White University | Stacey Lee |
| 2022 | Anthony Hernandez | Pockets of Opportunity: An Analysis of Success at Two-Year Hispanic-Serving Institutions | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2022 | Keith McNamara | Testing Bias in Psychology, Law, and Public Policy, 1920–1980 | Bill Reese |
| 2022 | Larry D. Brown Jr. | Edu-Carcerality: Beyond the Metaphor of School to Prison | Bianca Baldridge |
| 2021 | Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite | Language Policy Awareness and Implementation in Nigeria: Implications for Early Grade Reading Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2021 | Choua Xiong | HMoob-Making Lessons: Stateless Belonging and Home-Making in a Neoliberal Nationalist Thai School | Stacey Lee |
| 2021 | Huimin Wang | Creating the Well-Adjusted Citizen: The Human Sciences and Public Schools in the United States, World War I–1950 | Bill Reese |
| 2021 | Erin H Cantos | Revolutionary Teachers: Colonial Schooling and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Philippines | Bill Reese |
| 2021 | Sohyun Kang | Elite High Schools and Reproduction of Elites in the U.S. | Eric Grodsky |
| 2021 | Brett Bertucio | From Courtroom to Classroom: Church, State, and American Civic Education, 1940–1980 | Bill Reese & Simone Schweber |
| 2021 | Marlo Reeves | Understanding Race, Grassroots Organizing, and Funding within a Community-Based Youth Organization: A Three-Paper Case Study | Bianca Baldridge |
| 2021 | Shanshan Jiang | Between the Pearl River Delta and teh US Midwest: Class and Racial Transformation through Transnational Higher Education | Kathryn Moeller |
| 2021 | Teresa Speciale | Different Languages, Different Futures? Education, Language, and (Im)mobility in Dakar, Senegal | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2021 | Glen Water | Radical Urban Citizenship: Critical Education on the Margins of a Global Megacity | Michael Apple |
| 2021 | Tarsha Herelle | Women of the Black Diaspora: Policies of Inclusion, Politics of Exclusion, and Spaces of Resistance | Kathryn Moeller |
| 2021 | Amato Nocera | Constructing a Black Curriculum: Race, Representation, and the Politics of Knowledge, 1890-1945 | Adam Nelson |
| 2020 | Diana Famakinwa | Africa's Secret Weapon?": A Case Study of Diaspora-Homeland Collaborations in Nigerian Higher Education | Lesley Bartlett |
| 2020 | Jake Malloy | An Actor-Network Approach to Evaluation in Wisconsin Schools | Erica Turner |
| 2020 | Thatcher Spero | The Myth and Reality of Developing Global Citizens: A Qualitative Case Study of Higher Education Internationalization in Japan | Adam Nelson |
| 2023 | Abby Beneke | The Politics and Practice of School Discipline Reform | Erica Turner |
| 2023 | Dan Berman | Defending Democracy: Social Studies and Citizenship Education during World War II | Bill Reese |
| 2023 | Brianna LaFoon | Island Chains: The American Imperial Education Web in the Early Twentieth Century. | Bill Reese |
| 2023 | Qing Liu | Unexpected Immigrants: Chinese Scholars in American Universities, 1940s-1980s | Adam Nelson |
| 2023 | Eric Luckey | Developing Morals: The Education of Lawrence Kohlberg | Adam Nelson |
| 2023 | Linda Pheng | Disrupting Displacement: Taking Root in a Southeast Asian Community-based Educational Space for Southeast Asian Refugee Youth | Stacey Lee |
| 2023 | Maria Velazquez | Tenant Families in the Housing-School Nexus: Raising Children, Advocating, & Organizing in the California Bay Area. | Linn Posey-Maddox |
| 2024 | Kelsey Dalrymple | Processes of Erasure: The Consequences of Social Emotional Learning with Burundian Refugees in Tanzania | Diana Rodriguez-Gomez |
| 2024 | Arun Kolar | Creating a Bilingual Advantage: The Value of World Language and Biliteracy Skills on Academic Persistence and College Readiness | Amy Claessens |
| 2024 | Jacques Lesure | Making Extraordinary Men: Race Leadership Education in a Nonprofit Collegiate Black Male Initiative | Erica Turner |
| 2024 | Edgar Valles | Clashing Regimes: Misunderstandings of Social Systems in a Southern Dallas Latino Community Education Program | Stacey Lee |
| Year | Alumni | Title | Faculty Advisor(s) |