Desmond Hassing, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Email: [email protected] | Office: AL-330
Dr. Desmond Hassing is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and received his Ph.D. in Theatre and Dance from the University of California San Diego in 2024 where his dissertation, Settler Dreams and Affective Warfare: The Communications Campaign that Formatted the United States of America, focused on the use of the iconography of the “Hollywood Indian” trope in popular culture (sports mascots, film, comic books, advertising) as a mechanism for constructing Western/American identity in the 20th century. Hassing also received a Masters of Arts degree in Theatre from San Diego State University in 2017 where he conducted two major projects designed to the increase the accessibility of scholarship into the representation of Indigenous Peoples in the popular media of the 20th century: the first is the National Indian Project, an annotated bibliography of Indigenous Representations found in a survey of roughly 35,000 individual comic book stories published in DC/National comic books from 1938-1975; and second the Indigenous Peoples Reading Room, is a planned open access archive that contains samples of more than 2000 comic books, postcards, sports memorabilia and other “Americana” from the mid-20th century (circa 1911-1980).
Hassing is also a theatrical/conceptual artist and a community organizer, who has served on the boards of OnStage Playhouse, a local community serving theatre in Chula Vista, California, and the Teenage Youth Performing Arts company (TYPA) an experimental social justice theatre dedicated to centering the teenage performer/artist within the institutional power structure, up to and including a teenage Artistic Director. As an artist, Hassing’s most recent film, #stillhere, was selected for the First Nations Film and Video Festival, California’s American Indian and Indigenous Film Festival, the One Heart Native Arts and Film Festival, the Wairoa Maori Film Festival, and was a finalist at the 2016 Equality International Film Festival.