10/9/19 10/9/19

AMS 356 Students "Meme" Cultural History

Today in "Stories from the Classroom," Dr. Alex Beasley shares student-created memes from his AMS 356. Read on to learn more about this awesome assignment!

This semester in Main Currents in American Culture Since 1865, I had students create an original meme that emphasized some theme or concept we’d discussed in class. Students were tasked with taking an existing image that circulates as a meme and changing the text to communicate some broader point about U.S. cultural history between 1865 and 1900.This assignment has a hidden intention: it asks students to engage critically and creatively with the material, with the hope that doing so will make historical material feel more immediate in the present. Moreover, it tasks them with considering how memes communicate as a medium, and to think big about what points they can make about history that resonate in the present.Below are some of my favorites.

10/7/19 10/7/19

A Conversation with Angie Maxwell (PhD 2008), author of "The Long Southern Strategy" (2019)

Dr. Angie Maxwell (UT AMS PhD, 2008) recently published her second academic monograph, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics(Oxford, 2019). AMS :: ATX spoke with Maxwell about the new project, interdisciplinary research on Southern politics, and the importance of paying attention to white women voters in the South. Dr. Maxwell is Director for the Diane D. Blair Center for Southern Politics & Society, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Diane D. Blair Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Arkansas.

Can you tell us about your book, The Long Southern Strategy, and how you came to the project? I started this book long before “nasty women” and “bad hombres” became part of our political vernacular. But as I watched the events of those elections unfold, I realized that the central question of this book—how did we get here?—was more important to answer than ever. Political scientists will tell you that the realignment of the South from solidly Democrat to Republican is the single greatest partisan transformation in all of American history. Yet the explanation that we give—the explanation that we accept—seemed too simple to me, especially now. I wanted to figure out what we had missed? What dots had we not connected? To that end, rather than shining a spotlight on a single election, this book is a panned-out, mixed-methods, backward glance at the Republican Party’s decision, in the post-Civil Rights era, to court southern white voters. It turns out it wasn’t a decision, but a series of decisions—not just on the federal government’s role in ensuring racial equality, but also on equality for women and on the separation of church and state. It took a Long Southern Strategy to flip the South from blue to red, the result of which changed out national politics across the board.

What projects or people have inspired your work?Lillian Smith’s writing has influenced me profoundly. Her book, Killers of the Dream, published in 1949, set me on this research path. She was able to critique the social constructions that she lived in all of their complexity—how white supremacy and patriarchy and authoritarian religion were intimately and deliberately intertwined, mutually reinforcing each other until they became a gravitational-like force that held everything and everyone in their place.

How does your background in American Studies impact your writing, teaching, and your career in general?There has been very little research on the gendered aspects of political realignment, and even less on the political behavior of southern white women. Those dynamics play a critical role in the GOP’s efforts to win southern white voters and cut a new path to an Electoral College victory. The GOP’s decision to drop the ERA from its platform in 1980 is a lynchpin in the political realignment of the region, winning the South back after Democrat Jimmy Carter turns it blue again in 1976. And the anti-ERA movement gave the GOP its “family values” mantra that catalyzed the party’s campaign to convert religious evangelical and fundamentalist Christian voters. In order to understand why anti-feminism played so well in the white South, I had to pull from literary criticism, archival material, and scholarship in sociology, legal studies, gender studies, cultural anthropology, etc., and merge it with the quantitative polling data that underscores the book’s major arguments. I could not have done that without my training in American Studies.

What advice do you have for students in our department about getting the most out of their experience at UT?Read across disciplines. Take classes across disciplines, even across colleges. There is so much rich ground to till in the overlap between the humanities and social sciences. Quantitative methods can enrich American Studies scholarship, and American Studies scholars can help, for example, political scientists ask better polling questions.

What projects are you excited to work on in the future?I’m definitely planning to write more about the politics of southern white women—how they defy the national Gender Gap. For example, though journalists and pundits often report that Hillary Clinton lost white women in the 2016 election, they do not disaggregate the vote by region. Hillary Clinton won white women living outside of the South, 52 to 48. However, in the South, Trump wins the southern white female vote by almost 30 points. I’m also pursuing a project on the history of anti-feminism in America, particularly among women. But right now, I’m co-editing an edition of James Agee’s short fiction. I wrote my master’s thesis in American Studies on James Agee, and I’m thrilled to return to one of the first subjects that sparked my intellectual curiosity.

10/3/19 10/3/19

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Josh Kopin on Talking Le Guin in Paris

In this third installment of "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," UT AMS Doctoral candidate Josh Kopin takes us to Paris through the writing of Ursula K. Le Guin. Read on for Josh's take on conferencing abroad and the pleasures of traveling with your favorite writer.

The second best thing to do in Paris is to buy books. I don’t read French, but even buying English language books in Paris is a joy. All bookstores are jewels, but Parisian bookstores are especially striking by decree: the famous stalls that line the Seine, where I regret not picking up a poster of the 1953 Tour de France route; the big corporate ones a few blocks into the Latin Quarter, where I bought the first two novels by Northern Irish writer Anna Burns, whose recent dense and beautiful and dystopian novel of the Troubles, Milkman, flows like a river with rapids and dams; to the tourist trap at Shakespeare and Co, where I couldn’t resist a stout edition of Chinese science fiction and a Murakami-lite novel from Taiwan about a missing bicycle. But the bookstore that’s bookmarked in my memory is the big, airy one with the tall windows and the red panes across from the Jardin du Luxembourg, where a satire in translation, a hip award-winner, and one of the most beautiful book-objects I’ve ever seen, from a British press that publishes neglected twentieth century women writers, somehow found their way into my bag. We chatted with the owner, who mentioned she was looking for partners and we counted up our euros and our pocket lint and we told her we would have to think about it.We’re still thinking about it.Holding books in Parisian bookstores is a joy; American paperbacks almost never fulfill the primary function of a softcover book, which is to fit into your back pocket. In my two weeks in France, I didn’t ride in a car even once. Having a book at hand at on the train, in the park, walking down the street, having so many small, satisfying treasures to choose from, felt just about utopian.I was in Paris this summer to talk about books, specifically about one book, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, at a conference dedicated to her life and work. When Le Guin died at the beginning of 2019, I was devastated; I turn to her for wisdom and guidance; she is my heart. The opportunity to celebrate her with others was a kind of homecoming; of the many extraordinarily talented and dedicated scholars I was on the schedule, I’m proud that I can now call a few my friends.The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is a novel from Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, a group of experiments in political thinking that proceed from the premise that there are genetically modified humans living on planets arrayed across the stars. In The Left Hand of Darkness, perhaps her most famous novel, the inhabitants of the ice planet Winter are without gender or even differentiated biological sex; the humans of The Dispossessed are covered in short, fine hair, but they are otherwise similar to Earth-humans. The novel is set on the planet Urras, a planet fighting a thinly veiled analogue of the Cold War, and its moon, Anarres, where a colony of anarchists were allowed to settle a century and a half before the events of the novel. On Anarres, individuals are nominally free to do as they please, supported by and supported their society. Guided by the works of a philosopher named Odo, the moon lacks what we would call government; it uses a central computer for planning purposes and the opinions of an individual’s neighbors, rather than laws, as a means of social control. Both planet and moon have recently been shaken by the arrival of representatives from interstellar humanity, including an ambassador from Earth.The dual stories of the plot center around the youth of the Anerresti physicist Shevek, the way that the stifling social conditions of the moon drive him to rebellion as he completes his great theory of simultaneity (an apparently extraordinary development in theoretical physics that leads to the ansible, a piece of speculative technology that allows individuals to communicate across the vast distances of space in real time), and his eventual fool’s errand to Urras, where he hopes to reconcile the two societies.My paper focused on an unusual feature of the anarchist philosophy presented in the book, its emphasis on what Le Guin calls “fidelity.” I can say without hesitation or self-consciousness that the passage where I first remember encountering her use of that word changed my life; she writes:

…the variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

I was awed by Le Guin’s fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity, one of the utopias put forward for consideration in The Dispossessed (subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia”). Modeled on a just relationship between individuals premised on their mutual support for each other’s flourishing rooted in the individual’s moral obligation to promote their own, Le Guin’s fragile, makeshift, improbable utopia is striking because it appears as a fractal, the same pattern repeating over and over at increasingly smaller scales, from the level of the society all the way down to individual relationships. Some of these are premised on the sexual monogamy we usually mean when we use the word fidelity, but the vast majority aren’t, both because most human relationships aren’t sexual and because monogamy is not the default on Anarres.I gave my talk on Friday morning; Friday afternoon’s sessions were all in French, so my partner and I slipped out, ate some cheese for lunch and drank small sugary espressos after, went shopping for books, and then into the Jardin du Luxembourg.In the middle of the park, between the small restaurants and the bocce courts, there’s a grand fountain. In the plaza around the fountain sits a little stall that rents tiny toy sail boats and bamboo poles; you put the boat in the fountain, poke it with the stick, watch it sail around until it hits the wall, at which point you get it moving again by giving it another poke with a stick.This is the best thing to do in Paris.My partner stayed for a few more days, and after she left I traveled to Angoulême, a small city in the southwest. Every year, the city holds the world’s most important comics festival, and it is the home to a comics museum, open year round. I traveled there to give a paper on the role of the Ranger (a UT-Austin humor magazine that was also responsible for producing a significant number of important American media personalities over several decades in the middle of the twentieth century) in the prehistory of the US underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Underground was a national phenomenon, it is generally thought of as having been founded in San Francisco; recovering the Ranger and other campus humor rags in the movement’s coalescence serves a broader project of reconceptualizing the Underground that was the focus of an issue of INKS, put out this summer and co-edited by my friends Margaret Galvan and Leah Misemer, that featured my first published academic article.While I was in Angoulême, the temperature, already hotter than temperate France is used to, exploded. It exploded all over Europe. The Paris I returned to for a day and a half at the end of my trip was still bustling, but it was clearly under a good deal of strain. I went back to the Jardin du Luxembourg to see the boats one last time, but they weren’t there; it was simply too hot.Although many of Le Guin’s novels are early examples of the increasingly important genre of speculative environmental fiction we now call cli-fi, The Dispossessed is not usually counted among these. Critics instead (and perhaps rightfully) tend to focus on its experiment in anarchist living. But the novel pays clear attention to environmental conditions: its plot turns on a major ecological catastrophe on Anarres, a drought that causes many deaths and shakes Shevek’s faith in the way the moon’s people govern themselves; the beauty of Urras, meanwhile, emerges from its vegetation, its large animals, its wide open wild spaces, all absent from the harsh ecology of the moon. Even the one character from Earth, an ambassador, describes our planet’s future state in environmental terms; ecological catastrophe from climate change has rendered much of the planet uninhabitable, leaving its population at a sparse half a billion.It’s not clear exactly who Le Guin believes are the dispossessed of her novel’s title. Is it the anarchists of Anarres, scratching by on a barren world? Is it the poor of Urras, rendered abject by capitalist excess? As Paris boiled, as I tried to read my book and watched a fountain emptied of its happy boats, I began to wonder if, instead, she meant us.

10/1/19 10/1/19

Five Questions with First-Years Returns! An Interview with Coyote Shook

It’s October, which means it’s time to introduce the newest cohort of UT AMS doctoral students! We asked all five incoming students about their academic backgrounds, their intellectual interests, and projects they plan to pursue here at UT. Today we bring you Coyote Shook. Coyote comes to UT with a background in Gender Studies and research interests in comics, the American Spiritualist movement, and death/dying (but Coyote promises that they're an "otherwise normal person.") Read on to learn more about Coyote and their plans as a doctoral student UT!

What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your teaching and research?I did most of my undergraduate research in American Studies (particularly looking at death and dying in Civil War culture). I went to Wisconsin for an MA in Gender Studies where I researched prosthetic limb fundraisers after the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888. It was during this time that I started to experiment with comics as a medium for presenting research. It stuck. Outside of the academic world, I was a high school English teacher for three years and completed a Fulbright in Poland in 2014-2015.

Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?The department offered me the one thing I can't resist: funding. In all seriousness, I appreciated the supportive tone from faculty during the application process. They seemed genuinely curious and engaged with the concept of comics as research in a way that no other department quite matched. I felt this was a space where I could be challenged as a student, but also grow as a scholar who uses nontraditional mediums for research purposes. Plus I was drawn to Austin's alluring margarita culture.

What projects or people have inspired your work?I draw very heavily from queer/crip historians and scholars. Alison Kafer, Eli Clare, Ellen Samuels, Jasbir Puar, and Lee Edelman have all been really influential on my work. I also draw a lot from Marxist feminists and labor theorists such as Heidi Hartmaan, Lauren Berlant, and Sylvia Federici.In terms of projects, I'm really drawn to cartoonists who have used creative nonfiction. Cartoonists who inspire my work include Lynda Barry, Isabel Greenberg, Allison Bechdel, David Small, Edward Gorey, Art Spiegelman, Tove Jansson, and Joe Sacco.

What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?I'm currently focusing on the American Spiritualist movement and its intersections with disability and dark tourism. I'm currently working on research about diet and food in spiritualist culture and seances. I'm also working on a paper about Mary Todd Lincoln's relationship with spiritualism and her transgressions in Victorian grief culture that contributed to the sexist and ableist caricature we are left with in modern representations. Honestly, my research since I was in undergrad has focused on sickness and death, so I'd be surprised if it deviates from that. However, I'd like to emphasize that I'm an otherwise normal person who just happens to have macabre research tastes.

What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?I plan on marrying a very, very rich man and not worrying about future employment.Also, if that doesn't work, probably museum work around public history education and history curriculum design for public schools. But I really, really need option A to pan out.

Bonus Question: In your own words, what is American Studies?American Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines history and culture in the United States and/or the impact of American empire on global events...y'know what? I'm gonna just stop myself there. I fail.

9/30/19 9/30/19

UPDATE: Event Postponed to Spring 2020: Dr. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho to give Paredes Distinguished Lecture

This Wednesday, October 2nd*, Dr. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, Chair of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale, will give the 2019 Américo Paredes Distinguished Lecture. Dr. Schmidt-Camacho will speak on the need to defend Ethnic Studies and the high-profile strike she lead amongst ERM faculty at Yale.The lecture will take place at 6 pm in the Harry Ransom Center's Prothro Theater. *Editor's note: The Paredes Distinguished Lecture has been postponed to Spring 2020. Stay tuned! Screen Shot 2019-09-30 at 3.09.46 PM

9/27/19 9/27/19

Monday (9/30): Dr. Helena Woodard to Discuss new book, "Slave Sites on Display"

This Monday, September 30, Dr. Helena Woodard (UT Austin Department of English) will be in conversation about her new book, Slave Sites On Display: Reflecting Slavery's Legacy through Contemporary "Flash" Moments, with Dr. Sheila Smith McKoy (Holy Names University).The event begins at 2:30 pm in GWB 2.206. We'll see you there!

9/25/19 9/25/19

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Dr. Steven Hoelscher on Bicycling in Vienna

In this second installment of "What I Did on My Summer Vacation," AMS Department Chair Dr. Stephen Hoelscher shares his experience biking with UT undergraduates during the "Memory and the City" Maymester program in Vienna, Austria. Please enjoy Dr. Hoelscher's photo essay "Bicycling in Vienna: Toward a Velo-Centered Sense of Place."“

The bicycle was a collaborator in my reading of the city, of territory crossed and crisscrossed, of backwaters explored.” -Iain Sinclair

When encountering a new city, I can think of no better way to get around than on a bicycle: you can cover a lot of terrain quickly, but you are still embedded in the landscape. For art rock icon and avid urban cyclist David Byrne, part of what makes biking through a city so great is how you visualize the places you’re riding through: "faster than a walk, slower than a train, and slightly higher than a person . . . one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in [a]town.”Time and space compress as you traverse great expanses, and yet the theater of social life that makes cities so wonderful, so unforgettable, is everywhere evident. You run into all sorts of stuff that you had no idea was happening—parades, carnivals, social gatherings, protests. You see entirely new neighborhoods, new parks, new housing units, new stores and theaters, even though those “new” places may be hundreds of years old.“Forget the damned motor car,” urban theorist Lewis Mumford once pleaded,“and build cities for lovers and friends.” The cities I like best are ones that are built for lovers and friends to ride their bikes through, without worrying about where to find a parking spot, and that encourages them to stop and enjoy each other’s company.

Vienna, Austria, is one such city. The infrastructure for all kinds of transportation, including bicycles, is impressive. One recent study found Vienna to be the 9th most bike-friendly city in the world, and I believe it. There are bike lanes everywhere, more than 1,300 kilometers throughout the city, many of which are protected from automobile traffic. People ride their bikes everywhere: to the opera, to work, to a favorite park, to bakeries and grocery stores, to soccer games, to school, to wine taverns. Equally important is the hard-to-define cultural sensibility that has made riding a bicycle more of a way of life than simply a mode of transportation. A velo-centered sense of place permeates the city.Most summers, since 2007, I’ve had the good fortune of teaching an American Studies course in Vienna. Every year—except one—I’ve brought a bicycle. Like the British novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, for me the bicycle is a collaborator in my approach to making sense of cities. Each morning, I traverse Vienna, scouting out new places for our class meetings and looking to see whether the places I know well have changed. This is important logistical work since our class meetings are comprised of field trips to different sites that we’re studying. My pedagogical approach comes directly from my training in geography,with fieldwork built into the discipline’s DNA. I ask myself: why show PowerPoint slides about, say,the Karl-Marx-Hof social housing project, or a Nazi-era anti-aircraft tower,when we can conduct our class in those locations? Often,I get sidetracked, and explore backwaters that I had no idea existed.The bicycle might be the same one that I ride in Austin, but everything about the experience seems different, including the food that I eat along the way.Over the years, and with only a modest amount of encouragement, students have also discovered their own velo-centered senses of place. Many have made use of the excellent City Bike program.One student, in 2009, purchased a vintage steel-frame Colnago racing bike at the local flea market. And another, in 2015, even learned how to ride a bike, never having done so before.What happened this summer was a little unusual. Toward the end of our month-long course, a couple students approached me about leading a group bicycle ride for the entire class. I was immediately interested, of course, but also concerned about potential logistical and safety issues. Thankfully, riding bicycles(unlike skydiving and automobile driving) is not on the International Office’s prohibited-activities list.I was also hesitant because I didn’t want any student to feel left out if they didn’t have the ability to ride for a couple hours. On the bus ride back from our weekend in Salzburg, I asked every student individually if they would be interested in such an activity; much to my surprise, everyone responded affirmatively and with great enthusiasm. To the question: “Fährst du rad?,” each replied: “Ja, gern!”So, our penultimate evening in Vienna included a bike ride. The intensive work of the course—the lenghty readings, field excursions, field note writing, research presentations, dailyGerman language classes—was nearly complete, so the timing seemed right. As a route, I chose the Donauinsel (Danube Island). Closed to automobile traffic, the 21-kilometer-long island serves as an important urban greenway in the heart of the city. The island—constructed in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a flood control effort—cuts the Danube river in two sections. The wider (western) section is the main portion of the river and serves as the navigation channel for enormous tourist ships and cargo vessels. Free of motorized vessels, the narrower (eastern) channel—the Neue Donau (“New Danube”)—was constructed with the development of the Donauinsel and serves as an enormous swimming pool. Today, some thirty years after its creation and well connected to the city’s public transit system, the Donauinsel is a massive urban park, with sports fields, barbeque equipment,sun bathing areas, floating rafts, playgrounds, and the world’s largest music festival (unlike ACL, it’s free).And bicycle paths. Crisscrossing the island, the more than 50 kilometers of Donauinsel bike paths proved to be ideal. With the assistance of Fahrradverleih Copa Cagrana—a bicycle rental place adjacent to our subway stop—my students and I were outfitted with turquoise blue city cruisers. After getting everyone set up, we slowly took off, meandering up stream. One could almost hear Freddie Mercury sharing in our adventure:

Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle / I want to ride my bicycle / I want to ride my bike / I want to ride my bicycle / I want to ride it where I like

Before my eyes, college students were transformed. Some were reconnecting with nearly forgotten younger selves of when they loved riding bikes. Others were experiencing velo-exhilaration for the first time. We rode slowly, to enjoy the moment and so that no one felt pressured to keep up. I kept riding to the front and then to the back of our mini peloton, making sure that everyone was doing alright. The view, which I tried to photograph as best I could, approximates the atmosphere, but doesn’t quite capture the frolicking scene.We rode to the Anfang der Donauinsel, the point where the Danube Island begins, and stopped for a group photograph. It’s one of my favorites.On the way back to Fahrradverleih Copa Cagrana, and our not-quite-farewell dinner, we stopped for a swim. One of the students had the brilliant idea of bringing sidewalk chalk. And so for the better part of an hour, University of Texas students swam in the cool (if not exactly Blue) Danube. They made art that tagged their presence, that tried out some of their new German language, and that expressed their feelings about living and studying abroad. And they swapped stories about life back in the U.S. and how it differs from the city that had become home. The conversations continued well into the evening, long after we returned our bicycles and had dinner together.As a way to wrap up a course, to help students see and experience the world in a new way, cycling along the Donauinsel proved enormously successful. I think it was especially impactful for those students who did not consider themselves “athletic” or who had not ridden a bike in years. Pretty much every student told me how much they enjoyed the ride, and one wrote after the conclusion to our class: “that bike ride was one of the best experiences of my LIFE.”As for me, I count myself among the most fortunate of working people. When your job feels like summer vacation, and when others find your commitments—in this case, a velo-centered sense of place—worth sharing, you’ve found a winning combination.For more information about Steven Hoelscher’s Vienna course, including comments from students who have taken it, see the course website.

9/23/19 9/23/19

September 26-28: Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform Conference at UT Austin School of Law

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From September 26-29, the Rapoport Center for Human Rights at the UT Austin School of Law will host "Prison Abolition, Human Rights, and Penal Reform: From the Local to the Global."This interdisciplinary conference will consider the relationships among the human rights, prison abolition, and penal reform movements. Do they share the same goals? Should they collaborate? If so, in what ways?Ruth Wilson Gilmore will deliver the keynote address, “Meanwhile: Making Abolitionist Geographies,” on Thursday, September 26, as the fifth annual Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecturer in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights. Gilmore, a renowned activist and public scholar known for her work on prison abolition, is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she also directs the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. A poetry reading with Dwayne Betts and Natalie Diazwill precede the lecture. A reception will follow.Please see the event page and conference website for more information.

9/20/19 9/20/19

Tonight (9/20): "Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)" at Bass Concert Hall

Tonight, Friday, September 20th at 7:30 pm, Texas Performing Arts presents Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), a performance piece inspired by the work and legacy of Robert Mapplethorpe. The event is open to the public with tickets beginning at $10 for students and $20 for UT faculty and staff. triptuch_event_hero_1060x563_0 Here's a description from the event page:Thirty years after photographer and visual artist Robert Mapplethorpe’s untimely death, it’s difficult to turn away from the compelling emotional complexity of his influential body of work.  In this new performance piece, music, poetry, and photography come together in a theatrical context, exploring the impact Mapplethorpe’s work had on the lives and careers of composer Bryce Dessner (The National) and librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle. This major collaboration with director Kaneza Schaal, features the poetry of Tuttle, Essex Hemphill, Patti Smith, and others as well as the choral group Roomful of Teeth. It revisits the formative impact of Mapplethorpe’s work, inviting the audience to simultaneously experience Dessner’s music against some of the most captivating and divisive words and images the world has ever known. Through music and large-scale projection of Mapplethorpe’s images, this extraordinary work allows the audience to peer inside Mapplethorpe’s bold, insatiable view of how human beings look, touch, feel, hurt, and love one another.

9/18/19 9/18/19

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Andi Remoquillo on Interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Each year, when UT AMS returns to campus for the fall, we ask our faculty and graduate students to report on their summer activities. First up is doctoral student Andi Remoquillo who interned at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Read on for research discoveries, blossoming friendships, and the best hotdog food truck in D.C.

This summer I traded Austin’s triple digit temperatures for Washington, D.C.’s swampy humidity. Regardless of the fact that I constantly looked like I just stepped out of the shower, I had an amazing time on the East Coast. I ate endless amounts of shellfish, admired the different kinds of architecture as I walked down the streets, and interned with the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. This picture is of me in front of the NMAH, eating the first of many hotdogs I would buy that summer from the food truck on Constitution Ave.During my curatorial internship I worked with Dr. Sam Vong — a history professor at UT Austin and the curator of Asian Pacific American History at the NMAH — on his APA Women’s Labor History project. Dr. Vong started this project to expand the APA History collection and make women’s narratives more central within it. A large part of my responsibilities was conducting research on Southeast Asian refugee women and their industries in the U.S. I also contacted some of these communities in Seattle, Houston, and Long Beach to learn more about their histories, types of industries, and their communities. Lastly, I was in charge of cutting cake (and eating it).When working on the APA Women’s History project, I particularly enjoyed learning about the community of Hmong floral farmers in Seattle who sold their flowers at the Pike Place Market. Large groups of Hmong immigrants arrived in the 1970’s and 1980’s as refugees and made a living, built communities, and raised their families around floral farming. Today, second generation Hmong Americans continue to run their family farms and sell at farmers markets around Washington. However, my fondest memories from the internship had to do with the friendships I made with other Asian Americans also interning there. Spending time with them really reminded me of the importance of finding community in big institutions. We bonded over lots (and I mean lots) of food, conversations about our families and identities, and even went to see The Farewell together. So many tears were shed and tissues passed around.When I wasn’t at the internship I was out exploring other museums, trying out different food and drink spots, watching live music, and conducting my own research at the Library of Congress. I wasn’t quite sure where to start at the LOC, largely because I didn’t think they would have anything specific to Filipino women in Chicago. I’m thrilled to say, however, that I was mistaken. The Main Reading Room and Asian Reading Room had a number of documents specific to Filipinos in Chicago, such as resource guides, pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals. I found a few newspapers published in Chicago by Filipino immigrants as early as the 1940’s. Before my trips to the LOC, I had never seen documents like these that actually showed representations of Filipinos in Illinois. This gave me another exciting angle to study Fil-Am women in Chicago.Here is a picture I took of the Philippine Quarterly from 1943 and published in Chicago. I also found out that in the early 1950’s, the Philippine Quarterly began printing in Manila in addition to Chicago. In one issue of the Philippine Quarterly published in Manila, I came across an essay written by Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil called “The Filipino Woman.” This essay was the only piece that I came across in the PQ that solely focused on Filipina women. The essay was first published in a 1952 printing of the Philippine Quarterly, and would eventually become Guerrero-Nakpil’s most recognized works. In the introduction to her book of essays, Woman Enough, she talks about a white American journalist who took parts of her essay and republished it as his own in the U.S.My summer in D.C. was such a rewarding time. I got the chance to experience a new aspect of doing Asian Pacific American history in the museum context, make new professional and social connections, and discover exciting archival records that I would have never imagined working with before. I hope I can get back to D.C. soon and hit up all of these places again —the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and of course, my beloved hotdog food truck.