Five Questions with First-Years: An Interview with Cooper Weissman
It's the final week of (virtual) classes and our final installment of Five Questions with First-Years. Today, we bring you Cooper Weissman. Cooper comes to UT by way of the Pacific Northwest where his interest in outdoor recreation activities sparked his research on racialized experiences of "the outdoors." Read on to learn more about Cooper's plans at UT, as well as his future plans to live on a farm and "use homegrown veggies to cook recipes that Coyote Shook sends me from their archival research.”
What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
My research interests actually grew out of the short thesis I wrote for my Gender & Queer Studies minor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. I examined a contemporary mountaineering magazine to explore how language used to describe climbing mountains still employs many of the same Eurocentric, hypermasculine, and imperialistic narratives that were used when mountaineering first became a sport in the mid-nineteenth century. This interest emerged from my own outdoor recreation experiences. I did not grow up in an outdoorsy family, but when I moved to the Pacific Northwest for college, I became more interested in activities like hiking, backpacking, and kayaking. As I ventured to places like climbing gyms and R.E.I. for the first time, I was frankly struck by their whiteness and how unwelcoming they could be at times to the uninitiated. While I continued to love spending weekends at Mount Rainier National Park, I also sought to better understand how these dominant cultures of outdoor recreation and environmentalism came to be.Since my undergraduate studies, I have continued to be passionate about how different groups of people conceptualize their relationships to the natural world, especially as a consciousness of ecological crisis becomes more widespread. While completing my M.A. in American Studies at Yale, I became fascinated by the peculiar fact that so many early conservationists were also ardent eugenicists and my research interrogated the affective and intellectual overlaps between these two ideological movements. I have also written about several different nativist currents within mainstream environmentalism during the twentieth century. While I am still invested in critiquing dominant environmental ideas and movements, since coming to UT, I have increasingly been interested in thinking through alternative histories and futures of human relationships to the natural world. I have looked for these in the actions of migrants today who are forced to make dangerous crossings through deserts and rivers, histories of fugitive enslaved people who lived clandestinely in the woods and swamps of the U.S. South, and the fictional worlds of Octavia Butler.
Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
What initially drew me to AMS at UT was the brilliant work being published by the faculty. I was also excited about the opportunity to work closely with students and professors in other departments such as African and African Diaspora Studies and Geography. As I became more interested in the program, I looked into what the other graduate students were studying and I was struck by the amazing interdisciplinary scholarship that they were doing in addition to the creative courses they were designing and teaching. I knew that if I came here, I would be a part of an intellectual community that would broaden my perspective and challenge me to think in new ways. When I had the chance to visit the campus and meet the faculty and graduate students, their kindness and generosity sealed the deal.
What projects or people have inspired your work?
Foundational work on race and the environment by scholars like Dorceta Taylor, Laura Pulido, Stacy Alaimo, and so many others continues to help me think through the historical and ongoing entanglements of race, colonialism, and notions of nature. Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter and Éduoard Glissant aid me in understanding the destructive force of colonial modernity while also inspiring me to imagine alternative modes of relationality. More recently, books like Mishuana Goeman’s Mark My Words, Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, and Tiffany King’s The Black Shoals have provided wonderful models for how to do interdisciplinary scholarship that reaches toward alternative worlding practices that are at once history, present, and future.Most importantly, I am constantly inspired by the brilliance and fellowship of my cohort in addition to everyone else who is and has been part of my academic community.
What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?
I am currently most passionate about a project that examines histories of marronage in the U.S. South and considers the insurgent ecologies that these fugitive acts point toward. While scholarship on marronage has primarily focused on the more established communities, and even pseudo-state formations, of fugitive enslaved people in the Caribbean, scholars are increasingly examining the histories of enslaved people who lived alone or in small groups in the woods and swamps of the U.S. South. I am in the early stages of thinking about how these fugitive ways indicate alternative conceptualizations of “the outdoors” and alternative ecologies or modes of relationality with other forms of life and non-life. I envision this project involving a good deal of archival research in addition to a deep engagement with black literary work.
What are your goals for graduate school?
What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?As far as goals for graduate school, I just want to stay curious and passionate about the work I’m doing and to do my best to support others around me whether that be other graduate students, undergrads, our department as a whole, or my loved ones outside of the academy. Once I am finished with graduate school, I would love to be able to turn my research into a book-length project. It has also long been a dream to teach in some capacity. In an ideal world this would be as a University professor - and in a really ideal world this would be somewhere in the Pacific Northwest so I can live on a farm and write books and make goat cheese and eat marionberries and use homegrown veggies to cook recipes that Coyote Shook sends me from their archival research. Of course, I am aware that the academic job market is not as strong as it once was, so another goal of mine for the next couple years of graduate school is to develop skills and networks that might help me to find a fulfilling role in other related fields such as documentary filmmaking, podcast journalism, and museum work.
Bonus: In your own words, what is American Studies?
American Studies is a place in the academy for interdisciplinary scholars of all kinds to come together and share their work. It is a place where scholars refuse to draw boundaries and are willing to read and engage with scholarship that might not immediately seem relevant to their own because they know it might radically change the way they think. Ideally, it is a force that works to revolutionize the academy while also remaining active in transnational freedom struggles that are led by those beyond its walls.
The End of Austin Publishes "Sheltering In a Weird Place: Notes from a Quarantined Austin"
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The End of Austin, a digital humanities project housed in the UT Department of American Studies, recently published "Sheltering in a Weird Place: Notes from Quarantined Austin." The collection features reflections on quarantine from writers throughout Austin, including several UT AMS graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty."They’re like dispatches from a surreal battlefield," TEOA editor Randy Lewis writes, "people cooped up, waiting, goofing off, scared out of their minds, lonely, going broke, thwarted, cautiously optimistic, and a thousand other feelings that are bubbling up in neighborhoods under the violet crown."You can read "Sheltering in a Weird Place" here.
Tonight (4/17): E3W Review of Books Virtual Launch
The E3W Review of Books is hosting a virtual launch event in celebration of the publication of its twentieth issue thisFriday, April 17th from 5:30-6:30pm CST. The event will consist of a panel with professors from UT and beyond whose books are featured in this year's Review. UT students, faculty, and staff are invited to join in celebrating the work of student reviewers and authors!For information on how to attend the event via Zoom, please contact Nick Bloom (nfbloom@gmail.com).
Tonight (4/15): Virtual Panel on Anti-Asian Racism and COVID-19
This evening, UT community members and mental health professionals will present a virtual panel on coping with anti-Asian racism in the time of COVID-19. UT AMS PhD candidate Andi Remoquillo is among tonight's panelists.The panel centers on the importance of remembering anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and finding new ways to disrupt these harmful narratives in the present.The panel will take place over Zoom from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm CT. Please contact Kelsey Lammy (klammy@austin.utexas.edu) for further information on how to view the panel.
Tomorrow (3/13): Dr. Edmund T. Gordon on "UT's Raced Geography"
On Friday, March 13th, Dr. Edmund T. Gordon will present "UT's Raced Geography" as part of the Department of Geography and the Environment's Geography Colloquium.Dr. Gordon is a professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and serves as the Vice Provost for Diversity at UT Austin. His talk will discuss how racism, patriarchy, and the white nationalism of the New South are embodied in UT's campus architecture and landscaping.The talk will begin at 3 pm in RLP 0.130. Check out he Racial Geography Tour site for further background on Dr. Gordon's work!
Five Questions with First-Years: The Hartlyn Haynes Edition
We're back with our fourth installment of "Five Questions with First-Years!" Today, we bring you Hartlyn Haynes. Hartlyn joins UT AMS with a background in Women's and LGBTQ+ Studies and research interests in HIV/AIDS memorialization and quotidian surveillance. She's also a roller derby player with a truly aspirational plan to "support an array of dog-children." Read on to learn more about Hartlyn!
What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
I received my B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and my M.A. in Women’s and LGBTQ+ Studies from San Diego State University (SDSU). While I pursued my M.A., I also worked at Lambda Archives, a grassroots archive that preserves and teaches San Diego’s LGBTQ+ history. Materials I discovered at Lambda served as the basis for my master’s thesis on quotidian surveillance and homonationalism and sparked an interest in HIV/AIDS memorialization on a broad scale, which I hope to interrogate in my dissertation.These experiences also deeply inform my pedagogy. When teaching an introductory course on feminist theory at SDSU, I encouraged students’ creative cultural production as a valuable mode of scholarship and attempted to trouble what constitutes “legitimized” forms of knowledge production. Accordingly, I collaborated with the university library’s Special Collections and Archives to include my students’ academic zines in their extensive Zines and Minicomics Collection; this collaborative project offered a way to disrupt historical gatekeeping about whose work can and should be included in the archive.
Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
I was struck by the interdisciplinarity of the faculty and the department’s many impressive public-facing projects. To be frank, reading posts from this very blog humanized the department and made AMS at UT seem like a fruitful place to grow as a scholar—yay, AMS::ATX! I was also struck by UT’s vast humanities archives, which have certainly not disappointed! I was excited to learn that scholars like Dr. Simone Browne and Dr. Alison Kafer were also working elsewhere on the UT campus.I had also been to Austin before and fallen in love with it. As an avid roller derby player and fan, learning that Austin has oodles of roller derby (and that Austinites are really excited about it!) drew me to the city. The river, BBQ, fabulous vintage offerings, live music, and millions of other activities didn’t hurt, either!
What projects or people have inspired your work?Dr. Simone Browne’s Dark Matters has been endlessly inspiring and models the type of expansive and incisive scholarship that I hope to one day produce. Dr. Inderpal Grewal’s Saving the Security State and Dr. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages have been similarly influential. Dr. Amira Jarmakani—my beloved thesis advisor and mentor (and, honestly, life coach) at SDSU—has published incredible work at the intersections of transnational feminisms, Arab American studies, and cultural studies. I strive to emulate the intellectual rigor and deep empathy and kindness she exudes as a scholar, educator, and tireless student advocate.
What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?As I mentioned previously, my time at Lambda spurred an interest in HIV/AIDS memorialization, and I am curious specifically about AIDS memorials installed in parks and other public spaces, what sort of cultural work they do, and for whom. I am also curious about the fiscal sponsorship of such sites—thanks to Dr. Alex Beasley’s wonderful Capitalism and Culture seminar last semester, I was able to investigate some of the ways in which globalization, corporatization, and HIV/AIDS memorialization intersect via the sponsorship of biomedical and oil companies, which is a line of inquiry I plan to continue exploring. Knowing that so much scholarship has grown out of serendipitous moments in the archives and elsewhere, I remain open-minded to the fact that this project may (and, surely, will!) grow in a lot of different directions.
What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?My goals for graduate school are to do work I am proud of and be supportive and kind to those around me (and, I suppose, to myself—always working on that one!). While I have long dreamt of pursuing traditional academic tenure after graduation, my experience at Lambda and exposure to other potential archival and curatorial careers (and pragmatism about the current state of the job market!) have certainly piqued my interest, as well. In the same spirit of remaining open-minded, I’m going to say something that allows me to teach in some capacity, someday (maybe?) pay off my student loans, and support an array of dog-children is the general plan.
Bonus: In your own words, what is American Studies?A disciplinary home of interdisciplinarity, of that which refuses to be bounded categorically or theoretically, and of that which insists upon investigating the overlooked, the playful, and the quotidian—and, critically, puts these in conversation with (trans)national systems of power. I look forward to continuing to revise this definition in the years to come.
Book Talk (3/5): "A Black Woman’s History of the United States," by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
On Thursday, March 5, the History Faculty New Book Series presents: A Black Woman’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020), a book talk and discussion with co-authors Daina Ramey Berry (Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professorship in History, University of Texas at Austin) and Kali Nicole Gross (Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History, Rutgers University).From the event page: "In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today."The event will begin at 4 pm in GAR 4.100. See you there!
Tuesday, March 3: Public Talk by Dr. Shannon Speed, "Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State."
In her talk, "Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State," Dr. Shannon Speed explores the structural nature of the violence to which indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico are subjected, seemingly at every step. This exploration moves with the women migrants through space, considering how ideologies of gender, race, class and nationality function in conjunction with neoliberal market logics in the violence they experience at home, on their journey, and in the US through policing, detention, and human trafficking.Dr. Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC), professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA, and the current president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).Dr. Speed's talk takes place on Tuesday, March 3 at 3:30 pm in RLP 1.302E and is sponsored by The Gender, Race, Indigeneity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies Initiative (GRIDS) from the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin, of which the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) is a member.
Monday, March 2: Public Lecture by Dr. Louis Hyman, "Silicon Valley and the Rise of Insecure Work"
On Monday, March 2, Dr. Louis Hyman will present, "Silicon Valley and the Rise of Insecure Work."Louis Hyman is a historian of work and business at the ILR School of Cornell University, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. He has published two books on the history of personal debt (Debtor Nation and Borrow) and a history of how American work became so insecure (Temp). He is a founding editor of the Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series from Columbia University Press, and the director of the History of Capitalism Summer Camp.This Department of American Studies lecture is free and open to the public. Please join us Monday at 4 pm in BUR 214.
Tomorrow (2/26): The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy Presents Sherrilyn Ifill
On Wednesday, February 26th, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy will host Sherrilyn Ifill, one of the nation’s leading scholars on civil rights law and litigation, as the second keynote presenter in the William C. Powers, Jr. Speaker Series.Sherrilyn Ifill is the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall, and became a separate organization from the NAACP in 1957. The lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund developed and executed the legal strategy that led to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, widely regarded as the most transformative and monumental legal decision of the 20th century. Ifill is the second woman to lead the organization.The event will take place at 5:30 pm at the LBJ School, SRH 3 (First Floor Lobby). RSVP and Find More Info Here.