PhD Candidate Kate Grover publishes in Quarterly Horse
AMS PhD Candidate Kate Grover published an article on country artist Margo Price, feminism, and working class country music in Quarterly Horse: A Journal of Brief American Studies. Read her article here
Announcing the Jo Giese Excellence Endowment in American Studies
The Department of American Studies is delighted and honored to announce the establishment of the Jo Giese Excellence Endowment in American Studies. A graduate of the American Studies program in 1969, Ms. Giese went on to a path-breaking career as a radio journalist, author, teacher, and community activist. She attributes much of that success to her undergraduate degree, especially the experience of researching and writing a senior thesis on the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Although Ms. Giese traveled to some of Wright’s important buildings, financial constraints limited her research. She established the Jo Giese Excellence Endowment to assist outstanding American Studies students in doing more than she was able to do. As she puts it, “this Endowment seeks to make it financially possible, easier, and more fun for students to do their research, and to travel when necessary, whether domestically or abroad.”
We celebrate both the accomplishments of this esteemed alumna and the generosity with which she supports the American Studies teaching and research mission. For more on both Jo Giese and the Excellence Endowment named in her honor, please see the description below.
Talk by Dr. Izetta Autumn Mobley on Monday October 5, 4:00-5:15 pm.
Dr. Mobley’s talk, titled “Optical Illusions & the Anatomy of Looking: Race, Disability, Slavery and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” examines how race, gender, disability, and visual culture interact to produce notions of sovereign bodies in the United States. Dr. Mobley holds an ACLS Emerging Scholar Postdoctoral Fellowship and will be housed in the Humanities Institute. She will be conducting research during the Fall and Spring semesters and teaching two courses for American Studies in the Spring. You must register for the event, linked on the humanities institute page.
Introversion and Social Distancing
republished with permission from The End of Austin (this post was originally written during the spring semester)
I don’t like people, really. It’s mostly masked by my sunny disposition, but underneath it, I am just a wannabe Daria. My favorite place in the world is my couch. I order my coffee for pickup so I can run in and out without stopping. I like to go to bookstores alone and to watch endless seasons of TV shows and pet my cats. I like to write letters. I go to concerts alone, skipping the opener, not speaking to anyone around me. I like my friends, I do, but they will tell you it is the rare event that I show up at a bar or a party or whatever. I’ve found myself considering bailing on zoom hangouts.
In some ways, quarantine is made for someone like me. Indoor activities! No bars! Time for my hobbies (there are many). I will continue to exercise and eat and learn and write inside my apartment. But I’ve realized my love of being alone, of being an “inside cat,” of naps and baths and my laptop is premised on the existence of an outside world, the existence of a beyond I prefer to stay away from. My target run today was overwhelming, but not in the usual ways: there was no over-stimulation from the bright lights, anger at the crowds, nor a desire to buy every floral print dress in the store. Instead, everyone was wearing a mask. The clothes section was virtually empty, part of it now devoted to order pickups. After all, we aren’t going anywhere. The displays in the technology section were silenced. There were no kids grabbing at legos and dolls. The Easter candy wasn’t picked through. The “summer” section, with its patio seating and baby pools, seemed to be mocking me from a time, a place, that would never exist. I bought some food, a new colander, and even combed through the office supply section, looking, I suppose, for a semblance of normalcy. It wasn’t there.
What becomes of the desire to stay inside, when there is no outside to escape? No people gathered at the bars and pizza places, no movies, no shows to recover from. Of course, I’m sheltering in place. But my sense of identity, of myself, of my life, has been constructed in deference to an imagined world outside of my apartment that has ceased to exist.
Sheltering in a Weird Place
Over the spring and summer, Dr. Randy Lewis collected small essays and bits of writing on quarantine in Austin. He is graciously allowing us to republish some of those essays here. This first contribution is the introduction to the series, from Dr. Lewis himself.
Editor’s Introduction
What are you seeing, thinking, feeling during this time of quarantine? To understand how we are muddling through an unprecedented moment in our city’s history, I sought out short bits of writing that could form a collective sketch of Austin during the pandemic. Below you will find some incredible writing from all sorts of people: some dark musings; some hopeful visions; some comical takes. They’re like dispatches from a surreal battlefield—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.
Why here? With a focus on how things are changing, transforming, and dying in the fastest growing city in the US, The End of Austin is a pretty good place to wrestle with the pandemic blues. Since 2013 we’ve published more than 90 articles that have garnered almost 250,000 page views from Bhutan to Finland. For funding reasons (I used to have an editorial collective of UT American Studies students but am now a one man band) we have been mostly quiet for the last two years, but the covid crisis provided a spark to get us into gear again. Two weeks ago, while struggling to assemble a long-overdue issue, I saw an opportunity to use this space for conversation and commiseration about living through a tense moment in a city known for being laid-back, funky, and upbeat. The weather may be perfect, but people are suffering, some more than others, and parts of civic life seem unrecognizable. Rather than working out at the gym or gathering for drinks and music, we spend our days largely inside, shut off from other people, often with a painful new awareness of our body’s fragility. Often excluded from our city’s cult of exuberant youth, older Austinites are now at the center of our thoughts, along with the immunocompromised and the uninsured. If we are lucky enough to still have jobs and houses, we work and wait at home, watching too much news and reaching out to old friends online. Meanwhile the streets are quieter than ever. Restaurants, bars, and clubs are silent, the music has stopped, and the traffic has been cut in half. Friends tell me that the air feels cleaner, though I haven’t noticed. I have noticed how grateful people are for small interactions: self-isolation means that the dog walk becomes an important opportunity to smile at strangers, even from beneath a mask, and to check on neighbors from a good six feet away. Six feet away or six feet under—that should be the motto of these anxious weeks in sunbelt semi-quarantine.
No one knows what the city will feel like after the pandemic, and no one can say how long it will take for life to feel normal again. And not everyone wants to return to the old status quo. With the pandemic highlighting the grim disparities around us, some Austinites are hoping that something better will emerge after our months inside. Whatever it is, I suspect the city will feel different, maybe in ways that our writers have captured below. Their small impressions of life during pandemic might even help you process your own Austin story, one that was never supposed to include an ominous word like “quarantine,” or a numbing focus on the news coverage about an invisible contagion. Yet here we are, wondering if this is the End of Austin as we have known it, wondering how to stay healthy and sane, wondering how to keep ourselves afloat without the usual money coming in, and perhaps wondering what kind of good could come out of something so bleak.
This week I took some comfort from an interview with the novelist Anne Tyler, who was asked if she had difficulty being optimistic right now as the country recedes into ill-health in more ways than one. “Not up close, if you know what I mean,” she said. “Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about.” I agree. So let’s look closely at the city from some creative angles that come from artists, photographers, retailers, retirees, stylists, students, professors, engineers, and others; let’s keep sharing our impressions and experiences with one another; let’s offer commentary and feedback to these terrific writers; and most importantly, let’s all stay safe, healthy, connected, hopeful, and weird. There is solidarity in solitude and even in suffering, if we know how to reach for it.
— Randy Lewis, Editor, EndofAustin.com
Interview with PhD student Zoya Brumberg on her New Blog, Kimchi and Kishke
AMS PhD Candidate Zoya Brumberg recently started a recipe blog, Kimchi and Kishke. AMS: ATX Blog Editor Holly Genovese interviewed Zoya about her blog’s name, favorite foods, and the ways in which everything is an American Studies Project.
HG: First things first, How did you come to the name of your blog? I love it!
ZB: Thank you! I wanted to find a name that would tie Jewish/Russian food to East Asian food in an alliterative sense, because those are the cuisines I am working with. I wanted it to be true to the history and connections of overland trade routes between Russia and East and Central Asia. When reading Darra Goldstein's recent cookbook/food ethnography, Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, I learned that Russians probably learned lacto fermentation—salting vegetables and letting them ferment from natural yeasts in the air—from trading with China. There is also a type of carrot pickle that Russians call "Korean carrots," which was probably inspired by daikon kimchi. Pickles are important to East Asian, Central European, and Russian/Eastern European cuisines. Kimchi is culturally specific to Korea though, so it locates pickles in a geographic place. I initially wanted to call my blog Kimchi and Kasha, because I really like kasha (toasted buckwheat groats) but someone already took that. Kishke is better though, because it is uniquely Ashkenazi (Jewish of Eastern European or German heritage, typically Yiddish-speaking). It's a type of sausage made out of matzo meal crumbs, schmaltz (chicken or duck fat), vegetables, and meat scraps. If you did not grow up with it, you probably haven't heard of it. The word "kishkes" is also used colloquially in Yiddish/Jewish American vernacular to mean guts or insides, which feels kind of perfect. These are the recipes I cook from my gut, so to speak.
HG: How did you decide to start a recipe/food blog? What kinds of cuisines will you be focusing on? And why?
ZB: I love cooking! I started posting pictures of the food I cooked on instagram, and through that found some really amazing food writers and chefs from the Austin community. I was inspired. I'm not one of those people who always "loved cooking," but cooking and eating—usually surrounding shabbat or other Jewish holidays—was one of the few things my family always made time to do together. I developed cooking skills over time, building a lot from the Russian Jewish and Israeli/Middle Eastern foods that I was most familiar with. My grandparents and other family members of that generation were immigrants from Poland, the Soviet Union, Lithuania, etc, but I was born in America and have never even been to Russia. The food that I ate at their houses was one of the only connections I had to their culture, and it was very much a mix of traditional foods like kasha or duck and very American Jewish foods like smoked fish platters and Chinese takeout.
I really amped up my repertoire of recipes and ingredients when I moved to Austin from Chicago and realized that a lot of my favorite foods were not readily available here. I lived in the Argyle St. area of Uptown, the Vietnamese neighborhood of Chicago, and I realized how much I took it for granted that I could get a bowl of bun bo hue (Vietnamese spicy pork soup) or perfect Thai pad see ew noodles whenever I wanted. I have been cooking more adventurously and regularly for a few years now, but I think it was actually the isolation of COVID-19 though that brought me back to Ashkenazi/Russian Jewish foods. I started really thinking about, why do I love Asian cuisines and cooking so much, how do they connect with what is familiar to me, and my family's history?
I guess you could call my food blog cuisines Jewish/Asian fusion, but that feels a bit disingenuous to my experience as a home cook. "Jewish" and "Asian" are both aspecific. Maybe diaspora cuisine is more accurate, if a bit obscure-sounding. It's about making food with what is available, and affordable, what tastes good to me, what I have learned from cooking traditionally whether that tradition is Russian, Szechuan, Indonesian, etc. Diaspora "fusion" cuisine was not invented by celebrity chefs—it's the ingenuity of grandmas, whether they are making golubtsi stuffed cabbage with ketchup or Lao broken fried rice with hot dogs. t's a bit difficult to get typical Ashkenazi Jewish and Russian ingredients in Austin and quite expensive when I can find them—Borderless European Market carries some special imported things, and Central Market and Trader Joe's will have things seasonally—but I started digging into some of the other ingredients that I have become familiar with over the past few years to recreate the tastes I am looking for as well as create new ones.
I'm honestly not sure how to answer the "why" part—I mean, I want to share history and knowledge through food. I want to show that there are ways to share in ethnic cultures and cuisines outside our own backgrounds that aren't appropriative, that explore the multitudes of what it means to cook and eat in America without just playing into the melting pot myth. I want to share recipes that are unique but also homey and familiar. I love when I get a message that my cherry soup reminded someone of their mother's cooking, or that my recipes remind them of how their baba cooked lamb and cumin stuffed pierogi for their dad, tying together a blended Polish/Persian family.
HG: How do you see it fitting in with the kind of culture of food bloggers? Or not fitting?
ZB: I came to my project through instagram, and I think my approach and understanding of food blogging is shaped by the people I have connected with on that platform. It's a lot of Asian immigrants cooking in the US and finding immigrant community across cultures because there isn't really a strong Malaysian or Filipino or Syrian diaspora in Austin as there would be in, say, Los Angeles. Since COVID-19 started I have been connecting with people outside of Austin too, which has helped me connect with more people of Russian/Belarusian/Ukrainian/Balkan backgrounds, Jewish or not. My blog fits in as a heritage project; I love reading about other people's family histories and how it connects with food. I try to be really careful about understanding the cuisines I play with instead of just being like, "look at this cool exotic ingredient, learn how to make gochujang jalepeno poppers" or whatever. It is maybe an outlier in that my approach to the history and foodways aspect is more academic. I also do not care about making healthy recipes, or keeping stuff Kosher. It's gluten free because I have an allergy, but I don't present it as a special diet blog.
HG: I know not everything always relates to American Studies, but I do wonder if the blog is connected to your academic or other work in any way? Even if not explicitly, are there intellectual connections there?
ZB: Kimchi and Kishke is totally an American Studies project, even if I did not plan it that way. My academic background before graduate school is actually in Russian Studies, and now I am writing my dissertation in large part about Chinese American immigrants in California. It makes a lot of sense that I am looking to food to explore the intersections of immigrant history in America. I am obsessed with how American Jews have this love of Chinese food, which doesn't fit into my current academic research, but it totally something I can research and play with in my blog. It always gives me a way to learn more about global histories and draw from my experience studying Russian history, literature, and culture. Madhur Jaffrey, who is an Indian actress-turned-chef, has this amazing recipe book that looks at curries across the spice trade. So it has Indian recipes but also Japanese, Sri Lankan, British, Singaporean...if it was on the curry spice trail, it is in that book. I took her project as a cue to learn more about the Tea Trail—the 19th century overland trade route between Russia, China, and Mongolia—and other historic foodways. I am also always learning more about Jewish history, which is so global and fluid and cool to learn about.
HG: What is your absolute favorite dish or recipe?
ZB: From my blog? Right now probably Apsara Palace's Cambodian Style Cantonese Noodles (Dry), which is my interpretation of a dish that as far as I can tell only exists in these Rhode Island Cambodian/Chinese fusion restaurants. These were my all time favorite comfort food noodles, from the Cambodian/Chinese restaurant down the street from my parents' house, and I am proud of myself for figuring out how to recreate them just based on recognizing the flavors and ingredients now that I am more comfortable with Chinese and Southeast Asian ingredients. My other favorite would be Bobe's Apple Pie, which is a very homey dish but something that my whole family, in all our disparate locations, make for the Jewish New Year. My great grandmother (just "Bobe" to the whole family) was an amazing cook, just so resourceful at making all the best Polish/Jewish/American food with American ingredients and all the new technologies that came out. My mother had to follow her grandmother around the kitchen to figure out the recipe! And my version is gluten free, so of course it is not my Bobe's exact apple pie, but it is just so special in being this way that my whole family connects to our legendary family cook.
If I get to pick my favorite dish of all time anywhere, Indonesian Beef Rendang. CNN voted it the tastiest food in the world!
New Episode of Dr. Lauren Gutterman's "Sexing History" Podcast: "The Pickup Artist"
The Sexing History podcast, co-written and co-hosted by UT AMS Assistant Professor Dr. Lauren Gutterman, as well as Dr. Gillian Frank, has a new episode: “The Pickup Artist.” You can listen to the episode here. Straight white men’s sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. In “The Pickup Artist,” we showcase the 1970 bestseller, How to Pick Up Girls, in order to explore the cultural forces that have shaped how white men experienced and publicly expressed their desire for women in increasingly casual and aggressive ways. How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber was a mass-marketed book that advised men on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. The book spawned several sequels and countless imitators. But more importantly, How to Pick Up Girls represented the triumph of a male-dominated sexual revolution that allowed men to demand ever-greater access to any woman’s time, body, and attention.
"Flu in the Arctic": UT AMS PhD Student Coyote Shook Featured on Blog of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Congratulations to UT AMS PhD student Coyote Shook whose graphic essay "Flu in the Arctic: Influenza in Alaska, 1918" was recently featured on the blog of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE). Coyote's work kicks off a timely series on the SHGAPE blog that examines "the lived experience of Americans during the 1918 influenza pandemic."As Coyote explains, the graphic essay "came from a combination of factors. Janet Davis shared the opportunity to write a post on the SHGAPE blog about the Influenza epidemic with the AMS community just as I was doing research on the Great Race of Mercy and how Balto became a vaudeville star. A big part of that story is that the vast majority of deaths from diphtheria in and around Nome in 1925 were Inuit children. I'd read several articles about how the Influenza epidemic in Alaska had wiped out about 50% of the Indigenous population around Nome, and so I expanded a bit on that research to focus on the absolutely devastating impact the 1918-1919 flu outbreak had on Alaskan Native people. There were obvious overlaps in narrative between Influenza and Covid-19, from the total ineptitude of public health officials to the disproportionate impact of the illness on Indigenous communities, all of which I tried to incorporate into my comics."You can find a full PDF of "Flu in the Arctic," as well as the text with image descriptions, here.
UT AMS PhD Student Whitney S. May Published in Children's Literature
Congratulations are in order for UT AMS PhD student Whitney S. May whose article "The Lioness and the Protector: The (Post)Feminist Dialogic of Tamora Pierce's Lady Knights," was recently published Volume 48 of Children's Literature. Whitney spoke to us about the inspiration for the article and the urgency of critical work on young adult fantasy. Read on!
Whitney: I’m especially pleased with how this article turned out because it was one of those rare labors of so much love that they never actually manage to feel much like labor at all. As a passionate fan of Tamora Pierce’s young-adult fantasy novels since I was a child, I’ve read all of her books several times over. This project on feminist dialogue in Pierce’s work emerged when I noticed that I always found myself getting choked up when I read a specific conversation between two women in one of her novels, Squire from The Protector of the Small quartet. I followed that observation into an early draft of this research, which was presented at the Mythopoeic Society’s 2016 conference in San Antonio, TX. The powerful response I received during and after that talk’s Q&A session made me realize that many women who read Pierce’s fantasy felt the same way when reading the same scene, and many were keen to read research that might put into clearer words why that might be.This article pulls back the focus on the conversation in that scene, using it as a model by which to interpret the broader dialogical interventions at play between not just the two conversing characters in that moment, but between their entire respective quartets as these reflect Pierce’s broader, multidimensional feminist dialogic that observes the ideological shifts in feminism which occurred between the quartets' respective eras of publication. Ultimately, the article finds that, "[r]eflecting the self-critical relationship of postfeminism to previous feminisms, The Protector of the Small (1999-2002) critiques and engages the problems of The Song of the Lioness (1983-88) and generates a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the feminism as we have known it, as well as a vision of what it might look like in the future. In so doing, Pierce offers, by way of her fantastic postfeminist dialogic, a successful model of how to diligently engage with the past and responsibly project its ideological lessons into a critical, better-equipped future" (52-53).As we have seen in global headlines just this month, authors of fantasy for young adults are uniquely positioned to not just reflect, but encourage the momentums of social change—or not. This article details one of the many ways in which Pierce’s feminist fantasy has taken great care to hold itself accountable to its readers by not merely recognizing weaknesses when they appear, but actively seeking to correct them. In so doing, her work encourages feminists across almost five decades to do the same.
New Episode of Dr. Lauren Gutterman's "Sexing History" Podcast: "Love and Labor"
The Sexing History podcast, co-written and co-hosted by UT AMS Assistant Professor Dr. Lauren Gutterman, as well as Dr. Gillian Frank, has a new episode: “Love and Labor.” You can listen to the episode here. The story of African American midwifery is part of a larger history of Black women’s struggles to protect their own lives, as well as the lives of other Black women and their children. This episode explores the long history of African American midwives, doulas, and birth attendants who have labored to ensure the safety and dignity of Black mothers and their children in and beyond the maternity ward. These Black women have worked to provide emotional support and medical advocacy for other pregnant and laboring women. Their reproductive advocacy makes clear that the delivery room has become an important site to ensure that Black Lives Matter.