Five Questions with First- (and Second-) Years: Amanda Tovar
We’re excited to kick off another year of our “Five Questions” series. This year, we’ll be featuring both first- and second-year students here at UT AMS. We look forward to sharing our amazing graduate students with you. Read on to learn more about Amanda!
Q: What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
A: My academic background is in Mexican American & Gender Studies. Truthfully being a Xicana is what informs my academic career. Gloria Anzaldúa writes “I am trying to make peace between what has happened to me, what the world is and what it should be” and I truly feel that nothing is more useful in my life than understanding myself in relation to the rest of the world—that alone motivates me to unpack the historical nuances of the Rio Grande Valley to better understand my lived experiences which is the bulk of my research.
Q: Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
A: While researching PhD programs I paid specific attention to programs who seemed proud of their students as well as diverse and interdisciplinary dissertations. Aside from that location was a huge factor. I applied to ten programs throughout the country and got into 5—but I wanted to stay as close to the Rio Grande Valley (and the Texas heat) as possible. UT AMS fit the ENTIRE profile!
Q: What projects or people have inspired your work?
A: This might sound completely self-absorbed, but my life experience is what has largely influenced my work. The second I mustered up the courage to tell my experience regarding sexual assault, many of my friends and family shared their experiences with me. I began to view sexual assault as endemic to my community and I wanted to expose the crux of it to first understand but also to find a way to combat it.
Q: What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?
A: To be honest, I don’t know what I am going to do tomorrow so I cannot earnestly answer what I see myself doing here project-wise. HOWEVER, I have many ideas. I recently started to let loose and explore my other interests academically—like Sci-Fi movies! But my time in AMS inspired me to launch Escuelín which is a social media platform to emphasize knowledge that my community already holds outside of academia and traditional K-12 schooling.
Q: What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?
A: My goals for graduate school are first and foremost to get through it! Just kidding! My after-graduation goals are to either be a professor in my hometown or to own a bookshop/coffee shop. I have always envisioned myself making artisanal sandwiches and selling revolutionary books while hosting a free Saturday school.
Bonus Q: In your own words, what is American Studies?
A: To me, American Studies is my home. It’s where I can study all of my interests at once—from critical race theory, to sexual violence, to the Borderlands and beyond.
Meet Amanda Tovar, a second-year doctoral student in the UT American Studies department.
AMS Undergraduates: Chase C. Seabourn
This week, we’re highlighting the American Studies Department’s fabulous undergraduates — both those currently enrolled and recently graduated. Our final feature is of Chase C. Seabourn, who was awarded the University-Wide Endowed Presidential Scholarship for the 2021-2022 academic year.
Q: Why did you decide to major in American Studies?
A: I chose American Studies because this field presented me with the perfect culmination of my interests - Sociology, History, and Culture, to name only a few. I took Intro to American Studies because I had a close friend who was an American Studies major, and I instantly fell in love with the nuance and relevance. American Studies feels like the world spoken in a language of unbridled truth and urgency. I feel as if I am learning about the world in a way that finally makes sense to me—not as just a core subject—but as an exploration into the many facets of human existence in this country.
Q: What are your other majors and how do you see these interests intersecting with American Studies?
A: Initially, I studied Biology and added American Studies as a double major. I am, however, dropping my Biology major simply because I do not need it and do not desire to finish its coursework. I am Pre-Health, and American Studies is the perfect fit for how I approach healthcare. Interrogating the subcultures that influence each and every American differently helps me understand the people I meet on a deeper level. Public health requires empathy and understanding; it requires professionals who are modern people and 3-dimensional.
Q: What have been some of your favorite courses in the American Studies department and why?
A: It’s so hard to pick a favorite course because I’ve genuinely loved every course I’ve taken in this department, but I have to say my three favorites were Preserving Queer History in ATX with Dr. Gutterman, Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives with Dr. Knerr, and Black Political Thought with Dr. Marshall. Dr. Gutterman’s course took me outside of academia and gave me the invaluable experience of oral history with my queer community, an experience I’ll treasure forever. Dr. Knerr’s course helped me analyze social spaces and food cultures in a way that I had never done before. It further opened my eyes to how rich the world is in social tradition. Lastly, Dr. Marshall’s course provided me with such an in-depth learning experience of Black history from probably the most intelligent and well-spoken man I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting. I’ve never been so enamored by and thankful for readings in my life.
Q: What are some of the most important questions you’ve considered and research you've undertaken during your time in American Studies?
A: The two greatest research questions I encountered were independent, and I’m not quite sure I would’ve had the opportunity anywhere else. In Prison Art, Literature, and Protest with Prof. Genovese, I wrote a research paper over necropolitics - the phenomenon of those in power ultimately choosing who is worthy of life and who is worthy of death via the quintessential example of the American prison. Necropolitics have been a potential research point for me for a long time, and I am very grateful to have had the forum to research such a meaningful subject. The other standout research I did was in Dr. Gutterman’s course where I did an oral history interview with Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva. I was able to get her meaning of the intersection between queer and Latinx liberation. She is an incredible woman, and it was an invaluably enriching opportunity.
Q: How has your time in American Studies influenced your career goals? How do you think American Studies might influence your next steps after graduation?
A: My time in American Studies has forced me to stare intensely at my future career. Right now, I intend to pursue Psychiatry, a practice that involves patience and letting people guide me to where they’re at in life instead of speaking over them. American Studies introduced me to a bank of knowledge and experiences that will help me practice healthcare in the most ethical and moral way I know how; it sets a standard. Despite this, this department has also inspired me to explore new options for myself like activism through civil law or even becoming a historian. There’s not one avenue I can take where my passion for American Studies won’t be incredibly useful and inspiring. I have loved every second of my time here.
AMS Graduates: Libby Sears, Class of 2021
This week, we’re highlighting the American Studies Department’s fabulous undergraduates — both those currently enrolled and recently graduated. Our third feature is of Libby Sears (2021), whose senior honors thesis was entitled Shades of Shame: Contrasting the Methods of Gendered Control on Unwed Mothers in the Atomic Era.
Q: How did you come to your project,"Shades of Shame: Contrasting the Methods of Gendered Control on Unwed Mothers in the Atomic Era"? Were there classes, professors, other school projects, or anything else that helped you cultivate an interest in the topic?
A: The root of my topic has been a particular interest of mine for quite a while. My upbringing in the East Texas Bible Belt was marked by a grave lack of awareness and education around sex, pregnancy, and the gender dynamics within those phenomena. As I’ve grown older, the consequences of legally-, institutionally-, and religiously-based control over women’s bodies—particularly those of teenage girls—has become impossible to ignore. Thus, exploring the origins of these present issues of sexism and repression became an exercise in catharsis. Fixing my study at the intersection between sexuality, gender, race, and class was both an intimidating and a rewarding undertaking, and one that I would love to pursue further. Dr. Gutterman was an immense inspiration for pursuing this type of course. Her insight into the domestic lives of mid-century women was essential to my analysis and overall understanding of the social and gender dynamics of the era.
Q: What was your experience of doing research during a pandemic? Did it create any limitations and/or do you think it opened up new ways of doing research you might not have otherwise considered?
A: Researching during the pandemic was an interesting experience, and I think there were definitely some advantages mixed in with some significant shortcomings. Having open access to so much online content, such as certain books and films, that otherwise would not have been available otherwise. Though many academic institutions and archives made their resources available online, I do mourn the fact that I was not able to physically see or hold any records, photos, or documents during my period of research. Additionally, not being able to meet with Dr. Gutterman and my AMS Honors peers in person certainly put a damper on the spirit of academic camaraderie that makes these types of projects so fun in the first place.
Q: Now that you’ve submitted your senior thesis, what does the future hold for you?
A: Since the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in my plans to pursue graduate school immediately after graduation, I am currently seeking employment in Austin. Within the next few years, however, I would love to continue the work I’ve done on this thesis in grad school, particularly expanding upon my study of teenagerhood and midcentury adolescent identity. In the interim, I plan to continue in the spirit of inquiry and discovery that this project has inspired within me through the pursuit of personal academic research on this topic, as well as others that might cross my mind. More generally, I plan to read more, explore Austin, and spend quality time with my pup, Milo.
AMS Graduates: Natalie Sather, Class of 2021
This week, we’re highlighting the American Studies Department’s fabulous undergraduates — both those currently enrolled and recently graduated. Our second feature is of Natalie Sather (2021), whose senior honors thesis was entitled Peter Pan and the Predicament of the Child in Early 20th Century Anglo-American Culture.
Q: How did you come to your project, "Peter Pan and the Predicament of the Child in Early 20th Century Anglo-American Culture"? Were there classes, professors, other school projects, or anything else that helped you cultivate an interest in the topic?
A: I knew I wanted to research something about the history of the construction of childhood- I have been a childcare worker for years and I want to be a teacher, and it always bothered me both in my own childhood and in childcare work to see how children are mistreated by adults and seen as “potential” humans. I got interested in the subject academically when I did a project in Dr. Alison Kafer’s class on reproductive futurism, which is the perpetuation of current structures of oppression into the future through the vehicle of the nuclear family and specifically children. (Her book Feminist Queer Crip was a really important source for me.) So studying that got me interested in dynamics of age and how they are informed by white supremacy and ableism. My thesis advisor Dr. Julia Mickenberg is a children’s literature scholar, so I decided to go the literature route, and chose Peter Pan because there is so much to analyze in terms of ideas toward childhood- it’s like the quintessential book about childhood in American/ English culture, so it was a good jumping block to use in order to write about what I wanted to write about.
Q: What was your experience of doing research during a pandemic? Did it create any limitations and/or do you think it opened up new ways of doing research you might not have otherwise considered?
A: I think doing research during the pandemic was really hard for lots of reasons. First I would have much preferred to have been writing in an actual library, which helps me stay more focused than in my room. Also, lots of primary sources that would have been available in the Harry Ransom Center or other UT libraries were lost to me which was disappointing. I think the lack of the social element made it harder as well- it would have been nice to physically meet up with Dr. Gutterman, Ashley, and Libby, but we made it all work the best we could, and I’m so grateful for the experience!
Q: Now that you’ve submitted your senior thesis, what does the future hold for you?
A: Now that I’ve submitted my thesis and graduated, I’m going to be working as a nanny this summer and then starting my Masters of Secondary English at UT this fall with the Urban Teachers graduate program. I’m very relieved to be done with my thesis but so grateful for the chance to have done it, and very excited for my next chapter!
AMS Graduates: Ashley J. Taylor, Class of 2021
This week, we’re highlighting the American Studies Department’s fabulous undergraduates — both those currently enrolled and recently graduated. Our first feature is of Ashley J. Taylor (2021), whose senior honors thesis was entitled The White Male Gaze Must Be Omnipresent': The Effect of Capitalizing on Limited Black Experiences for White Money.
Q: How did you come to your project, “'The White Male Gaze Must Be Omnipresent': The Effect of Capitalizing on Limited Black Experiences for White Money"? Were there classes, professors, other school projects, or anything else that helped you cultivate an interest in the topic?
A: I took AMS 356 during Summer 2019 with Dr. Capetola. In class, we would watch clips of black performances during different time periods. The Jackson 5 performing on the Ed Sullivan Show caught my eye because of how precise and well crafted the choreography, costumes, and image of the Jackson 5 was. Dr. Capetola made a point to highlight how the Jackson 5 and other groups like them were very intentional in coming across as "respectable." I thought this was so fascinating and something that I had never thought of before, so I started investigating how the opinions of white audiences greatly altered the black art that was being put into circulation, especially those that were portrayed as “authentic.”
Q: What was your experience of doing research during a pandemic? Did it create any limitations and/or do you think it opened up new ways of doing research you might not have otherwise considered?
A: Oddly, I thought that researching during the pandemic was not that difficult for me. It obviously would have been more fun to be able to interact with professors and materials in person, but the pandemic expanded many databases online so I could find what I needed without needing to be in person.
Q: Now that you’ve submitted your senior thesis, what does the future hold for you?
A: I am moving to New York City to start a new job! I am also thinking about maybe going to law or graduate school one day, but that has yet to be decided.
AMS Department Chair Dr. Randolph Lewis Interviews UT Alum Dr. Natassja Gunasena
We are excited to share this interview with recent UT PhD Natassja Gunasena, who I met when she was an AADS graduate student in the process of making her second intellectual home in American Studies. I had the honor of supervising Natassja’s dissertation, and I was profoundly impressed by her work. Using a careful blend of literary criticism, Ethnic Studies methodologies, and personal narrative, “All the Places Your Heart Lives: Afro/Asian Women and the Poetics of Diaspora” aims to chart South Asian trajectories of migration, displacement, and travel in provocative new ways. If you read her interview below, I think you’ll understand why she is a young scholar with a fantastic reputation for brilliant, innovative work on South Asian postcolonial diasporic formations, Afro/Asian diasporas, and queer diasporas, and how she has embarked on such a stellar career. – Randy Lewis, Chair, Dept of American Studies
1. Tell us about your current position!
I am currently Patricia C. and Charles H. McGill III ‘63 Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Begun in 2002, the McGill Fellowship has brought not only scholars but poets, artists, and journalists to Trinity’s campus, so it’s quite a rich legacy, one I’m very excited and humbled to join. I was already teaching at Trinity in the International Studies Program when I applied for and was offered this position, and I was thrilled at the chance to continue working with all the incredible scholar-teachers here.
I attended a small liberal arts college for undergrad, so being at Trinity feels like a wonderful “return to my roots” as far as academia goes. The small classroom sizes and student-centric culture, as well as strong faculty governance, makes it a great place for junior scholars to get a feel for this profession in a supportive environment. Working here has reminded me how much I love teaching, and given me a better sense of what type of permanent position I want to aim for when I go on the market again.
2. What are you teaching?
I’m teaching a few classes, all of which I’m excited about for various reasons. “Global South,” is an introductory course for the International Studies major here which I’ve taught twice now; we read a combination of political texts, poetry, novels, and essays about the burgeoning independence movements and anti-colonial uprisings in the Third World that came to a head in the 1950s/60s/70s but were, of course, fomenting much longer. It’s a lot to cover in one semester, so I try to focus on a few specific voices from different regions of the global south, which is where the novels and poetry come in and give students as much context and background as possible so they can begin interpreting how and why those voices are declaring themselves a certain way, and what these texts tell us not only about history but the present political moment.
I’m an interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies scholar - I think for many of us queer, diasporic scholars of color this is the only way to even begin capturing the full breadth of our experiences in an academic setting - and I’m indebted to a rich history of Black and Third World women’s scholarship which insists on art and literature as counter-archives and counter-histories. It’s really wonderful seeing students make connections between the global north and south as the class unfolds, which is my main goal for the course: that students see how all these places are interconnected.
The other class I’m teaching is “War and the Asian Diaspora.” This is a class that I dreamed of teaching for many years. My program chair and colleagues at Trinity were incredibly supportive when I pitched it last year, and now I’m about to teach it for the second time. The first time I taught it was the most number of Asian diasporic students I’ve ever had in a single class - from various parts of the diaspora. It was exciting and wonderful and really humbling; together we co-created a rich and dynamic and enlightening classroom space, even though we were on Zoom. The course is concerned with how war and its many faces - militarism, gendered violence, ethno-nationalism, homophobia - disrupt the lives of women and children across the Asian diaspora, including here in the United States where hyper-militarism continues to devastate Black/Latinx/immigrant communities and erode everyone’s civil liberties. It’s structured around five texts - Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, and this year I’ve added Kao Kalia Yang’s The Latehomecomer - that cover Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia and Laos.
Each of these countries could easily be the focus of a single class, but as a transnational scholar and someone who’s lived in now three different parts of the world, it’s impossible for me to focus on a singular place without also drawing attention to that interconnectedness I mentioned earlier. I want students to understand that Asian peoples have been diasporic even within what we understand as “Asia” - the Korean diaspora in Japan for example, and the Hmong in Laos, and Tamil people in Sri Lanka, Southern India, and Singapore, to name a few - and that the formation of “Asian-America” is directly tied to U.S military interventions in Southeast Asia. “Diaspora” as a term has a tendency to become quite romanticized and even apolitical in popular discourse at times, so this class is also about helping students understand the hard realities, the “blood, sweat, and tears” of Asian diasporic formations, as well as of course their joy and beauty and resilience.
Naturally, you can’t discuss U.S militarism today without discussing 9/11 and the “War on Terror” which has also touched the Asian diaspora, both in the U.S and in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan. So, in that way, the class is also a bit like a survey course-we cover a lot of ground in a short time - aimed at giving students a framework or a heuristic technique they can take with them and continue sharpening throughout their academic careers.
3. What are you working on in terms of research these days?
I’m working on my monograph, which is partially drawn from my dissertation work and for which the working title is “Cobra Women: Race, Sexuality and Afro/Asian Diasporic Formations” and is a study of how visual and performance cultures from the late 1800’s to the mid-to-late 1900’s articulated “Brown” femininity as a racial category that shores up anti-Blackness and coloniality and functions as a liminal zone between “Yellow” Asia and “Black” Africa. Rather than celebrating the “hybridity” of Brownness as a category, I’m investigating the specific modes and discourses that helped constitute this “exotic” image, who it served, who it curtailed, and why. As per the title, I’m tracing how film and popular culture has tied cobras to this racial imagery, and how those images circulated among Southeast Asian, West African, and North American sites. Each chapter focuses on a single artist and the ways in which their performance furthers or intervenes in these racial discourses. Chapter 1 looks at the late, great Bollywood diva Sridevi, who was most famous for her role as a shape-shifting cobra in the pulp film Nagina, Chapter 2 looks at Debra Paget, a white Hollywood actress infamous for playing “Indian girls,” and the provocative “cobra dance” scene in a film called The Indian Tomb, Chapter 3 is focused on Marlene Clark, the Blaxploitation-era actress who played a number of horror/pulp roles, including a Filipina priestess in Night of the Cobra Woman, and finally Chapter 4 is about Lola Lestrange, a cabaret performer who creatively re-interprets the giant snake from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Nagini, for the stage. Lola is based in Austin with the performance group Fat Bottom Cabaret, and I’ve had the privilege of not only seeing her perform but interviewing her for the book; I highly recommend catching one of her shows if you’re in Austin and able to!
4. What advice do you have for students in grad school?
Writing your dissertation is invariably a solitary and even alienating process, but other parts of your life don’t have to be! Make time for your friends and family, regularly. Go on roadtrips, have small gatherings - all of this is of course infinitely more complicated in the era of COVID, but it’s vital to cultivate a small group of folks you regularly socialize with. Even better if not all of them are in grad school - in fact, it’s essential to cultivate a circle outside of academia.
While you obviously want to produce a dissertation you’re proud of, ultimately “the best dissertation is a done dissertation.” I’ve seen too many people punish themselves and delay defending trying to write the perfect dissertation when such a feat is impossible. Your dissertation is a draft of something - or many things - you will continue to work on long after you graduate, so approach it accordingly. It’s an audition for your eventual book, odd as that might sound.
Cultivate faith, whether it’s faith in a higher power, faith in community, or simply faith in your own abilities and the dreams that brought you to academia. For many of us first-generation scholars of color, academia can loom larger than life. It’s easy to put all our faith in institutional support and validation and forget what inspired us to pursue teaching and scholarship in the first place. Academia is your career, it’s a job like any other (of course with the significant benefits of flexibility and long-term security), and shouldn’t become the center of your universe. Practice and maintain healthy work-life boundaries. Flex your teaching and research skills in fun ways that have nothing to do with academia. In the last few years of grad school I did a lot of creative writing for fun, with no intention of publishing any of it. I also read novels that had nothing to do with my research, simply for the joy of reading. It may seem insignificant, but nurturing my intellectual curiosity in these ways kept me sane and reminded me that academia, which can be excessively gruelling and demanding, doesn’t own every facet of my creativity.
Focus on the heart of your project. It’s really easy to feel swept up by what’s “in” and “fashionable” and to try and tailor ourselves to what the ever-fickle “market” seemingly wants, but don’t let it sway you from the work you’re truly passionate about. I don’t think there’s any “one size fits all” list of tips for navigating the academic job market in its present state, so I won’t try, except to say: know, and stay true, to yourself, and that includes knowing and staying true to your limits and capacities.
5. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?
My second project is one I’ve been nursing for several years now and working on in small parts, but it’s not ready to be publicized yet. It’s quite different from any of my current work, mainly in that I envision it being rooted in oral history, which would require extensive ethnographic research on my part. It’s concerned with the impact of climate change on Black and Asian women both in the United States and globally, and continuing to develop those ideas of interconnection between the global north and south that all of my work is in some way preoccupied with. Admittedly, the scope of the project is quite expansive and ambitious, and I’m not sure how the ethnographic part is going to work out now that travel - especially international travel - is so fraught, but I’m optimistic about finding time and resources in the near future. I also want this project to have its own visual art component; my current book project is also very concerned with visual cultures, but it’s primarily me reading and theorizing visual art produced by others, whereas for this second project I’m challenging myself to also intervene in the visual archive, using overlapping images and simple collages to highlight the simultaneity of racialized violence, gendered labor, and climate change. I have a number of visual artists in my circle of friends and family, and I’m hoping to collaborate with them on some of the technical aspects. Essentially, this second project is one I hope arises from a series of collaborations with scholars, artists, family, and survivors of climate disaster.
On a larger scale, I want to help establish programs of Asian diasporic study that draw and support scholars working in those areas which may not always get as much attention here in the U.S; scholars studying the Asian diaspora in the Middle-east and Africa, for example, or intra-Asian diasporas. Diasporas can be fraught and divisive at times, especially in this neo-liberal age where we scholars of color might feel like we have to fight each other for scarce resources that, really, aren’t very scarce at all. But I think if we formed spaces to support the histories and epistemologies of Asian and Asian diasporic peoples, no matter where those peoples are located or displaced from, we would have something really strong and beautiful.
Congrats to the AMS Senior Honors Thesis Writers
Natalie Sather, "Peter Pan and the Predicament of the Child in Early 20th Century Anglo-American Culture"
Libby Sears, “Shades of Shame: Contrasting the Methods of Gendered Control on Unwed Mothers in the Atomic Era”
Ashley Taylor, “’The White Male Gaze Must Be Omnipresent’: The Effect of Capitalizing on Limited Black Experiences for White Money”
Interview with Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert Abzug: Author of “Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May”
AMS : ATX is thrilled to sit down with Dr. Robert Abzug, Professor Emeritus in American Studies and Jewish Studies at UT Austin. Dr. Abzug’s latest book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May, was published by Oxford University Press in February. Current UT AMS Ph.D. student Hartlyn Haynes sat down (virtually, of course) with Dr. Abzug to chat about his friendship with Rollo May, his experience with oral history and biography and how it has influenced his pedagogy, and his future projects and interests. Check out Dr. Abzug’s website here.
Hartlyn Haynes: Hi Dr. Abzug, thank you so much for joining me today. Immense congratulations on the publication of your latest book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May! Can you tell us a bit about how you came to the project?
Robert Abzug: I came to the project initially in the late 1980s. I’d written a biography of an abolitionist and pre-civil war America that was published in 1980 and started work on a broader study of pre-civil war reform that was published in 1994, and in between had done a book and some articles on America and the Holocaust. A lot of this work was informed by psychology, but psychology wasn’t exactly my field, as they say. I had a personal passion and interest in the subject from taking an undergraduate course in psychology at Harvard with Erik Erikson, my own psychotherapy sessions, and attending seminars at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute while in graduate school at UC Berkeley. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I met someone who turned out to be a lifelong friend who was also a great believer in psychotherapy, John Vasconcellos. John was a member of the CA Legislature for over thirty years. I’d moved to Austin in 1978 as a faculty member in the American Studies department here at UT, but was in California often for conferences and research trips, so John and I kept in close contact throughout the years.
In the late ’80s, John visited Austin to speak at the Texas legislature and my wife and I had him over for dinner. In the middle of dinner, John mentioned enjoying my last biography and suggested I write one about Carl Rogers, the famed humanistic psychologist with whom John was close friends. I said, “I love Carl Rogers, but Carl Rogers doesn’t move me.” If you're a biographer you really need some connection to the person you're dealing with, be it good or bad! I said, “if I ever wrote about a psychologist, I’d write about somebody who had a little more emotion, into whom you could read light and darkness—somebody like Rollo May.” Without missing a beat, John said, “next time you are in the Bay Area, let's all have a brunch meeting—you and me and Rollo.” So, the next time I was in town, we met in Sausalito for lunch; we sat outdoors and almost under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was just beautiful.
Rollo and I really hit it off and decided to exchange information; we began a courtship, of sorts. I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to do this project, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to reveal what he considered a somewhat messy life. For the next few years, we spent time reading each other’s works. I’d spend time with him at his home in Tiburon, CA whenever I could, during the summer and spring breaks, getting to know him and studying his papers. By the time 1990 rolled around, we reached a point where we both agreed we’d do this biography, but I let him know that I would need his permission to use all of his papers without censorship and without showing him the manuscript until it was finished, unless I needed him to comment on a certain passage. And, he said, “okay, I trust you.” He trusted me not necessarily to make him a nice guy, but he trusted me to tell a story, warts and all—as he said, this story was critical to how he’d developed as a psychologist and a person.
But, it has weighed on me that it has taken twenty-five years to complete the book. I had a lot of learning to do about psychology and psychotherapy and liberal Christian theologies in order to prepare to write it. I published a collection of documents about America and the Holocaust and an abridged edition of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and those were all related in some way to the book. I was also involved in institution-building in the interim. In 1996, the Dean asked me to help create a second honors program and, in 2007, UT received a grant from a major philanthropic organization to create the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. In 2017, I handed the reins of the Center over to someone else and got back to the May book.
HH: Thanks for mentioning the length of time you spent working on the book. I think about the fact that you two met in the 1980s and, a few years later, decided to do this project and he granted you unfettered access to his papers. Since he died in 1994 at age 85, I’m curious about whether or not both he and you were aware that he was probably not going to live to see this project come to publication?
RA: I think we were. I think he was pretty sure he wouldn't see it published because he’d had a stroke during the time we knew each other. His widow, Georgia May, is still alive. She’s 94 years old and has been very helpful. His daughter, Carolyn May, herself a psychotherapist, and Georgia both received express copies as soon as I received the book. And they’ve both said they love the book. While at no point did I censor the book or intend to, I was really happy that it turned out like that, that Carolyn could see her father and Georgia could see her husband. And the book—it lives for them. I received a wonderful early review from the Kirkus Reviews and I just love the phrase the reviewer opened with, by saying the book was “penetrating yet tender.” I really like that. At times, I was upset with myself for taking this long, but I realized I was doing all of these other things that I also wanted to do, so I finally decided it was okay.
HH: And I’d imagine that not only knowing May for eight years, but also then spending another twenty or so years studying his life and his papers so closely, and really almost living with his materials, was part of what allowed for that “penetrating yet tender” treatment.
RA: I’d like to think so. I don't think I could have written the book without knowing him, and I wouldn't want to have tried to do so. I think it was quite important, and it was quite important that he opened himself up to that. He shared a number of experiences with me in which he was transformed. He talked, for example, about how he had been not quite dismissed, but strongly encouraged to leave Michigan State University, where he was an undergraduate, after he published a critique of their agricultural department. And he described that someone he knew was able to help get him into Oberlin during his last two years of college and, as he was thinking back on these parts of his life, he actually wept. And I sat there because what I had learned from being a patient of a psychotherapist is to sit in that quiet and let things develop. I was his biographer and not his patient and, in fact, there were points toward the end of his life during which I sort of felt like he was my patient, because we had a lot to talk about and I did a lot of listening.
One of the things I was fascinated by originally was his transformation from the believing Christian into the believing existential psychotherapist, during which he essentially shed his theological faith. So, I wrote a paper about this, and I gave him the paper before I presented it at a conference because I wanted to see what he thought of how I was representing his transformation. The paper, The “Deconversion of Rollo May,” had a similar tone as the book—it was “friendly critical.” I read him the paper and he thought for a minute and then simply said, “that’s me.” I thought that was good. It was important to have known him in that way so I had the confidence to write this book.
HH: You mentioned to me early on that you really enjoy teaching, and actually taught your last semester during Spring 2020. How do you think your experience with oral history and biography across your various projects has shaped your pedagogy, if it has? I’m curious if you created assignments and syllabi that aligned with those specialties, or how it otherwise influenced your teaching or course-building.
RA: You know, what’s interesting about oral history as a methodology is that you bring things to it emotionally and based on life experience. Rollo and I were talking about things that only someone who has some decades behind them might know or have experienced. When I was first working on my first book, I was thirty years old and the man I was writing about was ninety-two. Before I was in my forties, I was certainly flying blind in terms of a deeper sense of the life experiences I was writing about, and I think that might be true of undergraduates doing this sort of research.
Doing this sort of research is a great exercise and a great way to widen one’s sense of the world, though, and I’ve tried to adapt some of that to my pedagogy over the years. Steve Hoelscher and I used to teach a graduate seminar on photography at the Harry Ransom Center and, early on, we created an assignment to write a term paper and create an exhibit of eight to ten photographs with an artist statement, and we spent the last class touring together the exhibits everyone had created. I also decided to teach that course at an undergraduate level with a similar assignment, which produced really interesting projects—we have really fabulous students in the American Studies department. The other course I taught regularly was Psychology and Religion, which I also taught at the Ransom Center. That was interesting because we regularly went into the archives and pulled out manuscripts, diaries, and other materials that really revealed the intersections of psychology and religion. We looked at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on the Cottingley Fairies and Allen Ginsberg’s Senate testimony, for example, which I encouraged students to consider alongside their own experiences with psychology and religion.
They wrote semi-autobiographical papers using primary and secondary sources, so this was a nice adaptation that wasn’t quite biography or oral history, but was an assignment wherein students could draw on their own life experiences. One of the finest papers was written by an Iranian student who was grappling with the conflict she felt within Islam between individual needs and the needs of the community of faith, and how she was grappling with religion in a new culture. She used William James’ work to get at these questions. Students also often wrote about their sexual and gender identities, and could draw on both theoretical literature and personal memoir to craft their papers. The assignment let them deal with certain questions that were on their minds in a way that came as close to biography as I’d want to get in that sort of course because, like I said a few minutes ago, I imagine that if I asked them to go in and talk to an 83-year-old veteran, they wouldn’t know where to start—just like I hardly knew where to start when I was working on my first book!
HH: That’s a really interesting insight about doing oral history—of course, we hear about positionality and identity, but there is a facet of that regarding the breadth and length of the life experiences you, as the researcher, have had and how those will always be a prism through which you write someone else’s story.
RA: Right, that is a constant question when doing this sort of work—am I believing this and writing about this in this way because of who I am, or because of who Rollo is, for example? It’s a really important exercise when doing biography and oral history and, also, an important exercise in self-knowledge, even if it’s incomplete—well, it’s always incomplete.
HH: That’s great. Well, speaking of seeing things through your own eyes, I know you have an interest in photography, so I wonder what future projects you have on the horizon and if photography intersects with any of those?
RA: I’ve been taking photos since I was thirteen or so; I got a camera for my Bar Mitzvah. When I was in Berkeley in graduate school in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I covered concerts, political demonstrations, things like that—I said to someone once, you could fall out of bed and pick up your camera and go out and capture something great. I’d publish some in the underground newspapers in Berkeley. I spent six months in Africa in 1968 and some of those nature photos are in the Museum of Natural History in New York now. I have a Flickr account where I publish some of my photographs, as well. I do think about doing a photography project about Texas sometimes. I have a friend, Joe Holley, who grew up around Waco and wrote for the Houston Chronicle for many years, and we’ve been talking about doing a book that illustrates his columns with photographs so, who knows, I may be spending a lot of time in Waco in the near future!
The topic that I’m really thinking about now is something that comes out of Psyche and Soul, and it’s the fate of thinking about the word “meaning.” The meaning of “meaning,” to put it bluntly! I’m thinking about what technology and the market economy have done to people’s lives that have shaped their ideas—some of those ideas useful and some of them downright destructive. That would be more of a short book in essay rather than formal research format, probably. Oxford also asked me to write a blog for their site about something that also comes out of Psyche and Soul, around questions of authenticity and alienation that come down to, essentially, “am I doing something that’s meaningful with my life?” May was very interested in that question as an existentialist and as a student of myth in society—that might be a short book, as well. We’ll see—if I do those two things, that will be a delight. For now, we have a new granddaughter and she’s also been a delight! Because I retired right when the pandemic hit, I don’t know what’s exactly ahead; I feel a little bit like when I was trying to choose a topic for my undergraduate honors thesis, coming up with a different topic every week. You know, ask me again in a year!
We are so appreciative of your time, Dr. Abzug and, again, a huge congratulations from the Department of American Studies on this publication! To purchase Psyche and Soul in America, please visit Oxford University Press here. For more on Dr. Abzug’s work, please visit his website here.
Assemblages of Empire: An AMS Symposium with Dr. Cynthia Wu
Please join us for our American Studies Graduate Student Symposium digital keynote discussion with Dr. Cynthia Wu next Friday, March 5! Dr. Wu will be delivering remarks entitled "In Praise of Small Scholarship" followed by an interactive Q&A. Dr. Wu is an associate professor of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She's the author of Sticky Rice: a Politics of Interracial Desire and Cheng and Ang Reconnected: the Original Siamese Twins in American Culture. The digital event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please register here or using the link below!
Managing Your Time: A Grad Student’s Guide to Getting It All Done
Please join us this coming Monday for this event on organization and grad school with Ravynn Stringfield, Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary.
