We asked our first year Assistant Instructors how their first month of teaching has gone so far. Check out Henrik J. Schneider’s response.
Henrik J. Scheider (he/him) is a third year PhD student in American Studies. He is currently teaching a course titled “Science and Pop Culture;” we asked him how his course is going so far & how his course embodies American Studies at UT. This is his response.
Science and Pop Culture surveys the intersection of science and entertainment from the 18th century to the present by exploring various pop cultural forms like film, TV, music, museums, cabinets of curiosity, print media, podcasts, etc. Its goal is to equip students with an interdisciplinary analytical framework to explore the ways in which contemporary conceptualizations about science in cultures of leisure and entertainment resonate with earlier ideas about the organization of knowledge and the role of public opinion in America.
This is my first time teaching in America, and it’s already been such an exciting, generative, and fun experience. It’s very inspiring to teach a class on science, technology, and pop culture to students with diverse academic backgrounds from the humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Working with such an interdisciplinary group of people and learning from their experiences as well as teaching them about US cultural history is what American studies in practice means to me.
Three “situations” inspired me to teach this class on the intersection of science, technology, and popular culture. The 2022 theme of the American Studies Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans, “The Roof is on Fire,” the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the fact that 10 years ago, palm trees started to grow in my grandparent’s front yard in Germany although they never planted any seeds. By tracing the concomitant history of science and technologies of mass production and distribution with popular cultural forms from the revolutionary period to our contemporary moment, my class intends to draw attention to how the junction of popular opinion, scientific inquiry, and technological innovation constitutes a dialectic of cultural struggles over meanings, facts, and the “truth.”
In class, we’ve already covered a lot of ground. We looked at how the agency of the everyday people that consumed science and technology through newspapers, pamphlets, dime museums, etc. informed scientific inquiry. We also talked about how technology relates to changing labor relations that gave Americans access to spare time and money to consume science through pop-cultural forms. More specifically, we’ve talked about the popularity of cabinets of curiosity, the display of natural artifacts and human bodies in dime museums, the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and figures like Eugen Sandow and Houdini whose performances resonated with anxieties over race, civilization, and the male body during the rise of the US as an industrial power.
I’m excited to see how students will connect these histories to contemporary intersections between science, technology, and pop culture. After all, they are the generation of this pandemic-post-truth-fake-news-rising-sea-levels-dumpster-fire world.
5 Questions with First Years—Lillian Nagengast!
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 Lillian Nagengast!
Q: What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
A: I come from a background in English—I received my MA in English from Georgetown University and my BA in English from Boston College. At Georgetown, I wrote my MA thesis on contemporary representations of gender and rurality in American media and memoir, a topic to which I have a personal connection. I grew up in Bloomfield, Nebraska, a tiny no-stoplight town in the northeast corner of the cornhusker state.
Where I grew up greatly influences my thinking, interests, and general personhood. My current research coalesces around questions such as the following: How does place influence identity? How is place (mis)represented in media and literature? What is the relationship among gender, sexuality, and place?
Q: Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
A: I decided to join AMS at UT because of its dynamism, dedication to public-facing work, and sense of comraderie among its graduate students. While I discerned some of this from the department’s website, the more affective part of my decision came after meeting with faculty, participating in graduate seminars, and speaking with current graduate students.
Q: What projects or people have inspired your work?
A: I’m inspired by academic works such as Scott Herring’s Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanisms and Nadine Hubbs’ Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music as well as works of nonfiction like Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland and Tara Westover’s Educated. I also admire the research and pedagogies of my MA thesis advisors, Sherry Lee Linkon and Pamela Fox.
Q: What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?
A: In terms of my own research, I hope to delve deeper into gender and sexuality studies and explore the field of American Indian studies. I also hope to continue developing my own public-facing project, a website dedicated to improving rural student college access.
Q: What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?
A: I hope to take advantage of the collaborative and transformative potential of American Studies in general, but especially here at UT. I want to build on the work of scholars I admire while developing my own approach to research and teaching. More personally, I hope to form a supportive and generative community. After graduating, I hope to continue teaching, researching, and writing—in whatever capacity I can!
We asked our first year Assistant Instructors how their first month of teaching has gone so far. Check out Stephanie Childress’ response!
Stephanie Childress (she/her) is a third year PhD student in American Studies. She is currently teaching a course titled “Archives and Activism: Digital Recovery | Texas Memory;” we asked her how her course is going so far & how her course embodies American Studies at UT. This is her response.
This course explores methods for digital recovery of historical memory through the regional lens of Texas. As a project-based collaborative research course, we engage alternative archives for telling under-told histories and discussing current and historical social movements - people, protests, uprisings, riots, and activism. Alternate archives include community/family memory, “rogue archives,” data archives, “reading against the (institutional) grain,” and more. Student’s final digital projects are built in collaborative teams. Some teams have already identified their projects - one is creating an interactive online experience that allows the user to learn about queer histories in Austin. Another is working on labor organizing efforts in Texas. The other two groups will be developing topics in environmental and criminal justice.
I am teaching research through the “design process,” which is a procedural model from Engineering. My hope is that my students leave the course with not only a conceptual and methodological approach to digital recovery work but that they know how to take action on issues of social or global importance. While we know that research and social change do not happen in neatly defined steps, this process gives them the building blocks to guide them as they learn. When they leave the course, they can replicate these steps to act in moments and with movements that call to them.
One of my favorite moments of the course was during a guided primary source analysis on the labor organizing efforts of Cesar Chavez at the Benson. One student commented about the carefully organized efforts of the labor organizers. The repetition of “organized” here is intentional and contrasts a discussion we started in our first week about witnessing many social movements fizzle after attending one protest or sharing an Instagram slide. Our discussions, activities, guest speakers, and the project design process aims to teach students that there is no absolute finality to activism or recovery work. It is a cycle that is constantly asking us - what’s next?
The class is “classic American Studies” in that I am asking students to investigate current social issues, retrace the “border crossings” of the United States imperial project, learn approaches to avoid recolonization, and look to a future of restoration and healing. The course also draws from other disciplines like public & digital humanities. What I am learning is that the class is not interdisciplinary because I have mixed methods as an instructor and scholar, it is interdisciplinary because of what my students bring to class from their disciplinary training. I have students from Computer Science, Natural Science, Data Science, Communications, Business, Government, History, Psychology, Economics, and American Studies who each bring a unique perspective and a way they approach the course. Developing and teaching this course has been a great experience!
UT AMS ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT OF THE WEEK!
Dr. Gavin Benke
A little update on what Gavin is up to post AMS at UT: “I'm a senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University. I've also served as a steward for BU's non-TT faculty union (and am generally an active union member). In terms of research/writing: In 2018, I published a book based on my dissertation. This winter, I have a history of capitalism supplemental textbook coming out. Otherwise, I've been doing the usual book reviews, op-eds, articles, etc. (and I was on Vice TV talking about Enron last fall). Overall, Boston is great and things are going well. Now that the pandemic is subsiding a little bit here, I'm easing my way back into playing and jazz jams, which has been really nice.”
Check out Risk and Ruin Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism here.
Check out Capitalism and Individualism in America here.
Join us in celebrating Dr. Erin McElroy's latest publication “Digital Cartographies of Displacement: Data as Property and Property as Data” in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies!
To read Digital Cartographies of Displacement: Data as Property and Property as Data, click here.
Join us in celebrating the wonderful Dr. Zoya Brumberg-Kraus' recent podcast feature titled “Subjective Conditions”
About the podcast episode from the podcast website:
'“Ep. 2 - You, Me, and Politics Makes Three
The material conditions are RIGHT HERE IN THE ROOM, COMRADES.
Comrade Adam is joined by two excellent and Galaxy-Brained™ comrades, Zoya and Jeff, who also happen to be D O C T O R S and professors, to discuss some key questions for anyone on the Left today. What are politics? Institutions - how do they work? What does the academy and the activist space have in common? What is the GREEN FROG in the room? How do we confront the terror of the unknown?
This the first of a two-part series looking at the relationship between social change, utopian projects, community, the built environment, and community.”
Listen here.
We asked our first year Assistant Instructors how their first month of teaching has gone so far. Check out Kristen Wilson’s response!
Kristen Wilson (she/her) is a PhD student in American Studies. She is currently teaching a class titled “The American Body;” we asked her how her course is going so far & how her course embodies American Studies at UT. This is her response.
“This course explores how conceptions of the “ideal” American body have historically shaped and motivated claims of belonging and otherness. We examine the relationship of sport to this “ideal” American body and how sport has often helped to define who and what an “American” is.
The first month of teaching this course has been wonderful! There's definitely been a learning curve, for me even moreso than the students, but we've already dug into some incredible moments in American history--bicycles and first wave feminism, indigenous stickball and indigenous resistance to white colonization, daredevilism and the birth of the white working class during early industrialization. I'm excited for all that's ahead!
This class embodies American Studies because it uses a cultural phenomenon (sports!) to help us make sense of political, economic, and social developments in American history from a bottom-up perspective; aka, how does the average American experience sport and what does it tell us about how the country is changing?”
5 Questions with First Years—Levina Parada!
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 Levina Parada!
Q: What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
A: I am from California where agriculture and the dairy industry shape the economy, the land, and the relationships of exploitative labor. I grew up with a large, blended yet fissured family and we would have tamales and pasteles during winter time. My experience as an elementary school gardener has influenced my interest in food justice, anti-racist work, and community support that challenges ableism and fatphobia. My previous experiences as an undergraduate student exposed me to feminist critiques of militarization, feminist animal studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, and sustainability studies, which have informed my current trajectory.
Q: Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
A: American studies is a unique field. Because I have various interests, I knew I did not want to be limited in methodology or scope of research. UT Austin has a profound history of American Studies and the many frameworks for “doing” American Studies have provided ways for scholars to pursue critical questions in a transgressive way. I was also drawn to the program because the Department of American Studies is a close-knit and supportive scholarly community.
Q: What projects or people have inspired your work?
A: My interests are inspired by community work such as mutual aid and organized protests, the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, my previous professors and TAs, the complexities of my friends and family, and projects around food involving: appropriation, erasure, and commodification, the work of community gardens, and explorations of citizenship. I’ve also been inspired by the people and movements that I've only read or or heard about, people who have challenged oppression and violence from generations before me, whose work has paved the way for me to enjoy the privileges I have today.
Q: What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?
A: At the moment, I can see myself pursuing work around critical food studies- which is a very vague answer. That is not to say I have a lackluster perspective about my pursuits; I am still honing in on my specific areas of study with the understanding that project interests may take different forms or change altogether.
Q: What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?
A: Over the next several years of graduate school, I would like to form relationships and community with people inside and outside the setting of academia and provide support and mentorship to my peers. I’d also like to be involved in various campus and community activities with an established awareness of my capacity. I am excited because being a graduate student will carve out the little path I need- sometimes winding, bumpy, curving, or U-turning- to pursue my career goals of professorship and also conduct research that is published in an accessible and serviceable way.
We asked our first year Assistant Instructors how their first month of teaching has gone so far. Check out Taylor Johnson Karahan’s response!
Taylor Johnson Karahan (they/she) is currently a PhD candidate in American Studies. We asked them to share their course title, and to describe their course to us and how it embodies American Studies. Additionally we asked how their first month of teaching is going so far and this is what they had to say!
Course name: Unburied: Ancestral Remains
About: This course is about the ways that collections of ancestral remains and burial grounds, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, demonstrate how the past continuously ruptures the present. Through the lens of the dead, we interrogate how history produces narratives and silences about the people who lived and died before us and how they figure into the stories we tell about ourselves.
Short answer: The first month of teaching has been both exhilarating and exhausting! I have found myself spending twenty hours preparing for class each week, mostly because I enjoy it so much and like drawing connections between different sources and ideas. I have also found that leading students in discussion about the course materials takes a lot energy! I've instituted a regular post-class rest and recovery time. My course embodies AMS at UT because we are using a distinct frame of reference that we encounter in our everyday lives - burials, mourning, memory - in order to interpret the significance given to "our" history. Using unburied ancestral remains, we are thinking about the construction of national narratives about slavery, settler-colonialism, Indian boarding schools, Jim Crow, convict leasing, citizenship, and ideas of national belonging. We are learning about the origins and development of race science, disciplines like anthropology and medical anatomy, and national standards for how we collectively deal with death. In this quintessential American Studies course, students are seeing connections between systems of domination, understanding how power influences the narratives that are told and taught, and recognizing themselves and their ancestors as agents of history.
New Mural by artist Luis Angulo, aka ULOANG
As a small note of thanks for creating an amazing new mural in our department, we want to celebrate the talented artist who took on this challenging commission: Luis Angulo, who is known as ULOANG. He was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and has been an Austin resident for thirteen years. He told us a little bit about his creative goals: “Murals are a fantastic way to create art that can be enjoyed by anyone and everyone. It doesn't have to hang in a gallery, you don't have to go to an art opening to enjoy it. It is out there for all to see.” More about the artist HERE, also be sure to follow him on Instagram for some more dope art!
