AMS Graduate Student Spotlight—Holly Genovese

Name: Holly Genovese, PhD Candidate

Pronouns: she/they

Contact information: holly.genovese@gmail.com, you can read & subscribe to my substack here: What Is Much?, and to view more thorough & in depth information about my work visit my website!

Q: What are your research interests, both academic and for fun, while in American Studies at UT!?

A: My academic interests are primarily in the ways that aesthetic work reacts and resists the carceral state. My dissertation focuses on cultural production (visual art, memoir, poetry, and hip hop) that is resistant to the carceral state in the Black South (which may or may not be an excuse to listen to Outkast constantly). But I am also working on an anthology of academic and creative work about American Girl Dolls, a memoir, and have taught a class on haunting which I adored.

Q: How did you make your way to American Studies as a discipline?

A: So I was a History and Political Science major as an undergrad and got my MA in American History as well. But more and more I wanted to stretch the bounds of academic history (which I do love) by writing about literature, art, and music in ways that American Studies allowed for and encouraged.

Q: What is the nature of your work? What method(s) do you utilize the most? How does your current work align with American Studies?

A: So I feel like every chapter of my dissertation project has a different method. I wish I was joking. But I am primarily working in literary criticism, visual culture studies, and popular music studies with influences from ethno-musicology, art history, ethnography, Black studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. I do still have a bit of that archival impulse as well and am currently (digitally) sifting through the Angela Davis papers. My work feels in tune with the field as a whole–it is very much centered on my ideology as a prison abolitionist, my passion for art and literature, and an interest n centering Black studies in my work, all things that I see in the field now (especially with the most recent theme and Keynote at ASA).

Q: Are you currently working on any projects, and if so tell us about them!  

A: Well, my dissertation. I am working on this anthology on American Girl Dolls. I am writing a memoir in essays. And I am revising an article on The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia. I am working on bringing a documentary on incarceration to UT and trying to figure out how to integrate haunting into my academic and creative work. I am trying to needlepoint a tiny strawberry.

Q: How does American Studies at UT make your work possible?

A: American Studies at UT allowed me to explore all of my academic interests. I got to explore my interests in courses within the department but was also encouraged to go outside of the department to English, AADS, CWGS and to join organizations like E3W. I was encouraged to volunteer with TPEI, which allows me to teach at a women’s prison, a goal I have had since undergrad. And I was encouraged to read everything. My co-advisors Dr. Shirley Thompson and Dr. Samantha Pinto (English) have truly allowed me to embrace my varied and sometimes unmanageable interests.

Q: What is your favorite thing about AMS at UT?

MY FRIENDS DUH. And the sense of community that permeates the department and also the brilliance of all of my fellow students and the faculty.

Bonus Q: What is a fun fact about you that you would like your colleagues, peers, and/or students to know about you?

A: My best quality is actually just being my cat Petunia’s human.