AMS Student Spotlight Feature—PhD Candidate Taylor Johnson Karahan
Name: Taylor Johnson Karahan
Pronouns: she/they
Question (Q): What are your research interests, both academic and for fun, while in American Studies at UT!?
Answer (A): My research interests currently are in ancestral remains and sites of unburial. I work on how and why certain people are remembered and memorialized while others are silenced and forgotten by mainstream narratives.
Q: How did you make your way to American Studies as a discipline?
A: When I was a senior in my undergraduate studies and mentioned wanting to get a doctorate, my advisor asked me what my favorite things I read and studied were. When I answered Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, and referenced the prison abolitionist projects I was a part of with her, she directed me toward American Studies.
Q: Are you currently working on any projects, and if so tell us about them!
A: Conceptualizing a politics of unburial at three sites in Texas, I ask what it means for human beings to be kept in the basements and warehouses of major universities, buried unremarked upon on the grounds of symbolic monuments, and found in unmarked graves at construction sites. I trace epistemological and cultural structures which muster some human beings out of their graves to tell particular stories and lead to the unmarked burials of others, how such structures manifest at these sites and in Texas history, and what a Texas-specific historical focus can illuminate about how narrative power operates in the building and expansion of empire. Attending to archeological evidence, counter-memories, and routinely silenced historical archives, my work unpacks the tenuous boundary between past and present and invokes the possibility of more just futures.
Q: How does American Studies at UT make your work possible?
A: Working in American Studies at UT allows me to also situate my research at the intersections of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Mexican American Studies, Texas History, Geography, Ethnography, Archeology, Cultural Studies, Carceral Studies, and Public History. By rooting my work in American Studies, I can take an interdisciplinary approach to analyze how power operates in historical productions about unburied ancestors and across ostensibly distinct sites.
Q: What is your favorite thing about AMS at UT?
A: My favorite thing about AMS is the tight-knit and supportive community – especially among the graduate students. From maintaining a close relationship with a visiting Fulbright scholar even though she’s back across the Atlantic Ocean to sharing puppy photos with the sibling of a professor I rode home from the airport with, the connections I’ve made in this department have really supported me through some of the more difficult parts of life and graduate schooling. I have met the most talented, passionate, thoughtful, funny, and generous people here, and I will cherish every one of them for the rest of my life.
Bonus Q: What is a fun fact about you that you would like your colleagues, peers, and/or students to know about you?
I’m not sure if it’s altogether that fun of a fact (and a particularly contradictory one for an abolitionist), but I have seen every single episode of Law-and-Order Special Victims Unit – most of them several times. I can alarmingly recite the intro with perfect timing, and I can place Mariska Hargitay by season based solely on her hairstyle. If you need a walking SVU encyclopedia – call me.
