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.