Announcement: introducing the social media team

The beginning of the school year seems like an apt moment to introduce the editors/writers/internet gurus behind the Department of American Studies social media presence. So, without further ado, meet your American Studies internet team!My name is Carrie Andersen, and I'm a fifth year Ph.D. student and one of this blog's original editors and founders. Aside from running the blog, I'm the manager of our Twitter account. My dissertation explores the cultural and political valence of the military drone in post-9/11 American society. Beyond my dissertation's confines of technology studies, cultural/media studies, political theory, and gender studies, I hold interests in digital humanities and public scholarship, which also led to my position as a member of The End of Austin's editorial board and manager of its own social media presence. My inclination towards all things internet, however, developed much earlier than graduate school: by age 10, I was teaching myself HTML and creating homepages on - and I'm aging myself here - AOL and GeoCities (RIP). As such, I'm so grateful to our department for supporting and encouraging the development of projects that foreground engaging with individuals through digital media and pushing beyond the boundaries of the everyday - an interest that also nourishes my love of exploring strange, far afield places, as you can see above. My name is Josh Kopin, and I'm a second year Ph.D. student in the department of American Studies. My interests lie at the intersection of art, history, politics and commerce, and they express themselves with work on comics and American popular religion. At the moment, I'm preparing to write a master's thesis on the place of religion, writ broadly, in Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip. Other dream projects include work on the English rock band The Animals, the relationship between non-fiction comics and traditional journalism and academic history and the history of men's style in the United States. I'm also dedicated, as both a student and a teacher, to writing as a way of thinking something through; I hope that my work for this blog will allow me to do that on a regular basis. I'm Emily Roehl, a fifth year Ph.D. student in American Studies. Carrie Andersen and I founded the AMS :: ATX blog back in 2011, and I manage the calendar. Have an Austin/UT event to promote? Let me know! My dissertation focuses on representations of contemporary oil extraction (hydraulic fracturing, oil sands, deep water drilling), and I share Carrie's interest in digital and public humanities. I am a member of The End of Austin's editorial board and the co-founder of Mystery Spot Books, an independent artist book publisher out of Minneapolis. As you can see from my picture, I'm a really bad vegetarian.  Texas has that effect.