Grad Research: Ph.D. students Kerry Knerr and Elissa Underwood inaugural recipients of Les Dames D'Escoffier, Dallas Chapter Endowed Presidential Fellowships in American Studies

A hearty congratulations to Ph.D. students Kerry Knerr and Elissa Underwood, who have been named the 2016 recipients of the Les Dames D'Escoffier, Dallas Chapter Endowed Presidential Fellowships in American Studies. Les Dames D'Escoffier of Dallas have offered their generous support of American Studies graduate scholarship at UT on topics relating to food studies.Kerry Knerr's project, “Cocktails, Class, and Conspicuous Consumption in the Progressive Era U.S.," examines the early history of the American cocktail and its entanglement with American cultural imperialism. The project will build upon her master’s report, “In Search of a Good Drink: Punches, Cocktails, and Imperial Consumption,” currently under review at Global Food History. In it Kerry argues that understanding the material aspects of alcohol consumption (what people are doing), through close readings of recipe collections and material cultures of public and home bars, can ground otherwise nebulous discourses (what people are saying) of social movements, gender politics, or class formation. Kerry will conduct research at the National Food and Beverage Foundation in New Orleans, which houses both the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and the Museum of the American Cocktail. There she will analyze menus, published cookbooks or bar manuals, private recipe collections, newspaper clippings, and photographs.Elissa Underwood's project, "Women and Food in Carceral Spaces," will explore women’s understandings of and experiences with food and foodways, including specific nutritional needs and distinct relationships with food, during and after incarceration by conducting oral histories with formerly incarcerated women in Texas. Elissa will interview women working and learning or perfecting skills in food-based industries, as well as women who have started their own food-based companies or non-profit organizations specifically aimed at combating recidivism and/or preventing incarceration.The winners were announced at this year's Foodways Texas conference, an organization now housed in the Department of American Studies. For more on the conference, check out this very in-depth, fascinating recap of the weekend of festivities.

Announcement: UT American Studies Receives $100K Endowment to Support Food Studies Research

The good news continues! Last week, UT AMS department chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt announced that the department has received a $100,000 Presidential Fellowship from Les Dames D'Escoffier Dallas Chapter to support dissertation research on Texas, women, and food culture.LDE is an organization of professional women who work in the food, fine beverage, and hospitality industries; Dr. Engelhardt says that their support, the first of its kind for the department, will "play a leading role in increasing the stability of the department into the future, inspiring other such endowments as we work with development and other donors." Additionally, it, in combination with the recent merging of Texas Foodways into UT AMS, "will help put UT Austin on the map as a leader in food studies in the humanities."Thanks to LDE's Dallas Chapter for their support!For the full press release, click here.

Grad Research: JFK, Reality, and Mediation at the Sixth Floor Museum

I probably don't have to tell you that Austin is a vibrant, exciting place to live and work: with a killer live music scene, ubiquitous tacos, and barbecue that'll make you weak in the knees, it certainly ranks near the top of my favorite cities in America list.That said, one of the benefits of living in Austin has also been having opportunities to explore other parts of Texas, from Marfa to Houston. This past weekend, I decided to venture out of the Austin city limits to Dallas, a city I had only ever experienced through way too many layovers at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.Though Dallas has its share of tourist destinations, my motivation was research-related. At the moment, I'm knee-deep in my Master's Report, which explores representations of John F. Kennedy's assassination in two video games, and how their odd, perhaps ethically questionable gamification of the event - an incredibly traumatic moment in American history - reconfigures and negotiates our understanding of history and politics. What kind of residue is left in our historical memory if we play these games? What do they do to our imaginations of power, official state accounts of history, our ability to interact with history and meaning-making? How do we understand history if we only experience it virtually?But to me, a 25-year old, Kennedy's assassination always felt remote, a moment in a textbook rather than a lived, traumatic experience. So I embarked on a journey to the place where it happened, to make it feel as real as it probably could to someone who was never there: Dealey Plaza, and the Texas State Book Depository, now a museum dedicated to Kennedy and the assassination.The Sixth Floor Museum relies on an audio tour that guides you through various points of the exhibit, offering both pure narration of the museum's holdings (mostly documents, photographs, and videos) and first-hand accounts from witnesses and public officials. After learning about Kennedy's early life and initial moments of the presidency, I found myself standing in front of the window believed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald's vantage point from where he fired three shots. But the museum does not permit visitors to approach or glance out that window at the street below: it is blockaded by glass, meaning I could not come within fifteen feet of the storied spot. Rats.The second half of the museum explores the aftermath of the assassination through a relatively homogenous collection of artifacts - photographs, stills from the few films we have, newscasts - relayed largely through the media. And, based on those holdings, I really got a sense of how mediated the assassination was even for people living in 1963. This was partially out of necessity, as there was no quicker way to spread the word about the tragedy than over the wire and through news programs. But it's also because several people in the crowd were snapping photographs to document the President's presence in Dallas, a signifier of having been there when Kennedy was, too. They saw the president and the assassination through lenses; so do we.The compulsion to document through photography and, in a few cases, through film, has invigorated debates about the true story of the assassination since 1963. The only reason folks have come up with detailed alternate theories and accounts of how Kennedy was killed - and why such theories remain contested, hashed over, pervasive - is because we can continually pore over photographs and film made by everyday citizens in Dallas.Ironically, the museum does not permit photography or recording indoors, so a moment in history that remains salient in public consciousness due to those media halts further documentation through visual and aural media. After leaving the museum, I felt a sense of anxious incompleteness: I hadn't documented my presence at this very fraught place except in scrawling a few notes in my notebook. I wanted to photograph, as a means of remembering the details of the exhibition and of signifying to myself and others that I had been to the actual place.Of course, once I left the building, I spent some time photographing its exterior. I was struck by how moving being there was, but also how utterly familiar it was: I had seen all of it countless times before in the Zapruder film, in photographs, in the video games that I'm studying. And it was exactly as expected.But in spite of that familiarity, there was also a pall cast over my experience of Dealey Plaza, the depository, the grassy knoll. At no point did I feel a stronger sense of sadness than I did when I first saw the white Xs painted on the street, signifying, "Kennedy was shot here and here." Those Xs connected the assassination with actuality - it happened in this space, on this concrete, not in the virtuality of film and television and photography and video game. I did not expect to feel distressed, but the reality of the assassination was striking.The significance wasn't lost on the tourists who visited the area, too: several visitors asked to have their picture taken over or near the X, ostensibly to signify presence: "I was at this place. This is where it happened." I was initially troubled by that impulse; who would want a memento of visiting the spot of a deeply tragic moment? Isn't such a practice crass at best and unethical at worst?But considering my similar impulse within the museum, and my motivations for coming to Dallas in the first place, I can't judge these people. Documenting their presence there could be a means of connecting, of making the assassination more real to them. And in a cultural moment where mediation and removal from history and politics is the norm rather than the exception, an impulse to make history more personal is laudable.At dusk, only 5 hours after I arrived in Dallas, I returned to Austin. But Austin lacks the aura of weighty historical trauma that permeates Dallas for me. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking back to the museum and the plaza with a measurable degree of real sadness.