Grad Research: MA student Ashlyn Davis releases book of photography of the American West

We're pleased to announce that one of our MA students, Ashlyn Davis, has edited and published a book of photography with Bryan Schutmaat. Here's what Ashlyn has to say about the book:

The 44 images in Islands of the Blest depict various places in the American West and were taken over a one hundred year period, from the 1870s to the 1970s. The photographers included range from the completely unknown to some of the most distinguished practitioners of the medium--Timothy O'Sullivan, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee for instance. We scoured free public archives state by state for a year, pulling thousands of photographs and spent the summer editing them down to the version presented here. While there are some of the grand landscapes one expects to find in a text about the West, there are also images of its destruction and containment. The book is clothbound, printed on a thick newsprint, and includes a poem by Michael McGriff, a former Michener fellow.

For more information about the book or to purchase a copy, see the publisher's website here.

Watch This: Time Lapse of Migrant Mother (in pumpkin form!)

As any graduate student will tell you, free time to enjoy any kind of leisure activity is at a premium. Amidst catching up with work or preparing for upcoming work, though, it's important to find a moment to decompress and do an activity that exercises a totally different part of one's brain.But sometimes those activities manifest as completely odd diversions that still have some relevance to our work in American Studies. Here, we present a video (and sort of an art project) by Carrie Andersen, whose love for working with her hands has manifested in a strange, infrequent hobby: carving intensely detailed pumpkins. Take a look at this time lapse video to see an icon of American photography and life take form in a somewhat unexpected way...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlPngLi-xRg?rel=0]