AMS department members speak about The End of Austin at UT Chancellor's Council Annual Meeting

Exciting news: earlier this May, three members of the American Studies department were asked to speak at the UT Chancellor's Council Annual Meeting, held at the Frank Erwin Center. Dr. Randy Lewis, editor and founder of the project, and two of its editorial board members Carrie Andersen and Sean Cashbaugh discussed the website and engaged in a Q&A after their talk.[gallery type="slideshow" ids="3207,3208,3209,3210,3211,3212,3206"]See Dr. Lewis's recap here:

Last week, Sean, Carrie and I had a remarkable opportunity to share our work on EndofAustin.com with the Chancellor's Council, several hundred of the most generous donors to the UT system. We spoke for an hour about the website, describing how it grew out of an American Studies graduate seminar to become a digital humanities project with almost 50,000 page views for its first four issues. We celebrated TEOA as an example of doing more with less: as resources shrink at UT, faculty and grad students have scrambled to create low-cost, high impact projects that reach beyond the confines of the campus to engage a larger public. We had a great response from Chancellor's Council, in part because so many people in the audience have the same hopes and fears about Austin that Sean and Carrie presented so effectively. It was great exposure for our project, the American Studies Department, and COLA generally, and we're hopeful that it will lead to greater support for our project, which has so far existed with an annual budget of $100.

Announcement: More on American Studies and the Texas Bookshelf Project

Last week, we shared the exciting news from UT Press about their new Texas Bookshelf series, a 5-year, 16-book series from UT faculty centering on what Texas is and means. Today, we have a few more details about the project (and our our faculty members' involvement in the project) from department chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt.And stay tuned this fall for more specific details about each of these four approaches to Texas.

Four core faculty members in American Studies are among the distinguished faculty chosen as authors in the Texas Bookshelf Project. Designed to be the most ambitious and comprehensive publishing endeavor about the culture and history of one state ever undertaken, the book series and website will draw on the state’s brightest writers, scholars, and intellectuals.

Professors Bob Abzug, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Karl Hagstrom Miller, and Shirley Thompson each will write for the series. The Department of American Studies thereby is contributing to the project more authors—in sheer numbers and in percentage of faculty—than any other department on campus. Were we to add in our American Studies affiliate faculty members, we might need to rename it the TexAMS Bookshelf.

In the words of President Bill Powers, “Texas deserves a comprehensive series of books that explores its history and culture. A collaboration between our esteemed faculty and UT Press is the ideal way to produce The Texas Bookshelf and to share the rich resources of this campus with the rest of the world.”

American Studies is proud to participate in the endeavor.