Announcement: Dr. Steve Hoelscher gives keynote lecture on photographer Elliott Erwitt
The following information on the photographer and exhibition comes to us from the Boca Raton Museum of Art:
Elliott Erwitt is a renowned documentary photographer who melds substance and enchantment into his work. This exhibition features over 80 images hand selected by the artist himself.Born in Paris, Erwitt and his family fled Europe for the United States at the onset of World War II. Iconic images by Mr. Erwitt include John F. Kennedy, Che Guevara, and Marilyn Monroe with the skirt of her white dress wafting around her legs as she posed over a New York City subway grate. His spectacular sense of humor and joy is evident in his work that captures quotidian life in urban surroundings.
Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
Today we would like to say a big, public "thank you" to Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, who has served the American Studies department and the University of Texas since 2004 and is off to North Carolina to take up the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Engelhardt is a leading scholar in Southern food studies, and since receiving her doctorate in Women’s Studies from Emory University, she has held academic positions at Emory, Ohio University, West Virginia University, and most recently at UT in the American Studies Department and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. In Chapel Hill, she will join the Department of American Studies, one of the first interdisciplinary programs at UNC, which has specializations in American Indian Studies, Global American Studies, Folklore, and Southern Studies.All of us here at AMS::ATX wish her all the best in her new adventure. As Dr. Engelhardt likes to say, she is never happier than when she can write and read with her feet in a mountain stream. We hope she'll get lots of opportunities to take advantage of the mountains and streams of North Carolina. Best of luck, and we'll miss you, Dr. Engelhardt!
Announcement: AMS Graduate Student Conference, Spring 2013
We are delighted to announce the 2013 American Studies Graduate Student Conference, "Reimagining the American Dream," scheduled for April 4-5, 2013.
The theme of the conference (excerpted below) stems from the Department's annual theme, "Dream!"
In the early 20th century, historian James Truslow Adams wrote that the American Dream was “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller,” and yet time and again this promise of opportunity has fallen short: opportunity and prosperity are not demonstrably available to all, and yet this promise, this dream, continues to circulate in the personal and political imagination. After Adams’ early statements on the dream, there emerged a particular vision of dream-status in American postwar prosperity that was countered by global revolutionary and post-colonial movements. Yet the dream bore on into the cocaine-fueled 80s, only to be brought into question once more by a succession of bursting economic bubbles.Given its historical weight, we hope to interrogate and reimagine the American Dream through a series of conversations. To what extent is the American Dream a myth rather than a real possibility? Who has access to its promises? What are the limits of prosperity? How have people leveraged the dream myth? What does the “American Dream” even mean in the 21st century, as the country is in the midst of vast demographic and technological changes? If we have an American dream, what is the American nightmare, and how might American dreams and nightmares coexist or be mutually constitutive?
The conference will feature panel discussions and a keynote by Dr. Claire Jean Kim (University of California Irvine):
Claire Jean Kim holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Asian American Studies. She also holds a courtesy appointment in African American Studies. She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) which won the American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on ethnic and cultural pluralism. Her current book project explores the intersections of race, culture, nation, and species in the contemporary U.S. She is also working on two collaborative projects. The first concerns the Obama phenomenon and the question of postraciality, and the second undertakes a comparative and historical analysis of the construction of Asian Americans and Latinos in the national imagination.
More information will soon be available here. The full CFP can be accessed here.
Announcement: Congratulations to Dr. Stephen Marshall
Hearty congratulations are due to UT American Studies professor Dr. Stephen H. Marshall, who has been awarded the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award from the American Political Science Association for his new book, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics. Well done, Dr. Marshall!