Alumni Voices: Robin O'Sullivan's American Organic
UT AMS grad Robin O'Sullivan recently published American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping and Eating, about the history of the organic movement in the United States. AMS grad student Kerry Knerr spoke to her last week.Can you tell us a little bit about your book American Organic, and how you came to the project?It’s a cultural history of the organic food and farming movement, which first elicited my interest after I happened to visit the homestead of Helen and Scott Nearing in Harborside, Maine (when I was living up there in Portland). As I began to research the history of homesteading, I learned more about the organic movement, which was related but also distinct. What projects or people have inspired your work?The Nearings, certainly; and the major player in the organic farming movement was J.I. Rodale, who began farming in Pennsylvania in the 1940s and subsequently developed a media empire that publicized the organic movement. How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?It’s relevant to work in environmental and agricultural history, consumer studies, food studies, and, of course, American Studies. How is this work you're doing now, as a scholar, teacher or both, informed by the work you did as an American Studies student at UT?At UT-Austin, four talented professors served on my dissertation committee: Jeff Meikle, Janet Davis, Steve Hoelscher, and Elizabeth Engelhardt. All four have written books that served as models for mine, and all four were delightful to work with. Do you have any advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their experience at UT?I’m sure the students already know how fortunate they are to be surrounded by such stellar faculty members! What projects are you excited to work on in the future?My next project will be an analysis of “techno-natural” phenomena, with a particular focus on its manifestations in 19th century literature.
5 Questions with Dr. Mark Smith
Today we are pleased to present the next in our series of interviews with American Studies faculty and affiliate faculty members: 5 Questions. We recently sat down with Dr. Mark Smith, whose research interests include the history of social science and the cultural history of alcohol and drugs.
1. What was your favorite project to work on and why?I’m sure my answer’s going to be a little bit different from the other people who I think would talk about their research projects, but I think I’d really like to talk about the teaching that I’ve done around the issue of alcohol and drugs, which is something I just chanced into. In fact, I started working at a drug and alcohol treatment center, and I realized that there was a lack of historical and sociological background to see where that stood, particularly where it stood in the issue of cultural history. And what I’ve done is I’ve been able to give a series of classes to different people that deal with the issue of drugs in various permutations. Someone once told me that in scholarship, the question is whether you do more and more about less and less, that is, your focus becomes wider and wider; or whether you do more about less and less. The second is clearly what you do when you write books. Teaching gives the opportunity to do the former. I’ve taught three classes. I taught the original class, a seminar in the American cultural history of alcohol and drugs, and I’ve taught that primarily as an upper division undergraduate class. And I’ve also taught an upper division class for Plan 2 which treats the issue from a public policy standpoint, and now I’m teaching an undergraduate class on alcohol and drugs from an international standpoint, pointing out the fact that alcohol has been handled differently in places like Sweden and Finland and Africa.2. How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?You know, if you asked me ten years ago, I’d have a very clear answer for that. I deal in cultural history; I believe that I was the second person who taught both parts of the cultural history survey. My perspective is always to provide a general overview on the issues involved. I’ve always done that, that’s always been my interest. I was one of the first people to teach Introduction to American Studies. But my feeling is not to plunge myself into a topic- and maybe not even come out- my interest is providing a background so that people in important contemporary fields like Gender Studies or Queer Studies can have background and context. To that extent, I think I’m very much rooted not only in these issues that are coming up today, but those issues that have come up in the past and hopefully the future as well.3. What projects or people have inspired your work?Within alcohol studies, probably the best books that I know are W. J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic, and then recently, on Prohibition, Daniel Okrent came up with a book called The Last Call. I think those have really been useful. Clearly, Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, about Vietnam, and Frances FitzGerald’s book Fire in the Lake have been books that really had a lot to do with my understanding of the kind of world that I had grown up in. More recently, George Chauncey's Gay New York, a work that you might think would be narrowly focused but instead tells you a lot more than you think it ever could. There are many amazing works on slavery, but the one that first opened my eyes at a very unprogressive time was Kenneth Stampp's Peculiar Institution. And then sometimes there are books where you think you’re not going to be interested in the topic at all and you're surprised. There’s a man who died much too young by the name of Roland Marchand who wrote a book called Advertising the American Dream. This is one of the big books, ambitious books, books that you just look at and go, “Wow, this is amazing!” and you’re reading them and you’re taking notes and you do that for two whole days. I think that’s why a lot of graduate students have a “fear and loathing," to use Hunter Thompson, in reference to the whole concept of the comprehensive exam fields. And to me, maybe that was my greatest scholarly experience in a way. Not only because you have a sense of accomplishment, but because you wind up reading books that you would never read. If you were just interested in alcohol and drugs, you would never read Marchand’s book. And that’s just a sampling of the books that have influenced me.4. What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research?As an undergraduate, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I’d major in English or History and the initial line for History was a lot shorter and that was the only reason I signed up for that. I think I took more classes in English than I did in History – I also took a lot of Political Science classes and Sociology classes and when I was a Sophomore, one of my friends said, “You know, you’re really doing American Studies.” I had never even heard of American Studies, and my school did not have an American Studies program. So I finished my degree in History but I continued to take all those things, and while it was exciting to put all of these things together, I didn’t feel that I was finished yet, which led me to the University of Texas as an American Studies graduate student. And at least for the first year or two, I still didn’t know what American Studies was, but I continued to follow this path. I came down here thinking I was going to work on the novels of the Gilded Age, which strikes me as the most boring thing that I’ve ever heard of today. So as I was trying to find something that was new and hadn’t been done, I wrote my Master’s thesis and dissertation on the history of social science because that was interesting to me and it was a gap in the scholarship. In my post-graduate years, I taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio for four years - and even when I was teaching Introductory History, which is required in Texas, I taught from a cultural history standpoint, and I was trying to talk about how one has to look at history from the position of what people think and how they then act, or how people think and how they consequently behave. I think that’s really important to me - that is the most important question for me - which is the concept of behavior and probably even more of people’s intellectual constructs. That’s been the most important thing for my own work and also for the kind of work that I try to teach on both an undergraduate and graduate level.5. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I’ve got this book that I have been fussing with - and really that’s the word, fussing with it - I haven’t made the progress that I’ve wanted to but I feel that I’ve cleared my path so that I can work on it. It’s a comparative public policy study of the United States and Finland, because they are the only two countries that have ever had national prohibition in the Western world - in the Middle East, of course, it’s different. But they occurred at the same time- Finland started a year earlier and quit a year earlier than the United States. There’s a lot of similarities between the propaganda that was sent to Finland from the United States, and I think it’s very interesting - there’s a lot of similarities, but there’s a lot of differences, too. The gangsters are all the same and that type of stuff. So I’ve been working on this and my problem has been that I don’t read Finnish and I haven’t been able to find someone who’s willing to do that type of work for me, although I think I’ve come up with someone recently. So that is the project that I’m really looking forward to. What I may do is to point out another society which, at the same time, went a completely different way, a way that Finland would later copy completely and the United States would copy to a certain degree, and that’s Sweden, which took a regulatory model rather than one of coercion - “you just can’t do it” in legalese. That’s the project I would like to do and hopefully will be able to start in the Spring.Bonus question - in one sentence, what is American Studies to you?What people think and how they act; how they act, and consequently what they think.
Five Questions with Rebecca Rossen
Today we're pleased to feature an interview with another one of our incredible affiliate faculty members, Dr. Rebecca Rossen, professor of dance history in the Department of Theatre & Dance and Performance as Public Practice. Dr. Rossen has just published her first book, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford). We recently sat down with her to talk about her scholarly and artistic background, her new book, and her future research and teaching.
What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your current research?Before I was a scholar I was a dancer and choreographer in Chicago. I did that for the decade after I graduated from college, my entire 20s. I went to graduate school to get a PhD, expecting to continue on making dance, but the experience ended up transforming me into a historian. I would say that as a scholar I'm a dance historian whose work focuses on identity, ethnicity, and gender representations in performance. Methodologically, I bring together my work as a dance historian with my experience as a performer. Those two threads are not only present in my research but are also present in the classes that I teach and how I teach them.What has been your favorite project to work on so far?As a scholar I've worked on one main project (with multiple side projects) for a really long time, which started as a dissertation--as many of our projects do--14 years ago. It was finally birthed as a book last spring. It's both my favorite project as well as something that I have sometimes referred to as "the beast" because it was the project. Dancing Jewish has been an extremely involving endeavor. The book looks at how American Jewish choreographers, working in modern and postmodern dance, represent their Jewishness. I show how, over a 75-year period, dance allowed American Jews to grapple with issues like identity, difference, assimilation, and pride.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?Dancing Jewish considers various themes that are repeated in dances over time, like nostalgic depictions of Eastern European Jews or biblical heroism as a response to World War II or Jewish humor and stock characters. Because the book focuses solely on Jewish-American performances, it's definitely an American Studies book. I'm interested in the next book in looking at representations of the Holocaust in performance, not focusing solely on American artists but including European and Israeli artists, and not just focusing on Jewish artists but also including non-Jewish artists who have responded to the Holocaust in interesting ways. The next project is a natural extension of the first one but takes a more global perspective and moves beyond considering just the work of Jewish artists.How do you see your work fitting into broader conversation in dance history or American Studies?Dancing Jewish is certainly an American Studies book, because when you are talking about Jewishness in America, you are talking about how a group of people balanced a very specific ethnic identity with their Americanness, which generally--especially in the earlier part of the century--was conceived as not-Jewish. There are some very interesting tensions that get worked out in these dances between Jewishness and Americanness and how choreographers are choreographically trying to balance these identities or converge them. It is ultimately a book about American identity with a specific lens looking at Jewish identity. But it is also a work of Dance Studies, so if you are interested in dance and performance, it's a book that considers how identities are performed physically. Because of that, and because of my background as an artist, I think one of the contributions it makes is its use of embodied scholarship. I spent a lot of time in the archive, I did dozens of interviews, and there is analysis of photographic and video evidence and live performance. But I also use embodied methodologies, which means that at points in my research, I had physical and creative dialogues with my subjects. For example, I asked two of my subjects to "make me a Jewish dance," and even though I didn't have any money and they didn't yet know me, they said okay. That process was a very interesting entre into my understanding of their work, because I didn't just learn about their products on stage, but I also learned something about their processes and what Jewishness meant to them.There are a number of ways in which my experience as a dancer/choreographer influences my research. Another example from the book is that I was a dancer in a piece called Breathe Normally. It's a very abstract piece; it was loosely about a family who has immigrated from the old country to the new country where they are very successful and lose touch with the past. The word Jewishness is certainly never mentioned in the performance even though there is text in the piece, but because I was in the room with those people as it was created, I am able to talk about how the piece is about assimilation. I would say that embodied scholarship is something that Dance Studies brings to the table and something that is not often found in American Studies or History scholarship. And there's consideration of gender in Dancing Jewish as well, because you can't really talk about ethnicity and stagings of ethnicity physically without talking about gender. So it's pretty interdisciplinary.What has inspired your research and teaching? What people, texts, things?There's a dance historian named Susan Manning who is my mentor and who wrote a book called Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion, which looks at American dance and the ways in which race informed what we call modern dace. Her work is very influential. So is the work of Sander Gilman, who looks at the Jewish body as a concept. More specifically, there are some really interesting theatre scholars who look at how Jewishness is represented in American theatre. Harley Erdman wrote a book called Staging the Jew which looks at ethnicity in American theater in the late 19th century and early 20th century, an era when a lot of Jews immigrated to the U.S. It's a very rich book. Another important work is by Henry Bial called Acting Jewish, which looks at representations of Jewish identity in popular American performance, specifically theatre and film in the mid-twentieth century. He has an idea called "double coding" that was really useful to me and considers how different audiences read and analyze a work differently. For example, a Jewish audience would get different messages from a performance than a non-Jewish audience. I found this useful in talking about works where other scholars or critics overlook Jewishness. Because I'm able to read the codes, I'm able to read Jewishness that's been assimilated out of a piece, abstracted away.Bonus Question. How would you define American Studies in one sentence?American Studies is an interdisciplinary inquiry into what it means to be an "American" that tries to understand how Americaness is represented and who gets to represent it and how.Rebecca Rossen (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is a dance historian, performance scholar, and choreographer whose research interests include modern and postmodern dance, stagings of identity in physical performance, and the relationship between research and practice. She teaches courses in dance history as well as undergraduate and graduate seminars that focus on identity in dance and interdisciplinary performance. Professor Rossen is a faculty affiliate in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and the American Studies Department.
Five Questions with Dr. Phillip Barrish
Today we continue our ever-popular series, 5 Questions, where we sit down with American Studies faculty and affiliate faculty members to chat about their research and teaching. Today we bring you an interview with Dr. Phillip Barrish, Professor of English and author of The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011).What has been your favorite project to work on and why?Luckily for me, my favorite project is the one I am working on right now, which has to do with the medical humanities. More specifically, I'm interested in what I'm calling the Healthcare Policy Humanities, or the Healthcare Humanities. A lot of work by literature scholars in the medical humanities has focused on representations of doctors, patients, and the illness experience, as well as on narrative medicine, which has to do with the stories patients tell doctors and the stories doctors tell patients—that is, the patient-doctor interface. I'm really interested in how literature and narrative relate to what could be called the political economy of healthcare, that is, for example the kinds of issues we are grappling with now around Obamacare and the healthcare crisis in our country. How has literature reflected, directly or indirectly, on questions such as who pays for healthcare, who has access to what kinds of healthcare, what is the role of government in providing healthcare? What role do stories, language, and metaphor play in the dynamics of how institutions, individuals, practices, and professional modes messily intersect to produce a healthcare system.There are plenty of excellent books by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists about the historical evolution and current state of the U.S. healthcare system, but I want to look at those issues through a literary lens. (I’m an Americanist so it’s the U.S. context that most interests me, at least for now.) For example, I have an article in the most recent issue of the journal American Literature called “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Healthcare at the Turn of the Century.” I’m currently in the early stages of researching an article/book chapter provisionally called "Healthcare Policy and Dystopian Fiction." Here I’m less interested in dystopian works that extrapolate from the often disturbing implications of cutting-edge developments in medical technology, many of which have to do with reproduction: genetic engineering, cloning, surrogate pregnancy, but also such things as new organ-transplant technology. As fascinating and disturbing as such literature often is, I want to focus on a related but different aspect of dystopian medical imagining—dystopian literature and films that focus at least as much on the seemingly more quotidian issues of healthcare access, distribution, and funding. Two great recent examples are the 2013 movie Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, and Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel, On Such a Full Sea. If anyone reading this interview has additional ideas for texts, I’d love to hear them!How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within and outside of academia?Throughout my career, I’ve tried to be conscious of how my scholarly work might speak to issues, tensions, and problems that are important to us today. I think this dialogue is clearest in my current project, because the question of healthcare’s political economy is one that obviously a lot of people are thinking about and debating. Indeed, elections may turn on it.What kinds of projects or people have inspired your work?I went to graduate school in the early 1980s at Cornell, which was known for having a theory-heavy English department. I was fascinated by post-structuralism and by the emphasis placed by post-structuralist literary critics on close reading, which I had come to from a more old-fashioned training in college in formalist close reading. Some of the early people who inspired me in graduate school would be Barbara Johnson at Harvard, who died tragically several years ago from cancer, and Jonathan Culler and Mark Seltzer at Cornell. Since then I've not gone against my training, because post-structuralism still informs my own thinking and reading practices, often in subtle ways, but I've extended my graduate student training into looking at literature in its relation to other discourses and practices in our society. Among American Studies scholars, for example, I love the work of Janice Radway, whom I was able to take classes with as an undergraduate. Not untypically for scholars of my and subsequent generations, I’ve been inspired by feminism, critical race studies, new historicism, cultural studies, queer studies, and affect studies.What is your scholarly background and how does that background motivate your teaching and research now?I grew up in a New York City, middle class, third generation Jewish immigrant family. When I was in college and even my first couple years of graduate school, a lot of my favorite texts were British. For a long time I thought about working in nineteenth-century British literature. But I had a feeling then that I wanted to be able to address the kinds of issues and problems American writers were dealing with in the U.S. context. Ultimately, I went into academia because I felt I was better at it than I was at some other things. I thought I'd go to graduate school for a few years and see if I liked it. I did like it, and here I am.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?It's always hard for me to think beyond my current project, especially when I'm still in the early stages. My mind is so full of different directions in which I might take my current work. So I'm going to have to defer answering that question. Ask me in a couple of years.In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?American Studies means, to me, mutually stimulating disciplinary approaches to issues and histories I care about.
Phillip Barrish is the author of American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (Cambridge UP, 2001), White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (Ohio State UP, 2005), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011). His current research explores fictional representations of health-care systems in the United States from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.