Announcement: Congratulations to our newly minted Ph.D.s!

Enormous congratulations to the following graduate students who are now, as of this weekend's commencement festivities, official Ph.D. recipients. We are so proud of them!Sean Cashbaugh"A Cultural History Beneath the Left: Politics, Art, and the Emergence of the Underground During the Cold War"Supervisor: Randolph LewisBrendan Gaughen"Practices of Place: Ordinary Mobilities and Everyday Technology"Supervisor: Jeff MeikleJosh Holland"Kurt Hahn, the United World Colleges, and the Un-Making of Nation"Supervisor: Julia MickenbergLily Laux"Teaching Texas: Race, Disability and the History of the School-to-Prison Pipeline"Supervisor: Shirley ThompsonSusan Quesal"Dismantling the Master's House: The Afterlife of Slavery in the Twentieth-Century Representations of Home"Supervisors: Shirley Thompson and Stephen MarshallKirsten Ronald"Dancing the Local: Two-Step and the Formation of Local Cultures, Local Places, and Local Identities in Austin, TX"Supervisor: Steve HoelsherJackie Smith"Black Princess Housewive and Single Ladies: Renee Cox's Housewife Enactments and The Politics of Twenty-First Century Wealthy Black Womanhood"Supervisor: Shirley Thompson

Announcement: Ph.D. alumna Carly Kocurek to deliver lecture on video game arcades

We're thrilled that one of our recent Ph.D. recipients, Dr. Carly Kocurek (Illinois Institute of Technology) will be returning to the hallowed halls of Burdine to deliver a lecture about video game arcades. Please join us on Wednesday, September 10 at 4pm in Burdine 214 to hear more about her research.A synopsis of her talk:

Over the past decade, the video game arcade has seen a small revival in the United States. Long-established arcades like New Hampshire's Funspot have become destinations in their own right while new businesses like Austin's own Pinballz and the growing number of bar-arcade hybrids scattered across the country draw a loyal, local clientele. This revival relies in part on a deep fascination with the video game industry's early glory days. Arcades feature "classic" machines in meticulous repair or boast particularly exhaustive collections of rare games to distinguish themselves. In this talk, I excavate the nostalgia for the arcade's "golden age" of the 1970s and 1980s and consider its position in contemporary narratives of American technological progress, entrepreneurship, and masculinity. Ultimately, I tie the nostalgia for classic arcades to multiple points of longing--for an imagined past that is defined by aesthetic style, by political positioning, by economic conditions, and by a particular kind of idealized young manhood.

Grad Research: Carrie Andersen writes on videogame glitches and joy in Flow

Apparently we have quite a bit of publishing going on this month in the American Studies department. Last week, Carrie Andersen published a column for Flow about the joy that arises from discovering absurd videogame glitches, centering on a YouTube personality and gamer named Dopefish. We've posted an excerpt below, and the full article can be found here:

Unsurprisingly, videogame designers and coders have been concerned with creating virtual, realistic, immersive spaces where the glitch is similarly undesirable (although perhaps not as world-ending). As designer Toby Gard writes, “When we are creating worlds in games, immersion is only possible for the player if we can convince the players that the space is authentic (whether stylized or not.).” The code that underlies the videogame holy grail—the authentic, immersive gaming world—is demystified if a character or background looks warped in such a way that players no longer buy into the illusion.In line with Gard’s concern with the immersive virtual space, media scholar Eugénie Shinkle describes how videogames ideally use sophisticated simulations to hide their intricate, sublime technological codes, but failure events—glitches—make these codes visible and thus rupture bonds between player and game space. Consequently, players can lose control, meaning, and their senses of self. The game shifts from being a virtual arena for exercising player agency and posthuman subjectivity back into a clunky object, as lifeless as any piece of furniture.In all of these cases, glitches occupy a space on a spectrum that spans from the minor irritation to the colossal fuck-up. But constructing the glitch so negatively ignores the real pleasure that can arise from encountering a hiccup in the technological system. What happens when failure events, rather than provoking a loss of our post-human selves or the literal end of the world, instead evoke happiness?

Alumni Voices: Dr. Carolyn de la Peña, Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute and Prof. of American Studies

Today, we feature some words of wisdom from Dr. Carolyn de la Peña, currently director of the University of California at Davis Humanities Institute and Professor of American Studies. Her books include The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (2003)  and Empty Pleasures: The Story of  The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda (2010). She graduated with a Ph.D. in American Studies from UT in 2001.How is the work that you're doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?Right now I oversee a large staff and work on grant proposals and events and am an advocate for humanities funding and research. In my own research I'm looking for ways that I can work with scientists and nutritionists on questions of health, technology, and the body. So much of my brain space is taken up thinking about the humanities at large--all of the disciplines and interdisciplines that comprise it and how it differs in important ways from the sciences and social sciences. I didn't do these things at UT in our smallish program. At UT I was very interested in defining American Studies (what are our methods? why can't we have a real theory class? how are we different then NYU?). I really wished that the program would give me more direction--have a more "inky" stamp to put on my work and my approach. Now I'm less interested in defining AMS, or worrying about whether my work fits in American Studies, and more interested in just being a humanist and working with different methodologies depending on the research or administrative problem I'm tacking.While I didn't learn these things in any organized way at UT, I do think the skills I learned in AMS at UT have helped me be comfortable working across disciplines and taking chances in my research--and imagining new ways that we could work within the humanities and getting funders and other administrators excited about those possibilities. At UT, while I was worrying about methods and theory and having anxiety about whether our way of doing AMS fit with "the" way of doing AMS, I was at the same time reading in history, urban studies, and women and gender studies in my exams. And I was working across several fields in my dissertation. So I guess I'd say that I worried too much when I was a student about what kind of American Studies I was doing, and should have better understood that the strength of the program was that it didn't tackle that question and pin down an answer. By letting us be kind-of-historians, or kind-of literature scholars or kind-of-media scholars it made us comfortable with cross-disciplinary thinking. I think for a lot of us in my generation this helped us get jobs in a variety of programs (media studies, english, history, religious studies) and then take on early leadership roles in expanding those fields and connecting disciplines in our own universities. Because no one gave us a real map we had to learn to make (and re-make) our own.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?Appreciate the brilliance of your friends in the program and work hard never to let go of those connections you make during your time there. These are the people who shape your thinking and call you on your BS in your dissertation concepts and slog through your first, second, and third drafts. You may have an advisor who really engages (I did), and that's fantastic. But don't forget that it's the people in that program with you who are really going to help you make your way while you're in grad school and while you're trying to establish yourself as a junior scholar. I'll always be grateful that I went to UT when I did, and I can point to so many specific ways that my friends in my cohort, then, are largely responsible for my successes now.