5 Questions with Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt
This week we bring you the next installment in a series of interviews with AMS faculty members: 5 Questions with Associate Professor Elizabeth Engelhardt.
1. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?
My favorite project is always my next project. There is an interesting way that all of the projects lead one to the next. Even as writing a book about Appalachia might on the surface seem really different from writing a book about Southern food, I did the first research on the food project out of a bunch of material I was finding in Appalachia and didn’t know what to do with. So it sort of led me off into then doing the next project. You know, it’s easy to look backward and put a straight line on it, thinking, “Clearly I progressed from this to that.” I don’t think it was a straight line, but I do think that one has led to the other, which is one of the great joys of this particular career.2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?One of the things that I love most about studying food is that there’s knowledge in all kinds of communities, and it has led me into conversations that are really thoughtful and challenging in university classrooms, but just as much in public libraries, waiting in front of a food trailer for someone to hand you food, at festivals or churches or in family kitchens. For me, that is not only one of the challenges of doing the research but also one of the places where I think the things we do in American Studies make real bridges to the communities in which we are living.I have been increasingly thinking about what it means to do public humanities, where we need to be humble in that process but also where we are better for engaging in that process. I feel like my scholarship is better for the places I get out and talk with communities and sometimes those are communities in the present. Sometimes that is a real-life conversation where you’re sitting down across from each other. Sometimes those are archival communities that I get to listen in on through our historical methods, through our archival methods, and sometimes they’re communities that are best talked about through fiction, where the world of literature is a place where we can find these otherwise lost or subverted connections.I just recently started working with an archive of letters from farm women around the U.S. South. It is striking to me how they are united by their love of plants, their love of heritage plants in particular. The earliest letters are from the 1920s and they go through the early 1970s. So it’s at a time in the U.S. South where there is a real transition to industrial foodways, to more national food distribution processes, and these are a group of people who believe very strongly in the old knowledge and the old plants and what gardeners know and what farm women know. That’s their language for themselves, they call themselves “farm women” or “farm ladies.” But reading those letters, not only do I find them interesting academically, but I also find them interesting for how this group of women who are otherwise vey hard to document are having exactly those same kinds of conversations about books they love, histories they’re interested in, plants they love, and connections between universities and communities. I don’t think I’m doing anything different than the women in those collections are doing. But I still think we have a lot to learn from that process.We sort of act as if this idea of storing things in the cloud is a brand new idea. These women are saying very clearly, “This knowledge doesn’t exist in libraries. This knowledge exists between all of us and we need to be talking to each other. Hey, I know this person and you know that person. How about writing to this person?” And it’s exactly like cloud computing, it’s just happening through the rural mail system.3. Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work?I think at age 2 I felt like I wanted to make the world a more just place. I did not think that everything worked fairly, and I wanted some explanations for that. In some ways I ask some of the same questions today as I’m doing my writing, as I’m doing my scholarship, as I’m doing my teaching. “How do we make this place better for all of us? How do we figure out who’s not included? How do we find ways for all of us to really hear each other?”I had an amazing godmother who comes from a town in western North Carolina that was then drowned by the TVA dams. In high school, she worked at a general store carrying 100-pound bags of flour and goods, which was not something that women tended to do. When her daughter started high school, Imogene went to college. When she was in her fifties she decided she had always wanted to know how to build houses, so she joined a housing crew for the summer. She gave me my first Margaret Atwood book, but she also gave me my first Wilma Dykeman book, my first explicitly feminist novel and my first explicitly Appalachian (and I would argue also feminist) novel. So she has always been a real inspiration for me.I think it’s also important that I went to a little public school from Kindergarten through graduating high school in western North Carolina. 45 of us started Kindergarten together; I graduate with 99 people in my class. I think 85 of us went to college. It was a little, amazing public school. It was also one of those havens of really fascinating teachers. I had a band teacher who had the high school band playing Dave Brubeck and other crazy, experimental jazz and experimental modernist music. He put on one of our summer marching halftime shows, which featured an overture written by one of the people in the band. I had a theater teacher who had us performing scenes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’m not sure many public high schools could get away with that today. These teachers introduced me to this world of weirdness and challenge and bizarre and wonderful and fascinating art, and they never assumed that we were too young or too innocent or too whatever to engage those materials. That was really important for who I am today.I just feel like the world is a really big and interesting and fascinating place, and the fact that I can have conversations about that, that I can read and write a little bit about it is amazing. And I can then be a part of other people figuring out what their contribution to it is going to be. It means that I can play a role in keeping the world one big and weird and wonderful place and have us think about how to make it open for those same folks who have been left out of it, who at age 2 made me think “that’s not fair.”4. What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?That’s kind of a long answer for me. Out of that crazy, wonderful public school system I ended up very fortunately getting a scholarship to Duke University, which was a little different than most scholarships because it was explicitly a leadership scholarship, so during my entire 4 years of college, the question that was asked again and again, was, “How do you give back to your community?” The scholarship was established because Duke figured out they didn’t have many students from North or South Carolina, so the question was usually framed as, “How do you give back to North or South Carolina?” Early on, I made a shift to say, “What are my responsibilities to the mountains, to Appalachia, to this particular place that I’m from, this small part of North Carolina?” The political reality is that the mountains are generally not included when people talk about North Carolina in particular.When I went on to grad school at Emory, it felt important to me as well as a really good fit to be a part of the Women’s Studies program there. The Ph.D. program at Emory was still in its early stages, although they had already granted a couple of Ph.D.s. In fact, nationally, the idea of the Women’s Studies Ph.D. was still being worked out. “Is this going to be a thing?” For me it felt important to say I believe in this and I think this is an avenue of scholarship that is important, and I also think it’s the kind of program that should exist. But when I went to choose a dissertation topic, those questions from Duke were very much in my mind. “What’s my responsibility to the mountains?” So the fact that I ended up with a dissertation about Appalachia was not really a coincidence.After I got my Ph.D. from Emory, I was a visiting professor there for a year. I taught for two years at Ohio University, which is actually in the Appalachian Regional Commission’s designation of Appalachia. There are a few counties in Ohio that are in Appalachia, which was a very different view of Appalachia than the one I grew up with. My first tenure track job was at West Virginia University, and I was there for three years. I love the state of West Virginia. I still do volunteer work there; I still have real connections there. But that was a university that did not have a lot of resources and had not made as strong an argument as it could have to the citizens of the state of why you need a flagship university and what that can do for your state. So in many ways, for me, I’ve been able to do more for Appalachia and for that question, “What’s my responsibility to my home communities?” from this position in Texas, which is where I went next, than I was in West Virginia, which is ironic. But it also can be true.As I’ve been here now for seven years, I have also been able to shift that question to think about what my responsibility is to this community, and so a lot of my work with Foodways Texas has been trying to answer that question. I believe strongly in the intellectual project of Foodways Texas because I think that the food studies questions and story in Texas are important and crucial for the rest of the nation. But it also bears a piece of that research which, for me, is in answer to “What’s my responsibility to where I have landed?” It’s a way to get my head around “How do I answer that question that started a long time ago in my undergraduate program?”5. What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?That collection of farm women’s letters is on my mind right now because I am interested in the hidden food archives of women and men’s letters, knowledge of plants, the kinds of conversations that happen in curb markets and farmer’s markets that I started to deal with in A Mess of Greens but really didn’t get to expand.I’m just now working on a project to do a biography of one of the first Appalachian women novelists who I ever read, that same Wilma Dykeman who I mentioned earlier. It’s a project in its infancy, but it turns out that not only did she write novels about Appalachia, but she also wrote a book about why integration was crucial, and she wrote that book in the year following Brown vs. Board. She and her husband traveled around the U.S. South and tried to get a handle on what was going on. She wrote a book about birth control; she wrote stories about questioning the death penalty. She wrote about social justice activists. She is one of the first people to write about environmental justice in Appalachia. And there doesn’t exist a biography of her, so I’m working with some people in North Carolina to think about whether it’s time for that to happen, so I’m really excited about that.I’m excited about the Foodways Texas oral history project that we have going on right now, the Iconic Texas Restaurants project is just taking off, and it’s clear just how much interest there is in this state for that kind of project. So I’m very excited about that. I’m also working on an anthology with some folks over at the University of Mississippi on southern food methodologies, because we all feel that the field has matured enough to have a conversation about the methods that we can use to do any given project, so that’s pretty exciting also. And I probably have six others.*Bonus Question* If you could describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I think American Studies resides in the conversations we have; I think it resists absolute definitions, which I think is a very good thing.For me, American Studies is a place where we try to understand these big, complicated communities and then we go about doing our best rather than stopping the project before it even starts because we don’t have the toolbox in place to answer it. To me that’s what is exciting about it. I played with the metaphor of the potluck in the beginning of the Barbeque book. I’ve played with the metaphor of the farmer’s market or curb market. There’s something I like about those metaphors for what American Studies is also. I don’t think that it is a field that I will ever or should know every conversation that is going on within it, much like at a potluck you’re not a part of all of the conversations that are happening or at the farmer’s market you’re not a part of all the exchanges that are going on. I think that little bit of chaos is really helpful.
5 Questions with Dr. Janet Davis
Today we bring you another incredibly fascinating and comprehensive interview with one of our illustrious faculty members, Dr. Janet Davis!
What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?My favorite project is hard to define because I enjoy all of them. Sometimes I love them, sometimes I’m eager for them to be finished, but each has had its moments of incredible revelation and excitement. I would have to say there are two places at which I love the process the most. The first is the initial exhilaration of discovery, which often happens in the shower or out running, or when I’m doing something completely unrelated to work. I believe in the power of being away from work as a generative experience for getting into that creative mode where I make connections and have fun. The act of discovery for my very first book, which came from my dissertation, The Circus Age, came when I was having fun in Chicago for a weekend. I was out with friends at the Museum of Science and Industry, and I saw an incredible circus pictorial display. It was a photographic exhibition of circus parades from roughly 100-150 years ago. At the time I was a student in modern South Asian history. I had just started graduate school and was in my first year, and I was poised to go to India that summer. It hit me like a thunderbolt, this sense of, “Oh my goodness, look at all of the colonial South Asian animals, rituals, dress, aesthetics in these circus parades, ponderously moving down the streets of Keokuk, Iowa, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and Waco, Texas.” All of this popular culture of empire was in full, intimate display for Americans across the country, and it sparked a question for me: why was this happening? What was going on? That process of questioning led to the serendipitous discovery that the world’s largest public circus archive was only forty miles from my home, which is really quite lucky. So I actually switched out of South Asian history and moved into the American history program at the University of Wisconsin, and I loved it. I had a blast doing my research, I had a blast thinking and writing. And I had children along the way while I was living in north central Wisconsin, so that was in and of itself a fascinating and educational experience, living out in the woods for a good chunk of the five years that I was there before I was lucky enough to get hired at UT.The Circus Age led to a slew of other opportunities. Again, it’s hard to say my favorite, because every project has had its own excitement and fun. I think that’s what makes this career so satisfying, in part. I would have to say that these projects grow out of each other, hence the difficulty in answering this question. It’s related to the interconnectedness of one’s own intellectual biography. Working in the circus archives and doing museum consulting at lots of different locations and building a community of people interested in this kind of research led to other projects, including the published memoirs that I edited, annotated, and wrote an introduction for about an aerialist named Tiny Kline. She was an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian empire and she lived at an industrial boarding school in New York City as a teenager, worked as a dancer, became a burlesque dancer, then became a circus performer and eventually hung by her teeth sliding across Times Square. She was a thrill artist. Tiny Kline later became Tinker Bell at Disneyland when she was 70, so her life story became a wonderful way to think about pop culture during the twentieth century in the United States. I really enjoyed the kind of detective work involved, from talking to her neighbors, to the descendant of one of her night-school teachers in Los Angeles.Out of all of this work on the circus emerged a sense of thinking about animals while reading bits and pieces of protest about cruelty at the circus and what it meant. Although the circus was a pretty scattershot target of animal welfare activity in that era, I discovered that there was indeed an incredible social movement taking place in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century that was interested in thinking about animals and kindness and ideas of American citizenship, civilization, and America’s place in the world. People involved in these movements were redefining American civilization as a kindly civilization by advocating being kind to animals. So these ideas that seem really abstract in some respects about nationhood, empire, cultural pluralism, are all very much tied up into ideas about kindness and this “gospel,” as they called it, “of kindness.” This movement was interconnected with all sorts of other reformist movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My current project has been going on for quite a few years. What’s really been a surprise for me is that right now I am in the home stretch and I’m more excited about the project than ever, which is kind of surprising. About a year and a half ago, I kind of hated it, but now I’m feeling things are really coming together in a way that I did not expect when I was plowing through massive amounts of seemingly disparate primary material from all over the world. There are certain through lines, such as stray dogs, and the ways in which they speak to changing attitudes about the place of animals in urban environments versus rural environments. Dogs keep appearing in my chapters in really fascinating ways, and now that I’ve had some distance through the review process, I have more of a mountain top view of the project, where I see the landscape of my thinking and the evidence below me in a way that is allowing me to make these final, strong connections. And of course, this project is leading to other things, too.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society? I feel like my work is tied to a lot of bigger conversations topically, thematically, and methodologically. My research on animals has given me a wonderful entre into the natural sciences, into thinking about animals as historical subjects—not just in terms of how people relate to them, but in terms of their place in history as physical beings, directly tied to the impact of disease, technology, diet, and to epidemiological changes and technologies of preventative health like vaccines. This project has taken me into places that have been really exciting as far as rethinking what the humanities are. I think these fundamental questions about human-animal relationships are interconnected with questions of public health, diet, how we raise our food, how we live, and where we live. These are fundamental public questions, so I feel like this project really brings me into conversation with so many other fields, and I love it.Are there other projects, people, or things that have inspired your work?I will mention a few people who really inspired me. As an undergraduate, I had amazing mentors. There are so many people who deserve a special shout out, but here, for the sake of time and space, are three: one is my advisor, Eleanor Zelliot. She was a hands-on advisor in terms of being blunt when my research projects weren’t as good as they should be. I had the exhilarating experience of doing a large primary source-based thesis project. Every student at Carleton College was required to complete “Comps,” either in the form of a long senior thesis, or a four-hour, written capstone exam, no matter what their field. This exercise was part of fulfilling a graduation requirement, on the one hand, but it was also an incredible experience of being a researcher. I wrote about a big topic, Indian art and colonialism. I took two centuries’ worth of material and I included architecture in my analysis. It was a big undergraduate project, and Eleanor encouraged me every step of the way. She is a very active scholar and writes about the Dalit movement, the “Untouchables,” and about Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who was a nationalist and social reformer in India. Her concern for social justice is incredibly inspiring in terms of her own scholarship and extends to the way she has lived her life.Robert Bonner taught British Empire and Victorian England, the Industrial Revolution, and I loved his classes. They were absolutely enthralling. People called him “Hardball Bob” because he was so tough. It’s amazing, because several fellow students in Bob’s small seminars have become professional historians. He was absolutely firm in his demand for clear writing, for evidence, for all the good stuff that we expect. You really had to think clearly, be careful, and support your words. I should note that Bob emphatically steered me away from becoming a lawyer and urged me to apply to graduate school in history. I am indebted to him for encouraging me to follow my heart. After I graduated from college, Bob also made the move over to American history and has published a wonderful book about impresario William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s “other life” as a major western land developer.Emily Rosenberg is a scholar of American foreign relations, of America’s place in the world. She taught at Macalaster College, but she came to Carleton and taught a class when I was a senior. It was a Cold War seminar, my first American history class in college. I loved it. I wrote a paper about American foreign relations with non-aligned South Asia and how cultural representations of each country affected these relationships during the Cold War. Emily and I still stay in touch. She is now a colleague of Allison Perlman, my former graduate student,, at UC-Irvine. The circle grows and grows.In graduate school, Linda Gordon was my Ph.D. supervisor. Her scholarship on women’s history and social movements is fantastic, accessible and beautifully written. She was so generous with her time and so encouraging. This is the funny thing; she always knew I would get a job in American Studies. She told me, “You just think like an American Studies person.” She lives by example; her commitment to social justice is inspiring. Tom McCormick, a scholar of American foreign relations, was and is a fantastic mentor and great friend. He’s another person who pairs his superb scholarship with a great generosity of spirit. Paul Boyer was an amazing mentor and guide in graduate school and beyond. He was an outstanding scholar, deeply committed to social justice, and personally he was so kind, decent, modest, generous, and always available to listen to my ideas. Paul passed away in 2012—I miss his wise counsel and wonderful sense of humor. In knowing Paul, I was lucky enough to get to know Ann Boyer, who remains my friend. My graduate mentors were completely supportive of my decision to have children in graduate school, and to live far away in north central Wisconsin while writing my dissertation. I realize that other advisors might have questioned my level of commitment to graduate study, and my ability to finish my degree under these circumstances. But Linda, Paul, and Tom weren’t worried; they were completely supportive and they believed in me. I feel very, very lucky.How does your research inform your teaching?My scholarship and my teaching are very much in conversation with each other all of the time. The act of discovery in my research and in making the past accessible and exciting and relatable to students is a constant dialogue and process. I could not do one without the other very well. Teaching and research, taken together, allow me to make coherent, “so-what?” sense of a period, an event, a cultural phenomenon, a social movement—whatever the subject—in a limited time frame for a broad audience. As a writer or in a classroom, you have 75 minutes, a certain number of pages, a word limit, or deadline. Time matters. The ability to tell a coherent story, not just tell but show, to offer an interpretation using historical evidence demonstrate how teaching and research are completely interconnected activities.What projects would you like to work on in the future?I have a few projects on the burner. Four, actually. Three are closely connected to the current project. The first is a fuller exploration of humane education in the United States and possibly in its empire, looking at pedagogies of citizenship in conjunction with the broader historical dynamism of race, gender, and class. This is something I explored in my current manuscript to some degree, but there is so much more material out there, especially humane education taking place in historically black colleges and universities. I’m fascinated by how African American activists traveled in an age of Jim Crow, sometimes even speaking to integrated audiences, though primarily speaking to African American children and young adults. Also, there were humane education programs on Indian reservations and boarding schools. The third location I would like to explore is colonial Hawaii, because there was a lot of animal protectionist activity there, too. I am interested in examining these three groups in conjunction with educational history and social thought concerning uplift, the “white man’s burden,” colonialism, citizenship, and civics. I am interested in the ways that black activists, such as F. Rivers Barnwell, John W. Lemon, Seymour Carroll, and Lucy Thurman, made a case for social justice in a racially oppressive society by different means.Another project is related directly to the book. It comes from a chapter I have radically revised and excised on animal protectionism in colonial India. I have bountiful primary sources about activism, surveillance, and resistance in India, but also in places like the British Residency at Aden, where the colonial laws of British India held jurisdiction, as well as in colonial British Africa. I have eighty pages that are waiting to find a home—either in the form of a couple of articles, or as a possible foundation for a separate book project, which will take me away from the United States, altogether.There are two more projects. I’m really interested in the book and movie, Jaws, and the cultural, social, and political settings in which the book and movie became such huge popular hits. I’m going to miss the anniversary: 2014 and 2015 will come and go, but I’m interested in the cultural production of a book, a movie, and a time period, and I want to think about the connections and cultural anxieties and larger meanings of this particular blockbuster complex amid the end of the Vietnam War, in the shadow of Watergate, and at a cultural watershed in American politics. That will be a shorter project. The last project is the one that is very new but very exciting. It’s a project that deals with libertarianism, Rose Wilder Lane and the heir to the Laura Ingalls Wilder franchise, Roger Lea MacBride, who ran for president as the libertarian candidate in 1976. I’m fascinated by his relationship with Rose Wilder Lane and the ways in which a host of cultural productions were connected to a changing political climate in the United States.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?American Studies is the interdisciplinary exploration of American culture, society, politics, and economy in domestic and transnational settings.Dr. Davis is Associate Professor of American Studies and History here at UT and has been with us since 1998. Her books include The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top and Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline.
5 Questions with Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller
Today, we bring you a discussion with American Studies affiliate faculty member Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, who also holds appointments in the History and Music departments.
What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?I’ve been working on two basic projects. My first book was my dissertation, and I got really into that. And, of course, I have to say that’s one of my favorites because that’s what I’ve spent the most time on. I really enjoyed that book partially because it’s the one that taught me how to write. It’s the one that taught me how to put long-ranging arguments together. I was getting pretty good at – well, okay at – writing the twenty-page seminar paper, but writing a 300-page book was kind of mysterious to me. It wasn’t until I got deep into re-writing after the dissertation and after I was working that I started getting into this kind of long arc of a narrative and long arc of an argument, and figuring out that as a form. As a learning experience, that was really exciting to me.My second project that I’m working on right now I’m really thrilled about in a whole new way. I’m writing about the history of amateur musicians and their effect on popular music across the 20th century. I find this really exciting because I get to focus on a completely unexplored topic. My first topic was on blues and country music and there are bookshelves and bookshelves and books about blues and country music. Amateur musicians, there’s a real dearth of serious scholarship about them. They’ve kind of been dropped out as popular music studies has become really, in many cases, either about folkloric groups or synonymous with professionally-recorded commercial artists – Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones. In fact, popular music in the United States is diffuse, it’s millions of people playing it every day. I’m really excited to have this clear open scholarly space to explore a new topic and trying to figure out what that means, rather than trying to elbow my way into an existing one.[On source material] That’s part of the thing. The source material for blues and country, although you can find a lot of new stuff if you’re really digging, a lot of it’s already out there. So you just have to follow in other people’s footsteps. For this project, I’m really having to try to be creative about where I find source material.One of the biggest sources I’ve found is the industry press for musical instrument industry, because musical instruments are selling primarily to amateurs. Reading industry insider press from musical instrument retailers is a great way to gauge change over time and who’s buying what. You really get a sense of the shift from the accordion being the most popular instrument to the acoustic guitar being the most popular instrument of the post-war years. It explodes in the 1960s with the British invasion and the folk revival and millions of people wanting to be the next Beatles or the next garage band. I’m reading a lot of sociology, good ol’ Lynds’ Middletown sociological studies, which are remarkable in their problematic design and they give you a real sense of change over time and numbers.I’ve even gone through New York Time and LA Times and other newspapers to find hundreds of articles about noise complaints about noisy neighbors playing music next door. It actually reveals a lot about what amateur musicians are playing, and how they’re denigrated and derided for playing different kinds of music rather than others. It gives you a sense of the way in which pop music functions in an urban landscape. One person’s dream is another person’s noise pollution. I love that kind of problem.I’m looking at a lot of cultural studies, a lot of musical examples that talk about being alone, and talking about amateur musicians from the Beach Boys “In My Room” to Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room,” a piece of experimental electronic art music.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?I’ve focused on using popular music as a way to get into larger debates about American politics and American culture. Popular music in my first book is really interested in ideas about crossover, about genre, about relationships between race music and money. My book there tries to talk about the kinds of social construction of musical categories. We kind of assume that race is socially constructed, and that becomes a point of departure rather than a conclusion. In my book, I’m trying to back it up and look very specifically at precisely how it is constructed in different places and at different times. For me, one of the interventions I was trying to make into this was looking at concepts of racialized music, whether it be early blues or country music or African American music as a whole, as a really interesting sight of continued struggle and renegotiation rather than as what Amiri Baraka would call “the changing same.”I don’t see a lot of the same. I see a lot more of the changing.The reason that I think I see a lot of the changing is because I think a lot of our concepts about how music works and how culture works more generally are deeply indebted to anthropology and folklore of the late 19th and early 20th century. My real goal in that book, one of them, was to investigate the construction of anthropology and folkloristics in the early 20th century, which gives us this whole concept about music and race as being an important and long-standing tradition. That intervention was partially into very specific music literature, but I kind of tried to do it in a way that was expanding into these larger questions about how meaning is constructed in academic traditions.My latest book also came out of trying to intervene and help us understand the destruction of the music industry as we know it in the 21st century with downloading and filesharing. I came up with George Lipsitz as a hero when I was in grad school, and George Lipsitz and Robin Kelley and Tricia Rose and this group of people that were writing in the1990s which were kind of invigorating American Studies and music studies at the time. For me, at least, they’re the ones that really got me going.And then I do my dissertation on the early 20th century, and I poke my head up, and it seemed like a lot of the people who were writing really influential music books in the 21st century aren’t cultural studies people, they’re lawyers interested in parsing out intellectual property and using intellectual property and copyright as the primary mode of framing questions about the music industry and filesharing. While they’re very useful – love my Lawrence Lessig – I was always kind of pining for what would George Lipsitz or this other group of cultural historians say about these new debates about musical ownership. We can go ask them, but I was trying to write in that mold. So this book is about amateur musicians, it’s about people being creative in their everyday lives, but I kind of got to it as a way of addressing filesharing, downloading, and taking these debates about musical ownership beyond copyright into the realm of creative ownership, community ownership, and cultural ownership.Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work?I get inspiration from absolutely everything. Of course. I’m standing on the shoulders of legions of great scholars. I’m inspired by every musician I’ve known, from the famous people I’ve had the opportunity to meet (very few), to the legions of unknown hacks who have ruined their backs carrying amplifiers into their hatchback every night after their club gigs. And that’s one of the things that inspired both of these projects, looking at music as an everyday job, rather than as a key to fame, or a way to speak politically, or a way to be an organic intellectual. Those are all good things, but for most people, music is an everyday occurrence. I’m really inspired by all the hacks that you don’t know, and you never will.I’m inspired by people who’ve trained me and other people who I’ve read. I’m inspired by my father and my mother who are both intellectuals if not scholars; I enjoyed the vigorous intellectual debate around the kitchen table every night. That got me going and I never stopped.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?When I graduated from high school I wanted to be a rock ‘n roll star, or a jazz musician, so I went off to music school at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Boston opened my eyes to the amazing urban culture in the United States in a way that I’d never seen before, but Berklee – you get really good at playing your instrument, but you don’t have to read books. I felt it was making me dumb. And so I went to Macalester College in Minnesota, which was one of the only schools I had ever visited; it’s where my parents went. I majored in history and focused on music. That kind of led me to NYU to study music history in the history department, and then I came here while I was still writing my dissertation and became a lecturer at UT.I’m really happy to be here. I showed up at my first graduate student class and we went around the room saying why we were in graduate school and everybody around the room had all these very thought-out reasons why they were there, and it got to me and I said, “This is my fallback for my music career.” And they all laughed at me. Because thinking of this very tough industry to try to make a living in as a fallback they saw that I was naïve at the time. And maybe I was.But I kind of still think that this – it’s a lot more likely that one puts in ten years preparing for a job in academia and is able to pay their bills than it is for them to put in ten years preparing to be a musician and pay their bills. So that’s how it influences my teaching. My background as a musician makes me very happy to have a job.What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?I’m still really in the thick of this amateur music project. My next book is going to be about cultural politics of abortion , using my long-term work in abortion provision and connection to abortion providers to talk about the musical and film and literary representations of abortion as a way of trying to step beyond this highly politicized and bifurcated language about abortion in the public sphere today. I’m very excited about that as well. I’ve already done some work on that and presented it at a number of conferences.So that’s the next thing. Down the line I’m not sure. I’m working with an organization called the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, which is a longstanding popular music organization, and we’re working on putting together a really great blog, which is taking up a lot of my time. Beyond that third book, I’m not quite sure where I’m going. It’s kind of wide open at this point. Hopefully it’s going to be good.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say? (bonus question!)At its best, American Studies is an escape hatch in order to get out of and beyond disciplines who are blinded by their own barriers they’ve constructed around themselves; American Studies typically has been a place where people can go to ask questions that other disciplines are unwilling to answer, or unwilling to ask.Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller has been at UT since 2001. His book is Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke University Press, 2010).
5 Questions with Dr. Randy Lewis
Today, we bring you another fascinating conversation as part of our "5 Questions" series that brings you up close and personal with our wonderful community here at UT. Dr. Randy Lewis is an associate professor in the American Studies department and also serves as graduate student adviser.
What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?Really I could say all of them and it would be accurate. I enjoy making music videos as much as writing books in film studies. I like making documentaries as much as crafting new courses. What I like best are the projects that allow for collaboration, something that breaks up the endless sitting and staring that goes into crafting a book, which can make you feel like you’re a forest fire look-out alone in the treetops.Collaboration is the ideal, but when I work alone, I find a different sort of pleasure. I like trying to pin down something that has never been pinned before. I like trying to describe an idea with as much precision as I can muster. I like trying to account for the ghostly passage of an idea through our collective imaginations.And I certainly like the process of making something. Like most people with the good fortune to labor in a creative field, I go into a pleasurable zone of suspended animation when I work on something absorbing---time stops, sounds are muffled, and nothing exists except the re-arrangement of words and images on a screen. It may sound like I’m drinking too much cough syrup in the wee hours, but it’s really what psychologists call a “flow” experience. In some ways, Final Cut Pro is ideal for this mindset in which nothing else exists, just you and the screen and an endless puzzle. But you can also get it with a legal pad and a fountain pen---it’s nothing new for people engaged in the creative process.In this sense, I relate to “process” artists of the seventies: scholarship is a craft in which the process is as important as the product, although the latter gets most of the praise and honor. Maybe I should write a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Bibliography Maintenance. I’m kidding, but only sort of. The process of attentive listening, digging, and sorting makes you who you are. In other words, scholarship should not simply be the insatiable drive for “product” that is easily measured. We should also appreciate how the intellectual process sharpens our ethical, political, and aesthetic selves, and does so in a manner that has subtle but significant benefits for the way we live with ourselves and others.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy and contemporary society?I’m interested in the democratization of our cultural life at every level, but most especially in how documentary expression can serve as a site of affective engagement, political mobilization, and aesthetic pleasure, often at the same time. For example, Marlon Riggs’ 1994 film, Tongues Untied, is a beautiful work of art that invites us to feel a connection to a community (gay African American men) that was traditionally disrespected or ignored in the mainstream media. Rigg’s film invites our empathy, compassion, and understanding, which lead to other forms of solidarity essential to a democratic culture.Using the interdisciplinary freedom of American Studies, I try to speak to scholars in multiple fields at once (Native American Studies, film studies, anthropology, media studies, cultural history, American Studies, English) and even to a broader public when I can. I’ve been interviewed on national radio programs about my research, and a film that I co-produced has aired on television in New York City. And yes, I blog like every other primate. I haven’t yet started to tweet, but am delighted by what I see on the new AMS twitter feed.Although I believe we can influence the larger conversation out there, I sometimes worry about being heard in a country so mesmerized by “Dancing with the Stars” and the Hitler channel. Still I remain hopeful about having an impact through writing and teaching. I have a high degree of idealism about intellectual work in general and the role of careful, critical teaching in our culture. I’m not delusional about the scale at which changes might occur, but I am confident that scholars can add something beautiful and important to what we know about the world.Are there other projects, people, and/or things that have inspired your work?YES. So many. I’m immensely reactive and recombinant at some deep level----one of my heroes is Robert Rauschenberg, the Port Arthur boy who took this principle and made it genius. I need to see what other people are doing, especially artists, philosophers and creative writers (which can include scholars). I love the push-pull between art and interpretation, artist and critic, text and scholar. I don’t like thinking in a vacuum.Specifically, I’m inspired by the artists who combine art and politics into Molotov cocktail of conceptual destruction: Tom McCarthy, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Kara Walker, David Shields, Spike Lee, Banksy, Sacha Baron Cohen, Guy Debord. The truth-telling comedians like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Ziggy.I’m odd: I like Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Stanley, and Joe Strummer equally well. Even odder: I imagine that they would like one another.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I came from a literature background way back in olden times, and worked in the Ransom Center with some very smart people. My paternal grandparents were poor Anglo-Irish immigrants who had made me curious about the world that they had fled in the 1930s, and as a weird result, I had found myself working on the cultural history of their time and place (although in a form they would have found unfamiliar). I suspect that I was part of the last generation to enter adulthood with a kind of spooky reverence for the early 20th century modernist canon. Joyce, Eliot, Stein---they came up with a spectacularly creative responses to human existence in a very grim epoch, and they seemed to register certain kinds of suffering that had torn the bark off my family tree.But these modernists had also run away from head-on politics in a way that I found appalling. As I got further into my twenties, I wanted them to descend from their creative isolation in “Axel’s castle,” as Edmund Wilson put it, and change the world---or at least protest a little more vociferously. Writing in 1931 about Proust, Wilson bemoaned “the spoiled child of rich parents who has never had to meet the world on equal terms and who has never felt the necessity of relating his art and ideas to the general problems of human society.” That was, as the centerfolds say, a real turn-off for me.And that’s when I ran into Emile de Antonio’s radical documentaries and said, Ahh…. You can be an artiste engage: creative and political and accessible and challenging. Holy smokes… And it was in this spirit that I went flying toward documentary film some twenty years ago, when very few scholars were paying attention to it. I sensed that we needed to understand how creative nonfiction could get up in the national imaginary and move the furniture around in interesting ways. What happens in the realm of nonfiction was (and is) important cultural work. And we’re in a documentary boom right now: it’s everything from a salacious corporate product called Reality TV to a quiet little art form that allows for contemplation and philosophical nuance. At its best, documentary is an independent counter-discourse to the mythic delusions of the mainstream media. It’s the collective conscience for the age of electronic media.What projects would you like to work on in the future? In what directions do you imagine taking your work?I just finished a book[1] that took a long time to write and quo vadis is an interesting question. I’m really inspired by some projects[2] that seem to blend creative nonfiction, thick description, and cultural geography in ways that are mysteriously powerful, especially in their evocation of certain places and certain intensities. I’m also very curious about the ways that we’ve learned to accept greater degrees of surveillance, including self-surveillance, and am looking for ways to track this phenomenon through our contemporary cultural landscape. And I even have an ill-formed interest in Texas as a place. Part of it comes from living here, and part comes from the accidents of ancestry. My mother’s family has been in East Texas since the 1830s, but because I grew up in New Jersey muttering “dems” and “does” on the skeezy Asbury Park boardwalk, I feel like I don’t quite belong here, at least not as much as I wish I did. On the other hand, maybe that complicated insider/outsider status makes me a better observer. We’ll see. I’ve also got a number of video and art projects on the agenda. And I’m working with some colleagues to build an app related to cultural geography and art. Lots ‘o’ stuff.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say? (bonus question!)Supercalifragilisticinterdisciplinariadocious? Oh, that’s one word… one terrible, terrible word.It’s a hard question---a slightly amorphous interdisciplinary enterprise doesn’t lend itself to easy encapsulation. But I can riddle you this: What could be more interesting than digging where you stand? Digging is a powerful metaphor at multiple levels, hinting at everything from archival diligence to stoner existentialism.So dig this: perhaps American Studies is a bit like Dig Dug, star of the sublime 1980s arcade game that rewards you not just for digging straight down through the dirt, but also for burrowing laterally and blowing up heavily pixilated dragons (aka “Fygars”). In American Studies or any other interdisciplinary field, you always have to dig down and across to score serious points: it’s the essential interdisciplinary maneuver. Just watch out for Fygars.[1] Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native Ground, forthcoming, Spring 2012.[2] See, for example: Katie Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.Dr. Lewis has been with the Department of American Studies at UT since 2009. His books include Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America and Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker.
