5 Questions with Dr. Shirley Thompson

Today we bring you a new entry in one of our favorite series of AMS :: ATX: an interview with Dr. Shirley Thompson, associate professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Dr. Thompson was also recently awarded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for her research on property, economics, and law. What was your favorite project to work on and why?I have to say my favorite was everything relating to my New Orleans project, which was my dissertation, and turned into my first book, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans.  First of all because I’m someone whose native constitution is more conducive to more quiet, solitary, archival research, and the New Orleans archival situation is just amazing.  Because New Orleans was so long a French colony, governed by civil code, there’s a different bureaucracy in place, which means that a lot of the transactions that would fall under the radar in another kind of space, an Anglo-American space, had to be attended by a notary, had to be heavily detailed, recorded and filed for future reference.  It was also really litigious on the civil side: you had neighbors bringing suit against neighbors for civil infractions.  It was a highly contestable, really rich culture of recording disagreement and recording interactions.  The logic of the archives is really interesting too, to trace people, who while I was working I thought of as characters, through their various material interactions, to witness them buying and selling property, interacting with their families, their neighbors – it brought history alive and made me feel really intimate with the people I was studying. The archival situation was really rich for me, and I could spend hours in a room, totally engrossed, in the historical events that were unfolding.But beyond that, when I came out of those archives, the place itself was completely engaging.  New Orleans opened me up to something I’ve always been interested in, which is maps, and thinking about various ways of experiencing and representing space, and marking the overlapping projects of placemaking – how these projects come together or fail to come together within a city, or town, a geographical unit.  It’s not hard in New Orleans because it wears its history on its sleeve, but I began to really pay attention to how the city itself is a palimpsest, and use that as a kind of guide for thinking about how to tell the stories that I thought were important.  And New Orleans, in terms of its placement, pulled me into a transnational perspective that I found really transformative for my way of thinking about US history, thinking about African American history and its relationship to a broader stream of African diasporic thought.The New Orleans project opened all that up for me.  I’ve also done some more creative pieces on New Orleans recently. I find that it’s a city that stokes my creative imagination.I love going back and talking to people in New Orleans.  One thing about the city is that the people who are from there and live there are, a lot of them, historians – not formally, but they’re really engaged with the history of their families, the history of their communities, how other people represent them. They’re very savvy about representations of New Orleans, what their city might mean, what their culture has given to the world, and all the consequences of that.  They’re very articulate about it, and very willing to engage you on all of those levels. I see it as an ongoing project.  Every time I go back, I’m thrown back in the midst of these broader questions about the city, race and the city, and questions of representation. How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations in academia and beyond?People get really excited to talk about race.  There’s always a call for a national conversation about race.  But every time that conversation gets started, people clam up, and get offended, and back away from the conversation.  So, I think careful, critical, studies of the history of race and racism, the legacies of white supremacy, how these take different shapes in different times, and bringing these histories to bear on the present and investigate just what those connections are – I see myself as helping to facilitate these conversations.  These conversations help to clarify some of these connections, and trace out these linkages between history and the present.  It’s important work.  Society is often averse history, period. Let alone the history of racism and white supremacy.I also think, between academia and the broader society, for me, those lines aren’t so stark. One of the things I’ve come to realize teaching at UT is that the classroom is where that intersection takes place in the most sustained way in my life.  When I’m in the classroom, I’m teaching students who may not see themselves – who probably don’t see themselves – as academics, but who see themselves as regular people, who are just recently graduated from high school, out in the world for the first time, and they are stepping into settings where they’re actually taking a risk on learning about things they don’t know, and interacting with people they wouldn’t normally interact with.  This includes me, an African American woman professor.  For the demographics of UT, most people aren’t accustomed to seeing black people in roles like this.  I see it as a challenge and an opportunity to figure out ways of facilitating these new, kind of fragile interactions that students are having around really difficult topics like the history of slavery, like race and place. It’s hard work. I’ve come to reconcile myself to the fact that this is part of the work I’m called to do here at this particular institution. What projects or people have inspired your work?I haven’t formally taken on a project about slavery, but slavery informs everything I do and all the questions that I ask.  So, the legacies of slavery in many respects inspire me.  My first book was about free people of color in New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the US.  But I’m not talking about actual enslaved people as the primary focus of that book.  The new project that I’m working on is about African Americans and conceptions of property and ownership: how have black people dealt with the legacies of enslavement, of being owned as property, in their attempts to own things themselves, and participate in this broader culture of property in ways that both correspond to mainstream American understandings of property, but also challenge them and subvert them as well? So the legacy of slavery is a thread through this project, but, again, it’s not about slavery!  But I’m really inspired by artists, writers, scholars, who take on the day-to-day realities of the history of slavery head on.I think slave narratives themselves are a huge inspiration.  A lot of these narratives I read multiple times as a student, or on my own, as a general coming of age.  But as I’ve taught them, and re-read them, I’ve tried to re-read them with fresh eyes – I remember the first time I taught Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, it just brought me to tears, the clear articulation of what the experience of enslavement was, then his attempts to use that brutal experience to forge a broader political project.I’m also inspired by scholars who write about slavery, and there are two in particular that I’ve come back to both in my scholarship and my teaching. Saidiya Hartman, both her Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother are texts that I find remarkable in their ability to weave together theoretical claims, to attempt to theorize the afterlives of slavery and theorize the limits of freedom, given the entanglements of slavery and freedom.  And in Lose Your Mother, her blending of memoir, historical research, and ethnography is exemplary.  Stephanie Smallwood is another historian I keep circling back to – she strikes a really interesting tone in her unflinching look at the gruesomeness of the commodification of bodies, of African captives, and the transformation of these captives into slaves.  I think her attention to the details of the process, as a process, is paradigm shifting. Those historians continue to inspire me.I draw a lot of inspiration from literature as well.  Faulkner and Toni Morrison are the two that have really influenced me over time.  I remember in graduate school, taking one summer out and devoting it to reading as much of Faulkner as I could, and that was transformative in shifting my perspective, of beginning to think creatively about the range of different emotional responses to enslavement, different psychological responses to the predicament of enslavement, and for thinking about the ontology of slavery for both masters and the enslaved.  Morrison has had a similar effect on me, and she continues to! Every time I think I’ve had an insight, and then read, or re-read one of her books, I realize that, oh, she’s had that very same insight and then some.  And so it keeps pushing me to different, deeper levels of analysis. What is your scholarly background and how does it motivate your teaching and research? What it seems to always boil down to, for me, is a sense of a bifurcated background and bifurcated experience with education from a very young age.  On the one hand, I was in this generation that was integrating the public schools in my suburban county in metro Atlanta for the first time. Brown v Board was obviously long before that. That was a generation of people on the front lines.  My own experience of integration in the 1970s and 1980s didn’t have that dramatic sense confrontation that you come to expect from photos of the Civil Rights movement.  I was more like a guinea pig. I felt like these formal educational settings didn’t have a place for me conceptually, or they were downright hostile to my presence, which was disorienting. Sometimes the slights were very subtle, which was even more disorienting. My parents had attended segregated schools and their experiences didn’t really translate to my situation.  My few peers and I were all kind of creating this thing as we went along.But also, my parents and grandparents were heavily involved in African American institutional spaces, institutional life, especially education.  My mother just retired as a math professor at Morehouse College, and my dad was a literature and religion professor and an administrator at many historically black colleges and universities over the course of his career, so my sense of being shut out of the social and cultural life of preschool, or junior high, or high school, didn’t really affect me as much as it might have, because when I came home I was in the midst of this really rich, long, institutional culture. That was always the other part of it.Beyond that, the library in my house was very well stocked with world classics, but also especially with African American literature and criticism – but not just Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, but the work of African American scholars who were friends and acquaintances of my parents, and other scholarship as well.  I had a sense that I could do this, that I could be a critic, a scholar of history and literature, in spite of the fact that everyone in the outside world was baffled by presence – much less my ambitions.  I’m really grateful to have had that kind of background, to have been able to draw from the strength of that kind of situation.The upshot of that for me is that I feel like I’m in a mainstream academic institution, but don’t feel bound by its limitations.  I know that there’s a history of building alternative spaces to pursue knowledge of peoples and communities that are disregarded by these mainstream spaces.  I feel if UT closed tomorrow, there are, or could be, other spaces to do the kind of work that I do. What projects are you excited about working on in the future?I’m really excited about my property project.  It grew out of my experience researching and writing the New Orleans book, when I realized that one of the ways that black people and free people of color tried to stake a claim to belonging in the city was to buy property and own property, to create these transactions that make them proprietors in their own minds and in the eyes of other people.  Also, thinking of New Orleans as a slave market, where the logics of property take on a really gruesome shape, and how that gruesomeness helps to form a foundation for the economic life not just of the nation but the world more broadly.  This alerted me to the contradictions of property, some of the conundrums in the way that relation has been articulated over time.  I want to pick apart some of those conundrums of property: how are property and personhood bound up with one another? How does one get at the difficulty of discerning an origin to proprietorship and also an end to it – what stories do people tell about the origin of their property rights, how they struggle to convey their rights to their property beyond their deaths even –  How does one get at the way in which property rights make sacred and secular claims at the same time?  How does property depend on and create norms of gender propriety? All these questions are really interesting, and I’ve been thinking about these questions for awhile.  But only recently in the last year have I really faced the fact – or the opportunity and excitement! – of admitting that I don’t know enough about the economy and economics as a field, or some of the legal aspects of property to do this right.  Getting the opportunity to push pause for a bit and actually study more methodically in these areas is really exciting to me.The Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship is giving me the next year off from teaching to take classes in economics, and to reach back in my previous life as someone who was actually good at math and apply it to a set of claims that means something to me currently, which is a great feeling.Also last summer I part of the inaugural History of Capitalism Summer Camp held at Cornell University, which was an effort to bring together scholars in an emergent field – who are concerned about economic history but do not want to abandon social and cultural history as well.  People are trying to find a way to bridge this divide and to re-infuse cliometrics – that old notion of cliometrics! – with an understanding of culture, politics, and aesthetics so that we can speak more fully to our current economic crises and those that have gone before. In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?American Studies is taking all the things that America says about itself to make it cohere as a nation and to help it authorize its imperial projects around the world, to take all these stories and to turn them inside out and then pick away at their guts. Interview by Jeannette Vaught.

5 Questions: Dr. Patrick Jagoda (UChicago), Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in American Studies

We're extremely excited to share the news with you that Dr. Patrick Jagoda, from the University of Chicago, has been appointed as a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in American Studies. Dr. Jagoda will be joining our campus community for the 2014-2015 academic year. AMS :: ATX had a conversation with him over email about his research interests, interdisciplinarity, his scholarly path, and teaching. Enjoy!What has been your favorite project to work on and why?As far as opening interview questions go, that’s a difficult one. Since I’m a new media scholar, I’ll start off with something like a hypertext menu. Or perhaps a constellation of projects. I see my work as stretching across the humanities, arts, and even the sciences. My recent and current work falls into several different categories: a book project about what I call “network aesthetics,” co-editorial work on two special issues (one on "New Media and American Literature” for American Literature, the other on “Comics and Media” for Critical Inquiry), a series of essays about games and play, the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab that I co-founded with medical and health researcher Melissa Gilliam at the University of Chicago, and a number of practice-based game and interactive narrative projects.My most consuming writing project in recent years has been my Network Aesthetics book. I hope to complete a full version of this manuscript during my time in Austin. My opening gambit with this project is that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a fascination with interconnectivity has become attached to the concept of the network. During this period, the network emerged as both a key architecture and metaphor of a globalizing world. The language of networks spread quickly across disciplines as a way of describing the Internet, the economy, terrorist organizations, and various ecological formations. More recently, really since the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of network science has expanded to include a range of research on complexity, self-organization, and systemic resilience.The language of networks is something we often encounter in fields such as biology, computer science, mathematics, and neuroscience. But they have also occupied a central place in the humanities. In my case, I’m offering a transmedia analysis of the relationship of networks to popular aesthetic forms that mediate our experience of these structures. My work examines narrative, visual, and procedural art forms that encourage a critical, even transformative engagement with the network as a dominant category of life. So I’m tracking networks through maximalist novels from the late 1990s such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, network films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, TV series such as David Simon’s The Wire, computer games such as Jason Rohrer’s Between, and the avant-garde new media form of alternate reality games such as Jane McGonigal’s Superstruct.While Network Aesthetics has been my most consistently engaging project, one of my favorites has been an alternate reality game (or ARG) that that I directed in April 2013 in Chicago. This game was entitled The Project. It was made possible by a wonderful Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship that was awarded by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Let me attempt a summary. For starters, the experience was a collaboration with Sha Xin Wei, the Montreal-based Topological Media Lab, and students at the University of Chicago. I would describe The Project as an experimental and pervasive experience. It told a single transmedia story through social media, performative role-playing, responsive media environments, and a series of live games. Over the game’s three and a half weeks, numerous players explored and joined three conspiracy groups involved in a shared enterprise. They played together online and across the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/72283300]

For me, The Project was one of my first sustained opportunities to immerse myself in practice-based research. My team approached art, through this game, not simply as the production of an object or a performance but as a mode of inquiry. Like several other scholars in new media studies and the digital humanities, I’m interested in thinking about the act of making, especially in the form of collaborative creation, as a way of developing, testing, and transforming concepts. This particular game explored the possibilities and limits of play in an early twenty-first century media ecology — one that includes screen-based entertainments, social media networks, and a blurring of work and play. One reason that this project was among my favorites was that it enabled me to grapple with these issues in a more robust way than theory alone might have allowed. It also gave me the chance to assemble an exceptional transdisciplinary team of designers, writers, and thinkers.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within academia or within society as a whole?That’s another capacious question. In academia, I see my primary work fitting in with the fields of American studies, new media theory, post-1945 literary criticism, critical theory, and game studies. More broadly, I’m committed to making sense of the humanities in a digital and transmedia moment. I’m invested in imagining transdisciplinary collaborations that enable researchers to tackle multi-scalar problems that exceed traditional field divisions.Let me break that down a bit. My Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, in particular, focuses on a kind of applied humanities work that pushes against existing methods and canonical texts. I started this lab with a medical and health researcher, so it’s not even a pure humanities lab. But so much of our work begins with the humanities and the arts. We use digital storytelling, board and card games, computer games, and emerging new media forms to explore social and emotional health issues, social justice, and civic responsibility. The projects are not restricted to the academy though. We work with high school youth on the South Side of Chicago, which is an especially disadvantaged part of a city that remains spatially and racially segregated. Our collaborative projects incorporate local youth, but they also bring together university faculty and game designers hired to work in the Lab, as well as graduate and undergraduate students, visiting artists and designers, and community organizations. Scholars from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts join our design, development, play testing, dissemination, research studies, and evaluation work. So our team is really diverse. We’ve already created a number of projects. For instance, a pervasive game about economic disparities and inequitable access to medical services. And a web-based transmedia story about sexual violence. And an alternate reality games related to STEM and new media education. I see all of these projects belonging to the emerging discipline of the digital humanities and new media studies.As I think about the question, I realize you asked about my work “fitting in” with academic and social processes. I keep fixating on your phrase: "fitting in." I should note that I’m also drawn to moments when my work doesn’t seem to “fit.” For example, at the University of Chicago, I started a Mobile Experiments Group with one of our full-time Game Changer designers, James Taylor. Even as "experimental" has become a buzzword that carries the clichéd dimensions of a word such as “interdisciplinary,” for me it still describes a meaningful kind of practice and thought. Or perhaps an improvisational orientation toward knowledge. For me, the experimental stands in contrast to another clichéd category of the "innovative.” Philosopher Brian Massumi associates the experimental with a sense of uncertainty and the opening of thresholds of potential. In the sciences, experiments are sometimes designed to test fairly certain hypotheses or to add minor details to something we already know. But an experiment can also embrace forms of failure that teach us just as much, if not more. For that reason, our experimental games group encourages hypothesis testing, but also reflective uncertainty, generative failure, ephemeral thought, and improvisational processing. We begin with affective states or theoretical concepts (say, “jealousy” or “passing”) and use those as the basis for creating quick game prototypes that respond to or explore those concepts. We do our best to dwell in the ambivalences and messy contradictions of the concepts with which we’re grappling instead of trying to comprehend or pin them down. Games, here, are not finished products but a medium of thought that works through mechanics, processes, procedures, networked actions.In any case, I see a tension in my work, hopefully a generative one. My ambition is to expand existing conversations, especially through forms of community and collaborative “fitting” that expand digitally-oriented research. But I also strive to find meaningful ways not to fit in. Given the assumptions and presuppositions that inhere in any discipline or institution, that second piece is the real challenge.What is your background as a scholar and how does it inform and motivate your current teaching and research?My scholarly interests began to take shape during my undergraduate years. During my time at Pomona College, I completed a double major in English and philosophy and spent considerable time in creative writing courses. After that, I did my PhD work in English, at Duke University, where I simultaneously earned a graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies. During those years, I specialized in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and media, as well as critical theory. I continued to pursue creative work on the side and, gradually, noticed my initial interest in fiction transform into a related interest in game design and new media art. Then, just prior to my faculty appointment in the English department at the University of Chicago, I received a two-year Mellon postdoctoral teaching fellowship in new media (also at UChicago). During that time, I did additional research in television and game studies, while also laying the institutional groundwork for the game lab that Melissa Gilliam and I launched officially in early 2013. In those years, I began to collaborate closely with artists and designers, as well as researchers in medicine, health, and even economics.So, as you can see, especially in recent years, I’ve made my way through numerous disciplines. But the study of American literature, culture, and media has always served as a through-line for all of my teaching and research. Since I’ve already said a fair bit about my research, I’ll add something about how this trajectory has shaped my teaching. I see my courses falling into three broad categories: 20th and 21st century American literature, media studies, and theory-by-design. Even as there is plenty of overlap, these groupings map onto my own overarching interests in English and American Studies, media studies and digital aesthetics, and creative writing and game design.In the first category, American literature, I would put courses such “Terrorism in Fiction, Film, and Media” and “American Hauntings” that I taught at Duke University. I would also add recent University of Chicago courses such as “New and Emerging Genres” that focused exclusively on American literary and media productions from the last 25 years.In the second category, media studies, I would include courses that I began teaching at the University of Chicago such as “Virtual Worlds,” “Critical Game Studies,” “New Media Theory,” and “American Television.” I would also include a PhD seminar that I co-taught with visiting professor Eivind Rossaak entitled “Network Aesthetics | Network Cultures.” This last course was especially exciting to me since it attracted graduate students from English, Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, and even the social sciences.In the third category, theory by design, I would include courses that combine either literary texts or critical theory but culminate in substantial creative productions. For example, I taught a course on “Digital Storytelling” in which students studied the history of electronic literature, interactive fiction, and narrative-based games and, for their final project, produced collaborative digital stories of their own. Another experimental course that fell into this category was “Transmedia Games: Theory and Design.” I co-taught this course with visiting professor Sha Xin Wei. The group read critical theory throughout the quarter but, instead of requiring seminar papers, we asked our students (both advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to create modules of an alternate reality game for their final project. This course felt truly transdisciplinary. In fact, we cross-listed it in English, Creative Writing, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Visual Arts. We included students from all of these disciplines and several others.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?In a couple of my recently published essays, and pieces I’m working on at the moment, I’ve been starting to think through the concept of so-called gamification. Gamification is the use of game mechanics in traditionally non-game activities or processes. It continues to be a major design component of social media, marketing, job training, and motivational apps. Since we're talking about the future here, I can use a fuzzy affective word (with a grateful nod to Sianne Ngai) and say that I’m interested in the implications of gamification for contemporary America. I think of it not merely as a design strategy but as a form that economic, social, and cultural life takes in the present. Games, both as metaphors and as forms, have become such a major part of everyday life and our cultural imagination. I find this development, by turns, to be both encouraging and insidious. Gamification is bound up, in different ways, with the contemporary state of behavior modification, disciplinarity, education, entrepreneurship, social disparities, and a leisure economy. In many ways, this paradigm marginalizes or even forecloses play (which could not be more different from leisure) in the present. As Ian Bogost insists, it is really necessary to make a sharp distinction between "gamification" and "games." So the obsession with gamification makes me curious about games that challenge or exceed this way of doing business. Even more so, I’m drawn to forms of play that are still possible or emergent in the early twenty-first century. This includes avant-garde and DIY videogames, transmedia experiences, and even non-digital play activities. It involves spaces where play unfolds without the structure of a formalized game. Or atmospheres in which game rules and objectives are minimized or peripheral. Or situations in which game rules serve as creative constraints. In any case, given the interdisciplinary nature of the UT-Austin American Studies department, I’m really eager to think through some of these fledgling ideas when I arrive.The other project I’m really excited about is a large-scale alternate reality game that I’m planning with Melissa Gilliam and our Game Changer Chicago Design Lab for July and August. Well... I think “excited” is the right word. But you know, that excitement is bundled up with various forms of apprehension, contemplation, flexible optimism, expectancy, intensity, stress, preoccupation, collaborative experimentation, over-planning, logistics, and various other components that are part of a long-term, collective thought. The basic idea is to follow up on a pervasive learning game called The Source that we ran last summer for 140 high school youth over 5 weeks. We’re planning to have even more players this year, to take greater risks with collective and emergent storytelling, and to embed more robust evaluation mechanisms into our research. But the game is essentially an interactive science fiction narrative that teams of youth will traverse while solving challenges, puzzles, and mini-games linked to science and technology themes. They will also be learning some new media skills. To explain it another way, this upcoming game will be a transmedia scavenger hunt with a robust narrative and concrete learning outcomes. Every aspect of the project is transdisciplinary and, by necessity, there are so many moving parts. Fortunately, we learned a fair bit about how to run this kind of game last summer. So, while remaining excited about the future, I hope to be mindful of our past experiences and incorporate them as much as possible into the current design process.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JyW8CaVq4Og]

Okay, last one's a bit of a curve ball, and is the hardest question we ask: if you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?Ha! And here you may regret that you employed a game metaphor (or a sports metaphor) with "curve ball." Since I study games, I'm interested in both making sense of and playing with the rules of any game. For instance, the game we've been playing (you know, "5 Questions") includes a few rules. The first one is that (in a shot reverse shot manner) you ask me a question and I offer an answer of adequate length. The other implicit rule is that there will be exactly 5 questions total.But rules are meant to be tested and broken. So, if you're willing, let's try a slightly different game and see what happens. I'll take a cue from one of my college mentors, David Foster Wallace, who would sometimes have interviewers answer their own questions as an opening to less predictable results. So: If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I think the best way to describe American Studies is metaphorically, because its interdisciplinary breadth resists simple definition and evocative imagery seems particularly suited for the task... so I would say that American Studies is an ivy plant: a breathing organism that reacts to its environment, at once clinging to and burrowing into ostensibly impenetrable walls to create, ultimately, a vast and complex network of life. I guess that means I'm using imagery that relates to your work, albeit unintentionally!Your "network life" formulation brings to mind something that a couple of non-Americans (who nonetheless very much belong to this discussion) had to say about the study of America. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call America a "special case." Their account of America tends toward the romantic, drawing heavily on the sociopolitical potential of the 1960s and 1970s, while also reaching back to texts such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass. They do capture something of the crucial kinetic energy that's implicit in your sentence. For them, America is so fascinating because it brings together the tree and the channel, the root and the rhizome (to continue with your floral imagery), as well as disciplinary and control societies. It becomes a generative figure for thinking both structural and historical paradox.In any case, whatever American Studies was in an area studies configuration or an earlier interdisciplinary moment, I look forward to seeing how this constellation adapts to emerging concerns that include transnational theory, practice-based research, new media studies, and the digital humanities — just to name a few. At a personal level, I'm perpetually grateful to this field for sustaining my own promiscuous intellectual appetites and transdisciplinary curiosities. And I'm very much looking forward to engaging with the UT-Austin American Studies community during the coming academic year.

5(ish) Questions: A Conversation With Dr. Ramzi Fawaz (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

On the first Friday in February, Dr. Ramzi Fawaz, braving the relative cold, came to UT from Madison, where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin, to give a talk on queer theory and comic book superheroes. Called “Flame On!: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of the Fantastic Four,” the talk is drawn from Dr. Fawaz’s upcoming book, The New Mutants: Comic Book Superheroes and Popular Fantasy in Postwar America. After he left Austin, we spoke by phone about comics, the importance of interdisciplinarity in both scholarship and teaching, and about American Studies as the study of how people dream what it means to be American.In your talk at UT, you discussed The Fantastic Four and their contribution to queer literary history in the 1960s. How did you come across this project? That’s a great question. There is a combination of personal and intellectual reasons that I approached this project. The personal one that I always tell is that when I was thirteen I went through this incredibly difficult period of my own life, as someone who was coming out as gay, who was ostracized, made fun of, bullied, etc., and, during this period of difficulty, I discovered the X-Men. I began reading this comic book that was about mutant outcasts, that was racially diverse, and I felt this incredible kind of identification with these characters that I never found in any other form of popular culture. As I grew older and started exploring American Studies in college, I became really interested in the kinds of questions that we ask in this field, where we don’t really think about how “I” personally relate to this object but, rather, what the conditions are that allow me to relate to this object in this way.The questions grew wider and wider over time, and I began to ask myself if I was the only person who identified in this way? Or was there something about the comic book that speaks to people who feel like outcasts? Through a series of research projects at the undergraduate level, I began to explore the history of the X-Men, and that history lead me back to the sixties, and the array of comics, including the X-Men, that exploded out of that moment, some of which of course included the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the Avengers, and many, many others. I began to realize that, in that moment, comic book creators began to think critically about readers like myself, and geared their comic books to people who did feel like they were out of the social norm, not merely people who identified as gay or lesbian, but also people who felt politically out of step with the conservatism of the US after World War II. This is fascinating to me.So, there’s kind of a personal history that lead me to a larger, intellectual set of questions, and I think as a scholar, invested in popular culture more broadly, I fell in love with this question as an undergrad: why would fantasy forms, why would popular cultural forms that seemed so escapist, so distinct from politics, why would they be the site in which people were doing political work? This fascinated me, as someone who felt a commitment to radical, left wing ideals, but also didn’t necessarily express those commitments through direct-action politics but rather through the forms of reading and interpretation. I started to ask why would that be one of the sites where people do that political work? Comics seemed like one of the great objects through which people engaged the political.Is this work you picked up as a graduate student?The kernel for this work began as an undergraduate. I was lucky as an undergraduate to be trusted enough by some of my professors to be asked to be their teaching assistant. I was an assistant for a class taught by Kathleen Moran, who was the chair of American Studies at the time at Berkeley. The class was on consumer society, and she asked me to give a lecture on comics and consumerism. She encouraged me to do a reading of a text rather than a history, so I ended up doing this reading of the X-Men storyline “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” which some people at UT actually read as a chapter, and we talked about how this storyline was about anxieties of consumption. After I gave that talk, Moran told me “I think you nailed it, and I think you need to pursue this as a project.”Little by little I was lucky enough to win small research awards, I spent a summer at Yale as an undergraduate research fellow, and I began writing about comics in a scholarly way. When I became a graduate student at GW, I was still very committed to the project, but I wasn’t sure what my method would be. I took an extraordinary seminar with Robert McRuer, which was all about cutting edge interventions in queer theory, and I remember being very transformed and galvanized in that seminar, and it led me to realize that queer theory was going to be one of the primary nodes of intervention that I was going to make in this project, one that had not been done with the object of superhero comics. So, little by little I developed this project, and in graduate school it kind of took shape theoretically, and that was kind of the genealogy of the project.Truly, I was lucky to have undergraduate mentors who said, you know, “go ahead,” and then to work with graduate mentors who said, “if you’re going to run with this project, let’s make it as precise, as theoretically innovative, as possible.” I think that’s part of the reason that the book has gained so much traction, even before its publication, is because the people I worked with knew that I knew that it wasn’t merely a history of comics, but rather about locating superhero comics in this larger conversation about liberal and radical politics in the post-war period. So that’s been my broader commitment.In that project, are there particular scholars whose work has been really helpful for you?Absolutely. I’ve said this many times, but I think a really transformative moment for me was when I read the work of Julia Mickenberg in Learning from the Left. I think Julia modeled for me what it mean to take a particular object, in her case children’s literature, and place it in this really deeply elaborated and thickly researched network of relationships. She not only thinks about children’s literature as a text, but also its relationship to its creators, its producers, its sites of circulation, and then to the broader political context in which it was circulated. So that allowed me to think about an object that was similarly denigrated or thought of as kind of escapist, meaningless, not intellectually worthy, and, instead of thinking of it that way, to actually place it in a context. I also think the work of people like Christina Kline and Melani McAlister, in Cold War Orientalism and Epic Encounters, also do really extraordinary interdisciplinary work in talking about the relationship of political theory and policy to cultural production. Those are some of the books I feel most moved by in American Studies.I also have to say that, over the course of this project, I was so galvanized not only by queer theory, but also by the uptake of political theory in queer studies. I read some unusual work that would not normally fit into this realm; I read a lot of work by people like Hannah Arendt. I read the work of political theorists like Linda Zerilli, sociologists like Debbie Gould writing about ACT UP and its radical politics, and I read an unbelievable range, in addition to the comic books themselves, of actual primary sources from the radical politics of the sixties and seventies; the Port Huron statement, the radical statements of women’s liberation, gay liberation. All of these together allowed me to see that comic books were not merely entertainment, they were a way to theorize politics and people’s relationship to public life through fantasy figures. I love being able to engage a broad range of work that normally wouldn’t be thought of as political theory. Those thinkers were really central to me.And I’ll admit to you something that really blows my mind: when I look back it, I read something like 3,000-4,000 pages of comics for every chapter that I wrote. And I wrote seven chapters. I would not only read and reread the actual thing that I was going to look at, let’s say The Fantastic Four or Green Lantern/Green Arrow, I would read many comics that were coming out at the same time, and the political discourse of that moment. So I tried to invest comics in this kind of wider language that’s going on. I was influenced from many, many different directions.I was going to ask you a question about interdisciplinarity, but you’ve already answered it…I’m actually happy to elaborate on that, if you want to talk a little bit more about it.Okay. So, what role does interdisciplinarity play in your research and your teaching?This is a question I really grapple with all the time, because I think that interdisciplinarity is not only an incredibly difficult and almost utopian achievement that no one ever really gets to – a utopian horizon you could say – but it’s also something that we have to do, in order to elaborate some of the thickness and complexity of the objects that we’re looking at. So I would say that I think that there are two primary ways that interdisciplinarity has been crucial for me. The first is that interdisciplinary thinking does not merely allow me to turn to other bodies of knowledge, like political theory, like history, like sociology, to do my work. Rather, it actually allows me to reconceive the objects I’m approaching as objects that operate in all those fields. So the example that I use is that I had never, when I first encountered comics, thought of them as political theory. I never thought that, for some readers, comics could be conceived of as a literary formation that theorized their relatoinship with the political. And so when I started to read political theory, I had these moments where I thought, “Wow, comic books are actually doing good work in political theory. What would it mean to acknowledge that while comics are not directly political theory, they’re doing political theorizing?”So on the one the hand interdisciplinarity allows me to think certain research objects as inhabiting multiple valences. And that’s been really, really crucial for me. It’s allowed me to link comic books to much broader discourses, and that’s been huge. I think that the second way that interdisciplinarity really affects my research and writing is that it has allowed me to think about objects as living things. What I mean by that is that I don’t look at an object like a comic book and say “let me now just do a close reading of it as on object.” I think this object can be close read, but whatever I glean from the close reading  is actually coming out of the moment in which its situated.Like, what Julia Mickenberg does in her work, I’m trying to think about what was the way in which this text was embedded in a whole host of lived relationships, fans, creators, cultural critics. While those are not always my primary sites of analysis (there are other scholars who focus primarily on fans, or who focus primarily on cultural production) I can never actually do a close reading that doesn’t think about all of this network of relations. So interdisciplinarity allows me to think multiple nodes of relations working at once, but it also allows me to access multiple knowledge basis that elaborate each one of those nodes. So, if I want to say something about politics, I need to know about political history. If I want to say something about creators, I need to be able to study production history. And to actually read the discussion across those fields.A good example from my teaching is, when I teach a certain class, what I want to do with the literature I’m offering my students is to actually reproduce, in a microcosm in the classroom, the lived experience of people who might have approached a certain text. So I want to actually create the conditions under which something emerged. I teach a class on sexual politics and queer literature since the seventies, and I teach a week called Gay San Francisco. We read Armistead Maupin’s famous serialized novel Tales of the City, and we watch the academy award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and then we read accounts of living in San Francisco in the 1970s, from queer people joining the gay liberation movement. So those three texts, read together, produce a moment. My students read texts, and they don’t simply read Tales of the City on its own, they think, “Wow! At the same moment people were reading this serialized narrative in the San Francisco Chronicle, they were also voting Harvey Milk into office, they were going gay bars, they were going to meetings of the gay liberation movement.” There’s a feeling that this literary text had a life that intersected with the daily, quotidian lives of queer people and their allies in San Francisco at this moment. To me, that’s true interdisciplinarity.And it’s not only strict historicism, it’s actually getting them to read across media. They take all these things for granted, they have to say “well, one of these things is a novel, one of these is a documentary, these are personal accounts, they all do different work, but they all help us understand a moment or a zeitgeist.” So that’s how I approach interdisciplinary thinking, and that to me is what allows a student to do critical thinking. Not just to read it and analyze it on its own, but to say, “this meant something, in the world, and this is why its important for me to understand it in a holistic, multidimensional sense.”Do they respond to that?I think my students have an extraordinary response to that. I had a student who came to me the other day, this is an example that helps explain what I’ve been describing. I’m teaching a class called American Fantasy in the 20^th Century, and we just did a week on pulp science fantasy, in the twenties. We read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, we talked about Tarzan, and then I gave a lecture on the ways in which this historical moment was when American masculinity was in crisis, and American imperialism was also trying to articulate white masculinity to support imperialist projects. I introduced Gramsci’s concept of the “historical bloc,” this idea that its not that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a book and it was popular. He wrote a book that happened to hit at a moment when all of these issues were rising in American culture and the book was popular because it articulated all those things about masculinity and imperialism. I had a student who came to me and said “that idea of the historical bloc blew my mind. I never thought that the reason that something becomes popular is because they’re all these historical realities that are happening simultaneously with it.”To me, that nails it. That’s why I do interdisciplinary work. I want my students to understand that the reasons why certain stories become popular, gain traction, circulate, are because of a complex set of relationships between historical conditions and, not only do we need to know those conditions, we need to gain theoretical architecture, we actually need to know the language of theory to be able to step out of those historical conditions and understand the structures in which they were operating. That requires multiple levels of thought, and I think that students respond so beautifully to that, because they feel a sense a light-bulb turning on when they approach these texts in an interdisciplinary way. They’re not reading them just to get through a class, but because they want to gain an understanding of why other people think the things they do. I do believe there’s an incredibly positive response that my students have to this way of thinking. It’s also just exciting for them. They’re excited they get to approach objects that wouldn’t be thought of a serious, scholarly objects. They gain a sense of independence, of having a stake in intellectual work when they can study the things they love in a serious way. I think that excites students.That’s really great.We have a good time. In my lecture course, we start with a children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and a couple of students told me, after my lecture, they said “that lecture transformed everything about this book for me. I never thought of it as a serious kind of intervention in modernity.” They said, “when I purchased this book, I kind of rolled my eyes, because, I thought, why am I spending $25 on a children’s book, what could I possibly learn out of this?” And it was only by reading scholarship that contextualized The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the history of American consumerism, modernity, the turn of the century, that my students said “wow, I could understand this book was doing so much cultural work.” So that made me really happy. Interdisciplinarity allows students to see the expansive nature of the endeavor we are engaged in in cultural studies. By the way, this is so crucial to the humanities at this moment. People are arguing that the humanities is useless, that it is not training people for the real world, and in fact doing that interdisciplinary work makes clear to students that this kind of analysis is about the real world. It’s about how we live, how we dream, how we tell stories, and how those stories shape our material lives. When they see that, arranged in front of them, they are elated.I want to switch gears back to the specific project. I’m curious if you have an elevator pitch for the talk that you gave at UT. Could you give it?Absolutely. The talk that I gave last week, “Flame On” explores some of the ways in which the Fantastic Four reinvented the American superhero from its previous figuration as a figure of white, masculine vulnerability, to one of intense vulnerability, body transformation and mutation. The way in which the comic book did that was by imagining a kind of fantastic family formation, four characters who appeared to be normative social types, mother and father, two bickering children, or, you might say, the child and the uncle. It imagines what would happen if the normative family was transformed into mutants, their bodies literally absorbing some of the textures and objects of the material world of the 1950s and early 1960s. Part of what I try to do in this talk is to trace the comic book’s investment in presenting these normal bodies as monstrous or mutated, to actually try to imagine what it would mean to take pleasure in those mutations, to want to be out of the ordinary, to want not fit into the nuclear family. And so I argue, essentially, that the comic book is an extended visual meditation on forms of non-normative or queer embodiment in the 1960s.Because of that, in the talk, at least, I argue that this allows comic books to be conceived of as a kind of proto- or early form of gay and lesbian literature, even though the comic book, because of the constraints of its historical moment, never actively identifies any of its characters as gay or lesbian. My point is to say that superhero comic books in this moment reject this broader zeitgeist to identify non-normative or non-traditional ways of inhabiting things like family form, gender and sexuality, which ultimately became the purpose of radical gender and sexual movements the 1970s and after. So that’s part of what I’m doing in the talk. I’m also trying to lay bare the way comic books functioned, at this moment, as a really elaborate primary source in the history of sexuality, as an object that actually shaped popular conceptions of sexual cultures as they got articulated to more radical politics, the politics of the New Left, with gay liberation. I don’t know if that does that trick, but that’s my elevator pitch.I’m sort of curious, going off that last little bit, does comics as a form plays into this, because this seems specifically attuned to that, but also into your work more generally?This is actually one of the big struggles that speaks exactly to interdisciplinarity in my project. My project is about comic books, but it’s not a traditional comics studies book, meaning that it does not spend an extensive amount of time debating about the formal qualities of comics, which is a major, and rightly so, of comics studies. One of the things I’m trying to do is balance a study of the aesthetic work of comics and their political content. Rather than try to make universal claims about the formal qualities of comics,  comics, I’m specifically interested in taking up those moments when formal elements articulate to specific transformations and political realities. Right now I’m writing an article for Radical History Review that is called “Queer About Comics,” in which I actually develop an argument about the critical relationship between the aesthetics of comics and their political understanding of gender and sexuality.One of the claims I make in the article is that the serialized nature of the visual form of comics, the fact that you get multiple panels that represent the same bodies or objects in different ways, actually models Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a copy for which there is no original. One of the things that I point out is that this idea, that you get repetition with a difference, creates the possibility for endless transformation of bodies in the in-between space between panels. If, as Judith Butler argues, gender unfolds as a series of performances where every new performance has the chance to rupture what came before, I argue that that structure literally describes the visual architecture of comics themselves.So I argue that, while, not all comics take advantage of this possibility, comic books from the 1960s and 1970s that were interested in articulating radical forms of non-tradition embodiment constantly use that quality of comics to take bodies to a place where they’re always switching, from one gender, one sexual position to another, across panels. So that’s one good example of where I activate form or formal structure, to do this work. An example from the talk that you saw, was that I discuss that panel where Johnny Storm looks like a normal boy, and in the next panel he’s on fire, his body is turned into flame. It’s extraordinary—we get the repetition of his body, with a difference. And that difference is articulated to a difference in gender and sexual performance, because the first panel says, “There’s only one thing I love more than cars,” and you expect him to say “girls,” but in the next moment he thwarts the direction of heterosexual desire towards his own body, and he says this is what I love more than anything else, essentially, “my body on fire.” This in an amazing moment in which the actual, formal structure of comics is articulated to questions of non-normative gender and sexuality.The final question, and we ask this to everybody, is that if you could define American Studies in one sentence, what would that sentence be?I think that American Studies is the exploration of the numerous ways in which people dream about what it means to belong. I think that that’s what it is. I really do. It’s about the ways in which people tell stories about how they fantasize being American, about belonging to something, whether it’s a nation, or a social movement, or a family or kinship, and that’s what we do in American Studies. And I think that dreams are by their very nature interdisciplinary. The way we dream or fantasize about how we belong, comes out of so many different areas, that it specifically requires an endlessly interdisciplinary method to study how people fantasize themselves into existence.

5 Questions with Dr. Robert Abzug

One of our favorite features here at AMS::ATX is our 5 Questions series, where we sit down with faculty members in American Studies and talk shop. Today we are thrilled to share a recent interview with Dr. Robert Abzug, Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair of Jewish Studies, Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and Professor of History and American Studies here at the University of Texas, Austin.What has been your favorite project to work on and why?I would say two projects, of course. How can you have just one? I wouldn’t call it exactly my favorite, but it was the most compelling one, and that was the book I published in 1985, about the liberation of the concentration camps. I did oral history work with G.I.s and it was all from the point of view of American soldiers, and I used diaries and letters from the time. What do you do with this shock of recognition? It was so compelling, and so unnerving, that everything else since seems like artisan work. This just was right down to the bone. It was an amazing transformation in me, just thinking about what was important.My favorite project, that makes me happy and expansive, is the one I’m just finishing right now. It’s a biography of Rollo May, the American psychologist. A lot of people over 60, over 50 even, will remember him as one of the psycho-gurus of the sixties and seventies. Really his history goes way back. It was actually an accident that I got into the project, and that’s always fun. I had to become literate in continental philosophy, I had to become literate in modern Protestant theology, as well as psychology, certainly. And I knew Rollo for the last eight years of his life, so it was this challenge of writing dispassionately about somebody whom I had gotten to know face to face. It’s all about psychology and religion, and where people seek spiritual guidance. So that’s been really compelling. Also, the people I’ve met—I’ve never known so many psychotherapists in my life, and it hasn’t cost me fifty, or a hundred, or a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, either. They are happy to talk to me, which is an unusual role for them, of course. They usually like to listen.But that project’s almost done—I’m hoping that at the end of my leave it’ll be done and in print in 2015. I’ve done other work in Pre-Civil War America, all of which has been important. But when you write about dead people, it's not quite as interesting as this mixture of history and living people, and its not quite as hairy, either. There aren’t people from the 19th century who could potentially sue you for what you’re saying.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within academia or within society as a whole?I think I’ve always been interested in one question that is always there, but rarely comes to the fore, because its usually chopped into different parts: essentially, the ways that a changing society understands its moral and ethical commitments and comes to understand them in new ways. For instance, the Rollo May project is really about the interpenetration of American religious life and spiritual seeking with psychotherapy. And the United States is just about the only country where this is a major cultural phenomenon. In most countries, even in the West, psychotherapy is a medical issue. That’s changing a little in Europe, but the United States, with its peculiar religious culture, is quite interesting that way.Of course, to the degree that the liberation of the camps, and the newsreels and the photographs that it created, is, along with the atom bomb, a kind of watershed in consciousness about human destructiveness, this was a very compelling thing to me. Potentially, what I study fits into just about any dialogue, but usually doesn’t fit into any one dialogue. With my earlier work, which was all about reform, and initially about abolitionism, it would have been simpler to answer that. I think my frame of historical thinking has gotten more philosophical, or academics have gotten more specialized, or something like that. I see this question of the formation of moral consciousness hovering over most topics as a metafield, and folks do read my work. But I’m not involved in any of the au courant debates at all, though they very much inform my thinking. For instance, gender issues are central to the Rollo May book, but it is not a book about gender per se.What projects or people have inspired your work?My mentor’s book about slavery, Kenneth Stampp’s Peculiar Institution was an inspiration to me in terms of what a historian could write and how a historian really could affect change in some ways. When you publish a revisionist book about slavery a couple of years after Brown v. Board, a controversial book that said slavery was nasty and assumed racial equality... So Stampp is always an inspiration. I also think there are artistic endeavors that inspire me.One of the things I’ve always had is a rather eclectic sense of culture and passion about literature, music, and art, but it's hard to know how it all comes out to influence my work and life. Early on, when I was taking photographs, Robert Frank was a big influence, when I was a teenager. I think another influence was simply being involved in anti-war and civil rights politics, just the human experience of it. And pondering how well anyone is capable of translating that into a history, or even a fiction. I did not go to Vietnam, but a number of my friends did, and they always complained, when they got home, that nobody tells the story right. And I think that’s certainly a judgment, whether it’s a film or a novel or a history, but I think it’s also a challenge. How do you translate what you know are real things, real feelings, how do you imbue that into scholarship.And lately, in private, I’ve been working on a project of portraiture in photography that has all sorts of interesting meanings to me. How does one get beyond caricature? How do you get beyond that to get comfortable with people who certainly are strangers? Or even near strangers, friends? But it's mostly questions. I’m always unsatisfied with my own answers, and I’m rarely satisfied with other people’s answers. War and Peace, that inspired me.What is your background as a scholar and how does it inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I was a pretty straightforward historian. I was a history major at Harvard and a history PhD at Berkeley. Harvard had an American Studies program, interestingly, American Civ, but Berkeley did not believe in inter-disciplinary work and so I had a fairly straight-forward history education and I like to think that what it did was to ground me with some very traditional skills, research skills, writing skills, narrative skills that have served me pretty well. When I got here in ’78, this very floor in Garrison Hall was where American Studies was, and I almost immediately got to know everyone in American Studies, even though I was a member of the history department.  But there’s another strand, too.When I was in college, I took a course with Erik Erikson, the psychologist, and when I got out to Berkeley, I started taking courses at the San Francisco psychoanalytic institute. I was offered a path to becoming a lay analyst. But I decided I couldn’t listen to people constantly without saying anything. Besides, I had a whole raft of work to do in history across the bay. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis of a variety of types influenced the way I thought about history, and I considered that an education, even though there was no degree attached to it. It was not until the mid-eighties that I thought about even writing about psychotherapy as a historical phenomenon. But there is a strand that goes from one to the next. In terms of art and photography, I sort of grew up in a family of artists—my older brother was an artist and a musician, my younger brother was a musician. The only place I could fit was with a camera, because I didn’t have his talent.But I’ve always been really taken with the arts, so it’s always played a part in that mix of things. I took a lot of art history in college, and when I could in graduate school. You can see the things you study. The education I got at Harvard was, I guess, an education, but I didn’t like the place all that much. But starting when I went to graduate school in Berkeley, spending six months in Africa, and being involved in all sorts of political movements, that was an education. That is inevitably as influential on how I think about things, and not necessarily linearly, but just the cumulative experience of the world that comes together with the book learning and such. It’s the school of life.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?As a private citizen, I want to continue work on this portraiture project. It’s a collection of pictures about people, regular people, but sets of them about individuals. Not just one, but twenty, thirty. I find that part of my life very sustaining. And very private. I don’t put it out there. Who knows whether I will. I’m already signed up to do a book in the Texas bookshelf series. So that’s part of my future, about insiders and outsiders and the growth of the Texas myth. Also, I’ve been interested, because I’ve been married to a Montanan for 33 years, in that culture, the culture of the West. Not so much as a Western historian or a Western scholar. The angle I’ve begun to think about is the way in which minorities, in one case Jews, in another case urban Native Americans, interact, how they live in those kinds of societies. And they live OK. It’s not a question of bad news all the time. Having been born in a city of eight million people, and spending a month each year in a state of one million people, is an interesting phenomenon, and it does interesting things to the way you look at the way different people live. I’m just curious about those things. I’ve already given one lecture about it, and I’m going to give one at Tulane in February about a particular incident in the life of Billings, Montana. Where it’s going to go I have no idea. I have always felt that tenure was nothing if it wasn’t license to do seriously what you wanted to, and not worry about meeting the preconceptions of your colleagues. The Texas book will be the focus of some serious archival research or oral interviews. Beyond that I don’t know. Right now, I’m looking to finish the last one hundred pages of the Rollo May book. But life’s the project, and not any one project.If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?It’s the identity crisis question! One time, when I was head of American Studies and trying to move it towards departmental status, the new President of the University of Texas, Bob Berdahl, a German historian, said to me, “I’ve never really understood what American Studies is.” I told him, and it fit then more than it fits now: “the interdisciplinary study of American culture.” Or the multidisciplinary study. I think both work. And when you have both its best of all. You have a lot of different kinds of people.But I’ve seen it change so much. Its amazing, when you think about Perry Miller and Henry Nash Smith and all these other luminaries, to see where it is now. I sometimes evince a little nostalgia for where it was. And it’s constantly changing. I remember Jeff Meikle once gave a talk on “what is American Studies?” And he would always talk about it as this ongoing identity crisis. But I think that’s true of any interdisciplinary field. Or really any field. Anthropology has always been called anthropology, but my God! They have experienced light-year kinds of changes, even over the past of twenty or thirty years.