Alumni Voices: Film Director Bob Byington
Today we feature some words from Bob Byington, who pursued a career in film after graduating with an MA in American Studies. His films have screened in theaters and festivals nationwide, including our own South by Southwest. His most recent film, Somebody Up There Likes Me (2012), stars Nick Offerman, Keith Poulson, and Jess Weixler and was filmed right here in Austin.
How is the work that you're doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?Bill Stott, who was my primary mentor at UT, let me make a movie for the Doc. class he was teaching, and that got me started on the whole idea of trying to make a movie instead of being fascinated by watching them. And I was able to take RTF classes as a kind of cross-discipline thing.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?The facilities and resources at UT are astounding. Professors work for the students, tho' it's not set up to seem that way. And the equipment you have access to as an American Studies grad. student, that's sitting in the RTF building -- even when I was there in the early '90's it was great, and now it's obviously way better...
Alumni Voices: Author Kevin Smokler
Kevin Smokler received his MA in American Studies in 2000. He is the author of "Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School." (Feb. 2013). His criticism and essays have appeared in the LA Times, The San Francsico Chronicle, Fast Company, the Believer and NPR. He's currently at work on a memoir about being a music fan with lousy taste. He has 65,000 twitter followers at @weegee, the subject of his American Studies Masters Thesis.
How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?I'm a nonfiction book author focusing on music, film and literature and its place in our rapidly changing 21st century. Which means a novel, album, band, filmmaker, or movement are always a gumbo pot of ingredients from linguistics, to political science, to economic history and critical theory. Those things pre-mixed, like gumbo, scream American Studies to me.And selfishly, what gets me out of bed in the morning as an American is not the constitution or baseball or modern dentistry or the folding umbrella or the Internet, all righteous and wonderful things invented right here in this country. No, it's American culture, in all its beautiful diversity and flavors and contradictions.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?It's a big beautiful country out there and an archive can only take you so far. So learn how to talk to people. Real people, strangers even. Don't be afraid of the weird, confused look someone might give you when explaining your research interests but don't be resigned to it either. Learn to talk about your work in plain old English. Whatever it is, it's too valuable to be passed around amongst your peers or even your discipline or the academy itself. Let it breathe. Let it have a life.
Alumni Voices: Dr. Frank Goodyear, Associate Curator of Photography of the National Portrait Gallery
Here, we offer some insights from Dr. Frank Goodyear, currently the Associate Curator of Photographs for the Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery. He graduated from UT with a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1998, focusing on 19th and 20th century photography. His books include Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits from the American West, 1845-1924 (2009), Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief (2003), and Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer (2008).
How is the work that you're doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?I am a photography curator at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. I enjoy my job because it gives me an opportunity to meet and work with people from many, many different backgrounds. To give you an example, one day not long ago, I started my day giving a special museum tour to a group of D.C. kindergartners. Thirty minutes is all that they were good for, but we had a great time looking at a large, colorful painting of LL Cool J. One kid thought he looked like a king, which is a pretty fair assessment. That get-together was then followed by an afternoon meeting with two researchers from Harvard who are working on a new book about Frederick Douglass’s public image. It was interesting to share with them the different likenesses of Douglass in the museum’s collection and to discuss the role that images played within the abolitionist movement.In my job I get to work with artists, conservators, collectors, dealers, other curators and scholars, and groups that range in age from five to eighty-five. What was most valuable about my experience at UT was the time to read widely across the field of American cultural history. Conversations with both the faculty and my fellow grad students were invaluable in gaining expertise in my area of concentration (American photography and visual culture), but reading and thinking so widely also prepared me to work with the great number of people I encounter as a Smithsonian curator. At UT, I learned to look closely and to ask good questions, and that knowledge serves me well every day.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?This advice might sound quite shallow; however, my recommendation is to regularly attend get-togethers with colleagues and guest scholars. Go to as many guest lectures, art openings, symposiums, and after-seminar happy hours as possible. Go to the parties and other social functions. I realize that everyone’s time is limited, but it’s vital to participate in the larger scholarly dialogue that goes on beyond the seminar room. When possible, try to attend academic meetings, submit an abstract to a scholarly panel, and pursue a publishing opportunity. Graduate students should be as pro-active as possible in getting out, finding their voice, and making a name for themselves and their research interests. And there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun too.
Alumni Voices: Dr. Carolyn de la Peña, Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute and Prof. of American Studies
Today, we feature some words of wisdom from Dr. Carolyn de la Peña, currently director of the University of California at Davis Humanities Institute and Professor of American Studies. Her books include The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (2003) and Empty Pleasures: The Story of The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda (2010). She graduated with a Ph.D. in American Studies from UT in 2001.
How is the work that you're doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?Right now I oversee a large staff and work on grant proposals and events and am an advocate for humanities funding and research. In my own research I'm looking for ways that I can work with scientists and nutritionists on questions of health, technology, and the body. So much of my brain space is taken up thinking about the humanities at large--all of the disciplines and interdisciplines that comprise it and how it differs in important ways from the sciences and social sciences. I didn't do these things at UT in our smallish program. At UT I was very interested in defining American Studies (what are our methods? why can't we have a real theory class? how are we different then NYU?). I really wished that the program would give me more direction--have a more "inky" stamp to put on my work and my approach. Now I'm less interested in defining AMS, or worrying about whether my work fits in American Studies, and more interested in just being a humanist and working with different methodologies depending on the research or administrative problem I'm tacking.While I didn't learn these things in any organized way at UT, I do think the skills I learned in AMS at UT have helped me be comfortable working across disciplines and taking chances in my research--and imagining new ways that we could work within the humanities and getting funders and other administrators excited about those possibilities. At UT, while I was worrying about methods and theory and having anxiety about whether our way of doing AMS fit with "the" way of doing AMS, I was at the same time reading in history, urban studies, and women and gender studies in my exams. And I was working across several fields in my dissertation. So I guess I'd say that I worried too much when I was a student about what kind of American Studies I was doing, and should have better understood that the strength of the program was that it didn't tackle that question and pin down an answer. By letting us be kind-of-historians, or kind-of literature scholars or kind-of-media scholars it made us comfortable with cross-disciplinary thinking. I think for a lot of us in my generation this helped us get jobs in a variety of programs (media studies, english, history, religious studies) and then take on early leadership roles in expanding those fields and connecting disciplines in our own universities. Because no one gave us a real map we had to learn to make (and re-make) our own.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?Appreciate the brilliance of your friends in the program and work hard never to let go of those connections you make during your time there. These are the people who shape your thinking and call you on your BS in your dissertation concepts and slog through your first, second, and third drafts. You may have an advisor who really engages (I did), and that's fantastic. But don't forget that it's the people in that program with you who are really going to help you make your way while you're in grad school and while you're trying to establish yourself as a junior scholar. I'll always be grateful that I went to UT when I did, and I can point to so many specific ways that my friends in my cohort, then, are largely responsible for my successes now.