Announcement: AMS :: ATX is turning 1!
One year ago today, the AMS :: ATX project began. Happy birthday, blog!
Thank you all so much for reading, and stay tuned for even more great content about and by our departmental community.
Announcement: Introducing the UT American Studies 2012-2013 Departmental Theme, "DREAM"
The Department of American Studies is introducing a theme that will create common threads among course offerings, discussions, and departmental events throughout the 2012-2013 school year. Dr. Janet Davis explains what kinds of conversations we might have about this year's theme: DREAM.
The word “dream” has rich and variegated meanings in American life. The American dream offers the ideal of social mobility as a distinctly American ethos. On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King reckoned with the aspirational potential and deep contradictions of this American value in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington: “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” Dreams are a central part of our nation’s political and cultural language. “Dreams from My Father,” is the title of President Obama’s bestselling memoir. On June 15, 2012, the president issued an executive action to put the Dream Act into effect.The lexicon of dreams has saturated pop cultural productions throughout American history: “Dream On”; “Dream Girls”; “Teenage Dream”; “California Dreamin”; “Dream Weaver”; “All I Have to Do is Dream”; and more. In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal poem, “A Dream Within a Dream,” asked ominously, “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” Sigmund Freud treated dreams as a portal into the human subconscious. When Freud traveled to America in 1909, he visited Dreamland Park at Coney Island and was fascinated by its pantheon of dizzying rollercoasters, lights, tunnels, and fragrant machine-spun candy floss. Myriad cultural forms embody the ways in which American dreams are pleasurable, whimsical, aspirational, hopeful, fearful, nightmarish, and denied.The Department of American Studies invites you to consider the significance of “Dream!” in the American experience. During the 2012-2013 academic year, each of our course offerings will touch upon the ways in which our designated word enriches our understanding of American culture and society. Thus, we structure this year’s inaugural word as an invocation and an imperative. Dream!
Announcement: Elizabeth Engelhardt on UT TV Show, 'Game Changers'
We are very excited to share the news that one of our faculty members, Elizabeth Engelhardt, will be featured on a television show on the Longhorn Network called Game Changers, which highlights "our most dynamic and inspirational faculty with fresh perspectives about contemporary and relevant topics."
She'll be discussing the importance and relevance of southern food, from greens to barbecue:
A southern meal of fried chicken or barbecue, homegrown tomatoes, a mess of greens, and peaches. Should they be subjects of academic research? Does southern food matter? We live in an era of great interest in food—with high stakes questions of who has enough food, what food contributes to our society’s and our planet’s health, and how food makes reputations of people or places. Simultaneously, a cultural fascination with the US South has continued for at least two hundred years. Civil rights, identity, definitions of home and away are debated in portraits of southern culture. When we bring the two together and apply academic lens to southern food, we access complex gender, racial, and class politics of the past as well as our present. Our discussion reveals the southern food matters in a meal, a can of tomatoes, a pot of greens, and a pitmaster’s story.
All of YOU are invited to attend the taping on Wednesday, June 20, at 6:00pm at KLRU, Studio 6A, in the Jesse H. Jones Communications Building (CMB 6th Floor).RSVP here (scroll down for directions - don't worry, it's free!). The doors will open around 5:15pm, and the taping will last until 7:00pm.Be there or be square - it will be a really fun and fascinating event!
Announcement: Summertime, and the blogging is easy!
A very happy summer to all of you, dear readers! We have some announcements for you about the months ahead of us.
With many of our faculty and students scattering for the summer, we'll be offering new posts on a less frequent basis until the end of August.But rest assured that we are not just riding off into the sunset! We're also spending the summer brainstorming and developing some new digital projects that we hope to share with you all as we continue to move forward on this social media project. We'll also continue to update the calendar and the CFP page in case you find yourself aching to submit a proposal to a conference or journalIn a nutshell: stay tuned! And keep checking back for some exciting new things. More details to come.And, as always, follow us on Twitter for departmental announcements, Austin news, and links to very cool and weird articles throughout the summer.