Announcement: Magnum Photographer Alec Soth Lectures Wednesday at UT!

Photography fans, take note: esteemed Magnum Photographer Alec Soth will be giving a lecture this Wednesday, October 23 in the Belo Center for New Media. You'll see a selection of Soth's photographic work alongside his commentary about community life in America.

Here's an excerpt from a write-up of his current project, the rest of which you can find here:

At the simplest level, the LBM Dispatch project falls into the long American tradition of expedition and road trip photography. Walking in the footsteps of everyone from Timothy O’Sullivan to Robert Frank, Soth and Zellar have headed out on rambling open ended trips and documented what they’ve found. But unlike their predecessors, Soth and Zellar have brought prose much more fully into the artistic end product; the texts here are not addendums or afterthoughts, but integrated parts of the collaborative storytelling experience. While the James Agee/Walker Evans team is certainly once precedent, I think there is stronger kinship here with the work of Wright Morris, where text and pictures were used with nearly equal brilliance to capture the nuances of specific American places and times.In this particular issue, Soth and Zellar have driven the roads of Colorado, taking in healthy gulps of mountain vistas and frontier spirit. While their trips clearly have a dose of serendipity, these are not really random moments; they’ve done their homework, read their history, and are looking for certain kinds of encounters that will touch on larger themes. This method of building up a narrative is well suited to Soth’s approach to photography; he has never been one to be pigeon holed into just portraits, landscapes, still lifes, or any other type or subject matter, so this kind of vignette-driven storytelling fits well with his natural working style. While rugged snowy mountains and huge storm clouds are an inescapable part of any portrait of Colorado, Soth and Zellar have dug deeper than the stunning landscape, probing the edges of local communities, common folklore, and the undercurrent of violence seemingly inherent to life in this wide open country.Many of Soth’s photographs in this book are portraits of people and objects, seen with an open, unassuming honesty that allows a sliver of the surreal to slip in nearly undetected: a bearded man stands in front of an enormous pile of antlers, while another sports a plastic mask of Doc Holliday, and a woman in formal riding gear waits for her horse perched on a set of stairs, while another beams in her colonial frontier dress amid a row of parked cars. Often, the still life objects and places are secondary evidence, physical remains with some additional resonance: a tombstone of a famous cannibal, the path leading to the Columbine High School memorial, a bullet hole in the wall at Focus on the Family, a rusted out, pock-marked car in the dust near the home of the Dragon Man, a plastic bear torso at a local archery club. Each image tells its own self contained mini-story, and contributes to the weaving of a larger non-linear tapestry of collective impressions.

For more on Soth, see his website here.

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Announcement: The Course Transformation Project Continues This Week

The Course Transformation Project in the history department is hosting a series of lunch workshops for faculty and graduate students. This week's theme is: History and its New Pedagogues. This workshop turns its attention to learning history and how we can bring some of the insights from the last session on participatory learning into the unique and demanding discipline in which we are trained and in which we work. The workshop will meet Friday, October 18 in GAR 1.122 at noon.They'll start with Lendol Calder's short article, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" (available here). Faculty and graduate students (regardless of your particular field) are encouraged to participate. RSVP to Jessica Luther.

Announcement: Thomas Frank's Take on Higher Education in The Baffler

We recently announced the exciting news that Thomas Frank and John Summers, editors of The Baffler, will be joining the Department of American Studies for a spirited conversation on the future of higher education on October 30. Today, we offer an excerpt of a piece called "Academy Fight Song" that Frank published about the topic for their most recent issue. Expect the event to address and spring off of the arguments that Frank makes here.

The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.[...]Another fact: This same industry, despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives indistinguishable from the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange.The coming of “academic capitalism” has been anticipated and praised for years; today it is here. Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds.[...]Grant to an industry control over access to the good things in life; insist that it transform itself into a throat-cutting, market-minded mercenary; get thought leaders to declare it to be the answer to every problem; mute any reservations the nation might have about it—and, lastly, send it your unsuspecting kids, armed with a blank check drawn on their own futures.Was it not inevitable? Put these four pieces together, and of course attendance costs will ascend at a head-swimming clip, reaching $60,000 a year now at some private schools. Of course young people will be saddled with life-crushing amounts of debt; of course the university will use its knowledge of them—their list of college choices, their campus visits, their hopes for the future—to extract every last possible dollar from the teenage mark and her family. It is lambs trotting blithely to the slaughter. It is the utterly predictable fruits of our simultaneous love affairs with College and the Market. It is the same lesson taught us by so many other disastrous privatizations: in our passion for entrepreneurship and meritocracy, we forgot that maybe the market wasn’t the solution to all things.

The full article is available here.For more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here. 

Announcement: The AMS Film Series Starts This Week!

This week, the AMS Film Series is back in action with films that have been chosen by AMS faculty and graduate students to reflect this year's departmental theme: Security/Insecurity.  Our first film of the year will be Peter Bogdanovich's Targets, which will be introduced by our very own Ph.D. student, Brendan Gaughen.The following comes to us from Brendan:

Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) centers around the character Bobby Thompson, a clean-cut military veteran who goes on a sudden and random shooting spree.  Thompson is based loosely on mass murderer Charles Whitman, who shot 30 people from the University of Texas Main Tower, killing 11.  Targets was released during a time of increasing violence in the late 1960s and depicts the type of high-profile mass killings that led to an erosion in feelings of safety and security in the home and public space.

Join us on Thursday at 6pm in CAL 100 to watch the film and continue the discussion on Security/Insecurity. Check out the Facebook event here.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiSc3xAXX5gFor more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here.