Announcements Holly Genovese Announcements Holly Genovese

Announcement: Dr. Julia Mickenberg Comments on Civil Rights History in Life and Letters

Today we are happy to share some words from our very own Dr. Julia Mickenberg, who recently commented in an article in Life & Letters, the College of Liberal Arts Magazine, on a pivotal moment in civil rights history.bannerDr. Mickenberg writes,

People don’t usually think about Louise Bryant, the radical bohemian journalist made famous in Warren Beatty’s film about the Russian Revolution, Reds, as a fighter for women’s rights. But, in fact, she was.When she returned from Russia in 1918, after writing the sketches that would be published as Six Red Months in Russia, she stayed for several weeks at the National Woman’s Party (NWP) headquarters in Washington, DC. She got arrested and went to prison with several other NWP members for burning an effigy of President Woodrow Wilson, who had been a vocal opponent of women’s rights. Later, she spoke about the Russian Revolution at an event that other NWP members organized. Anti-suffragists, (known as the “antis”), who had for some time been insisting that woman suffrage was a Communist conspiracy, had a field day, announcing “Bolsheviki Meetings Arranged by Suffragists!”Does this mean that the anti-suffragists were right? Was woman suffrage a communist conspiracy? No, but the fact that women got the vote in “darkest Russia” before they did in the United States was a real spur to passage of the woman suffrage amendment, especially during a war in which democracy was at stake (the amendment finally passed after the war had ended, but Wilson wound up endorsing it earlier as a “war measure”). In Overman committee hearings – a 1919 red scare version of the more famous McCarthy hearing – Bryant emphasized the specifically feminist reasons why she found revolutionary Russia so appealing: “I have never been in a country where women were as free as they are in Russia and where they are treated not as females but as human beings…It is a very healthy country for a suffragist to go into.”Those who promote significant social changes often are radicals. They ruffle feathers and they even make mistakes. Louise Bryant was mistaken in her romantic image of the “new Russia.” But she was right about woman suffrage as an essential basis for making women full human beings in the eyes of the state.

Check out the full article here, which also features comments from Jeremi Suri (History, LBJ School of Public Affairs), Terri E. Givens (Government), King Davis (African and African Diaspora Studies, Director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis), and John Hoberman (Germanic Studies).

Read More
Announcements Holly Genovese Announcements Holly Genovese

Announcement: Julia Alvarez Speaks at UT Tonight!

Today! Acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist Julia Alvarez will speak about her life and work with University of Texas at Austin professor, Dr. Jennifer M. Wilks, at 7:00 p.m. in Jessen Auditorium at Homer Rainey Hall. A book signing and reception will follow at the Harry Ransom Center. The event is sponsored by the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) as part of their "Reading Race in Literature and Film" series. It is also sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center, where Alvarez’s archive resides.alvarezHere is a little more about Alvarez from TILTS:

Alvarez was born in New York City but raised in the Dominican Republic until she was 10. In 1960 her family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic when it was discovered that her father was involved in a plot to overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo. Much of Alvarez's work is considered semi-autobiographical, drawing on her experiences as an immigrant and her bicultural identity. Alvarez's unique experiences have shaped and infused her writing—from such award-winning novels as How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies to her poetry.

Seating is limited, so get there early! Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Read More
Announcements Announcements

Announcement: UT American Studies Receives $100K Endowment to Support Food Studies Research

The good news continues! Last week, UT AMS department chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt announced that the department has received a $100,000 Presidential Fellowship from Les Dames D'Escoffier Dallas Chapter to support dissertation research on Texas, women, and food culture.LDE is an organization of professional women who work in the food, fine beverage, and hospitality industries; Dr. Engelhardt says that their support, the first of its kind for the department, will "play a leading role in increasing the stability of the department into the future, inspiring other such endowments as we work with development and other donors." Additionally, it, in combination with the recent merging of Texas Foodways into UT AMS, "will help put UT Austin on the map as a leader in food studies in the humanities."Thanks to LDE's Dallas Chapter for their support!For the full press release, click here.

Read More
Announcements Holly Genovese Announcements Holly Genovese

Announcement: Grad Symposium Features Torin Monahan

Join the American Studies Events Committee this Thursday, March 27 from 5:00 to 7:00 in Garrison 1.126 as they host a talk by Dr. Torin Monahan that incorporates our 2013-2014 departmental theme, SECURITY/INSECURITY. Dr. Monahan's lecture will focus on his current NSF-funded collaborative research project that analyzes data-sharing practices through Department of Homeland Security "fusion centers."

Dr. Monahan, author of the 2011 Surveillance Studies Book Prize winning text Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity (2010), has published a number of articles and books on surveillance and security programs and their tendency to reproduce social inequality. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from California State University, Northridge and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.dataHere is an abstract of his talk, titled "Beyond Counterterrorism: Data Fusion in Post-9/11 Security Organizations":
The voracious collection and promiscuous sharing of data define contemporary security organizations. While the seemingly disembodied, intelligent, and passive nature of new surveillance techniques appears to be less prone to bias or abuse, such techniques are infused with interpretive actions that afford racial, religious, and political profiling. Drawing upon empirical research on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “fusion centers,” this talk will explore the politics of emergent security paradigms. Fusion-center officials propose to fight distributed networks of criminals or terrorists with similarly distributed digital networks that overcome traditional jurisdictional boundaries. Through their intelligence activities, though, fusion centers perform an erasure, or a selective non-generation, of data about their own practices, thereby creating zones of opacity that shield them from accountability. This is concerning particularly because fusion centers are rapidly becoming primary portals for law-enforcement investigations and the model for information sharing by security agencies more broadly.

Dr. Monahan's talk will take place on Thursday, March 27 from 5:00 to 7:00 in Garrison 1.126. We look forward to seeing you there!

Read More