Kate Grover 9/26/14 Kate Grover 9/26/14

Announcement: core and affiliate American Studies faculty explore relevance of 'Gone With The Wind'

Mark your calendars, everyone: on Wednesday, October 1 at 4:00pm, professors Daina Ramey Berry, Jacqueline Jones, Randolph Lewis, Thomas Schatz, and Coleman Hutchison will be participating in a panel discussion exploring Gone With The Wind's contemporary relevance, 75 years after its premiere in Atlanta.Dr. Lewis is a member of our core faculty, while Jones, Schatz, and Hutchison are American Studies faculty affiliates.The panel, held at the Harry Ransom Center, is a part of a series of events this semester occurring alongside the center's impressive and comprehensive Gone With The Wind exhibit, open until January 4, 2015.For more information, see the event announcement here.

Kate Grover 9/21/14 Kate Grover 9/21/14

Announcement: Dr. Jeff Wilson ("Professor Dumpster") to deliver lecture Friday, Sept. 26

Please join the Department of American Studies for a talk by Dr. Jeff Wilson, also known as Professor Dumpster, who has garnered widespread publicity in the past few weeks for an ongoing project - The Dumpster Project - for which he has been living in a 36-square foot dumpster. For "The Ultimate Conversation Box: A Dumpster," Dr. Wilson will be describing how he links his academic research, teaching, and community activism with issues of sustainability as well as with his role as a dean at Huston-Tillotson University. Wilson will also give a "tour" of his dumpster/home.Here's what a recent piece in The Atlantic had to say about him:

Professor Wilson went to the dumpster not just because he wished to live deliberately, and not just to teach his students about the environmental impacts of day-to-day life, and not just to gradually transform the dumpster into “the most thoughtfully-designed, tiniest home ever constructed.” Wilson’s reasons are a tapestry of these things.

[...]

Not long ago, Wilson was nesting in a 2,500 square foot house. After going through a divorce (“nothing related to the dumpster,” he told me, unsolicited), he spun into the archetypal downsizing of a newly minted bachelor. He moved into a 500-square-foot apartment. Then he began selling clothes and furniture on Facebook for almost nothing. Now he says almost everything he owns is in his 36-square-foot dumpster, which is sanctioned and supported by the university as part of an ongoing sustainability-focused experiment called The Dumpster Project. “We could end up with a house under $10,000 that could be placed anywhere in the world,” Wilson said at the launch, “[fueled by] sunlight and surface water, and people could have a pretty good life.”

[...]

For Professor Dumpster, the undertaking is at once grand and diminutive, selfless and introspective, silly and gravely important, even dark. “We bring everything into the home these days,” Wilson said. “You don’t really need to leave the home for anything, even grocery shopping, anymore. What’s interesting about this is it’s really testing the limits of what you need in a home.”“The big hypothesis we’re trying to test here is, can you have a pretty darn good life on much, much less?” He paused. “This is obviously an outlier experiment. But so far, I have, I’d say. A better life than I had before.”

The talk will take place Friday, September 26 at 4:30 in Huston-Tillotson University's AL Auditorium at 900 Chicon Street.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies, the Graduate Program in Community and Regional Planning, and Plan II Honors. We hope to see you there.

Holly Genovese 9/17/14 Holly Genovese 9/17/14

Announcement: Deborah Willis Lecture This Thursday

On Thursday, September 18, Deborah Willis (NYU) will give a lecture as part of this year's Flair Symposium at the Harry Ransom Center. The Flair Symposium theme for 2014 is Cultural Life During Wartime, 1861-1865, and Dr. Willis will discuss the early years of American photography alongside a reading of iconic moments in Gone With The Wind whilst examining the role black history played in producing such a controversial and celebrated cultural phenomenon. The lecture will take place in Jessen Auditorium in Homer Rainey Hall at 6:30pm.

Holly Genovese 9/12/14 Holly Genovese 9/12/14

Announcement: "The End of Austin" Named One of 2014's Best Publications

Every year, The Austin Chronicle solicits readers' and critics' assessments of Austin's best institutions: restaurants, bars, swimming holes, museums, publications, and more. This year, the publication lists the Department of American Studies' own The End of Austin as one of 2014's best publications, naming it the "Best Place to Rise Above the Old Austin vs. New Austin Fray."

Here's what The Austin Chronicle had to say about the project:"An online magazine originating in UT’s American Studies department, TEOA is an engaging mélange of written and visual material devoted to our city’s anxiety about itself. It’s also a hodgepodge of surprises: A meditation on the state surplus store and history of civic racism both suit it well. And while the quarterly's contributors emigrated mostly after 1995, they’re more invested in the mythology than earlier cranks – see expatriate professor Barry Shank’s corrective, “Cities Do Not Have Souls” – who rein in the nostalgia and validate newcomers. That makes it a most interesting place to drop in on the dialogue – which, like Barton Springs, is eternal."Congratulations to the members of the editorial board for this honor, and see The End of Austin to learn more about "our city's anxiety about itself."

The End of Austin was founded in Fall 2011 as a pilot project within Dr. Randolph Lewis's "Documenting America" graduate seminar. The site relaunched as an extracurricular digital humanities project in Winter 2013 and is currently collecting submissions for its sixth issue. In addition to Dr. Lewis, members of the editorial board include American Studies graduate students Carrie Andersen, Sean Cashbaugh, Ashlyn Davis, Brendan Gaughen, Julie Kantor, and Emily Roehl. For more information about the project's development, see The End of Austin's press page.For more information, contact the editorial board at endofaustin@gmail.com.