Announcement: The winter edition of The End of Austin is here!
The End of Austin is back in action with its Winter 2015 edition, which features articles, photographs, and video on chicken shit bingo, the light rail, Plaza Saltillo, and lots of other Austin-y things. In case you haven't heard, The End of Austin is an award-winning digital humanities project based in the Department of American Studies at UT that explores urban identity in Austin. This edition features an article on the Colorado River and water in Austin by UT AMS alumnus Andrew Busch and an article by PhD candidate Brendan Gaughen on Dazed and Confused.
Check it all out here!
Announcement: Stephen Vider gives talk on "queering domesticity" this Monday
Our series of talks continue in the Department of American Studies here at UT with a talk by Stephen Vider titled, "Interior Relations: Queering Domesticity and Belonging After World War II." Vider is the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellow in the History of Sexuality at Yale University, and he recently won the Crompton-Noll Award from the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association for best essay in lesbian, gay, and queer studies for his article, "'Oh Hell, May, Why Don't You People Have a Cookbook?': Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity," which appeared in the December 2013 issue of American Quarterly. Vider's talk will take place on Monday, February 9 at 4:30pm in Burdine 436A.
Vider had the following to saw about his upcoming talk:
In the decades after World War II, gay men were typically represented as quintessential outsiders to the American home - a view reinforced by historians both of the home and family, and of LGBT culture. This talk examines the various ways gay men challenged and adapted conventional domestic practices to reshape norms of intimate, communal, and national belonging, from 1945 to the present. From “homosexual marriages” in the 1950s, to gay communes in the 1970s, gay domesticity emerged as a central site of a broader tension between cultural integration and resistance, revealing the normative constraints and creative possibilities of home-making and affiliation.
Announcement: Patrick Jagoda to deliver talk, "On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect"
We're excited to announce the first in a series of four talks here in the Department of American Studies at UT Austin. Patrick Jagoda, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, Co-editor of Critical Inquiry and Co-founder of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, will be giving a talk called, "On Difficulty in Video Games: Mechanics, Interpretation, Affect" at 4:30pm on Monday, February 2, in Burdine 436A. Jagoda has been with us this year at UT as a Harrington Fellow, and we sat down with him a while back for an interview, which you can check out here.
Here's a description of the talk from Jagoda:
In a 1978 essay, literary critic George Steiner observes that a sense of difficulty in poetry became a major aspect of aesthetic experience in the late nineteenth century and extended, by the twentieth century, to new forms of visual and aural expression. This talk takes up videogames as a crucial medium for making sense of aesthetic difficulty in our time. As a way of mapping the cultural stakes of videogames to the early twenty-first century, I examine three types of challenge that games generate: mechanical, interpretive, and affective difficulty. All three forms of difficulty demand continued analysis, but I argue especially for the importance of attending to the third category of demanding affects and emotions. New media scholarship is already becoming more adept at accounting for elements such as aesthetics, interactivity, software, platforms, and media history. It has not yet done justice, however, to the complicated ways that digital media, and games in particular, generate and alter affects. This talk posits that the types of experiences that register as difficult within cultural consciousness, as they do in a variety of unique ways in the context of gameplay, can help animate the values of contemporary American media and their effects on the sensorium. A fuller sense of affect in videogames is necessary to better understand the ways that games serve as unique ideological forms — and might also structure, limit, and even enable more complex practices of play in the United States.
Announcement: Dr. Julia Mickenberg gives talk on American artists in Soviet Russia
This Friday, January 30, our very own Dr. Julia Mickenberg will share her work with the Modern Studies group at UT Austin in a talk titled, "Missions to Moscow: Vision and Veracity in Margaret Bourke-White and Lillian Hellman's Wartime Portraits of Soviet Russia."
Dr. Mickenberg had the following to say about her talk:
My talk will discuss photojournalism, memoirs, radio documentaries, unpublished writings, and screenplays by Margaret Bourke White and Lillian Hellman concerning the Russian front during World War II, particularly Hellman’s screenplay for North Star (the highest-grossing wartime film about Russia) and Bourke White’s photo-memoir, Shooting the Russian War. Both women were core actors in the Popular Front, and both have attracted intense interest as historical figures. Both were criticized by prominent members of the anti-Stalinist Left for their politics and for their apparent dishonesty, lack of integrity, and/or opportunism. Through archival and textual analysis I'll use World War II as a framework and Bourke-White and Hellman as lenses for considering the way in which World War II temporarily revived and also predicted the un-sustainability of a Soviet-influenced left-feminism in the United States.
The event will take place in Battle Hall 1.101 at 1:30pm. Hope to see y'all there!