Faculty and Grad Research: Dr. Steve Hoelscher and Andi Gustavson on the Magnum Archive
Today we bring you a lovely piece hosted on the UT History Department's Not Even Past website: Dr. Steve Hoelscher and Ph.D. candidate Andi Gustavson have teamed up to bring you this piece on the Magnum archive of photography. We've reprinted an excerpt below; take a look at the full article here.
Like the print itself, the collection of photographs to which it belongs is now also retired—at least from its previous occupation of carrying the image it bears to publishing venues. Davidson’s print came out of retirement in the summer of 2010—or, more accurately, it took on a new life—when the Magnum Photo New York Print Library was opened for research at the Harry Ransom Center, a research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin. The Magnum Photos collection, as it is now known, is comprised of some 1,300 boxes containing more than 200,000 press prints and exhibition photographs by some of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers. Once Magnum began using digital distribution methods for its photographs, the function of press prints as vehicles for conveying the image became obsolete and these photographs became significant solely as objects for both monetary and historic value.Magnum’s visual archive is a vast, living chronicle of the people, places, and events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Images of cultural icons, from James Dean and Marilyn Monroe,to Gandhi and Castro, coexist in the Magnum Photos collection with depictions of international conflicts, political unrest, and cultural life. Included are famous war photos from the Spanish Civil War and D-Day landings to wars in Central America, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as unforgettable scenes of historic events: the rise of democracy in India, the Chinese military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the Iranian revolution, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis pens NYTimes editorial on elephants in the circus
We're pleased to share with you all the news that Dr. Janet Davis, one of our core faculty members, published an editorial in the New York Times this past Sunday. She describes the history of elephants in the circus in light of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus's announcement that their traveling elephant performers would be retiring by 2018.See an excerpt below; the full editorial can be found here.
Elephants have been wildly popular in this country since 1796, when the first one arrived on American soil. Jacob Crowninshield, a ship’s captain from Salem, Mass., landed in New York City with a two-year-old Asian female from Calcutta. He sold the “Crowninshield Elephant” to an enterprising showman for $10,000. Thousands of eager Americans, including President John Adams, flocked to see the animal in taverns and courtyards, where audiences, fascinated by her trunk’s dexterity, plied her with gingerbread and wine. She and her keeper plodded from Rhode Island to New Orleans under cover of darkness for the next nine years because her owner was fearful of giving spectators a “free” look.Americans at the time were particularly receptive to the Crowninshield Elephant and the many others who followed her, in part, because of nationalistic myth: Thomas Jefferson believed that flesh-eating elephantine mammoths roamed the American West, and he expressly ordered Lewis and Clark to look for one on their trans-Mississippi expedition. Performing elephants gave live, physical form to Jefferson’s notion of the American mammoth.
But that's not all! Janet also contributed her expertise to this recent CNN piece on the circus's decision. See that article here.
Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis featured in 'Life and Letters' Magazine for documentary film
Last spring, we posted a dispatch from Dr. Randy Lewis about his travels to Sicily, Italy to screen an ethnographic documentary called Texas Tavola that he directed and produced with Dr. Circe Sturm. We're pleased to also share with you a brand new piece in the College of Liberal Arts's Life and Letters magazine featuring the duo's work on this film, as well as Dr. Lewis's and Dr. Sturm's broader concerns with public scholarship."From Bryan to Sicily: Public Scholars Join Academy to Community" can be read in its entirety here, and here is a quick excerpt:
Sturm and Lewis both come from non-academic families, and this background is a big driver of their passion for public scholarship.“Randy and I have always tried to create work that has an impact as scholarship and is also accessible to broader publics,” Sturm says. “Even with book writing, we’re both committed to writing about complex ideas in such a way that anyone can read it and that the communities that we write about will want to read it and engage with it.”Public scholarship is intellectual work done with a non-academic audience in mind. It can take many forms, from digital humanities and online journals to books and documentary films created for a general public.“Public scholarship is a broader thing that’s trying to transcend this inwardlooking model of higher education and really connect with different kinds of publics and communities out there,” Lewis says. “How do you convert or translate [your academic research] into something that resonates with the people who are actually paying for the University of Texas?”
Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis presents at national conference of the Livestock Conservancy
On Saturday, November 15, Dr. Janet Davis presented an invited lecture at the national conference of the Livestock Conservancy right here in Austin. Her talk, entitled "The Cattle Drives of Wall Street and Other Stories of Urban Livestock: 1866 - 1940," considered how animals that once roamed through city streets disappeared prior to World War II.See her abstract here:
In the middle of the nineteenth century, livestock were everywhere in the urban United States. In the nation’s largest city, cattle drives plodded through Wall Street and sheep manicured the grass at Central Park. Livestock muscle powered city transportation and commerce. Armies of hogs rooted through mounds of garbage, while chickens scratched for bits of food. In an age before refrigeration, American stockyards, dairies, slaughterhouses, and butcher shops spawned fetid olfactory clouds. Yet on the eve of World War II, the nation’s urban landscape had changed dramatically with the virtual disappearance of livestock. This paper explores the historical processes that led to this disappearance, including motorized transportation and cooling technologies, sanitation reform, and the rise of the animal welfare movement. This paper will also examine the cultural, social, and economic consequences of this transformation, as well as the nascent resurgence of urban livestock today.
For more information about the conference, see the Livestock Conservancy website.