Grad Research: Jeannette Vaught on teaching the mystique of the cowboy

One of our department's chief strengths is that it gives advanced graduate students the opportunity to create and teach their own small classes for undergraduates. Today, Ph.D. candidate and instructor-of-record Jeannette Vaught relates a fascinating unit she created for her class, "The Cowboy Mystique in American Culture."

By presenting science as a central part of cultural history, I show students how scientific inquiry responds to cultural pressures. In the first unit of my “Cowboy Mystique in American Culture” seminar, I paired selections from Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization about Theodore Roosevelt’s constructed sense of masculinity with “Agassiz,” a chapter from Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club detailing battles between various nineteenth century scientific race theories. To offer a concrete example of how race, gender, and science were entangled with politics, in class we analyzed Roosevelt’s use of the term “race suicide” in his own writings. By the end of the class, students understood that Roosevelt’s valorization of manly virility was deeply tied to emergent scientific anxieties about whiteness in the face of immigration and imperialism. Such transformative realizations eventually led the class to question the cultural pressures that shape current scientific debates, and to learn how to approach them from a historical, not polemical, position. In the Unit wrap-up, several students commented that they'd had to "break up" with TR (he'd been their favorite president!) after they'd learned to turn their critical eye towards his identity. The "Roosevelt as Bad Boyfriend" discussion was fun, for sure, but it resounded with students' developing critical thinking skills.  Music to my ears! 

Grad Research: MA student Ashlyn Davis releases book of photography of the American West

We're pleased to announce that one of our MA students, Ashlyn Davis, has edited and published a book of photography with Bryan Schutmaat. Here's what Ashlyn has to say about the book:

The 44 images in Islands of the Blest depict various places in the American West and were taken over a one hundred year period, from the 1870s to the 1970s. The photographers included range from the completely unknown to some of the most distinguished practitioners of the medium--Timothy O'Sullivan, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee for instance. We scoured free public archives state by state for a year, pulling thousands of photographs and spent the summer editing them down to the version presented here. While there are some of the grand landscapes one expects to find in a text about the West, there are also images of its destruction and containment. The book is clothbound, printed on a thick newsprint, and includes a poem by Michael McGriff, a former Michener fellow.

For more information about the book or to purchase a copy, see the publisher's website here.

Grad Research: Graduate presentations abound this semester

We recently highlighted some of the folks presenting at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles November 6-9. But our students and faculty present all over the place. Here are just a few examples of the exciting new research UT AMS grad students are sharing around the country this semester:Andrew Gansky

Graduate student Andrew Gansky recently attended the Society for the History of Technology Annual Conference in Dearborn, Michigan, and took part in the SIGCIS Workshop. His presentation was titled, "The Meaning of Life in the Automated Office." Here's what Andrew had to say about his paper:

Many previous studies have looked at computer automation, or the displacement of human workers with computerized processes, through the lenses of labor and economics. However, the effects of automation extend far beyond the workplace. I examine automation as a fundamentally social technology, which helps engineer human relationships as technological feedback loops. In this paper, I focus on Control Data Corporation's proposals to computerize and automate the American Indian national education system during the 1970s, and critique the application of teaching machines as the displacement of human care and responsibility for maintaining a functioning educational system.

Josh KopinGraduate student Josh Kopin presented his paper, "A Cosmonaut in Palomar: Seeing, Showing, and Imagining In Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup" at the the International Comic Arts Forum. Josh sent us the following snapshot of his paper, and he has a longer description of the event here:

Although the Palomar of Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup comics is something of a backwater, a small town where news always seems to come late, Hernandez populates it with characters who have dreams that go beyond the town’s limitations, even as he centers their lives there. Although they could easily be trite or descend into kitsch, the stories set in Palomar are involved in defending the dignity of those characters and the legitimacy of what they want, both in the context of the small town and outside of it. Perhaps the most instructive of the many ways that Hernandez mounts this defense is the way he relates his characters’ imaginations to visual culture external to Palomar; this talk will discuss the ambivalent relationship that Palomar has with outside visual influence, beginning specifically with the moment in the 1985 story “Space Case” when Luba’s daughter Guadalupe, recently introduced to the mysteries of the cosmos, looks out her window and finds the churning sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In order to illuminate the relationship between seeing and imagination, in order to figure out of if Guadalupe sees the same thing we see, I will approach questions of seeing, showing, and imagination in Hernandez’s work by further investigating the music teacher Heraclio’s relationship with and attempted dissemination of high art, and the presence, in “An American in Palomar,” of American photographer Howard Miller, who embodies Palomar’s conflicted relationship with seeing and showing as he looks at the town and the town looks book at him. These investigations will show both that, for Hernandez, ambivalence, perhaps even doubt, is the key to dignity and legitimacy, and that in his supposedly beleaguered backwater we can find a metaphor for comics’ relationship to other kinds of art.

Jeannette VaughtPhD candidate Jeannette Vaught organized the panel "Beyond the Laboratory: Animals and the Culture of Scientific Knowledge" for the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Chicago. The following description of the panel and her contribution to it comes to us from Jeannette:

This panel looks at places where animals and science intersect beyond a strict research setting. Investigating material from across the globe, spanning the sixteenth century to the present, the panelists show how the use of animals in the production of scientific knowledge gets at larger questions about how scientific knowledge is used, what cultural anxieties it informs, and how animals continually shape the definition of science. Jeannette will join the panel, made up of scholars from a range of institutions, home disciplines, and career stages, to present her talk "Envisioning Living Tissue: Race, Animality, and Conflicts Over Vivisection in 1920s America." This paper considers the battle over vivisection in 1920s America, showing how arguments for and against the practice depended on problematic conceptions of race and animality.

Graduate Research + Exhibition: Natalie Zelt on LaToya Ruby Frazier

Today, the first of two Austin-area exhibitions, both featuring the work of photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and curated by the INGZ curatorial collective, opens at the UT Visual Arts Center, located in the ART building. INGZ's Z is AMS grad student Natalie Zelt, who wrote her master's report on Frazier. She elaborates on the project:

I had been familiar with Frazier's work for a while, but I have this problem where I tend to be extra skeptical of photographers working in the rustbelt who deal with deindustialization. It wasn't until I got to spend time in Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's exhibition "Witness" that I really got a sense of how her photographs work as both object and images on so many different registers. Seeing a solo exhibition really brings out the ways that she is conceptually using the history of photography as a tool in here work. That is part of why INGZ is bringing two exhibitions to Austin, both under the title "LaToya Ruby Frazier: Riveted."The black and white gelatin silver prints, the documentary style, her use of mostly analogue process and commitment to photography as an activist medium all harken to a history of photography that has been criticized for being aloof, marginalizing, and voyeuristic. Frazier is using this history and its criticisms when she makes these intensely personal and political images.But the study and engagement with her work begs to move beyond a masters project. Thats part of why the INGZ collective decided to bring two exhibitions to Austin. At a moment when the very city around us is experience industry driven growth, not all that unlike the boom in Braddock in the 1950s, it is important for people to bear witness to LaToya's experience.

The first exhibition is open at UTVAC until December 6th. Reservations for tours with the curators are available for classes and interested groups, please email info@ingzcollective.org for scheduling information. The second exhibition runs from January 15, 2015 to May 6, 2015 at ISESE Gallery in the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies (Jester A232A).