Grad Research: PhD Candidate Carrie Andersen wins P.E.O. Scholar Award!
We love it when our grad students do awesome stuff, so we're thrilled to be able to share that PhD Candidate Carrie Andersen has been awarded the prestigious P.E.O. Scholar Award!
Carrie's advisor, Dr. Randolph Lewis, had the following to say about Carrie's work in a recent Chicago Tribune article announcing the award:
Few scholars have reckoned with the profound implications of UAVs or "drones" in ways that go beyond the legality of CIA drone strikes on foreign soil or private drones invading our backyard pool parties with remote-controlled video cameras. These are important matters, but Carrie is exploring something that extends far beyond a single academic discipline, something that requires an interdisciplinary fusion of research and method, indeed, something that probes to the heart of American culture.
Congratulations, Carrie!
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.
Grad Research: MA student Ashlyn Davis' work featured on LightBox blog
We are thrilled to draw your attention to Time magazine's LightBox blog, which recently featured MA student Ashlyn Davis' collaborative artist book project, Islands of the Blest, which brings together historic photographs of the American west that Davis and photographer Bryan Schutmaat sourced from the online archives of the Library of Congress and the United States Geological Survey.
The following is a description of the book from the publisher's website:
These photographs depict various places in the American West, and were taken over a one hundred-year period, from the 1870s through the 1970s. The photographers represented range from the completely unknown to some of America’s most distinguished practitioners of the medium. All of the images were sourced from digital public archives.
Grad Research: PhD student featured on television series 'American Canvas'
We are thrilled to be able to draw your attention to the great work our graduate students do both on and off campus. PhD student Kirsten Ronald, who is writing a dissertation about social dance, gentrification, and cultural preservation, is featured in a segment that was recently filmed for the program American Canvas on the cable channel Ovation TV. The segment follows Ronald as she leads two-step dance lessons at The White Horse in Austin. The episode airs this Wednesday, March 18, at 9pm Central Time. You can find the channel number for your cable provider here.
Ronald shared the following with us about her research about and through dance:
Most of us in American Studies are lucky enough to study what we love, and I’m no exception – I’ve been an avid two-stepper almost since I set foot in Texas, and I research and write about social dance, gentrification, and cultural preservation in Austin. I also teach beginning two-step classes at a few bars around town. My co-teacher Houston Ritcheson and I were thrilled when the folks from American Canvas, a new cultural travel show on Ovation TV, asked if they could come film our class at The White Horse for their pilot, and now we’re super psyched to announce that the Austin episode is airing, and we’re in it! With fingers crossed that they made us look far cooler than we actually are, please check it out: March 18th at 9pm on Ovation.