Grad Research Holly Genovese Grad Research Holly Genovese

Grad Research: Carrie Andersen writes on Call of Duty, marketing, and Eminem

Call of Duty: GhostsMany of our graduate students have a variety of extracurricular activities and jobs that keep them busy in addition to the scholarly work that they do within the department. Carrie Andersen, currently a doctoral student, is a writer for Kill Screen Magazine, a periodical devoted to video game criticism and cultural analysis. She recently published a piece about the viral marketing strategies underlying the latest release in the popular Call of Duty video game series, an excerpt of which you can read below (and, if you're inclined, the full version can be found at this link).

The threat technology poses to the future of the military also looms in Ghosts, set in 2023. Once again, a sophisticated military technology—ODIN, a weaponized space station—gets hacked by a collective known as “The Federation.” Once again, the hackers turn technology against American soil. The Federation destroys more than a few U.S. cities, leaving the nation open to social disarray and invasion thanks to an almost entirely crippled military. Chin up, though! Although the military has collapsed, a few surviving soldiers band together and create a paramilitary force known as the “Ghosts.” Cue the revenge fantasy; say farewell to the Federation.

Ghosts is thus ostensibly a classic tale of rugged individualism that has its roots in early American mythology. Think vaunted figures like Theodore Roosevelt, a cowboy-style statesman who would put Dubya to shame. Or Davy Crockett, whose brief shining moment in politics as a U.S. Congressman ended with a huffy departure for the wild frontier of Texas. Such figures—again, heavily mythologized—eschewed working within sluggish, stodgy institutions in favor of manly action exercised through aggression and occasional violence.

A glance at the marketing of Call of Duty: Ghosts suggests that the game can firmly be placed in that continuum of individual prowess, but with a more menacing twist. Here’s where Eminem comes in. After meeting with members of the Call of Duty team and catching a glimpse of Ghosts gameplay footage, Eminem purportedly retooled one of his songs, “Survival,” so that it meshed more cleanly with the game’s narrative. The final music video can be seen on the Call of Duty website, where the rapper performs in front of projections of in-game video footage of guns, soldiers, and death.

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Alumni Voices Holly Genovese Alumni Voices Holly Genovese

Alumni Voices: Kimberly Hamlin, Asst. Prof. at Miami University in Ohio

Today we have a new dispatch from Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, an alumna of our graduate program, who shares some fascinating and useful advice from her experiences at UT and beyond. Hamlin is assistant professor of American Studies and History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her first book, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America will be published in early 2014 by the University of Chicago Press.  For her article “‘The Case of a Bearded Woman’: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin” (American Quarterly, December 2011), Hamlin received the 2012 Emerging Scholar Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. She completed her PhD in American Studies at UT in 2007.kh profile picHow is the work that you're doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?Both my research and my teaching are very much informed by the work that I did in American Studies at UT. My book, which will be published in a few months, began as my dissertation. While there were many revisions along the way from dissertation to book, the central question remained the same: what did evolutionary science mean for women living in the nineteenth century when many gender roles were defined by the myth of Adam and Eve?My next book project, a biography of freethinking feminist Helen Hamilton Gardener – a woman who played a key role in the passage of the 19th amendment and later donated her brain to Cornell University to prove that women’s brains were not inferior to men’s—is also informed by my experiences at UT, not so much in terms of content but in terms of my desire to connect my scholarship to readers who may or may not be academics. One of the strengths of the AMS program at UT is that faculty encourage students to share their research beyond the academy and often model how to do this with their own research (here, for example, I am thinking about Professor Elizabeth Engelhardt’s work on barbecue).One of the great benefits of having gone to UT was the opportunity to teach my own courses for four years. Before I taught my own courses, I was not 100% sure if graduate school was for me, but as soon as I was able to design my own syllabus and spend a semester working through it with students, I knew I was in the right field. At UT, I served as a teaching assistant for two semesters, then I taught in the rhetoric department for several semesters, and, finally, I developed and taught several sections of a class in the American Studies Department (“Women in American Culture from Seneca Falls to ‘Sex and the City’”). The ability to teach while still in graduate school not only helped me prepare for life as a professor, it also allowed me to begin connecting my scholarship with my teaching at an early stage. For example, my dissertation project—and later book—actually grew out of a connection I made while preparing the course packet for my class on “The Rhetoric of Feminism.” In putting together this course packet of pro and con feminist arguments from the 1790s till the present, I noticed that nearly everyone writing prior to 1900 mentioned Eve. So, I wondered, what happened to feminist thought when Eve became optional as a result of the broad-based acceptance of evolutionary theory? The answers to this question form the basis of my forthcoming book.In addition, the reason that I have my particular job is very much because of the unique experiences I had in American Studies at UT. In the summer of 2006, when I had written exactly two chapters of my dissertation and was not planning on graduating till 2008, I saw a posting on H-Net for an American Studies scholar with an interest in “public culture.” At UT, I participated in several projects that promoted public history and public culture and knew that I wanted a job that would reward me for engaging with academic and non-academic audiences. For example, through a connection of Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s (then at UT), I served as a research assistant on Ken Burns’s documentary on the national parks the summer after my first year. I also served as the assistant director of the Austin Women’s Commemorative Project which began as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation grant directed by Professor Martha Norkunas. And, finally, as a result of my master’s thesis on the origins of the Girl Scouts, I connected with Austin-area filmmakers Karen Bernstein and Ellen Shapiro and served as the historical consultant on their award-winning PBS documentary “Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars.” I think it is because of these “public” experiences that I got the job I have today.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?When I was at UT, I often turned to my friend Matt Hedstrom for advice and generally followed his excellent example. So, since Matt wrote a list in answer to this question for his blog post, I will once again follow his example here. I guess this is also my first piece of advice:

  1. Seek out role models and mentors among the faculty, fellow students, and alumni. 
  2. Enjoy the graduate student lifestyle. I know this sounds odd to say when you probably feel very stressed, overworked, and underpaid. But, trust me, graduate school is a luxury in terms of time, if not money. Take advantage of the flexible schedule, the time for walks and contemplation, hanging out with friends, and reading all sorts of books just because they sound interesting.
  3. Make the most of all that UT has to offer, including but not limited to the American Studies Department. (One of my regrets is that I never went to a UT football game. Even though I do not really care about football, I should have taken advantage of those student tickets!) Many of the best experiences I had and closest friends I made while at UT came from outside the department. Teaching rhetoric was a terrific way to ease into the classroom (because before you apply to teach your own class you teach from a shared syllabus); working at the Writing Center not only improved my own writing but helped me become a better teacher of writing; the History Department’s Gender and Sexuality Symposium provided the core intellectual home for me while writing my dissertation; and working on the outside projects described in my answer above helped me imagine myself as a professional in this field and helped me attain my current position.
  4. Look for projects that can be researched at archives with travel funding. I was fortunate in that I was able to research my dissertation at the major women’s and gender history archives and that they all provided travel funding. So, to the extent possible, look for archives related to your general interests and see if they offer research or travel stipends.
  5. That said, do not look for “trendy” projects. Select a project that truly interests you and that you will be passionate about for the next 5-10 years. Besides, by the time you finish your dissertation/book, what is “trendy” will have changed.
  6. Now that I have also served on search committees, I am going to use a word that makes me cringe a little bit—look for ways to “credential” yourself. If you are interested in women’s and gender studies, for example, complete your certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Including on your CV that you completed this certificate program looks a lot better than writing that you are “interested” in women’s and gender studies. If there is a not-for-profit group connected to your research interests, try to connect with them; if you have a pretty solid seminar paper, present it at a conference; if there is an article or paper prize in your area, apply for it; etc. I wish I could just say do #5 (follow your interests), but in this tight job market candidates who do #5 and #6 generally fare much better.
  7. I think this one is actually the most important-- Take advantage of living in Austin! Odds are that the place you move next will not be as vibrant or exciting… or have as great food or music! (And the connections you make outside of UT may prove to be equally as helpful as those you make within the university.) So, please go for a walk around Town Lake and eat a breakfast taco and a gingerbread pancake for me!
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Link Round-Up! Security/Insecurity in the News, Oct. 25 - Nov. 8

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A Post-Lecture Assessment of Thomas Frank on Higher Education

Last week, we were delighted to host Thomas Frank and John Summers, founding editor and editor-in-chief of The Baffler, for a conversation on the future of higher education. In case you weren't able to attend the event (or watch our live-tweeting), one of our graduate students, Brendan Gaughen, has penned this thorough and thought-provoking write-up of the event. Feel free to weigh in in the comments, too - where is higher education going in the age of market pressures and student loans?Tuition Hike Protest-0385Thomas Frank, founding editor of The Baffler, gave a talk called “Academy Fight Song” on October 30 in Avaya Auditorium on issues in higher education. Comparing higher education to an impossible dream burdened by unfulfilled promises, Frank decried the fact that universities have over the past few decades been increasingly run as businesses that value profits over the interests of students. Though his jeremiad was quite effective in articulating some of the problems presently occurring in higher education, his solutions were less clear.Frank began the talk by describing the perception of the American university system as a dreamlike utopia of infinite possibility. Then all of a sudden, he said, recent college graduates wake up from the dream to discover themselves $100,000 in debt with no prospects to speak of, despite the pervasive myth that their college degree grants automatic entry into the professional managerial class. Frank was careful to differentiate between a college degree and a college education, the former being what is thought of as the single most important credential to obtaining a career.According to Frank, universities themselves are guilty of perpetuating this myth of self-importance. They are driven by what he called academic capitalism, selling promises to students but acting in their own institutional best interests, calling Harvard, for example, a “hedge fund with a university attached to it.” Frank cautioned against universities functioning like businesses that answer to the needs of the marketplace.He claimed college students also feed into the problem, calling them cash cows who are duped into believing a college education is necessary. Like lambs to the slaughter, said Frank, they sign a student loan application, a blank check drawn on their own future, not knowing what they are getting themselves into. Once in college, they are trapped by the high cost of textbooks and ever-increasing tuition. Afterward they are saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt.Higher education has been undergoing what he called deprofessionalization, and the bulk of the teaching is now done by low-ranking faculty with no tenure, benefits, or job security. University budgets go toward things like fancy architecture, sports stadiums, food courts, and celebrity professors with no academic credentials such as General David Petraeus and Chelsea Clinton, who was given a high-ranking position despite not have finished her doctorate. Perhaps most importantly, higher and higher percentages of university budgets are spent on an increasing number of administrators, whom Frank believes are largely unnecessary. Instead of a dreamlike utopia, said Frank, the American higher education system has become a “dystopia brought about by parasites and billionaires.”The problem will remain unnoticed, said Frank, until there is an eventual breaking point: a bursting bubble that would take the form of a debt-driven failure of a prestigious university. The failure, he said, will inevitably be blamed on socialism, and the solution will be more standardized tests and more number-crunching administrators to monitor budgets and standards. There will be a mass faculty extinction that will miraculously spare administrators, and as a result humanities education will only be available to the very rich.At the end of the talk, Frank outlined some components that would begin to reverse the process of marketization in higher education. Ideally, college should be very cheap, he said, with greater subsidies from the state. Universities should reduce the number of adjuncts and get rid of most administrators. Student loan debt should be forgiven in bankruptcy. Finally, he suggested college students speak up for their own interests and strike for better higher education. Though he did mention a recent event in Quebec where students were able to negotiate for lower tuition, one wonders if he truly believes college students would be able to successfully organize on a grand scale, given that he previously portrayed them as unsophisticated and charmingly naïve (though perhaps it takes a bit of youthful naivete to proceed when the odds are not in your favor).In the question and answer session that followed, several audience members brought up good points. What about the positive experiences and transformations of students? What about the fact that universities continue to be at the forefront of scientific and intellectual innovation? Why isn't the solution to dream more, rather than less? Frank acknowledged the transformative power of college but again lamented the fact that it has largely been captured by market logic. He then described an intellectual epiphany that he had in college when he used to be a Republican, though surely he must have had a more significant transformative experience than that.But let’s face it – the climate of higher education was much different then. The cost of tuition and textbooks was much lower. University budgets were not burdened by cadres of administrators, and a significantly greater portion of the teaching was done by tenured (or soon-to-be-tenured) faculty rather than adjuncts. The high cost of a college education today has made it increasingly more difficult for even the middle class to attend, let alone those from lower socioeconomic classes. This makes the privileges afforded to certain groups (based on race, gender, and class) even more pronounced. Despite a somewhat condescending view of the ones who should be central to the story – college students – “Academy Fight Song” described quite effectively some of the main problems facing higher education today: belief in the necessity of a college degree, skyrocketing debt, shrinking budgets that have decimated some humanities departments, and a proliferation of administrators. But as I’m sure even Thomas Frank knows, outlining the problems is much easier than articulating realistic solutions.

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