5 Questions: Dr. Patrick Jagoda (UChicago), Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in American Studies

We're extremely excited to share the news with you that Dr. Patrick Jagoda, from the University of Chicago, has been appointed as a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow in American Studies. Dr. Jagoda will be joining our campus community for the 2014-2015 academic year. AMS :: ATX had a conversation with him over email about his research interests, interdisciplinarity, his scholarly path, and teaching. Enjoy!What has been your favorite project to work on and why?As far as opening interview questions go, that’s a difficult one. Since I’m a new media scholar, I’ll start off with something like a hypertext menu. Or perhaps a constellation of projects. I see my work as stretching across the humanities, arts, and even the sciences. My recent and current work falls into several different categories: a book project about what I call “network aesthetics,” co-editorial work on two special issues (one on "New Media and American Literature” for American Literature, the other on “Comics and Media” for Critical Inquiry), a series of essays about games and play, the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab that I co-founded with medical and health researcher Melissa Gilliam at the University of Chicago, and a number of practice-based game and interactive narrative projects.My most consuming writing project in recent years has been my Network Aesthetics book. I hope to complete a full version of this manuscript during my time in Austin. My opening gambit with this project is that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a fascination with interconnectivity has become attached to the concept of the network. During this period, the network emerged as both a key architecture and metaphor of a globalizing world. The language of networks spread quickly across disciplines as a way of describing the Internet, the economy, terrorist organizations, and various ecological formations. More recently, really since the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of network science has expanded to include a range of research on complexity, self-organization, and systemic resilience.The language of networks is something we often encounter in fields such as biology, computer science, mathematics, and neuroscience. But they have also occupied a central place in the humanities. In my case, I’m offering a transmedia analysis of the relationship of networks to popular aesthetic forms that mediate our experience of these structures. My work examines narrative, visual, and procedural art forms that encourage a critical, even transformative engagement with the network as a dominant category of life. So I’m tracking networks through maximalist novels from the late 1990s such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, network films such as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, TV series such as David Simon’s The Wire, computer games such as Jason Rohrer’s Between, and the avant-garde new media form of alternate reality games such as Jane McGonigal’s Superstruct.While Network Aesthetics has been my most consistently engaging project, one of my favorites has been an alternate reality game (or ARG) that that I directed in April 2013 in Chicago. This game was entitled The Project. It was made possible by a wonderful Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship that was awarded by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Let me attempt a summary. For starters, the experience was a collaboration with Sha Xin Wei, the Montreal-based Topological Media Lab, and students at the University of Chicago. I would describe The Project as an experimental and pervasive experience. It told a single transmedia story through social media, performative role-playing, responsive media environments, and a series of live games. Over the game’s three and a half weeks, numerous players explored and joined three conspiracy groups involved in a shared enterprise. They played together online and across the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

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For me, The Project was one of my first sustained opportunities to immerse myself in practice-based research. My team approached art, through this game, not simply as the production of an object or a performance but as a mode of inquiry. Like several other scholars in new media studies and the digital humanities, I’m interested in thinking about the act of making, especially in the form of collaborative creation, as a way of developing, testing, and transforming concepts. This particular game explored the possibilities and limits of play in an early twenty-first century media ecology — one that includes screen-based entertainments, social media networks, and a blurring of work and play. One reason that this project was among my favorites was that it enabled me to grapple with these issues in a more robust way than theory alone might have allowed. It also gave me the chance to assemble an exceptional transdisciplinary team of designers, writers, and thinkers.How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within academia or within society as a whole?That’s another capacious question. In academia, I see my primary work fitting in with the fields of American studies, new media theory, post-1945 literary criticism, critical theory, and game studies. More broadly, I’m committed to making sense of the humanities in a digital and transmedia moment. I’m invested in imagining transdisciplinary collaborations that enable researchers to tackle multi-scalar problems that exceed traditional field divisions.Let me break that down a bit. My Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, in particular, focuses on a kind of applied humanities work that pushes against existing methods and canonical texts. I started this lab with a medical and health researcher, so it’s not even a pure humanities lab. But so much of our work begins with the humanities and the arts. We use digital storytelling, board and card games, computer games, and emerging new media forms to explore social and emotional health issues, social justice, and civic responsibility. The projects are not restricted to the academy though. We work with high school youth on the South Side of Chicago, which is an especially disadvantaged part of a city that remains spatially and racially segregated. Our collaborative projects incorporate local youth, but they also bring together university faculty and game designers hired to work in the Lab, as well as graduate and undergraduate students, visiting artists and designers, and community organizations. Scholars from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts join our design, development, play testing, dissemination, research studies, and evaluation work. So our team is really diverse. We’ve already created a number of projects. For instance, a pervasive game about economic disparities and inequitable access to medical services. And a web-based transmedia story about sexual violence. And an alternate reality games related to STEM and new media education. I see all of these projects belonging to the emerging discipline of the digital humanities and new media studies.As I think about the question, I realize you asked about my work “fitting in” with academic and social processes. I keep fixating on your phrase: "fitting in." I should note that I’m also drawn to moments when my work doesn’t seem to “fit.” For example, at the University of Chicago, I started a Mobile Experiments Group with one of our full-time Game Changer designers, James Taylor. Even as "experimental" has become a buzzword that carries the clichéd dimensions of a word such as “interdisciplinary,” for me it still describes a meaningful kind of practice and thought. Or perhaps an improvisational orientation toward knowledge. For me, the experimental stands in contrast to another clichéd category of the "innovative.” Philosopher Brian Massumi associates the experimental with a sense of uncertainty and the opening of thresholds of potential. In the sciences, experiments are sometimes designed to test fairly certain hypotheses or to add minor details to something we already know. But an experiment can also embrace forms of failure that teach us just as much, if not more. For that reason, our experimental games group encourages hypothesis testing, but also reflective uncertainty, generative failure, ephemeral thought, and improvisational processing. We begin with affective states or theoretical concepts (say, “jealousy” or “passing”) and use those as the basis for creating quick game prototypes that respond to or explore those concepts. We do our best to dwell in the ambivalences and messy contradictions of the concepts with which we’re grappling instead of trying to comprehend or pin them down. Games, here, are not finished products but a medium of thought that works through mechanics, processes, procedures, networked actions.In any case, I see a tension in my work, hopefully a generative one. My ambition is to expand existing conversations, especially through forms of community and collaborative “fitting” that expand digitally-oriented research. But I also strive to find meaningful ways not to fit in. Given the assumptions and presuppositions that inhere in any discipline or institution, that second piece is the real challenge.What is your background as a scholar and how does it inform and motivate your current teaching and research?My scholarly interests began to take shape during my undergraduate years. During my time at Pomona College, I completed a double major in English and philosophy and spent considerable time in creative writing courses. After that, I did my PhD work in English, at Duke University, where I simultaneously earned a graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies. During those years, I specialized in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and media, as well as critical theory. I continued to pursue creative work on the side and, gradually, noticed my initial interest in fiction transform into a related interest in game design and new media art. Then, just prior to my faculty appointment in the English department at the University of Chicago, I received a two-year Mellon postdoctoral teaching fellowship in new media (also at UChicago). During that time, I did additional research in television and game studies, while also laying the institutional groundwork for the game lab that Melissa Gilliam and I launched officially in early 2013. In those years, I began to collaborate closely with artists and designers, as well as researchers in medicine, health, and even economics.So, as you can see, especially in recent years, I’ve made my way through numerous disciplines. But the study of American literature, culture, and media has always served as a through-line for all of my teaching and research. Since I’ve already said a fair bit about my research, I’ll add something about how this trajectory has shaped my teaching. I see my courses falling into three broad categories: 20th and 21st century American literature, media studies, and theory-by-design. Even as there is plenty of overlap, these groupings map onto my own overarching interests in English and American Studies, media studies and digital aesthetics, and creative writing and game design.In the first category, American literature, I would put courses such “Terrorism in Fiction, Film, and Media” and “American Hauntings” that I taught at Duke University. I would also add recent University of Chicago courses such as “New and Emerging Genres” that focused exclusively on American literary and media productions from the last 25 years.In the second category, media studies, I would include courses that I began teaching at the University of Chicago such as “Virtual Worlds,” “Critical Game Studies,” “New Media Theory,” and “American Television.” I would also include a PhD seminar that I co-taught with visiting professor Eivind Rossaak entitled “Network Aesthetics | Network Cultures.” This last course was especially exciting to me since it attracted graduate students from English, Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, and even the social sciences.In the third category, theory by design, I would include courses that combine either literary texts or critical theory but culminate in substantial creative productions. For example, I taught a course on “Digital Storytelling” in which students studied the history of electronic literature, interactive fiction, and narrative-based games and, for their final project, produced collaborative digital stories of their own. Another experimental course that fell into this category was “Transmedia Games: Theory and Design.” I co-taught this course with visiting professor Sha Xin Wei. The group read critical theory throughout the quarter but, instead of requiring seminar papers, we asked our students (both advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to create modules of an alternate reality game for their final project. This course felt truly transdisciplinary. In fact, we cross-listed it in English, Creative Writing, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Visual Arts. We included students from all of these disciplines and several others.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?In a couple of my recently published essays, and pieces I’m working on at the moment, I’ve been starting to think through the concept of so-called gamification. Gamification is the use of game mechanics in traditionally non-game activities or processes. It continues to be a major design component of social media, marketing, job training, and motivational apps. Since we're talking about the future here, I can use a fuzzy affective word (with a grateful nod to Sianne Ngai) and say that I’m interested in the implications of gamification for contemporary America. I think of it not merely as a design strategy but as a form that economic, social, and cultural life takes in the present. Games, both as metaphors and as forms, have become such a major part of everyday life and our cultural imagination. I find this development, by turns, to be both encouraging and insidious. Gamification is bound up, in different ways, with the contemporary state of behavior modification, disciplinarity, education, entrepreneurship, social disparities, and a leisure economy. In many ways, this paradigm marginalizes or even forecloses play (which could not be more different from leisure) in the present. As Ian Bogost insists, it is really necessary to make a sharp distinction between "gamification" and "games." So the obsession with gamification makes me curious about games that challenge or exceed this way of doing business. Even more so, I’m drawn to forms of play that are still possible or emergent in the early twenty-first century. This includes avant-garde and DIY videogames, transmedia experiences, and even non-digital play activities. It involves spaces where play unfolds without the structure of a formalized game. Or atmospheres in which game rules and objectives are minimized or peripheral. Or situations in which game rules serve as creative constraints. In any case, given the interdisciplinary nature of the UT-Austin American Studies department, I’m really eager to think through some of these fledgling ideas when I arrive.The other project I’m really excited about is a large-scale alternate reality game that I’m planning with Melissa Gilliam and our Game Changer Chicago Design Lab for July and August. Well... I think “excited” is the right word. But you know, that excitement is bundled up with various forms of apprehension, contemplation, flexible optimism, expectancy, intensity, stress, preoccupation, collaborative experimentation, over-planning, logistics, and various other components that are part of a long-term, collective thought. The basic idea is to follow up on a pervasive learning game called The Source that we ran last summer for 140 high school youth over 5 weeks. We’re planning to have even more players this year, to take greater risks with collective and emergent storytelling, and to embed more robust evaluation mechanisms into our research. But the game is essentially an interactive science fiction narrative that teams of youth will traverse while solving challenges, puzzles, and mini-games linked to science and technology themes. They will also be learning some new media skills. To explain it another way, this upcoming game will be a transmedia scavenger hunt with a robust narrative and concrete learning outcomes. Every aspect of the project is transdisciplinary and, by necessity, there are so many moving parts. Fortunately, we learned a fair bit about how to run this kind of game last summer. So, while remaining excited about the future, I hope to be mindful of our past experiences and incorporate them as much as possible into the current design process.

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Okay, last one's a bit of a curve ball, and is the hardest question we ask: if you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?Ha! And here you may regret that you employed a game metaphor (or a sports metaphor) with "curve ball." Since I study games, I'm interested in both making sense of and playing with the rules of any game. For instance, the game we've been playing (you know, "5 Questions") includes a few rules. The first one is that (in a shot reverse shot manner) you ask me a question and I offer an answer of adequate length. The other implicit rule is that there will be exactly 5 questions total.But rules are meant to be tested and broken. So, if you're willing, let's try a slightly different game and see what happens. I'll take a cue from one of my college mentors, David Foster Wallace, who would sometimes have interviewers answer their own questions as an opening to less predictable results. So: If you had to describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?I think the best way to describe American Studies is metaphorically, because its interdisciplinary breadth resists simple definition and evocative imagery seems particularly suited for the task... so I would say that American Studies is an ivy plant: a breathing organism that reacts to its environment, at once clinging to and burrowing into ostensibly impenetrable walls to create, ultimately, a vast and complex network of life. I guess that means I'm using imagery that relates to your work, albeit unintentionally!Your "network life" formulation brings to mind something that a couple of non-Americans (who nonetheless very much belong to this discussion) had to say about the study of America. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call America a "special case." Their account of America tends toward the romantic, drawing heavily on the sociopolitical potential of the 1960s and 1970s, while also reaching back to texts such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass. They do capture something of the crucial kinetic energy that's implicit in your sentence. For them, America is so fascinating because it brings together the tree and the channel, the root and the rhizome (to continue with your floral imagery), as well as disciplinary and control societies. It becomes a generative figure for thinking both structural and historical paradox.In any case, whatever American Studies was in an area studies configuration or an earlier interdisciplinary moment, I look forward to seeing how this constellation adapts to emerging concerns that include transnational theory, practice-based research, new media studies, and the digital humanities — just to name a few. At a personal level, I'm perpetually grateful to this field for sustaining my own promiscuous intellectual appetites and transdisciplinary curiosities. And I'm very much looking forward to engaging with the UT-Austin American Studies community during the coming academic year.

Happy Spring Break!

We're taking a 1-week hiatus for Spring Break, but we'll be back in mid-March with more content for you folks. We hope you find some time to chill and enjoy the [slightly] warmer weather.

“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.” - Willa Cather

Announcement: SXSW Film Picks

With SXSW looming over us, we've curated a list of films that are of interest to folks who live beneath the American Studies umbrella. If you have a moment during spring break and want to catch a flick, check these out! If you don't have a badge or wristband, tickets will go on sale about 15 minutes prior to screening time if there is still seating available. The single admission ticket price is $10 for all screenings. Need more details? Check out SXSW's official website.The 78 Project Movie (documentary)The 78 Project Movie is a road trip across America to make one-of-a-kind 78rpm records with musicians in their hometowns using a 1930s Presto direct-to-disc recorder. With one microphone. One blank disc. In one 3-minute take. Along the way, a kaleidoscope of technologists, historians and craftsmen from every facet of field recording - Grammy-winning producers, 78 collectors, curators from the Library of Congress and Smithsonian - provide insights and history. In Tennessee, Mississippi, California, Louisiana, the folk singers, punk rockers, Gospel and Cajun singers in the film share their lives through intimate performances, and find in that adventure a new connection to our cultural legacy.Above All Else (documentary) 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G3eb6TOS9E4]

One man will risk it all to stop the tar sands of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from crossing his land. Shot in the forests, pastures, and living rooms of rural East Texas, "Above All Else" follows David Daniel as he rallies neighbors and environmental activists to join him in a final act of brinkmanship: a tree-top blockade of the controversial pipeline. What begins as a stand against corporate bullying becomes a rallying cry for climate protesters nationwide.As in his previous film, "Mississippi Chicken", director John Fiege puts a human face on a complex case of social injustice, capturing the South in all its drama and contradiction.All American High (documentary)

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In 1984—before cell phones, the web, and reality TV, a young director set out to document a year in the life of a typical California high school. The result was “All American High”, an unusually honest and humorous look at 80’s teen life. The Hollywood Reporter found it “fascinating and insightful” and The Village Voice called it “a laugh out loud documentary”. Told through the eyes of a visiting foreign exchange student, the film presents an uncensored view of senior year in the era of big hair, punks and parachute pants. Thirty years after they lived it, some of the film’s original subjects return in new interviews, revisiting one of the most memorable chapters in their lives.

Born to Fly (documentary)

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Elizabeth Streb is not just a choreographer; she is an extreme action architect. "Born to Fly" traces the evolution of Streb’s movement philosophy – she pushes herself and her company from the ground, to the wall, to the sky. The film asks: Why is one person’s circus another person’s dance? One dancer’s gorgeous flight another dancer’s stunt work? Why call it art? Why choreograph it? Why have a role in performing it?How might a film inspire a broad audience, hungry for a more tactile and fierce existence in the world?

Cesar Chavez (feature)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FZDXXFtJwLM]

Directed by Diego Luna, "Cesar Chávez" chronicles the birth of a modern American movement led by famed civil rights leader and labor organizer, Cesar Chavez. Torn between his duties as a husband and father and his commitment to bringing dignity and justice to others, Chavez embraced non-violence as he battled greed and prejudice in his struggle for the rights of farm workers. His triumphant journey is a remarkable testament to the power of one individual's ability to change the system.

Deep City: The Birth of the Miami Sound (documentary)

"Deep City" is an inspirational story that explores the early days of soul music in Florida, the era’s pioneers and their lasting contributions to the broader American musical landscape.During the mid-1960s, producers Willie Clarke and Johnny Pearsall masterminded Deep City Records. Both from the streets of Miami, they honed the business and musical skills learned in college and went on to change the face of soul music in Miami and eventually the country by creating the first black-owned record label in Florida."Deep City" delves into the life and times of these groundbreaking producers, their label, the artists they spawned and the remarkable era in which they accomplished it.For No Good Reason (documentary) 

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Johnny Depp pays a call on his friend and hero Ralph Steadman and we take off on a high-spirited, raging and kaleidoscopic journey discovering the life and works of one of the most distinctive radical artists of the last 50 years.

The Frontier (feature)

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Sean, a retired literature professor and civic activist, writes a letter to his estranged son, Tennessee, a ranch hand. Tennessee is uncertain how to respond, but knowing he should see his aging father, he decides to go home. Tennessee arrives just as Nina, Sean’s personal trainer fresh off a bad breakup, accepts Sean’s offer to move in and help him write his memoirs. The tension between Sean and Tennessee is ever-present. As Sean and Nina work, Tennessee avoids his overbearing father with fix-up projects around the house. One evening after Nina has gone out, Sean and Tennessee find themselves alone in the house for the first time. No longer able to avoid each other, the two men must talk.

Joe (feature)

A gripping mix of friendship, violence and redemption erupts in the contemporary South in this adaptation of Larry Brown’s novel. Directed by David Gordon Green ("Prince Avalanche", "Pineapple Express") the film brings Academy Award® winner Nicolas Cage back to his indie roots in the title role as the hard-living, hot-tempered, ex-con Joe Ransom, as he meets a hard-luck kid, Tye Sheridan ("Mud", "Tree of Life") who awakens in him a fierce and tender-hearted protector. Joe and Gary forge an unlikely bond. When Gary finds himself facing a a great threat, he turns to Joe and sets off a chain of events that play out with the brutal inevitability of tragedy and the beauty of a last stab at salvation.

Ping Pong Summer (feature)

The year is 1985. Rad Miracle is a shy 13-year-old white kid who's obsessed with two things: ping pong and hip hop. During his family's annual summer vacation to Ocean City, Maryland, Rad makes a new best friend, experiences his first real crush, becomes the target of rich, racist local bullies, and finds an unexpected mentor in his outcast next-door neighbor. "Ping Pong Summer" is about that time in your life when you're treated like an alien by everyone around you, even though you know deep down you're as funky fresh as it gets.

Que Caramba es la Vida (documentary)

Mariachi is an essential part of Mexican culture. It’s more than just music; it's a lifestyle that views the world from a macho perspective. The business is tough and women are seldom appreciated in this strictly male domain. Nevertheless, a handful of female musicians choose to be Mariachi. Against the backdrop of the folky 'Día de los Muertes' celebrations, director Doris Dörrie accompanies the musicians to their performances on the streets of Mexico and throughout their daily lives. When the Mariachi women sing about death, love and poverty, the heavy issues of everyday life in Mexico City appear slightly more bearable.

Road to Austin (documentary)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-NVoVn2tdwI]

"Road To Austin" chronicles how Austin, Texas became the Live Music Capital of the World, dating from 1835 to present. The film highlights 1800s Austin, the psychedelic movement, Armadillo World Headquarters, and numerous iconic musical inflection points that shaped the American musical culture of today. Vintage photos, posters, and footage are presented to a soundtrack that truly inspires! The film story line weaves towards an all-star live performance featuring Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, Delbert McClinton, Eric Johnson, Ian McLagan, Joe Ely, and 40 other Artists led by Musical Director, Stephen Bruton. Kris Kristofferson dedicates this film to Stephen Bruton.

Take Me to the River (documentary)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NKAU17l61YE]

"Take Me to the River" is a feature film celebrating the inter-generational and inter-racial musical influence of Memphis in the face of pervasive discrimination and segregation. The film brings multiple generations of award-winning Memphis and Mississippi Delta musicians together, following them through the creative process of recording a historic new album, to re-imagine the utopia of racial, gender and generational collaboration of Memphis in its heyday. Featuring Terrence Howard, William Bell, Snoop Dog, Mavis Staples, Otis Clay, Lil P-Nut, Charlie Musselwhite, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Yo Gotti, Bobby Rush, Frayser Boy, The North Mississippi All-Stars and many more.

5(ish) Questions: A Conversation With Dr. Ramzi Fawaz (University of Wisconsin - Madison)

On the first Friday in February, Dr. Ramzi Fawaz, braving the relative cold, came to UT from Madison, where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin, to give a talk on queer theory and comic book superheroes. Called “Flame On!: Nuclear Families, Unstable Molecules, and the Queer History of the Fantastic Four,” the talk is drawn from Dr. Fawaz’s upcoming book, The New Mutants: Comic Book Superheroes and Popular Fantasy in Postwar America. After he left Austin, we spoke by phone about comics, the importance of interdisciplinarity in both scholarship and teaching, and about American Studies as the study of how people dream what it means to be American.In your talk at UT, you discussed The Fantastic Four and their contribution to queer literary history in the 1960s. How did you come across this project? That’s a great question. There is a combination of personal and intellectual reasons that I approached this project. The personal one that I always tell is that when I was thirteen I went through this incredibly difficult period of my own life, as someone who was coming out as gay, who was ostracized, made fun of, bullied, etc., and, during this period of difficulty, I discovered the X-Men. I began reading this comic book that was about mutant outcasts, that was racially diverse, and I felt this incredible kind of identification with these characters that I never found in any other form of popular culture. As I grew older and started exploring American Studies in college, I became really interested in the kinds of questions that we ask in this field, where we don’t really think about how “I” personally relate to this object but, rather, what the conditions are that allow me to relate to this object in this way.The questions grew wider and wider over time, and I began to ask myself if I was the only person who identified in this way? Or was there something about the comic book that speaks to people who feel like outcasts? Through a series of research projects at the undergraduate level, I began to explore the history of the X-Men, and that history lead me back to the sixties, and the array of comics, including the X-Men, that exploded out of that moment, some of which of course included the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, the Avengers, and many, many others. I began to realize that, in that moment, comic book creators began to think critically about readers like myself, and geared their comic books to people who did feel like they were out of the social norm, not merely people who identified as gay or lesbian, but also people who felt politically out of step with the conservatism of the US after World War II. This is fascinating to me.So, there’s kind of a personal history that lead me to a larger, intellectual set of questions, and I think as a scholar, invested in popular culture more broadly, I fell in love with this question as an undergrad: why would fantasy forms, why would popular cultural forms that seemed so escapist, so distinct from politics, why would they be the site in which people were doing political work? This fascinated me, as someone who felt a commitment to radical, left wing ideals, but also didn’t necessarily express those commitments through direct-action politics but rather through the forms of reading and interpretation. I started to ask why would that be one of the sites where people do that political work? Comics seemed like one of the great objects through which people engaged the political.Is this work you picked up as a graduate student?The kernel for this work began as an undergraduate. I was lucky as an undergraduate to be trusted enough by some of my professors to be asked to be their teaching assistant. I was an assistant for a class taught by Kathleen Moran, who was the chair of American Studies at the time at Berkeley. The class was on consumer society, and she asked me to give a lecture on comics and consumerism. She encouraged me to do a reading of a text rather than a history, so I ended up doing this reading of the X-Men storyline “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” which some people at UT actually read as a chapter, and we talked about how this storyline was about anxieties of consumption. After I gave that talk, Moran told me “I think you nailed it, and I think you need to pursue this as a project.”Little by little I was lucky enough to win small research awards, I spent a summer at Yale as an undergraduate research fellow, and I began writing about comics in a scholarly way. When I became a graduate student at GW, I was still very committed to the project, but I wasn’t sure what my method would be. I took an extraordinary seminar with Robert McRuer, which was all about cutting edge interventions in queer theory, and I remember being very transformed and galvanized in that seminar, and it led me to realize that queer theory was going to be one of the primary nodes of intervention that I was going to make in this project, one that had not been done with the object of superhero comics. So, little by little I developed this project, and in graduate school it kind of took shape theoretically, and that was kind of the genealogy of the project.Truly, I was lucky to have undergraduate mentors who said, you know, “go ahead,” and then to work with graduate mentors who said, “if you’re going to run with this project, let’s make it as precise, as theoretically innovative, as possible.” I think that’s part of the reason that the book has gained so much traction, even before its publication, is because the people I worked with knew that I knew that it wasn’t merely a history of comics, but rather about locating superhero comics in this larger conversation about liberal and radical politics in the post-war period. So that’s been my broader commitment.In that project, are there particular scholars whose work has been really helpful for you?Absolutely. I’ve said this many times, but I think a really transformative moment for me was when I read the work of Julia Mickenberg in Learning from the Left. I think Julia modeled for me what it mean to take a particular object, in her case children’s literature, and place it in this really deeply elaborated and thickly researched network of relationships. She not only thinks about children’s literature as a text, but also its relationship to its creators, its producers, its sites of circulation, and then to the broader political context in which it was circulated. So that allowed me to think about an object that was similarly denigrated or thought of as kind of escapist, meaningless, not intellectually worthy, and, instead of thinking of it that way, to actually place it in a context. I also think the work of people like Christina Kline and Melani McAlister, in Cold War Orientalism and Epic Encounters, also do really extraordinary interdisciplinary work in talking about the relationship of political theory and policy to cultural production. Those are some of the books I feel most moved by in American Studies.I also have to say that, over the course of this project, I was so galvanized not only by queer theory, but also by the uptake of political theory in queer studies. I read some unusual work that would not normally fit into this realm; I read a lot of work by people like Hannah Arendt. I read the work of political theorists like Linda Zerilli, sociologists like Debbie Gould writing about ACT UP and its radical politics, and I read an unbelievable range, in addition to the comic books themselves, of actual primary sources from the radical politics of the sixties and seventies; the Port Huron statement, the radical statements of women’s liberation, gay liberation. All of these together allowed me to see that comic books were not merely entertainment, they were a way to theorize politics and people’s relationship to public life through fantasy figures. I love being able to engage a broad range of work that normally wouldn’t be thought of as political theory. Those thinkers were really central to me.And I’ll admit to you something that really blows my mind: when I look back it, I read something like 3,000-4,000 pages of comics for every chapter that I wrote. And I wrote seven chapters. I would not only read and reread the actual thing that I was going to look at, let’s say The Fantastic Four or Green Lantern/Green Arrow, I would read many comics that were coming out at the same time, and the political discourse of that moment. So I tried to invest comics in this kind of wider language that’s going on. I was influenced from many, many different directions.I was going to ask you a question about interdisciplinarity, but you’ve already answered it…I’m actually happy to elaborate on that, if you want to talk a little bit more about it.Okay. So, what role does interdisciplinarity play in your research and your teaching?This is a question I really grapple with all the time, because I think that interdisciplinarity is not only an incredibly difficult and almost utopian achievement that no one ever really gets to – a utopian horizon you could say – but it’s also something that we have to do, in order to elaborate some of the thickness and complexity of the objects that we’re looking at. So I would say that I think that there are two primary ways that interdisciplinarity has been crucial for me. The first is that interdisciplinary thinking does not merely allow me to turn to other bodies of knowledge, like political theory, like history, like sociology, to do my work. Rather, it actually allows me to reconceive the objects I’m approaching as objects that operate in all those fields. So the example that I use is that I had never, when I first encountered comics, thought of them as political theory. I never thought that, for some readers, comics could be conceived of as a literary formation that theorized their relatoinship with the political. And so when I started to read political theory, I had these moments where I thought, “Wow, comic books are actually doing good work in political theory. What would it mean to acknowledge that while comics are not directly political theory, they’re doing political theorizing?”So on the one the hand interdisciplinarity allows me to think certain research objects as inhabiting multiple valences. And that’s been really, really crucial for me. It’s allowed me to link comic books to much broader discourses, and that’s been huge. I think that the second way that interdisciplinarity really affects my research and writing is that it has allowed me to think about objects as living things. What I mean by that is that I don’t look at an object like a comic book and say “let me now just do a close reading of it as on object.” I think this object can be close read, but whatever I glean from the close reading  is actually coming out of the moment in which its situated.Like, what Julia Mickenberg does in her work, I’m trying to think about what was the way in which this text was embedded in a whole host of lived relationships, fans, creators, cultural critics. While those are not always my primary sites of analysis (there are other scholars who focus primarily on fans, or who focus primarily on cultural production) I can never actually do a close reading that doesn’t think about all of this network of relations. So interdisciplinarity allows me to think multiple nodes of relations working at once, but it also allows me to access multiple knowledge basis that elaborate each one of those nodes. So, if I want to say something about politics, I need to know about political history. If I want to say something about creators, I need to be able to study production history. And to actually read the discussion across those fields.A good example from my teaching is, when I teach a certain class, what I want to do with the literature I’m offering my students is to actually reproduce, in a microcosm in the classroom, the lived experience of people who might have approached a certain text. So I want to actually create the conditions under which something emerged. I teach a class on sexual politics and queer literature since the seventies, and I teach a week called Gay San Francisco. We read Armistead Maupin’s famous serialized novel Tales of the City, and we watch the academy award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and then we read accounts of living in San Francisco in the 1970s, from queer people joining the gay liberation movement. So those three texts, read together, produce a moment. My students read texts, and they don’t simply read Tales of the City on its own, they think, “Wow! At the same moment people were reading this serialized narrative in the San Francisco Chronicle, they were also voting Harvey Milk into office, they were going gay bars, they were going to meetings of the gay liberation movement.” There’s a feeling that this literary text had a life that intersected with the daily, quotidian lives of queer people and their allies in San Francisco at this moment. To me, that’s true interdisciplinarity.And it’s not only strict historicism, it’s actually getting them to read across media. They take all these things for granted, they have to say “well, one of these things is a novel, one of these is a documentary, these are personal accounts, they all do different work, but they all help us understand a moment or a zeitgeist.” So that’s how I approach interdisciplinary thinking, and that to me is what allows a student to do critical thinking. Not just to read it and analyze it on its own, but to say, “this meant something, in the world, and this is why its important for me to understand it in a holistic, multidimensional sense.”Do they respond to that?I think my students have an extraordinary response to that. I had a student who came to me the other day, this is an example that helps explain what I’ve been describing. I’m teaching a class called American Fantasy in the 20^th Century, and we just did a week on pulp science fantasy, in the twenties. We read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, we talked about Tarzan, and then I gave a lecture on the ways in which this historical moment was when American masculinity was in crisis, and American imperialism was also trying to articulate white masculinity to support imperialist projects. I introduced Gramsci’s concept of the “historical bloc,” this idea that its not that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a book and it was popular. He wrote a book that happened to hit at a moment when all of these issues were rising in American culture and the book was popular because it articulated all those things about masculinity and imperialism. I had a student who came to me and said “that idea of the historical bloc blew my mind. I never thought that the reason that something becomes popular is because they’re all these historical realities that are happening simultaneously with it.”To me, that nails it. That’s why I do interdisciplinary work. I want my students to understand that the reasons why certain stories become popular, gain traction, circulate, are because of a complex set of relationships between historical conditions and, not only do we need to know those conditions, we need to gain theoretical architecture, we actually need to know the language of theory to be able to step out of those historical conditions and understand the structures in which they were operating. That requires multiple levels of thought, and I think that students respond so beautifully to that, because they feel a sense a light-bulb turning on when they approach these texts in an interdisciplinary way. They’re not reading them just to get through a class, but because they want to gain an understanding of why other people think the things they do. I do believe there’s an incredibly positive response that my students have to this way of thinking. It’s also just exciting for them. They’re excited they get to approach objects that wouldn’t be thought of a serious, scholarly objects. They gain a sense of independence, of having a stake in intellectual work when they can study the things they love in a serious way. I think that excites students.That’s really great.We have a good time. In my lecture course, we start with a children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and a couple of students told me, after my lecture, they said “that lecture transformed everything about this book for me. I never thought of it as a serious kind of intervention in modernity.” They said, “when I purchased this book, I kind of rolled my eyes, because, I thought, why am I spending $25 on a children’s book, what could I possibly learn out of this?” And it was only by reading scholarship that contextualized The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the history of American consumerism, modernity, the turn of the century, that my students said “wow, I could understand this book was doing so much cultural work.” So that made me really happy. Interdisciplinarity allows students to see the expansive nature of the endeavor we are engaged in in cultural studies. By the way, this is so crucial to the humanities at this moment. People are arguing that the humanities is useless, that it is not training people for the real world, and in fact doing that interdisciplinary work makes clear to students that this kind of analysis is about the real world. It’s about how we live, how we dream, how we tell stories, and how those stories shape our material lives. When they see that, arranged in front of them, they are elated.I want to switch gears back to the specific project. I’m curious if you have an elevator pitch for the talk that you gave at UT. Could you give it?Absolutely. The talk that I gave last week, “Flame On” explores some of the ways in which the Fantastic Four reinvented the American superhero from its previous figuration as a figure of white, masculine vulnerability, to one of intense vulnerability, body transformation and mutation. The way in which the comic book did that was by imagining a kind of fantastic family formation, four characters who appeared to be normative social types, mother and father, two bickering children, or, you might say, the child and the uncle. It imagines what would happen if the normative family was transformed into mutants, their bodies literally absorbing some of the textures and objects of the material world of the 1950s and early 1960s. Part of what I try to do in this talk is to trace the comic book’s investment in presenting these normal bodies as monstrous or mutated, to actually try to imagine what it would mean to take pleasure in those mutations, to want to be out of the ordinary, to want not fit into the nuclear family. And so I argue, essentially, that the comic book is an extended visual meditation on forms of non-normative or queer embodiment in the 1960s.Because of that, in the talk, at least, I argue that this allows comic books to be conceived of as a kind of proto- or early form of gay and lesbian literature, even though the comic book, because of the constraints of its historical moment, never actively identifies any of its characters as gay or lesbian. My point is to say that superhero comic books in this moment reject this broader zeitgeist to identify non-normative or non-traditional ways of inhabiting things like family form, gender and sexuality, which ultimately became the purpose of radical gender and sexual movements the 1970s and after. So that’s part of what I’m doing in the talk. I’m also trying to lay bare the way comic books functioned, at this moment, as a really elaborate primary source in the history of sexuality, as an object that actually shaped popular conceptions of sexual cultures as they got articulated to more radical politics, the politics of the New Left, with gay liberation. I don’t know if that does that trick, but that’s my elevator pitch.I’m sort of curious, going off that last little bit, does comics as a form plays into this, because this seems specifically attuned to that, but also into your work more generally?This is actually one of the big struggles that speaks exactly to interdisciplinarity in my project. My project is about comic books, but it’s not a traditional comics studies book, meaning that it does not spend an extensive amount of time debating about the formal qualities of comics, which is a major, and rightly so, of comics studies. One of the things I’m trying to do is balance a study of the aesthetic work of comics and their political content. Rather than try to make universal claims about the formal qualities of comics,  comics, I’m specifically interested in taking up those moments when formal elements articulate to specific transformations and political realities. Right now I’m writing an article for Radical History Review that is called “Queer About Comics,” in which I actually develop an argument about the critical relationship between the aesthetics of comics and their political understanding of gender and sexuality.One of the claims I make in the article is that the serialized nature of the visual form of comics, the fact that you get multiple panels that represent the same bodies or objects in different ways, actually models Judith Butler’s conception of gender as a copy for which there is no original. One of the things that I point out is that this idea, that you get repetition with a difference, creates the possibility for endless transformation of bodies in the in-between space between panels. If, as Judith Butler argues, gender unfolds as a series of performances where every new performance has the chance to rupture what came before, I argue that that structure literally describes the visual architecture of comics themselves.So I argue that, while, not all comics take advantage of this possibility, comic books from the 1960s and 1970s that were interested in articulating radical forms of non-tradition embodiment constantly use that quality of comics to take bodies to a place where they’re always switching, from one gender, one sexual position to another, across panels. So that’s one good example of where I activate form or formal structure, to do this work. An example from the talk that you saw, was that I discuss that panel where Johnny Storm looks like a normal boy, and in the next panel he’s on fire, his body is turned into flame. It’s extraordinary—we get the repetition of his body, with a difference. And that difference is articulated to a difference in gender and sexual performance, because the first panel says, “There’s only one thing I love more than cars,” and you expect him to say “girls,” but in the next moment he thwarts the direction of heterosexual desire towards his own body, and he says this is what I love more than anything else, essentially, “my body on fire.” This in an amazing moment in which the actual, formal structure of comics is articulated to questions of non-normative gender and sexuality.The final question, and we ask this to everybody, is that if you could define American Studies in one sentence, what would that sentence be?I think that American Studies is the exploration of the numerous ways in which people dream about what it means to belong. I think that that’s what it is. I really do. It’s about the ways in which people tell stories about how they fantasize being American, about belonging to something, whether it’s a nation, or a social movement, or a family or kinship, and that’s what we do in American Studies. And I think that dreams are by their very nature interdisciplinary. The way we dream or fantasize about how we belong, comes out of so many different areas, that it specifically requires an endlessly interdisciplinary method to study how people fantasize themselves into existence.