Announcement: UT American Studies Receives $100K Endowment to Support Food Studies Research
The good news continues! Last week, UT AMS department chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt announced that the department has received a $100,000 Presidential Fellowship from Les Dames D'Escoffier Dallas Chapter to support dissertation research on Texas, women, and food culture.
LDE is an organization of professional women who work in the food, fine beverage, and hospitality industries; Dr. Engelhardt says that their support, the first of its kind for the department, will "play a leading role in increasing the stability of the department into the future, inspiring other such endowments as we work with development and other donors." Additionally, it, in combination with the recent merging of Texas Foodways into UT AMS, "will help put UT Austin on the map as a leader in food studies in the humanities."Thanks to LDE's Dallas Chapter for their support!For the full press release, click here.
Announcement: Grad Symposium Features Torin Monahan
Join the American Studies Events Committee this Thursday, March 27 from 5:00 to 7:00 in Garrison 1.126 as they host a talk by Dr. Torin Monahan that incorporates our 2013-2014 departmental theme, SECURITY/INSECURITY. Dr. Monahan's lecture will focus on his current NSF-funded collaborative research project that analyzes data-sharing practices through Department of Homeland Security "fusion centers."
Here is an abstract of his talk, titled "Beyond Counterterrorism: Data Fusion in Post-9/11 Security Organizations":
The voracious collection and promiscuous sharing of data define contemporary security organizations. While the seemingly disembodied, intelligent, and passive nature of new surveillance techniques appears to be less prone to bias or abuse, such techniques are infused with interpretive actions that afford racial, religious, and political profiling. Drawing upon empirical research on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “fusion centers,” this talk will explore the politics of emergent security paradigms. Fusion-center officials propose to fight distributed networks of criminals or terrorists with similarly distributed digital networks that overcome traditional jurisdictional boundaries. Through their intelligence activities, though, fusion centers perform an erasure, or a selective non-generation, of data about their own practices, thereby creating zones of opacity that shield them from accountability. This is concerning particularly because fusion centers are rapidly becoming primary portals for law-enforcement investigations and the model for information sharing by security agencies more broadly.
Dr. Monahan's talk will take place on Thursday, March 27 from 5:00 to 7:00 in Garrison 1.126. We look forward to seeing you there!
Announcement: Dr. Julia Mickenberg Publishes Article in Journal of American History
The week of good news continues here at AMS::ATX! Congratulations are due to our very own Dr. Julia Mickenberg, who recently published an article, "Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia" in the Journal of American History.
Here is a taste of the article, which considers the importance of Russia in the struggle over suffrage in the United States:
Russia became a crucial foil in the battle over woman suffrage. As a product of the first revolution inspired by socialism, “new Russia” came to represent the very notion of internationalism. Thus it loomed large for many progressives, including feminists, whose struggle was “decidedly internationalist” in orientation—and closely associated with socialist agitation—beginning around 1890. Russia served as a powerful framing device for considering the nature of women's citizenship in the United States, for reasons specific to Russia's gender politics and its place in the U.S. imaginary. For a significant number of American women—few of whom could rightfully be called Bolsheviks—the Russian revolutions in 1917, and the “new Russia” that emerged from them, became touchstones for a cosmopolitan, social democratic vision of female citizenship in the United States that encouraged American feminists to set their sights well beyond suffrage. A belief that Russian revolutionaries were taking practical measures to transform women's place in society opened space for American feminists to conceive a new model of citizenship that encompassed not simply political rights but also social rights, economic security, and, to use the philosopher Etienne Balibar's formulation, a new kind of subjectivity that results from being citizens rather than subjects.
For those of you with access to journals through a library website, check out the full article here.
Announcement: Dr. Shirley Thompson Awarded Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship
We are delighted to share with you the news that Dr. Shirley Thompson, Associate Professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, has been awarded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship. These fellowships "assist faculty members in the humanities, broadly understood to include the arts, history, languages, area studies, and zones of such fields as anthropology and geography that bridge the humanities and social sciences, who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest."Dr. Thompson says she will use the fellowship to study economics and law more systematically and to confront the theoretical and methodological challenges of her current book project, "No More Auction Block for Me." Here is a little more from Dr. Thompson on her current research:
An interdisciplinary scholar trained in cultural history, literary criticism, critical race theory, and cultural geography, I have been inspired by my previous research on nineteenth century New Orleans, the largest slave market in the U.S. South, to ask broader questions about the gruesome intersections of race, law, and economics. I believe that this avenue of research can illuminate the history of racial disparity and also help us understand wider, seemingly unrelated macro- and microeconomic processes. In the past decade and a half, many historians and cultural studies scholars have detailed the connections among slavery and other capitalist ventures, particularly within the FIRE industries of finance, insurance, and real estate. As an important foundation of local, national, and global economies, the slave market, according to Walter Johnson, Stephanie Smallwood, Ian Baucom and others, has also shaped individual and collective identities in powerful ways. I will explore the accounts and critiques of capitalist logics issuing from the knowledge and experience of those subjects who had functioned as capital—the enslaved and those persons whose blackness has continued to serve as a “badge of slavery” even after formal emancipation. In other words, I aim to ask Karl Marx’s rhetorical figure, the “speaking commodity,” what she knows about the vagaries of the capitalist economy in general and the property relation in particular.
Congratulations, Dr. Thompson!