Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis Teaches Course on Public Scholarship

We hope you folks are enjoying your summer so far! As we mentioned, AMS :: ATX is on a summer posting schedule so we can catch our breath a little bit, but not everyone is in vacation at the moment. Take a look at this brief note from Dr. Randy Lewis about a course he's teaching this summer on public scholarship:

The College of Liberal Arts asked me to create a new summer graduate seminar that began last week. “Doing Public Scholarship” is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar that will explore the quickly evolving landscape of public scholarship, which is a broader vision of what we often know as public humanities work. Focusing on the creative, intellectual and professional possibilities now emerging in the field, this intensive summer course is open to all graduate students willing to work in a fast-paced, collaborative context. Using a praxis-based approach that emphasizes doing as much as discussing, the course will culminate in a joint project that enables students to appreciate the transformative potential of public scholarship in the digital age. In addition to providing a crash-course in public scholarship skills and concepts with intellectual, creative, and job market benefits, this course will examine how public scholarship can serve a vital function in the democratization of knowledge. Including but not limited to OA journals, digital humanities projects, applied research initiatives, public intellectual blogs, academic podcasts, and oral history archives, such public scholarship allows academic knowledge to reach and cultivate new audiences. Ideally, public scholarship creates reciprocal relationships between universities and communities, serving to answer the question asked in 1939 by social scientists Robert S. and Helen Lynd: “Knowledge for What?”

Happy summer!

We're officially shifting to summer vacation here at AMS :: ATX, so we'll be publishing content at a more leisurely pace than we do during the school year. We will have new content for you, however, so keep checking back, dear readers.

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The End of Austin Issue 5 Launches

We are pleased to announce that issue 5 of The End of Austin is now published.Featuring the work of current UT American Studies Ph.D. candidates Brendan Gaughen and Jeannette Vaught, as well as Adam Tallman, David Villarreal, Megan Coxe, Andres Lombana Bermudez, Jack Murphy, Derek Sayer, Riley Triggs, Jonathan Silverman, Adrian Mesko, Monty Jones, Álvaro Torres, Daniel Perera, Jonathan Lowell, Emily Mixon, and Joy Luther, this issue addresses topics like Slacker 25 years later, shared services at UT, flooding in Onion Creek, the F-1 track, weirdness in Austin, cedar fever, and more.2014 has been an exciting year already for the project. Having surpassed 50,000 unique page views, the site continues to gain momentum as an invaluable source for conversations about Austin's changing identity. This year, we've been featured in a variety of national and international press outlets, including British Airways's High Life Magazine and Bavarian Public Radio's Bayern 2 for an hour-long feature about Austin - not to mention UT's own The Daily Texan.Members of the The End of Austin editorial board were also asked by the University of Texas to speak at the UT Chancellor's Council Annual Meeting on May 2. Randy Lewis, Sean Cashbaugh, and Carrie Andersen gave a well-received lecture to nearly 200 donors about the project, the field of American Studies, and what they anticipate of Austin's future.We hope you enjoy this issue, available here - and please share it with anyone you know who may be interested in Austin's metamorphosis.

Alumni Voices: Kimberly Hamlin Publishes First Book

Hearty congratulations to Ph.D. alumna Kimberly Hamlin, assistant professor of American Studies at Miami University, for publishing her first book, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America. From Eve to Evolution has just been reviewed in Nature, and you can read that review here.From the University of Chicago Press's page for the book:

From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American women’s responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin reveals how a number of nineteenth-century women, raised on the idea that Eve’s sin forever fixed women’s subordinate status, embraced Darwinian evolution—especially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man—as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis.
           
Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their enthusiasm for evolutionary science with their commitment to women’s rights, including Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt Gamble, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These Darwinian feminists believed evolutionary science proved that women were not inferior to men, that it was natural for mothers to work outside the home, and that women should control reproduction. The practical applications of this evolutionary feminism came to fruition, Hamlin shows, in the early thinking and writing of the American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. 
           
Much scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing what Darwin and other male evolutionists had to say about women, but very little has been written regarding what women themselves had to say about evolution. From Eve to Evolution adds much-needed female voices to the vast literature on Darwin in America.

For more information about Kimberly and her work, see our interview with her here.