Announcement: core and affiliate American Studies faculty explore relevance of 'Gone With The Wind'

Mark your calendars, everyone: on Wednesday, October 1 at 4:00pm, professors Daina Ramey Berry, Jacqueline Jones, Randolph Lewis, Thomas Schatz, and Coleman Hutchison will be participating in a panel discussion exploring Gone With The Wind's contemporary relevance, 75 years after its premiere in Atlanta.Dr. Lewis is a member of our core faculty, while Jones, Schatz, and Hutchison are American Studies faculty affiliates.The panel, held at the Harry Ransom Center, is a part of a series of events this semester occurring alongside the center's impressive and comprehensive Gone With The Wind exhibit, open until January 4, 2015.For more information, see the event announcement here.

Alumni Voices: Carly Kocurek

Back on September 12 here at UT, the department hosted a great talk by one of our recent graduates, Dr. Carly Kocurek, who discussed "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ms. Pacman." Before her talk, we sat down with Carly to discuss her current research as well as her time at as a graduate student at UT.What will you be talking about today?Today I will be talking about the nostalgia for what gets called the golden era of the video game arcade, which I position roughly between 1972 to 1985 (there's some wiggle room in there). There's been a real vogue for new arcades and archiving projects both formal and informal, so I'm talking about that, but I'm also talking about what's at stake in this resurgence of interest in arcades, and what people are actually trying to preserve or longing for when we they talk about a kind of arcade that many of us didn't experience firsthand. I'm positioning all of this within the context of the current culture wars of gaming.How did you get interested in this topic? Is it part of a larger project?I'm wrapping up my book, which doesn't yet have a title (that's the last thing that happens in that process), but it's about the classic arcade and the creation of the gamer that happens around the classic arcade. Even though that term is used later, from the 1990s forward, there's already an emerging idea in the 1970s of who plays games. The word "vidiots" is used -- there's actually a little magazine called Vidiots -- that was published for what we would now call gamers and was sold through arcades. I got interested in that because I was interested in gender and games and the assumptions about who plays games and why. I wondered, when did we start assuming that women don't play games, and why did this happen? If we look at media history, especially when we look at how many different media are considered feminized, for example film or television (there's strongly gendered traditions there that we generally think of as feminine) it appears peculiar that we think of games as being something that is "for boys." Looking at that early coverage of games, I wondered, what are we saying about games, who are we saying they are for, why are we worried about who games are for? I argue that there are a lot of factors that influence this, including the Cold War and the Space Race and the technological anxieties of the time, as well as the ongoing crisis of masculinity in the U.S. in the twentieth century and especially after World War II. There's also the story of the coin-op industry itself, which was trying to look respectable and really struggled -- still does -- with looking respectable. They saw these young, clean-cut men playing games as a good way to stake their claim for respectability, saying, "Look, we're doing good things for the kids!" But what happened is that we have all these images of boys playing games, which is powerful and narrows down who designers think they are catering to.There's something at stake here that is important and needs an intervention, needs to be exposed. I think there's a lot of good in gaming, even though we often hear about the terrible misogyny and racism in the gaming world. The gaming industry employs a lot of artists and there's a lot of emphasis on design and teaching social behaviors and imparting important skills which people value and love, and that's why people are so passionate about gaming. But what does it mean when that is not open to everyone? That is the real question.How does your work build on what you did as an American Studies graduate student at UT?This work is an update and expansion of what was at one point the final chapter of my dissertation. It has been a few years, so that work has moved and changed quite a bit in part because of something I started to notice--the recent revival of the classic arcade, with places like Barcade in Brooklyn. I wondered, how come Dave and Buster's is a place that corporations have events? There's Pinballz in Austin, which is a really wonderful arcade, and my neighborhood in Chicago has an arcade called Emporium.This all started when I was working on my dissertation at UT. My original question was, why do we think games are for men and boys? I could ask people why they think that now, but there's actually a historical process that helps us understand this. It's not a "natural" occurrence. I was also really interested in what young women are doing with pop culture and how they are responding to and through pop culture.Do you have any advice for current graduate students about how to get the most out of their time at UT?For me, it was really important to have a hobby or something that I was spending a lot of time on that didn't have to do with school. Sometimes that was volunteer work, sometimes it was sports, it just depended. I think it made my writing a lot better, because I spent a lot of time freelancing and blogging and things like that. I also think it's good to have a backup plan, and that's not just because the job market is terrible, which I think everyone gets told all the time, but also because you might realize that you want to do something else. I think keeping in mind that you are actually a person and not just a graduate student is really great. When I was going through the death spiral of the job market my last year, I was making a plan for what I might do instead. For me, I would have gotten a game design certificate at ACC and looked for a job in the industry. That's not the right fit for everyone, but that would have been an okay path for me. We have alumni that teach at really amazing high schools, or run really excellent nonprofits or make documentaries or work for the state department. All kinds of things. Thinking about how you would apply your interests later is a good thing to do.  

Announcement: Dr. Jeff Wilson ("Professor Dumpster") to deliver lecture Friday, Sept. 26

Please join the Department of American Studies for a talk by Dr. Jeff Wilson, also known as Professor Dumpster, who has garnered widespread publicity in the past few weeks for an ongoing project - The Dumpster Project - for which he has been living in a 36-square foot dumpster. For "The Ultimate Conversation Box: A Dumpster," Dr. Wilson will be describing how he links his academic research, teaching, and community activism with issues of sustainability as well as with his role as a dean at Huston-Tillotson University. Wilson will also give a "tour" of his dumpster/home.Here's what a recent piece in The Atlantic had to say about him:

Professor Wilson went to the dumpster not just because he wished to live deliberately, and not just to teach his students about the environmental impacts of day-to-day life, and not just to gradually transform the dumpster into “the most thoughtfully-designed, tiniest home ever constructed.” Wilson’s reasons are a tapestry of these things.

[...]

Not long ago, Wilson was nesting in a 2,500 square foot house. After going through a divorce (“nothing related to the dumpster,” he told me, unsolicited), he spun into the archetypal downsizing of a newly minted bachelor. He moved into a 500-square-foot apartment. Then he began selling clothes and furniture on Facebook for almost nothing. Now he says almost everything he owns is in his 36-square-foot dumpster, which is sanctioned and supported by the university as part of an ongoing sustainability-focused experiment called The Dumpster Project. “We could end up with a house under $10,000 that could be placed anywhere in the world,” Wilson said at the launch, “[fueled by] sunlight and surface water, and people could have a pretty good life.”

[...]

For Professor Dumpster, the undertaking is at once grand and diminutive, selfless and introspective, silly and gravely important, even dark. “We bring everything into the home these days,” Wilson said. “You don’t really need to leave the home for anything, even grocery shopping, anymore. What’s interesting about this is it’s really testing the limits of what you need in a home.”“The big hypothesis we’re trying to test here is, can you have a pretty darn good life on much, much less?” He paused. “This is obviously an outlier experiment. But so far, I have, I’d say. A better life than I had before.”

The talk will take place Friday, September 26 at 4:30 in Huston-Tillotson University's AL Auditorium at 900 Chicon Street.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies, the Graduate Program in Community and Regional Planning, and Plan II Honors. We hope to see you there.

Announcement: Deborah Willis Lecture This Thursday

On Thursday, September 18, Deborah Willis (NYU) will give a lecture as part of this year's Flair Symposium at the Harry Ransom Center. The Flair Symposium theme for 2014 is Cultural Life During Wartime, 1861-1865, and Dr. Willis will discuss the early years of American photography alongside a reading of iconic moments in Gone With The Wind whilst examining the role black history played in producing such a controversial and celebrated cultural phenomenon. The lecture will take place in Jessen Auditorium in Homer Rainey Hall at 6:30pm.