Grad and Faculty Research: UT AMS at ASA!
It's that time of year again--time for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, which will be held from November 6-9 in Los Angeles. This year's theme is “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century," and the program features a number of UT AMS folks. Here's a snapshot of what grad students and faculty from UT American Studies will be presenting at this year's conference:THURSDAY, November 6Anne Gessler, "Second Lines, Creative Economies, and Gentrification: Music Cooperatives in Post-Katrina New Orleans" (Thu. Nov. 6, 4:00-5:45pm, San Pedro). Part of a panel called, "Alternative Economies of Pleasure in Contemporary Southern Working-Class Cultures." Gessler's paper examines the ways in which New Orleans’ black, working-class participatory culture uses music and performance as tools of social critique: second lines parades, for example, have become forums for protesting gentrification of black residents' communities. Specifically, she will argue that contemporary cooperatives have used their city’s long tradition of innovative, egalitarian cultural production to empower working-class New Orleans citizens to alleviate the effects of structural inequality and poverty.FRIDAY, November 7Julia Mickenberg, "Child Savers and Child Saviors: Horror, Hope, and the Russian Famine of 1921" (Fri. Nov. 7, 8:00-9:45am, Santa Anita). Part of a panel called, "Other World(s): Childhood, Nation, and the Price of Feeling Good." Dr. Mickenberg's paper considers the way in which the Russian child became a focal point for humanitarian relief efforts (typically gendered as feminine) and thus offered a socially acceptable vehicle for American women to enter Soviet Russia, through agencies like the American Friends Service Committee. Alongside widely disseminated images of starving Russian children were tales of rosy-cheeked, self-governing, artistic, and socially engaged children to whom the Soviet Union's bright future belonged; "child savers" in Russia were thus, in part, motivated by the notion that the Russian child rescued from starvation might go on to become a child savior.Jennifer Kelly, "Blueprinting Post-Return: Tourism, Pedagogy, and the Work of Imagination in Palestine" (Fri. Nov. 7, 2:00-3:45pm, San Anita). Part of a panel called, "Political Imaginings of Palestine Beyond the Here and Now." Kelly will explore the collaboration between the Israeli organization Zochrot and the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, a Palestinian organization in the West Bank, as they respectively and collectively use tourism to expose Israel’s displacement of Palestinians and imagine futures of decolonized space in Israel/Palestine.Andrew Hamsher, "Controlling Fantasyland: Surveilance and Freedom in Transmedia Storyworlds" (Fri. Nov. 7, 4:00-5:45pm, Santa Monica B). Part of a panel called "We’re Listening: Surveillance Technologies and Non-Private Publics." Hamsher's paper explores how entertainment conglomerates are seeking to exploit the proliferation of branded storyworlds to dramatically expand and normalize datavalliance practices. He focuses on Disney World's new billion-dollar MyMagic+ initiative.SATURDAY, November 8Elizabeth Engelhardt, "Appalachian Food Studies: A Tale of Belgian Waffles and Cast Iron Fried Chicken" (Sat. Nov. 8, 8:00-9:45am, San Gabriel). Part of a panel called, "The Invention of Authenticity: Troubling Narratives of the “Real” Southern Foodways." Dr. Engelhardt will discuss the impossibility of "Appalachian Chicken and Waffles" as well as the usefulness of such an impossible term.Kerry Knerr, "Institutionalizing the Bon Vivant: Reading Empire through Jerry Thomas’s Cocktails" (Sat. Nov. 8, 10:00-11:45am, San Gabriel). Part of a panel called, "Commerce of Pleasure." Knerr will consider early cocktails, mainly punch, as a form that moves through various European colonial contexts. In her paper, she offers a close reading of a particular punch from Jerry Thomas's How To Mix Drinks: Or, The Bon Vivant's Companion (1862) to demonstrate its imperial inheritance through to the American context.Elissa Underwood, "Food" (Sat. Nov. 8, 2:00-3:45pm, Beaudry A). Part of a Critical Prison Studies Caucus panel called "Keywords in Critical Prison Studies I." Using a lively format of words and visuals, the panelists will explore sixteen terms – some ordinary, some unexpected - related to critical prison studies.
Five Questions with Dr. Phillip Barrish
Today we continue our ever-popular series, 5 Questions, where we sit down with American Studies faculty and affiliate faculty members to chat about their research and teaching. Today we bring you an interview with Dr. Phillip Barrish, Professor of English and author of The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011).What has been your favorite project to work on and why?Luckily for me, my favorite project is the one I am working on right now, which has to do with the medical humanities. More specifically, I'm interested in what I'm calling the Healthcare Policy Humanities, or the Healthcare Humanities. A lot of work by literature scholars in the medical humanities has focused on representations of doctors, patients, and the illness experience, as well as on narrative medicine, which has to do with the stories patients tell doctors and the stories doctors tell patients—that is, the patient-doctor interface. I'm really interested in how literature and narrative relate to what could be called the political economy of healthcare, that is, for example the kinds of issues we are grappling with now around Obamacare and the healthcare crisis in our country. How has literature reflected, directly or indirectly, on questions such as who pays for healthcare, who has access to what kinds of healthcare, what is the role of government in providing healthcare? What role do stories, language, and metaphor play in the dynamics of how institutions, individuals, practices, and professional modes messily intersect to produce a healthcare system.There are plenty of excellent books by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists about the historical evolution and current state of the U.S. healthcare system, but I want to look at those issues through a literary lens. (I’m an Americanist so it’s the U.S. context that most interests me, at least for now.) For example, I have an article in the most recent issue of the journal American Literature called “The Sticky Web of Medical Professionalism: Robert Herrick’s The Web of Life and the Political Economy of Healthcare at the Turn of the Century.” I’m currently in the early stages of researching an article/book chapter provisionally called "Healthcare Policy and Dystopian Fiction." Here I’m less interested in dystopian works that extrapolate from the often disturbing implications of cutting-edge developments in medical technology, many of which have to do with reproduction: genetic engineering, cloning, surrogate pregnancy, but also such things as new organ-transplant technology. As fascinating and disturbing as such literature often is, I want to focus on a related but different aspect of dystopian medical imagining—dystopian literature and films that focus at least as much on the seemingly more quotidian issues of healthcare access, distribution, and funding. Two great recent examples are the 2013 movie Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, and Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel, On Such a Full Sea. If anyone reading this interview has additional ideas for texts, I’d love to hear them!How do you see your work fitting in with broader conversations within and outside of academia?Throughout my career, I’ve tried to be conscious of how my scholarly work might speak to issues, tensions, and problems that are important to us today. I think this dialogue is clearest in my current project, because the question of healthcare’s political economy is one that obviously a lot of people are thinking about and debating. Indeed, elections may turn on it.What kinds of projects or people have inspired your work?I went to graduate school in the early 1980s at Cornell, which was known for having a theory-heavy English department. I was fascinated by post-structuralism and by the emphasis placed by post-structuralist literary critics on close reading, which I had come to from a more old-fashioned training in college in formalist close reading. Some of the early people who inspired me in graduate school would be Barbara Johnson at Harvard, who died tragically several years ago from cancer, and Jonathan Culler and Mark Seltzer at Cornell. Since then I've not gone against my training, because post-structuralism still informs my own thinking and reading practices, often in subtle ways, but I've extended my graduate student training into looking at literature in its relation to other discourses and practices in our society. Among American Studies scholars, for example, I love the work of Janice Radway, whom I was able to take classes with as an undergraduate. Not untypically for scholars of my and subsequent generations, I’ve been inspired by feminism, critical race studies, new historicism, cultural studies, queer studies, and affect studies.What is your scholarly background and how does that background motivate your teaching and research now?I grew up in a New York City, middle class, third generation Jewish immigrant family. When I was in college and even my first couple years of graduate school, a lot of my favorite texts were British. For a long time I thought about working in nineteenth-century British literature. But I had a feeling then that I wanted to be able to address the kinds of issues and problems American writers were dealing with in the U.S. context. Ultimately, I went into academia because I felt I was better at it than I was at some other things. I thought I'd go to graduate school for a few years and see if I liked it. I did like it, and here I am.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?It's always hard for me to think beyond my current project, especially when I'm still in the early stages. My mind is so full of different directions in which I might take my current work. So I'm going to have to defer answering that question. Ask me in a couple of years.In one sentence, what is American Studies to you?American Studies means, to me, mutually stimulating disciplinary approaches to issues and histories I care about.
Phillip Barrish is the author of American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995 (Cambridge UP, 2001), White Liberal Identity, Literary Pedagogy, and Classic American Realism (Ohio State UP, 2005), and The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism (Cambridge UP, 2011). His current research explores fictional representations of health-care systems in the United States from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Faculty Research: Interview with Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández
In honor of her recent appointment as the inaugural chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT (MALS), we sat down with Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández to talk about the founding and future of MALS, the unique features of the program, and what Latina/o Studies contributes to scholarship and the community more broadly.Tell us a little bit about the history of the Center for Mexican American Studies and the founding of the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies department. What do you think is important about the work of the Center and Department at UT and beyond?These two questions are actually connected. The Center for Mexican American Studies was founded in 1970 under the leadership of Americo Paredes, who was a public folklorist and conducted interdisciplinary anthropological work. He was a student at UT and trained with J. Frank Dobie, one of the most renowned American folklorists. Another really important person who was here was Jovita González, the first woman to be the president of the Texas Folklore Society. When the Center was founded, the mission was to serve the community through intellectual work, so one of the reasons we are doing all the press about the new department is because we feel we are not just an academic unit but that we have a political and social obligation to communities of interest here in Austin, in Texas, and nationally. When I say "the community" I don't just mean Mexican American or Latina/o communities but wonder instead, what is the responsibility of this department in preparing the state of Texas and the nation for dealing with the exploding Latina/o demographic.I actually think that we have a real opportunity to show that academic departments can help set the stage and problem solve for questions that emerge on the political scene. I'm not saying we have all the answers or that we should be writing policy, but why can't research and teaching inform public debate? Also, why can't the students we train be the people that end up becoming those key decision makers? One of the things I've been stressing in a lot of recent interviews is the value of the degree in terms of training students to be Latina/o professionals. I told a journalist that we're not here to teach people to be Latina/o, that's something they learn how to do on their own. This major, this degree, this program, its emergence as Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, is a recognition of the historic Mexican American population in the state of Texas, of newly emerging Latina/o populations from Central and South American and the Caribbean, and also a recognition of their long term histories. For example, there's a Puerto Rican community in San Antonio--why? Because of military bases. We can link that back to the Jones–Shafroth Act of 1917, where Puerto Ricans were given citizenship and could join the U.S. military to fight in World War I. That's why we have a Puerto Rican community in San Antonio, because of militarization. There are direct correlates between Latina/o migration and historic population and U.S. foreign policy that I think we need to pay attention to. At some level, it is the political, social, and intellectual responsibility of the department to account for these histories. What we can do is provide students a stellar UT education but also give them the additional bonus by teaching them how to be ethical, how to recognize cultural difference so they can be responsible professionals no matter what they're doing. That's where I see the relationship between the MALS department’s public mission and the long-term history of the Center being linked.The thing MALS brings to the table that is different than, say, an area studies model of Latin America where you study Mexico or Chile or the Dominican Republic is that we're interested in the diaspora question, the transit between there and here, "here" being the U.S. What happens here with those populations when, for example, Central Americans live next to historic Mexican American populations or African American population?. How do we account for these social relations? That's what Latina/o Studies helps us do as a nation.How do you see the MALS department growing in terms of research and teaching?We have six faculty now. When we arrive at the optimum number it will be between ten and twelve, very similar to the size of the American Studies department. We'll have a Ph.D. program, because you can't have a research department without a Ph.D. program. One of the things we're interested in is training students in a core discipline as well as the interdisciplinary field. For example, you could do Latina/o Studies and History, or Latina/o Studies and Psychology, or Latina/o Studies and American Studies. What that does is it gives a student formal interdisciplinary training in their field, and it also gives them a foot in a traditional discipline. I think that more and more it becomes critical to make sure students have as many advantages as possible for an ever-shrinking job market, and if we can provide two different kinds of training that are related to each other, then I think our students are going to fare better. The other thing I would say is that we are going to have small cohorts so that we can support our students better monetarily. What that means is that our students will be taking classes in departments like American Studies, like History, like English as a part of their training. On some level, what we're doing is building on core disciplinary strengths across the university at the same time that we're establishing our own individual research program that focuses on Latina/os but with interdisciplinary, qualitative, and quantitative methods.The other thing I would stress at both the undergraduate and graduate level is that we are hiring faculty in the social sciences. One of the unique features of this program will be a quantitative social science training for grads and undergrads if they choose to seek it out, which is really unusual for Ethnic Studies programs. That makes me really excited and proud. We have some classes online for research design in the social sciences and for nonprofit evaluation using statistical methods at an intro level so that someone who may not have taken a Stats class can get their feet wet in quantitative methods. What we need is people trained in demography, in program evaluation, in things methods that have direct social imapct.The other unique aspect of our department is a focus on language and cognition, which refers to bilingualism but not just the Spanish-English binomial. We want to think about how we account for the language usage of, say, Huichol-speaking migrants to the Houston area and the way they re-grammatize their language through English instead of Spanish. How do we talk to students about the fact that migratory processes don't just change economic and political structures but also linguistic structures? What happens, say, when a Huichol-speaking migrant returns to their sending community with the binomial Huichol-English? How do you account for the re-grammatizations that happen as a result of return migration? This is just one of the key issues for our faculty in this concentration. Language is not just about bilingual education. Language is a complicated process; it's how we construct meaning in the world, and Ethnic Studies has something to say about that. Those are the two components I'm most excited about in terms of research. We will be hiring a senior social scientist and that person will fit into some of those budding interests that are being developed in the department.What are some of the collaborations you see MALS taking part in?One of them would be around graduate courses. I think because of the smaller size of the program in terms of faculty, we could potentially share teaching classes and methods classes and students, which I is good. Historically, the Center for Mexican American Studies has funded American Studies students who choose to do a portfolio, so I would say that support won't go away. There will still be opportunities for American Studies students to come over and train in the other unit. I am a 50/50 faculty member, so I think I will serve as a bridge between the units. People ask me why I'm not moving 100% into the new department, and it's because I am an American Studies scholar as much as I am a Latina/o Studies scholar. It's important to keep my foot in both worlds. The American Studies conversation is enhanced by Ethnic Studies, but I also believe in traditional disciplinary training. I see the value in teaching core works as part of the field formation in American Studies. Even though I work in this other field, I see the two projects as being related.What are some of your goals for MALS going forward?One of my concrete goals is to double the number of majors in our classes. Right now we have between 25 and 30, and I want to have 60. We have 948 students total in our classes, and I'd like to end the year with 1800. What's been great about the recent media buzz is that it shows the interest and utility of doing this kind of work. The first question we always get is, "What kind of job am I going to get?" Well, let's look at our students. We have students who are attorneys, we have students who run political organizations, who run nonprofits. They're teachers, they're faculty in institutions, they're business owners, they work in television, they work at the White House. Our students have all these different kinds of career tracks. I think the degree is just as valuable as any other degree, especially if you look at our student placement record.
Undergrad Research: "Exhibiting Austin" Presentations This Tuesday
The amazing undergraduate research just keeps coming! Earlier this week we featured a project by Dr. Steve Hoelscher's Intro to American Studies class, Postcards from Texas, a photo blog that considers the themes of the American Dream and mobility. Today we would like to invite you to attend a series of presentations by students in Dr. Cary Cordova's "Exhibiting Austin" class that ruminate on Austin's diverse history. The presentations will take place at the Austin History Center photo gallery (810 Guadalupe St.) on Tuesday, May 13, from 3:00 - 5:00pm.Here is a description of the project from Dr. Cordova:
Students have spent the semester studying not just the history of Austin, but the collections of the Austin History Center. Studying our local archive has inspired diverse and unique research projects: students have gathered oral histories, composed photo essays, generated economic studies, composed resource guides, and launched fundraiser projects. Their research topics vary widely, but feature examinations in education, the arts, activism, food, transportation, and human trafficking, and include meaningful contributions to Mexican American history, Asian American history, Native American history, Czech history, and LGBTQ history.
Please join us to celebrate the hard work of these students and to share in their excavations of Austin histories.