Faculty Research: Dr. Randy Lewis featured in 'Life and Letters' Magazine for documentary film

Last spring, we posted a dispatch from Dr. Randy Lewis about his travels to Sicily, Italy to screen an ethnographic documentary called Texas Tavola that he directed and produced with Dr. Circe Sturm. We're pleased to also share with you a brand new piece in the College of Liberal Arts's Life and Letters magazine featuring the duo's work on this film, as well as Dr. Lewis's and Dr. Sturm's broader concerns with public scholarship."From Bryan to Sicily: Public Scholars Join Academy to Community" can be read in its entirety here, and here is a quick excerpt:

Sturm and Lewis both come from non-academic families, and this background is a big driver of their passion for public scholarship.“Randy and I have always tried to create work that has an impact as scholarship and is also accessible to broader publics,” Sturm says. “Even with book writing, we’re both committed to writing about complex ideas in such a way that anyone can read it and that the communities that we write about will want to read it and engage with it.”Public scholarship is intellectual work done with a non-academic audience in mind. It can take many forms, from digital humanities and online journals to books and documentary films created for a general public.“Public scholarship is a broader thing that’s trying to transcend this inwardlooking model of higher education and really connect with different kinds of publics and communities out there,” Lewis says. “How do you convert or translate [your academic research] into something that resonates with the people who are actually paying for the University of Texas?”

Grad Research: Jeannette Vaught on teaching the mystique of the cowboy

One of our department's chief strengths is that it gives advanced graduate students the opportunity to create and teach their own small classes for undergraduates. Today, Ph.D. candidate and instructor-of-record Jeannette Vaught relates a fascinating unit she created for her class, "The Cowboy Mystique in American Culture."

By presenting science as a central part of cultural history, I show students how scientific inquiry responds to cultural pressures. In the first unit of my “Cowboy Mystique in American Culture” seminar, I paired selections from Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization about Theodore Roosevelt’s constructed sense of masculinity with “Agassiz,” a chapter from Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club detailing battles between various nineteenth century scientific race theories. To offer a concrete example of how race, gender, and science were entangled with politics, in class we analyzed Roosevelt’s use of the term “race suicide” in his own writings. By the end of the class, students understood that Roosevelt’s valorization of manly virility was deeply tied to emergent scientific anxieties about whiteness in the face of immigration and imperialism. Such transformative realizations eventually led the class to question the cultural pressures that shape current scientific debates, and to learn how to approach them from a historical, not polemical, position. In the Unit wrap-up, several students commented that they'd had to "break up" with TR (he'd been their favorite president!) after they'd learned to turn their critical eye towards his identity. The "Roosevelt as Bad Boyfriend" discussion was fun, for sure, but it resounded with students' developing critical thinking skills.  Music to my ears! 

Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt

Today we would like to say a big, public "thank you" to Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt, who has served the American Studies department and the University of Texas since 2004 and is off to North Carolina to take up the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professorship in Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Engelhardt is a leading scholar in Southern food studies, and since receiving her doctorate in Women’s Studies from Emory University, she has held academic positions at Emory, Ohio University, West Virginia University, and most recently at UT in the American Studies Department and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. In Chapel Hill, she will join the Department of American Studies, one of the first interdisciplinary programs at UNC, which has specializations in American Indian Studies, Global American Studies, Folklore, and Southern Studies.All of us here at AMS::ATX wish her all the best in her new adventure. As Dr. Engelhardt likes to say, she is never happier than when she can write and read with her feet in a mountain stream. We hope she'll get lots of opportunities to take advantage of the mountains and streams of North Carolina. Best of luck, and we'll miss you, Dr. Engelhardt! 

Grad Research: MA student Ashlyn Davis releases book of photography of the American West

We're pleased to announce that one of our MA students, Ashlyn Davis, has edited and published a book of photography with Bryan Schutmaat. Here's what Ashlyn has to say about the book:

The 44 images in Islands of the Blest depict various places in the American West and were taken over a one hundred year period, from the 1870s to the 1970s. The photographers included range from the completely unknown to some of the most distinguished practitioners of the medium--Timothy O'Sullivan, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee for instance. We scoured free public archives state by state for a year, pulling thousands of photographs and spent the summer editing them down to the version presented here. While there are some of the grand landscapes one expects to find in a text about the West, there are also images of its destruction and containment. The book is clothbound, printed on a thick newsprint, and includes a poem by Michael McGriff, a former Michener fellow.

For more information about the book or to purchase a copy, see the publisher's website here.