Announcement: congratulations to our 2013 graduate degree recipients!

We recently featured some of the fascinating theses from our graduating honors undergraduates, and we’d like to take a moment to congratulate some of our graduate students who will be graduating this spring and summer. Way to go, everybody!

Greg Seaver, MA
WAKE-UP ARTISTS: MAXIMALIST VOICE IN THE NONFICTION OF JAMES AGEE, LESTER BANGS, AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Sherri Sheu, MA

Becky D’Orsogna, Ph.D.
YOGA IN AMERICA: HISTORY, COMMUNITY FORMATION, AND CONSUMERISM

Tony Fassi, Ph.D.
MANUFACTURING RUIN

Katie Feo Kelly, Ph.D.
ORGANIZING THE AMERICAN DOMESTIC INTERIOR: 1978-2010

Rebecca Onion, Ph.D.
SCIENCE AND THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, 1900-1980

Announcement: summer is upon us!

We’re very happy that, following a few final exams and papers, summer vacation is nearly upon us. Like last summer, we’ll be blogging at a more leisurely pace. But you will see the return of a popular feature that we began back in summer 2012: Stories from Summer Vacation. Stay tuned for reports from the UT American Studies community about how folks are spending their well-deserved months of respite (or, in reality, a few months to catch up on work, prepare for fall classes, polish up drafts of books and articles, read for qualifying exams, write dissertations – and occasionally relax!).

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

- Henry James

Undergrad Research: Lauren White on Soul Food

Today we are thrilled to feature an interview with AMS undergraduate student Lauren White. Her thesis project looks at media representations of soul food. We sat down with Lauren and chatted about her research and future plans–enjoy!

Tell me a little about your research.

I’m looking at various media surrounding the neo-soul food movement, thinking about things like the representation of soul food in movies, music, and television. I decided to look at examples from the media, like the film Soul Food and episodes of Boondocks. Soul food is an important part of American culture–it is something that you couldn’t study anywhere else. My thesis project and the paper I am presenting at the conference were originally a part of the Food Studies Project. They needed a blog writer. I was originally going to write about something else, but I had presented at Undergraduate Research Week about soul food, and they noticed that and encouraged me to expanded it from there.

What has been your favorite class in American Studies and why?

Southern Cultures with Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt. It was a great opportunity to find out about southern traditions, where they come from, where they are practiced, how they have changed. In that class I got to do an ethnomusicology project on the banjo which has led me to want to pursue graduate school in ethnomusicology, or perhaps archival work related either to ethnomusicology or gastronomy. I would love to work at an institution like the Smithsonian and do work on jazz and popular culture.

Faculty Research: Elizabeth Engelhardt and Randy Lewis Featured in Liberal Arts Video Series

Although the school year is winding down, we still have news to share with our loyal readers! The College of Liberal Arts at UT has recently released a slew of video conversations with faculty members across campus, and two of our own - Elizabeth Engelhardt and Randy Lewis – are among those professors who have shared some ideas about their work for the college.

Elizabeth describes her work with food studies (including a brief discussion of iconic Texas restaurants!), and Randy talks about The End of Austin and the challenges confronting the city. All videos are available at the LiberalArtsUT YouTube account here.

Grad Research (?): Featuring the Machine in the Garden Softball Team

For our 150th blog post at AMS :: ATX (!!), we thought it might be nice to show you another side of our department. American Studies graduate students certainly work hard, but we also play hard. Several members of the graduate community band together each spring to play softball in the UT intramural league. Today, we bring you some photos of the Machine in the Garden team, the name (of course) an homage to Leo Marx’s canonical American Studies text. While the team’s record was not one for the books, we had a wonderful time getting out in the sun and working out some of our academic aggression on the field. Enjoy!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

5 Questions with AMS Affiliate Faculty Member Dr. Eric Tang

Today we are thrilled to feature an interview with affiliate faculty member Dr. Eric Tang, Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies and Associate Director of the UT Community Engagement Center.

Dr. Eric Tang, credit by David Woodberry

1. What has been your favorite project to work on and why?

I’m not sure that I have a favorite project. I have different projects that each offer moments of profound reward. I guess, then, I have favorite moments. And those moments are when the exceptions prove the rule: when seemingly unlikely racial alliances explain a community’s resilience; when what seems like social disorganization and disjuncture is in fact the generative force of political movements; when what is misunderstood as hopelessness, despair and ambivalence among oppressed peoples is rather an expression of a profound political critique.

2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy or contemporary society?

My work looks at the poetics of displacement–from third world refugees to the African American communities throughout Austin. Why poetics? Because the violence of displacement necessarily produces among the displaced a specific way of knowing the world–a theory and a form. Some scholars refer to this as a methodology of the oppressed. My goal as a scholar is  to ensure that contemporary society does not squander their vision/theory/method.

3. What projects, people, and/or things have inspired your work?

Far too many to name. Historian Robin Kelley was my dissertation chair and my mentor since undergrad days, so his influence is evident in my work. But it depends on what I’m working on. If it’s the question of justice and its limits, then I’ll be reading Sadiya Hartman. If it’s New Orleans we’re talking about, then it’s the dearly departed Clyde Woods. If it’s 1980s New York City, then I am turning straight to the lyrics of Public Enemy. If I’m focusing on Austin’s genteel apartheid, then it’s the generation of black residents I’ve recently interviewed who recall the city’s unmistakable history of Jim Crow (alive and well today, they insist).

Alumni Voices: Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Asst. Prof. of American Studies, Ramapo College

Today we share with you some insight from Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey. Dr. Gronbeck-Tedesco graduated from the department with a Ph.D. in 2009.

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

The work I do right now evolved out of the nourishing range of experiences I enjoyed as an American Studies graduate student and temporary citizen of Austin, Texas.  UT introduced me to an invigorating intellectual atmosphere where I could explore many facets of humanistic study.  At first, the flexibility of American Studies can be frustratingly amorphous, with its oft-cited lack of consensus on the query, “What is American Studies?” (and outsiders’ persistent question, “What is it not?”)  But as an interdisciplinary, malleable form of study, American Studies continually demands reinvention of itself through its refreshing breadth and creativity.  The program allowed me to tailor my scholarly interests into a set of paradigms and methodologies that still govern my work today.  Classes on Cuban history, the American Left, the African Diaspora, U.S. foreign relations, and on race and ethnicity in the United States helped me produce my own definition and working model of American Studies, which I took with me on the job market, inscribed onto syllabi, and crammed (if uncomfortably in parts!) into my dissertation cum book manuscript.  American Studies at UT gave me the resources and peer/mentor support to travel to Cuba to conduct research and form a community of scholars and friends that continue to shape my personhood today.  And Austin was a place where I politically matured by joining activist organizations that organize on behalf of immigrant rights, compulsions I keep up on a weekly basis in Queens, NY.  UT American Studies is a thriving community that still dazzles on the ASA stage.  I consider myself lucky to have been a part of it.

Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?

Explore, explore, explore.  Then write a manageable dissertation.  It seems to me that through this exploration we develop an understanding of the scholarly domains to which we will ultimately contribute.  It’s important to have a sense of where our work fits (in journals, departments, conferences) and where it doesn’t.  The advantage of American Studies is that we can have several options in this respect.   Having a good relationship with your mentors is also key.  I have been in awe of my mentors’ capacity to tirelessly help me well beyond graduation.

I think the most important words of advice I can give is something that I did not learn until I was deep into my degree.  That is to indulge in the vulnerability it takes to unmask and remake the hidden assumptions and understandings you carry into the program.  This is intensely personal, much more than I realized until later.  We are intimately invested in our knowledge production because it is inseparable from our profound sense of selfhood.  Breaking down time-tested barriers and defense mechanisms is a discomfiting but unconditional part of the liberatory process of education.  Knowing this at the outset, I think, is advantageous in graduate school.