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).

5 Questions with AMS Afficilate Faculty Member Dr. Jim Cox

Today we are pleased to bring back a favorite feature here at AMS::ATX—-5 Questions! Today’s interview introduces you to Dr. James H. Cox, AMS affiliate faculty member in English and author of the forthcoming book, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico.

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

My most recent project was on American Indian writers who traveled to Mexico and wrote about it and its indigenous population. This was an exciting project because I was thinking about comparative indigeneities, about the way indigeneity is experienced in the United States and Mexico, and how it’s experienced when people are crossing the border as well. I enjoyed it because I was writing about a time period in American Indian writing that has been largely neglected by literature scholars, and overlooked by historians, too. This period falls between the progressive and civil rights eras – it looks like an empty four decades, but the period is actually full of manuscripts and published works that only a few people have studied in depth. The genre diversity within the project is fun as well – I worked with detective novels, worked with plays, which I had never done before, and nonfiction. I was going outside of the more conventional literary genres, reading biographies and memoirs and histories by Native authors.

Additionally, I’ve just started a new project that I’m really stoked about. One of the writers in the American Indians in Mexico project is Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee dramatist who published between 15-20 plays, a book of cowboy songs, and a book of poetry during his life. He wrote about 10 other plays that went unproduced and unpublished. In 1931, he also made an experimental film with a director named James Hughes and with guidance from several fairly well known cinematographers from Hollywood, including Henwar Rodakiewicz. It is a 15 minute film of a day in Santa Fe. When the film was complete, he showed it first to the literary crowd–Alice Corbin Henderson, Spud Johnson–in Santa Fe at that time. It’s a silent movie, and he interspersed it with a poem of his called “Santo Domingo Corn Dance.” There are two dominant images in the film. One is of a huge cross outside a church in Santa Fe, and then there’s a dance by local indigenous people. So I’m going to Santa Fe and the New Mexico historical archives. In particular, I want to know who the dancers are. If the dance in the film is actually the corn dance, then Riggs violated a prohibition against filming it. I suspect it wasn’t, but, if so, I’d like to know how and why Riggs staged it the way he did for the film. I’m also interested in his multicultural conception of Santa Fe at the time: there are Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Anglos, interspersed throughout the entire film; and I’m interested in the images too of the cross and the corn dance and how he’s playing with both of them to convey a sense of the religious identity of this place.

5 Questions with Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt

This week we bring you the next installment in a series of interviews with AMS faculty members: 5 Questions with Associate Professor Elizabeth Engelhardt.

1. What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

My favorite project is always my next project. There is an interesting way that all of the projects lead one to the next. Even as writing a book about Appalachia might on the surface seem really different from writing a book about Southern food, I did the first research on the food project out of a bunch of material I was finding in Appalachia and didn’t know what to do with. So it sort of led me off into then doing the next project. You know, it’s easy to look backward and put a straight line on it, thinking, “Clearly I progressed from this to that.” I don’t think it was a straight line, but I do think that one has led to the other, which is one of the great joys of this particular career.

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

One of the things that I love most about studying food is that there’s knowledge in all kinds of communities, and it has led me into conversations that are really thoughtful and challenging in university classrooms, but just as much in public libraries, waiting in front of a food trailer for someone to hand you food, at festivals or churches or in family kitchens. For me, that is not only one of the challenges of doing the research but also one of the places where I think the things we do in American Studies make real bridges to the communities in which we are living.

I have been increasingly thinking about what it means to do public humanities, where we need to be humble in that process but also where we are better for engaging in that process. I feel like my scholarship is better for the places I get out and talk with communities and sometimes those are communities in the present. Sometimes that is a real-life conversation where you’re sitting down across from each other. Sometimes those are archival communities that I get to listen in on through our historical methods, through our archival methods, and sometimes they’re communities that are best talked about through fiction, where the world of literature is a place where we can find these otherwise lost or subverted connections.

5 Questions with Dr. Janet Davis

Today we bring you another incredibly fascinating and comprehensive interview with one of our illustrious faculty members, Dr. Janet Davis!

What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

My favorite projects – that is a great question and it’s really almost impossible to answer, because I feel like the work that I have done essentially is unfinished because it constantly keeps coming back.  I’ve done a couple [of] projects related to the circus, but they continue to live in ways that are continually surprising…. What I did in [my] first book was to think about the ways in which a cultural form like the circus could help us understand, on the ground, the broader social, cultural, economic, political forces that might seem to be apart from lived experience – but how this community event, this ritual, brought things together in a way that both tells us something about society but also tells us something about how this cultural form changed over time…. The adoption of railroads, national expansion, all of these things played a very direct role in shaping how the circus evolved….

So anyway, this book really became [a means of] thinking about the circus as a way to recast and understand the story of the United States in the 19^th century and the early 20^th century – how we became Modern, essentially.  Thinking about ideas about gender, performance, thinking about labor and foreign policy – I mean how all of these ideas about the self, the other, community, nation, how they all collide in the performances and in the ways in which those performances were received.  AND the actual structure of the business itself, how it played into ideas about the Gilded Age, monopoly formation, cutting deals with railroads for the bigger shows, buying each other out – you know, all of these stories that we know from other settings in American life, like with J.P. Morgan and John Waugh and Carnegie and all of these kind of captains of industry in the 19^th century.  We don’t associate someone like John Ringling or P.T. Barnum or James A. Bailey or Adam Forepaugh in that same list.

5 Questions with Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller

Today, we bring you a discussion with American Studies affiliate faculty member Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, who also holds appointments in the History and Music departments.

What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

I’ve been working on two basic projects. My first book was my dissertation, and I got really into that. And, of course, I have to say that’s one of my favorites because that’s what I’ve spent the most time on. I really enjoyed that book partially because it’s the one that taught me how to write. It’s the one that taught me how to put long-ranging arguments together. I was getting pretty good at – well, okay at – writing the twenty-page seminar paper, but writing a 300-page book was kind of mysterious to me. It wasn’t until I got deep into re-writing after the dissertation and after I was working that I started getting into this kind of long arc of a narrative and long arc of an argument, and figuring out that as a form. As a learning experience, that was really exciting to me.

5 Questions with Dr. Randy Lewis

Today, we bring you another fascinating conversation as part of our “5 Questions” series that brings you up close and personal with our wonderful community here at UT. Dr. Randy Lewis is an associate professor in the American Studies department and also serves as graduate student adviser.

What have been your favorite projects to work on and why?

Really I could say all of them and it would be accurate. I enjoy making music videos as much as writing books in film studies. I like making documentaries as much as crafting new courses. What I like best are the projects that allow for collaboration, something that breaks up the endless sitting and staring that goes into crafting a book, which can make you feel like you’re a forest fire look-out alone in the treetops.

Collaboration is the ideal, but when I work alone, I find a different sort of pleasure. I like trying to pin down something that has never been pinned before. I like trying to describe an idea with as much precision as I can muster. I like trying to account for the ghostly passage of an idea through our collective imaginations.

And I certainly like the process of making something. Like most people with the good fortune to labor in a creative field, I go into a pleasurable zone of suspended animation when I work on something absorbing—time stops, sounds are muffled, and nothing exists except the re-arrangement of words and images on a screen. It may sound like I’m drinking too much cough syrup in the wee hours, but it’s really what psychologists call a “flow” experience. In some ways, Final Cut Pro is ideal for this mindset in which nothing else exists, just you and the screen and an endless puzzle. But you can also get it with a legal pad and a fountain pen—it’s nothing new for people engaged in the creative process.

In this sense, I relate to “process” artists of the seventies: scholarship is a craft in which the process is as important as the product, although the latter gets most of the praise and honor. Maybe I should write a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Bibliography Maintenance. I’m kidding, but only sort of. The process of attentive listening, digging, and sorting makes you who you are. In other words, scholarship should not simply be the insatiable drive for “product” that is easily measured. We should also appreciate how the intellectual process sharpens our ethical, political, and aesthetic selves, and does so in a manner that has subtle but significant benefits for the way we live with ourselves and others.

5 Questions with Department Chair Steven Hoelscher

One of the goals of AMS :: ATX is to connect you with all of the exciting things happening around the Department of American Studies. One way we hope to do this is by introducing you to some of the inspiring and accomplished people we are proud to call mentors and fellow scholars. In our “5 Questions” posts, we want to take a little time to talk with our faculty members about the many places they are coming from and why they do what they do.

Last week I sat down for our very first “5 Questions” talk with Dr. Steven Hoelscher, Chair of the Department of American Studies and Academic Curator for Photography at the Harry Ransom Center.

What is your academic background? How does this inform your work today?

My background, unlike a lot of people in this department, is in a traditional academic field, human geography and environmental geography. My undergrad majors were Geography and Environmental Science, and my MA and PhD were also in Geography. So, in that regard, I’m coming to American Studies after my formal education has been completed. I don’t see that as necessarily a hindrance to me as an American Studies scholar, but it makes me somewhat unusual. It also makes me unusual in the Geography world that I’m as committed to interdisciplinarity as I am to anything “geographical.” But it certainly informed my American Studies scholarship. Issues of landscape, space and place, are part of pretty much everything I do. So, for instance, I’m working on a book about the Magnum photography archive, and the chapter of my book, I believe, will be something called “Magnum’s Geographies Toward a Global Sense of Place.” That’s a very geographic concept with a rather nontraditional source material for geographers.