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!
Tag Archives: American Studies
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.
Undergrad Research: Honors Thesis Symposium TODAY
Research week at UT begins next week, and the American Studies honors thesis writers will be presenting a year’s worth of hard work at our annual symposium on Wednesday, April 17, 5:30-7:30pm in Burdine 214. Below are some brief remarks about each thesis and each presenter. Come by to see the great work these students have done!
Conference Preview: American Nightmares
The conference is two short days away, and today we bring you our last post in a series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference: a panel entitled “American Nightmares.”
Photograph by Andrew Jones
- Sara O’Neill, “Longing for the Zombie Apocalypse: Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and Contemporary America”
- Susan Quesal, “The John Wayne Gacy House as Metaphor for America”
- David Juarez, “‘I was Gerard’: Saintliness, Sorrow, and Shame in Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard”
- Kayla Rhidenour, “The Dream of a Soldier, The Promise of a Nation”
- Regina Mills, “The Indescribable and Undiscussable in George Washington Gómez: The Trauma of An American Dream”
This panel will be the final panel of the conference and will take place on Friday, April 5 from 4:00p.m. – 5:30p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room. This is definitely one you don’t want to miss!
Conference Preview: The American Dream and the Politics of Promise
Next up in our series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference is a panel entitled “The American Dream and the Politics of Promise.” This panel will feature papers on political theory and rhetoric as they relate to the American Dream.
Photograph by Andrew Jones
- Curt Yowell, “The Rhetoric of Poverty and Payday Loans”
- Joe Roberto Tafoya, “Watching and Learning From the Shadows: Political Sophistication of Latina/o Young Adults”
- Jeff Birdsell, “Advancing the Student as Investor Metaphor by Reconceptualizing the ‘Career Student’ to Advance the American Dream”
- Duncan Moench, “How Social Democrats can Change the American Dream: A Political Communication Perspective”
This panel will take place on Friday, April 5 from 10:45a.m. – 12:15p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room.
Conference Preview: The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary
Today we continue our series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference with a look at another one of the great panels we have in store–”The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary.”
Photograph by Andrew Jones
“The American Dream and the Spatial Imaginary” is composed of papers that consider the relationship between space, place and literature, art, activism, and identity construction. This panel will take place on Thursday, April 4 from 2:15p.m. – 3:45p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room.
- Vinh Nguyen & Alma Salcedo, “Post-Antebellum Spaces and Places at the University of Texas at Austin: From Lost Cause to Student Activism, Plot of the Land and Sites of Resistance”
- Paul Gansky, “Creosote and Electricity: Telecommunications, Art, and the United States”
- Julia Traylor, “‘I Wanted My Tiara, Damn It’: Drag Royalty in Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties”
- Valerie Henry, “Cattle or Wheat: Spatial Imaginings and the Production of Local Knowledge in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don”
- L.E. Neal, “The Music of Class Mobility: Identity Construction in Emerging Western Swing and the Texas Centennial”
This conference is free and open to the public. Conference registration (and refreshments!) begin Thursday April 4 at 1:00p.m. in the Texas Union, 3.128 Sinclair Suite. Stay tuned for more sneak peeks!
Conference Preview: The Dream in Popular Media
Today our series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference continues with”The Dream in Popular Media,” a panel that will feature commentary on the American Dream and representations of alternative pasts and hopeful futures as expressed in popular music and comedy.
Photograph by Andrew Jones
“The Dream in Popular Media” panel will feature the following presenters and papers:
- Jen Rafferty, “‘If the South Woulda Won’: Reimagining the Southern Past in Contemporary Country Music”
- Sequoia Maner & Yvette DeChavez, “‘Build Your Fences, We Diggin’ Tunnels’: Remixing the American Dream”
- Carrie Andersen, “‘I Find Human Contact Repulsive’: The Pain of Political Discourse and Community in Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm“
This panel will take place on Friday, April 5 from 2:15p.m. – 3:45p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room.
Conference Preview: American Homes, Consumer Dreams
Good morning, Austin and everywhere!
This week on AMS:: ATX we are excited to feature a series of sneak peeks at the panels that will take place at the upcoming American Studies Graduate Student Conference on Thursday, April 4 and Friday, April 5 here at UT Austin. The theme for this year’s conference is “Reimagining the American Dream,” and we have an incredible line-up of grad student presenters and faculty moderators who will weigh in on everything from power lines and western swing to payday loans, refrigerators, and the zombie apocalypse.
Photograph by Andrew Jones
First up, we present to you a panel entitled “American Homes, Consumer Dreams,” which takes on the complicated relationship between the American Dream and the domestic landscape of houses, appliances, waste, and work. This panel will take place on Friday, April 5 from 9:00a.m. – 10:30a.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room
- Natalie Zelt, “Self-Preservation: Identity, Food Politics and the American Dream in Mark Menjivar’s series ‘You Are What You Eat’”
- Laura Jacquelyn Simmons, “General Electric’s Monitor Top Refrigerator and the Impossible Dream Kitchen of Tomorrow”
- Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa, “Trash Talk: Disposable Tableware and the American Dream”
- Sherri Sheu, “Salvaged Visions of the American Masculinity: Restoration Hardware, American Mythologies, and the Post-Fordist Economy”
- Jocelyn Wikle, “Cinderella and Cinderelliot: Gender Differences in Adolescent and Young Adult Housework”
This conference is free and open to the public. Conference registration (and breakfast!) begin on Friday, April 5 at 8:00a.m. in the Texas Union, 2.102 Eastwoods Room. Stay tuned all week for a look at the great panels coming to UT next Thursday and Friday!
Alumni Voices: Matthew Hedstrom Featured on ShelfLife@Texas!
Today over at ShelfLife@Texas, UT American Studies alumnus and historian Matthew Hedstrom shares details about the evolution of “Post-Protestant spirituality” and his book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2012).
The following comes to us from the interview with Hedstrom up at ShelfLife@Texas, in which Hedstrom discusses his inspiration for the project and what he hopes his readers will get out of The Rise of Liberal Religion:
I was a graduate student in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, looking for new ways to think about religion in the modern United States. Basically, I wanted to think about religion as a phenomenon not just of churches or other formal institutions, but as a part of culture more broadly. Also, in a related way, I wanted to think not just about official theology and ritual, but about religious sensibilities—about spirituality.
As I was thinking about all these things, I came across a set of sources about religion and reading in the 20th century and thought, “Ah ha! This is how I can access the stories I want to tell.” So I began studying the history of religious books and reading in the 20th century, because I quickly came to see this as one of the most important ways that religion happens outside of church, especially in a consumer-oriented society like ours.
…
I hope my book raises questions for my readers about the power of consumerism in our society. I hope my readers will come to see that the categories “religious” and “secular” are not very easy to disentangle—that psychology and spirituality, for example, often blur. And I hope my readers will look at religious liberalism as a significant religious tradition in the United States, one with strong ties to Protestantism but not limited to Protestantism. Much of the vitality in modern American religious life is in what might be called post-Protestant spirituality, and I want my readers to learn to see the contours of this phenomenon and to understand where it came from.
