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.

Conference Preview: Keynote Address by Dr. Claire Jean Kim

Only one more day to wait! This Thursday and Friday, the American Studies Graduate Student Conference will take place at the Texas Union. Click here for a full schedule.

Today we’d like to offer you a special invitation to our keynote address by Dr. Claire Jean Kim (Political Science and Asian American Studies, UC Irvine). Dr. Kim’s address is entitled, “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Michael Vick” and will take place on Thursday, April 4 from 6:00p.m. – 7:30p.m. in NOA 1.124.

Here’s a little more on our keynote speaker:

Claire Jean Kim received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.  She is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on racial politics, multiculturalism, social movements, and human-animal studies.  Dr. Kim’s first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity.  She is completing a second book, Multiculturalism On Edge: Contesting Race, Species, and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which examines the intersection of race and species in impassioned disputes over how immigrants of color, racialized minorities, and Native people in the U.S. use animals in their cultural traditions. Dr. Kim has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters.  She has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.  Dr. Kim is an Associate Editor of American Quarterly and the co-guest editor with Carla Freccero of a special issue of American Quarterly entitled, Species/Race/Gender, forthcoming in September 2013.

Hope to see you there!

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!

Announcement: Women’s and Gender Studies Conference Today and Tomorrow!

Today and tomorrow, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies presents “The Feeling Body—Feeling the Body, ” the 20th Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies Conference. This graduate student run conference offers undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to share their research on issues in women’s, gender, and/or sexuality studies. The theme of this year’s conference addresses the relationship between feminist theory,  affect, and the body.

The following comes to us from the conference program:

Affect is an emerging new direction in feminist theory, generating fascinating conversations around the role of the body and feeling in producing knowledge. How are other disciplines writing about and engaging with affect? How might this new direction shift how we think about the role of the body in academic research? The panelists will examine these topics, exploring the ways in which the body shapes knowledge.

The conference will feature a keynote address on Friday at 3:30p.m. by Dr. Ann Cvetkovich (Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at UT) in the SAC Ballroom.

Also, be sure to check out our AMS grad students presenting at this year’s conference! Masters student Tynisha Scott will present her paper, “Imagining Freedom: On the Vestiges of Enslaved Black Women, Pleasure, and Sexuality” at 3:00p.m. today in SAC 3.116, and Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Kelly will present her paper, “Negotiating (Im)Mobility: Solidarity Tourism in Occupied Palestine” at 1:30 Friday in SAC 1.118.

Hope to see you there!

Grad Research: Visiting the “Food, the City, and Innovation” Conference

The following dispatch comes to us from MA student Natalie Zelt:

This past weekend the Food Lab at the University of Texas co-hosted with Boston University two days of round table panel discussions on food, global urbanization and innovation. The sequel to a conference hosted at BU last year, each of the six panels were composed of an interdisciplinary array of academics, practitioners and innovators who were charged with answering one of six questions: What is Food? Do we need to rethink how we produce food? How are cities building resilient food systems? What will our urban food map look like? What is innovation as it relates to our food system? Food Start-ups: who, what, where, when, why?

The interdisciplinary nature of each panel was extremely valuable to the conference overall as was the wealth of food thinkers and doers working in and around Austin. Placing architects next to sociologists next to urban garden managers next to artists and historians forced the majority of the panels to acknowledge the impact of both concrete problems (like frequent technological malfunctions of EBT machines when trying to adopt food stamps to a farmers market) and larger questions about the role of urban space in agricultural production.  Strangely enough the most raucous panel proved to be on Saturday morning. Having the founders of three of Austin’s largest organic farms and food cooperatives, Johnson’s Backyard Garden, Farmhouse Delivery and Greenling, in one room with Chris Romano, the Global produce procurement team leader for Whole Foods Market, led to seemingly friendly but loaded conversation about economic growth in food innovation in Austin that was punctuated by lively additions from the historians on the panel.

Only once, in the panel charged with spending two hours answering the question “Do we need to rethink how we produce food?” did the conversation fall into what felt like a tried feedback loop of food issues dialogue: continually reweighing environmental concerns against socio-economic issues of access and fair practices. Perhaps because, by 2013, the answer to the question under these panelists purview is clearly “yes.” Moderator John Doggett, did his best to push the conversation toward a centralized end, but unfortunately the group concluded with a frightfully complicated charge:  the need to outline America’s definition of “good food” for the future.

Finite solution forthcoming.

For a full list of the participants see: http://foodincubator.wordpress.com/conference/

Announcement: UT American Studies at ASA in Puerto Rico

Like many of you, several members of our department will be traveling to Puerto Rico this weekend to present and participate in events at the annual American Studies Association meeting. If you’ll be there, be sure to check out their panels!

John Cline

Panel: Musical Movements
Paper: “Familiar Islands: The U.S., the Bahamas, and the Permeable Boundaries of ‘Folk’ Music”
Saturday, November 17 / 2:00 p.m. – 3:34 p.m. / Room 102B

Eric Covey

Panel: Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Explorers: 150 Years in Africa
Paper: “‘Swallowed by the East?’ Or the Red, White and Blue on the Nile?”
Friday, November 16 / 10:00am – 11:45am / Room 209B

Dr. Janet Davis

ASA Committee on American Studies Programs and Centers: Revising and Developing American Studies Curricula/Programs in the Twenty First Century
Friday, November 16 / 10:00am – 11:45am / Room 204

Daniel Gerling

Panel: Sanitary Imperialism: U.S. Efforts to Clean and Beautify Puerto Ricans
Paper: “Tropical Prophylaxis: U.S. Envoys of Continence in Early 20th Century Imperialism”
Friday, November 16 / 10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. / Room 104B

Andrea Gustavson

Caucus: Visual Culture: Pictures in Motion: American Photography and Empire
Paper: “Snapshots and Scrapbooks: Private Photographs, Public Feelings, and American Empire during the Cold War”
Saturday, November 17 / 12:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. / Room 208B

Jennifer Kelly

Panel: Liberalism in the Service of Empire: Past, Present, and Future
Paper:  “The Politics of Response: Justice Tourism in Palestine and Israel”
Thursday, November 15 / 10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. / Room 202A

Lily Laux

Panel: Pedagogies of Empire
Paper: “ Teaching Texas: Education as a Practice of Empire”
Saturday, November 17 / 8:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m. / Room 208C

Dr. Julia Mickenberg

Insights from Outside: Approaches to the Study of Americans Abroad
Thursday, November 15 / 10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. / Room 102B

Rebecca Onion

Caucus: Childhood and Youth Studies: Space, Place, and Privilege: New Geographies of Childhood
Paper: “Childhood, Animality, and New Geographies of Extinction in the 1970s”
Saturday, November 17 / 12:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. / Room 204

Dr. Naomi Paik

The Violence of Life Itself: Progress, Design, Beauty, Humanitarianism
Thursday, November 15 / 12:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. / Room 203

Elissa Underwood

Caucus: Critical Prison Studies: State of the Field: Critical Prison and Carceral State Studies, Current Scholarship and New Directions
Saturday, November 17 / 2:00 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. / Room 103B

Jeannette Vaught

Panel: Animal Dimensions of American Empire: 1830-2012
Paper: “A Saddlebag Full of Syringes: Rodeo’s Technoscience Frontier”
Sunday, November 18 / 12:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. / Room 207