The E3W Review of Books is hosting a virtual launch event in celebration of the publication of its twentieth issue this Friday, April 17th from 5:30-6:30pm CST. The event will consist of a panel with professors from UT and beyond whose books are featured in this year’s Review. UT students, faculty, and staff are invited to join in celebrating the work of student reviewers and authors!
For information on how to attend the event via Zoom, please contact Nick Bloom (nfbloom@gmail.com).
This evening, UT community members and mental health professionals will present a virtual panel on coping with anti-Asian racism in the time of COVID-19. UT AMS PhD candidate Andi Remoquillo is among tonight’s panelists.
The panel centers on the importance of remembering anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and finding new ways to disrupt these harmful narratives in the present.
The panel will take place over Zoom from 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm CT. Please contact Kelsey Lammy (klammy@austin.utexas.edu) for further information on how to view the panel.
On Friday, March 13th, Dr. Edmund T. Gordon will present “UT’s Raced Geography” as part of the Department of Geography and the Environment’s Geography Colloquium.
Dr. Gordon is a professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and serves as the Vice Provost for Diversity at UT Austin. His talk will discuss how racism, patriarchy, and the white nationalism of the New South are embodied in UT’s campus architecture and landscaping.
The talk will begin at 3 pm in RLP 0.130. Check out he Racial Geography Tour site for further background on Dr. Gordon’s work!
We’re back with our fourth installment of “Five Questions with First-Years!” Today, we bring you Hartlyn Haynes. Hartlyn joins UT AMS with a background in Women’s and LGBTQ+ Studies and research interests in HIV/AIDS memorialization and quotidian surveillance. She’s also a roller derby player with a truly aspirational plan to “support an array of dog-children.” Read on to learn more about Hartlyn!
What is your background, academic or otherwise, and how does it motivate your research?
I received my B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and my M.A. in Women’s and LGBTQ+ Studies from San Diego State University (SDSU). While I pursued my M.A., I also worked at Lambda Archives, a grassroots archive that preserves and teaches San Diego’s LGBTQ+ history. Materials I discovered at Lambda served as the basis for my master’s thesis on quotidian surveillance and homonationalism and sparked an interest in HIV/AIDS memorialization on a broad scale, which I hope to interrogate in my dissertation.
These experiences also deeply inform my pedagogy. When teaching an introductory course on feminist theory at SDSU, I encouraged students’ creative cultural production as a valuable mode of scholarship and attempted to trouble what constitutes “legitimized” forms of knowledge production. Accordingly, I collaborated with the university library’s Special Collections and Archives to include my students’ academic zines in their extensive Zines and Minicomics Collection; this collaborative project offered a way to disrupt historical gatekeeping about whose work can and should be included in the archive.
Why did you decide to come to AMS at UT for your graduate work?
I was struck by the interdisciplinarity of the faculty and the department’s many impressive public-facing projects. To be frank, reading posts from this very blog humanized the department and made AMS at UT seem like a fruitful place to grow as a scholar—yay, AMS::ATX! I was also struck by UT’s vast humanities archives, which have certainly not disappointed! I was excited to learn that scholars like Dr. Simone Browne and Dr. Alison Kafer were also working elsewhere on the UT campus.
I had also been to Austin before and fallen in love with it. As an avid roller derby player and fan, learning that Austin has oodles of roller derby (and that Austinites are really excited about it!) drew me to the city. The river, BBQ, fabulous vintage offerings, live music, and millions of other activities didn’t hurt, either!
What projects or people have inspired your work?
Dr. Simone Browne’s Dark Matters has been endlessly inspiring and models the type of expansive and incisive scholarship that I hope to one day produce. Dr. Inderpal Grewal’s Saving the Security State and Dr. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages have been similarly influential. Dr. Amira Jarmakani—my beloved thesis advisor and mentor (and, honestly, life coach) at SDSU—has published incredible work at the intersections of transnational feminisms, Arab American studies, and cultural studies. I strive to emulate the intellectual rigor and deep empathy and kindness she exudes as a scholar, educator, and tireless student advocate.
What projects do you see yourself working on at UT?
As I mentioned previously, my time at Lambda spurred an interest in HIV/AIDS memorialization, and I am curious specifically about AIDS memorials installed in parks and other public spaces, what sort of cultural work they do, and for whom. I am also curious about the fiscal sponsorship of such sites—thanks to Dr. Alex Beasley’s wonderful Capitalism and Culture seminar last semester, I was able to investigate some of the ways in which globalization, corporatization, and HIV/AIDS memorialization intersect via the sponsorship of biomedical and oil companies, which is a line of inquiry I plan to continue exploring. Knowing that so much scholarship has grown out of serendipitous moments in the archives and elsewhere, I remain open-minded to the fact that this project may (and, surely, will!) grow in a lot of different directions.
What are your goals for graduate school? What do you see yourself doing after you graduate?
My goals for graduate school are to do work I am proud of and be supportive and kind to those around me (and, I suppose, to myself—always working on that one!). While I have long dreamt of pursuing traditional academic tenure after graduation, my experience at Lambda and exposure to other potential archival and curatorial careers (and pragmatism about the current state of the job market!) have certainly piqued my interest, as well. In the same spirit of remaining open-minded, I’m going to say something that allows me to teach in some capacity, someday (maybe?) pay off my student loans, and support an array of dog-children is the general plan.
Bonus: In your own words, what is American Studies?
A disciplinary home of interdisciplinarity, of that which refuses to be bounded categorically or theoretically, and of that which insists upon investigating the overlooked, the playful, and the quotidian—and, critically, puts these in conversation with (trans)national systems of power. I look forward to continuing to revise this definition in the years to come.
On Thursday, March 5, the History Faculty New Book Series presents: A Black Woman’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020), a book talk and discussion with co-authors Daina Ramey Berry (Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professorship in History, University of Texas at Austin) and Kali Nicole Gross (Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History, Rutgers University).
From the event page: “In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.”
The event will begin at 4 pm in GAR 4.100. See you there!
In her talk, “Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State,” Dr. Shannon Speed explores the structural nature of the violence to which indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico are subjected, seemingly at every step. This exploration moves with the women migrants through space, considering how ideologies of gender, race, class and nationality function in conjunction with neoliberal market logics in the violence they experience at home, on their journey, and in the US through policing, detention, and human trafficking.
Dr. Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC), professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA, and the current president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).
Dr. Speed’s talk takes place on Tuesday, March 3 at 3:30 pm in RLP 1.302E and is sponsored by The Gender, Race, Indigeneity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies Initiative (GRIDS) from the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin, of which the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) is a member.
On Monday, March 2, Dr. Louis Hyman will present, “Silicon Valley and the Rise of Insecure Work.”
Louis Hyman is a historian of work and business at the ILR School of Cornell University, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. He has published two books on the history of personal debt (Debtor Nation and Borrow) and a history of how American work became so insecure (Temp). He is a founding editor of the Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series from Columbia University Press, and the director of the History of Capitalism Summer Camp.
This Department of American Studies lecture is free and open to the public. Please join us Monday at 4 pm in BUR 214.
AMS :: ATX 