AMS Faculty Spotlight—Dr. Julia Mickenberg
Name: Julia Mickenberg
Pronouns: she/her
Title: Professor
Contact information: mickenberg@austin.utexas.edu
Q: What are you research interests, both academic and for fun!?
A: My research interests are pretty wide-ranging, but they’ve tended to focus around radical cultures in the 20th century (the Old Left and the New Left in particular), women, and childhood/children’s literature. My first book was on children’s literature and the left, and my second book was on American women and revolutionary Russia—and I also edited or co-edited several others on related subjects. I’m interested in hidden histories and untold stories of apparently unimportant people, which may sound kind of random, but it reminds me of something Virginia Woolf wrote in “The Art of Biography”: “Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography--the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness?” The real question is whether the person writing is up to the task of illuminating why a particular story or life is worth writing about. I suppose this is a side interest, but for the past ten years or so—spurred by a first-year Signature course I’ve taught on “College and Controversy” and another course on “The History and Future of Higher Education,” which I co-taught with Rich Reddick (from Higher Education Administration) and Kate Catterall (from Design)—I’ve become interested in Critical University Studies, which looks at the ways in which power informs the processes and cultures around higher education.
I was an American Studies (“American Civilization”) major in college (see below for how I wound up with that concentration), but my two favorite classes were a creative writing class on “Autobiographical Fiction Writing” and a black and white photography class that I took at a neighboring art school. In the former, I found ways of exaggerating and embellishing stories from my own life. In the latter, my final project, which I called “People and Objects,” paired photographs of strangers walking on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island with photographs of objects that reminded me of those people. I still think about that project often because it got me wandering around town in ways I might not have done otherwise, and this became one of my favorite activities. What do we discover and learn by simply wandering and really looking? I also still think about a paper I wrote in graduate school (this for a class on Poetry/Culture/Power) on a 1966 book by the French artist Daniel Spoerri and several friends called An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, which is considered a key artifact of the Fluxus movement. Spoerri cleared off his desk, put down a piece of tracing paper, and then waited a while. Eventually he traced everything that had accumulated and then told stories about each object, stories his friends then expanded upon in footnotes, which also had footnotes. “From the banal detritus of the everyday a virtual autobiography emerges, of four perceptive, witty and exceptionally congenial artists,” notes a description of the book. I wrote about the Anecdoted Topography as a kind of tribute to the poetry and poetics of research and storytelling (I recall the book describing an ailment that the writers may have invented but which I surely have: anecdotonomania, a mania for anecdotes and telling stories).
For me that’s where all the joy is in this work: discovering new things and trying to find interesting and compelling ways of making sense of them. I’m especially interested in varieties of biography and autobiography, collective and individual. I recently taught both graduate and undergraduate versions of courses on auto/biography and loved having undergraduates write flash non-fiction pieces. So many were incredible. Choosing readings for the classes on auto/biography helped me realize/remember how much I like reading (and writing) creative non-fiction (in addition to reading novels, which have long been a refuge for me).
At some level I always wanted to be a writer. I’ve published five books and more than 20 scholarly articles, but I still don’t feel like a writer.
Q: What is the nature of your work? What method(s) do you utilize the most? How does your work align with American Studies at UT?
A: My work tends to be archive- and interview-based. I love getting at original sources and have spent many happy hours in libraries and archives all over the United States and also in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Moscow, and elsewhere, piecing through documents that, in some cases, no one besides their original creator has thought worth considering. I’m pretty intrepid about contacting anyone related to my research projects who is still alive and who might talk to me. I take special pleasure in talking to elderly women, maybe because I feel like their stories have not been properly valued in the past. I also look at actual physical books. Indeed, I’m proud to have been a thorn in the side of administration-level people who want to remove books from accessible shelving in the UT libraries to make way for larger study/social spaces. Books are not just pretty decorations—they are rich resources and artifacts (feel the pages, smell them, look at the marginalia. . . and look at books on the shelves nearby). Some of my favorite sources are diaries and letters: I suppose there’s something voyeuristic about that, but I’m eager to understand individual subjectivity, and the lines between private lives and public selves, especially as those lines shape political expression (this probably arose from studying American Communists, most of whom were secret about their affiliation with the Party).
I’m also pretty committed to following the sources wherever they lead me, even if it’s into unfamiliar territory. This is how I found myself writing a chapter of my first book on children’s literature about science, and a chapter of my second book about dancers and dance (as part of a section on performance in general). In both cases I started out knowing nothing about these subjects. Indeed, I could take that further: I wrote my dissertation and first book about children’s literature because I discovered that many blacklisted writers were able to publish children’s books. That idea was fascinating to me (especially because teachers were under so much scrutiny, and children are always a lightning rod for popular fears), but when I started my research, I knew nothing about children’s literature. I had to learn that whole field, in addition to learning about the history of childhood. And then I discovered that a big proportion of the books that lefties wrote were on scientific subjects. This meant I had to figure out why. In the case of dancers, I kept discovering American dancers who wanted to visit the Soviet Union, but their interest felt different from that of folks interested in Soviet art, film, theater, etc. What was that difference? I read a bunch of performance theory, and learned about embodiment and movement and what that can communicate. I guess you could say I’m methodologically open to anything that can help me understand and articulate whatever it is I’m trying to learn about. I even spent four years learning Russian so that I could do research in Moscow!
I think my work aligns with American Studies at UT in that almost all of us on the faculty are interested in reaching a wide range of readers/audiences. The work is theoretically inflected but we’re not interested in being inscrutable. We care about writing and finding ways to make our work engaging.
I try to communicate these passions in my teaching: I realized at some point that I learn the most from 1) doing my own research and 2) teaching. This means I try to give my students the opportunity to engage with primary sources and to teach each other (with guidance, obviously). I also teach students to value research, and to work hard at becoming good writers. And I encourage them to follow their curiosity wherever it leads them.
Q: Are you currently working on any projects (academically or otherwise), and if so tell us about them!
A: I’m currently working on several projects. The biggest thing is a biography of sorts focused around the poet, playwright, essayist, writer for children and activist Eve Merriam (1916-1992), which I’m currently calling “The Way We Were: Eve Merriam and the Hidden History of US Feminism.” My title comes from the fact that she was a model for Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were. But that’s not what is significant about Merriam, who was very well known for decades and was groundbreaking in all kinds of ways even though now most people haven’t heard of her. What’s striking is that Streisand’s character in The Way We Were gives up her ambition to become a writer, channeling that energy into promoting her husband’s career. We’re supposed to respect her for never giving up her political commitments, but she did give up her own career aspirations. Merriam, in contrast, never did. I’m really interested in all the history I can explore through Merriam, who won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, knew a huge range of people from W.H. Auden to W.E.B. DuBois to Robin Morgan to Norman Lear; and wrote important feminist theory that predated (and influenced) Betty Friedan, the first “story for free children” in Ms. Magazine, the first tv special focused on women’s history (with Mary Tyler Moore narrating), and a gender-bending play that won an unprecedented 10 Obie awards. In some ways the book I’m conceiving is more like a biographically-based intellectual history, but I’m also deeply interested in interiority and the relationship between self and society.
The question of what it means to be “story worthy” also informs an article, “Dreiser’s Red Typewriter in Russia: Ruth Epperson Kennell,” which I’m currently trying to publish. I got interested in Kennell initially because of her children’s books about the Soviet Union, but then I learned about the utopian colony in Siberia that she joined in 1922, and that was the seed that started my book, American Girls in Red Russia. But I did not say much in the book about the fact that she was Theodore Dreiser’s private secretary (and lover) on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1927-1928. The article I’m currently finishing up is based mostly on Kennell and Dreiser’s unpublished correspondence as well as biographical pieces that each published about the other, and the power relations revealed in all of this.
Finally, I recently finished co-writing an article on “Valuing the Liberal Arts,” which started as my Provost Teaching Fellows project on Valuing the Humanities, and eventually involved working with an assistant from the English department, Ricky Shear (who became my collaborator) on a survey of UT liberal arts alumni (we expanded to include all of liberal arts after the dean of COLA agreed to provide additional funding for Ricky’s help). Our questions aimed to find out what alumni valued about their liberal arts degrees and how they felt those degrees limited them. I’m most excited about all the stories we gathered through open-ended questions, and I’m glad we ignored advice to not include so many of those questions. We’ll be presenting this research at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in January. I’m also returning to some work I’ve done on the dancer Isadora Duncan to write a commissioned essay on Isadora in Russia for a collection on Duncan and Modernism. For the future, I’m playing with an essay or a book on child liberation. The second-wave feminist Alix Shulman (who I met through my research) sent me an incredible poster made by two kids in the 1970s that really got me thinking about this. In non-scholarly arenas, I started writing a novel a few years ago and then realized it would probably be better as a short story, and then I pretty much stopped working on it. But hopefully I’ll go back to it. I’ve also thought about making a podcast based on letters from the ‘80s, inspired by the piles of mail I recently retrieved from my childhood home (yes, we wrote real letters with stamps and everything). Speaking of work outside of academia I’ve become increasingly involved politically in the past six years or so. I got involved with a local group started after the 2016 election that consists mostly of retired, feisty old ladies who do things like register voters, knock on doors to get out the vote, etc. They’ve restored my faith in humanity (and democracy). Our country has become so polarized, and it’s easy to dismiss the election deniers as lunatic fringe but I think the people who have given up on democracy are afraid and feel misunderstood. We who are working for social justice owe it to them (and to ourselves) to at least try to understand where they’re coming from.
Q: How did you come to American Studies as a discipline?
A: In college (at Brown University) you had to declare a concentration by the end of sophomore year. I distinctly remember sitting on the Green trying to figure out how I could graduate and just keep taking whatever classes I felt like taking. That’s how I discovered American Studies. I never really thoughts about becoming a professor but I decided to apply for graduate school when I was working after college as a writer at a public relations firm. I decided to go back to school so I could have more interesting conversations then I was having at this job, and I chose American Studies (over History, Folklore, or English) because it offered the most possibilities. When I was told that I would need to apply to PhD programs in order to get funding, I decided to pursue a PhD. As I was finishing my dissertation and it came time to apply for jobs, I was less stressed out than many of my peers because I felt like there were so many possibilities, not just in academia. I still believe you can do almost anything with a degree in American Studies—that’s what’s so great about it.
Q: How does American Studies at UT make your work possible?
A: American Studies allows me to ask whatever questions seem natural to me. It allows me to teach almost anything I want to teach—even the “service” classes are fun. I’m constantly learning: from my students, from the new courses I design, from my research, you name it. It’s a gift to teach students who are open-minded and intellectually-curious, qualities possessed by a lot of people who wind up taking classes in our department. I also have great colleagues who push me in new directions. And I appreciate how connected we are to incredible resources on campus like the Harry Ransom Humanities Center and the Briscoe Center for American History.
Q: Favorite thing about AMS at UT.
A: I’d have to say that my favorite thing is the students. Getting feedback from a student about how I’ve helped them or influenced them is an incredible feeling. I also love seeing former students come into their own as people, scholars, professionals, etc. I still keep up with a student I had in my very first year at UT (in 2001!) who I now get to hear on NPR and see quoted in the New York Times because she’s become such an important figure nationally. I’ve also gotten letters and emails from students who took big classes with me years ago, people I don’t even remember, but who tell me how my class changed their outlook. The pride and gratification I get from a letter like that is up there with seeing my own children happy and successful. It’s even more of a gift because it comes from out of the blue and I have no expectations.
Bonus Q: What is a fun fact about you that you would like your colleagues, peers, and students to know about you?
A: I am a left-handed Gemini. I don’t remember exactly when I became obsessed with this fact, but I think it was in college: I heard that more Geminis are left-handed than any other sign. Around the time I heard this, I was working in a coffee shop and whenever someone picked up a cup with their left hand I would ask when their birthday was. I’m so obsessed with this fact that if we’ve ever met you probably already knew this about me.
This photo was taken outside a lodge in Stehekin, a remote community in Washington State (bordering North Cascades National Park) which you can only access by boat or by hiking about 10 miles. When I was 21 I worked for the Student Conservation Association in a historic apple orchard and homestead, doing maintenance and giving tours. I returned for the first time this past summer, and you can see I was very happy to be there. When I was in college and taking an American Studies class on “Yeomans and Yahoos: Images of the Farmer in American History,” I wrote a first-person essay about my experience of working in that apple orchard and homestead and how that related to larger ideas about the frontier, the west, the farmer, etc. I used that essay as my writing sample when I applied to graduate school. In other words, this photograph seems to represent not just something about me as a person but how I connected to American Studies.
