Stories from Summer Vacation: Kirsten Ronald Says "Cheese!"

This story from summer vacation comes our way from UT AMS doctoral student Kirsten Ronald:This summer, with coursework finally behind me, I’m mostly reading for orals, which lately has meant long hours learning about trains and roads and race and gender and empire (Yes, I organized my reading thematically, because I’m neurotic like that).  But while reading books is cool and all, it doesn’t exactly fill the stomach, pay the rent, or provide much in the way of human interaction, so a few days a week I put on a hat and some non-slip shoes and go back to my previous life – as a cheesemonger.I monged in DC before I came back to school, but the shop here in Austin puts the one in DC to shame.  Even in the summer, when the heat makes cheese hard to transport, we have upwards of 300 different kinds of cheese, ranging from local goat chevre and hand-made mozz to French Epoisses, Pyrenees Chabrin and (the very tasty) Tarentaise from Vermont.  And while one of the best parts of the job is tasting and sharing high-end cheeses, learning about and caring for them is pretty awesome, too.  Cheeses are living, breathing things, with their own needs, social order, and vocabulary.  They come from different animals, from different parts of the world, and from totally different cheese-making aesthetics and traditions.  And they all have to be treated with respect: blues, washed-rinds, bloomy-rinds, cheddars, tommes, alpine cheeses – they’re all made and aged differently, each likes slightly different temps and humidity, and all require careful handling and clean knives and hands to avoid cross-contamination of molds.  The specialized tools and processes of monging are fun too: cubers, cheese wires, graters, heat wrappers, knob-handled parm knives; the assembly-line of cutting, hand-wrapping, pricing, stocking; rotating commodities and brining olives; checking temps and culling products soon to go bad; and, of course, the guesswork of helping a customer figure out what cheese they got from you last time that was so good but they just can’t remember the name of it.  It’s like being a researcher, assembly-line worker, and detective all in one.

And, thanks to my incredibly knowledgeable fellow mongers and caseophiles, we are constantly getting in new cheeses to taste, learn about, and share with folks.  I really can’t think of a better complement to (and break from) the heady work of academia – and yes, that means that if you know where I work and you’re in the neighborhood, do stop by.  Just make sure you come on an empty stomach.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Dr. Steve Hoelscher on Photography at Home and Abroad

This dispatch comes from Dr. Steve Hoelscher, who has spent this summer with photography in Germany, France, and Texas:I’ve spent my “summer vacation” looking at thousands of photographs, researching them, thinking about them, and writing about them. Sometimes, this has taken me to attractive places. Like Frankfurt, Germany, the center of the Euro crisis and where the Occupy Movement has taken hold and become something of a tourist attraction.And like Arles, France, where I met and talked with many of the photographers I’m writing about. One conversation was with the photographer whose 1963 portrait of a cigar-chewing Che Guevara has become something of a cultural icon, finding its way onto t-shirts, posters, and coffee mugs around the world; another photographer has spent the nine years since graduating with a history major documenting the war in Afghanistan and its traumatic impact on veterans and families on the homefront; and another had just arrived from the Mauritania-Mali border, where he spent a month with some of the tens of thousands of refugees who had recently fled Mali. I thought it was revealing that the exhibit that caught the most attention at the Les Rencontres d’Arles, the celebrated international photography festival that emphasizes cutting-edge conceptual art, focused on the photojournalist Josef Koudelka’s decade-long “gypsies of Europe” project from the 1960s.Most of my time, though, has been spent in the more mundane spaces of my writing desk and at the Ransom Center’s photo archive. One of the cruel realities of post-tenure life is that deadlines don’t go away and I’ve been logging in long days working to meet this one (I am grateful to my American Studies colleagues who have taken time away from their own “summer vacations” to read portions of a much labored-over manuscript). Summer vacation (without the scare quotes) begins for me after noon, on August first, when the book leaves my hands and I board a plane, with my family, to the Midwestern homeland.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Jeannette Vaught Celebrates the Year of Proposal Writing

The following comes to us from UT AMS doctoral student Jeannette Vaught:Submitting my full and final National Science Foundation grant proposal this week brings my Year Of Proposal Writing to a very hefty close.  NSF, you say?  Their interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society directorate is made for American Studies people – that is, those AMSers who are willing to read reams worth of PDFs with rules, qualified rules, quantified rules, provisional rules, and so forth, followed by an equal deluge of instructions full of many, many words like “directorate” (Nota Bene: they will all eventually make sense if you read them enough times.  Start early.  Read often.).  All that rule-following aids in compiling at least 10 separate documents ranging from the “HA I completed you in 10 minutes!” bio-sketch to the ever-arduous (how many revisions was that again?) project description.  Oh, and a data management plan, since the NSF spares no humanities student an existential confrontation with their own metadata.Many months will pass until I hear back from the NSF; some of the different kinds of proposals I’ve put out there this past year were successful and some were not.  We grad students commonly face the fear that we’ve sunk countless hours into a document, or tome as it may be, that will ultimately go unrewarded.   My NSF nadir – the “zomg why am I even doing this forget it * cries *” moment – was thankfully interrupted by a lovely vacation to New Orleans, which seemed like ill timing at the outset (IT’S DUE IN 10 DAYS) but turned out to be so restorative that I came back to writing rejuvenated enough to finish the application with energy and enthusiasm left over.  Maybe it was the beignets. But more broadly, I’ve found that all of this writing, re-writing, scrap-and-start-overing, and aiming-at-different-audiences kind of work has been a very useful tool and exercise for thinking through – or, as some might say, “reconceptualizing” – the ins and outs of my project, which is in itself a kind of reward.  And also, counter-intuitive as it may be for the Type-As among us, it’s always good to be reminded that ditching the grind for revelry at inopportune moments can be the best kind of work you can do.

Stories from Summer Vacation: Dr. Julia Mickenberg says "Au revoir" to Paris

This summer update comes to us from UT American Studies professor Dr. Julia Mickenberg, who has just returned from a research stint in Paris:Having only just returned to Austin after six months in Paris (au revoir!), I'm looking forward to being home: getting settled back in, catching up with friends and colleagues, writing with all my books and files close by, going to my favorite yoga classes, doing work in my favorite coffee shops, and cooling off at Ramsey, Deep Eddy, and Northwest Pools with my husband and daughters. Before we left for Paris we started a project of visiting Austin places that in 10+ years here we'd never managed to go to (went to the Zilker Botanical Garden and kayaked on Town Lake, for instance), and I'd like to continue that project: I still haven't been to the French Legation, to Emma Long State Park, or to Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, and there are also lots of restaurants, cafés, galleries, and shops I need to check out. If it's too damn hot to step outside, I hope to take up sewing. Or something else crafty. Work-wise, I'm trying to finish a chapter that's been making me crazy (the book is on Russia in the American feminist imagination, 1905-1945, and the chapter deals with dance and performance, about which I've had to learn a lot), and to revise an article for a journal. Now that I've publicly announced these goals maybe I will achieve them. We're going to Maine for a week in August with my extended family (including a year-old cousin I still haven't met), and the thought of cool sea air will hopefully sustain my family and me until then. We're planning to get a dog shortly after we get back from Maine. Not sure yet what kind of dog, but it will be a puppy, and we're going to name him or her Sunny. Or Soleil.