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 ClinePanel: Musical MovementsPaper: "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 102BEric CoveyPanel: Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Explorers: 150 Years in AfricaPaper: "'Swallowed by the East?' Or the Red, White and Blue on the Nile?"Friday, November 16 / 10:00am - 11:45am / Room 209BDr. Janet DavisASA Committee on American Studies Programs and Centers: Revising and Developing American Studies Curricula/Programs in the Twenty First CenturyFriday, November 16 / 10:00am - 11:45am / Room 204Daniel GerlingPanel: Sanitary Imperialism: U.S. Efforts to Clean and Beautify Puerto RicansPaper: "Tropical Prophylaxis: U.S. Envoys of Continence in Early 20th Century Imperialism"Friday, November 16 / 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. / Room 104BAndrea GustavsonCaucus: Visual Culture: Pictures in Motion: American Photography and EmpirePaper: "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 208BJennifer KellyPanel: Liberalism in the Service of Empire: Past, Present, and FuturePaper:  "The Politics of Response: Justice Tourism in Palestine and Israel"Thursday, November 15 / 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. / Room 202ALily LauxPanel: Pedagogies of EmpirePaper: " Teaching Texas: Education as a Practice of Empire"Saturday, November 17 / 8:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. / Room 208CDr. Julia MickenbergInsights from Outside: Approaches to the Study of Americans AbroadThursday, November 15 / 10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. / Room 102BRebecca OnionCaucus: Childhood and Youth Studies: Space, Place, and Privilege: New Geographies of ChildhoodPaper: "Childhood, Animality, and New Geographies of Extinction in the 1970s"Saturday, November 17 / 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. / Room 204Dr. Naomi PaikThe Violence of Life Itself: Progress, Design, Beauty, HumanitarianismThursday, November 15 / 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. / Room 203Elissa UnderwoodCaucus: Critical Prison Studies: State of the Field: Critical Prison and Carceral State Studies, Current Scholarship and New DirectionsSaturday, November 17 / 2:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. / Room 103BJeannette VaughtPanel: Animal Dimensions of American Empire: 1830-2012Paper: "A Saddlebag Full of Syringes: Rodeo’s Technoscience Frontier"Sunday, November 18 / 12:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. / Room 207

Announcement: Dr. Eric Tang awarded prize for best essay in American Quarterly

American studies affiliate faculty member Dr. Eric Tang has been awarded the Constance M. Rourke Prize for the best article published this year in American Quarterly. Congratulations, Dr. Tang!The announcement comes to us from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department:

Each year the American Studies Association awards the Constance Rourke prize to the best essay published in the journal American Quarterly. This year's prize goes to Eric Tang, Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies. Tang won for his essay entitled "A Gulf Unites Us: The Vietnamese Americans of Black New Orleans East" 63:1 (March 2011), which examines the forms of life and solidarity created by Black and Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The prize will be announced at the annual American Studies Association Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico on Friday, November 16, 2012. Stay tuned this week for a full listing of UT American Studies folks presenting at the annual meeting!

Undergraduate Research: Interview with Amanda Martin, Recipient of the Rapoport-King Thesis Scholarship

Today, we're pleased to share with you an interview with one of our undergraduates, Amanda Martin, who recently received the Rapoport-King Thesis Scholarship. Congratulations to Amanda on this incredible accomplishment!

What was/is your favorite class in American Studies?I took a Beats Literature class last semester with Dr. Meikle. I really loved that class. It was kind of refreshing to dive into the literature and live vicariously through these rugged souls. My life looks quite different. I really enjoyed that. I usually take the more intense cultural studies, critical thought classes, which I love, but it's nice to take something different every once in a while, so I really enjoyed that class.What are your research interests? Tell me a little about your thesis project.My thesis is inspired and fueled by personal interests that I have in female identity in America and how it is constructed and maintained by women. I'm really interested in gender studies, obviously, and my thesis focuses specifically on examples of women who claim individual empowerment through partaking in beauty processes or traditional gender roles that can be perceived as regressive by feminist scholars. So I look at these complex, contradictory examples. For example, I'm looking at a pole dancing fitness studio called Brass Ovaries, which is interesting in itself. Even the title gives this idea of empowerment, and I'm hanging out with them and taking photos. Obviously, pole dancing has a lot of connotations for women in our society, but they see it as a really empowering thing, embracing their sexuality. They're not really frilly about it. I have pictures of them in their Converse, these kick-ass women. I like trying to understand this and grapple with these ideas I'm not really certain about. As I'm trying to understand it, photography is a really useful medium especially with something complex like this.What are your post-graduate plans?I'm currently applying to a couple of graduate programs--probably not as many as I should, but I'm also open to the idea of taking a year off and doing photography and figuring life out if the grad school thing doesn't work out immediately. I'd love to continue studying American studies at a graduate level because in a lot of ways it fuels my photography, that curiosity. I'm always being introduced to new ideas about American culture that make me want to jump into it, take pictures, and get to know people. So I'd love to go to grad school.Why did you ultimately decide to study American Studies?It's funny how it happened. I actually went into undergrad as a Public Relations major. I took a journalism elective because I was still interested in photography, and I had a journalism professor who totally tore apart the advertising industry and PR and was offering a critical analysis that I'd never been introduced to. It was the first time I thought, hey, you can look at things critically, and things aren't just a given, or naturally occurring, things are very constructed. So I ended up taking an AMS course on a whim as a history credit, and again I was introduced to this idea of critical cultural analysis, and I just loved it. So I immediately went in and added it as a second major, mainly because I thought it was awesome. I thought, I have my journalism degree, but I can do this for fun on the side. That's how it started, but I've really fallen in love with the field and I want to keep going with it.Amanda Martin is a senior studying American Studies and Photojournalism. She grew up in College Station, Texas. Amanda is currently employed by Texas Performing Arts as a student photographer and also pursues various other freelance photo opportunities. To view her work, visit www.amandamartinphotography.com.

Alumni Voices: Dr. Kim Simpson, Austin-Based Author, Musician, and Disk Jockey

Kim Simpson is an Austin-based author, musician, disk jockey, and English composition instructor. He graduated with a Ph.D. from UT in 2005, and his book, Early '70s Radio: The American Format Revolution, was published by Continuum in 2011.

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?First of all, it taught me not to dread the writing process.  In my application to the program, I said something along the lines of wanting to “write, write, write.” Until then I had tended to drag my feet even though I had specific projects I wanted to tackle. The admissions committee granted my wish and I wrote a torrent of words during my time in the program, many that I’m happy to forget but many more that I still like. I’m proud to have made it through the demanding writing regimen the department requires of its students in terms of both quantity and quality.Next, it taught me that deadlines are my friends. From day one, the American Studies program expanded my field of vision quite dramatically, and just about anyone else who’s been through it will likely say the same thing. While this is certainly a bonus, it presents additional challenges to people like myself who enjoy exploring things still further and further still, tinkering, and procrastinating outright. Big projects like dissertations and books, I came to realize, exist only because their creators found stopping points, made certain concessions, and obeyed deadlines.It also taught me to welcome criticism, to understand that validation did not need to take the form of continual praise, and to appreciate the diversity of viewpoints my work would be subjected to. I was lucky to get into the graduate program at a time when I could learn from—and bounce ideas off of—venerable American Studies trailblazers like Bill Goetzmann, Bill Stott, and Bob Crunden (who, when I first spoke with him, referred to the program as a “haven for oddballs”). The feedback given to me by all of my wondrously varied professors was invaluable, as were the opinions and thoughtful comments from my fellow students.  I realize now what a luxury it was to have so much feedback readily available, and much of it still dances around in my head.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?I imagine that those who consider entering the program have all been driven by a specific subject they’d like to spend more time with. I’m a believer in holding fast to this subject and approaching all of your studies in relation to it. The program, by nature, is already so kaleidoscopic that you won’t be doing yourself any disservice by keeping a narrow focus.My next word of advice is that although you should take full advantage of every opportunity to bolster your academic marketability, you shouldn’t overlook the power your work has in developing credentials for yourself in the non-academic world. My early hunch about American Studies was that it could “open more doors,” whatever they might be. The doors certainly did open, in my case—most of them granting me entry into sectors of the world I’d written so much about.At the risk of contradicting anything I've just said, my final words of advice are to resist any notion you may be harboring of a prescribed and correct way to go about earning a degree in American Studies. That kind of thinking will almost certainly slow you down, dim your flame, and cause you to doubt the subject matter you're passionate about, which is not the true oddball spirit. You’re not there for the program; it’s there for you. (Thank heaven it is, though…)