Hot Off the (Digital) Presses: The AMS 2012-2013 Newsletter!
AMS :: ATX isn't the only game in town when it comes to updating you readers about the goings-on of our department. Yesterday, the 2012-2013 newsletter was released, and you can check it out here!
Features include pieces from current faculty, students, alumni of both the graduate and the undergraduate program, updates from our faculty and graduate community, and a few words on two of our digital projects (The End of Austin, spearheaded by Dr. Randy Lewis, and, well, AMS :: ATX).
Alumni Voices: Dr. David Wharton, Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi
Today we share some insights from Dr. David Wharton, the Director of Documentary Studies at Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade, Texas (2000) and will release Small Town South, a collection of photographs of the south, in Fall 2012. In addition, a selection of his photographs can be found at his website.
The work I do now, both my teaching as a member of University of Mississippi faculty and my personal photographic work, have been directly informed by the graduate work I did at UT. As a teacher, I demand that students search beyond the obvious to discover deeper meanings in nearly all things cultural. I learned this, not always happily at the time, from seminars with Professors Goetzmann and Crunden. Goetzmann knew intuitively that everything was connected to just about everything else and took delight in showing us how. Crunden insisted that we constantly dig deeper and that we think clearly all the while. Jeff Meikle’s quiet good humor assured us that we could be both good scholars and good people, while Bill Stott’s grand embrace of a broad spectrum of ideas gave us intellectual license to roam. I try to incorporate all of these qualities into my teaching. Occasionally I succeed and that makes me feel good.As a photographer whose work lives in the gray area between art and documentary, I am also able to credit my grad school years. While working on my MFA in the Art Department, Mark Goodman and Lawrence McFarland made me wrestle with the complicated relationship between photography and reality. The AMS doctoral program demanded that I steep myself in the study of America’s past and present (something I had managed to avoid as an undergraduate) for several years, but then set me free to do whatever I wanted. That was a vote of confidence I am thankful for to this day. It propelled me into completing a photographic/ethnographic/historical dissertation on a small bit of rural culture that was eventually published in book form: The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). I continue to work in a similar vein, traveling throughout the American South to photograph various aspects of rural and small town culture. Another book of photographs—Small Town South—will be published this fall (see www.gftbooks.com for more information). I truly believe that my UT graduate school experiences opened these intellectual doors for me and gave me the confidence to walk through them.
Do something you truly care about—not something you think you should care about—but something you REALLY do care about. Find a mentor who will support and encourage you but won’t insist that you do things his/her way. Life’s too short to always be jumping through hoops.
Happy Thanksgiving from AMS :: ATX!
To all of you, a very happy Thanksgiving from the AMS :: ATX team."The different characters of the trees appear better now, when their leaves, so to speak, are ripe, than at any other season; than in the winter, for instance, when they are little remarkable, and almost uniformly gray or brown, or in the spring and summer, when they are undistinguishably green.... It is with leaves as with fruits and woods, animals and men: when they are mature, their different characters appear." -Henry David Thoreau, "Autumn," September 30, 1851
Read This: Rebecca Onion Blogs for Slate
Here at AMS::ATX we love blogs (obviously) and we love our UT AMS Ph.D. students (naturally). So we couldn't be happier to announce that our very own Rebecca Onion, who recently defended her dissertation entitled How Science Became Child's Play: Science and the Culture of American Childhood, 1900-1980, has recently launched a blog on Slate.com called The Vault.
This description of the blog comes our way from Rebecca:
I'm now running a blog on Slate.com, called The Vault. I post one interesting historical document or object every day, most of which will come from archives, special collections, and museums.The idea is to showcase stuff that jumps out of the historical record. These are the kinds of documents that made me laugh out loud, cringe, or become unexpectedly sad while doing archival research for my dissertation. Examples thus far: a "lab technician" microscope set for girls from 1958; a photograph of a Better Baby contest winner from 1910; a memo from one of Nixon's aides in which he suggests alternative names for the space shuttle program.It's been great fun to hear back from readers about the posts; I love feeling like I have an audience with which to share my weird enthusiasm for research.If anyone has interesting documents or objects that deserve inclusion, by all means, get in touch. And follow @SlateVault on Twitter, or like Slate's The Vault Blog on Facebook, to get notifications of posts as they run.