Faculty Research: Janet Davis Interviewed in Spirit Magazine
Hey there, sports fans! We'd like to alert you to the fact that Dr. Janet Davis was recently interviewed for a lengthy piece on a young man's work in the circus in Spirit Magazine, the in-flight magazine for Southwest Airlines. Take a look at the excerpt below and click here to read the full piece.
Jesse’s challenge is more complex: In going to college, he was encouraged to step beyond a community in which he already knew his place. "All of a sudden you’ve got to rebuild, you know? And find your identity," he says. In high school, he was a big man on campus—the star jock, a promising scholar, the circus kid, a rural success story. At SMU, among the children of Dallas’ elite? “It seemed like the kids there were entitled to be there. One’s mom is the CEO of Victoria’s Secret. He lived in my dorm. I was like, 'Your mom owns Victoria’s Secret?' It’s heavy-duty; heavy-duty people. And I was like,'‘My dad owns a circus."'Plenty of college kids plow through these crises of self and set a course for their adult lives. If Jesse were just another boy shocked to discover that his strutting high school persona amounted to nothing in college, he might have toughed it out. But the circus offered an escape from the disorientation SMU stirred in him; it gave him a purpose. In bailing, Jesse wasn’t running away to join the circus, he was running home to it.Now he’ll have to pull off the same tricks his forebears did. Despite its robust past, the circus has repeatedly had to evolve to avoid extinction. Although today’s audiences are harder to come by, the circus arts have become popular among kids. More than 350 instructional youth circuses operate in America, a quarter of them having emerged in the past 10 years. "The challenge for Jesse’s generation," says author and circus historian Janet M. Davis, "is to bring all of these young people into the broader circus fold."
Security/Insecurity: Our Departmental Theme, 2013-2014
Two weeks ago we announced that our department's theme for the 2013-2014 school year would be Security/Insecurity. On this first day of school, we'd like to share some lengthier commentary on that theme from Dr. Randy Lewis.We'll continue sharing content related to security and insecurity over the course of the year, so stay tuned. (and, as many of you eagle-eyed readers might have noticed, we've changed the logo of AMS :: ATX to align with the theme).
Everyone craves security in some form: emotional security in our relationships, job security at work, food security for our communities, or national security in the “war on terror.” Yet many Americans are still bedeviled by deep-seated feelings of insecurity--and understandably so. When we turn on the television, we often find politicians shouting about “securing the border,” reality shows celebrating backstabbing insincerity, and advertisements prodding us to feel hopelessly inadequate. Even in the placid imaginary world of Peanuts, Linus needs his security blanket.Providing security in every sense of the word has become a massive business in this so-called “culture of fear”. Feeling a little freaked out? Build a panic room that would make Jodie Foster proud! Sign up for that new undergraduate major in “crisis management”! Or hunker down at night in a gated community designed to ward off “stranger danger”... Still feeling uneasy about the crisis du jour in “fortress America”? Why not stock up on anxiety meds and meditation apps for your iPhone? Have you considered “building a secure faith” in a megachurch equipped with armed guards? How about buying a 13,000 pound armored vehicle to drive around town? You can never be too careful—especially if you’re a member of group that is “profiled,” followed, and harassed for simply wearing a hoodie on the way home from a convenience store.More than a decade into the “war on terror,” the issue of security seems to haunt every aspect of our lives, yet we rarely have a chance to explore its deeper impact on our psyche and culture. One exception is in the work of artists such as the playwright Eve Ensler, who has described the underlying paradox of security in these terms: the more we pursue security, the more we feel insecure. Sociologists have illustrated this paradox in relation to surveillance cameras: we install them to make us feel secure and protected, but their unnerving presence makes many people feel anxious and exposed. Does the camera suggest “this is a secure place where I can relax” or “this is an insecure place where bad things happen”? We could ask the same question about the NSA reading our email or the Department of Homeland Security sending drones overhead: does it make us feel protected or violated? Liberated or oppressed? Secure or insecure? These questions have particular poignancy in the case of individuals whose basic legal rights are insecure: undocumented workers who are afraid to report unsafe working conditions, indigenous people whose treaty rights are often violated, convicted felons who cannot serve on juries or possess a firearm, or transgendered individuals simply trying to use a public restroom.Security and insecurity have so many different meanings that can be explored through the interdisciplinary prism of American Studies. We hope you’ll join us in a conversation this year as we weave this important theme into our teaching, research, and special events. It is one of the many ways that the American Studies department is trying to connect its faculty and students to the wider world beyond the Forty Acres.
Randolph Lewis teaches in the American Studies Department. He is writing a book on surveillance in the contemporary US as well as teaching a seminar on the subject this fall.
Stories from Summer Vacation: Steve Hoelscher, "Meeting Denise on Morzinplatz"
Today, we're delighted to share with you an incredible and powerful story from Dr. Steve Hoelscher, who spent part of the summer teaching in Vienna:I spent part of this summer, like three others, teaching a study abroad course in Vienna, Austria. Beyond the obvious pleasure of living in what is arguably the world’s “most livable city,” the course gives me the opportunity to connect different areas of teaching and research interests that often remain separate. Urban geography, cultural memory, and transnational exchange entwine as my students (who are always superb, and this class was no exception) use the city as a living laboratory. We don’t just read about socialist housing in “Red Vienna,” for example; we study the Karl-Marx-Hof by holding class in one of its dozen courtyards, by talking with the curator who singlehandedly opened a new exhibition in one of its former collective washrooms, and by finding the bullet holes, which remain from the 1934 civil war (an event that ushered in Austrofascism and eventually Nazism). The geographer in me—born and bred in the tradition of fieldwork—comes alive when I leave behind the classroom and enter the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world beyond the ivory tower’s womb.To be sure, there are risks with this approach. It sometimes rains when you’ve got a three-hour walking tour planned. Occasionally students get on the wrong streetcar and end up misplaced on the other side of town. Once in a while a beloved theoretical position doesn’t jibe with empirical reality as it’s lived on the street. Sometimes, though, serendipity brings it all together in a way that’s both unexpected and invigorating.One such moment took place on the 12th of June this summer. The theme of the week took the somewhat cumbersome, but hopefully explanative, title of “Remembering Hitler’s Vienna: The Collapse of Monarchy and the Rise of Competing Political Movements, 1918-1945.” We had just had a class meeting at Berggasse 19, Sigmund Freud’s house until he escaped Nazi persecution in 1938. Reluctant to leave the home he had lived in and had practiced psychoanalysis for nearly 47 years, Freud finally took action after his daughter, Anna, survived a daylong interrogation by the Gestapo. Today, all that remains of the former Gestapo headquarters is a rather bleak park on the edge of the central city. Here, on Morzinplatz, stands the first of three Holocaust memorials that trace the changing textures of Austrian cultural memory and its participation in World War 2. Narratives of victimhood and perpetrator, of evasion and responsibility, of redemption and hopeless despair—in other words, many of the central themes that run through discussions of the Holocaust—are written in stone here, and at Albertinaplatz and Judenplatz.To encourage my students to look closely at such memorial landscapes and to think about what they’re seeing, I ask that they spend a half hour drawing them. (I steal this practice from one of my graduate school mentors, Ted Relph, who convinced me of the importance of “seeing, thinking, describing landscapes,” as a way of understanding them) Although some students initially balk at the assignment—“I’m not an artist” or “I can’t draw” are frequent, understandable complaints—most find it a compelling way to defamiliarize the taken-for-granted. Or, in this case, to make sense of something strange. The site-specific Nameless Library on Judenplatz, for example, only makes sense when seen in its geographic setting; the steel and concrete design comes alive only when one notes that the books’ spines are facing inward, and thus hiding their contents; the power of the place as a void—as a space where things are missing, like handles to the entrance, or the 6 million people it commemorates—can only be felt when you’re viewing it from both up close and at mid-distance (and not, I would argue, online).
The quiet, somber landscape, which gestures toward loss and emptiness, contrasts with the more traditional memorial on Morzinplatz, with its inscription of Austria’s resurrection and its chained figure breaking the bonds of tyranny. In one, the focus is on Jewish genocide; at the other, the state of Austria is written as Hitler’s first victim—a preposterous claim, but one at the center of Austrian nationhood for more than a half century. Such, at any rate, were some of the things we talked about at each memorial. That is, until we noticed a couple eavesdropping on our discussion at Morzinplatz. After I explained, in German, that we were an American university group studying the history of Vienna, the woman answered, in Australian English, “well, I gathered that.”
Thus began one of the most remarkable conversations I’ve had in a college course. Denise introduced herself and her cousin, whom she was visiting for the first time.After the long flight from Australia, it was Denise’s first full day in Vienna and her cousin was bringing her to the site where his father and her father, like Anna Freud, had been questioned by the Gestapo shortly after the 1938 Anschluß. But unlike the Freuds, these Jewish brothers were not allowed to leave, but instead were sent to Dachau. How they escaped the concentration camp was not made clear, but each spent the rest of the war in England, with one eventually returning to Vienna and the other immigrating to Australia.
My students and I were spellbound by Denise’s story, which seemed to embody the themes of the course. Memory really does seem anchored in places. It’s both personal and collective. And it’s fraught with unpredictability. But Denise’s story did more than just illustrate themes we had read about in books by James Young or Pierre Nora. It also made scholarly concepts real. This is important, and I’m not talking here just about convincing lunatic Holocaust deniers of what happened. Making theories concrete, breathing life into histories that appear ancient, giving voice to experiences that seem unfathomable: all that happens when you meet someone like Denise on Morzinplatz (or Judenplatz, where we ran into her later that day). That’s why I like to teach in Vienna during my summer vacation. And it is a nice place to live.
Announcement: More on American Studies and the Texas Bookshelf Project
Last week, we shared the exciting news from UT Press about their new Texas Bookshelf series, a 5-year, 16-book series from UT faculty centering on what Texas is and means. Today, we have a few more details about the project (and our our faculty members' involvement in the project) from department chair Dr. Elizabeth Engelhardt.And stay tuned this fall for more specific details about each of these four approaches to Texas.
Four core faculty members in American Studies are among the distinguished faculty chosen as authors in the Texas Bookshelf Project. Designed to be the most ambitious and comprehensive publishing endeavor about the culture and history of one state ever undertaken, the book series and website will draw on the state’s brightest writers, scholars, and intellectuals.
Professors Bob Abzug, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Karl Hagstrom Miller, and Shirley Thompson each will write for the series. The Department of American Studies thereby is contributing to the project more authors—in sheer numbers and in percentage of faculty—than any other department on campus. Were we to add in our American Studies affiliate faculty members, we might need to rename it the TexAMS Bookshelf.
In the words of President Bill Powers, “Texas deserves a comprehensive series of books that explores its history and culture. A collaboration between our esteemed faculty and UT Press is the ideal way to produce The Texas Bookshelf and to share the rich resources of this campus with the rest of the world.”
American Studies is proud to participate in the endeavor.