Faculty Research: Designing History's Future with Karl Hagstrom Miller

It should come as no surprise that we at AMS :: ATX headquarters love projects that delve into the digital world. One of our faculty members, Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, is working on the ever-fascinating Course Transformation Project with the UT History Department to "reimagin[e] what it means to teach and learn history." The project includes a blog with content from Karl's graduate seminar in the department, "Designing History's Future," a compendium of online resources about history pedagogy and research, an extensive bibliography, and a series of Friday afternoon workshops.Here's an excerpt from a write-up about the endeavor from Karl - the full post can be found here:

Penne Restad and I, in consultation with other history faculty, developed the basic plan for the project. But we have no idea how it is going to turn out. That is by design.One of our major goals is to re-imagine the way we teach our US history survey courses. “United States, 1492-1865” and “United States Since 1865” are the backbone of the UT history department. These two courses enroll about 4,500 students annually. That’s a lot of students. It’s also a lot of faculty and a lot of graduate teaching assistants. Our goal is to develop ways for these students to learn more and learn better. For us, that means moving away from the lecture format towards more active and collaborative learning, designing a course in which students engage in doing history rather than watching it done by others. We don’t know what that is going to look like yet. We’ve got a load of ideas, but we will be developing, refining, and implementing them over the coming year. Keep posted.We also hope to foster a broader conversation about teaching and learning history among our faculty, our students, and anyone else who is interested. The issues facing those who take and teach the US survey are far from unique. They resonate across the department and the university. Many, of course, resonate across the field of higher education. From student engagement and success to the paradoxes of systematic assessment in the humanities, from debates about active and situated learning to the existential challenges and exciting opportunities offered by digital technology, from graduate funding and placement to faculty research and retention: we often find ourselves working on contested and congested terrain. It is not always clear which way to travel or whether the paths we forge today will still be viable routes tomorrow. We do think that practicing teachers are in the best position to work out solutions to these complex issues while preserving and improving the quality of student learning. We hope that the history CTP will provide faculty and graduate students opportunities to debate these issues and collaborate on new designs for teaching history well into the future.

For more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here. 

Faculty Research: Steve Hoelscher Interviewed on KUT

Last week, we featured the research of our very own Dr. Steve Hoelscher and his incredible new edited book, Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World. Dr. Hoelscher was also recently interviewed by UT's public radio station, KUT, where he offered a narrated look at the Magnum photo archive in two segments that you can find here.  Listen to Dr. Hoelscher talk about the arrival of the Magnum archive at the Ransom Center, the criteria he used to decide which photos were published in Reading Magnum, and how Magnum is adapting to new multimedia photojournalism.

Announcement: Today! The Baffler Joins Us for a Conversation on Higher Ed

This afternoon in Avaya Auditorium (POB 2.302), Thomas Frank and John Summers, editors of The Baffler, join us for a conversation on the future of higher education. A reception will begin at 4:30pm and the conversation starts at 5:00pm. Brave the rain and take part in a great discussion!Here are some of the topics Frank and Summers will discuss:

College is the best thing in the world; college is a complete ripoff. How are these two statements compatible? How do they differ? How can we assess the campus battles of this era, which are more focused on money than the niceties of Western Civ and Great Books? And what are we to make of the fact that a college education, which was essentially free for the World War II generation, serves today to fasten the bonds of inescapable indebtedness to an entire generation of students?

Many thanks to our co-sponsors: the Department of English, Radio-Television-Film, Undergraduate Studies, the History Course Transformation Project, and Plan II Honors.

Alumni Voices: Jason Mellard, History Lecturer at Texas State University

We're back this week with a feature on an alumnus of the American Studies Ph.D. program. Jason Mellard currently teaches history at Texas State University and recently (as in, this month!) published his first book, Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture with the University of Texas Press. You can nab a copy here. Do it! (And, if you're in the Austin area, Threadgill's South will be hosting a book release party this Wednesday, October 30, at 6:00pm.)

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?

I work with the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University in San Marcos. Under Director Gary Hartman, we publish the annual Journal of Texas Music History, produce the short This Week in Texas Music History radio segments for KUTX, advise on the Dickson Series in Texas Music with Texas A & M University Press, and teach popular music courses in the Department of History and Honors College at Texas State.

The interdisciplinary habit of mind fits the Center’s broad audience quite well. We speak to musicologists, historians, record collectors, industry types, artists, and fans, all of whom have strong, but often divergent, affective investments in Texas Music. This requires the ability to pivot, to see the relevance of popular music history from each of their vantage points.  The conversations we seek to foster beyond the academy also involve a populist sentiment I feel to be deep in the American Studies vein. Janet Davis, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Randy Lewis, among others, have modeled this sensibility in the department, one that dates back to our UT forebears in Henry Nash Smith, J. Frank Dobie, and Américo Paredes.

In teaching, I credit the wide latitude the department offered in allowing us to design and teach our own courses. In the spring I have the opportunity to return to the first class I ever offered at UT, “The 1970s in America: Revolution, Malaise, Reaction, and Sleaze.” I feel lucky that AMS gave me free reign to present students with the disorienting smorgasbord of disco, Patty Hearst, AIM, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And, it is likely that I never would have been in a position to teach it had not the department given the same freedom, years before, to Joel Dinerstein in developing his legendary “The History of Being Cool in America.” It was there I first learned of American Studies as a UT undergrad, and I continually endeavor to develop that same combination of curiosity, wonder, and critical acumen that UT-AMS faculty and grad students offer in the classroom, semester after semester.

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?

Say “yes.” This is a tricky piece of advice, as I am only now reaching a place where I tell people to learn to say “no.” In grad school, though, I found it served me best to stay hungry. My dissertation and book project evolved from answering an Austin Chronicle open call to aid Threadgill’s proprietor Eddie Wilson in researching material for his memoirs. Saying yes also earned me a writing gig with UT AMS alum Farbrizio Salmoni’s magazine American West: La Rivista Italiana di Western Lifestyle, where I covered rodeo and Texas Music for a fervent Italian audience. Also know that there is a network of alumni locally, nationally, and internationally that wish for your success and the success of the department as a whole. Take advantage of these contacts to learn of the various possible career paths out of the graduate experience.

And, have a life outside of the university. In addition to cultivating the Italian rodeo circuit, I worked at a shoe store that sprung out of the Emo’s orbit and at Toy Joy’s short-lived vegan bakery. American Studies folks tend to be drawn to these opportunities of their own accord, but I just want to ratify the impulse. Do something that engages your physical and social intelligence to get you out of your head now and again.

For more about American Studies at UT, subscribe to our newsletter here.