July 28, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Vetri Nathan

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]

Two reasons why an Italian Professor can still be featured on AmericanStudies.

Yeah, okay, Vetri Nathan is Assistant Professor of Italian at UMass Boston, but I’m not going to apologize for featuring him in a series on AmericanStudies scholars. For one thing, I’ve had the chance to work with Vetri for the last year and a half in his role on the Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Board, where he’s the Member-at-Large for Diversity. In that role, Vetri has been instrumental not only in organizing sessinos and special events for our NeMLA conferences, but also and to my mind even more importantly in advocating for the diverse community of scholars, teachers, graduate students, independent scholars, and higher ed professionals who comprise NeMLA. Those questions of academic community and labor are at the heart of 21^st century American higher education, and Vetri’s doing great work in advocating for and supporting them.

Even if he weren’t performing that vital organizational role, however, Vetri’s interdisciplinary, transnational scholarly work would more than qualify him for this week’s series. After this year’s NeMLA conference, I kicked off my week of recaps with a post on a wonderful seminar on transnational Italian-American connections, influences, and conversations. Vetri’s work to date has focused more fully on Italian culture and society than did that seminar’s papers; but in his central interests in migration and immigration, globalization and transnational relationships, and cinema (which in and of itself is of course a hugely transnational medium and force), he has modeled a transnational as well as interdisciplinary scholarly approach, one that considers any one 20^th and 21^st century culture through the lens of those broader but just as complex and analytical frames.  

I know we Americans (and Americanists?) have a tendency to see everything through our own lens, so I should make clear that I’m not trying to claim either Italy or Vetri’s scholarly work on it as a part of the global United States or the like. They deserve and demand to be read and analyzed on their own complex terms to be sure. Instead, I’m trying to make clear that AmericanStudies, both as a scholarly discipline and as my blog, contains multitudes—and that connecting the work that we and I do to scholars like Vetri both reflects that 21^st century breadth and can only benefit our own perspectives, analyses, and scholarly identities.

Next scholar tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Scholars you’d share?

July 27, 2015: Scholars on Fire: Luke Dietrich

[As we near the dog days of summer, a series on a handful of AmericanStudies scholars bringing the fire through their work and voices. I’d love to hear in comments about scholars whose work lights a fire under you!]

Three of the many reasons to keep an eye on Lucas Dietrich.

1)      His organizational service: While still a graduate student at UNH, Luke contributed significantly to one of my favorite scholarly organizations, the New England American Studies Association (NEASA) Council. He’s also brought a lot to conferences for the Northeast MLA (NeMLA), the American Literature Association (ALA), and THATCamp, among other work. Now that Luke has received his PhD and moved into the next stage of his career (with a gig at Lesley University), I look for him to add his voice to these and other organizations even more fully.

2)      His online scholarship: I first met Luke through Twitter, where he’s one of the many young scholars turning that social media site into a nuanced, thoughtful, evolving, communal conversation. He’s also written for a number of other websites and spaces, as illustrated by this wonderful piece for the Humor in America blog. In these and other ways, Luke is modeling what 21^st century public scholarship can be and offer, and I look forward to seeing where he takes his online writing and voice next.

3)      His dissertation project: Those first two arenas would be meaningful even if Luke didn’t have a first book in the works that seems destined to blow everyone away. But he does—that recently defended dissertation, on the role that turn of the 20^th century publishing and print culture played in the careers of ethnic authors such as Charles Chesnutt and Sui Sin Far, promises to become a truly ground-breaking, innovative, important book project. I’ve spent a good part of the last decade thinking about Chesnutt, Far, and their contemporaries, and every time I’ve heard Luke share elements of his work, he has added immeasurably to my perspective and knowledge. Can’t wait for the book!

Next scholar tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Scholars you’d share?

July 25-26, 2015: Crowd-sourced Hits

[75 years ago this week, Billboard magazine released its first chart of American popular music hits. So this week, I’ve AmericanStudied five #1 hits and their cultural and social contexts. This crowd-sourced post draws on the responses and other nominees of fellow ChartStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

On Twitter, my former FSU colleague (and current writing superstar) Ian Williams nominates “The Ting Tings’ ‘That’s Not My Name’ as a possible feminist anthem.”

Gregory Laski writes that “an old student of mine once wrote great essay on ‘Party in the USA’ as a democratic meditation. I found it convincing.”

Josh Paddison shares that he “once taught Ke$ha’s ‘Die Young’ video in a New Religious Movements class! Students were surprised.”

Osvaldo Oyola, one of our best analyzers of pop music and culture, shares this wonderful blog post.

On Facebook, my former Temple colleague Jeff Renye notes that “Autotune sucks,” which reminds me of one of my favorite recent hip hop hits, Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)” [that explicit excerpted version is NSFW].

My former FSU student and current professional editor and blogger Erin Fay highlights “censorship on the radio” as something she’s “never understood,” focusing on “‘Semi-Charmed Life’ by Third Eye Blind” as an example of a song that “gets butchered on the radio. But that song is interesting in that it sounds so light and peppy despite being about meth.” Jeff adds “‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam” to that thread.

Finally, New England American Studies Association webmaster par excellance Jonathan Silverman shares these thoughts on teaching music:

“One of my duties as a roving scholar was to give workshops on subjects of my hosts’ choosing. Often this turned out to be a seminar on how to teach music in the classroom. I often use music as a way of helping students write about subjects that are not literature; I find by introducing the idea of argumentation and evidence on subjects that are not familiar to students, that they are able to think easier about the macro ideas behind paper writing rather than the familiar process of literature interpretation.

My workshop was a meta-version of what I often do in my class—we listen to a song, and I have students write down 10 things about the song as they listen to it. And then I give them the song lyrics and we go over it again, trying to come up with an argument.

I often used Sufjan Stevens’ song “Casimir Pulaski Day,” the story about the death of young woman from cancer, because it had a story, the music was simple but sophisticated, and the students rarely had heard it. In Norway, no one had actually heard of Stevens, who was a Brooklyn coffee shop darling when I lived there.

I remember once in a classroom at Pace that students were on the verge of crying after we had gone through the process of breaking down the song, which begins with the guitar and voice, then adds a banjo for the next verse, and finally a guitar for the final verse. We figure out together (I try to hang back in the discussion) the themes of loss, young romance, and the questioning of religious faith. Exercises like this are often ones of discovery for both myself and the students. One time, a student alerted me to the line “the cardinal hits the window” when the narrator’s would-be girlfriend dies was probably a religious one; I only get such insights when I leave myself out of it.”

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Any other hits you’d highlight?