Humanities Now

On our season finale, we wish a happy fortieth anniversary to Texas Tech's Women's and Gender Studies program by talking at length with two WGS-affiliated faculty members about their recent books.  Dr. Elissa Zellinger from the Department of English speaks with us her book Lyrical Strains and its attention to nineteenth-century American poetry and the figure of the "poetess."  Next, Dr. Julie Willett from the Department of History discusses her recent history of the male chauvinist pig--as a trope in American popular culture and as an influence on political discourse over the past few decades.

For more on Elissa Zellinger's Lyrical Strains: Liberalism and Women's Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, see https://uncpress.org/book/9781469659817/lyrical-strains/.

For more on Julie Willett's The Male Chauvinist Pig: A History, see https://uncpress.org/book/9781469661070/the-male-chauvinist-pig/.

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On this first episode back from winter break, we sit down with Dr. Bryan K. Hotchkins, a faculty member in TTU's College of Education, to hear about his new book My Black is Exhausted: Forever in Pursuit of a Racist-free World Where Hashtags Don't Exist.  Extending our year-long conversation about anti-racism in scholarship and the arts, Hotchkins shows us how writing autobiographically and reflecting on popular culture offer possibilities for challenging white supremacy, acknowledging the persistence of anti-black racism, and offering relief for African Americans afflicted by those forces.

Click here for more information about Dr. Hotchkins's book, or here for more about the art he is creating in coordination with that project.  Follow Dr. Hotchkins (@drbkhotchkins)  on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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For our final fall episode before our winter break hiatus, Michael Borshuk sits down with Dr. Sebastian Ramirez, the Humanities Center's 2021-2022 Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities.  Sebastian speaks with us about his research on white supremacy and "white backlash" and how his scholarship builds on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Mills, and others.  Over the course of the conversation, Dr. Ramirez shows us how philosophy's disciplinary focus might contribute to anti-racism, and reminds us of the importance of conceptual clarity as we look critically at white supremacy's history and legacy.

Some of the works Dr. Ramirez mentions in our conversation: Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism by Charles Mills,  Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth Anderson, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender by Himani Bannerji.

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On this episode, we think about the relationship between art, racism, and social justice as we continue to engage our year-long Anti-Racism theme.  We speak with Dra. Leslie C. Sotomayor II, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Texas Tech, about her work as a scholar, curator, and working artist, and how her various projects contribute to an anti-racist mission.  Then we hear from Danielle Demetria East, founding Director of East Lubbock Art House, a vital center here in Lubbock for showcasing marginalized artists, supporting anti-racism, and building community.

Click here to read more about the Let's Pretend exhibition Dra. Sotomayor curated, and here to see her work featured in Visual Culture and Gender.

Click here to read more about East Lubbock Art House, including how to donate to this important institution.

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On this first episode of season two, Michael Borshuk sits down with members of the programming team for the Center's scholarly theme for 2021-2022, Anti-Racism.  We hear from Dr. Nadia Flores-Yeffal, dr. aretha marbley, Dr. Jennifer Nish, and Dr. Beau Pihlaja, as they explain what events and ideas provided the impetus for this year's programming and then forecast what topics and contexts we will work through in our various events and activities.  What does it mean to be anti-racist in the humanities and what steps must a university take to be anti-racist? How does this year's programming clear up some of the misconceptions that circulate in our public conversations about race, racism, and white supremacy? Where should one begin in one's reading to commit to anti-racism?

For further reading, texts mentioned in this episode:
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists (5th ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)  
Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (Routledge, 2013)
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Anti-Racist (Random House, 2019)  
Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, "Decolonizing Antiracism," Social Justice 32.4 (2005): 120-43.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, "The Shush," PMLA 136.3 (2021): 417-23.
Rinaldo Walcott, On Property  (Biblioasis, 2021)

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On this final episode of our first season, we conclude our ongoing discussion with this year's Alumni College Fellows by considering the new perspectives their research offers on the texture of everyday life.  We hear from Dr. Heather Warren-Crow, media theorist, interdisciplinary artist, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, as she leads us through the history of singing ATMS; Dr. Scott Weedon, Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, who speaks with us about popular beliefs about science and their broader implications; and Dr. Justin Tosi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, who advises why, in these ever contentious times, it might just be all right to mind our own business.

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On this episode, we continue visiting with our 2020-2021 Alumni College Fellows as they lead us in conversation on the relationship between who we are, how much freedom we possess, and the cultures we navigate in establishing either of the two.  We hear from Dr. Dale Kretz, Assistant Professor of History, who discusses African Americans' engagement with the federal government after the Civil War; Dr. Lesley Wolff, Assistant Professor of Latinx and Latin American Art History, who speaks with us about foodways and indigeneity in post-revolutionary Mexico City; and Dr. Alan Barenberg, Buena Vista Foundation Associate Professor of History, who talks about his current research on the Soviet government's punitive use of hard labor beginning in the 1940s.

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On this episode, we reflect on creativity in its worldly context as we continue to visit with the Humanities Center’s most recent cohort of Alumni College fellows.   Our topic is New Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics, and the World at Large, and our guests are Dr. Ali Duffy,  Associate Professor of Dance and Founder and Artistic Director of the Flatlands Dance Theatre, Dr. Michael Jordan, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and Dr. Matthew Hunter, an Assistant Professor of English who focuses on poetry and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  We also check in with Yerko Sepulveda, a specialist in Spanish Linguistics with the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures.   Yerko was the first student the Humanities Center selected to represent Texas Tech at the National Humanities Center's graduate student summer residency last year.

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As we come back from winter break, we begin a new sequence of episodes featuring the research of our 2020-2021 Alumni College Fellows.  Between now and May, we have arranged our twelve scholars into four audio panels, all speaking under the broad banner “New Perspectives on…”  For our February installment, the topic is “New Perspectives on History and Society,” and we hear from historian Richard Lutjens on "ordinary crime" in Nazi Germany, sociologist Ori Swed on drone technology and violent non-state actors, and musicologist Virginia E. Whealton on nineteenth-century musical culture in Norfolk, Virginia. 

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To wrap up our first half-season before we take a pause for winter break, we discuss the Humanities Center's focus on interdisciplinary collaboration by introducing two of our funded working groups.  Belinda Kleinhans tell us the history of the Animal in the Humanities working group, which the center funded from 2017 to 2019.  Then we hear from our latest working group, the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center.  Five of their members, Angela Mariani, Janis Elliott, Julie Nelson Couch, Jacob Baum, and Lane Sobehrad, talk about the intellectual ideas that ground their collaborative work, and preview some of the plans they have for the future.

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