Humanities Media Project

Death and Numbers: Food for Thought, Ep. 2

In this special three-part series of Death & Numbers written by Amy Vidor and Caroline Barta, we’re cracking open cookbooks and archival records to learn about the bond between food and text. In this second episode, we break down how technology influences food writing and criticism by focusing on the effect of visual-based technology. Read more! About best-selling cookbooks: “Cookbook bestsellers in the U.S., 2016” The New York Times Best Sellers List: Food and Diet About Michelin stars: “How Restaurants are Awarded Michelin Stars” by Christopher … [Read more...]

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Death and Numbers: Food for Thought Ep. 1

In this special three-part series of Death & Numbers, we’re cracking open cookbooks and archival records to learn about the bond between food and text. In this first episode, we pair a largely forgotten 17th century French cookbook with Julia Child’s classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking to consider how food writing shapes cultural transmission. Find out more! To see medieval and early modern “recipe” collections, check out the Harry Ransom Center. For more information on Le Cuisinier françois read British Library curator Polly Russell’s “The History … [Read more...]

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2018 Media Production Grant Recipients

Racial Geography Tour Edmund T. Gordon, Department Chair/Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies/Vice Provost for Diversity For nearly 17 years, the Racial Geography Tour of The University of Texas at Austin, led by Dr. Gordon, has provided students, faculty, and visitors with a guided opportunity to examine the historic origins of the buildings, landmarks, and spaces of the University’s campus. This experience invites the public to come to grips with the historical and present racial realities of the University and the city of Austin. The Media Production Grant will … [Read more...]

The Voting Rights Act of 1975

The 1965 Voting Rights Act has been deservedly well-documented and researched. But the ’75 VRA, when Mexican American civil rights advocates sought to expand the protections of the VRA, is relatively unknown. The expansion was the brainchild of Al Perez, the son of working class Mexican American parents in Brownsville who found it difficult to vote because they were Spanish-monolingual and could not read the ballots. His closest partner was Tom Reston, a Yankee blue blood whose father was a legendary New York Times columnist. The expansion found supporters among Congressman Edward Roybal … [Read more...]

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The DWRL at 30

We were around before the digital was digital… In the mid-1980s, a group of English graduate students at The University of Texas at Austin drilled holes in the wall in the basement of the Undergraduate Library, now the Flawn Academic Center. Running cable through those holes, they connected twelve computers and formed a network that allowed for synchronous communication. This network became a classroom, and thus the Computer Research Lab (CRL) was born. Please allow me a moment of full disclosure: I was a graduate student instructor teaching and proctoring in the lab in the 1990s, when … [Read more...]

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Can We Ever Kill the Author?

In this episode, written by Amy Vidor, we discuss infamous author Norman Mailer and explore a timely question, given the recent accusations of sexual misconduct throughout Hollywood and beyond and the #MeToo movement: Can you really separate the art from the artist? Read the original essay by Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” here, and the translation by Richard Howard here. Be sure to read Mailer’s works, like The Armies of the Night. Looking to read more about Mailer’s life? Grab a copy of Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon and check out Allen Barra’s profile in … [Read more...]

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The Gold Standard

The United States used a gold standard for most of the late 19th and early 20th century. This meant that a person could exchange U.S. currency--as well as many public and private debts--for gold until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the practice during the Great Depression. Even after that, though, the U.S. dollar was tied to the value of gold until the early 1970s when President Richard Nixon canceled the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold. Currently, the U.S. dollar is fiat currency, meaning that its value is backed by the government that issues … [Read more...]

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Eureka!

What connects an ancient Greek mathematician to the catchphrase of the California Gold Rush? The short answer is a potentially apocryphal story involving a bathtub, a crown, and some mild nudity. Today's episode asks why the Greek word "eureka" is so commonly associated with gold, and tells a popular story about how mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse c. 287 – c. 212 BC) discovered a formula that was later called Archimedes Principle, which is a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape. The object we believe he used in this experiment was a crown... or was it … [Read more...]

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Why Do People Still Think the Earth is Flat?

In November 2017, 500 people from around the globe convened outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, for the Flat Earth International Conference, the first of its kind since the modern iteration of the movement began over 130 years ago. Why now? Surely all of the scientific and cultural innovations of the past century would have ended this debate for good... right? Or is technology at least partially to blame for this resurgence of anti-science rhetoric? According to Bruce Hunt, professor of history at the University of Texas, the flat earth theory has been around for much longer than its … [Read more...]

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2017 Media Production Grant Recipients

The Range Marvin Bendele Director, Foodways Texas & Lecturer, American Studies & Jeannette Vaught American Studies The Range is a new podcast created by Foodways Texas, a nonprofit organization hosted by the American Studies Department at the University of Texas, that draws from Foodways Texas’s existing strengths in collecting and preserving oral histories to bring diverse narratives of Texas food cultures to a national audience. The podcast goes beyond profiles of various chefs, authors, or recipes to delve deeper into the relationships between the past and present, … [Read more...]

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