Alumnus Report
Submitted to The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation
From Dr. Erika Bsumek-Hannon, Geraldine R. Dodge Postdoctoral Fellow, 1998-2001
History, either purely academic or that which transcends into the public sphere, helps us better understand our ever changing world. Nothing has helped me learn this lesson, and convey it to my current students, more so than the time I spent as the inaugural Geraldine R. Dodge Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience. I am writing to provide an overview detailing the ways that the Fellowship has fostered my growth as an academic and reinforced my commitment to public history.
The Impact of The Dodge Fellowship on my life and work:
To begin, I am certain that my tenure as a Dodge Fellow at the Institute helped me get a job. Recent studies illustrate that less than 8%of Ph.D’s in the humanities actually receive teaching positions at colleges and/or Universities. In reviewing my curriculum vitae, search committees repeatedly asked me about my position at the Institute. Many were especially impressed when I explained that the mission of the Institute was designed, in significant part, to help scholars working on race and ethnicity connect with the public. Too often it seems, such work is conducted in a vaccum – with scholars speaking only to each other. The Institute allowed for a free-flowing conversation to occur between those writing, researching, and studying the way race and ethnicity operate in America with those who actually “lived” those experiences. As a result, since leaving Newark, I have had two tenure track teaching positions. One at the University of Texas, El Paso and my current position at the University of Texas, Austin. In both settings I have been lucky enough to find departments that supported the goal of the Institute and hoped that I could bring some of the purposeful public programming to campus. I am currently Assistant Professor of Native American and U.S. Western history at the University of Texas at Austin and although I have only been here for one year, I have actively worked to bring Native American scholar and poet, Simon Ortiz to Austin, participated in an on-going symposium on gender and race, and have met with the Dean of Liberal Arts, Richard Laviere, who was so intrigued with past Institute programming, that he is interested in starting a similar organization on campus.
Time spent at the Institute has also helped me develop my own scholarship. Working with scholars such as Dr. Price, Dr. Russell, Lori Barcliff Baptista, and the many, many others who came to lecture as part of Institute programs have influenced my own work in significant ways. Specifically, I am currently working on a book that will not only cross disciplinary boundaries, but also incorporate new ways of thinking about race, ethnicity, and society. At this point, my manuscript, Making ‘Indian-made’: The Production and Consumption of Navajo Identity, 1860-1940 is currently under contract with The University Press of Kansas and is slated to be part of the Culture American Series, edited by Erika Doss. A study of consumerism and ethnic identity construction, this project links the history of Navajo Indians to larger economic and cultural trends in American history. In doing so, it locates the emergence of the “Navajo primitive” in Navajo internment in the 1860s and, then later, in the arrival of the railroad in the Southwest and the heavily promoted tourist industry that it generated. By the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of middle-class white consumers were enthralled with aspects of “Navajo primitivism” and purchased millions of dollars worth of Navajo-made goods from Anglo middlemen who worked as Navajo traders. Navajo women, the weavers of fine textiles, and Navajo men, the skilled silversmiths, often saw little of the money that resulted from this trade. Ultimately, this project reveals that the meanings associated with Navajo-made objects differed among producers, arbiters, and consumers. Along the way, production, distribution, and consumption became interdependent concepts shaped by tourism, race relations, trade law, and the representation of culture. Men and women, Navajo and white, experienced those forces differently, leading to a reconceptualization of gender roles and ethnic and racial identities in local and national contexts as well as in domestic and commercial spaces. I anticipate that next year, when I am the Tanner Humanties Fellow at the University of Utah, I will complete a full draft of this manuscript.
Current Teaching Practices and Course Development
I consider teaching one of my strengths and I carry my interest in understanding the connections between cultural, ethnic, social and public history into the classroom. In the past two years I have taught courses on the twentieth century American West, Native American history as well as the general United States Survey course. Each course incorporates a focused approach to cross-cultural contact, economic growth, and representations of race and ethnicity in American history. While at the Institute, I designed and taught upper level undergraduate courses on Race, Class, and Ethnicity in America and on the History of Immigration to the United States. In this course I focused on the emergence of multiracial and multiethnic populations in three urban areas: Los Angeles, Newark, and Harlem. I hope to repeat this course soon. It enabled the students to look outside of their own communities, to envision how others construct racial identities, how society constructs those identities, and how such constructions operate within unique economic and social atmospheres. I have also taught American history survey courses utilizing a comparative framework that helps undergraduates comprehend the malleability and interconnectedness of relationships of class, race, and gender in different regions of the United States. In all the courses I teach I emphasize the skills of critical analysis and writing and I seek to provide a sense of immediacy, relevance, and personality of the material. In designing courses, I draw on my own interdisciplinary approach to research and my minor field in Immigration and Ethnic history. In short, the Institute helped me realize that knowledge is a social entity, something to be shared, discussed, and interpreted in public forums. What better place for an educator to convey these things to students than the classroom?
Public Scholarship
In addition to working with students and local organizers to bring Acoma poet Simon Ortiz to Austin, I have been involved in other forays into public scholarship. At the University of Texas, El Paso, I participated in and helped to plan numerous events geared toward the public from film festivals to a symposium on gender and the border. In addition, an article I wrote as a fellow at the Institute was recently published in a collection of essays on tourism in the Southwest. Titlted, “Exchanging Places: Virtual Tourism, Vicarious Travel and the Consumption of Southwestern Indian Artifacts” this piece represents my first attempt to make my own scholarly research accessible to the general public and yet still remain an important contribution to the field. My second project, currently in the research and planning stage, seeks to expand the way that the public and the academe looks at everyday environments and they way they physcially, socially and culturally structure our lives. This work, a cultural history of cement tentatively titled “The Concrete West,” will focus attention on how one material altered the landscape and the lives of people in the arid West. This project will deal with how westerners became dependent upon cement as the primary building material and how it altered the culture(s) and environment(s) of the area. Specific chapters will focus on the construction of dams, freeways, cities, suburban neighborhoods, sewers, and swimming pools. How these things were built, along with where they were built, had as much to do with innovations in civil engineering—and the emergence of the powerful concrete industry—as they did with relationships that were structured by the multiple forces of ethnicity, class, and race in the West. As I research and present material from this project, my work is moving in the direction of environmental studies. My own experience at the Institute, specifically planning such programs as the City Children and their Cultures Series has forced me to think about the way urban landscapes shape the lives of individuals. My second project reflects my continued interest in, and development of, this theme.
In short, my experience at the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience has helped me form a blueprint that will guide both the initial stages and future goals of my career. I anticipate building on the experiences I had while a Dodge Fellow throughout my career, keeping my connections to the public and public history in the foreground.
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