Category: Personal

The Professor’s Bookshelf

I was asked to participate in an article for Loyola’s student newspaper on books that shaped me. The full article has some great reads (and some questionable ones, I admit). They didn’t include my full explanations of my choices, so here they are:

Orientalism by Edward Said: This was my introduction to critical theory and to the concept of social construction and has influenced me ever since I read it in college. It gave me a new way of understanding power and our place in the world. 

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Probably the book I’ve re-read the most; I never regret entering into Tolkien’s world.

Gay New York by George Chauncey: Another college read, this book introduced me to queer history and helped launch me into my own career.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin: This was actually the Humanities Symposium text from a few years ago. A classic science fiction tale that also helped me better understand the malleability of sex and gender.

The Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick: An essential introduction to the way heterosexist society creates cycles of shame and enforces silence (while also declaring that we don’t need to hear “it”), this foundational work of queer theory is also an interrogation into the queer subtext (and text) of novels I also love (like Billy Budd and In Search of Lost Time).

Currently Reading

Got more books on my mind than usual these days. Some initial thoughts:

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen: This one is for my book club and I’m finding it fascinating. I confess I knew very little about Margaret Mead beyond the basics. I’m about a third of the way through this (extremely well-written) book and am finding the ways her humanistic anthropology led her not only to the idea that psychedelics might expand our ability to connect to one another, but also to working directly with the CIA to be fascinating and delightfully in tension with one another. So many people enter the orbit of Mead and her cohort you basically come away reading a chapter of this book thinking Breen has found an entry point to explaining the whole of American society during the decades he covers.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner: I’m very far into a years (maybe decades) long project of reading all the Hugo winners for best novel. This quest continues despite the recent controversies (Babel absolutely should have been nominated, but the winner, Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher was the better book). I’m only a couple chapters into this one, but the introduction to the edition I got from my awesome local library served as a warning when it referenced Georges Perec as an influence. I will finish this, but the postmodern conceits are strong in this one.

Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France by Holly Grout: I’m just about done with Holly Grout’s new book on Sarah Bernhardt, Collette, and Josephine Baker’s relationship to Cleopatra. This might be considered a “work” book that I picked up in order to draft a chapter of an edited volume I am working on, but it hasn’t been as relevant as I had hoped. That said, the book is an excellent companion to Grout’s first book on beauty and effectively showcases the ways that these three actors put on display and mixed up the sexual and racial politics of the Third Republic.

My Pandemic Year in Film

With the essential end of non-Zoom socializing, I had originally thought that I’d play a lot more video games and read more novels. In the end, game playing was about even and I only read a few more novels than normal. What I really ended up doing was watching a ton of movies, both classic and contemporary, “serious” and for fun. Indeed, my best purchase when this all started was a subscription to the Criterion Channel. Now that we’re at the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I thought I’d revisit what I’ve watched. Those films in bold are the ones I simulwatched (almost weekly now for an entire year), with my close friend, the art historian Jessica Fripp:

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My Moments

A sign announces that Brandon Scott’s office is closed due to the Coronavirus, Baltimore, MD, April 2020

I woke up this morning to an e-mail from Spot Hero “celebrating” my one year anniversary since joining their parking reservation service. Why had I decided to sign up a year ago? Because I was traveling to Philadelphia to give a talk to a class at the University of the Arts. I went, had a great time, and had no idea that it would be basically the last professional event I would attend in-person for over a year.

On Twitter and on Podcasts, people are talking about their “moment” when they realized that the novel coronavirus was going to be a profound event; that it was going to truly disrupt our lives. For me, the moment was a series of small decisions that were made within a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I was regularly reading updates about the Coronavirus. The very day I left for Philly, the University of Washington announced it was evacuating campus. When I went to the store that weekend, I bought some extra stuff including, fortunately, some toilet paper. I knew that something was brewing.

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Strangers on a Plane

[Warning: Discussion of sexual abuse in this post]

Do not talk to me on an airplane. When I sit down, normally with headphones already on, book in hand, I am not inviting a conversation with a stranger. And yet, my most recent trip (a short hour and change flight, thankfully) these standard strategies utterly failed in the face of an older woman who just needed to chat. I could tell, 20-minutes in, that I was not escaping this so I settled into a rhythm of “uh huhs” that I figured I could keep up for the rest of the flight. The worst that would happen, I assumed, was that I lost an hour while providing some company to a lady who, at most, lacked the self-awareness necessary to realize that I just wanted to finish my novel. But what a chat it became.

It started innocuously enough. She told me about her life, her children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. She was a retired teacher and school superintendent and a pastor. She told me about beginning teaching at 19, barely older than her students, and some of the problems and difficulties that entailed. She worked for 42 years before retiring. Things took a turn, however, when she began tell me why she doesn’t substitute teach any longer. She told me about an incident when she had to call a young kindergartner’s parents after the child had swore at her (“bitch, don’t touch me,” she claimed she said). Obviously not a good look for a five-year old, though who knows if that’s what was actually said. In any case, my airline companion proceeds to explain that she called in the students parents and it turns out that it was two dads. The child, who the teacher assumed was a girl, turned out to be a boy wearing girls’ clothes.

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On Being Jewish in the Deep South

I came across the following tweet this morning and couldn’t help but think of all the times this has happened to me:

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now, so I’ll take the tweet (the whole thread, really) as an opportunity.

When this has happened to me, it’s usually either been because I am Jewish (my mom says I don’t “look Jewish,” but I’m not so sure) or because of random bad luck. The most vivid time it happened was when I was about 14, trapped on a ski lift with a random guy who just asked what my faith was and when I answered “Jewish,” launched into a speech (one he clearly delivered frequently) about how I should accept Jesus Christ. It shook me. Since moving to Mississippi, I’ve encountered proselytizing with more frequency than I had in Michigan or Ohio, but not by a huge amount. I remember sitting in a grocery store parking lot in Ann Arbor once, when a guy knocked on the car window in order to ask if I accepted Jesus. What has differed, however, is the way those moments have combined with other interactions to reinforce just how “weird” it seems to people to find a Jew down here.

Granted, part of this is my own doing insofar as I don’t attend the local synagogue (there is one). And yet, I’ve been surprised at how frequently I’ve felt that it was not my sexuality that rendered me different living in the Deep South, but rather my existence as a (secular) Jew. One time, after being approached by a stranger in a restaurant who asked if I had “found Jesus,” I tried to explain to someone who had grown up here their whole life why I found it so offensive. Namely, that it reeks of anti-Semitism to assume that Jews need “saving” and that it is incredibly condescending to assume that I haven’t considered my own spirituality just because I don’t practice a religion or haven’t turned toward Christianity. I understand that some forms of Christianity are more given to proselytizing than others, but such practices rely on a myopia about other people that helps explain some of the broader fears about strangers of all kinds that is so prominent in today’s conservative politics.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand throughout my four years in Hattiesburg, as again and again I encountered behavior that came out of ignorance much more than malice. During my first year here, I attended a university function that opened with a Christian prayer. A student asked me why the “Jews decided to go into the ghettos.” A burlesque show of all things told the audience they “loved their Jew friends” before peppering the crowd with basic trivia about Hanukah. Another student asked if I was “of the Jewish race,” while a third declared that Jews are more likely to get typhus “because of the Holocaust.”

Though these comments often set me back on my heels, I tried to use them as learning opportunities, especially with my students. That said, they reveal the ways in which the evangelism practiced in so many local churches is born out of a kind of ignorance that renders Jews something totally foreign. This only makes these encounters more uncomfortable: you know that if you engage you’re going to have a one-sided conversation. I honestly don’t think those who do this kind of thing really think about its actual (versus imagined) effects of those they approach. The assumption that all others share the same spiritual goals (we don’t) is reinforced by the notion that anyone who hasn’t found the “correct” path simply needs to be shown the way (we don’t). This is not to say that racism doesn’t also shape my life in the north, but this specific kind was unique to my experience in the south. Others’ mileage may vary.

I’ve just agreed to participate in a proposed workshop on personal identity, diversity, and academia at this year’s Western Society for French History. I certainly have some things to say about my work in sexuality studies, but ultimately it has been these experiences that have been most troublesome in the past few years. I should say very clearly that I have met wonderful people in Mississippi. But at the same time, I have never felt more “other” for being a Jew than I have while living here.

Hello (Again)

When I think about how hard it is to get something onto that blank word document, I’m somewhat amazed that I ever thought I would have the energy to write for anything other than professional work.  Then I remember how enjoyable it was to write for a wider audience and on topics I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to address and I wonder why I ever stopped making the time.  This is the third time I’ve come back to the web with the intent of writing under the title of “air pollution,” but I have somewhat different goals in mind this time.

In the past, I approached my online work as simply another weblog, a way to improve and practice my writing while touching on subjects I wasn’t covering in my graduate courses or dissertation research.  This time, the blog is simply be one component of a broader space in which I can work digitally.  I keep the same address and same home, but see this space as my center of gravity for both my research and teaching.  Rather than put either aspect of my professional self behind closed doors — on a teaching platform like Blackboard or Moodle, for instance — this will be where I share what I can of what I’m doing as I’m doing it.

Right now, teaching will be the focus.  I’ve put up my first few syllabi from last semester as well as those I’m working on now.  The latter will be constantly updated with public links to PowerPoint slides and other resources my classes and I will be using throughout the semester.  Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that it can be freely used for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution.

Research will come later.  I have a few ideas about some cool digital projects — such as an interactive map of prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris — but I need a little more time to conceptualize them and lots more time getting oriented around the best tools for completing them.

So for now, here’s my latest attempt to integrate my original interests in digital tools (I did start out as a Computer Science major after all) and my new career as a professional historian.  Enjoy!