Academics & Ales: An Informal Night of Research Presentations
Heirloom Rustic Ales
March 4
I’ve got 18 years on either side of my college experience. In the last almost two decades, I’ve accidentally retrained my brain to learn outside of the format of higher education. Most days, I’m not listening to someone tell me new ideas from a position of authority unless they made a documentary or put it on the internet. In this way I’ve taken one giant leap for mankind away from mankind, and so have plenty of other people. It takes little to no actual knowledge to seem like you know something anymore, a media literacy blow almost as damaging to the reputation of the institution of college as the cost of such an education. But I, like most thinking types I know, appreciate the specificity of academic study, the idea that passionate humans can spend entire careers in pursuit of enlightenment in specific fields of interest. Very, very specific fields.
So for me, it’s a delight and a treat that the University of Tulsa’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences stages biannual microlectures at Heirloom Rustic Ales, free and open to the public, so anyone can pop in and sip an adult beverage while pondering the literary canon. If you didn’t study liberal arts and have wondered, “What are they even doing in there all day?” then this Bud’s Hand Lantern’s for you. (This season’s symposium also featured Old Dog hawking fried rice and dumplings just outside, in case anyone wanted to ponder the canon while eating Thai curry.)
I, not an idiot, expected some of the topics to be inaccessible to me, not due to their complexities but in a vague “I haven’t done the reading” sort of way (or in some cases, an “I haven’t done the reading in 20 years” way), but this was largely entry-level stuff for anyone willing to listen.
It was standing room only by the time the talks started at 5:40 p.m., with Heirloom full of what Kendall College dean and the evening’s emcee Blaine Greteman called a “lively” crowd who hushed for the duration of each talk and asked thoughtful questions, most of which appeared to come from university colleagues, students and former students. I couldn’t tell if any attendee other than myself had zero connection to TU, and I wonder what, other than venue selection, was done to encourage community attendance outside the sphere of TU’s or Heirloom’s social media reach. I also think they could use a bigger space with more seating.
The first presenter was Michelle Martin, MFA, the director of TU’s school of Art, Design, & Art History. Her talk, “Mystorical Constructions,” was focused on her own body of work. She discussed her desire as an artist to push the boundaries of traditional collage by combining up to 30 or 40 images with content often spanning different centuries into modern prints that detail past, present and future at the same time—collage, but not obviously. The most resonant part was her toying with “the definition of craft,” as she’s a printmaker who often spends several months at a computer manipulating singular pixels before creating a physical work. Is it printmaking if you did a lot of the work on a computer? She says yes.
Rachel Head (assistant professor of sociology) discussed “Diseases of Despair in the 21st Century,” condensing six years of research into five minutes on the growth of depression, addiction and other despair-related ailments that have stunted American life expectancy. She spoke briefly about personal agency and goals as they relate to despair and her desire to move her studies toward the “sociology of hope,” treating hope as a measurable metric. She ended by saying, “The absence of despair does not mean the presence of hope.” Bleak, if timely.
The second half of the evening was for the ladies. “Type in the margins: Tracing feminist histories of typography” by M. Wright (associate professor of graphic design) was the reason I wanted to attend the event, despite never having thought about feminism (which I think about often) as it relates to typography (which I also think about more often than the average person).
Wright gave a crash course in the history of women in typesetting and women-founded type foundries in the 1800s publishing feminist and lesbian lit. Then, she dropped a couple of real bangers I’ve thought about every day since hearing them:
- With the onset of keyboards, typesetting went from an “only men can do this work” profession to an “only women should do this work” profession almost immediately.
- Have you ever thought about the limitations of language and communication about gender fluidity? I have, because I’m an English major who also believes in equal civil rights! Bye Bye Binary is working on ungendered typefaces (!!!) that confront the binary issue of languages with grammatical gender built into them. This idea is genius, never would have occurred to me, and makes way more sense than the apparent retrofitting of words and characters that already have other meanings.
The evening ended with “Editing Frances Burney’s ‘Camilla’ for the Cambridge Novels of Frances Burney,” by TU Provost George Justice. Sasha Colby said, “I’m your favorite drag queen’s favorite drag queen,” and Chappell Roan said, “I’m your favorite artist’s favorite artist.” George Justice said, “She’s your favorite author’s favorite author” (paraphrased) when he told us that “Miss Jane Austen of Steventon” subscribed to Burney’s crowdfunding efforts before she’d published her own novels. We also learned that Napoleon was a fan and that Justice thinks Burney’s dad was probably an asshole.
This was the most college class-y of all the talks and I believe the least likely to reach a general audience in a meaningful way, given the discussion of the reputation of editorial versus scholarly work and that I think a lot of people don’t know what a Norton Critical Edition is. To me though—a woman for whom the lady novelists of the 18th century are burned into my consciousness as the blueprint for the anger of repression expressed as written satire—hoo boy, this was fun.
I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed this event if I had just spent all day in class, but a lot of days I miss my more academic self, and this was a short and sweet opportunity to visit her. The next Academics & Ales, according to dean Greteman, will be in October-ish.
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