Karen Leigh Tongson, a graduate of UCLA, and current Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC, recently delivered a talk entitled, “Always True to You Darlin’ in My Fashion: Queer Musicality and Disciplinarity,” at UCLA’s Queer Studies Conference in October, 2011.
After graduating from UCLA in 1995, Prof. Tongson received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, before joining the faculty at USC in 2005. Prof. Tongson’s research interests include Queer & Gender Studies; Minority Discourse; Popular Culture (Pop Music, TV, Entertainment & Media Cultures); Suburban Studies; Performance; Los Angeles & the Southern California Region; Contemporary Literature; 19th-Century British Literature; Theory; Aesthetics on popular culture, queer studies, performance, music and literature. Her writings have appeared in such journals as Social Text, GLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The International Journal of Communication, as well as in the anthologies Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge), and The Blackwell Companion to LGBTQ Studies (eds. Haggerty and McGarry). Her first book, RELOCATIONS: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, was published August 1, 2011, as part of the New York University Press Sexual Cultures Series. Professor Tongson is also a co-founder of the culture industry webzine OH! INDUSTRY (2007-2010) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (alongside Gustavus Stadler), Series Editor of Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press (with Henry Jenkins), and Events Editor for the journal, American Quarterly.
In her recent presentation as a plenary speaker at UCLA’s Queer Studies Conference, Prof. Tongson addressed issues of cultural promiscuity and attachment in interdisciplinary studies, highlighting her open relationship with various genres, eras, and forms of media. To exemplify her kinetic movement between ostensibly disparate modes of production, Prof. Tongson began her talk with a screening of a London theater’s revived performance of Cole Porter’s “Always True to You in My Fashion,” a favorite show-tune from his 1948 Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate. The singer’s spurious declaration that she’s always true to her cardinal love despite her flirtatious exchanges with other men exemplified Tongson’s own movements of study between various boundaries of classification, category, and style, all the while asserting the enduring value of her scholarly roots in literature.
Citing Matthew Arnold’s advocacy for the memorization of esteemed lyric poems by which to measure other works of art, Prof. Tongson outlined various approaches for integrating perspective from one art form to another, including those of the 1980’s pop band, Scritti Politti’s playful referencing of Kant and Derrida. Through her exploration of a number of media forms in her work, Prof. Tongson affirmed her own abiding roots in literature, which, while intimately embedded, remain actively in flux with a range of both peripheral and remote aspects of aesthetics, gender studies, and literary theory.
English Professor Emeritus, Frederick Burwick, has recently been awarded the Andrew Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship (making him UCLA’s sixth recipient and the first from the English Department). Author and editor of twenty-eight books and one hundred twenty-eight articles (as well as numerous reviews), Prof. Burwick’s research deals with issues of perception, illusion, and delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance, especially in the fields of English and German Romanticism.
The project for which Prof. Burwick has been awarded the Mellon Foundation’s generous support, “Working-Class Theaters in London, 1790-1840,” proposes to analyze the relationship between theater performance and spectatorship in terms of working-class demographics, alongside the formation of the first trade unions in England. After assembling a precisely defined account of London’s population growth, distribution, employment, income, and immigration patterns, Prof. Burwick intends to address the different ways in which non-licensed theaters were shaped and defined by their local communities.
Although public assembly was heavily restricted, workers could safely gather within theaters, where ticket admission sometimes doubled as purchase of union membership, and plays in performance addressed factory conditions (depending on the degree to which performers elaborated on heavily censored scripts). Consequently, Prof. Burwick’s task will be to determine from the plays, playbills, reviews, commentaries, and memoirs the relevant labor issues presented in a play, and to establish the reception and consequences of a performance among the working-class audience in attendance.
Apart from research conducted at UCLA and the Huntington Library (which houses the collection of the Examiner of Plays, John Larpent), Prof. Burwick will spend four weeks in London consulting immigration and demographic records at the National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives Library, and theater and performance records at the British Library and East End Theater Archives. Prof. Burwick has already found a publisher at Palgrave/Macmillan to publish the results of this research, making it his twenty-ninth book and fourth monograph devoted to the theater of this turbulent period of rapid and radical social change.
Prof. Burwick has noted his surprise at his success in garnering major support, given his project’s concern with the rise of the labor movement and the establishment of trade unions since both have been the target of extensive political attack during the past year (including efforts in a few states to render them illegal), though not – he makes clear – to the degree of aggressive opposition which unions faced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Reflecting on the fact that nominees for this award are considered by invitation only, Prof. Burwick would like to thank Department Chair, Ali Behdad, for the strength of his endorsement, as well as the departmental CAO, Caleb Na, for effectively facilitating the proposal (as well as the judges and scholars who nominated and selected his project from among twenty finalists nationwide).
We wish him the best of luck in his upcoming travels and research, and continue to delight in his academic success within and beyond the department!
