Joan Burbick Looks at Culture, Democracy, and the American West

After driving hundreds of miles, she entered the gun show and started shooting. But gun show organizers aren't fond of cameras, and so the slender, blue-eyed English professor with a 35mm camera was promptly asked to leave.

Such was Joan Burbick's experience on a 1995 trip to photograph what she describes as "the harder side of the rural west."

After public hours ended, Burbick was permitted to return to the show to take the pictures of vendors if they were willing. The vendors greeted her with lectures on American history, guns, and cultural identity. Eleven years, later Burbick's stunning exposé on the roots of American gun culture, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy (The New Press, 2006), was published.

The author of 4 books, including Rodeo Queens and the American Dream (PublicAffairs, 2002), and numerous articles and reviews on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture, Burbick is working on what she calls "public writing," where cultural insights are grounded in the everyday lives of people living in this country.

Gun Show Nation examines guns in relation to the politics of the United States and how they have affected our democracy. Burbick spent the years between her first unplanned encounter with guns and the book's publication researching and traveling in the American west, meeting and talking with people who have attachments to guns. She visited shows, stores, gun-rights meetings, and National Rifle Association conventions.  Her book is based on these interviews, her personal experiences, and what she has learned and observed.

Burbick's obsession with the culture and politics of the United States began in her graduate school days in the 1970s. She studied literature, comparative religion, and fine arts at Brandeis University with an interdisciplinary perspective that she maintains today, earning her master's and doctoral degrees in American literature. She went on to earn another master's degree in religious studies from Wesleyan University, and in 1978 Burbick moved to Pullman to teach at WSU, where she is a professor of English and American studies.

Burbick has held 2 endowed professorships in English and liberal arts at WSU, and she has been the Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for Humanities. In 2004, she completed a month-long residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy.

This spring Burbick is taking her interest in American culture overseas to Poland, as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Warsaw's American Studies Center. Raised in a Polish-American community in Chicago, Burbick said, "I've wanted to go to Poland sometime in my life."

The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and for over 50 years has been administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES). Senator J. William Fulbright authored the legislation that established the program in 1946. Said Fulbright, "International education exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that nations can learn to live in peace."

In Poland Burbick will teach courses on "Women Writers in the American West" and "Theories of Visual Culture." She is interested in gaining an "understanding of how people outside the U.S. are attempting to understand us." She asks, "How do they perceive us? What are their critiques?" She also hopes to investigate her personal point of view when looking from the outside in.

While in Poland, Burbick will be working on her new Snake River project. She is looking at the river, a place where she loves to hike, swim, and camp, as a cultural historical space. Its rich history is a context for examining social violence, which Burbick defines as "an umbrella for human violence in relation to the individual, violence toward groups of people, violence against nature."

If there is any truth to the notion that history repeats itself, Burbick in her next book is sure to focus her lens on another fascinating angle and view into American culture.