Blog
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At Winedale, The Show Goes On
Students in UT Austin’s famous Shakespeare at Winedale program often push theater’s “the show must go on” maxim to the edge. Now director James Loehlin faces an offstage challenge, but his commitment to Winedale isn’t wavering.
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Kamran Asdar Ali links UT Austin to Global Asia
Kamran Asdar Ali, chair of UT’s Department of Anthropology, just finished his term as president of the Association for Asian Studies. His goal? Expanding how we think about Asia.
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“Defining Freedom” Dialogue Features Range of Voices, Perspectives at UT’s College of Liberal Arts
On February 16, two distinct voices from different academic disciplines and positions on the political spectrum met for a moderated dialogue about how they define freedom.
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Sparking joy through entrepreneurship: Q&A with COLA student Haley Jústiz
COLA student Haley Jústiz, a partner in the Austin-based startup FreeWater, talks about her journey from book blogger to entrepreneur and what she thinks the liberal arts can bring to business.
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Why is a love poem full of sex in the Bible? Readers have been struggling with the Song of Songs for 2,000 years
Many Americans have heard the expression “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine,” but perhaps not all of the quotation’s admirers know that its origins lie in a biblical text: the Song of Songs.
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These UT Sophomores Started a Company That Incentivizes Sustainability
The idea: an app to help ranchers in Botswana make data-driven decisions about grazing allocation on their land. Inspiration: discussions among friends at Kinsolving that evolved into the student-run startup company Gazelle Ecosolutions. It’s taken Mihir Bendre, along with sophomores Amod Daherkar and Siddharth Thakur, across the globe, from the national Fowler Global Social Innovation…
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COLA’s Favorite Books of 2022
With 2023 just around the corner, we asked some of our COLA faculty what they most enjoyed reading in 2022. Below are their picks, which cover contemporary fiction and poetry as well as looks at long-haul trucking and Black women’s impact on pop culture. Whatever it is you like to read, we’re sure there’s a…
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Iranian protesters turn to TikTok to get their message past government censors
Images of the protests in Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Zhhina Amini have circulated widely on social media. TikTok in particular is proving to be an effective tool of political activism both in and outside of the country.
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Study of Texas German Gets a Million-Dollar Boost
For more than 20 years, the Texas German Dialect Project, an organization housed in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Linguistics Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, has recorded and preserved Texas German language, culture, and history. Now, with the award of a million-dollar grant from an anonymous donor, the project’s…
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Remembering UT’s World-Class Creative Writing Professor, Zulfikar Ghose
Ghose was the author of more than twenty-five books and his range was wide: fiction, poetry, and criticism. As a novelist, he challenged the limits of traditional realism with innovation in structure and language. But he’s also remembered by many as a generous and warm colleague and mentor.
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Economics as Storytelling: Alumni Q&A with Kyle Kretschman
Now the Head of Economics for Spotify, Kretschman was once a doctoral student studying microeconomics at The University of Texas at Austin. One afternoon in October, we met over Zoom to discuss how he got from one point to the other and how he sees his liberal arts background affecting the work he does now.
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In Memoriam: Joel F. Sherzer, Linguistic Anthropologist, Visionary Digital Archivist, and Pioneer of Speech Play and Verbal Art Studies
Sherzer joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 1969, and served as its chair from 1987 to 1995. He became a member of the UT Department of Linguistics in 1978. He was the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships in 1975 and 1997–98;…
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Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath
Analyzing Swift’s writing will hopefully help my students recognize how certain poetic and literary devices operate in older texts – as much as those same books and poems from the past help them appreciate Swift’s art at a deeper level. Swift, like all artists, is part of a great tradition, and she calls upon it to…
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‘Much more than a surgeon’: Remembering David Genecov, MD, 1963-2022
David Genecov, a COLA alum, longtime Advisory Council member, and dear friend of the College, tragically passed away this November. He possessed a combination of innovative drive, intellectual curiosity, and an unyielding willingness to collaborate with others, and he will be missed by all of us at COLA.
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The New Conversation with Lisa B. Thompson
A professor of African and African diaspora studies at The University of Texas at Austin and a celebrated author and playwright, Thompson is also a Presidential Visiting Scholar at The New School for 2022-23. The New School’s president Dwight A. McBride recently interviewed Thompson about her work as an artist-scholar and how she uses her…
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A Video Game produced by UT Austin’s JapanLab and Studio Unagi Immerses Players in the Turbulent World of Nineteenth Century Japan
A fully functional, historical video game, Ghosts over the Water: Changing the Tides of Japan’s Future, features an accessible visual novel framework and 130,000 words of researched text.
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Heavy mercury contamination at Maya sites reveals a deep historic legacy
By Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Timothy Beach, Duncan Cook, Nicholas Dunning, and Simon Turner Story originally published on The Conversation. Mercury is a toxic heavy metal. When leached into the natural environment, it accumulates and builds up through food chains, ultimately threatening human health and ecosystems. In the last century, human activities have increased atmospheric mercury concentrations by 300-500% above…
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The Value of the Liberal Arts
Those of us who teach in liberal arts colleges are passionate about the value of a liberal arts education. But for those outside of academia – even for those who might have received a degree in UT’s College of Liberal Arts – the precise meaning of “liberal arts” can be murky. What, exactly, is meant by…
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Q&A with Celina de Sá
Celina de Sá, an assistant professor of anthropology and an affiliated faculty member in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT Austin, is one of the College of Liberal Arts’ newer faculty members. Her research focuses on performance and race through grassroots social networks in…
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The Psychologist and the Firefighters
When Chief Ken Bailey, head of Travis County Fire Rescue ESD No. 11, realized his organization had a problem with staff morale and turnover, he turned to an unlikely place for help: UT Austin’s Applied Psychology Research Lab, led by assistant research professor Alissa Mrazek. Bailey’s district serves a wedge of Travis County that stretches…
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In Memoriam: Nora C. England, Visionary Linguist and Mentor
Nora England’s passion for linguistics was sparked during her undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr College. Almost on a whim, she enrolled in a linguistics field methods course. “That really got me going—actually hearing data from another language and paying attention to it,” she recalled in an interview. “It was the first course that I ever…
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A Love Letter to Black Austin
Interview with Lisa B. Thompson and Richard Reddick on Their New Black Austin Matters Podcast Black Austin Matters, a new podcast from KUT and KUTX Studios, aims to give voice to the daily experiences of Black Austinites, while deepening mutual understanding throughout the broader Austin community. We spoke to its hosts and co-producers, College of…
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Q&A with RANE Eurasia Analyst Matthew Orr
Matthew Orr is a Eurasia analyst at RANE, a risk intelligence company that provides geopolitical information and consultation to consumers and corporate clients with business interests around the globe. Prior to starting at RANE, Orr received dual Master’s degrees in Global Policy Studies and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas…
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Q&A with Mykhaylo (Misha) Simanovskyy, Graduate Student and Donetsk Native
Misha Simanovskyy is a native of Donetsk, Ukraine and a first-year graduate student pursuing a dual master’s degree in Global Policy Studies and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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Fighting from Within
A Q&A with 2020 Diehl Prize winner and public school teacher Yulissa Chavez. A child of immigrants who had no formal education, Chavez has long been passionate about public education and combatting systems of oppression and poverty.
