Kaulie Watson
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Extra Credit: Lessons in Monkey Studies, or, a Q&A with Anthony Di Fiore
In the first-ever Extra Credit Q&A, anthropology professor Anthony Di Fiore talks spider monkeys, sloth attacks, and a historic vote in Ecuador.
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Watch Roger Reeves Accept 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize
Roger Reeves, English professor at UT Austin and poet extraordinaire, has won the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize for his book Best Barbarian. The world’s largest international poetry award for a book written or translated into English, the Griffin comes with $130,000 in prize money.
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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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Ghosts in the Machine: Digital forensics and the race against the technological clock
Jacques Derrida, the famous philosopher, thought the advent of digital word processing meant the end of the draft. Thorsten Ries and a team of researchers are proving him wrong — and pushing the boundaries of digital forensics in the humanities.
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A Classics Podcast Gets Greek Greats Onto Your Phone
The idea for Deborah Beck’s podcast burst forth from her head like the goddess Athena from the head of Zeus. That moment of inspiration has turned into three seasons and counting of “Musings in Greek Literature,” a podcast on classical Greek texts hosted by Beck and a rotating cast of her advanced undergraduate students.
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The McCrackenaissance
A few things to know about Elizabeth McCracken: She’s hilarious on Twitter. She likes to spend her mornings swimming in Austin’s Barton Springs Pool. She’s not wild about the term “autofiction,” and her new book, “The Hero of This Book,” is definitely a novel, not a memoir.
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Bringing the Liberal Arts to Texas Prisons
The Texas Prison Education Initiative offers college-credit courses to incarcerated students in the Austin area. The courses, which span subjects from physics to philosophy, are taught by volunteer instructors and offered at no cost to students. Since it began in 2018, the program has served some 230 students in over 400 classes. But there’s still…
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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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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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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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‘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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The Bell Tolls for WHOM: The complicated fate of the stuffiest object pronoun
Whom is dying out … mostly. As an essential part of grammatical English, that stuffy, old-fashioned object pronoun is declining in usage, and has been for more than a century. As a stylistic marker, though, it has some life left.
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K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Places: The Research of Youjeong Oh
Oh investigates how Korean cities and regions use popular culture, particularly television dramas and K-pop, to promote themselves to an expanding audience of ardent fans. But pop culture is always a bit of a gamble, and it’s not always clear who — or where — benefits from sudden stardom.
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The Way of Roger
Roger Reeves’ latest poetry collection, Best Barbarian, is part jazz song, part fever dream, part mythic reimagining. “For me, the barbarian is the achievement of something that is recognizably outside and potentially threatening, not because it seeks to be but just because it’s making a way and a life of being possible. It’s about self-love.…
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Spreading the Fever: Arianna Avalle wants everyone to read Elena Ferrante
One of the French and Italian department’s Italian Civilization courses, Avalle’s class gives students a tour of Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” and its Neapolitan context. But more importantly, Avalle says, it introduces students to a new way of thinking about cultures outside their own.
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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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COLA Alumni Updates
The Cenote of Latino Literature Nicolás Kanellos has devoted his life to unearthing and showcasing an unprecedented body of U.S. Latino literature Johnny Holden When Tarzan Fought the Japanese Brian Hurley delves into the archives to bridge the literature and thought of Japan and the West Maureen Turner A Citizen of the Arts James Cox…