The world’s new reality amid the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us to confront issues and critically think about how to revive communities slowly, safely and sustainably.
Features
Ukraine’s Social Media Presidency
UT Austin student researchers delve into the state of democracy in Ukraine, and the role of youth political engagement and social media.
No Stopping Her
Margaret Siu, a Plan II honors senior from Dallas, is the recipient of a 2020 British Marshall Scholarship. The scholarship will fund her graduate education at the University of Oxford.
Blog
Exploring the World Through Language
Sometimes we fall in love when we least expect it. Arriving at The University of Texas at Austin as a mathematically inclined freshman, Heather Rice had no intention of learning Russian. Now a lecturer in Slavic and Eurasian Studies at UT Austin, she’s spent the past two decades studying and teaching the language and culture […]
Retracing UT’s Complicated Racial Past
Taking graduation photos in front of Littlefield Fountain and singing “The Eyes of Texas” at a packed home football game are common bucket-list experiences uniting UT Austin’s students and alumni. Still, most people don’t realize the controversial history behind these traditions. For the last 20 years, anthropologist and founding chair for UT’s Department of African […]
Women’s Activism in Tunisia
In 2014, Maro Youssef arrived in Tunisia just one day before the country passed a constitution that is among the most progressive in the world. She was serving as a foreign affairs analyst at the American embassy in Tunisia. The post was a culmination of eight years of work with the U.S. Department of State. […]
Earliest Mayan Ceremonial Structure Unearthed
The discovery of a near 3,000-year-old platform, built among wetlands and rivers of the Mexican tropical forest, offers new insight into the Maya’s early communal development. The site, called Aguada Fénix, is the earliest and largest known monumental structure built by the Maya and challenges the existing narrative that the Maya civilization developed gradually, with […]
Books
Turning the Past into Poetry
H.W. Brands hopes his latest book, Haiku History: The American Saga Three Lines at a Time, won’t be a page turner.
This Summer is One For the Books
Summer 2020 books from our college community.
Commentary
Mark Hayward
Why Do People in Hawaii Live 7 Years Longer than People in Mississippi?
Add living a longer life to the list of reasons to move to Hawaii, which tops the list in a national study on average life expectancy. The study showed that living somewhere with more economic regulations and policy protections for marginalized groups may be the key for a clean bill of health. “We run the […]
Lise Ragbir
State of the Art: AGBS Presents The Narrative
In the spring of 2020, the Art Galleries at Black Studies’ (AGBS) Christian-Green Gallery and Idea Lab closed their doors to help contain the spread of COVID-19. As such, we joined the ranks of thousands of art institutions worldwide, who were all confronting the same conundrum: Without physical access to art, how can we create […]
Rachel E. Winston, Daina Ramey Berry and Kevin Cokley
What is Juneteenth?
Although Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, the date the holiday observes, June 19, 1865, came more than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when Texas finally received word that slavery had ended. It may come as a surprise, but President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not effectively free […]