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.
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. Being your best barbarian is really about loving yourself, and that is completely different from the normal.”
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.
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 […]
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 […]