German-American immigrants triggered a lager beer revolution during the second half of the 19th century, fundamentally changing US drinking culture.
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LLILAS Director Fosters Transformation via Internationalization
Adela Pineda Franco’s love for language, culture and literature dates back to her childhood in Puebla, Mexico. Now, as the director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, she’s bringing that same passion to the Forty Acres and beyond.
Building a Sense of Belonging: Q&A with Stephanie Holmsten
The word “mentorship” conjures an image of a seasoned professional taking a novice under their wing. But Stephanie Holmsten’s primary focus is on creating communities where faculty of all experience levels can learn from each other.
Global Virtual Exchange Professor Elevates YouTube with International Education
University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Michael Domjan has embarked on a mission to make psychology concepts more accessible and engaging for students. Thanks to grants from the Texas Global’s Virtual Exchange (GVE) program, he has launched a successful YouTube channel that does just that.
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.
2023 Keene Prize in Literature Winners
The Scholarship Committee of the College of Liberal Arts has completed the judging for the Keene Prize in Literature and is pleased to announce the 2023 Keene Prize goes to Reena Shah, for the fiction entry, “Every Happiness.”
To Do Justice
Federal prosecutor Heidi Boutros Gesch (Plan II and Government ’04) is on the case.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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 Challenge competition in San Diego to six weeks of intensive research and field testing in Botswana.
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 winning recommendation for you here.
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.
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 efforts to build awareness and appreciation for Texas German are getting a crucial boost.
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.
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.
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; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978–79; and several grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities between 1975 and 2008. In 1989, he was named Liberal Arts Foundation Centennial Professor, a title he held until his retirement in 2008.
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 create new works.
‘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.
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 teaching to give students creative liberty.
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.
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 […]
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 […]