Life & Letters Magazine

Features

The McCrackenaissance

by

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.

Laws of the Lands: Exploring the World’s Constitutions

by

There are almost two hundred countries with constitutions currently in existence, and their contents vary considerably. The Comparative Constitutions Project has been documenting and analyzing them for almost two decades, creating a set of resources for scholars and non-scholars along the way.

May my child become like Toyin!

by

College of Liberal Arts alumnus Vik Bahl talks to his mentor, African and African Diaspora Studies professor Toyin Falola, about Falola’s globe-spanning career as a scholar of African and a building of the discipline of African Studies.

K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Places: The Research of Youjeong Oh

by

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

by

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.”

Huge in Nigeria: Q&A with Abimbola Adelakun

by

In the U.S., Abimbola Adelakun is a respected junior academic, first a graduate student and now an assistant professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. In her native Nigeria, Adelakun is “a bit famous.” She is the author of a weekly political column for Punch, one of the most widely read newspapers in the country.

Talking to Julieta Suárez Calderón, 2022 Randy Diehl Prize Winner

by

The $18,000 award, now in its seventh year, was established by donors to support a graduating liberal arts senior who is committing the year after graduation to effect positive change in the world by working for a nonprofit organization, working for a for-profit organization that benefits others, or creating a new nonprofit.

The Sequencing of our Success: Q & A with Kathryn Paige Harden

by

In her book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, psychology professor Kathryn Paige Harden explores how genes contribute to variation in complex life outcomes such as educational attainment and income level. She argues that understanding genetic impacts on these outcomes could and should be used to promote greater equity among individuals with […]

A Love Letter to Black Austin

by

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 […]

Q&A on the War in Ukraine with Professor Joan Neuberger, Department of History

by

Joan Neuberger, a professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, studies modern Russian culture in social and political context, with a focus on the politics of the arts. Her most recent book, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell: 2019), won the American Historical Association’s George L. Mosse Book […]

Assembling the February 24 Archive

by

Since the war began, Professor Steven Seegel has tweeted about 12,000 times. He plans to keep going, with the help of international colleagues in the digital humanities, for as long as necessary, in order to build what he’s calling “The February 24th Archive.”

A People’s History of New York City

by

Eric Tang’s new course, The Global City, will be offered exclusively during the fall 2022 session of the UTNY program, where UT students spend a semester living in New York City while continuing their studies and gaining work experience with a local internship.

Balancing Art and Academia

by

Lisa B. Thompson is doing great. Not “all right” or “pretty good under the circumstances” or any other common COVID-era reply to the question of “how are you?” Just great. And it’s not surprising. Her life of late is series of awards, achievements and new projects so plentiful that it’s honestly a bit hard to keep track of them all.

Borderlands Historian Awarded ‘Genius Grant’

by

Monica Muñoz Martinez has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.” The award recognizes her work to recover untold histories of racial violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.