Alice Embree doesn’t know what came over her the first time she stood up against injustice. She just knew it was the right thing to do. Along with her friends Karen and Glodine and the rest of the Austin High School drill squad, Embree had just sat down to order at a restaurant in Corpus […]
Summer 2018
Living in a Material World: Philosopher Galen Strawson tackles a few of life’s nagging questions
Writer and actor Stephen Fry says Galen Strawson “opens windows and finds light-switches like no other philosopher writing today,” and novelist Ian McEwan simply dubs Strawson “one of the cleverest men alive.” High praise for this UT professor of philosophy, who discusses his latest book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc. with Life […]
A Right to the City
Just south of Manor Road on Airport Boulevard, there’s a dimly lighted blues club where new and old East Austin meet. There, at the Skylark Lounge, local African American piano icon Margaret Wright plays happy hour on Thursday and Friday nights, giving city newcomers a taste of the bygone culture that once engulfed Austin’s eastern […]
Watch Your Step
Walking on natural terrain takes precise coordination between vision and body movements to efficiently and stably traverse any given path. But until now, vision and locomotion have been studied separately within controlled lab environments. To better understand how gaze and gait work together to help us navigate the natural world, UT Austin researchers combined new […]
Rising to the Challenge
Five years ago we opened the doors to a new College of Liberal Arts Building in the heart of campus. It was a milestone event, marking the first time students in our college had a place to call home. Departments and other units once scattered across campus were brought together in new collaborative spaces, as […]
Be Your Authentic Self
Dr. Travis Cosban is a Dedman scholar alumnus from New Orleans by way of Katy, Texas. He graduated from UT Austin with a Plan II Honors degree in 2009 before becoming a part of the inaugural class at the Texas Tech University Health Science Center’s Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. Cosban is an emergency […]
Make Life Extraordinary
In 1986, Robert and Nancy Dedman invested $10 million in the College of Liberal Arts to help recruit and educate the nation’s top students. Since its creation in 1989, the Dedman Distinguished Scholars (DDS) program has funded the education of nearly 200 students. Dedman scholarships cover tuition, housing, books and all other education-related expenses. In […]
Defending Humanities
Legend has it that Alexander the Great fell asleep with an annotated copy of The Iliad tucked under his pillow, dreaming of Achilles. And when he led his armies into Persia, the Homeric epic and the notes of his tutor, Aristotle, were thrumming in his mind, shaping his vision of great leadership. A story, not […]
Extreme Summer: Speaking the Many Languages of Climate Change for Texas
Summer is coming. In Texas, this warning — not unlike the familiar Game of Thrones motto — makes residents vigilant. And the admonition becomes dire as summers get hotter and drier, fueling wildfires, flash floods and worse. 2017 was Texas’ second-warmest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and those temperatures […]