Life & Letters Magazine

Department of Anthropology

Black Women’s Academic Work is Not for the Taking

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From its start at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 2018, Cite Black Women has developed into a movement. As founder and COLA professor Christen Smith has said, “I’m not fighting to be on someone’s bibliography. I’m fighting to have my intellectual self respected, and the intellectual work of my foremothers respected, the intellectual work of my sisters and friends respected.”

In Memoriam: Joel F. Sherzer, Linguistic Anthropologist, Visionary Digital Archivist, and Pioneer of Speech Play and Verbal Art Studies

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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.

Q&A with Celina de Sá

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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 […]

Spring Books Unfold

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Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital DisconnectionOxford University Press, July 2021Edited by Paul C. Adams, Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment, and André Jansson, Karlstad University After the rapid rise of digital networking in the 2000s and 2010s, we are now seeing a rise of interest in how people can disentangle their lives from the […]

Leaf Through a Good Book

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Keep your to-read list up-to-date with our fall book list, featuring a selection of titles from College of Liberal Arts faculty members and alumni.

Fight Like a Girl:  How Women’s Activism Shapes History

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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 […]

Using Your Mellon

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The College of Liberal Arts has a long and proud tradition of preparing its graduate students to teach and conduct research in the humanities at colleges and universities around the world, and we are particularly proud of our many placements in the nation’s top institutions. However, over the past two decades academic positions in the […]

Can We Talk?: Why Discourse is Dying in America

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I’ll have to admit that I was a bit perplexed when I heard linguistic anthropologist Elizabeth Keating say, “There is a very strong preference for agreement in conversation in the U.S.” I couldn’t believe my ears — even the Pew Research Center pegged political polarization as the defining feature of modern U.S. politics. And it’s […]

Solving an Ice-Cold Case: How Lucy Died

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Sharp, clean breaks on the right arm of the oldest, most famous fossil of a human ancestor reopened the coldest cold case in human evolution. Lucy, a 3.18-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis — or “southern ape of Afar” — is among the oldest, most complete skeletons of any adult, erect-walking human ancestor. Since her discovery […]

Chatting in Chatino

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Graduate Students Revive Early Languages In Rural Oaxaca In a rural village between two rivers outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, Ryan Sullivant walked door to door like a salesman, asking neighbors to conjugate verbs. The village, Tataltepec, is one of few within a small mountainous area between Oaxaca and the Pacific coast where a dwindling population […]

Gordon Receives Presidential Citation

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Edmund T. Gordon, chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department (AADS) in the College of Liberal Arts, was recognized on April 17 with a Presidential Citation from UT Austin President Bill Powers. As one of the university’s highest honors, this prestigious award was established to recognize the extraordinary contributions of individuals who personify […]

Ancient Girl Shares Genetic Lineage of Modern Native Americans

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The ancient remains of a teenage girl found in an underwater Mexican cave establish a definitive link between the earliest Americans and modern Native Americans, according to a new study released in the journal Science. The study was conducted by an international team of researchers from 13 institutions, including Deborah Bolnick, assistant professor of anthropology […]

Nothing Backward About Walking on All Fours

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Anthropologist Liza Shapiro may finally have an answer for why members of a Turkish family walk exclusively on their hands and feet. Contradicting earlier claims of “backward evolution,” Shapiro and her team of researchers found the group of siblings made famous by a 2006 BBC documentary, “The Family That Walks on All Fours,” have simply […]

Keeping A Pulse On Population Health

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A few years ago, a Plan II Honors student in Marc Musick’s sociology lecture came to him with a question. Musick had been talking about the shortage of doctors in rural and inner city areas. The student had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley and hoped to go on to medical school. Why, he […]