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.
Department of Anthropology
Black Women’s Academic Work is Not for the Taking
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
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
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
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
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.
How Social Dynamics Influence the Gut Microbes of Wild Lemurs
New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that Verreaux’s sifaka, a species of wild lemur native to Madagascar, have gut microbes that are affected by those they socialize with.
A Look at Our Latest Books
2021 Spring and Summer titles from our college community.
Shake Up Your Winter Reading
Winter 2020-21 books from our college community.
Ticket to Read
Fall 2020 books from our college community.
Fight Like a Girl: How Women’s Activism Shapes History
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 […]
From Bryan to Sicily: Public Scholars Join Academy to Community
In her most recent study, anthropologist Circe Sturm returned to her own backyard in East Texas. Sturm’s family hails from Sicilian roots, specifically a cluster of more than 1,000 Sicilians who settled in Bryan, Texas, around the turn of the 20th century. This enclave has managed to preserve many Sicilian traditions, including an annual ritual in which a single Sicilian-Texan family hosts 800 guests […]
Millennial Nation
A Generational Look at Education, Money and Work Empathetic. Impatient. Innovative. Unfocused. Rational. Naive. Excited. These are the words millennials in the College of Liberal Arts use when they’re asked to describe themselves. However, it’s a question they’re not often asked. Plenty of people, from journalists to researchers to employers, are looking to define who […]
UT Faculty Chronicle Texas Cultural History
Texas Bookshelf is a 16-book series that will be published by University of Texas Press chronicling the state’s rich culture and history. The five-year project is set to launch in 2017 and will cover a diverse range of topics—from the Tejano experience to Texas food culture to performing arts. This is the first project undertaken […]
Extinct Ancient Ape Did Not Walk Like a Human, Study Shows
For decades, the movement of an ancient ape species called Oreopithecus bambolii has been a matter of debate for scientists. Did it walk like a human across its swampy Mediterranean island or did it move through the trees like other apes? According to a new study, led by University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle […]
What Big Eyes You Have
Maximum running speed is the most important variable influencing mammalian eye size other than body size, according to new research from anthropology associate professor Chris Kirk and physical anthropology doctoral student Amber Heard-Booth. “If you can think of mammals that are fast like a cheetah or horse, you can almost guarantee they’ve got really big […]
Dig This
Undergrads who conduct research in the field are more likely to thrive in the classroom For three College of Liberal Arts undergraduates, conducting research with professors provided the skills they needed to succeed and helped them discover just what they wanted to do next. “Undergraduate research gives you an experience that you’d almost never get […]