Year: 2008

From the time she was arrested at the age of 4 months, Sheryll Cashin's life was shaped by her parents' activism It’s Aug. 11, 1969. Another hot day in Greene County, Ala. I am 7 years old, about to start the second grade. We are here to watch the swearing… Read More

Brecht at the Opera (2008, University of California Press) by Joy Calico, associate professor of musicology. Calico’s book analyzes the German playwright’s lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera, arguing that Brecht’s simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück (or “learning play”) in the 1920s generated the new concept of… Read More

Associate Professor of History William Caferro has received the 2008 Otto Gründler Book Prize for his biography John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (2006, The Johns Hopkins University Press). Western Michigan University offers this prestigious award annually for the best book or monograph on medieval studies. David E. Read More

The portraits of Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt and her daughter, Emily Thorn Vanderbilt Sloane, spent the summer in Hamburg, Germany, at the Bucerius Kunst Forum as part of the exhibition High Society: American Portraits of the Gilded Age. Maria Louisa and Emily were the wife and daughter, respectively, of… Read More

Like many small boys growing up during the 1950s and ’60s, Alfred Sharp enjoyed making wooden models. That early love of woodworking ultimately would become his life’s calling, bringing him national and international recognition and awards. But the long, winding road for this self-described former hippie had a few detours… Read More

The Mike Curb Creative Campus Program, administered by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt and funded by recording-industry executive Mike Curb, will affect every student on campus through new courses, faculty, internships, guest speakers, and implementation of the first national research program on creativity, the… Read More

Gayle Shay joined the Blair School of Music faculty in 1998 with a directive from Dean Mark Wait to make opera an important part of the vocal program. In her role as associate professor of voice and director of the Vanderbilt Opera Theatre, Shay has helped to do just that. Read More

If the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt is, as its mission states, “dedicated to designing a new road map for cultural policy in America,” its cartographer is Bill Ivey, the center’s founding director. It’s a course Ivey has been charting his entire professional life, and… Read More

When David Wasserstein, the first holder of the Eugene Greener Jr. Chair in Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt, spoke at the Nash-ville downtown public library recently, he drew quite a crowd. His noontime talk, “Islam and Europe—Sites of Conflict,” was intended to get people thinking about Europe’s longstanding relationship with Islam… Read More

Let’s say you’re the owner of a widget factory who’s worried about maintaining your talent pool as baby boomers begin retiring from the workforce in droves. In making your business attractive to employees, is your best bet to focus on (a) motivation-enhancing practices such as incentive pay plans, performance bonuses and… Read More

Binary stars, as every science-fiction aficionado knows, are pairs of stars that orbit around their center of mass. In the world of astrophysics, binary stars are important because observing their mutual orbits not only helps determine the mass of the binaries, but also, by extrapolation, the mass of many single stars. Read More

Who will save America? Which presidential candidate has the intelligence, charisma and acumen to fix our economy, deal with Iraq, address rising oil prices, eradicate poverty, lead democracy, and put the nation on a better moral track? It’s a trick question, and every four years we pound our heads… Read More

Worldwide, 15 to 20 percent of people suffer from migraines—excruciating headaches often presaged by dramatic sensations, or “auras.” By studying a rare inherited form of migraine, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have found clues to the biological basis of the debilitating disorder. In the July 15, 2008, edition of the Proceedings… Read More

Hoping to ward off the flu bug, these boys wear bags of camphor around their necks during the influenza epidemic of 1918. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed nearly 50 million people worldwide, including many healthy young adults. With fears of another flu pandemic stoked by “bird flu” in Asia… Read More

Images from Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives. Vanderbilt panty-raid coverage in the 1958 Peabody Pillar yearbook On May 20, 1952, during my first year of graduate work at Vanderbilt, I phoned a nursing student who lived in Mary Henderson Hall, the nursing dormitory. I had casually… Read More

Change the “V” to a “P” on Pedro Alvarez’s cap: He has signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Baseball MLB Raids Commodore Roster in 2008 Draft Major League Baseball liked what it saw and snatched 18 Commodores (eight current, 10 signees) in the 2008 draft. Junior third… Read More

Who’s your all-time favorite Commodore? That’s the question the university asked alumni, fans and friends of the varsity athletic program when it set about creating the new Athletics Hall of Fame to recognize and honor outstanding achievement and celebrate its (black and) golden sporting heritage. Hundreds of nominations… Read More

Watch video of the Oct. 28 lecture American Holocaust: The Destruction of America\'s Native Peoples. Read More

Watch video of a lunchtime "Federal Forum" on the "Passage of the Higher Education Act: the feds want us to do WHAT?" Read More

Watch video of a lunchtime "Federal Forum" on the "Passage of the Higher Education Act: the feds want us to do WHAT?" Read More