Fall 2010

The Vanderbilt Alumni Association has partnered with Abenity Inc. to offer alumni more than 60,000 local and national discounts at hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, retailers, florists, car dealers, theme parks, national attractions, and concerts and other events. To register, go to www.abenity.com/VanderbiltAlumni. Once you have registered, you will… Read More

Mr. Commodore has a heart for adventure and wants to travel the world—with you! Take his picture at favorite locations in your hometown or iconic landmarks around the world. Upload your photos to http://www.flickr.com (tag “travelingcommodore”), and they will be added to photos taken by other Vanderbilt alumni… Read More

When the new Alumni Association bylaws went into effect July 1, the leadership structure of your organization was transformed overnight, from a largely honorary board of 46 members to a much smaller, working board of 22. Terms of office were reduced from four years to three, and board rotation was… Read More

Think back to a day you may or may not remember so well: your 21st birthday. For most, it’s a day celebrated with a drink. About a month before my Sept. 8 birthday, I was already thinking about “drinking” on my birthday—but not in the way you might think. For… Read More

They Came to Nashville (2010, Vanderbilt University Press and Country Music Foundation Press) by Marshall Chapman, BA’71 Singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman interviews 15 Music City legends in her latest book, which she describes as her “love book to Nashville.” Starting with Kris Kristofferson and ending with Willie Nelson, Chapman’s… Read More

George Hamilton IV, a 50-year veteran of the Grand Ole Opry, gazed out across the faces of 200 students who had gathered for Vanderbilt’s History of Country Music course this fall. Now in its third year, the class has proven to be one of the university’s most popular electives, thanks… Read More

Liza Barley, BMus’05, always knew she wanted to do something with her music that would bring people together. She never dreamed that would mean starting an arts center in the East Africa nation of Tanzania. “I went to the arts high school in inner-city Pittsburgh and was greatly influenced by… Read More

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is digitizing its permanent collection to make it accessible to researchers and the general public. Visitors to the gallery website now can link to the collection’s database and browse the collection. Photographs of 25 percent of the collection’s 5,500 objects have been added so… Read More

Lisa Wainwright, BA’82, can recall the precise moment when she embraced art history and education as her life’s work. An English major at Vanderbilt at the time, Wainwright was taking an art history class with Milan Mihal (now professor of fine arts, emeritus). “His class made me realize I… Read More

The little girl in Stacey Irvin’s photograph is laughing. Her head tilts to one side, and her hand is at her chin. Either she wants to ask the photographer something, or she’s just eaten some of the grapes she holds in her other hand. Her eyes invite a conversation, and… Read More

Connie Vinita Dowell, Vanderbilt’s dean of libraries, is kicking off the Heard Library’s new exhibits program with a bang—or maybe with a Frug. “We have a fabulous collection of ’60s materials on many topics,” Dowell says. “Now’s a good time to let people see it.” Cases exhibit everything from the… Read More

Libraries can be intimidating places. The young James Baldwin thought so. Read More

Divinity grads aim to compensate for the chaos in contemporary society. Read More

Freak accidents sever limbs. Tumors disfigure faces. And reconstructive plastic surgeons team up for their toughest challenges. Read More

When she was studying Shakespeare and Milton at Vanderbilt in the late 1970s, Nora Wingfield Tyson never dreamed she’d be making history one day. But last July in a cavernous aircraft-carrier hangar in Norfolk, Va., Rear Adm. Tyson did just that when she became the first woman in U.S. Navy… Read More

A collaboration between Vanderbilt and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools on an Early Reading First project for preschool children has yielded “spectacular” results in a preliminary study, according to project leaders. “The big picture is that high-quality language and literacy instruction in pre-K can make a big difference,” says Deborah Rowe,… Read More

In this corner, weighing in at 150 pounds: Homo sapiens, creator of the bug zapper, the citronella candle, the rolled-up newspaper and Deep Woods Off! And in the opposite corner, weighing in at less than 5 milligrams: Anopheles gambiae, transmitter of 250 million new cases of malaria each year, possessing… Read More

U.S. health care exacts a heavy toll not only in terms of dollars, but also in the demand we exert on the world’s supply of surgeons. A decline in the number of international medical graduates practicing general surgery in the United States is contributing to a “crisis of urgency” as… Read More

Hearing loss now affects nearly 20 percent of U.S. adolescents age 12 to 19, a rise of 5 percent during the past 15 years, according to a new Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study co-led by Dr. Ron Eavey, director of the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center and the… Read More

Between 2003 and 2005, Vanderbilt physicians treated more than 50 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division based in Fort Campbell, Ky., with a common complaint. Each soldier had a history of shortness of breath, and each one—a former supremely fit soldier—was having trouble passing a running test. They also shared… Read More