Spring 2009

Click to Build Your Brick  Honor your family, a classmate or a favorite athlete with a personalized brick in the new walkway at Vanderbilt Stadium. The area will be completed by the beginning of the 2009 football season, and the price of each brick ($200 until June… Read More

Sarah (“Sally”) Des Prez was a 19-year-old Vanderbilt freshman when she was found suffocated in her off-campus apartment in February 1975. Nearly 34 years later, a jury has found Jerome Barrett guilty of first-degree murder in her death. A repeat sex criminal, Barrett has spent most of the intervening years… Read More

Vanderbilt has seen a number of high-profile appointments during the past few months, including two deans, both promoted from within their schools; two vice chancellors; and several senior posts in the Division of Development and Alumni Relations. New Deans for Arts and Science, Medicine Carolyn Dever In the College… Read More

Paul Manners, BA’42, and Joy Manners One teacher’s interest made all the difference in the life of Paul Manners. A native of Dover, Tenn., Manners grew up during the Great Depression and was the top student in his high school class. A high school English teacher, Lillian Bayer, encouraged… Read More

Welcome to “The President’s Corner,” a new column that will appear in each issue of Vanderbilt Magazine, along with the latest news from the Vanderbilt Alumni Association. As your association president I am committed to strengthening the university’s outreach to the global community of 120,000 Vanderbilt alumni. With… Read More

Hundreds of volunteers and professional staff worked thousands of hours to coordinate last October’s Reunion and Homecoming Weekend, which drew nearly 7,000 alumni, family members and friends to campus. Topping off the festivities were Reunion gifts from alumni totaling more than $41 million, with the Class of 1958 leading the… Read More

Four successful alumni led a panel discussion for current students Jan. 29, revealing the versatility of their Vanderbilt degrees. “Life After VU: Where My Vanderbilt Degree Has Taken Me” was the latest in a series of events designed to provide students with an alumni perspective of life after Vanderbilt. Read More

The Washington, D.C., Vanderbilt Chapter formed its own softball team and joined a local league consisting of 69 other university alumni teams. In the final tournament of 2008, the Vanderbilt team finished 17th out of 70. To find out about chapter events in your area, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/alumni/chapters. Read More

Current students and new graduates, who are facing one of the worst job markets in recent times, have a new resource that allows them to search for internships and first-time professional opportunities. The Vanderbilt Intern and Professional (VIP) Network—a secure, Web-based database of job postings and leads—has been developed by… Read More

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston, ’61, has helped define the history of color photography. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, an exhibit at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art from November through January, was rated one of the top 10… Read More

From a recent Russian adaptation of Hamlet to a 1928 French silent classic about Joan of Arc, from a South Korean film influenced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo to a documentary about the lives of gay, lesbian and transgendered Muslims produced jointly by the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia—those looking for… Read More

Georgia Stitt, BMus’94, with 4-year-old America's Got Talent contestant Kaitlyn Maher. In show business, the saying goes, it’s not what you know but whom you know. In the case of Georgia Stitt, award-winning composer and vocal coach on America’s Got Talent, it’s both. A Tennessee native, Stitt received her bachelor’s… Read More

Being on tour and missing life at home is nothing new for Stokes Nielson, BS’00, and Ryder Lee, BA’00, of the fast-rising country band The Lost Trailers. But on New Year’s Eve, the day of Vanderbilt’s historic victory in the Music City Bowl, it was especially painful to be alumni… Read More

“The Madonna and Child and St. John” by an unknown artist In 1956, Vanderbilt’s Permanent Collection was founded by a generous gift from renowned art collector Anna C. Hoyt of Boston. Hoyt, who had been a print curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, had a particularly fine eye for… Read More

 Rick Hilles, acclaimed poet and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt, was named one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Awards given for “writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.” Author of the award-winning poetry collection Brother Salvage, Hilles received a $50,000 prize from the Mrs. Read More

Last fall I had lunch with a friend whose only child is a sophomore at another university that we refer to around here as one of our “peer” schools. “Oh, Ethan seems happy, and his grades are good,” my friend replied when I asked about her son. “But I hate… Read More

David Carlton David Carlton, associate professor of history at Vanderbilt, has devoted his career to studying the industrialization of the South. He is the author of Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920, which is still in print after a quarter century. More recently, he was co-author, with Peter A. Read More

Nocturnal Naughtiness Regarding Vanderbilt panty raids, I disagree with Paul Conkin’s statement [Fall 2008 issue, Collective Memory, “Boys Gone Wild”] in his final paragraph: “Never again would such a raid take place at Vanderbilt. The last panty raid [occurred] in 1959 … .” In reality, pages 34–35 of… Read More

Editor GayNelle Doll Art Director and Designer Donna DeVore Pritchett Editorial Associate Editor and Advertising Manager Phillip B. Tucker Arts and Culture Editor Bonnie Arant Ertelt, BS’81 Class Notes and Sports Editor Nelson Bryan, BA’73 Production and Design Assistant Director, Photography Services… Read More

Transformative Literature When Ann Neely, faculty director of the Ingram Scholars program, went to Cape Town, South Africa, last July to visit three of her students involved with a Vanderbilt service-learning project, she never dreamed that she would be inspired to create a new service-learning course of her own. During… Read More