The Mind’s Eye

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

“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

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

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

The Blue Star: A Novel (2008, Little, Brown and Company) by Tony Earley, Samuel Milton Fleming, Associate Professor of English It’s been eight years since readers met the character of 10-year-old Jim Glass, the anchor of Earley’s acclaimed debut novel, Jim the Boy. In The Blue Star,… Read More

Noah Walcutt, a 2008 engineering school graduate, won this year’s $25,000 Margaret Wooldridge Hamblett Award with this interactive sculpture that combines art, music and engineering for therapeutic purposes. Photo by Steve Green. When the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Art Center was completed in 2005, it provided… Read More

Tom Kimmel, singer-songwriter and artist-in-residence for the “God in Music City” project, with artist Lisa Silver at the project’s culminating concert at Second Presbyterian Church. Photo by Steve Green. One Saturday last February, a curious busload from Vanderbilt got a taste of that old-time religion–and many of the… Read More

Lane Denson, foreground, and Larry Taylor of the Monday Night Jazz Band. Photo by Steve Green When Lane Denson–Episcopal clergyman by day, cornet and flugelhorn player by night–started playing with the Monday Night Jazz Band, he hardly could have predicted how long it would last. “We’re… Read More

Top: Dr. Milton Ochieng’, left, celebrates with his brother, Fred, at Fred’s white coat ceremony in August 2006. Right: The movie poster for Sons of Lwala Photo by Dana Johnson. One rainy evening 10 years ago, Patricia Opiyo, a pregnant woman from the remote village of Lwala, Kenya,… Read More

John Hunter, “Hear Me,” linoleum block print Vanderbilt senior Aimee Casey’s oil painting “Explosion” was featured at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in December. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts exhibition Future/Now: Mid-State Art Majors featured the work of nine Vanderbilt students last winter among… Read More

Great Performances at Vanderbilt and its director will help the National Dance Project set the agenda for dance in America when it becomes one of 10 “hub sites” that guides the organization. “I am pleased that we are now in the room as one of the top 10 curators,” says… Read More

Greg Barz, associate professor of ethnomusicology in the Blair School of Music, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Traditional World Music Album category for his album Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Singing for Life, released last February by Smithsonian… Read More

Scott Schoenherr, “Times Totem,” Diane and Sandy Besser Collection, Arizona State University Photo by Craig Smith Sandy Besser, BA’58, has enjoyed a successful career in investment management, while earning national recognition as an art collector. Both pursuits took root almost simultaneously at Vanderbilt. “I don’t recall taking art courses… Read More