Vanderbilt Magazine

Longtime Vanderbilt volunteer Billy Ray Caldwell, BA’85, has been elected to a two-year term as president of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association Board of Directors. He took office July 1. A member of the board since 2004, Caldwell is a former president of the Nashville Vanderbilt Chapter of the Alumni Association. Read More

Ben Hindman, BS’07, and Brody Davis, BA’07 “The best things in life are free … tours.” That’s the favorite quote of Brody Davis and Ben Hindman, entrepreneurs and founders of DC by Foot Tours. Their 90-minute “More than Monuments” tour is entirely tip-based. Former Vanderbilt fraternity brothers Davis, a… Read More

TO: Mick Jagger, Barry Manilow, Joe Namath, Al and Tipper Gore, Tuesday Weld, and the other nearly 3 million Americans turning 65 this year FROM: The Baby Boomers Happy birthday, everyone. (To be frank, the rest of us weren’t sure all of you would make it this far.) Now… Read More

“You must be Catholic.” It’s the most common reaction I hear when someone finds out I’m the youngest of 12 children. (And they’re right—we’re Catholic, raised by the Sisters of Mercy.) The next most common reactions: “Your parents did know what causes pregnancy, didn’t they?” (I guess so—but, really, I… Read More

I was sitting in the Peabody Library last semester when I overheard a conversation between two students that ended with one saying to the other, “Well, I guess public school isn’t for everyone.” This sentiment was spoken with what I judged to be irony aimed at humor. The fact that it… Read More

Toward the end of high school in Margate, Fla., a small strip of suburbia just north of Fort Lauderdale, Daniel Bernard Roumain managed to land two internships that prefigured his future musical career crossbreeding hip-hop and classical music. For a couple of summers in the late 1980s, he worked… Read More

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