Vanderbilt Magazine

H. Carl Haywood, professor of psychology, emeritus, and former Kennedy Center director, died Oct. 12 in Nashville. He was 89. Read More

As students returned to campus amid numerous COVID-19 safety protocols, they found new ways to connect. Here, students enjoy a physically distant lunch together in front of the newly opened Nicholas S. Zeppos College. Read More

On Feb. 29, the best distance runners in the country were in Atlanta to compete in the 2020 United States Olympic Marathon Team Trials. Of the 691 elite men and women runners who came from all corners of the nation to compete, five were Vanderbilt alumni. Read More

Fifty years later, finally it may be time to give this novel another chance. Deliverance offers too much relevance to contemporary American culture to let it slip past us, out of print. Read More

In 2020–21, Vanderbilt is welcoming an impressive group of educators and researchers to its faculty, including 26 full-time, tenure-track and tenured faculty members across nine of the schools and colleges. Read More

Destiny O. Birdsong, MA’07, MFA’09, PhD’12, is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer and essayist who lives and works in Nashville. Read More

Beshear, the first-term Democratic governor of Kentucky, was elected last November by a margin as thin as a surgical mask, just in time to steer his largely Republican state through a runaway pandemic, the resulting economic damage, and America’s most consequential reckoning with racial injustice since the 1960s. Read More

As we continue to navigate a fall semester like no other, and as I embark on my first academic year as Vanderbilt’s chancellor, I am increasingly impressed by the strength of our university community. Read More

This election night, Sam Feist, BA’91, will perform one of his more unusual duties as head of CNN’s Washington Bureau. Assuming the results are clear-cut, he will—in consultation with CNN’s statisticians and political scientists—call the winner of the presidential race for the network. It is a responsibility he has held since 2004, and one that he does not take lightly. Read More

Maizie Zhou, a new assistant professor of biomedical engineering, blends bioinformatics, computational genomics, neuroscience and machine-learning techniques to understand how the brain enables us to behave intelligently and how specific genomic mutations can alter that process. Read More

Julie Barroso, a new professor at the School of Nursing, has made the care of people living with HIV the focus of her research career. Read More

New Peabody College assistant professor Kelly Slay's experiences as a college readiness coach for Chicago public high school students serve as the foundation for her scholarship focused on issues of race, access, diversity and equity in higher education. Read More

Raheleh Filsoofi, a new assistant professor in the Department of Art, draws on her childhood in Iran and the U.S. immigration experience as themes in her work. Read More

Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams are both writers-in-residence at Vanderbilt—Randall in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies and Williams in the Department of Medicine, Health and Society. And neither is afraid to shine a light on complicated questions around race. Read More

Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips, BA’67, the first African American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt and a member of the inaugural class of Vanderbilt Trailblazers, recently was interviewed by the American Chemical Society about her career as a chemist and the importance of making the physical sciences more inclusive for women and underrepresented minorities. Read More

Shatema Threadcraft, whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of race and gender, will join the departments of Gender and Sexuality and Political Science in the College of Arts and Science as associate professor in January 2021. Read More

Major Jackson, an accomplished poet and essayist, will join the Vanderbilt faculty as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English in January 2021 after 18 years in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. Read More

Lisa Fazio, assistant professor of psychology and human development at Peabody College, shares a few tips on how to avoid knowledge neglect and spreading misinformation. Read More

David L. Tuleen, an emeritus chemistry professor who excelled first as a teacher and later as a university administrator, has died. Read More

Birch, the new chief legal officer and senior vice president of business affairs for the Tennessee Titans, recently was named chair of a new Vanderbilt Board of Trust ad hoc committee that is partnering with university leadership to evaluate and recommend policies around equity, diversity and inclusion. Here he discusses the work of the committee, the rise in athlete activism, and his favorite Nashville sports memory. Read More