Vanderbilt Magazine

A multidisciplinary artist from Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons creates installations that showcase her personal experiences as a Cuban woman as well as document displacement and inequality in the Caribbean. She was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship last October from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Read More

The new scholarship program, Nashville Vanderbilt Scholars, aims to get more students from Nashville high schools into Vanderbilt classrooms. Read More

With a prestigious new grant, archaeologist Ari Caramanica will explore what ancient people can teach us about dealing with the most pressing environmental issue of our time. Read More

Americans saw an uptick in unity for the first time in over a year, with widespread agreement that the U.S. political system needs to be more responsive and an overall distrust of social media influencers, according to the most recent Vanderbilt Unity Poll measuring Americans' views of national unity and the democratic process. Read More

Vanderbilt Blair School of Music Professor of Viola Kathryn Plummer will celebrate 50 years of performing and teaching in a special concert, 3 p.m. May 4 in Turner Recital Hall. Read More

Vanderbilt is leading the charge on what AI can do for teaching and learning in higher education. Read More

Jad Abumrad, Distinguished Research Professor of Communication of Science and Technology and creator of Vanderbilt’s Quantum Potential series, talks to Vanderbilt Magazine about this groundbreaking project, described as a collection of wild but precise portraits of the scholars, scientists and students at Vanderbilt who are finding new ways to understand the world—and change it. Read More

Logan Glazier’s (Class of 2025) experience is what many educators might call the ideal result of education: the ability to take what’s learned in a classroom—be it something specific, like how to build a roof rack, or general, like critical thinking skills—and apply it in the outside world. That ideal is exactly why, when Vanderbilt rolled out a strategic plan in fall 2014, it put a greater focus on experiential learning. That plan emerged as Immersion Vanderbilt.   Read More

Joseph J. Cunningham Joseph Cunningham, 82, passed away peacefully on March 8, 2024, at his home in Lake City, Pennsylvania. Cunningham was an accomplished administrator and professor at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development. Upon moving to Nashville in 1969, Cunningham joined the Peabody College faculty as an assistant… Read More

Vanderbilt has begun work to establish a transformative college dedicated to computer science, AI, data science and related fields, university leaders announced today. In addition to meeting the growing demand for degrees in technological fields and advancing research in rapidly evolving, computing-related disciplines, the new, interdisciplinary college will collaborate with all of Vanderbilt’s schools and colleges to advance breakthrough discoveries and strengthen computing education through a “computing for all” approach. Read More

Doan Phuong Nguyen, BA'07, was in the first grade when she decided her dream was to be an author. The dream came to fruition in 2023 with the publication of her first novel for middle grade readers, 'Mèo and Bé' (Lee and Low Books, 2023; illustrated by Jesse White). Read More

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Art, has been named the 2024 SEC Faculty Achievement Award winner from Vanderbilt University. Her artistic work spans a variety of media, including photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video. She employs them in immersive installations that explore her experience as a Cuban woman and the broader issues facing Caribbean people, including displacement and inequality. Read More

Reese Animashaun, Maddy Bowser, Taryn DeWese, Hailee Mack, Giovanna Mason and Rachel Ogunleye are the first new volleyball Commodores. Head coach Anders Nelson and assistant coaches Lauren Plum and Russell Corbelli worked together to recruit Vanderbilt’s first class for volleyball since the program was paused in 1980. Read More

Chris Lowry, BMus’11, and Peter Dayton, BMus’12, both received recognition in the American Viola Society’s 2024 biennial Maurice Gardner Competition for Composers. Among the 77 submissions to the contest, Chris Lowry was the first prize winner, with his work, “Zenith (for Jackson)” for viola and electronics. Read More

More than 150 alumni and parent volunteers gathered on campus March 1–2 for Vanderbilt’s seventh annual Volunteer Leadership Weekend. Attendees of the weekend events included representatives from many alumni and parent groups across the university. Read More

An upcoming motion picture, 'Cabrini,' features a score composed by Blair School of Music alumnus Gene Back, BMus’06. Coming to theatres on March 8, International Women’s Day, 'Cabrini' was directed by the award-winning Alejandro Monteverde. Read More

Alumni wrote in to tell us about their favorite professors. Read More

Some have said that singer Dashon Burton’s bass-baritone is enormous, capable of raising the dead or like looking directly into the sun. This year, the two-time Grammy winner is nominated once again with vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth in the Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance category for their album Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023). Read More

Vanderbilt University Press has launched a new trade series, Global Black Writers in Translation, which will publish a variety of texts by authors of African descent translated from their source languages into English. The goal is to amplify a body of writing that introduces anglophone readers to the range and complexity of Black literary and cultural production, history and political thought. Read More

See how Alexandra Doten, BA'18 is turning her love for all things space into a social media adventure. Read More