Prologue

Photo by Matt Murphy The Band’s Visit, a musical about an Egyptian orchestra stuck for a night in a remote Israeli town, swept the Tony Awards on June 10, winning 10 awards, including Best Musical. Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub (above, seated) both won Tony Awards for their… Read More

Lauren Urquhart, photo by Steve Green For the second year in a row, Blair undergraduates won national honors competing against both undergraduate and graduate students at the 2017–18 Music Teachers National Association annual competition March 17–21 in Orlando, Florida. To compete at nationals, musicians have already won their state… Read More

Joshua Austin Forges The Vanderbilt University Department of Art awarded its prestigious Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award for 2018 to Joshua Austin Forges, BA’18, from Davie, Florida. He received a $25,000 prize that provides for a year of art research and travel, culminating with a solo exhibition in Space… Read More

Renewed Energy: Insights for Clean Energy’s Future (2018, Kauffman Fellows) by John Weyant, Ernestine Fu and Justin Bowersock, BA’94 Renewed Energy sheds light on the recent history of clean energy between the 2009 recession and 2012, providing firsthand perspectives from the industry’s leading policy makers, technology investors and industry experts. Read More

Peabody College’s Knapp Farm featured a dairy barn housing what was likely the first herd of purebred Holstein cows in the South. Vanderbilt Special Collections and University Archives. Sustainability has become a buzzword in recent years, used to describe everything from economics to transportation. But at its root, the… Read More

Zhubin Parang, BS’03 (foreground, left), and his writing staff discuss the day’s script with Trevor Noah (seated) on the set of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Photo by Sean Gallagher/The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Zhubin Parang, BS’03, always wanted to work in politics. And he does—in a… Read More

Above: The Cultures in Clay exhibit includes the Man and Beast seal (Arno Poebel Collection); below, left, a statue of Osiris, mythological father of the Egyptian god Horus, from the private collection of emeritus professor Douglas Knight; and, below right, the Drehem tablet (James Stevenson Collection). Clay… Read More

HELLO, DOLLY  An exhibition of Polaroids and black-and-white photographs by Andy Warhol of his friends and clients—including Dolly Parton, above, taken in 1985—kicked off the 2018 season at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. Famous! (and Not-So-Famous): Polaroids by Andy Warhol provides a glimpse into Warhol’s creative process… Read More

Costa Rica native Jose Sibaja, associate professor of trumpet, photo by Susan Urmy Building connections with Latin American musicians has been a major focus for the Blair School’s Thomas Verrier since first traveling to Central America in 2009. Now he and a group of like-minded Blair faculty members… Read More

DOMINICK REUTER/GETTY Daniel Bernard Roumain, BMus’93, (right, with the production’s assistant director and choreographer Bill T. Jones, center), composed the music for the opera We Shall Not Be Moved, which was named by The New York Times in December as one of the best classical music performances of… Read More

Lee Conell (photo by Susan Urmy) Lee Conell, MFA’15, is not the sort of writer who cultivates a high profile. While she’s excited about the upcoming launch of her first story collection, Subcortical, she finds the public role of author far removed from the drive that compels her… Read More

Will the Count be caught cheating? Will Cherubino really be voted off? And who, exactly, will marry Figaro? Vanderbilt Opera Theatre cast members were filmed by students from the Department of Cinema and Media Arts for webisodes to preface VOT’s Marriage of Figaro, produced at Blair in November as a… Read More

Alphabet card, France, early 19th century; from the George Clulow–U.S. Playing Card Co. Gaming Collection, Vanderbilt University Special Collections The George Clulow and United States Playing Card Co. Gaming Collection—one of the world’s premier collections of books about card games, games of chance, playing cards and chess—has been acquired… Read More

Michael Kurek, associate professor of composition, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Album chart this summer with The Sea Knows, an album that continues his transition to more traditionally melodious music. The Sea Knows, on the Navona label, features a lush, gorgeous sound in the traditional… Read More

With all that we have been taught, all that we have learned, just what have we wrought with all that we’ve burned? (oil on canvas, 2015) is featured in Morgan Craig’s solo exhibit With all that we have been taught …, on display through Nov. 30 at Sarratt… Read More

Visual artist Mel Chin, BA’75, was named this year’s Peabody College Distinguished Alumnus. (Courtesy Mel Chin) Visionary artist Mel Chin, BA’75, was honored during Commencement May 12 by Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development with the 2017 Distinguished Alumnus Award. Born in Houston in… Read More

Mark L. Schoenfield, professor of English, is among 173 scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada to be awarded a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts Jonathan Rattner’s film The Interior won the Michael Moore Award for… Read More

The program cover for the Verlaine celebration featured this watercolor illustration by artist László Barta(1902–1961) under the name of Brutus, for a 1936 edition of a collection of Verlaine’s poems titled “Hombres.” Poet Paul Verlaine rocketed between emotional highs and lows, between a life of complete freedom… Read More

James Berkenstock (top right) and his wife, Jean, co-founded the Midsummer’s Music Festival in Door County, Wisconsin, dedicated to the chamber repertoire. (Courtesy Midsummer’s Music Festival) Some people believe the life of a musician is nomadic, traveling the world and playing in all kinds of venues. However, James… Read More

Inspired by last year’s flooding in Louisiana, Chris Lowry wrote his winning composition, which premieres in June in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Christopher Lowry In August 2016 much of southern Louisiana lay underwater, flooded by more than 7.1 trillion gallons of rainfall. It was, meteorologists said, a… Read More