Arts And Science

Nashville Metro Council has honored Vanderbilt nuclear physicist Joseph Hamilton for his role in the discovery and naming of chemical element 117, known as tennessine on the periodic table of elements. Read More

Patrick J. Geary, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will present “The Challenges and Dangers of integrating Genomic Data into History” on Wednesday, Nov. 18. Read More

After decades influencing political and social change, both locally and nationally, Memphis attorney James S. Gilliland died Feb. 24. He was 86. Read More

David Potts and his wife, Frances Candi Potts, recently documented their intent to establish the Potts Scholarship to provide financial support for undergraduate students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics at the College of Arts and Science or the School of Engineering. Read More

The Latin American Public Opinion Project's efforts never stopped when Vanderbilt closed labs in mid-March due to COVID-19. Instead, director Elizabeth Zechmeister’s team pivoted to exclusively remote work and tackled the monumental task of overhauling research protocols to acquire data that reveals new insights about the pandemic’s effects on democracy. Read More

Eunji Kim, a scholar of American public opinion, political communication and political psychology, and Caroline Randall Williams, an award-winning poet, author and activist, have been selected as Vanderbilt Global Voices Fellows for the spring 2021 semester. Read More

An American Studies seminar is exploring the complex relationship between religion and partisan politics in the United States by putting an emphasis on civility, mutual respect and robust dialogue. 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

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

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

Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy Savanna Starko originally intended to become a high school math teacher. But when a battle with thyroid cancer disrupted her first year of college, a professor helped her see how physics might be a better fit. Read More

David Card, the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California–Berkeley and director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will give the Vanderbilt Department of Economics' Steine Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 28, beginning at 4 p.m. Read More

Chancellor Daniel Diermeier discussed his research and scholarship on management, political science, public policy and more during two recent virtual webinars with Owen Graduate School of Management and the College of Arts and Science. 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

The Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word will be held online Oct. 1-11, with Vanderbilt faculty, staff and alumni participating and three new VU Press titles spotlighted. Read More

Thomas Aldrich Finegan, a Vanderbilt University professor of economics, emeritus, and a meticulous empirical scholar of labor economics, has died. He was 91. Read More

Michael Eric Dyson, a globally renowned scholar of race, religion and contemporary culture, will join Vanderbilt as Centennial Chair and University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies in the College of Arts and Science and University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Divinity School on Jan. 1, 2021. 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