Arts And Science

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

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

Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips, BS’67, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the National Organization for the Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. Phillips, the first African American woman to receive an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt, is a 2020 recipient of NOBCChE’s Lifetime Service Award.  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

Vanderbilt University is launching "Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice," a new initiative conceived by professor Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and focused on healing at a time of social unrest. Read More

A new $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health is enabling Vanderbilt University chemist Renã A.S. Robinson to expand her research on racial disparities in Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Read More

Derek Griffith, professor of medicine, health and society and founding director of the Center for Research on Men’s Health, takes an intersectional approach to researching the impacts of COVID-19, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of identity’s role in determining risk to enhance policy reforms toward greater health equity. Read More