Celebrating Excellence – Page 2 – College of Arts & Sciences

Anthropology Chair Elected to Prestigious Antiquarian Society

November 26, 2016

Dr. Ian Brown, professor and chair of the anthropology, has been elected into The Society of Antiquaries of London. This prestigious, 300-year old society has 3,000 fellows and only 5 per cent are from the U.S. Dr. Brown was the only American on this year’s ballot! His contributions to the field in areas such as the Lower Mississippi Valley, Gulf Coastal Plain and Native American prehistory and ethnohistory landed him the spot. Check out UA News for the story on Dr. Brown […]

Panitch Wins UA’s Blackmon-Moody Award

November 8, 2016

Seth Panitch, professor of acting in The University of Alabama’s department of theatre and dance, has earned the 2016 Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor Award. Panitch will receive the award Nov. 11 in a ceremony at the UA President’s Mansion. The Frederick Moody Blackmon and Sarah McCorkle Moody Outstanding Professor Award is one of the most prestigious awards given by UA. It is based on a specific accomplishment that is innovative, creative, useful or captures the imagination. Created by Frederick Moody Blackmon, […]

Musician Recognized Internationally

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | When Cynthia Simpson was 10 years old, she had no intention of becoming a professional musician—and certainly not a professional French horn player. She was in fifth grade at the time, and her father was the band director at her school. He needed horn players, so she played horn. She couldn’t have guessed that 15 years later, as a graduate student at The University of Alabama, she would be ranked the second best French […]

When Fame Breeds Infamy: Shooters Who Want Attention, a Growing Phenomenon

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | With at least two attention-driven mass shootings in the last year, it has never been more important to accurately understand the minds of killers—especially those who kill for fame. Dr. Adam Lankford, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, has been studying fame-seeking mass shooters since the aftermath of 9/11. In the past year, his research on the subject has been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The […]

A Leader’s Legacy: Bringing Life to Renaissance Literature

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence |Four hundred years ago, at the age of 52, William Shakespeare died. He left behind a legacy of nearly 200 plays and sonnets, which students, scholars, actors, and directors have been reading, studying, and adapting ever since. In anticipation of the anniversary of his death on April 23, Dr. Sharon O’Dair, a professor of Shakespeare in the Department of English and director of UA’s Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, wondered why, after 400 years, […]

Communicating Over Coffee: Coffee Shop Restores Confidence after Brain Injury

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Prior to her stroke, Nancy Taylor, a client at the Speech and Hearing Center at The University of Alabama, loved learning. She was social and vibrant, and then one day—the day she had her stroke—she lost her ability to talk. “I feel like I’ve had to do life over,” Taylor said. “People treated me like I was handicapped, but I’m just trying to find my words.” Taylor has aphasia, an acquired language disorder, and […]

Protecting the Coosa: New College graduate leads environmental nonprofit

April 27, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Growing up, Justinn Overton, a native of Birmingham, spent many of her Saturdays barely awake and fishing on Logan Martin Lake in the Coosa River system with her parents. “I have a distinct memory of feeling the wind on my face in this little john boat we had at the time and learning how to bait my own hook,” she said. Today, Overton, a 2010 New College graduate, is the executive director of Coosa […]

Beer in Your Bones: Geologist Reconstructs Past Civilizations Using Chemistry

April 26, 2016

From the 2016 Celebrating Excellence | Dr. Fred Andrus says he would never do this to you, but if he pulled one of your teeth, took it to his lab, and dissolved it, he could tell you about where you lived as a child. How? By analyzing isotopes, or variations of chemical elements. “Isotopes are used to detect everything from steroid use to the paths that medicines and nutrients take in your body,” said Andrus, a professor in the Department […]

Biology and Classics Graduate Finds Home in Oil Industry

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | What do Colombia, Gabon and Brazil all have in common? For one thing, Lauren Wilder, a UA graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biology and classics, helped negotiate exploration rights for oil and gas in all three places. Wilder’s first trip abroad as a land negotiator with Hess Corporation was to Lima, Peru. She traveled with two other Hess employees, “experienced professionals” she calls them, who had been to Peru dozens of times. “I […]

From UA to Antarctica to the White House

May 27, 2014

From the 2014 Celebrating Excellence | Dr. Samantha Hansen spent Thanksgiving 2013 – and several weeks on either side of it – shoveling snow in Antarctica, and she’s likely to spend the next two Thanksgivings doing the same. But shoveling snow in more than 30-degrees-below freezing temperatures is the beginning of her labors. She now has more than 200 gigabytes of data that she will painstakingly anaylze over the next year to try to map a massive subsurface mountain range […]