Category: For Faculty


New Performing Arts Center to Be Built

The Bryce Hospital property is getting a make over. The space will be transformed into a performing arts center. The project was greenlit recently by the Board of Trustees and promises to be the world-class facility the University deserves. The planning process had started and stopped over the years, but now the center is officially being planned. To get more information on the center, check out their web site.   Read UA News’ story on the $60 million, 168-acre facility in […]

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A&S in the News – October 7-13

Fresh take jazzes up venerable Shakespeare play Tuscaloosa News – Oct. 8 Performances of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” are always games of expectation: What fresh take on “To be or not to be” can possibly exist under the sun? Seth Panitch’s production of “Hamlet” at the University of Alabama this week does not disappoint on this score. Setting the play in the 1950s of Greenwich Village, Panitch pits Hamlet’s tortured soliloquies against the stylings of original songs by Tuscaloosa musician Nick […]

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A Name to Reflect Change

From the October 2016 Desktop News | Since 2001, the number of undergraduates majoring in the Department of Criminal Justice has increased more than 300 percent. Last year alone, more than 2,000 students took Introduction to Criminal Justice, and the department now holds some of the most popular majors on campus. “Our growth is due in large part to the efforts of our dedicated and diverse faculty,” the department’s chair, Dr. Lesley Williams Reid, said. “As the demand for our courses has […]

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Researchers Explore Biomass Potential to Replace Petrochemicals

Arduengo and German exchange student Philip Maximilian Knaff work in a UA lab.

From the October 2016 Desktop News | For years, manufacturers of some pharmaceuticals and everyday items made of plastic have relied on non-renewable petrochemicals that gush from the bowels of the Earth—black gold, Texas tea—as a key ingredient. Now Dr. Anthony J. Arduengo III, a University of Alabama chemistry professor, and an international group of scientists are working to replace petrochemicals with a much more chemically complex component that grows, rather than springs, from the ground. The component? Wood. “Wood, a renewable […]

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Fruit-Fly Diet Impacts Descendants, UA Researcher Finds

 From the October 2016 Desktop News | For a fruit fly, what its grandparents ate may affect how much it weighs. And, according to Dr. Laura Reed, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, similar relationships between generational diet and obesity may hold true for humans as well. To study obesity, Reed and her team experiment with the diets of fruit flies. They feed some of the larvae a high-fat diet while they give the control group a regular diet. Then, […]

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A&S in the News – Sept. 30-October 6

Goldie 1971 – The Fallen Robot Atlas Obscura – Sept. 30 When the Sloss Blast Furnaces closed in 1971 the site had been an anchor of Birmingham’s industrial life for nine decades. As one of the South’s largest manufacturers of pig iron, the obsolete hulk that was left behind was an inspiration for then-graduate student Joe McCreary, who created a rusting giant for the University of Alabama campus. Called “Goldie 1971,” the creature has stopped to rest in the sculpture […]

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Philosophy professor fields questions on Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything”

Dr. Kenneth Ehrenberg, an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama, hosted a Reddit Ask Me Anything online interview on Sept. 26. Reddit is a social media platform composed of subreddits, or targeted forums of discussion, in which users can comment and vote on various topics. Ehrenberg had his Ask Me Anything, or AMA, session on /r/philosophy, a board with more than 8 million subscribers. “I got a lot of questions on issues that aren’t really my area of […]

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UA Researcher Helps Unlock Biodiversity Mystery

A sample of green algae collected from the Gulf of Mexico.

From the September 2016 Desktop News | The discovery of a deep-water seaweed that evolved into a multicellular plant more than 540 million years ago has added a new branch to the tree of life, according to a biologist at The University of Alabama. Dr. Juan Lopez-Bautista, professor of biological sciences at UA, co-wrote a study of algae collected from the Gulf of Mexico that revealed a significantly different cellular structure than first believed. The finding, published in Scientific Reports, details the […]

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UA Appoints New Summersell Chair and Director of Hudson Strode Program

From the September 2016 Desktop News | The College of Arts and Sciences welcomes the new Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History and the new director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History Dr. Lesley Jill Gordon, former professor of history at the University of Akron, is the new Charles Grayson Summersell Endowed Chair of Southern History at The University of Alabama. The Summersell Chair endowment was established in 1997 by […]

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Traveling to the Ocean Floor: Professor Studies Deep-Sea Mollusks

Aplacophora are worm-like mollusks characterized by their lack of shells and tiny units called calcareous spicules.

From the September 2016 Desktop News | While the unique environment of the deep ocean would likely prove nightmarish and panic-inducing for many people, it’s just another day of fieldwork for Department of Biological Sciences’ assistant professor Dr. Kevin Kocot. This July, Kocot submerged to oceanic depths for the ninth time, joining 21 other marine scientists from universities across the nation who were selected to participate in this year’s Chief Scientist Training Cruise put on by the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System. In […]

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