Life & Letters • Fall 2013

Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts Magazine 路 Fall 2013

Adventures in Online Learning Pushing Forward

Overcoming traumatic events

Liberal Arts @ Work 9 ways to rev up your career

Botswana Earth’s Classroom The Botswana study abroad program gives undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to spend their summer exploring climate change, ecosystems and human dynamics in the heart of Southern Africa.

From dawn to dusk, students spend hours sampling soil, identifying species and observing wildlife and local culture. From leopard sightings in Modisa to San Bushmen walks in the Kalahari, students enjoy a wild summer while getting field experience and college credit. The popular course was designed by Thoralf Meyer, lecturer and research affiliate, and his wife Kelley Crews, associate professor; both from the Department of Geography and the Environment.

FOR MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAM, VISIT: studyabroadbotswana.blogspot.com

Geography senior Jessica Alvarenga engages in a fireside chat with safari guide Daryl Dandridge (left) after a full day of field research in Botswana, Africa.

Life & Letters

Contents Fall 2013 Departments 2

Message from the Dean

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Knowledge Matters

A look at the college’s top news, research and achievements.

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Quantified Self

Neuroscientist embarks on a yearlong quest to study a single human brain, his own.

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Brain Power

Undergraduates gain valuable research experience scanning UT’s human brain collection.

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Cover Story

Classical archaeologist leads two decades of excavation and research in Chersonesos.

14 Adventures in Online Learning

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Pushing Forward

Social scientists identify new ways to overcome trauma.

Photos: Courtesy of the Botswana Study Abroad Program

He Likes to Talk About the Weather

Meteorologist Troy Kimmel explains the science behind natural disasters.

Features

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How to Jumpstart Your Dissertation

Boot camp helps graduate students avoid pitfalls and get writing.

Exploring the acronym jungle of MOOCs, SMOCs and beyond.

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Archaeology Site Garners World Heritage Designation

Liberal Arts @ Work

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English professor confirms the Bard’s hand in The Spanish Tragedy.

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Pro Bene Meritis

Q&A’s with our 2013 recipients of the college’s highest honor for outstanding service and contribution.

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Op-ed: Fear Factor

Dr. Vivian Harris Porche shares how she overcame fear and achieved her lifelong goal of becoming a doctor.

Nine ways to rev up your career.

37 On the cover: Navigating the digital world. Illustration by Tim Lahan.

That’s Shakespeare, With One ‘S’

Books

Back cover: The What Jane Saw prelaunch party, held May 9, constructed a 3-D walkthrough of the 1813 Sir Joshua Reynolds exhibit visited by Jane Austen. The What Jane Saw site has since attracted nearly 75,000 visitors. Photo by Marsha Miller.

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Dean’s Message

Life & Letters The College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin publishes Life & Letters for its community of scholars, alumni and friends.

At a recent meeting of our college Advisory Council, an alumnus participating in a discussion on communications suggested that our college has one simple message to convey: “A liberal arts education is the best education for anyone aspiring to be a leader.”

He was paraphrasing our global affairs expert Jeremi Suri, who at a previous council meeting observed that the liberal arts, more than any other discipline, prepared students for leadership because it exposed them to the complex ways in which various issues relate to one another in the real world. When we inspire our students to think critically and to analyze situations from multiple perspectives, we also inspire qualities of selflessness and a sense of duty—the very essence of a successful leader.

Liberal arts students become successful leaders because we engage them in diverse experiences as well as ideas. We strongly encourage our students to participate in research, internships, campus organizations and study abroad opportunities because we know these real-world experiences impart knowledge and skills one can only learn by doing.

Some studies suggest that more than a third of Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts backgrounds, and more of them hold liberal arts B.A.s than professional degrees. The same is true for doctors and lawyers. Last year, when Google executive Marissa Mayer said that her company expected to hire 6,000 new employees, she noted that 4,000 to 5,000 of those hires would be liberal arts majors. I needn’t look beyond my own office to find proof: One of our student employees, Molly Wahlberg —a Liberal Arts Honors alumna with a master’s in Latin American Studies—was recently hired by Google in large part because of her liberal arts background and her working experience as an intern.

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Writing in the Huffington Post this past July, Edward Ray, the president of Oregon State University, noted “In today’s global economy, most people will have six to 10 jobs during their careers, and liberal arts majors are the most adaptable to new circumstances. No one knows what the jobs of the future will be, but a liberal arts degree provides a great foundation for adjusting to new careers and further education.”

As employment patterns continue to change rapidly, liberal arts alumni need to engage friends and family as well as our leaders and the general public on the value of a liberal arts degree. Our future as a nation will depend on our ability to provide strong and ethical leaders in all sectors of society, to uphold Thomas Jefferson’s vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely.

As we prepare tomorrow’s leaders, we endeavor to live up to this vision. The late Bill Livingston, a former government professor and chair in our college, profoundly understood the importance of leadership to our nation and society. We are fortunate to have a series of lecture videos, recorded by our college in 2005, of Professor Livingston speaking on the origins of the U.S. Constitution. If you are a former student of his, or if you are interested in knowing more about U.S. history, I encourage you to go to our website and watch these videos.

They are entertaining, informative and a fitting tribute to a great teacher who truly understood the value of leadership.

Randy L. Diehl, Dean David Bruton, Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts

Director of Public Affairs David Ochsner Editor Michelle Bryant Art Direction and Design Allen F. Quigley Contributing Writers Emily Cicchini Daniel Oppenheimer Jessica Sinn Molly Wahlberg Contributing Photographers Brian Birzer Tamir Kalifa Marsha Miller Emily Nielsen Adam Voorhes Alexander Wang Contributing Illustrators Brad Amorosino Dennis Haynes Tim Lahan Visit us online at lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu Follow us facebook.com/utliberalarts twitter.com/LiberalArtsUT youtube.com/LiberalArtsUT Postmaster Send changes of address to: Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts 116 Inner Campus Dr., Stop G6000 Austin, TX 78712-1257 Or email us at cola.alum@austin.utexas.edu Printed by Horizon Printing

Photo: Marsha Miller

Preparing Tomorrow’s Leaders

College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy L. Diehl

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Knowledge Matters

Quantified Self

Neuroscientist embarks on a yearlong quest to study a single human brain, his own Psychology / Imaging Research Center

Photo: Alexander Wang

BY DANIEL OPPENHEIMER Every Tuesday morning through November 2013, neuroscientist Russell Poldrack woke up, took off his headband-like sleep monitor and told it to wirelessly send data about his night’s sleep to a database.

Then he’d log in to a survey app on his computer and provide a subjective report on how well he had slept, whether he was sore and what his blood pressure and pulse rate were. He’d step on a scale, which would send his weight and body mass index to another database. Then he’d skip his usual paleo-style breakfast and head to his office, where he’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC).

Poldrack followed this routine every Tuesday since the fall of 2012. It was part of his yearlong quest to study a single human brain (his own, as it happens) in more detail than a single brain has ever been studied before.

At 7:30 a.m. every Tuesday, he would head down to the basement of the building and lie down for 10 minutes while his brain was scanned by the IRC’s magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Immediately after the scan he would fill out more surveys.

With that done he would walk over to the student health center, have some blood drawn and then drop off that blood sample at the university’s genome sequencing facility. The scientists there would analyze the blood for evidence of which of Poldrack’s genes were expressed that day.

If he exercised, he would wear a heart monitor, and the data would go into a database. On other days of the week, he might also submit to a high-resolution structural MRI, or perhaps work with his neuroscience colleague Alex Huk to perform

A close-up look at Russell Poldrack’s MRI scan of his brain. high-resolution scans that can identify specific regions of his visual cortex.

On those Tuesday evenings Poldrack would do more surveys and reports. He noted, among other things, how much time he spent outdoors, the severity of his psoriasis during the day, how much alcohol he drank, what he ate, how stressed he was, how good his gut health was and how his mood fluctuated over the course of the day. Then he would strap his sleep monitor back on and go to bed.

Old-Fashioned Science Not every day of Poldrack’s life, during the year of the “Russ-ome” Project, was as

intensely tracked as on those Tuesdays.

But every day he would fill out his surveys, wear his monitors and feed more data into a series of datasets that are so rich that he will need to use the supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to make sense of it all.

“There’s a way in which it’s a very old-fashioned project,” says Poldrack.

“There’s a long history of scientists doing experiments, sometimes crazy experiments, on themselves. It doesn’t happen much anymore, but in this case I couldn’t expect a volunteer to give up this much of their time. However, I’m obsessive enough that I thought I could actually pull it off, and I have the resources to do it.”

Poldrack hatched the idea, in part,

VISIT THE IMAGING RESEARCH CENTER WEBSITE: irc.utexas.edu

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Knowledge Matters

“It’s about optimizing ourselves.

That might mean getting smarter if you’re already smart, or losing weight effectively or figuring out how to best titrate your medicines if you have depression.”

after some fascinating conversations with Laurie Frick, an Austin-based artist whose work focuses on the “Quantified Self” movement—people who use monitors and sensors to track and then “hack” their lives.

Once all the data are in, toward the end of 2013, Poldrack will test some hypotheses and hopes to discover new ones by applying sophisticated data-mining techniques to the mountain of information he’s accumulating.

“Maybe we’ll see that particular gene networks move up and down in sync with

a particular brain network,” he says. “And maybe there will be something happening metabolically, or in the subjective mood reports, that parallels this pattern. Then we can drill down.”

Discovery Science Poldrack cautions that any pattern he discovers won’t have the scientific weight it would if he were doing a study of multiple subjects. But it will point the way forward to more refined hypotheses, which can be

Russell Poldrack undergoes his weekly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Poldrack’s brain was scanned more than 100 times.

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tested by more traditional means.

“Any finding that’s just from me could be a statistical fluke,” he says, “but the hope is that it will be meaningful as a driver of new hypotheses. It’s discovery science.”

Robert Bilder, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at UCLA, sees Poldrack’s project as a bold, and potentially important, first step to filling in some of the big gaps in the field’s knowledge.

“Even in the cases where we’ve done the most scans of a single brain, we’re talking a few measurements separated by weeks, months or even years,” says Bilder, who is director of a major NIH-funded consortium dedicated to explore links between the human genome and complex brain functions. “As a result, we don’t even know what’s normal in terms of day-today variation. Russ’s project won’t tell us what’s normal, because it’s just one brain, but I think it’ll give us a sense of what’s possible. We’ll see the day-to-day fluctuation, see what kind of variability there is.”

Poldrack says the goal of the project, as of all his research, is to help us understand ourselves better so that we can exert more control over our lives.

“It’s about optimizing ourselves,” he says. “That might mean getting smarter if you’re already smart, or losing weight effectively or figuring out how to best titrate your medicines if you have depression,” he says. “It might mean using gene expression analyses, or even something as simple as an EEG, to monitor the efficacy of a treatment. We know almost nothing, right now, about how individuals change over longer time scales. We don’t know what’s possible.”

Photos: Alexander Wang

-RUSSELL POLDRACK, professor of neuroscience, psychology and the director of the Imaging Research Center

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Literary Gold British Studies / History / Middle Eastern Studies

Wm. Roger Louis, director of the Program in British Studies, has won the Benson Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature, the highest award in literature and history in England. The award was given in recognition of his enormous contribution

to English literature—both through his own writing, and through his support of other writers over several decades. Established in 1916, some past Benson Medal recipients include Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and J.R.R. Tolkien.

More than two years ago, photographer Adam Voorhes photographed UT Austin’s brain collection, including the two images featured here.

He is working on a book project, Malformed, the Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital.

Brain photos: Adam Voorhes Louis photo: Emily Nielsen

Brain Power Students are busy scanning a collection of nearly 100 brains preserved from Texas State Hospital patients as part of a unique undergraduate research opportunity at The University of Texas at Austin.

A new high-resolution MRI scanner and storage space in the Norman Hackerman Building on campus makes the brain collection and associated data more accessible to students, staff and faculty.

“I think it will mean a decidedly better learning experience for students,” says psychologist Larry Cormack, who cocurates the brain collection with psychologist Tim Schallert. “When you are looking at MRI images, no matter how detailed,

Psychology

they have a certain level of abstraction.”

Having the actual brains as a reference will provide students with an easier way to understand the spatial relationships within the images.

College of Natural Sciences neuroscientist Jeff Luci’s class will learn to scan the brains, giving students the opportunity to learn on both the front and back end of the project.

This remarkable collection includes intact specimens dating from the 1950s to the 1980s, and includes a variety of brain abnormalities. MRI scanning leaves the preserved brains exactly as they were before, allowing them to be scanned

BY MICHELLE BRYANT multiple times and for long durations, a process that a living brain could not endure.

For nearly three decades, the collection remained mostly unused until now, housed in large fluid-filled jars labeled with a date of death or autopsy, a brief description in Latin and a case number— some faded with time.

“The brains have been preserved while technology has improved—similar to the way in which an archeologist might leave part of a site untouched in the hopes that better technology will come along and allow more to be learned,” Cormack says.

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Knowledge Matters

Archaeology Site Garners World Heritage Designation Classics / Institute of Classical Archaeology

Psychology About 70 percent of a person’s intelligence can be explained by their DNA—and those genetic influences only get stronger with age, according to new research by psychology researchers Daniel Briley, Elliot Tucker-Drob and Paige Harden.

Using meta-analytic procedures— the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature— the researchers examined genetic and environmental influences on cognition in twin and sibling pairs from infancy to adolescence.

According to the findings, genes influencing cognition become activated during the first decade of life and accelerate over time. The results emphasize the importance of early literacy and education during the first decade of life.

“The conventional view is that genes place an upper limit on the effects of social intervention on cognitive development,” says Tucker-Drob, assistant professor of psychology. “This research suggests the opposite. As social, educational and economic opportunities increase in a society, more children will have access to the resources they need to maximize their genetic potentials.”

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Ariel view of Chersonesos with the newly renovated St. Volodymyr’s Church in 2001. The entrance to Sevastopol Harbor is in the distance.

An international team excavates a Byzantine-era residential section along the main road in the Ancient City.

A Ukrainian port city founded by Greeks in the fifth century B.C. has new life and world prominence thanks to two decades of excavation and research led by classical archaeology professor Joseph Carter and a diverse team of experts from UT Austin. The site, Chersonesos, was granted World Heritage status in June by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“Chersonesos commands our respect because of its very important place in world history, as the birthplace of democracy in this part of the world, and of Christianity in the Slavic world,” says Carter, director of the Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICA) in the College of Liberal Arts. “Few places on Earth have such a long and vital history.”

The site was deemed significant because it linked the ancient chora, or agricultural settlements, to the urban area, providing a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people and the exchanges of Greek, Roman and Byzantine empires.

Since the early 1970s, Carter has studied and continues to study ancient Greek colonial farm life in southern Italy. He expanded his study to Chersonesos in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine. The UT Austin researchers were the first American and foreign team given access to the site, which benefitted from more than $12 million of support from the Packard Humanities Institute.

Illustration: Dennis Haynes Photos: Christopher Williams

Genetic Influence on Intelligence Increases Over Time

Life & Letters Fall 2013

English Senior Wins Keene Prize for Literature

Back row: Jonathan Brown, Matthew Butler, Seth Garfield, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Jorge CañizaresEsguerra and Frank Guridy. Front row: Lina Del Castillo, Susan Deans-Smith and Ann Twinam

English

Noble photo: Annie Baker Group photo: Tamir Kalifa

Katherine Noble, English ’13, has won the $50,000 Keene Prize for Literature for her collection of poems, Like Electrical Fire Across the Silence. She is the first undergraduate to win or place in the competition, which awards one of the world’s largest student literary prizes.

“I have been affected by images from biblical myths since I was a young girl, and the narrators in my poems often wrestle to understand how God interacts with the physical world,” Noble says. “The collection also has a long poetic essay called ‘In the Empire of Flesh,’ which I wrote after a couple of meaningful, but failed, relationships.”

In addition, three finalists will each receive a $17,000 prize. Finalists include: Corey Miller, a Michener Center graduate student, for a collection of poems, The New Concentration; Karan Mahajan, a Michener Center graduate student, for an excerpt from his novel, “Notes on a Small Bomb”; and Jenn Shapland, an English graduate student, for her essay collection, Finders Keepers.

Established in 2006 in the College of Liberal Arts, the Keene Prize is named after E.L. Keene, a 1942 graduate of the university, who envisioned an award that would enhance and enrich the university’s prestige and support the work of young writers. Students submit poetry, plays and fiction or nonfiction prose.

Katherine Noble, English ’13

¡Numero Uno! History | Graduate Studies U.S. News & World Report ranked the Department of History’s graduate program in Latin American History as No. 1 in the nation.

“Such professional accolades not only pay tribute to the fine work of the Latin Americanist faculty, but are a badge of distinction for the entire History Department,” says Seth W. Garfield, associate professor of Latin American History.

The rankings for 2013 are based on data gathered by surveying university deans, program directors and senior faculty in the field. The program has

consistently ranked at the top since the Humanities and Social Sciences rankings were introduced in 1995. There are 40 students in the program.

“This ranking represents a clear acknowledgement of the incomparable quality of our resources such as the Benson Latin American Collection and faculty as well as the exceptional students that our program attracts, and who, in turn, go on to become influential scholars in their own right,” says Susan Deans-Smith, associate professor of Latin American History.

Regents Honor Outstanding Teaching

The 2013 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award recipients from the College of Liberal Arts are:

College of Liberal Arts

Don B. Graham, J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor in American and English Literature in the Department of English

Five faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts received the 2013 Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the UT System Board of Regents’ highest teaching honor.

The awards program is one of the nation’s largest monetary teaching recognition programs in higher education, honoring outstanding performance in the classroom and dedication to innovation in undergraduate instruction.

Henry A. Dietz, University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Government Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History

Allen MacDuffie, assistant professor in the Department of English Catherine Riegle-Crumb, assistant professor in the Departments of Sociology and Curriculum and Instruction, and research associate in the Population Research Center

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Knowledge Matters

How to Jumpstart Your Dissertation Research and Graduate Studies

Boot camp helps graduate students avoid pitfalls and get writing

BY MICHELLE BRYANT

Getting Started Staring at a blank computer screen can be a daunting task for any writer. Graduate students face the added pressure of representing a culmination of years of study and research, while knowing they will eventually have to defend their work.

“The boot camp literally jump-started me writing my dissertation,” Shafer says. “Two things were huge for me: Just start writing, because you can’t edit

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nothing. Also, working in small time blocks is okay.”

“It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the scale of a book-length project, so it’s essential to break it down into manageable parts,” says Randy Lewis, a professor in the Department of American Studies. “This is key to developing a mindset that allows you to endure and even enjoy a multiyear writing process.”

Lewis, who served as a boot camp mentor, says he often imagines a large-scale writing assignment as a huge pile of sand that needs to be moved, but you only have a spoon.

“All you can do is move one spoonful at a time,” he says. “Yet if you do this consistently, you’ll actually make progress faster than you expect.”

The boot camp incorporated plenty of time for writing and visiting one-on-one with faculty mentors, as well as the opportunity to exchange work with a partner for feedback and advice. A chalkboard was used to keep tally of their writing progress each day.

By the end of the boot camp, the participants had collectively written 241 pages and 67,579 words.

“My advice to people starting work on their dissertation is just start,” encourages Sandra Black,

FOR MORE TIPS ON SURVIVING YOUR DISSERTATION, VISIT: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2013/09/dissertation

Kathleen Shafer, a Geography and the Environment graduate student and boot camp participant, discovered her dissertation topic in Marfa, Texas while photographing abandoned airfields.

Photo: Courtesy of Kathleen Shafer

Like most graduate students, the hardest part of Kathleen Shafer’s dissertation was getting started.

Shafer, a graduate student in the Department of Geography and the Environment, was among 11 graduate students from The University of Texas at Austin to attend Dissertation Boot Camp this summer, a twoweek pilot program hosted by the College of Liberal Arts’ Office of Research and Graduate Studies. The boot camp assembled some of UT Austin’s premier faculty and staff to offer guidance on writing and the importance of maintaining mental and physical fitness throughout the process.

“The task of writing a dissertation is one of many challenges that our doctoral students face as they grow into their scholarly profile, and the work habits and confidence that they develop during the dissertation stage remain with them for the duration of their professional lives,” says Esther Raizen, associate dean for research. “In addition to providing the framework for actual progress in writing, the boot camp was also a statement on the extent to which we in the College of Liberal Arts value students’ scholarship and the long-term promise of their career trajectories, as well as their well-being.”

Life & Letters Fall 2013

“Just start writing, because you can’t edit nothing.”

Illustration: Dennis Haynes Photo: Wikipedia Commons

-KATHLEEN SHAFER, Geography and the Environment graduate student

professor of economics and a boot camp mentor. “I found that was the hardest part of graduate school.

I kept waiting for a brilliant idea to pop in my head and it doesn’t really work this way. You just need to start working on some project and the right project generally evolves from there.”

Shafer stumbled onto her dissertation topic in Marfa, Texas, during a summer spent photographing abandoned airfields in the Southwest. One of her dissertation chapters is on visual methodologies, and she will be incorporating some of her own visual arts work into her dissertation.

“It is a town that combines both my interests of art and airfields,” she says. “I also knew that there was little qualitative writing on it so that was exciting.”

After boot camp, Shafer began keeping a daily writing log of her activity. She says that keeping track of her progress and working patterns helped her realize it is okay to take a day off, since about every sixth day she was producing little to no writing.

“Seriously, boot camp was essential,” Shafer says.

“I would be in a very different place right now if I had not done it. First draft is done!”

History Podcast Helps Students Prepare for STAAR Exams History 15 Minute History is a podcast about world and U.S. history created for teachers, students and anyone who wants to know more about history. Both Joan Neuberger, history professor and Not Even Past editor, and Christopher Rose, history doctoral student and outreach director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, wanted to find a way to help educators and students prepare for the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR™ exams—a requirement for high school graduation.

Each podcast is tied to specific goals set in the standards and is accompanied by supporting reading materials for people who want to learn more. The podcasts are a collaboration between Not Even Past, a website with articles on a wide variety of historical issues produced by the History Department, and Hemispheres, UT Austin’s international outreach consortium. Since its launch in October 2012, 15 Minute History has attracted more than 15,000 visitors and has 700 subscribers to the podcast.

TO LISTEN TO A PODCAST OR SUGGEST THE NEXT EPISODE TOPIC, VISIT: blogs.utexas.edu/15minutehistory

Walk This Way

Skeleton of Oreopithecus bambolii from Baccinello, Italy.

Anthropology

Scientists have long questioned the locomotion of a mysterious extinct ape that lived in modern-day Tuscany millions of years ago. Did Oreopithecus swing in the trees, or did it move on two legs like humans?

According to a study, led by The University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle Russo and Liza Shapiro, the ancient ape didn’t have the pelvis or spine necessary for regular upright walking.

The findings, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, confirm that anatomical features related to habitual upright, twolegged walking remain exclusively associated with humans and their fossil ancestors.

“Our findings offer new insight into the Oreopithecus locomotor debate,” says Russo, who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeast Ohio Medical University. “While it’s certainly possible that Oreopithecus walked on two legs to some extent, as apes are known to employ short bouts of this activity, an increasing amount of anatomical evidence clearly demonstrates that it didn’t do so habitually.”

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Knowledge Matters

He Likes to Talk About the Weather

A monster EF-5 tornado roared through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on May 20, 2013. The twister boasted winds exceeding 200 miles per hour as it ravaged schools and neighborhoods, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds.

In its wake, many are questioning the relationship between tornadoes and climate change, and whether these monster storms are intensifying over time.

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BY JESSICA SINN & MOLLY WAHLBERG

Resident weather expert Troy Kimmel— senior lecturer of Studies in Weather and Climate in the Department of Geography and the Environment and chief meteorologist for KOKE FM Radio—explains the science behind these natural disasters.

According to Kimmel, though there were a record number of EF-1 and stronger tornadoes in the United States in 2011, that is not a sign of even more frequent and powerful tornadoes to come.

“Every weather pattern is unique and the atmospheric ‘recipe’ ingredients must come together just right,” Kimmel says.

“Through analogue forecasting, we understand what weather patterns are most likely to produce severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Some years you see very active weather patterns and then there are years you don’t.”

The ingredients for a thunderstorm are moisture, instability and atmospheric lift. For severe thunderstorms with tornadoes, Kimmel says, those ingredients must be more than marginal and be combined with strong winds aloft so that strong updrafts and rotation form in the parent thunderstorms.

READ Q&A WITH TROY KIMMEL: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2013/08/kimmel

In April 2011, very dynamic weather patterns produced extreme atmospheric lift and a high wind shear environment that resulted in damaging tornadoes in the middle Mississippi Valley, the Ohio River Valley as well as the southern United States. A month later, another very dynamic weather pattern produced the tornado that roared through Joplin, Mo., killing more than 150 people. This tornado ended up being the worst urban tornado event in modern history in the United States in terms of deaths, injuries and property damage.

Though climate change is an oftencited culprit for extreme weather in recent history, Kimmel says blaming it for the increase in tornadoes throughout the United States would be overly simplistic.

The region known as “Tornado Alley” is geographically located at the convergence of numerous atmospheric factors that, combined, create an optimal environment for tornado formation. The recent increase in tornadoes, Kimmel says, is basically indicative of a very dynamic weather pattern present in a high moisture and high instability environment.

Storm photo: © Minerva Studio/Fotolia Kimmel photo: Courtesy of Moore Visuals

Geography and the Environment

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Noël Wells Joins Saturday Night Live Cast Plan II Honors Move over Tina Fey, there’s a new funny girl in town. Noël Wells, Plan II and RTF ’10, has taken the stage of Studio 8-H as a featured cast member of Saturday Night Live. She comes to the late-night comedy show with an impressive background in acting, directing, film studies and musical theater.

During her time as a student at UT Austin, Wells began doing sketches and impressions on her YouTube channel, which has amassed more than 11 million views and 20,000 subscribers. Among her popular sketch and parody videos, she is well known for her impersonations of New Girl actor Zooey Deschanel in her Web series, Hey! I’m Zooey Deschanel. She also performed at Esther’s Follies, Austin’s famed sketch and magic show located on 6th Street.

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2010, Wells has appeared in numerous online comedy videos for Funny or Die, College Humor and Cracked.com. She was a house performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade

UT Austin Mourns Loss of Bill Livingston and plays the lead character Sophie in the romantic comedy film Forev, which was released at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Constitute Receives Google Ideas Grant

Wells photo: Dana Edelson/NBC/NBC Universal/Getty Images Livingston photo: Marsha Miller

Government Constitutions are supposed to provide a sustainable structure for politics. Yet only half live more than 19 years.

Zachary Elkins, associate professor of government and a leading constitutional scholar, knows what it takes for constitutions to last for generations—and now he’s teaming up with Google to share his expertise with drafters around the world.

With a grant from Google Ideas, Elkins and his colleagues Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago) and James Melton (University College London) created Constitute, a free online resource that offers a growing set of constitutional texts that users can compare systematically across a broad set of topics. Built with data from the team’s Comparative Constitutions Project, the website allows users to

search and analyze excerpts of more than 900 current and historical constitutions from around the globe.

Constitute has every constitution that was in force in June of 2013 for every independent state in the world. Soon it will include data and text for a version of every available constitution ever written since 1789. The goal of the project is to use technology to solve worldwide problems— especially in developing countries, says Elkins, who has helped advise constitutional drafters in Latin America and Africa.

The website launched on Sept. 23, with an event at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT: constituteproject.org

Government The University of Texas at Austin community mourns the loss of former acting university president William S. Livingston, who died Aug. 15 at the age of 93.

“Bill Livingston embodied all the best qualities of a university leader: erudition, eloquence, sweeping vision, warmth and good humor,” says President Bill Powers.

“The University of Texas is a better place for his lifetime of service. He was an inspiration to generations of Longhorns, and we all will miss him.”

An Ohio native and World War II veteran, Livingston earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge.

He came to UT Austin in 1949 as a government professor and spent the next six decades teaching and serving the university in various roles, including chair of the Government Department, vice chancellor of academic programs, and vice president and dean of graduate studies. In 1992, he served as acting university president.

Livingston was also beloved by more recent alumni as the baritone voice of TEX, the 1990s telephone registration system, from which he signed off each call with “Goodbye and good luck.”

WATCH LIVINGSTON’S VIDEO SERIES ON THE ORIGINS OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION: utexas.edu/cola

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Knowledge Matters

UT Faculty Chronicle Texas Cultural History College of Liberal Arts Texas Bookshelf is a 16-book series that will be published by University of Texas Press chronicling the state’s rich culture and history. The five-year project is set to launch in 2017 and will cover a diverse range of topics—from the Tejano experience to Texas food culture to performing arts. This is the first project undertaken by a university press to capture the culture and history of a state in such an in-depth way. Participating authors from the College of Liberal Arts include:

Martha Menchaca, professor, Department of Anthropology

Shirley Thompson, associate professor, Departments of African and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies

Bob Abzug, professor, Departments of History and American Studies; director, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies

Frank Guridy, associate professor, Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies

Cecilia Balli, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology

Greg Curtis, senior lecturer, Humanities Honors Program

Revolution of a New Media Culture Middle Eastern Studies / Humanities Research Award With the advent of new media technologies, people around the world have instant access to uncensored news and images of revolutions through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and an array of other social networking platforms.

Since the Arab Spring began in 2010, conversations about the “digital war” have centered on the power of social media. Did social networking play a central role in shaping political debates in the uprisings?

What can the Arab Spring tell us about

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Tarek El-Ariss, assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies the future of social media in revolutionary movements? Tarek El-Ariss, assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies, is examining these questions in his forthcoming book Making a Scene: Literature, Social Media, and the Arab Spring.

Focusing on new writing practices and social media, El-Ariss studies the

Charlotte Canning, professor, College of Fine Arts, Department of Theater and Dance; Department of African and African Diaspora Studies

Karl Hagstrom Miller, associate professor, Departments of History and American Studies; College of Fine Arts, School of Music

sweeping political and social changes in the Arab world since fall 2010.

“Social media multiplies instances of scandal and exposure through hypercirculation of images, videos and news,” El-Ariss says. “The Internet, like the street, is a site of possibility and empowerment, but also of vulnerability, harassment, regression and abuse.”

The Humanities Research Award is aiding El-Ariss in exploring the complex relationship between the literary and political aspects of the Arab world. He is one of 10 College of Liberal Arts faculty members to receive the $15,000 award, established in 2010 by Dean Randy Diehl to address the shortage of external grants to offset humanities research expenses.

“The award is allowing me to attend conferences and conduct research integral to my project,” El-Ariss says. “It has allowed me to interact with other scholars in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, gaining important insights for my work. The award also allowed me to obtain books and other materials that are advancing my research.”

WATCH HUMANITIES RESEARCH AWARD VIDEO SERIES: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2013/04/humanities-research-award

UT Faculty photo: Michael O’Brien El-Ariss photo: Courtesy of Tarek El-Ariss

Elizabeth Engelhardt, professor and chair, Department of American Studies

Life & Letters Fall 2013

That’s Shakespeare, With One ‘S’ English Professor Confirms the Bard’s Hand in The Spanish Tragedy

Photo: Marsha Miller

English

BY JESSICA SINN

For centuries, scholars have been searching for answers to a literary mystery: Who wrote the five additional passages in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy?

Mounting arguments point to William Shakespeare, but Douglas Bruster, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, has recently found evidence confirming that the 325 additional lines are indeed the work of the Bard.

According to Bruster’s textual analysis, published in the July online issue of Notes and Queries, the proof lies in Shakespeare’s trademark misspellings and the bad handwriting behind them.

“This is the clinching evidence we need to admit the additional passages into the Shakespeare canon,” says Bruster, who holds the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professorship in American and English Literature. “It’s not every day

we get to identify new writing by Shakespeare, so this is an exciting moment.”

Bruster examined Shakespeare’s spelling habits in the manuscript pages of the 16th-century play Sir Thomas More.

Using Shakespeare’s contributions as a guide, he identified 24 points of similarity between Sir Thomas More and The Spanish Tragedy, a play republished, with new material, at about the time of Hamlet.

The findings reveal that Shakespeare’s spelling was both old-fashioned and idiosyncratic. For example, with words like “spotless” and “darkness” Shakespeare would use a single “s.” Pasttense words like “wrapped” and “blessed” he ended with a “t” (i.e. “wrapt,” “blest”).

Also telling is his habit of spelling the same word in two different ways (i.e. “alley” spelled “allie” and “allye” in the same line).

Shakespeare’s contributions to the revised version of Kyd’s play were first suspected in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the noted poet, philosopher and literary critic. Yet the cold case has remained unsolved owing to a number of awkward lines in the additions. Like a game of telephone, Shakespeare’s words got lost in translation, resulting in phrases that barely resemble the original, Bruster says.

“One line in particular literally kept me up at night wondering what Shakespeare was doing,” Bruster says.

“Then I realized that the copyist or printer had misread his handwriting. It turns out that the worst line in the additional passages wasn’t what Shakespeare wrote. Once you recognize what the line originally said, the beauty of his verse rises to the surface.”

WATCH BRUSTER’S VIDEO: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu/2013/08/shakespeare

13

Adventures in Online Learning Exploring the Acronym Jungle of MOOCs, SMOCs and Beyond

BY EMILY BALL CICCHINI

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIM LAHAN

Life & Letters Fall 2013

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Adventures in Online Learning

When Professors John Hoberman and Daniel Bonevac sat down with a small development team in January to create two new online courses, the possibilities of “what if” and “could we” electrified the room.

The goal: to deliver 72 hours of traditional coursework in an engaging and interactive format via the Web. Five months later, as the heat of summer and deadline approached and the realities of limited time, resources, and the ever-changing landscape of technology started to set in, someone uttered: “It’s the World Wild West.”

These are digital pioneers of the university’s newest development in a long tradition of technology-enhanced learning. They are moving forward into uncharted territory: an online course that will seek to instruct more than 30,000 students at once from all over the world. Moreover, this MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is just one of the many directions that the university is heading, including flipped classrooms and SMOCs (Synchronous Massive Online Courses). They are all designed to enhance online and blended learning, often using methods that combine digital with face-to-face interaction.

We can look to the past for models, but it is clear that the time and place for learning is changing. Many faculty members are leading mixed teams of staff and student assistants to experiment with e-learning and explore what will work best with their students both on and off campus.

The Evolution of Web Learning While online learning isn’t new, it has had a relatively low profile on campus to date. Rapid change is being driven by a convergence of external and internal factors, including advances in streaming video and Web technology, access to mobile devices and the diverse learning styles and expectations of students.

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One could argue that educational technology started with papyrus and slates, and that blended learning has been around since the days of educational films and correspondence courses.

“The early days of online education were a bit like the early days of movies where studios essentially filmed a play,” says Sam Gosling, professor of psychology. “Then filmmakers realized, wait a minute, if we don’t have to be in a theater any more, there are all kinds of things we can now do, like set up the cameras at new angles, put the camera on a car, introduce special effects.”

We now live in a world where technology is permeating our everyday lives. Many people cannot spend a day without checking their email or surfing the Internet. New devices, like smart phones and tablets, allow people to use the Internet in new places and ways. Increasingly, students and faculty alike expect constant availability of certain information and transactions online.

For instance, the faculty has been using Blackboard for many years to share course materials and collaborate with students. But even this staple learning management system is about to change.

The university has moved to adopt the Canvas system, which offers ways for faculty and students to leverage many different kinds of learning tools such as TEDTalks, Adobe Connect and Piazza, a robust online learning discussion forum. It also allows both students and teachers to record, upload and securely submit video and audio assignments right from their devices. Customizing Canvas is as easy as adding an app to your phone.

It’s becoming clear that one tool is not going to

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Photo: Tamir Kalifa

Professors Sam Gosling and Jamie Pennebaker discuss the script before the broadcast begins.

fit all teachers, subjects or students. A variety of approaches will be needed for Web-based and hybrid types of learning.

“Online learning does not have to be expensive or complicated,” says Wen-Hua Teng, a senior lecturer who is developing an online pilot course in Chinese.

“If online courses can be designed to be parallel to traditional courses, they would offer a great deal of flexibility to students, especially for those classes of high demand.

“It can help students graduate on time,” Teng adds.

“But the challenges and promises go hand in hand; how to deliver the same curriculum and assessment in a traditional classroom and in an online environment needs careful planning and perhaps trial and error.”

The College of Liberal Arts is embarking on offering a new set of online courses, each with a different set of tools and delivery mechanisms best suited for their subjects. Some of these Gateway and Introductory Foreign Language courses have already started, and some will be released over the next few years.

“We have to be innovative, constantly trying new things,” says Jamie Pennebaker, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology who, with Gosling,

teaches the online course Psychology 301. “If something doesn’t work, throw it out. The college is working with faculty to rethink models of online learning.”

Where We Learn One way that the college has been providing for this change is through smart classrooms with Internet access and high-quality video projection systems.

Classroom consoles have been widely adopted by faculty for enriching course content with visual presentations, videos, and engaging real-time activities such as interactive Web polls—where the results can be displayed immediately to all participants—and lecture capture systems that automatically record classes for students to review outside of class.

Jennifer Ebbeler, an associate professor who teaches Introduction to Ancient Rome, says her best experience is with what she calls a “modified flipped” class model. In the flipped model, teachers record lectures and offer an online forum for students to use outside of class, to leave more time for discussion and in-class activities.

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Adventures in Online Learning

dean for student affairs in the College of Liberal Arts.

“The promise of the online effort is that it will reach Texans and others who currently do not have access to those courses but want it.”

When We Learn TOWER (Texas Online World of Educational Research) is an online learning methodology that combines a real-time, physical classroom with live video broadcasting that was developed for Psychology 301, an introductory course. While the idea predates the rise of the MOOCs, it can be useful to think of it as a SMOC— a synchronous massive online course. Pennebaker and Gosling taught Psychology 301 as a traditional course together for about seven years before converting it into a SMOC in the fall of 2010.

With the aid of customized technology, the majority of students watch the live class streamed to their computer wherever they are located. They all take benchmark quizzes at the same time, but at places as different as a dorm room or a coffee shop.

The TOWER method is now being repeated in a section of the required American Government 310 course. The preliminary findings are very encouraging, including increased student performance, attendance

The view from the control room during broadcast.

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Photo: Tamir Kalifa

Ebbeler used lecture capture tools available in several classrooms that allow faculty to record and share courses with students, who in turn use the recordings for study review. But in the flipped classroom, students are expected to watch all the video outside of regular course meeting hours. The lectures become the homework.

“It was important not to overload students with assigned readings and pre-recorded lectures,” Ebbeler says. “The difficulty was finding a balance between shifting content out of class in order to free up class time for more active learning, and not inciting a rebellion from students who felt that they were being asked to do an excessive amount of work for a non-major class.”

Getting the right balance is a theme that rings throughout technology-enhanced learning. It means redefining the expectations between teacher, student and content, and building new relationships across a variety of face-to-face and digital teaching methods.

Few will dispute the value of face time for student learning, but perhaps one of the biggest benefits of the Internet is the long-distance delivery it provides for those who cannot study on campus.

“Many students do not have access to the diverse array of high-quality courses available at a university like UT Austin,” says Marc Musick, senior associate

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Ideas of the Twentieth Century

by Daniel Bonevac

Age of Globalization

by John Hoberman

and a student preference to the system over the use of traditional textbooks and traditional testing strategies.

Most interestingly, the TOWER method has reportedly resulted in a leveling effect on student performance across different ethnicities and social classes.

Although still considered a pilot teaching strategy, other promising aspects include an open response tool that analyzes student essays using sophisticated psychometric software, giving students immediate and personalized feedback on their work. It also helps faculty study and understand what kinds of online teaching methodologies really work.

“We are particularly excited about the forthcoming integration of learning with mobile technologies, which can help students monitor their learning habits and track their progress,” Gosling says. “These developments will provide unprecedented access to the behaviors that promote and hinder learning. Again, it’s another example of the value of integrating teaching and research.

“What’s exciting about the approach we are taking is saying okay, now we’re not stuck in a lecture hall, what can we do with technology and the latest findings from the science of learning to improve the effectiveness and reach of education?” he adds. “Our teams are using technology to help build classroom communities, even in very large classes. They are integrating multi-media sources of information. They are using online interaction to allow students to monitor their own progress carefully so they can adjust and build their learning skills appropriately.”

Getting Personal

Photo: Ann Morgan

The venerable but worn “sage on the stage” method goes back to the Middle Ages. A professor today, how-

ever, is being re-envisioned as a “guide on the side.”

But again the question of balance appears: Who is leading the drive toward knowledge? What happens to the role of research in higher education? And what about the critical role of teaching in providing individualized attention to our students?

The answer may lie at the intersection of expertise and adaptive learning technologies. Through collecting student data and looking for patterns, faculty can adopt an evidence-driven instructional practice.

Researchers can begin to see what works in learning not only across large groups, but also for individual student progress. Just as Amazon makes suggestions for our books, music and movie selections, learning technologies can help analyze interventions that can help students succeed. Instead of waiting to the end of a course for a test and a grade, the assessment can be built into the course throughout.

“As a language instructor, I have enjoyed the increased interaction with students by using online tools,” says Teng—who has the challenge of teaching a foreign language with very different rules than English—to students of many backgrounds. “The individual attention each student has received would have been impossible in a traditional learning setting.

I am of the opinion that technology has great potential in promoting effective language learning.”

Some faculty are already convinced about the value of data-driven teaching.

“As we learn more about how learning works in these different environments, we will be able to better direct students to the model of course delivery (lecture, blended, online) that best suits their learning style and other needs,” Ebbeler says. “The key, though, is rigorous assessment at the course level, and then having ‘big data’ people who can assimilate the data from multiple courses.”

“The difficulty was finding a balance between shifting content out of class in order to free up class time for more active learning, and not inciting a rebellion from students who felt that they were being asked to do an excessive amount of work for a non-major class.”

-JENNIFER EBBELER, associate professor of classics

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Adventures in Online Learning

Quick ½ Stats

The amount of letter grade that TOWER students did better compared to non-TOWER students

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The amount of minutes it takes to do a benchmark quiz in TOWER online

The average number of minutes it took for an instructor or teaching assistant to respond in the Intro to Ancient Rome flipped course online forums

A screenshot from Professor Daniel Bonevac’s MOOC titled Ideas of the 20th Century.

Students can choose from a menu of class lectures at left, and each lecture includes a simultaneous transcription to the right of the video. Students are also invited to participate in live Twitter chats with Bonevac, and discussion forums throughout the course allow students to post comments and questions. The main goal of the course is to help participants learn how philosophy, art, literature and history shaped the last century and the world today.

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Life & Letters Fall 2013

72

99

4,632

30,000

The average number of 9 to 13 minute videos in Liberal Arts’ edX MOOCs

The percentage of UT students who report owning a laptop

The number of posts made on the Intro to Ancient Rome flipped course online forum

The number of students enrolled in the edX MOOC Age of Globalization

“We cannot afford to treat teaching and educational research as separate entities,” Gosling says.

“Instead, they have to be tightly integrated with one another. Just as the new technologies allow students to monitor their progress and improve their learning skills, they also allow educators to monitor the effectiveness of new methods and technologies themselves. That information provides unprecedented data to inform the science of teaching and learning.”

New Educational Resources One of the other fronts in online learning is access to quality digital educational materials. Faculty including Carl Blyth, director of the Center for Open Educational Resources in Language Learning (COERLL), have been spearheading the creation of “open educational resources.” They are making, sharing and using community-developed content for teaching both online and in the classroom. The desire for open resources is two-fold: it lowers costs, and it

“Just as the new technologies allow students to monitor their progress and improve their learning skills, they also allow educators to monitor the effectiveness of new methods and technologies themselves. That information provides unprecedented data to inform the science of teaching and learning.”

-SAM GOSLING, professor of psychology

gives faculty more control over their content when compared to teaching from outdated or mass-produced textbooks.

Along these lines, the university has joined with edX, a consortium led by Harvard and MIT, to offer MOOCs to a global audience. Two MOOCs currently being presented by Bonevac and Hoberman, Ideas of the 20th Century and Age of Globalization respectively, are reaching a combined 60,000 students worldwide. Students self-report various reasons for joining, including a basic thirst for learning and knowledge, and access to some of the best education available in the world. The courses are free to anyone with Internet access. After completion they will live on as enhanced e-books, available from major online retailers for a cost of less than $10. The proceeds from these sales are intended to support continued free access to massive online courses.

The Future of Web Learning “There are a number of existing online efforts in Texas and elsewhere,” Musick says. “Many of these efforts will be lower in cost than what we can provide, but we also expect that our quality will be much higher than these low-cost alternatives.

“Given these existing forces, we must be realistic about our chances of succeeding in this environment,” he adds. “With enough time, energy and other resources we can be successful in delivering a wide array of high-quality courses.”

As the university continues to develop strategies to adapt and shape the future, individual professors will continue to pilot innovative technology to enhanced learning methods.

“The most important thing to keep in mind about online learning is that it is not homogenous,” Ebbeler says. “There is no one model of online learning. Online learning isn’t bad or good. It’s simply a different learning environment, with different challenges than the campus classroom. The important thing is that we understand how to design and deliver high-quality online courses for our students.”

TO REGISTER, VISIT: For Intro to Psych, utexas.edu/ce/uex/utpsych301 For edX, courses.edx.org

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Photo: Getty Images

PUSHING

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Life & Letters Fall 2013

FORWARD Social Scientists Identify New Paths to Mental Health for Trauma Victims

BY JESSICA SINN

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALLEN F. QUIGLEY

On a sunny spring afternoon, Kate Jones was anxiously waiting to see her husband cross the finish line at the most prestigious marathon in the world.

Then came the boom.

Cheers of excitement immediately turned into blood-curdling screams as hundreds of people rushed from the clouds of smoke. Lost in the sea of chaos, Jones frantically searched for her husband, desperately hoping he wasn’t among the many victims sprawled on the bloodied streets.

“All I wanted was to find my husband, but I got lost in the crowd,” says the 36-year-old elementary school teacher who requested her real name not be used in this story. “I kept looking over my shoulder, waiting for another bomb to go off as hundreds of people were screaming at me to move.”

Since the Boston Marathon in April 2013, she continues to experience that terrifying scene in the safety of her own home.

“I sometimes have the same dream where a bomb is about to go off, and I’m trying to run for my life, but I’m paralyzed in fear,” says Jones, who is also a marathon runner. “I’m also very sensitive to loud, sudden noises. Fourth of July will never be the same.”

It’s difficult to imagine what the future holds for Jones and many others who have endured such horrors. How many will suffer from a crippling constellation of flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?

Not as many as you would think, says Michael Telch, professor of psychology and leading expert on anxiety disorders. Just as ecosystems can withstand

serious shock and come back stronger, so can humans.

In fact, a report from the PTSD Alliance shows that 70 percent of adults in the United States have experienced a traumatic event at least once in their lives, yet only 20 percent go on to develop PTSD. So why do most people bounce back from trauma while others falter? Is there a way to combat PTSD, depression and other psychological disorders before the trauma begins? Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are seeking answers to these questions and compiling strategies for building resilience.

Among them are early diagnosis, drawing new perspectives, strengthening social ties and psychological intervention.

Results from Telch’s ongoing Texas Combat PTSD Risk Project lend new insights into PTSD and other psychological disorders. The goal of the project is twofold: Find the factors that predispose service members to combat-related stress disorders, then develop more effective screening and prevention programs.

For several years, Telch and a team of researchers have put nearly 200 Fort Hood soldiers through more than a dozen tests before their first yearlong deployment. The process includes surveys, clinical interviews, brain scans, genetic testing and a carbon dioxide stress challenge. While overseas, they fill out stress symptom and combat experience logs every 30 days, then go through all the tests again upon their return.

In the C02 challenge, the participants inhale a mixture of 35 percent carbon dioxide and 65 percent oxygen for 30 seconds—which induces breathlessness and dizziness. Those who showed an increased fear response during the challenge were much more likely

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Pushing Forward

to develop anxiety and PTSD symptoms, Telch says.

However, with CO2 therapy, that predisposition can be modified.

“If we find people are sensitive to the CO2 challenge, we can easily fix it by repeatedly exposing them to the test until they can control their reactions—and this can be applied to other stressful situations,” Telch says. “Just like with high cholesterol and heart disease, we’re able to identify a risk factor that can be modified before the illness sets in.”

This technique is one of the many forms of exposure therapy, where patients learn to process memories of fear differently by experiencing trauma again and again in a safe, controlled environment. As therapy progresses, the fear of the memory weakens and patients begin to feel more in control of their emotions and their lives in general. Typically about two-thirds of PTSD patients treated with prolonged exposure therapy during ten 90-minute sessions no longer exhibit the disorder.

“The success rates for patients receiving exposure therapy for PTSD are significantly higher than for people who are being treated for many other forms of mental illness,” Telch says. “Since we have such powerful treatments that can really make a difference so quickly, it’s important for patients to get help early on.”

Knowing When to Get Help Of course, the first step toward recovery is knowing when to get help. But how do you know if those recurring nightmares and blue phases are natural parts of the healing process, or early signs of a mental illness?

It’s normal to feel down for days, or even weeks, after trauma says Christopher Beevers, professor of psychology and director of the newly established Institute for Mental Health Research at The University of Texas at Austin. But if feelings of sadness, lethargy and loss of interest persist for longer than a month, it may be time to get some help.

Some of the hallmarks of depression include sleepless nights, lack of interest in hobbies and social activities, lethargy and hopelessness. PTSD, however, can be much more difficult to detect, because the symptoms can linger under the surface for months after the trauma, Beevers says.

And when those symptoms appear, people with PTSD often go to great lengths to avoid anything in their personal or physical environment that reminds them of the trauma. In fact, findings from Beevers’ eye-tracking experiments demonstrate two stark differences between depression and PTSD. As part of the Texas Combat PTSD Risk Project, Beevers presented various images to study participants and directly measured their line of gaze. He found those who are prone to depression linger longer on upsetting images of violent situations and unpleasant facial expressions. Yet people with a propensity for PTSD quickly cut away from negative images.

“Habitual avoidance of negative stimuli can increase vulnerability to anxiety,” Beevers says. “Whereas people with depression have trouble shifting away

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“I sometimes have the same dream where a bomb is about to go off, and I’m trying to run for my life, but I’m paralyzed in fear.”

-KATE JONES

negative information, which leads to repetitive negative thinking.”

Like a broken bone or an infected wound, these debilitating mental illnesses rarely heal themselves without treatment. Laura Ebady, outreach coordinator and staff psychologist at UT Counseling and Mental Health Center, says untreated mental illnesses can lead to a host of problems, including substance addiction, unemployment, divorce and suicide. The first step, she says, is to understand what’s normal, and when it’s time to get help.

“When I talk about trauma, I often make this analogy: If you have no knowledge about the flu and end up getting sick, you’re likely to think that you’re going to die,” Ebady says. “After experiencing trauma for the first time, people don’t understand the pain they’re feeling is normal—and that they will get better in time.”

Ebady recommends calling upon previous coping strategies that have worked in the past, whether it be going for a jog, engaging in a hobby, journaling or seeking support from others.

“Sometimes it’s hard for other people to understand what you’re going through, so it can be really helpful to connect with people who’ve shared similar experiences,” Ebady says.

Another way to move forward is returning to a daily routine, Ebady says. But in the wake of a highprofile tragedy, that comforting sense of normalcy can be thwarted by a barrage of upsetting media reports.

“After 9/11, there was an intense need to make sense out of what happened,” Ebady says. “But once you have the basic information, all those extra details can be very upsetting. The images and videos can cause more confusion and create a sense that the world is not safe.”

Marlone Henderson, assistant professor of psychology, says the media feeds our natural desire to make sense out of tragedy. In a recent study, he found that people are more likely to find clarity by turning away from detailed reports in the news and adopting a

Life & Letters Fall 2013

help bring people comfort by incorporating a sense of distance in their reports.”

Scared Sick

simplified understanding of the event.

“As time passes, people naturally gain more certainty about events,” Henderson says. “If you’re trying to give yourself a feeling of meaning, you can distance yourself from the incident with time and space. And this also applies to personal problems, such as troubles at work or a bad breakup.”

In the study, Henderson altered the participants’ sense of time by framing the Sandy Hook shooting around different reference points. For example, the shooting appears to be much more recent when compared to the Sept. 11 attacks. But in comparison to a similar incident that occurred just two weeks prior, the Sandy Hook shooting seems much farther away.

He found the participants who perceived the shooting as farther away in time were less concerned about the small details and more confident in their understanding about why the event happened.

Henderson says results from the study have important implications—not just for mental health professionals—but for the media as well.

“It’s in the media’s interest to keep coming up with new reasons because these things are novel and exciting,” Henderson says. “But reporters could actually

In the age of instant communication, it’s almost impossible to avoid the nuanced accounts of devastating storms, school shootings and terrorist attacks. Looking back at the barrage of images of dazed bombing victims on the streets of Boston and the tear-streaked children evacuating classrooms at Sandy Hook, it’s easy to believe violent crime is on the rise.

But what’s really going up is not the rate of crime, just the reporting of it, says Mark Warr, a leading criminologist and professor in the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center.

In fact, the rates of crime in the United States are much lower than they were four decades ago, and they’re continuing to drop over time, Warr says.

Unfortunately, reporters often fail to put this perspective in their coverage of crime and violence, causing people to believe the world is much more dangerous than it really is, Warr says. They also fail to adjust the raw data of crime rates into the increasing population.

“Rarely do crime reporters have scientific training in criminology, so they don’t know any more about crime than the people they’re reporting to,” Warr says.

“And what’s so scary about that is that these reporters have the power to go on TV and scare an entire city.”

Of course there are risks to worry about, but for the most part people are worrying about the wrong ones.

“Crime is utterly predictable,” Warr says. “In rough terms I could tell you how many homicides will happen tonight, who will commit them and where they will happen. There’s an epidemiology to these crimes, but we occasionally get crimes that don’t fit the pattern. Randomness and unpredictability are powerful tools of terrorism. But people need to realize that these events are exceedingly rare.”

Choosing to stay “safely” at home instead of cheering on runners at a marathon or catching a midnight screening at the local movie theater may seem rational in light of recent national headlines. But the fact is, people who go out of their way to err on the safe side are robbing themselves of their personal freedom, Warr says.

“The tragedy of the United States is that we give up much of our freedom needlessly,” Warr says. “We fought for freedom in this country and to lose it to unfounded ideas about risk is a real shame.”

As for Jones and her husband, who have both added several race medals to their collection since the Boston Marathon, they refuse to let fear get in the way of their passion for competitive running.

“If I stopped running marathons in fear of another attack, the terrorists win,” Jones says. “It feels great to get out there and run hard. I feel like I’m able to leave all my uncertainty on the pavement as I run. Every time I start a race, I’m able to prove that I don’t quit, I’m not afraid, and I have the strength to push through what us runners like to call ‘the wall of pain.’”

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Liberal Arts @ Work Nine Ways to Rev Up Your Career

BY MICHELLE BRYANT

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRAD AMOROSINO

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Whether you’ve landed your dream job or find yourself repeatedly pushing the snooze button each morning dreading the workday, a liberal arts education may help you forge a better career path and create an environment for innovation and productivity.

If you’re like most employed Americans, you will spend the majority of your waking hours at work. And you may spend your additional waking hours complaining about it. So how do you make the career choices that are best for you? We asked faculty, staff and an alumna from the College of Liberal Arts to share their best career strategies for success. Here’s what they said.

Recommended Reading

Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others Perigee Books, Jan. 2014

By Art Markman, professor, Department of Psychology, and director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations Program

When We Are the Foreigners: What Chinese Think About Working with Americans CreateSpace, Aug. 2011

By Orlando Kelm, associate professor, Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, and Marketing Administration at McCombs School of Business; John N. Doggett and Haiping Tang

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Start at the End

It’s all how you look at it, according to psychologist Art Markman, director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations (HDO) program, who encourages taking a backward-looking perspective of your career.

“Project yourself to the end of your career and ask yourself what you would regret not accomplishing by the end of your career,” says Markman, author of Smart Thinking and Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others, forthcoming in January 2014. “Then, use that information to help you set out the contribution you want to make in your work life.”

However, the road to career contribution is paved with many distractions. Whether it’s an exploding email inbox competing for our attention or a noisy cube mate, understanding how the brain works may help us overcome those pesky distractions to be our most productive without sacrificing quality.

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Create a Space that Fosters Good Habits

“You have to understand that the human brain does not multitask,” Markman says. “It time-shares.”

He warns that when we try to multitask—flipping back and forth among tasks rapidly—quality suffers.

Markman’s advice: Keep your cell phone shut off at work as much as possible, check your email only a few times a day and avoid using instant messaging. That will help to reduce the temptation to multitask while keeping you focused on the big-picture jobs you need to complete.

In addition to multitasking he says there are a number of ways the modern workplace derails us from doing our best work. One example is the open office systems where people do not have their own desks.

“It is difficult for people to create an environment that is tailored to their own work behaviors,” Markman says. “As a result, people cannot develop good habits.

It is important to help people at work to develop good habits and then to help them maintain those habits.”

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Liberal Arts @ Work

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Build a Good Neighborhood

Don’t switch zip codes or grab your hard hat just yet.

Building your career neighborhood doesn’t involve relocation, but it does require relationship building.

“Neighbors are people who keep in regular contact and are willing to go above-and-beyond to do things for each other,” Markman says. “When a workplace functions like a neighborhood, then people look out for each other and are motivated to help the group succeed.

“When the group starts to treat each other like strangers, then every little task needs to be negotiated and done by contract,” he adds. “In that situation, individuals within the group are motivated only by self-interest.”

The consequence? The breakdown of a neighborhood makes it increasingly difficult for an organization to reach its goals.

“When a workplace functions like a neighborhood, then people look out for each other and are motivated to help the group succeed.”

-ART MARKMAN, director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program

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4

Use Social Science; Your Customers Will Thank You

A positive trend Markman observes is that many companies are beginning to use information from the social and behavioral sciences to reach their customers more effectively. Amazon uses interface designers with a cognitive science background to create an easier website user experience. Procter & Gamble has a behavioral sciences group that takes the latest research and applies it to problems within the company. And recently, the HDO program helped Special Operations Command in the U.S. Military to develop new structures to bring people together and improve innovation.

“The liberal arts help you to think about people by having a deeper understanding of the human condition,” Markman says. “With that background, you are better able to see both how people’s characteristics influence the way they act as well as the role that situations play in people’s responses.

“You come to understand how the diversity of members of a group can allow that group to function effectively and achieve creativity,” he adds. “These skills are highly valued in the modern workplace, because there is a growing recognition in business that success is fundamentally about people.”

Life & Letters Fall 2013

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Be a Problem Solver

“I hear recruiters tell me that the most important skills that they look for in hiring is to find people who are problem solvers and creative thinkers,” says Orlando Kelm, an associate professor in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Marketing Administration at McCombs School of Business. “That is exactly what liberal arts majors study.”

He often sees expatriates trying to conduct their work abroad the same way they would in the United States instead of embracing the differences.

“A liberal arts background gives them the ability to interact with their local partners by talking about art, history, language, politics, religion and literature,” he says. “It’s what gives them the edge beyond that which is just work.”

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Embrace the Best of Both Worlds

Kelm says he particularly values seeing how people from different cultural perspectives look at problems with a unique solution.

During a recent visit to Peru and Chile with a group of Korean executives, Kelm heard a lot of companies talk about their corporate social responsibility programs. He says he initially thought the Koreans would be impressed.

However, from the Korean perspective, they were more curious as to why the Peruvians didn’t focus

their efforts on educating their youth first, which in turn would create a generation of new workers, who would also improve social responsibility.

“To me, this is the opportunity of multicultural teams,” says Kelm, author of When We Are the Foreigners: What Chinese Think About Working With Americans. “That is, they allow us to work with people who look at challenges from new perspectives.

“Too often with cultural differences we start with an attitude that people from the other culture are stupid because they do XYZ,” he says. “I like to start with the premise that in general people are smart, and so there must be a logical or good reason why they do the things that they do.”

During his trip to Peru, he and the Korean executives visited energy companies outside of Lima. Some of the executives complained to each other about the size of the bus.

“What they didn’t understand is that we were going to be taking them along unpaved roads and the larger buses would not have been able to handle the roads that we were traveling on,” Kelm says. “The locals knew which bus would be best for the terrain.

Whenever things seem ‘stupid,’ chances are that we have just not figured out the reason behind it. Sometimes the reasons are historical, but we still benefit from trying to discover why.”

Kelm’s advice: If one culture is strong at planning and organization and the other culture is good at flexibility and spontaneity, rather than reject one side as “wrong,” try to incorporate the best of both. Similarly, if one culture is good at following rules and another is good at adjusting behavior to the situation, rather than the rules, try to combine the best of both.

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Liberal Arts @ Work

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Ask Yourself, What Will I Do in the Next 24 Hours?

Robert Vega, director of Liberal Arts Career Services, likes to end career-coaching sessions with a simple question—“What will you do in the next 24 hours?”

“Don’t just think about it, make it happen,” he says.

By helping students strategize a career search plan with manageable goals, he and his team are helping them to think and actively engage in preparing for life after graduation.

Employer surveys confirm that effective communication skills, taking initiative, creative problem solving, critical thinking and analytical abilities are some of the most important competencies of today’s employees. These attributes make liberal arts students a tremendous asset to any organization.

“Liberal Arts does not necessarily have one career path,” Vega says. “Some paths are linear, leading directly into a career for which the student has spent the last four years preparing. Others are winding, with curves and rolling hills along a path filled with a variety of experiences, from backpacking to community service and graduate school to entrepreneurship.”

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8

Use Your Longhorn Network

For alumni exploring their career options or for those who might be contemplating a career transition, Vega recommends searching the Texas Exes LinkedIn account, where alumni can connect with each other in a plethora of career fields.

“Networking with other Longhorns in an area of interest can help those in transition learn more about a career path and build a network of potential job-search advocates,” Vega says.

Alumni have full access to Liberal Arts Career Services for up to one year after graduation and lifetime access to the campus-wide job posting board, AccessUT, which represents all industries and experience levels.

Life & Letters Fall 2013

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Test Drive Careers

Students in the career exploration stage can take advantage of internships in a variety of fields that allow them to “test drive” a career they may find interesting.

In spring 2013, Cristina Flores, Sociology ’13, had the opportunity to intern at the Social Office in the White House under the direction of the Office of the First Lady, Michelle Obama. She worked on 30 cultural, political and social events including a PBS Performance at the White House, the annual Easter Egg Roll and Inauguration events. She also communicated with constituents, public figures, talent and volunteers.

Having completed a variety of internships over the last two-and-a-half years, Flores says she’s learned a lot about herself and the type of work she likes and dislikes without having to commit to one career.

“I have learned I like working in a fast-paced environment where I have to be on my toes rather than

Photo: Courtesy of Cristina Flores

Cristina Flores, Sociology ’13, had the opportunity to intern at the Social Office in the White House under the direction of the Office of the First Lady, Michelle Obama.

a place that has a lot more down time,” Flores says. “I enjoy working with people and having constant communication with communities. I also learned I don’t want to have a career in one sector forever.

“Having a balanced life between work and social life is important to me, especially if I hope to have a family in the future,” she adds. “Most importantly, I learned there’s no one that can push me as hard as I can push myself.”

During her freshman year, Flores took the Crime and Violence in Urban Latin America class with Professor Bryan Roberts, which helped her decide on sociology as her major. The class covered Latin America, immigration, education, women’s rights, government, crime and violence.

“I felt that with this major I could touch on all the topics that I was passionate about and didn’t have to decide on just one,” she says. “Loving science in high school, I did a lot of work on scientific methods and the fact sociology also incorporated scientific methods really made this the perfect major for me. I was able to study human social behavior, which is part of everyday life.”

Flores is back in Washington after receiving a Running Start Fellowship to work for a congresswoman and learn about running for office one day. Her ultimate career goal is to become a U.S. ambassador.

She credits her liberal arts education for giving her an advantage in written and oral communication, problem solving, statistical skills, foreign language, critical and analytical thinking, interpersonal skills and adaptability to change.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without my liberal arts education,” Flores says. “With the wide variety of courses available, I was able to have a less career-focused curriculum. This allowed me to grow as an individual and be prepared for anything thrown my way.”

LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS: Hone and refine their communication skills through the language and writing requirements as well as the wide variety of course papers and projects that they must fulfill.

Are some of the most creative problem solvers because a liberal arts education introduces them to a wide variety of subjects and the opportunity to develop multiple perspectives about them.

Must demonstrate competency in a variety of math and science courses, and many also engage in research studies with faculty, developing critical thinking and analysis skills.

Take initiative by selecting interdisciplinary coursework, research and experiential opportunities that meet their academic and personal interests and make them well-rounded job candidates.

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2013 Pro Bene Meritis PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN BIRZER

The Pro Bene Meritis Award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. First granted in 1984, it is given each spring to alumni, faculty and friends of the college who are committed to the liberal arts, have made outstanding contributions in professional or philanthropic pursuits or have participated in service related to the college.

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Ben Barnes

On Pursuing Your Dreams Ben Barnes was elected to the Texas House of Representatives at age 22. He went on to serve as house speaker and the youngest lieutenant governor in Texas history, achieving unparalleled state support for Texas public higher education. After leaving office, Barnes tried his hand at land development and was instrumental in creating the Barton Creek Resort in Austin, Texas. Now in his third career, he is a gifted fundraiser and governmental affairs advisor in Washington, D.C. The Houston Chronicle named him one of the “Ten Most Powerful Texans in Washington.”

Full name: Ben Frank Barnes, B.A. Business ’57 Hometown: Gorman, Texas Best UT experience: Taking a class on the History of World War II and making what would become a lifetime friendship with Dr. Otis Singletary. He was a distinguished World War II vet and just an incredible teacher and storyteller. He was a great mentor to me.

Best advice: I would say to anyone who is young and surrounded by peers who are older, the first thing to do is become a good listener and to seek the advice of your peers and older associates. And most important of all, don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know. Would you mind telling me what this is about?” People will help you. People have a very kind spot in their hearts for young people who are trying to accomplish things.

When I look back on my Speaker’s tenure—age 26 to 30—one of the first things I did in dealing with my fellow House members was to ask their advice and counsel on a lot of the issues.

Setting the bar high: There is not any challenge that’s really too great if you set your mind to it. It’s all right to set your goals so high that you won’t ever achieve them, but don’t fail with low goals. Shoot for the moon. Try to be the best at what you’re going to do and don’t be afraid of failure. Be willing to pick yourself up and start all over again because there are so many opportunities in life including service to your state and your country.

Dream job: Teaching. I enjoy going back to The University of Texas and other university campuses and exchanging ideas and thoughts with young people.

One of the best sources of new knowledge and new understanding of today’s problems are young people, and particularly bright young students at The University of Texas.

Interviewed by Michelle Bryant

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Jeanne and Michael Klein On the Art of Giving

Jeanne and Michael Klein are both graduates of the university and have devoted much of their adult life to philanthropy in support of their alma mater and causes promoting the liberal arts, including UT Elementary, Blanton Museum of Art and Humanities Texas. The Association of Fundraising Professionals of Greater Austin honored the Kleins for their outstanding philanthropy in support of Central Texans.

Names: Jeanne Klein, B.S. Special Education ’67; and Michael (Mickey) Klein, B.S. Petroleum Engineering ’58, LLB ’63 Hometown: Michael Klein, Kansas City, Mo.; and Jeanne Klein, Amarillo, Texas Custodians of the arts: We have been involved in the visual arts for more than 30 years, principally by collecting and supporting museums and artists. We view ourselves as custodians of the art that we collect (modern and contemporary) and will donate the collection to a museum in the future. Several of our other interests are history, books and education, which we experience by being active at the Ransom Center, Blanton Museum, UT Press, College of Education, Humanities Texas and The Contemporary Austin.

Art matters: It serves as nourishment for the soul, opens our eyes to the world allowing us to see things that we wouldn’t otherwise observe, both good and bad. Mrs. Dominique DeMenil, who was our greatest influence, believed that artists are the chroniclers of our times, expressing contemporary ideas and preserving them for future generations.

We only acquire works of art that we are passionate about. As a consequence the work of every artist is special and of equal importance to us, whether by an emerging or established artist.

The Eyes of Texas (JK): My grandfather, Louis Johnson, co-authored The Eyes of Texas. I have great memories of being on the field at Memorial Stadium with my father and uncle to present the original manuscript to the university. My entire family feels such pride every time we hear it played and we are honored to be a part of the history of the university.

Making the grade at UT Elementary (MK): I’m very active at UT Elementary School, which serves Pre-K – fifth grade students in an economically disadvantaged area of East Austin. I interact closely with the kids by assisting fourth and fifth grade teachers with math and social studies. One of my greatest joys has been in establishing a close relationship with many of the kids that I have worked with, starting in first grade.

There is no greater feeling than walking onto the campus and getting hugs and high fives from these kids. I recently received a letter from a student telling me that I changed her life by teaching her how to read.

Another fourth grader wrote me to thank me for being his best friend. Their display of gratitude and affection, which is mutual, is my greatest return on investment.

Making the investment: Our greatest satisfaction is actually participating in the organizations and causes that we support. We wish to have a voice in their operation and direction so as to be integrally involved in their success.

Dream job: We have frequently discussed what we’d like to be doing other than what we’re doing now.

Each of us would like to be educators as we believe this is the most vital profession. (MK) I would like to teach fourth grade. (JK) I would like to teach Art History from 1960 to the present, at the college level.

Interviewed by Michelle Bryant

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Pro Bene Meritis

Marion Mark

On the Meaning of Education

“What I learned from my students is that everybody has special qualities.”

-MARION MARK

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Marion Mark has dedicated her life to teaching and the advancement of liberal arts education, having taught students at every grade level. During her husband’s tenure as UT System Chancellor, Marion led the effort to enhance the connection between the university and the community by hosting a variety of programs and events at the Bauer House, including the promotion and advancement of several liberal arts programs.

Full name: Marion Mark, B.S. ’52 and M.A. Education ’53, Boston University; Ed.D. George Washington University Hometown: Hayward, Calif.

Define “teacher”: Someone who helps the kids. Who gives them a feeling of appreciation of themselves. I think that all teachers really care about the kids and helping them. Their success is our success.

A sailor of the world, bound for all ports: My family and I have sailed in Sweden and in the Fiji Islands. We sailed up to Canada. On Sundays we sailed on the San Francisco Bay. The Fiji Island trip was pretty amazing.

We sailed among sharks and I had glasses that enabled me to see through the water. We met with the Fijians on different islands and appreciated their capabilities. I met a wonderful teacher. We wrote to each other and exchanged gifts. I would send her fabrics and she would send me things.

Education as a mutually enriching experience: I learned so much from my students—really valuable things I think that would have been hard to learn otherwise. What I learned from my students is that everybody has special qualities. And everybody knows something or can do something that you cannot do.

For example, a bookcase was once delivered in pieces to my classroom. I thought, “Oh my goodness! It’s going to take me the rest of my life to put this together.”

One of the boys eagerly asked me if I would like him to do it for me. He just looked at the picture and did it. So whatever your educational level is, you needn’t feel superior to other people, because everybody is superior to you in one way or another.

More than words: Reading develops your vocabulary and gives you an acquaintance with ways to express your feelings and your ideas through other people’s writing. Then you have that vocabulary and that ability to express your interests and most importantly your feelings about these matters. I think that’s an important thing. People who don’t have that developmental background have the feelings but don’t know how to express them in words.

Dream job: I would be a doctor. Or an artist—a painter. But there again, painting is an expression of feelings. And being an M.D. is a way of helping people psychologically as well as physically. It’s all connected.

But I’m glad I taught because I learned so much.

Interviewed by Molly Wahlberg

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Toyin Falola On Telling Africa’s Story

Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian, professor of African studies and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian Academy of Letters. He has authored or edited more than 100 books.

The African Diaspora: Migrations, Modernity and Globalization, published in July 2013; and his second memoir, Counting the Tiger’s Teeth, which covers the extremely turbulent period of Nigeria’s early postcolonial history, is currently under review.

In 2011, the Ibadan Cultural Studies Group in Nigeria honored Falola by establishing The Toyin Falola International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC). In addition, for the past 14 years he has convened the Africa Conference at The University of Texas at Austin to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue about the African continent for scholars from around the world.

“I enjoy expanding students’ perspectives and increasing their awareness of and appreciation for other cultures.”

-TOYIN FALOLA

Full name: Oloruntoyin Omoyeni Falola (Goes by Toyin Falola). B.A. and Ph.D. History ’81, University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ile-Ife, Nigeria Hometown: Ibadan, Nigeria Define “teacher”: I think it means being an elder and a griot (a storyteller), someone who seeks knowledge of a society’s history, culture, and values, and aims to use this knowledge in ways that can aid the transition of youth and society into the next generation.

Favorite course to teach: I like to teach undergraduate courses. The new African film class has especially been effective and popular. So has the established one on the United States and Africa. I enjoy expanding students’ perspectives and increasing their awareness of and appreciation for other cultures. I like playing a role in encouraging their curiosity, excitement, and wonder and perhaps helping to engage their scholarly curiosity, particularly in those who may not have considered an academic or scholarly direction.

Life’s work: From an early stage in my career I was clear about my professional goals, which included writing history and changing how knowledge about Africa was constructed, taught and disseminated. I feel compelled and fulfilled by striving to account for the life I have lived and the history of Nigeria in particular and Africa more broadly, as well as the African diaspora in ways that honor and respect the contributions and complexity of the peoples, cultures and stories that shape histories and experiences along with their enduring legacies.

Dream job: Maybe a painter, but without angst! I think artists create stories in ways that capture and record culture and beauty. And they can stir curiosity and impact social change in ways that I very much admire.

Interviewed by Molly Wahlberg

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Op-ed

Fear Factor

I am also afraid of receiving injections, getting my blood pressure taken, and being examined. However, this underlying fear did not stop me from my lifelong goal of becoming a physician. Upon entering The University of Texas at Austin, I knew I wanted to become an empathetic doctor and needed to have the educational tools in order to become one. That is when I realized that understanding and controlling my fears would help me in accomplishing my goal. How is this done, you ask? There are many ways, but what helped shape my path is my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.

Psychology [sahy-kol-uh-jee], noun: the science of mind and behavior; the study of mind and behavior in relation to a particular field of knowledge or activity. Studying psychology helped me to assuage my fears, but more importantly to my career, it helped me be more understanding of different personality types. And, this understanding helps me communicate better with my patients.

The tenants that I learned while studying psychology guide me in all of my interactions. I understand people’s psyche, their actions, reaction, and non-actions. I understand their joy, angst, anger and pain.

My knowledge of medicine eases and

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heals their physical ailments, while my knowledge of psychology provides a balm for their troubled mind. As an anesthesiologist, I am trained to use many different pharmaceutical methods to relieve anxiety and pain. I have studied and mastered anatomy, physiology and pharmacology, but the first and best drug I use with each and every patient is the time I spend in the initial interview. During my first interaction with that patient, I assiduously work to set a tone of confidence, ability and trust all wrapped up with empathy. In days past, a visit with the doctor was much different. He—and I intentionally mean he—knew all, spoke little and was never questioned. The doctor who spent his life caring for the ill and infirm was often aloof, cold and unapproachable. I knew that I wanted to be a better physician.

It was my liberal arts education that taught me how to be more approachable and available to my patients. I answer their questions in a way that they can understand, and give thought to simple, workable solutions. I humbly let my patients know that I am doing my best in taking care of them, and I will not hesitate to seek answers to those questions that I do not know. The care I show puts my patients at ease, which allows me to improve

communication and establish a sense of trust. A relationship built on trust is important because I am often able to avert conflict through conversation rather than confrontation when problems arise. I also believe that when patients have peace of mind concerning their doctor, and they believe that the physician is invested in their well-being, the road to recovery is quicker and has fewer obstacles.

I am so blessed to follow my passion and I thank God every day as I conquer my fears. My liberal arts education has equipped me well with the tools I need to help allay and understand my patients’ fears. It has helped shape me into the compassionate, thorough physician that I am. I hope more medical school students choose the route that I did because our profession is the better for it. During that initial meeting, show your empathy, it can help you. Remember these paraphrased words from the Hippocratic Oath, “...First, do no harm.”

Dr. Vivian H. Porche, Psychology ’81, is a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, Division of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Photo: Courtesy of MD Anderson

First, let me make a confession. I am Vivian Harris Porche, M.D., an anesthesiologist, and I am afraid of “the doctor.”

Life & Letters Fall 2013

Books The Gingrich Senators: The Roots of Partisan Warfare in Congress Oxford University Press, May 2013

By Sean M. Theriault, associate professor, Department of Government

Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín University of Pittsburgh Press, Oct. 2013

By Gabriela Polit Dueñas, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil University of Minnesota Press, Oct. 2013

By Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Anthropology MA ’01 and Ph.D. ’05

In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region Duke University Press, Dec. 2013

By Seth Garfield, associate professor, Department of History, and director of the Institute for Historical Studies

Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America

Famous Writers I Have Known: A Novel

Princeton University Press, May 2013

By Harel Shapira, assistant professor, Department of Sociology

W. W. Norton & Company, Jan. 2014

By James Magnuson, professor, Department of English, and director of the Michener Center for Writers

Michael Wilding and the Fiction of Instant Experience: Stories, Novels, and Memoirs, 1963-2012

Thomas Jefferson’s Qu’ran: Islam and the Founders

Teneo Press, June 2013

By Don Graham, professor, Department of English

The Decameron W. W. Norton & Company, Sept. 2013 Translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn, professor, Department of English

Knopf, Oct. 2013

By Denise A. Spellberg, associate professor, Department of History, Middle Eastern Studies and Religious Studies

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards University of Texas Press, reprint edition Sept. 2013

By Jan Reid, American Studies MA ’72

READ MORE ABOUT BOOKS AT: ShelfLife@Texas, UT Austin’s book blog

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