Life & Letters • Fall 2015

Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts Magazine 路 Fall 2015

Room for Thought

The Learning Commons houses the University Writing Center, in a first-of-its-kind partnership between UT Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts, designed to streamline student resources and create a one-stop shop for student research and productivity.

Photos: Courtesy of University of Texas Libraries

The Learning Commons in the Perry-Casta単eda Library opened in August, creating a cross-campus collaborative space to support students. The 20,000-square-foot renovation is the largest transformation of space since the library opened in 1977. It includes five technology-rich classrooms, a 44-seat media lab, and consultation and meeting areas available to all students, as well as faculty members who want to incorporate digital literacy into their courses.

ABOVE: College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy Diehl, UT Austin President Gregory Fenves and Vice Provost and UT Libraries Director Lorraine Haricombe during the Learning Commons ribbon cutting ceremony in the Perry-Casta単eda Library on Aug. 25, 2015.

BELOW: The University Writing Center in the Learning Commons.

Life & Letters

Contents Fall 2015 Departments 2 Dean’s Message 3 Knowledge Matters

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

3 Making a Mayacene

Clues from ancient Maya reveal their lasting impact on the environment.

Journeys

Three liberal arts professors explore how travel transforms us, discovering that often in the journey we learn more about ourselves than we do about our destinations.

Forever Shakespeare

As the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death approaches, five scholars share how they celebrate his work and his ultimate staying power.

8 Campus Life

A sampling of notable happenings across campus.

10 Chatting in Chatino

How UT graduate students helped revive early languages in rural Oaxaca.

11 All Grown Up

Prime of Life author Steven Mintz explores what it means to be an adult.

12 Books 28 Pro Bene Meritis

Q&As with the 2015 recipients of the college’s highest honor.

31 Happy Birthday to Dante and Don

Spark Your Interests

Five liberal arts courses that help students communicate with and think critically about the world.

ON THE COVER: Illustration by Lauren Rolwing.

BACK COVER: Illustration by Lauren Rolwing.

How the AMC television series Mad Men pays homage to Dante.

33 A Virtual Quest

“MappaMundi” broadens scope for Middle Ages teaching and research.

Photo: LAITS photo studio

Dean’s Message

Open a Door for a Longhorn Intern

Photo: Courtesy of Megan Palombo

Learning by doing — what we call experiential learning — is at the heart of a liberal arts education, and that is why our students can be found working as interns in a variety of businesses and organizations in Texas and across the globe.

That is also why the College of Liberal Arts is partnering with alumni to create a new Longhorn Internship Program specifically designed to connect our undergraduates with alumni for internships, mentorship and support.

Internships give students who are preparing to enter the job market a valuable opportunity to apply what they have learned to real-world situations, while employers benefit from the work of engaged, creative students who are trained as critical thinkers,

strong communicators and problem solvers.

Internships are also a great opportunity for employers who are also alumni of the College of Liberal Arts to help a future alumnus or alumna gain valuable workplace experience, networking opportunities and insights into potential careers.

It is no surprise that our students, with their broad and diverse exposure to the humanities and social sciences, land prestigious internships in major companies as varied as Morgan Stanley and Amazon and in nonprofits such as the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity. In the public sector, our interns work in high-profile places such as the White House, Congress and the Texas Legislature.

Alumni can help current students as they connect the dots between their academic studies and their professional goals by providing internship opportunities, and they can also serve as an intern’s direct supervisor, mentor or sponsor.

Since the majority of internships — almost 75 percent — are unpaid, alumni can also help students afford internship opportunities by contributing funds to help with living expenses, travel and other costs associated with unpaid internships.

The Longhorn Internship Program is a great way to stay connected to your college and university while helping our future alumni on the road to success. For more information on how you can become involved, please visit our college website (utexas.edu/cola) or call our Career Services Office at 512-471-7900.

Megan Palombo (Spanish and Advertising ’15) during her 2014 summer internship at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, Spain.

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.

College of Liberal Arts Dean Randy L. Diehl Director of Public Affairs David A. Ochsner Editor Michelle Bryant Art Direction and Design Allen F. Quigley Copy Editor Adam Deutsch Contributing Writers Rachel Griess Emily Nielsen Guy Raffa Kay Randall Contributing Photographer Brian Birzer Contributing Illustrators Caitlin Alexander Yevgenia Nayberg Lauren Rolwing Visit us online at lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu Or email us at cola.alum@austin.utexas.edu Postmaster Send changes of address to: Life & Letters College of Liberal Arts 116 Inner Campus Dr., Stop G6000 Austin, TX 78712-1257 Follow us facebook.com/UTLiberalArts twitter.com/LiberalArtsUT youtube.com/LiberalArtsUT

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

Printed by Horizon Printing

Life & Letters Fall 2015

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Knowledge Matters

Making a Mayacene Geography & the Environment

By Rachel Griess

Clues from Ancient Maya Reveal Lasting Impact on Environment Evidence left by ancient Maya in the tropical lowlands of Central America suggests that human-influenced climate change predates the Industrial Revolution.

By looking at the Maya’s effects on climate, vegetation, hydrology and the

lithosphere from 3,000 to 1,000 years ago, UT Austin researchers propose that the Maya’s advanced urban and rural infrastructure altered ecosystems within globally important tropical forests.

These are findings of a study published in Quaternary Science Reviews and led by Tim Beach, the C.B. Smith Sr. Centennial Professor of Geography and the Environment. He and his team were the first to show the full extent of the “Mayacene” as a microcosm of the early Anthropocene — a period when human activity began to greatly affect Earth’s environment.

“Most popular sources talk about the Anthropocene and human impacts on climate since the Industrial Revolution,

but we are looking at a deeper history,” says Beach. “Though it has no doubt accelerated in the last century, humans’ impact on the environment has been going on a lot longer.”

The researchers studied stratigraphic markers — or “golden spikes” — in soil, water and building remains that indicate a time of large-scale change.

“These spikes give us insight into how and why the Maya interacted with their environment, as well as the scope of their activity,” says co-author Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, chair of the Department of Geography and the Environment.

“Maya clay” rocks and soil sequences indicated erosion, human land-use changes and periods of instability. Soil profiles near

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Knowledge Matters

ABOVE: Professors Tim Beach and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach in the tropical lowlands of Central America.

Move to Improve Stroke Recovery

Rx for Medicare

Psychology

Economics

According to a new study, relying on the better-functioning body side after a stroke can delay recovery of the impaired side, strengthening the case for intense physical therapy treatments.

Loss of function in one hand and arm is a common consequence of a unilateral stroke, leading many to learn new ways to use and rely on the “good” side. For example, people with strokes affecting their dominant hand often learn to write with their nondominant hand.

Using animal models to simulate unilateral strokes, graduate researcher Soo Young Kim and psychology professor Theresa Jones found that learning a new skill with the better-functioning upper limb can cause structural brain changes at the site of the stroke, limiting recovery and worsening the function of the impaired limb.

Given their findings, researchers suggest that therapies requiring greater use of the impaired side may be needed to prevent these structural changes.

Their findings were published in The Journal of Neuroscience in June.

Photo: Courtesy of Tim Beach and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach

CONTINUED wetlands revealed heightened carbon isotope ratios due to agriculture and corn production, and researchers noted a three- to fourfold increase in phosphorus throughout sediments from the period. But the most visual indication of human impact was found in building material remains and landscape modifications.

The changes are both good and bad, researchers said.

“Historically, it’s common for people to talk about the bad that happened with past environmental changes, such as erosion and climate change from deforestation,” Beach says. “But we can learn a lot from how the Maya altered their environment to create vast field systems to grow more crops and respond to rising sea levels.”

Whereas some studies suggest that deforestation and other land use contributed to warming and drying of the regional climate by the Classic Period (1,700 to 1,100 years ago), this study shows that many existing forests are still influenced by Mayan activities of the distant past, with many structures, terraces and wetlands still existing today.

Medicare, already the costliest public health insurance program in the world, may be costing taxpayers in excess of $2 billion annually due to the practice of “upcoding” risk scores in private Medicare Advantage plans.

Unlike traditional fee-for-service Medicare, private Medicare Advantage plans receive diagnosis-based subsidies based on their enrollees’ risk scores — or current diagnosed health conditions. Higher risk scores yield higher government subsidies.

“Upcoding means that Medicare Advantage enrollees appear sicker than those same enrollees would have appeared if they had chosen the fee-for-service option,” says UT Austin economics professor Michael Geruso, who investigated risk adjustments in private Medicare Advantage plans in 2014, finding that each senior who opts for the Medicare Advantage plan costs the taxpayer about $120 each year. With 16 million Medicare Advantage enrollees, this means $2 billion.

The study shows that on average Medicare Advantage plans generated 6.4 percent higher risk scores than what the same enrollees would generate on traditional fee-forservice plans, an inflation rate that is nearly equivalent to 7 percent of all consumers becoming paraplegic, 12 percent developing Parkinson’s disease, or 43 percent becoming diabetic, Geruso says.

“Risk adjustment is necessary to prevent insurers from designing plans that cater only to low-cost enrollees.

It solves a real problem,” Geruso says. “However, the regulators need to design the risk adjustment system with an explicit consideration of how insurers and providers can manipulate the patient diagnoses that get reported. This means attaching less importance in the payment formulas to the health conditions most susceptible to manipulation.”

Life & Letters Fall 2015

“Future research in ancient epigenetics should open a new window into the lives and experiences of people who lived long ago.”

Genetic Clues to the Past

Photo Anna Donlan for the Alcalde

Anthropology For the first time, researchers uncovered epigenetic marks on the DNA of a large number of ancient human remains, which may lead to further understanding about the effects of famine and disease on ancient populations.

The field of epigenetics looks at chemical modifications to DNA, known as epigenetic marks, that influence which genes are expressed. Some epigenetic marks stay in place throughout a person’s life, but others may be added or removed in response to environmental factors such as diet, disease and climate. If the modification is made to sperm or egg DNA, the changes could be inherited.

Anthropology graduate researcher Rick Smith and his team successfully recovered the epigenetic mark known as cytosine methylation in 29 out of 30 sets of ancient human remains from five archaeological sites

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Deborah Bolnick, associate professor, Anthropology in North America, ranging in age from 230 to more than 4,500 years old — a dramatic improvement over previous studies, which had primarily detected cytosine methylation in isolated ancient remains, Smith says.

“By studying methylation in ancient DNA from archaeological populations, not just isolated samples, we may gain insights into how past environments affected ancient societies,” says co-author and associate

professor of anthropology Deborah Bolnick.

“Future research in ancient epigenetics should open a new window into the lives and experiences of people who lived long ago.”

The study “Detection of cytosine methylation in ancient DNA from five Native American populations using bisulfite sequencing” was partially funded by the Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research program and appeared in the journal PLOS ONE.

Mom Support Many women feel pressured to be both the perfect employee and the perfect mother, but various Western nations’ work-family policies leave many working mothers feeling unsupported in these roles.

Sociology doctoral candidate Caitlyn Collins interviewed 135 middle-income, working mothers in the U.S., Germany, Italy and Sweden to compare national workfamily welfare models among Western countries. Her findings were presented at the American Sociological Association 110th Annual Meeting.

“Through policies, countries say something about their citizens and shape the opportunities available to them,” Collins says.

Collins found that other than in Sweden, the majority of working mothers experienced uncertainty and tension between being a mother and a paid worker. Swedish working mothers felt supported in both roles because of labor market policies that grant the same rights and obligations to men and women.

Most U.S. working mothers said they felt supported as workers, but not as mothers. With no federally mandated paid maternity leave and only need-based entitlements available, America treats child rearing as a private responsibility.

In contrast, German working mothers felt supported as caregivers, but not as workers. Mothers with young children who returned to work were often criticized as “raven mothers” — women who fled the nest to pursue a

Photo: Caitlyn Collins

Sociology

career, Collins says.

Italian working mothers did not feel supported as workers or as mothers. Many struggled with job security and child care resources, forcing them to depend on family members to assist with child care.

“Our understanding of whose job it is to raise and support a family really depends on the cultural and political context,” says Collins. “Paid work is valued in contemporary societies, and the unpaid work of maintaining a home is often culturally invisible and undervalued.”

ABOVE: A mother cares for her twins while on nationally mandated maternity leave in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Knowledge Matters

Culture Affects Women’s Satisfaction with STEM Careers

ABOVE: NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg (Mechanical Engineering M.S. ’96 and Ph.D. ’98) enjoys the view of Earth from the windows in the Cupola of the International Space Station.

do, international women view STEM research careers as providing a means to fulfilling these values while U.S. women do not.

Bigler believes that international-born women may perceive themselves to have stronger family support systems than U.S.-born women, leading them to view work-family balance as more manageable.

She added that change may first need to happen on a cultural level in order to successfully improve matters for U.S. women in STEM academia.

Their paper was published in the International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology.

Photo: Courtesy of the Institute for the Study of Labor

Women, especially those born in the U.S., do not perceive STEM research careers as “family friendly” — an issue psychologists say is rooted in American culture.

According to psychologists Rebecca Bigler and Amy Hayes, a UT Austin alumna, women’s representation in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have stagnated, whereas the number of international doctoral students in STEM has risen dramatically.

“We noticed the rate of international students going up, but people weren’t really talking about the intersectionality of this trend, or how it relates to gender,” says Bigler, an affiliate with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies who surveyed 297 chemistry, biochemistry and engineering graduate students at UT Austin.

Their study revealed that women born in the U.S. who pursue STEM careers perceive their gender as a target for discrimination more than international female students do. And whereas both U.S.-born and international female students value family flexibility in a potential career more than their male counterparts

Photo: Courtesy of NASA

Psychology/Women’s & Gender Studies

Obama Names Sandra Black to Council of Economic Advisers Economics

President Barack Obama appointed UT Austin economics professor Sandra E. Black to the three-member White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) following a July 23 announcement.

Black has done extensive research on education, intergenerational mobility and early childhood development. In her latest research, she looks at the wealth correlation between parents and their children.

“Dr. Black is an ideal choice for the CEA,” says Jason Abrevaya, chair of the Economics Department at UT Austin. “She is one of the

world’s leading experts in the areas of labor economics and the economics of education, and her expertise will be invaluable in her role advising the president. Her outstanding academic research has consistently been characterized by its attention to detail, its objectivity and an overriding desire to use data carefully to answer important policy questions.”

In her new appointment, which began in early August, Black helps advise the president and his staff on the economics behind different issues. The CEA is charged with offering the president expert economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy.

“Sandy brings a wealth of expertise on labor market dynamics and social mobility, two of the most important economic issues facing our country today,” says CEA chairman Jason Furman.

Black is the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs and a professor of economics at UT Austin, positions she has held since 2010.

“I think this is a really exciting time to be joining the president’s team,” Black says.

“There have been some really great achievements recently, and I am looking forward to continuing to make progress on some pressing and important economic issues.”

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Classics Greek classicist and archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis’ fresh take on prehistoric Greek societies has earned him a spot among the nation’s 2015 MacArthur Fellows.

Nakassis, an associate professor of classics at the University of Toronto, earned both his Master’s of Arts in Greek archaeology (2000) and doctorate in classical archaeology (2006) from the Department of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

He is the second person from the department to receive the honor — professor Thomas Palaima was named a fellow in 1985.

The no-strings-attached fellowship, known as the ‘genius grant,’ awards a $625,000, five-year stipend to individuals who have demonstrated “extraordinary originality and dedication” in their respective fields.

Nakassis’ unique research approach — a combination of philology, archaeology, and contemporary social and economic theory — challenges a long-held view of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palatial society (1,400 – 1,200 B.C.) as an era that brought palaces, kings and a strong centralized government to Greek societies.

Contrary to that, Nakassis’ book Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos argues the system was more open and

Unethical Hormones Psychology Photo: Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Classics Alumnus Wins 2015 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’

bureaucratic — a theory he developed analyzing ancient clay tablets, which recorded day-to-day administrative activity of the palace, to track individuals and their activities outside of the palace.

“One of the insights of my own work is that you really need to look outside of the palace to understand how the palace worked,” Nakassis said in a video on the MacArthur Foundation website.

Nakassis continues to test this hypothesis through the Western Argolid Regional Project, an archaeological survey of the Mycenaean world. He has also partnered with UT Austin classics research fellow Kevin Pluta to begin digitally documenting the ancient tablets he referenced throughout his research, so that they can be easily accessible to other scholars.

Keeping Kids on Track

With cheating scandals a persistent threat on college campuses and financial fraud costing businesses more than $3.7 trillion annually, researchers looked to hormones for answers about unethical behavior.

According to a study by UT Austin psychology professor Robert Josephs and Harvard University researchers, the reproductive hormone testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol play a dual role in unethical acts such as cheating. Elevated hormone levels indicate a likelihood of cheating, and a change in hormone levels during the act of cheating reinforces the behavior.

Researchers asked 117 participants to complete a math test, grade it themselves and report the number of correctly completed problems. The more problems they got correct, the more money they would earn.

From salivary samples collected before and after the test, researchers found that individuals with elevated levels of testosterone and cortisol were more likely to overstate the number of correctly solved problems. Furthermore, participants who cheated showed lowered levels of cortisol and reported reductions in emotional distress after the test, as if cheating provided some sort of stress relief.

Because neither hormone without the other indicated unethical behavior, lowering levels of either hormone may prevent unethical episodes, Josephs says.

Get the latest news: lifeandletters.la.utexas.edu

Population Research Center A $999,956 grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund an extensive study on U.S. children and adolescents to identify critical points of intervention in their academic careers and track problem behavior development.

The Interdisciplinary Collaborative on Development in Context will be housed in the Population Research Center and will be directed by sociology department chair Robert Crosnoe and associate professor of human development and family sciences Elizabeth Gershoff. Their project, “Identifying the Optimal Levels and Timing of Family and

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School Influences,” was one of only eight selected for the NSF’s Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Science Research Network Initiative.

During the next five years UT Austin psychologists, sociologists and economists will collaborate with researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of California-Irvine. Crosnoe says it is an exciting opportunity to leverage the insights of multiple social and behavioral science disciplines and translate research into effective policy.

Life & Letters

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Knowledge Matters

Campus Life Inauguration of the 29th President University/Plan II Honors

Photo: Marsha Miller

Student Government President Xavier M. Rotnofsky (Plan II, senior) gives President Gregory Fenves the medallion of office during his inauguration celebration and first State of the University address at Bass Concert Hall on Sept. 17. The medallion is one of five presidential emblems that Fenves received as part of the inauguration ceremony.

CIA Director Visits Foreign Policy Class Government Government professors Patrick McDonald and Robert Moser speak with CIA Director John O. Brennan (Government, M.A. ’80) at the LAITS Studio on Sept. 14, during their United States Foreign Policy class (GOV 312L), which streams live over the Internet to 1,000 enrolled undergraduates.

Texas State Historical Association Returns to Campus History

Photo: Brian Birzer

TSHA President Lynn Denton (Archaeological Studies, B.A. ’76 and Anthropology, Ph.D. ’05), along with former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (LL.B. ’67 and Government, B.A. ’92) and UT Austin President Bill Powers announce the association’s return to the UT Austin campus — where it was founded and operated for 108 years to support the teaching and preservation of Texas history — during a news conference at the Texas Capitol on May 8. Through this partnership, the TSHA will establish an endowed faculty chair in the History Department.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Arellano Kicks Off Hispanic Heritage Month Mexican American Studies

Photo: Eduardo Luna

Domino Perez, director of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS); Gustavo Arellano, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Taco USA; and Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, lecturer and CMAS public outreach director, at the Gordon-White Building on Sept. 15. Arellano’s keynote speech addressed the importance of ethnic studies in higher education and marked the university’s first campus-wide Hispanic Heritage Month celebration.

Harry Ransom Center/ LLILAS Benson

Photo: Matt Valentine

Photo: Ryan Miller/LAITS

Gabriel García Márquez working on One Hundred Years of Solitude. The sold-out symposium on Oct. 28-30, marks the opening of the Gabriel García Márquez archive at the Harry Ransom Center, exploring the life and legacy of the author and public intellectual. Keynote speakers include Elena Poniatowska and Salman Rushdie.

Photo: Guillermo Angulo. Image courtesy of Harry Ransom Center

Gabriel García Márquez: His Life and Legacy

Liz Carpenter Lecture: Robert Reich Plan II Honors Robert Reich, an expert in global and domestic economic policy and a former U.S. secretary of labor, discussed “The Future of Inequality: The 2016 Election and Beyond” at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium on Sept. 8. Reich is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Knowledge Matters

Chatting in Chatino Linguistics

By Rachel Griess In a rural village between two rivers outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, Ryan Sullivant walked door to door like a salesman, asking neighbors to conjugate verbs.

The village, Tataltepec, is one of few within a small mountainous area between Oaxaca and the Pacific coast where a dwindling population of 50,000 continues to use one of the three Chatino languages today: Zenzontepec, Tataltepec and all the rest — referred to as “Eastern” Chatino.

“People were a bit suspicious of my work at first because their language had been devalued over the years,” says Sullivant, who began his research as a linguistics doctoral student at UT Austin in 2009. “It’s not so much that a language is dying as it is a language not being used.”

Spanish is slowly replacing Chatino, especially in formal education settings where Spanish is used for instruction because until recently, Chatino had never been written.

Many thought the languages were unwritten because they were unwritable, existing merely as “dialects” with a complicated tonal system. One Eastern variety has as many as 14 tones. In comparison, Mandarin has four tones and Vietnamese has six.

“It is the most unusual and exotic tonal system I’ve seen,” says linguistics professor Anthony Woodbury, who oversaw the Chatino Language Documentation Project.

“It’s as if everything that had been seen in linguistics was combined. It uses levels,

Graduate Students Revive Early Languages In Rural Oaxaca like you hear in many African languages, and contour tones, like you hear in Asian languages.”

Learning, documenting, writing and teaching Chatino became the focus for six UT Austin graduate students beginning in 2002, when Emiliana Cruz, a native speaker of San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, came to UT Austin as an anthropology student associated with the Center for Indigenous Languages of Latin America.

Since then, the students have spent every summer living in remote villages and learning from Chatino speakers, documenting interviews and conversations, and capturing and preserving the language.

The six students trained the next generation of Chatino speakers, often in villages where only elders spoke the language, by creating classes and workshops for children and adults.

This spring brought an end to the Chatino Language Documentation Project at UT Austin, when the final three students — Ryan Sullivant, Justin McIntosh and Stéphanie Villard — finalized their dissertations. The following are Sullivant’s reflections. To read McIntosh’s and Villard’s stories, visit Life & Letters online.

ABOVE: Celiflora Cortés Jiménez and Ryan Sullivant in Tataltepec de Valdés.

LEFT: Alicia Martínez Quiroz interviews her grandmother Trinidad Santiago Jiménez in Tataltepec Chatino.

Location: Tataltepec de Valdés; 16.3000° N, 97.5500° W Language: Tataltepec Chatino Language status: Endangered, spoken by 540 mostly older persons “Malā ntyaā?” – Where are you going?

Every day in Tataltepec, I passed people on the road wanting to know where I was going, not because they were nosy, but because that’s just what people say to folks they pass on the road.

Whereas children around the world learn the languages they hear with no problem, the Chatino languages are tough nuts to crack for someone like myself who speaks English and Spanish.

Sentences start with verbs, and each verb has four principal parts that must be memorized. Like lots of Mesoamerican languages, the languages use a base-20 rather than a base-10 system (i.e. “seventy” in French is soixante dix, or “sixty ten”).

Then there are the words themselves.

Clusters of three and four consonants are everywhere, and some of the most common sounds are not found in English or Spanish. To top it off, the languages make much use of tonal distinctions. Because tone alone distinguishes many nouns and conjugated verbs, it’s a small wonder I managed to learn to properly answer the question: “Where are you going?”

I’m going to run an errand. NtyaɁàn ka lkichen.

I’m going to work. NtyaɁàn ka knyá.

I’m going home. NtyaɁàn ka tuniɁi.

Tataltepec is a big town by regional standards, with more than 2,000 people and, at last count, three places to check your email. Nevertheless, it is still a rural place. I would walk alongside small pastures with cattle resting in the shade of a large mango tree. In contrast to the many chilly mountaintop villages where Chatino is spoken, Tataltepec lies in hot country in a low valley near the confluence of two rivers.

In addition to the water needed to irrigate the fields during the dry seasons, the river also gives the Chatinos of Tataltepec many different kinds of crustaceans. My bayou-born heart was overjoyed when I saw the different kinds of long-pincer crawfish gracing the chili and tomato broths that I ate with white corn tortillas as big as dinner plates. The Chatinos of Tataltepec are connoisseurs of crawfish and distinguish many different species (nxkweèɁ, tkúɁ, tyunù, saɁya, and at least three kinds of tatyà) that local Spanish calls simply camarón — or shrimp.

The community is quite close-knit. One day my host, an elder who cleared out a space in his shed for me to sleep in, came home with a load of firewood on his donkey. I helped him move the firewood and stack it under the awning of his house, and within days I learned that everyone in the town had heard about it. As an outsider and a guest, I was doubly unlikely to help out with tasks, and word spread fast.

It was around that time that people on the street stopped greeting me in Spanish and started asking me Malā ntyaā? -Ryan Sullivant

Life & Letters Fall 2015

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All Grown Up History/Core Texts & Ideas

By Michelle Bryant Chances are at some point in your life, you have been told to “grow up” or “start acting your age.” Faced with the pressures of paying bills, holding down a steady job and frequenting home improvement stores, it’s easy to see why adulthood may have lost some of its luster.

Steven Mintz, a historian at The University of Texas at Austin, tackles the transformation of adulthood in his latest book, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood. And while he says coming of age has never been easy, Mintz reminds us that it can also be a time of great joy and fulfillment.

Mintz’s work is often reflective of his private life. He wrote the history of the family at the time when he was getting married, the history of childhood when his sons were going to college, and the history of adulthood continues to be guided by his life’s journey.

“Anyone who has gone through a divorce or who’s shifted career tracks, who’s had to deal with now adult children who are trying to make their way in life — all those issues — I wanted to understand on a personal level, as well as place them in some historical perspective,” says Mintz, who is also executive director of the UT System’s Institute for Transformational Learning.

“Everything has a history, and my view is that history needs to speak to the issues that people are wrestling with,” he says. “We have lived through a revolution of the life course throughout our own lifetimes, and we need to know how that happens, why it changed and maybe even where it’s going.”

What it Means to be an Adult

Defining Adulthood The book’s chronological narrative describes the rise, fall and replacement of a particular conception of adulthood defined in terms of early marriage and childbearing, a life-long career and homeownership.

“The rulebook of adulthood has crumpled,” Mintz says. “There was a whole set of assumptions and expectations and fantasies that we clung to, and real life came. So it’s hard to live up to those expectations and norms because they’re not there anymore.

“I think for many people adulthood is more fulfilling in some ways, but it’s a lot less predictable and a lot less secure than it once was,” he adds.

Alas, unlike Peter Pan, we are not given a choice of whether we would like to grow up; it’s thrust upon us whether we want it or not. Mintz defines adulthood as both an age range and a set of responsibilities and obligations that one acquires as he or she gets older — to a significant other, children, parents, friends or to a job

— some of which can be inherently stressful.

“It’s often said that historians write about things when they’re in decline, and I think that’s very much the case with this,” Mintz says. “An earlier conception of adulthood has broken down, and for many young people — including the most conformist of young people — that’s not what they aspire to be.

“They don’t aspire to a life of conformity, stagnation or being in a rut,” he says. “They want to grow, but they don’t want to grow up.”

ABOVE: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall from the 1946 film The Big Sleep.

Adult Culture Mintz says he is particularly interested in how our society came to devalue adulthood as a stage of life.

His research traces back hundreds of years looking at cultural changes.

He relies on the great literature that has influenced him throughout his life — books that are timelessly grounded in the human experience. And then there are the stories of individuals who underscore this experience such as Charles Eliot, who would become the president of Harvard University in his 20s tearing his hair out about what he should do with his life.

“It’s hard to imagine a world not too long ago when people aspired to grow up, and they dressed to make themselves appear older, and the dominate culture was an adult culture, not youth culture,” Mintz says. “Lauren Bacall may have become an actress at the age of 18, but she didn’t look 18. And Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant certainly looked like adults.”

Mintz says they were models for a certain kind of adulthood. Not adulthood defined in terms of marriage, homeownership and life-long careers, but in terms of sophistication, maturity, worldliness and knowingness.

And that’s the definition of adulthood Mintz is arguing we should try to reclaim that we would find meaningful, and not the old rulebook, which as it turns out is not a very good prescription for happiness.

“Some people believe that every stage of life is meaningful in and of itself, and that’s true,” Mintz says.

“After finishing this book, I decided adulthood really is the prime of life. That is, you have to mature and you have to grow and that doesn’t mean it’s all pleasurable, but it means it’s more meaningful.”

The Prime of Life A History of Modern Adulthood Belknap Press, April 2015

By Steven Mintz, professor, Department of History

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Knowledge Matters

Books

Intimate Grammars An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry

Unsettled Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto

Anxious Politics Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World

Temple University Press, Oct. 2015

By Eric Tang, assistant professor, Department of African & African Diaspora Studies

Cambridge University Press, Oct. 2015

By Bethany Albertson, assistant professor, Department of Government; and Shana Kushner Gadarian, assistant professor, Syracuse University

After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide and years of confinement in international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ’90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of the Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family as they remained captives of unrelenting poverty and violence in urban America.

The University of Arizona Press, June 2015

By Anthony K. Webster, associate professor, Department of Anthropology

The emotional life of politics and especially how political anxieties affect public life are explored in Anxious Politics. The authors show that political anxiety triggers engagement in politics in ways that are potentially both promising and damaging for democracy. Using four substantive policy areas (public health, immigration, terrorism and climate change), they demonstrate that anxiety affects how political news is consumed, who is perceived as trustworthy and what types of politics are supported.

The importance of Navajo poets and poetry was brought to light in 2013 when Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic and linguistic research, Webster’s book explores the emotional value assigned through poetry to various Navajo Nation languages, why Navajo poets write about the “ugliness” of the Navajo Nation, and the way contemporary Navajo poetry connects young Navajos to their language.

The Cherokee Kid Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon University Press of Kansas, June 2015

By Amy M. Ware, associate director of HDO The political humorist Will Rogers was perhaps the most famous cowboy in early 20th century America. However, few were aware that he was also the most famous American Indian of his time. In interviews Rogers would avow, “I’m a Cherokee and they’re the finest Indians in the world.”

Throughout his life he made much of his American Indian background and thereby helped promote Cherokee artistry as a fundamental part of American popular culture, suggests Ware.

Dark Matters On the Surveillance of Blackness Duke University Press, Oct. 2015

By Simone Browne, assistant professor, Departments of African & African Diaspora Studies and Sociology Browne shows how contemporary surveillance is informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery such as branding, runaway slave notices and lantern laws.

Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from diverse sources including the design of an 18th century slave ship, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, the historical document The Book of Negroes, contemporary art, literature, biometrics and post-9/11 airport security.

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

Healthy Learners A Whole Child Approach to Reducing Disparities in Early Education Teachers College Press, Nov. 2015

By Robert Crosnoe, professor, Department of Sociology; Claude Bonazzo and Nina Wu, sociology graduate students The early childhood field has long understood that targeting the intersection of health and learning is integral to serving children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Yet this developmentally informed educational philosophy has been jeopardized by an increased emphasis on standards-based accountability. The authors explain why healthy learning is good for children, schools and society, and they suggest concrete ways to make it happen.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

The Power of the Past History and Statecraft Brookings Institution Press, Nov. 2015 Edited by Jeremi Suri, professor, Department of History and LBJ School of Public Affairs; and Hal Brands, associate professor, Duke University History, with its insights, analogies and narratives, is central to the ways in which the United States interacts with the world.

Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as they should. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the historypolicy relationship.

Discounted Life The Price of Global Surrogacy in India NYU Press, Dec. 2015

By Sharmila Rudrappa, associate professor, Department of Sociology; director, Center for Asian American Studies India is the world’s top provider of surrogacy services, with a multimillion-dollar industry that continues to grow exponentially. Little is known, however, about the experience of and transaction between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of many agencies that control surrogacy in India.

Drawing from interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore and intended parents in the U.S. and Australia, Discounted Life focuses on the social and market exchanges in transnational surrogacy.

Postcard America Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950 University of Texas Press, Jan. 2016

By Jeffrey L. Meikle, professor, Department of American Studies From the Depression through the early postwar years, most postcards mailed in America were “linen” cards. Vividly colorized and embossed with a linen texture, these cards celebrated the American scene with views of majestic landscapes, modern cityscapes and roadside attractions. Linen postcards were popular, with close to a billion published. Postcard America offers a comprehensive look at these cards and their cultural significance.

The Last Hindu Emperor Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America

Cambridge University Press, Dec. 2015

By Cynthia Talbot, associate professor, Departments of History and Asian Studies This new study traces traditions and memories relating to the 12th-century Indian ruler Prithviraj Chauhan, a Hindu king who was defeated and overthrown during the conquest of Northern India by Muslim armies from Afghanistan. Surveying narratives that span more than 800 years, Talbot sheds new light on the enduring importance of heroic histories in Indian culture and the extraordinary ability of historical memory to transform the hero of a clan into the hero of a community and nation.

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Cultural Memories in the Roman Empire J. Paul Getty Museum, Jan. 2016 Edited by Karl Galinsky, professor, Department of Classics; and Kenneth Lapatin, Getty Museum The attempt to preserve and construct local and regional identities in the Roman Empire took many forms, ranging from the revival of long-dormant traditions to the invention of new ones. The 15 international contributors to this volume examine these varied traditions across a range of disciplines and subjects including art, monuments, cults, literature and history. The volume originated with a 2013 conference at the Getty Villa Museum as part of Galinsky’s Max Planck Award project on cultural memory in ancient Rome.

Oxford University Press, Feb. 2016

By Kali Nicole Gross, associate professor and associate chair, Department of African & African Diaspora Studies Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered near a pond outside of Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two black suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs and George Wilson. Their ensuing trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants further inflamed public anxieties about shifting notions of race in the post-Reconstruction era.

Journeys

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Why do we travel?

What impels us to leave behind the comforts of home and endure the indignities of airports or the toils and snares of an interstate highway?

By David A. Ochsner • Illustrations by Lauren Rolwing

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We travel because it is in our nature. Humans have always been on the move, sometimes out of necessity — hunting and gathering, or fleeing from predators, poverty and persecution. But much of our travel, particularly in modern times, is about exploring new places. Three faculty members in the College of Liberal Arts have examined the idea of travel in very different ways, discovering that often in the journey we learn more about ourselves than we do about our destinations.

• “When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

William Least Heat-Moon • Often our most rewarding travel experiences have no itinerary.

Although a frequent traveler such as Peter LaSalle has seen his share of maps and timetables, his travels are often prompted by an interest in an author or book, and where it might lead him.

“I do this thing where I pack a small bag with enough clothes for a couple of weeks along with some books by an author I admire, and I reread the work ‘on the premises,’ so to speak, to see what happens,” says LaSalle, the Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing, who teaches in both the English Department and the Michener Center for Writers at The University of Texas at Austin. “It’s maybe rereading Borges’ amazing short stories in his native Buenos Aires, or the French Surrealists in Paris.”

LaSalle says sometimes there is much in common between reading and travel, a dreamlike sense of exploring in which one is always on the brink of discovery.

“In reading there is discovery, wondering where the words will take you next, and in travel there is a similar sense of that, wondering where your thumping Reeboks will take you next, let’s say, as you meander for hours upon wonderful hours through a strange city,” he says. “Lately I like to blend the two. And it’s not simply seeking an understanding of an author and his or her work, which is more the job of actual scholars, those who produce academic critical commentary. In my case, as a writer myself — of short stories and novels, meaning creative work hopefully employing the imagination, even in my essays — scholarly research isn’t at all my intent, for better or worse.”

To have that sense of discovery, however, requires a style of travel that is open to the unexpected, that listens to an inner voice rather than to a voice of a tour guide. So LaSalle avoids the touristy areas, stays in relatively “crummy” hotels, seeks out offbeat spots to eat, speaks the language to the best of his ability, and always tries to meet and mix with locals in ordinary places.

“I know that in my own traveling, exploring a new place, my senses are intensified, when everything around me takes on a fresh, focused too-clarity of things, as if in a dream,” he says. “And while it admittedly sounds a little strange, I do feel that in such a scenario there can be a moment when an inner voice seems to be directing my walking — spookily, almost somnambulistically — calling me on toward some spot where I somehow need to be.”

LaSalle writes about such experiences in his latest book, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling, due out in December. These literary travel pieces include his visit to Rio de Janeiro, the setting for Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner. While exploring parts of the city associated with Machado’s work, LaSalle was seized with the urge to walk to the other side of the iconic Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain). It entailed a long walk on a humid day along an unfamiliar route that wound through areas rife with crime and misfortune.

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Journeys

It is worth noting here that the word “travel” is derived from “travail,” or as Albert Camus once observed, fear gives value to travel because it is an occasion for spiritual testing that can free us from our “instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits” and bring us “back to ourselves.”

So despite warnings that muggings were rampant, LaSalle took his walk, perhaps to get back to himself: “… it was as if suddenly the whole outing wasn’t merely a walk, and it was as if I was being drawn along, was moving toward something very definite even if I didn’t know what it was…”

Wending his way through areas of heartbreaking poverty, he reaches a wide, sun-baked boulevard, and then finally arrives at a square that is empty save for a statue of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin, bowed toward the sea.

Then it hits him.

“It was just that overwhelming feeling, again and more than anything else in the world,” he writes, “that I wanted to be writing

my fiction, getting back to it as soon as I could, in this case to somehow immediately dispose of the several thousand miles and many hours of an overnight jet hissing on and on through the darkness, then a change of planes in Atlanta and finally a taxi ride on the freeway back to my place in Austin.”

In a sense the journey takes LaSalle back to where he began, but not quite as the same person. A truth has been discovered.

• “We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

George Santayana • In his essay, “Au Train de Vie: That Voice You Hear When Traveling” (featured in the Best American Travel Writing 2014, his second essay to be included in that series), LaSalle writes of a similar metaphysical experience in Paris. No, it was not at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, nor along the banks of the Seine, nor over a plate of foie gras at Maxim’s. It was at a shabby café called Au Train de Vie, near the Gare de l’Est. “It was as if I had to go there, or more so, as if a voice was telling me to go there again because it was where I was supposed to be, where I, well, I needed to be right then and at that time of my own life in Paris,” writes LaSalle.

And so he returns again and again to sip his strong coffee and take in the scene, the open railway yards against a huge Paris sky, and although he is seated at a little table, he nevertheless continues his journey, “a soothing and even transcendent silent excursion into the evening …”

For LaSalle, travel becomes both a physical and metaphysical experience: “And aren’t we all travelers in our dreams, wandering alone and solitary, constantly being drawn to a place where we should be, for the larger perception we should have, a voice often urging us on …” he writes, noting that the café is also perfectly suitable for such a dream journey “because dull gold letters on the tattered red awning out front do announce it as ‘Au Train de Vie,’ meaning in this case not just the idiomatic French term for ‘lifestyle’ but nothing less than — with a crisp pun when taken literally — ‘the train of life,’ all right.”

Photo: Nicolas Vigier

• “My progress brought me to a corner. I breathed in the night, in a most serene holiday from thought. The view, not all that complex, seemed simplified by my tiredness. It was made unreal by its very typicality.”

Jorge Luis Borges •

Au Train de Vie, Paris, France, October 2012.

We are travelers in our dreams, but dreams also inspire our travels. How many of us buy a travel book, or scroll through various destinations on Travelocity and dream of a journey to a new and exciting place? Sometimes we book a flight and off we go, but often we settle for traveling vicariously, whether we are reading about travel or watching Anthony Bourdain eat and drink his way across the planet.

In terms of Anglo-American and European history, travel for pleasure is an idea not more than 3½ centuries old, dating back to the days of the Grand Tour enjoyed mostly by the upper classes.

It was not until the early 19th century that those of more modest means could afford to travel, and with more people traveling came

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Journey to Texas 1833 University of Texas Press, June 2015

By Detlef Dunt, Translated by Anders Saustrup, edited and with an introduction by James C. Kearney, lecturer, Department of Germanic Studies, and Geir Bentzen

The City at Three P.M. Writing, Reading, and Traveling Dzanc Books, Dec. 2015

By Peter LaSalle, professor, Department of English

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a demand for books and articles on travel, as well as an expanding pool of people who could write about their travels.

Kirsten “Kit” Belgum examines how improved travel technologies coincided with advances in publishing and a growing demand for news about the world. She is fascinated by travel as something we react to, and what it says about us as a society.

“The world shrank in the 19th century — it shrank in part because travel got cheaper and quicker, but it really shrank because of how information about the world and travel got disseminated,” says Belgum, an associate professor of Germanic studies who explores the topic in her upcoming book, Geographical Imagination or How the World Shrank in the Nineteenth Century.

“The rise of the steamboats and railroads coincided with the rise of a burgeoning middle class and advances in print technology.”

• “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.

You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Cesare Pavese • Belgum has examined many types of travel writing, from John Quincy Adams’ observations of early 19th century Silesia, to

Journeys

Photo: Joshua Earle

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a German geographical magazine founded in 1862 called Globus, a precursor to National Geographic magazine of two decades later. As an early work of its kind, Globus attempted to introduce German readers to the world.

The first issues were tough for Globus editor Karl Andree.

Working alone and challenged to find enough information to publish a weekly travel magazine, he would frequently borrow text and images from other sources, resulting in mismatched images and composite articles that sometimes contained misleading reports.

For example, Andree repurposed illustrations he had acquired from a French periodical devoted to travel, Le Tour du Monde. The illustrations originally accompanied an article about Baron de Wogan’s travels in Nevada and Utah, but Andree used the illustrations for an article about California and Oregon. He also borrowed from the French text, leading to further confusion.

According to Belgum, this transnational “borrowing” in early travel writing was not uncommon. In his Letters on Silesia (c. 1800), John Quincy Adams himself borrowed descriptions and even social insights from an earlier work by Johann Friedrich Zöllner (Silesia was then under Prussian control; today, it is mostly in southwest Poland).

She writes that her point is “not to indict travel writers for instances of unacknowledged borrowing, but rather to highlight the complex and interconnected nature of writing about foreign places in the modern era.”

Further, these writings also provide insights into how writers and readers perceived themselves in the world, since accounts of a foreign land “might provide a challenge to one’s own national

culture or they might be part of an attempt to fashion a personal or national agenda by using the foreign place as a negative foil,” Belgum writes.

“We never see anything for what it really is. We always have our filters on, our spectacles, and our own motivations and agendas,” she says. “What fascinates me is not so much what any specific traveller does, or what any specific traveller writes, but almost more what a society makes of it, what kind of hay you make out of a person’s description, characterization, how long it lasts, when it gets challenged.”

Belgum says it’s “this whole idea of changing reality. Travel is culture in contact, societies in contact, germs in contact … it’s what has made the world we live in today, a world that would be unrecognizable without all of this travel.”

• “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

Aldous Huxley • That includes the State of Texas. It took just one letter, and a book inspired by it, to cause thousands of Germans to pull up deep roots and move to colonial Texas beginning in the 1830s. It was part of a vast migration of millions of Germans and other Europeans to the United States, a migration that James Kearney says not only dramatically changed Europe, but also changed the U.S. “in ways so profound that you can’t even itemize them.”

Life & Letters Fall 2015

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

Henry Miller

Kearney is a rancher in Colorado County who is partly descended from those early Texas Germans. He is also a lecturer in Germanic studies and editor of a recently published translation of one German’s impressions of colonial Texas, Journey to Texas 1833,

by Detlef Dunt.

In an introduction to the translation, Kearney (along with co-editor Geir Bentzen) writes that Dunt read at least one letter by early settler Fredrich Ernst, who wrote letters to friends back in Germany “about the opportunities and easy lifestyle awaiting them in Texas.” Dunt decided to go to Texas and see for himself.

In writing those letters, “Ernst became part of an epistolary pattern that lured settlers across the Atlantic for several decades,” writes Kearney and Bentzen.

The same forces that coincide in Belgum’s research were at play here: Advances in printing and greater mobility, plus lack of economic opportunities, got some Germans thinking about making the big leap across the Atlantic. The catalyst was land, and in Texas, there was much of it.

“Texas was one of the great land giveaways of all time. A married man of good standing could get a league of land, 4,428 acres — that’s an enormous amount of land — only the grand duke of Oldenburg (in Germany) had that kind of land,” says Kearney. “Just sign your name and get it surveyed and it’s yours.”

If the land alone wasn’t enough of an incentive, Dunt’s book promoted many other aspects of life in the U.S. and in Texas, offering detailed descriptions of everything from the price of shoes to the wide availability of tobacco (“here it is provided by nature …”). Although Dunt admired the native flora and fauna, he did

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encourage German settlers to bring their own seeds and other plants “to have familiar creations growing around them (and) lessen their feeling of being so far from home.”

Dunt also made cultural observations, noting that in America “generally there is more work than play,” and “When it comes to community or group singing … their popular tunes actually sound barbarous.” During a stay in New Orleans, he wrote that he “felt sorry for the poor Negroes when I saw them being herded like cattle for work early in the morning.” (During the Civil War, German Texans from Central Texas and the Hill County were mostly Unionist or neutral in their political views and resisted conscription by the Confederate Army, sometimes violently.)

But for the most part, Dunt painted a positive picture of life in the U.S. and especially Texas, telling his readers that in return for moderate physical work, they will find “a carefree existence and an honest living.”

“Dunt’s book extolling the virtues of Texas life amplifies Ernst’s letter. It motivates a lot of people to make that unbelievably difficult decision to pull up stakes and try to make a new home,” Kearney says, adding that after Dunt’s book, more than 50 other books about Texas were published for German readers in the 19th century. Some German settlers wrote novels for German publishers, including the 1867 novel Friedrichsburg, written

by Friedrich Armand Strubberg and translated into English by Kearney in 2012.

“I argue that this is the first Western written by a Texas German, an old-fashioned melodrama set against the backdrop of colonial Fredericksburg,” says Kearney. “Strubberg is the precursor to Karl May.” May was a hugely popular German writer of the late 19th century best known for his Old West adventure novels. Unlike Strubberg, May never visited the Old West.

But May did visit in his imagination. And isn’t that what much of travel really is — what we imagine it to be?

Belgum recently taught a course, Voyages that Changed the World, in which her class looked at how the stories of four journeys — Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Charles Darwin and Apollo 11 — have changed through time.

Some in Europe celebrated Columbus’ exploits; others, such as the Spanish historian and friar Bartolomé de las Casas eventually condemned the “conquest.” In the U.S., Columbus has been commemorated for centuries as the discoverer of the Americas, but now he is also vilified as a brutal exploiter and killer of indigenous peoples.

As for Marco Polo, some scholars have questioned whether he even made it to China. Others point out that, even if he did, some of his account is clearly fictional.

Either way, his stories changed the world. Columbus carried a copy of Polo’s travels with him on his voyage west from Europe, thinking he was going to the Spice Islands described by the merchant traveler. Instead he landed in a new world and created a new reality.

The statue of Chopin that Peter LaSalle discovered on his walk in Rio was a gift from the Polish residents of Brazil to their new country. It was a gesture from a group of displaced people, trying to make sense of a new land, of their new reality.

The statue didn’t matter much to LaSalle: … all that did matter while I stood there was that again, as on the walk in Paris, I had ended up where I hadn’t expected to have ended up. In other words, a rather random walk had taken me to a place — and a scene — I surely never expected to have come to, but it was, I fully knew now, a place where I very much wanted, and even needed, to be.

And this, perhaps, is the hope of all travelers. To end up where we need to be.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

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Forever Shakespeare The Making of an Icon

By Kay Randall Illustration by Allen Quigley

In 10 years, people won’t care about Kim Kardashian’s face-contouring regimen or that she had 35 million Twitter followers. But William Shakespeare? Four centuries after his death he’s still a megastar.

From Finland to the Philippines, his name remains synonymous with “artistic genius,” his plays are still performed worldwide and his remarkable body of work is still giving university scholars endless “aha!” moments.

Janine Barchas, a UT Austin English professor who is one of those curious scholars, has been working for the past few years on a digital project that will offer 21st century fans a peek at the point when Shakespeare’s reputation made the leap from “just another really good British dramatist and poet” to superstar who never stops trending.

“Although Shakespeare was appreciated in his time as an artist, he was just one of a group of talented actors, playwrights and poets on the London scene and didn’t have the superhero reputation he holds today,” says Barchas. “His current fame wouldn’t have been possible without some very savvy marketing ‘spin’ in the 18th century, when a few influential promoters took advantage of nationalistic fervor and linked Shakespeare to the British identity.”

When it came to brand-building, one of the most attentiongrabbing efforts to define “Britishness” through art was the launch of the first-ever Shakespeare museum.

Opened in 1789 and called the Shakespeare Gallery, the museum’s two floors were filled with paintings depicting key scenes from each of the Bard’s plays. Visitors borrowed catalogs that included matching excerpts from the plays and enjoyed the full experience of seeing and (almost) hearing the most memorable scenes.

Up until now, modern fans have had to imagine what a stroll through that very popular London museum would be like, but by the end of this year — and just in time for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death — Barchas will unveil a meticulously researched and beautifully rendered digital replication of the gallery. Anyone with Internet access will be able to take a tour.

The online version will show the museum as it appeared in 1796, a moment in the exhibition’s 15-year run when the upper gallery’s three rooms had reached capacity and held 84 life-size paintings.

“The exhibition was one of the hottest tickets of the London ‘season’ and something that everybody who was anybody would have attended,” says Barchas. “It definitely boosted Shakespeare’s reputation. For one shilling, you could binge-watch all of Shakespeare in one emotional go.”

Digitally reconstructing a gallery that permanently closed

in 1804 required considerable sleuthing on the part of Barchas and the talents of Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services’ (LAITS) students and staffers.

“Of the 84 large oil paintings, only 29 survive in museums or collections, so we started our digital modeling with those,” says Barchas. “The real challenge began when we set out to calculate the sizes of the remaining 55 lost paintings and the likely curatorial ‘hang’ of the show in 1796.

“Our educated guessing was guided by surviving copies of the 1796 catalog, the serendipitous discovery in the Folger Shakespeare Library of a payment list to the artists, remaining pieces of large paintings that were once cut down to fit in snug parlors and sitting rooms, and clues from another exhibition that was staged in the same gallery space in 1813.”

Because John Boydell, the entrepreneur responsible for the gallery, had sold stunning folio engravings of all the pictures, his prints preserve the content of the lost paintings. To avoid a monochromatic result for the e-gallery, Barchas used hand-colored versions of Boydell’s prints as digital stand-ins for the lost — and vibrantly hued — works.

Barchas and her team also had to make sure that every aspect of the museum setting, from the color of the gallery walls (blue) to the frames on the pictures, was historically accurate.

To keep the gallery anachronism-free, she would do archival research on a topic or item, then pass a drawing request on to a student artist. The artist’s rendering of the fireplace, stone plinth or railing was then scanned into Photoshop and made digitally “real.”

“Working with Liberal Arts’ ITS group is like working at Hogwarts,” says Barchas. “I’ll ask a student designer or coder to create this or that feature, and they inevitably come back with something far more magical than I ever imagined possible.”

As though the 2-D online model of the Shakespeare Gallery were not enough, for the past two years Barchas also has been working with the university’s Texas Advanced Computer Center and its Visualization Lab to create a 3-D version of the gallery space.

This interdisciplinary work has allowed her to familiarize herself with technical tools such as Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles and Google Cardboard.

“Virtual reality may show us just how overwhelming the Shakespeare Gallery would have been, with its gargantuan, richly colored paintings of tragic, comic and even violent scenes filling every square inch of wall space,” says Barchas. “Putting on a pair of 3-D goggles will be the next best thing to jumping into Doctor Who’s TARDIS, flying back to 1796 and experiencing first-hand the celebrity culture that transformed Shakespeare into a superhero.”

Digitally reconstructing the lost Shakespeare Gallery is part

Forever Shakespeare

of a larger historical project that Barchas and the LAITS team have undertaken called What Jane Saw. The goal is to show cultural events and places that novelist Jane Austen definitely or probably witnessed. The What Jane Saw website has already attracted about 150,000 visitors since its creation in 2013. On Dec. 16, which is Austen’s birthday, the site will add the Shakespeare museum to its e-gallery.

Although Austen does not mention the museum in her surviving letters, historians know she stayed around the corner from it in 1796. Barchas reasons that it is unlikely Austen would have forgone the opportunity to view an exhibition devoted to one of her idols and inspirations.

Fingerprinting the Play Sometimes it takes a village to solve a literary mystery, a village with a couple of social psychologists and some scary-smart software.

For three centuries literary scholars have debated about who wrote the play Double Falsehood, which was published by Shakespeare expert Lewis Theobald in 1728. According to Theobald, the play was based on Shakespearean manuscripts that were later lost in a library fire, but many scholars have assumed it was actually a forgery, penned by Theobald himself.

Some have theorized that playwright John Fletcher, who occasionally collaborated with Shakespeare, also contributed to the play.

Enter UT Austin psychologist James Pennebaker and graduate researcher Ryan Boyd with text-analyzing software that can automatically extract psychological information from texts, removing the possibility of biased readings and selective interpretation. Invited by University of California-Irvine professor emeritus Robert Folkenflik to investigate the longstanding conundrum, they set to work on the centuries-old authorship question.

Pennebaker and Boyd entered 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 by Theobald and nine by Fletcher into a software program that analyzed the three authors’ words, creating a unique “psychological fingerprint” for each. The results were then statistically compared with the “fingerprint” of the play in question to look for similarities.

As it turns out, the play does seem to have been written by

Shakespeare, as Theobald claimed. The profile for Double Falsehood matches Shakespeare’s distinctive psychology very closely, with sprinklings of Fletcher apparent in later parts of the play.

According to Boyd, Theobald’s profile was practically the opposite of the play’s true author.

“A lot of people think the most interesting thing about this analysis process is that a computer can determine very specific information about one’s personality and intellect,” says Boyd.

“Research consistently shows that a person’s mental world can be revealed by analyzing how they use everyday words like ‘a,’ ‘the,’ ‘will’ and ‘of,’ as well as some words related to emotions, family and religion, for example.”

So will these findings end all argument on the topic?

“Given the fact that people have made careers around debating every detail of Shakespeare’s plays — and that we’re psychologists, not literature scholars — our news was surprisingly well-received,” says Boyd. “Still, I doubt that the debates will stop anytime soon.”

Lady 8 and the Making of a Brand Google has a brand identity. Oprah has a brand identity. And now, thanks to skilled detective work by UT English professor Douglas Bruster, we know that 400 years ago William Shakespeare had one as well.

Bruster unearthed this “Shakespeare brand” while conducting archival research on the Bard’s best-selling poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and dubbed the emblem “Lady 8.”

“In 1931, scholar A.E.M. Kirwood reproduced nearly two dozen ornaments that were commonly used by well-known Elizabethan printer and publisher Richard Field, and this particular ornament was eighth in the list,” says Bruster. “My name for the emblem also calls attention to the prominence of the female face gazing placidly at the reader from the center of the design.”

On the rectangular emblem, the “pagan and beguiling” woman is surrounded by a profusion of intertwined flora and fauna.

According to Bruster, an elaborate and elegant emblem such as Lady 8 would have taken hundreds of hours to execute and been extremely expensive for the printer to acquire. The emblem decorated the title pages of Venus and Adonis in 1593 and Lucrece in 1594, the first occasions when anyone would have seen it

Photo: Marsha Miller

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LEFT: English professor Janine Barchas (right) and students from her Jane Austen on Page and Screen (UGS303) class experience the What Jane Saw project in 3-D at the Visualization Laboratory of the Texas Advanced Computing Center on Sept. 28.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Dec. 21, 2015– May 29, 2016 Exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center

associated with Shakespeare.

“Giving Shakespeare such a fancy ‘logo’ at this stage in his career was a huge step for him professionally,” says Bruster. “To an educated audience, it was a very elite, French, aristocratic adornment and said that the play or poem it accompanied was equally important and elite.

“The logo visually evokes Shakespeare’s love of nature and country settings and also is very much connected to his most memorable female heroines, from Lady Macbeth to Rosalind and Ophelia. Even though others attempted to appropriate the emblem and use it for their own publications, they didn’t meet with much success because the adornment had so thoroughly come to say ‘Shakespeare,’ specifically.”

According to Bruster, this discovery gives fans and scholars new insights into the Elizabethan publishing industry in general, as well as the savvy business strategies Shakespeare employed in managing his career.

“He knew his skills were valuable,” says Bruster. “New information that scholars are uncovering reveals him to have been quite canny, leveraging his talents into money and success. Over time, his name on title pages of his works steadily gets larger and larger and eventually eclipses the title of the work itself — that didn’t just happen by accident.”

Enter, Stage Right Most adults have seen at least a few Shakespeare plays performed and maybe read two or three, such as Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet — but how many know of Cymbeline?

“This is one of Shakespeare’s least familiar and most challenging works to stage or read,” says UT Austin English professor Hannah Wojciehowski. “It’s a shame it hasn’t gained traction with modern audiences because it’s quite edgy and contemporary, with blood, guts, intrigue and sex, all in one clever package.”

Defined by some scholars as a tragedy and by others as a romance or comedy, Cymbeline is based on legends about the early Celtic British King Cunobeline.

To help readers understand the play, encourage more directors to stage it and give educators additional resources, Wojciehowski recently edited Cymbeline for the New Kittredge Shakespeare Editions series.

This newly edited version is the first to have performance footnotes that explain how and why scenes were staged a particular way in select major productions of the play. The new edition also includes an essay on how to read the play as performance, suggested topics for discussion, photos from major productions of the play and a filmography.

“This was quite an interesting project for several reasons, not

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the least of which was my opportunity to speak with film director Michael Almereyda about his adaptation of the play to a movie, also titled Cymbeline,” says Wojciehowski.

“That the play was reinterpreted and made into a 2015 movie about conflict between dirty cops and a gritty biker gang only emphasizes how beautifully Shakespeare speaks to all people of all ages at all points in history. His plays remain fresh and exciting precisely because each new director and actor can take a play and, to some extent, make it his or her own.”

For anyone who’s completely unfamiliar with Cymbeline, Wojciehowski suggests beginning with the Almereyda film version.

“Next, try to catch a performance of the play,” she says. “The incomparable magic of Shakespeare lies in hearing his words spoken and watching the stories powerfully unfold on a stage.”

Coastal Plains Elizabethans If someone wants to experience Shakespeare on stage, James Loehlin has just the place. Turning a barn in a Texas pasture into an Elizabethan theater is something of a trick, but Loehlin has been making it look easy for 15 years.

Loehlin, director of the College of Liberal Arts’ Shakespeare at Winedale program, spends most of his summer each year in a quiet, bucolic setting just outside the Central Texas town of Round Top. There, on open fields dotted with a few old buildings, he teaches college students how to stage and perform the Bard’s plays.

Although it helps to have some familiarity with Shakespeare and perhaps to have performed on stage, those are not requirements for being accepted into the program.

“We have students from every major and college, as well as other universities, like Stanford and Columbia,” says Loehlin.

“Once they’re at Winedale, they’re immersed in Shakespeare for nine weeks from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., seven days a week.

“They live in a dorm together, eat together, read lines together, and rehearse and perform together. It’s extremely intellectually, physically and socially demanding since we perform three plays most years, and they only have one week to learn each — and all students are in all plays.”

The culmination of the two months’ work is a series of performances in late July and early August in front of paying audiences from across Texas and, occasionally, from farther-flung spots.

In addition to the program for university students, Shakespeare at Winedale also conducts workshops and residencies at elementary schools, as well as Camp Shakespeare, a two-week residential camp in Round Top for 10- to 16-year-olds.

“Young people absolutely love Shakespeare, whether they’re eight or 18,” says Loehlin. “He has that extremely rare gift of being able to tell stories that allow you, wherever you are in your life, to connect with him, and his language is uniquely dynamic, which is something that younger people especially love.”

According to Loehlin, shortly into the nine weeks at Winedale, some students even begin to sprinkle their everyday conversations with Shakespeare’s wonderful turns of phrase, such as “Excellent good, i’faith” from Twelfth Night and “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” from Henry V. “Early last summer we had quite a lot of rain at Winedale, and a huge puddle developed alongside the barn,” says Loehlin. “The students regularly began to refer to the puddle as ‘the perilous narrow ocean,’ which is a phrase from the prologue of Henry V, one play they were rehearsing and would perform.

“As long as children and young adults keep getting excited about Shakespeare and grasping his amazing talent, his fame will never die,” says Loehlin.

Spark Your Interests

By Emily Nielsen Illustrations by Caitlin Alexander

It’s not uncommon for the College of Liberal Arts to break the Registrar’s website.

Not on purpose — the interdisciplinary nature of the courses offered in liberal arts do not always mesh well with a system that was designed around rigid department codes. The level of collaboration among faculty members across departments to create in-depth, fascinating courses that are applicable for students of all majors is one of the unique things about our college.

One thing that all the courses have in common despite the diverse subject matter is an emphasis on reading, writing and critical thinking. Susan Somers, a College of Liberal Arts senior academic advisor at UT Austin for almost five years, emphasizes the deeper meaning behind these skills.

“A liberal arts education teaches you how to interact with other humans in a deeper way,” Somers says. “In liberal arts classes, students interact with many different types of people — some who may have beliefs that surprise or concern one another. A degree in liberal arts teaches us how to interact in a respectful manner and seek what’s valuable in others’ perspectives, while also remaining a strong advocate for our own positions and values.”

With more than 1,000 classes offered to liberal arts students each semester, choosing just a handful is tough.

Casey Bushman, a liberal arts advisor who received a 2015 Outstanding New Advisor Award from the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), gives students guidance on how to get the most out of the course catalog.

“Each semester, I recommend students take three or four courses that excite and interest them and one or two wildcards on topics they haven’t considered before or know little about,” Bushman says.

The following five classes are good contenders for those wildcard spots. They delve into complicated, important themes and prepare students to communicate with and think critically about the world.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Women in the History of Political Thought Taught by Dana Stauffer

Government, Core Texts & Ideas After an eight-year hiatus, government lecturer Dana Stauffer is bringing back her class on women and political theory.

“I aim to show students that questions about gender, the family and the relations between the sexes are not side issues for political theory; they are central to it,” Stauffer says. “I hope students come away from the course with an understanding of how the great minds of the past have thought about the status of women and the nature of the family, and how their views on these issues were connected to their conceptions of human nature and the human good.”

The course delves deep into the history of political philosophy, from analyzing ancient Greek political thought and drama at the beginning of the semester to studying the development of early feminism at the end. Stauffer uses the extreme perspectives of some scholars — such as Plato’s theory that abolishing the private family altogether was the only way women could gain equal status, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s call to ban the private kitchen — to help students clarify and refine their own views.

Exposing students to these new ideas and historical context could not be timelier, as it coincides with the 2016 presidential race.

“We are heading into the first presidential election in which a serious contender for that office will almost certainly be a woman,” Stauffer says. “It will be fascinating to see how issues of gender enter into the election, as they undoubtedly will, and to see in what ways the public opinion has shifted its thinking on women and the family, and in what ways it remains more traditional.”

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Spark Your Interests

Environmental Science: A Changing World Taught by Kelley Crews and Thoralf Meyer Geography & the Environment The essence of Environmental Science: A Changing World is to provide liberal arts students with a course that is taught with the same scientific rigor as it would be in any other college on campus.

That includes building a sound scientific vocabulary and lab work where hypothesis testing and experiential learning are key.

Thoralf Meyer and Kelley Crews have their work cut out for them when it comes to teaching a topic that is constantly evolving.

Students are not only given a foundation by learning the history of monumental events such as the Love Canal disaster; they’re also covering the most recent developments in environmental science.

“No matter how many times you have taught this class, you are often working on updating it weeks and even hours just before teaching,” says Crews. “You want the material to be as fresh as possible — students both demand and deserve to be current on what’s happening.”

The course has had a profound effect on students who have taken it since its establishment at UT Austin nine years ago.

“We have had students who have gone on to funded graduate school positions and those who have assumed leadership positions and NGO roles,” Crews says. “Most of all, we have alumni citizens who know how to critically examine the information overload we all confront each day and make sustainable choices.

Being a wise consumer of information and making responsible decisions is more important than ever.”

This spring, Crews and Meyer were awarded a 2014-15 Sustainability Course Development and PLUS (Peer-Led Undergraduate

Studying) Award, a $2,500 grant that will allow them to adapt the class to the PLUS model, featuring weekly study groups led by student volunteers. The award is providing a scholarship to their first peer leader, Paige Lambert, an environmental science senior, as well as aiding in the acquisition of much-needed lab equipment.

In addition to carrying the Quantitative Reasoning, Writing and Ethics & Leadership UGS flags, the course is also the inaugural gateway course of the College of Liberal Arts’ new sustainability studies major, which officially launches in fall 2016.

Deviant Bodies: Disability, Race, Sexuality Taught by Julie Minich

English/Women’s & Gender Studies/ Mexican American & Latina/o Studies Julie Minich’s Deviant Bodies class challenges the way students see and react to others through our shared societal norms.

The course examines the intersection of disability with race and equality by studying contemporary literature by writers of color in the United States. By defining disability broadly to include elements such as neurological differences, illness and other forms of embodiment such as fatness, it gives students an in-depth perspective on how people are labeled as capable, beautiful or fit.

“We discuss throughout the semester

how prevailing ideas about bodies — that they should look, function or even smell a particular way — have become powerful proxies for prevailing ideas about race, gender and sexuality,” Minich says. “This is one way that oppression persists even as overt racism, sexism and homophobia become socially unacceptable.”

The syllabus for the course was designed around Minich’s belief that reading carefully, writing persuasively and thinking critically are among the most important skills that students develop.

“My hope is that this course will challenge students to examine ideas they have taken for granted for most of their lives about what traits make other people beautiful, healthy, capable, worthy of love or socially valuable,” says Minich. “This doesn’t mean that I necessarily want students’ ideas about these categories to change, just that I want them to subject these ideas to critical scrutiny, and, in the process, deepen their ability to think critically about the many ideas that circulate in our society as ‘common sense’ that might need some shaking up.”

Life & Letters Fall 2015

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Digital Storytelling Taught by Casey Boyle

Rhetoric & Writing The way we tell stories is rapidly evolving in the Digital Age, and Casey Boyle’s new rhetoric & writing course is helping students learn to adapt to and critique that process.

Digital Storytelling gives students the opportunity to research, document, compose and share narratives using new media techniques, Boyle says. The class gives students a space to interact with public and civic resources such as archives and museums while using text, audio, visual and video technology to present

their research in a digital environment.

“When possible, I try to use either open source or widely available applications in the course,” says Boyle, an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing. “Audio editing tools like Audacity and image editors like GIMP offer very powerful programs for free, and widely available video editing software such as iMovie or MovieMaker are usually standard on most computers. By opting to teach these programs, students are learning to use tools that they will have

access to long after the semester is over.”

Providing students experience with digital tools is just one component of the course, however.

“It’s designed to give students experience in composing with digital tools but also to understand the ways that digital technologies help shape how we understand our world,” says Boyle. “The course will help equip students with practical skills for composing with new media, as well as help students read such media more critically.”

Maymester: Cuba in Question

Taught by César Salgado Spanish & Portuguese When the announcement came from President Barack Obama on Dec. 14, 2014, that the United States would be restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, Spanish & Portuguese associate professor César Salgado knew his plan to take a group of undergraduate students to Cuba was more necessary and relevant than ever.

Study abroad programs are a form of experiential learning that is key to a liberal arts education, and establishing a program in a country that is somewhat mysterious to many in the U.S. was compelling. An expert in Cuban visual culture, Salgado designed his course to show students Cuba’s cultural and political history and future by experiencing elements such as art, architecture, film, literature and media firsthand.

“I thought it could be great to have a program in which I could bring students to Cuba instead of showing slides on a screen,” Salgado says. “It’s a way for them to think and research and experience issues of visual culture in the island itself.”

Salgado’s group of 18 students traveled from Havana to Santiago over four weeks this summer. They were the first students from UT Austin to travel to Cuba as part of an institutional program. Prior to the trip, they attended weekly classes throughout the spring semester to complete coursework and readings that would prepare them for lectures and excursions in Cuba.

Salgado acknowledges the still-controversial atmosphere of Cuba-U.S. relations, but he says he does not lecture with a specific viewpoint in mind.

“I want students to make up their own minds,” Salgado says.

“A student that is capable of producing a strong testimony of what he or she accomplished in this program is bound to become a very qualified type of professional. I’m looking at what students will accomplish five, 10 years from now — how they’ll be able to think about the world after this experience. It’s up to the individual students to determine what they’re going to do with what they learn from it.”

“It’s a way for them to think and research and experience issues of visual culture in the island itself.”

César Salgado, associate professor, Spanish & Portuguese

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Q&A

Pro Bene Meritis Interviews by Rachel Griess Photography by Brian Birzer

Living The Examined Life Peggy Hardaway Beckham

The Pro Bene Meritis award is the highest honor bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. Since 1984, the annual award has been given to alumni, faculty members 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.

Name: Peggy Hardaway Pattillo Beckham, B.S. and Plan II Honors Program ’56, The University of Texas at Austin; M.S. Literature ’75, Hardin-Simmons University; Honorary Doctorate of Humanities ’90, Hardin-Simmons University.

Hometown: Abilene, Texas Peggy Beckham has dedicated much of her life to advocating for the arts and humanities. She is a strong supporter and champion of the Plan II and Liberal Arts Honors Programs as an alumna of the Plan II Honors Program and lifelong member of the Liberal Arts Advisory Council. Beckham, her husband Bob and their four children all live in Abilene, where Beckham established the Hospice of Abilene and actively serves on various community boards.

Who or what has been the greatest influence in your life, and why?

I have been blessed to have many positive influences in my life, including my lifelong membership in the Episcopal Church where Bob and I were married 59 years ago. Surprisingly, one of the strongest influences has been my father, John F. Hardaway, who died of cancer when I was only 4. He died at home before the hospice movement was available, but I think that experience led to my interest in helping hospice get started in Abilene in 1982.

What role have the liberal arts played in your life?

Socrates said many years ago that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I feel there is much truth in that statement. A liberal arts background gives us good tools to examine life — to see what makes us human and binds us together. If we are ever to be able to live together in peace and harmony, a liberal education’s viewpoint is invaluable.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

I would say without hesitation, our family. Bob and I are so blessed to have four wonderful children, three of whom graduated from UT where they all met their spouses, whom we also love dearly. The nicest thing of all is that they all live in Abilene.

You take on many leadership roles in the Abilene community.

What do you think makes a good leader?

I would say the ability to listen, to delegate responsibility and to have a passion for the project.

Why do you think it’s important to give back to your community?

I firmly believe that we all have been given gifts and talents that we have a responsibility to use to improve the life around us. We have received much from our communities, and to give back is to be a good citizen.

What’s your life’s philosophy?

My philosophy is shaped by my Christian belief that life is a gift, and that it is good; and it is best shared through a servant ministry to others. I have found that the older I get, the deeper my faith is but the fewer beliefs I have. I trust that we are all in the hands of a loving God, who through Jesus shows us the way we are to try and live with love and respect for each other to make the world a safer and better place for all.

What quote do you find most meaningful to you right now?

I find in our present, crazy and chaotic world, the words of Julian of Norwich — written in the 14th century — most comforting: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Teaching An Understandable World Austin Gleeson

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Name: Austin Michael Gleeson, B.S. Physics ’60, Drexel Institute of Technology; M.S. Physics ’63 and Ph.D. Physics ’65, University of Pennsylvania Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Austin Gleeson teaches physics in the Plan II Honors Program and has won numerous teaching awards, including the Jean Holloway Teaching Excellence Award and the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award, for his exciting and engaging teaching style. Upon receiving the Pro Bene Meritis award at the college’s annual spring banquet, Gleeson surprised the audience by announcing a generous gift to help fund five professorships in Plan II, including the Elizabeth B. Gleeson Professorship in Plan II Physics named for his late wife.

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?

I have had the good fortune to be able to add to the knowledge base and analytic skills of generations of young Texans who constitute the current and future leaders of our society.

What do you find most exciting about teaching?

Teaching and growing in your discipline go hand in hand. Each new crop of Plan II students challenges me to expand my knowledge and insight of my subject and to feel confident that I have helped prepare our future leaders to understand the world in which they live.

What’s your teaching philosophy?

To me teaching is engagement. The teacher, students and subject must all be involved in the process. The students must deal with the subject at the most fundamental level; the teacher must engage with the students; and the teacher and students must grow from the experience.

Other than knowledge in physics, what do you hope students gain from your class?

Students in my class do learn some physics but, more importantly, they discover that the world we live in is understandable, and our position in it is greatly enhanced by having the ability to analyze it with strong analytic and quantitative reasoning.

In your opinion, how can STEM students benefit from a liberal arts education?

For most people, a university education is the final formal character development experience. All of our students deserve a balance of insight, reason and appreciation in their exposure. In my class, I try to bring to the students a mix of all majors and insights into an understanding of our physical world; expand their analytic skills; and with simple quantitative techniques, provide access to a nuanced “numerate” worldview. Most STEM students develop powerful technical skills and world views from their university experience probably to have them languish in their later lives, but they must also experience the literate, historic and artful skills to be able to read their world experiences in a “literate” framework.

Both frameworks, literate and numerate, must be developed for success in both their personal and professional lives.

What inspired you to establish and partially fund the first Plan II professorships?

My experience with Plan II has been incredibly positive. Because of the administrative organization of the university, it has no standing faculty and no direct significant input on faculty raises or promotions. I know that in my own discipline it has been very difficult to find faculty to participate. For that reason, I established the Elizabeth B. Gleeson Professorship in Plan II Physics, expecting a one-for-one match, and four additional professorships through a one-for-two match, with the discipline and naming left open to provide Plan II administration with strong affirmative tools to lure faculty from a broad range of disciplines into the network called the Plan II Faculty.

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Pro Bene Meritis

Leading His Longhorn Family Bill Powers “The College of Liberal Arts is a custodian for advancing our understanding of our place in the universe.”

Bill Powers

Name: William Charles Powers, Jr., B.A. Chemistry ’67, University of California, Berkeley; J.D. ’73, Harvard University Hometown: Los Angeles, California Bill Powers made liberal arts and diversity top priorities during his role as the 28th president of The University of Texas at Austin from 2006 to 2015. He was a driving force in the capital campaign for the new Liberal Arts building; the integration of the Liberal Arts perspective into the curriculum of the new Dell Medical School; and the development of the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies, the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis, and the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies.

What are your proudest accomplishments during your time as president of UT Austin?

I’m most proud of the work done to improve the undergraduate experience coming out of The Commission of 125 and the task force on undergraduate curriculum, which resulted in the establishment of the School of Undergraduate Studies; the Campaign for Texas, which raised an unprecedented $3.12 billion to support people, places and our purpose; and perhaps the most lasting accomplishment of which I am most proud would be helping to create the Dell Medical School.

Why were the liberal arts such an important part of your legacy as president?

I think universities, especially leading universities like UT, do a number of things. We educate people in the professions, conduct research that aids the economy, and teach students to be leaders and critical thinkers. There’s no one thing that we do. But teaching students a broader understanding of the world we live in is an important thing we do that often gets lost. The College of Liberal Arts is a custodian for advancing our understanding of our place in the universe.

What has been your greatest influence?

I can name several episodes that have greatly influenced my life. The first was when I went off to the University of California, Berkeley, where I learned a lot and saw what wonderful institutions public universities can be. After that, I went into the Navy and my eyes were opened to the world. But the biggest influence was being at UT for almost 40 years. I’ve been influenced most by faculty and students who are completely immersed in the learning experience.

Will you continue to teach at UT? I’ll start teaching again next fall. For now, I’m working on my book about my time as president. It was an interesting period with some turmoil for the university, so I’d like to share it through the lenses of my experiences and offer a new perspective to the value and role of higher education in Texas and in America.

What makes you most proud to be a Longhorn?

I’ll say No. 1 is the people. I think it’s the way that the students throw themselves into it, the outpouring of support and involvement from alumni, and the excellent faculty and staff. There’s something special about UT and being a Longhorn. I didn’t go here, but in many ways it’s my alma mater.

How do you hope to be remembered?

I hope to be remembered as a member of the family. For a period of my life and the university’s life, it was my job to lead this family; but now I’m just proud to be among the many alumni, students and supporters who make up the UT community.

Life & Letters Fall 2015

Happy Birthday to Dante and Don The party for Dante’s 750th birthday was extensive — he was a Gemini (May 21 – June 21) born in 1265 — with nearly 200 events taking place in Italy and another 173 sponsored by Italian cultural centers around the world. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti kicked off the festivities by reciting the opening lines of Paradiso, Dante’s poem recounting his celestial voyage, while orbiting in the International Space Station. The medieval Florentine, whose imagining of the afterlife stands as one of the world’s greatest forays into virtual reality, surely appreciates the birthday wishes sent by people around the globe at Twitter hashtag #dante750.

But the best gift to Dante was delivered in the AMC television series Mad Men, whose final episode aired on May 17, 2015.

In anticipation of this gift, the show’s sixth season premiered in 2013 with a spectacular direct homage to Dante. The episode opened with Dr. Arnold Rosen (Brian Markinson), Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) neighbor, attempting to revive a heart-attack victim, followed by a shot of Don and Megan Draper (Jessica Paré) relaxing on a sun-drenched Hawaiian beach. But this earthly paradise was an illusion. The clue was Don’s voice-over reciting the first lines of Dante’s Inferno in the translation by John Ciardi that he held open in his hands: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood.”

We learned at the end of the show that it was Don’s new lover, the doctor’s wife Sylvia (Linda Cardellini), who introduced him to the Italian poet.

“Did you read my Dante?” she purrs after they have made love, Don’s body still pressing down on her.

“It made me think of you,” he says softly, his languid eyes seeking refuge in hers.

This makes her smile — he has just compared her to Dante’s Inferno, after all. “I don’t know how to take that,” she teases.

Don’s explanation, after a meaningful pause, praises both Dante and the woman who hopes the poem will deepen their intimacy: “It’s beautiful.”

But Dante’s beautiful verses, like the historical moment in which Don reads them, go hand in hand with a tale of horrific pain and destruction. Ravished by devastating social ills and reeling from the carnage of the Vietnam War at the end of 1967, America is about to implode with protests, riots and assassinations while Don Draper, who has relapsed into infidelity, remains stuck in his existential “dark wood.”

He is as lost as ever three years later at the start of a new decade, the period of the final episode. To find himself — to survive — he must first, like Dante, hit rock bottom. Hell is the ticket to Heaven. Dante’s ticket is stamped by “three blessed women”: the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucia (whose name suggests spiritual illumination), and Beatrice — the poet’s muse and great

Illustration: Allen F. Quigley

French & Italian

By Guy Raffa

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love, his bearer of beatitude. Their intercession allows Dante to witness the lost souls of Hell and the purifying spirits of Purgatory under Virgil’s guidance, and then, reunited with Beatrice, to ascend to the stars.

The female trinity in Don Draper’s life are the recipients of his “person-to-person” calls (the title of the series finale) — his daughter (Sally [Kiernan Shipka]), his dying ex-wife (Betty [January Jones]), and his creative protégé (Peggy (Elisabeth Moss]).

Jon Hamm thinks it’s no coincidence that Don tries (and fails) to connect emotionally with these women who “are important to him for different reasons.” He calls Peggy last, at his lowest point, a fitting reminder that, as Elisabeth Moss puts it in a recent interview, “his work is the love of his life, that's his purpose in life.”

“A new day, new ideas, a new you,” intones the spiritual leader to nine men and women seated in lotus position before him, their backs to the Pacific Ocean. It remains unknown in this final scene whether Don will become a new man, but he seems to be at peace with himself Guy Raffa, associate professor, French & Italian on this new day, the smile that spreads across his face announcing a very big new idea — the iconic Coke commercial, featuring the song “I'd like to teach the world to sing,” that he will presumably pitch to his colleagues at McCann Erickson, the ad’s real-life creators.

Series creator Matthew Weiner’s brilliant decision to end the series with, in his words, the “greatest commercial ever made,” meshes beautifully — in perfect harmony — with the ending of what many believe to be the greatest poem ever written. The culmination of Dante’s journey through the afterlife is his vision of God. He sees the mystery of the Incarnation, the paradoxical union of complete human and divine natures, the Word made flesh. Don’s Moment of Zen produces an equally paradoxical revelation: the ABOVE: The Hilltop commercial, which includes the iconic jingle I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke, was produced by McCann Erickson and premiered in 1971.

“Series creator Matthew Weiner’s brilliant decision to end the series with, in his words, the ‘greatest commercial ever made,’ meshes beautifully — in perfect harmony — with the ending of what many believe to be the greatest poem ever written.”

marriage of commerce and community achieved by the famous 1971 TV ad. The Word made cash.

The comparison appears less strange when we consider that Dante himself has become both a product and an ad man. He has become a hot commodity not just for the spiritually, intellectually, or literarily inclined, and not only in Italy, where Roberto Benigni has electrified audiences — in the piazza and on TV — over the past decade with his TuttoDante performances, brought to North America in 2009. Dantemania inspires an astonishing assortment of writers, artists and directors in today’s global culture, giving rise to popular video games and blockbuster novels like Dan Brown’s 2013 Inferno, with Ron Howard’s film adaptation, starring Tom Hanks, now scheduled to hit theaters in fall 2016. In a sign of the times, two of the best-selling books on Dante today are memoirs crediting the poet’s work with nothing less than saving one author’s life (Rod Dreher’s How Dante Can Save Your Life) and teaching another about “grief, healing and the mysteries of love” (Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood).

Whether he is helping people to survive, promoting the highbrow wares of Italy and a liberal arts education, or hawking consumer goods ranging from perfume to toilet paper, one thing about Dante is more true today than ever before: he enjoys immense posthumous popularity —commercially and politically as well as academically and artistically — because he’s a canonical figure with broad-based appeal, a magnet for elite and mainstream audiences alike.

And why not? He puts his enemies and frenemies in Hell (damning the worst of them before they die), confounds romantic love with the love of God, and prophesies his own fame, all while polishing his audacious fantasy with a veneer of spiritual fervor, intellectual rigor and artistic splendor.

In his birthday message, Pope Francis praised Dante as a “prophet of hope” for offering a model by which humankind may “attain a new condition, marked by harmony, peace and happiness,” words that apply disturbingly well to the Coke jingle lip-synched by the “young people from all over the world” gathered on a hilltop located (where else?) in Italy. For an advertising guru like Don Draper, this is indeed the Real Thing.

We found out in the first episode of season five that Don was also born under the sign of the twins, his 40th birthday falling on June 1, 1966. Speaking as Dick Whitman, he tells Megan he actually turned 40 six months earlier, but she will have none of it, insisting that “this,” June 1, “is your birthday now,” a reminder, as if we needed it, that he didn’t so much steal another man’s identity as invent a new one. The “Don Draper” we know is, like Dante, very much a Gemini, a master and victim of the double life.

Happy belated birthday to you both.

A version of this story first appeared in PopMatters on Sept. 2. Guy P. Raffa created the Danteworlds website at UT Austin, where he teaches a course on Dante’s Hell and Its Afterlife. He has published three books, including The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy.

Image: Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

ABOVE: Marco Polo’s caravan traveling to India. Detail from the Catalan Atlas, Abraham Cresques, 1375.

A Virtual Quest Online users can now travel back in time to the medieval world by clicking through a collection of international research on the first digital platform of its kind, known as “MappaMundi” — a Latin word meaning “world map.” The Web portal launched in October and is managed and maintained through collaboration between the Department of English and UT Libraries. This growing collection of research on the Middle Ages allows scholars and teachers to study and analyze data, creating their own kaleidoscopic understanding of the world in deep time.

Begin your medieval journey at globalmiddleages.org.

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