When Chadwick Allen delivers his lecture, “Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Art & Literature,” in Kane Hall on December 3, he’ll do so with an underlying message: the network of earthworks that dot the eastern half of North America not only hold knowledge from the Indigenous past, but also provide inspiration for Indigenous futures. [...]

Continue Reading →

Food brings people together. In the case of the academic collaboration between Jennifer Otten and Branden Born, so did food policy. Otten, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and core faculty in the Nutritional Sciences Program within the School of Public Health (first from left above), met Born, an [...]

Continue Reading →

Kate Norako is a scholar, a mother, a hula dancer, and a third-degree black belt in karate. This fall, the Hawaii-born assistant professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Washington added another title to the list of things she is: published poet. When not working on academic projects—including a forthcoming monograph on late medieval [...]

Continue Reading →

Devin Naar is a natural storyteller. In order to relate the rich yet fragmented history of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and their descendants, you have to be. It’s a story spanning centuries and continents—from the ancient port city of Salonica in what is now Greece to Seattle [...]

Continue Reading →

“The Ugly Duckling.” “The Little Mermaid.” “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” If you haven’t read one of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, you likely have seen one adapted on film or heard one of the titles invoked in everyday conversation. Since they began appearing in the 1830s, Andersen’s tales quickly became known the world over–translated from their [...]

Continue Reading →

Growing up in Idaho Falls, Kevin O’Brien felt surrounded by science. With thousands of residents employed at the nearby Idaho National Laboratories, the high desert community cultivated an air of intellectualism and sophistication manifest in a community symphony and opera. Occupations ran the gamut. Whereas O’Brien’s paternal grandparents farmed potatoes and his maternal grandparents ran [...]

Continue Reading →

A riot of blue and subtle umber, the painting on the wall of Thomas Hawn’s office might easily be mistaken for an abstract effort. But where some see abstract shapes, Hawn knows exactly what he’s looking at: a depiction of Mycobacterium tuberculosis approaching a macrophage white blood cell. In most cases, macrophage immune cells are [...]

Continue Reading →

Most people spend summer enjoying the bright, warm weather. Charity Urbanski spent hers hunting monsters. “Mostly my summer has been devoted to monsters—dragons, revenants, werewolves, that sort of thing,” says Urbanski, a senior lecturer in the University of Washington Department of History specializing in France and England in the 12th century. As she prepares to [...]

Continue Reading →

Growing up, Kristi Morgansen dreamed of becoming an astronaut—of unknown worlds and the engineering feats that would allow her to explore them. Today, as chair of the UW Department of Astronautics and Aeronautics, she does all that and more. She didn’t become an astronaut, but she does have her own school of robotic fish, so [...]

Continue Reading →

For social work professor Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, the celebration of LGBTQ Pride is a matter of public health. “Invisibility creates vulnerability and tends to lead to very poor health outcomes,” says Fredriksen Goldsen, professor and director of Healthy Generations Hartford Center of Excellence at the University of Washington. She’d know, having served as lead on [...]

Continue Reading →

If UW biology professor Greg Wilson had a time machine, he’d dial it back 66 million years to the last days of the late Cretaceous—a period when Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops still thundered across the Montana badlands and small mammals—none larger than a modern raccoon—scurried along the ground. The area he’d visit is known as [...]

Continue Reading →

Selim Kuru’s love of literature all started with his mother, Nihal. “She was an avid reader and had a library under lock and key and would release books for me according to my age,” Kuru recalls of his youth growing up in Samsun, a city on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. For Kuru, “reading turned into [...]

Continue Reading →