When ancient walls talk, Sarah Levin-Richardson listens. What she hears are the unheard voices of a distant past—those of slaves and prostitutes, men and women who, in the classical literary tradition, are otherwise left on the outside looking in. An assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Washington, Levin-Richardson specializes in [...]

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If Eric Chudler could design the perfect children’s television show, he would fuse three elements: dinosaurs, outer space, and the brain: “Those are three things almost every kid can get into.” But budgets being what they are—and technology to clone dinosaurs or launch rockets into deep space lagging behind recent advances in the field of [...]

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We all have that song—the piece of music that gets us moving in the morning. The one that taps a hidden reserve of energy during a workout in pursuit of a personal best or which settles the nerves at the end of a stressful day. It’s the one that really takes you back, spurs you [...]

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Growing up in the small borough of Lewistown in central Pennsylvania, Jack Berryman excelled at athletics. As a freshman in high school, he lettered at shortstop for the varsity baseball team. Each fall, he’d leg it down the soccer field with ease. When the weather turned cold in winter, he was usually one of ten [...]

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In 1999, Megan Ming Francis left home in Seattle to study computer science at Rice University. Her plan was to see the world, then someday return to Washington to work for Microsoft. Fifteen years later—after subsequent stopovers in New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and California—she was back, but instead of a career as a computer programmer, [...]

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What happens when you’re a surgeon who relies on her hands for intricate operations and one day you lose the upper body strength needed to perform them? Ask Barbara Goff. The chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Goff serves as professor and division director of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Washington and the Seattle [...]

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Last July, Thaïsa Way set out with her daughter to climb Mt. Rainier. Several days and 9,000 vertical feet later, they stood together atop the 14,411-foot summit. Beneath the blisteringly blue sky stretched a vast sheet of cloud into a trackless sea of white, broken only by an occasional archipelago of mountain peaks jutting upwards [...]

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The late October rain arrived this week, but soon Seattle will be hit with a deluge of a different sort. For three days during the first week of November, comics scholars from across the world will descend on the University of Washington for The International Comic Arts Forum, the largest gathering of its kind in [...]

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If you’ve ever helped a parent or family member use the internet to research health symptoms or decipher a prescription, you’ve participated in what Carmen Gonzalez and her research team call a brokering interaction—helping someone bridge a language or skills gap in order to access information and resources. Gonzalez, an assistant professor in the Department of [...]

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Most enter graduate school with a clear vision of their intended path of research. William Streitberger decided to follow his nose. “I loved the look, the feel, the smell—everything,” Streitberger, a professor of English at the University of Washington, says of time spent among sixteenth and seventeenth century tomes as a graduate student at the University of [...]

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The slump of a shoulder; the twitch of a lip; a certain gaze. Some actions say it all without the need for words. But when so much daily human connection and communication occurs on this substratum of silence, what can we learn from what’s left unsaid? It’s a question for Valerie Manusov, a professor in [...]

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Hey hey, my my / Rock and roll can never die / My my, hey hey / Rock and roll is here to stay Any seasoned musician will tell you that it’s one thing to say the lyrics, but another thing to make them ring true. If Neil Young’s famous lines are to be recognized as rock [...]

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