News

The Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative has awarded fellowships to three Arts & Sciences faculty members for the 2017-18 academic year as part of an effort to establish UVA as a research center of excellence for the study of the Indigenous arts.

Thomas Koberda, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, is one of 126 scientists and scholars in the United States and Canada who were selected this month to receive a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship.

UVA artists-in-residence Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the creators of “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon,” offered encouraging critiques to student-performers and shared their decades of creative insight with University and community audiences.

Assistant Prof. of Anthropology Mark Sicoli uses ‘big data’ computing to compare dozens of languages and shed light on migration patterns and cultural contact in the Americas that might’ve begun in a place called Beringia.

Karen Kafadar, chair of the Dept. of Statistics, is developing new techniques for understanding the difference between length of diagnosis and length of life regarding cancer screening.

New mitochondrial and nuclear DNA testing of prehistoric skeletal remains provides “the best evidence of a social hierarchy in the ancient Southwest,” according to UVA archaeologist Stephen Plog.

The Association of American Universities has announced that UVA is one of 12 member campuses selected to receive mini-grants supporting initiatives to improve undergraduate education in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The Creative Writing Program concluded its series of three public events featuring Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Junot Díaz with a lecture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and as with the previous reading and the conversation with Assistant Prof. Njelle Hamilton, it was standing room only in the Newcomb Hall Ballroom.

Arts & Sciences faculty voted unanimously in the fall of 2015 to support the program’s move for departmental status. Offering courses on women's history, literature and art, women in sports, queer theory, gender politics, and LGBTQ Studies, the department engages in the study of gender and sexualities, with an emphasis on transnational perspectives.

The UVA Summit on Liberal Arts & Sciences Education for the 21st Century, held on Jan. 20 at Morven Farm, drew a distinguished panel of prominent thinkers on undergraduate curriculum reform including representatives from Harvard, Stanford, William & Mary, Duke, and Barnard College.