A Bridge from Campus to Community
The College of Arts and Sciences transforms knowledge into action—bringing discovery, learning, and innovation beyond campus to engage, inspire, and create lasting impact in communities.
Outreach activities that have been traditions for decades continue, and new avenues are reaching more people.
Space for Everyone to Learn
The College of Arts and Sciences is not limited to current UT students. People of all ages come to UT to discover and pursue their passions.
Darwin Day at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture has long been a favorite for families and science enthusiasts. Each year, the event highlights new scholars and research, with recent additions including activities focused on animal behavior.
The UT Downtown Gallery brings art to the community, including participating in Knoxville’s First Friday events every month. The gallery recently featured an exhibit related to research into East Knoxville’s former Bottom neighborhood, celebrating and preserving stories from a southern Black neighborhood demolished in a push for urban renewal.
Meanwhile, an exhibit that opened this year at the McClung Museum, Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art, was informed by decades of scholarship by Lisa King, an associate professor in the Department of English, on representing Indigenous people.
The Scopes Trial Centennial, a year-long program centered on the anniversary of the famous trial over teaching evolution in public schools, highlights the breadth of experiences the college offers to the community. Scientists, scholars, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, exhibitions, and a production of Inherit the Wind at the Clarence Brown Theatre have offered a wide array of opportunities to explore topics related to this historic event.
Expanding Access
Each year on Frederick Douglass Day, UT welcomes students, faculty, and the wider community to actively engage with historic documents. More than 100 people show up to join in a national transcribe-a-thon, logging in to the Library of Congress to create text transcripts that make those documents more accessible for research. For the first time in 2025, UT welcomed students from African American history and literature classes at Knoxville’s Fulton High School to the event.
Faculty are expanding access to historic documents in other ways too. Hilary Havens, associate director of the new Digital Humanities interdisciplinary program, has developed methods for using image manipulation software to recover deleted text from 18th century novels, providing new insight into authors and changes made to manuscripts. She is also co-editor of an open-access archive for the works of one of the most successful novelists of the Regency period—Maria Edgeworth.
Tennessee as a Living Laboratory
Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences work with community partners on programs that make lives better today while also preparing graduates to be effective immediately in the 21st century workforce, serving Tennesseans through UT’s land-grant mission.
Students in the Center for the Study of Tennesseans and War research, preserve, and share the stories of people’s lives from the 1700s to today. Using StoryMap technology, this history becomes even more dynamic on the screen as part of a digital humanities project.
An interdisciplinary green jobs initiative is bringing partners together to benefit inner-city and rural Southern Appalachian communities, and research that began in a UT microbiology lab is on a path to reduce bioplastic waste.
News of UT’s expertise is a reaching wide audience through The Conversation, an online, independent source for news articles and informed analysis that is republished by print and broadcast media from the local to the international level.
Last year marked the second in a row that UT placed first in the SEC for the number of articles written by its scholars, and more than half of them were from faculty and graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Future UT undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members discover early that there has never been a better time to be a Volunteer, and the College of Arts and Sciences offers endless opportunities to discover, learn, and engage with local communities.
Check the UT College of Arts and Sciences online calendar regularly, at calendar.utk.edu/artsci, for events open to the public.
By Amy Beth Miller