Research & Creative Activity

Student-Faculty Collaboration Refreshes McClung Exhibit

Anthropology student and professor collaborate to update long-standing McClung exhibit on human origins. The university celebrated the Scopes Trial Centennial throughout 2025 with numerous public activities that addressed a variety of topics related to the historic Tennessee trial and the science of evolution. As official events rolled along, one honors anthropology student and her faculty…
Fern Scientist Uncovers How Limits Fuel Evolution

Combining curiosity about ferns with the high-tech imaging available at UT, Professor Jacob S. Suissa is adding new insight into evolution. Research by Assistant Professor Jacob S. Suissa at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is revealing complexity in how ferns have evolved. Instead of the vascular structure inside fern stems changing as a direct adaptation…
Rats! Science Redefines Social Media Sensation

The rodent that caused a sidewalk impression known as the “Chicago Rat Hole” likely was a squirrel, according to a UT animal researcher and his colleagues. An imprint of a rodent in concrete is more than a meme to an animal researcher from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his collaborators. By investigating photos of…
Sinnreich Book Receives Prize

Photo by Erik Campos Professor Helene Sinnreich’s book The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II was a shortlist finalist for the 2025 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize. The German Studies Association awards the prize every two years to the best book dealing with Nazi Germany…
Dear Maria Edgeworth: Digitizing Historical Letters

A UT Digital Humanities team leads the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project to create a digital database of the author’s history-revealing correspondence. The UT faculty-led Maria Edgeworth Letters Project (MELP) will digitize the historic and extensive correspondence of the most commercially successful novelist from the Regency period, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities…
New Program to Enhance Grad Student Career Readiness

Graduate student training program in sciences and math gets a boost from the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $399,209 to Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) faculty to develop and implement a holistic disciplinary training program for first-year graduate students that enhances research, teaching, and leadership skills,…
UT Professor Shines Light on Virginia Woolf

UT Professor Urmila Seshagiri’s scholarship provides context for Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction in The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories. A century after Virginia Woolf became a leading modernist writer, a professor from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is showing the world a new side of her, through three of the…
Radicals in Early Christian Conflict Redefined

A new book by religious studies Professor Tina Shepardson examines religious devotion and polarization within Christianity during late antiquity. Examining conflicts over Christian doctrine in the fifth and sixth centuries might provide a case study for thinking about religion and violence today, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, scholar suggests. Tina Shepardson, UT Distinguished Professor in…
Burghardt Paper Earns Biosemiotics Award

Burghardt paper on interpreting animal behavior earns Biosemiotics Award for 2024. Professor Emeritus Gordon Burghardt received the 2024 Biosemiotics Achievement Award for his contribution to a special issue of Biosemiotics, titled “Jakob von Uexküll, heterophenomenology, and behavior systems I: Core ethology and Merleau-Ponty.” In the special issue, Umwelt Theory and Phenomenology, Burghardt’s winning paper compares…
Multi-Lab Collaboration Unites Math and Biology

Researchers from math and molecular biology collaborate for a new analysis method. Photo by Erik Campos An interdisciplinary team of University of Tennessee researchers recently published in Biophysical Journal on their development of a new statistical method that improves analysis in single-molecule fluorescence experiments, which are used to study important protein complexes in cells. The…