Department News
This section of Dialogue features internal news and noteworthy achievements by faculty, staff, and students in our college, as well as other department news. If you have a news item, please email Amanda Womac.
 Jessi Grieser, assistant professor of English linguistics, will present “Language and Belonging” at Duolingo’s 2021 Duocon, a free global event at the intersection of language, learning, and technology hosted by Patton Oswalt and including Trevor Noah as a plenary speaker. |
 A chapter from Alex Bentley’s book, I’ll Have What She’s Having, was featured on the MIT Press Reader, the digital magazine from MIT Press. Bentley is a professor of anthropology. |
 Daniel H. Magilow, professor of German in the UT Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Helene Sinnreich, associate professor in the UT Department of Religious Studies and director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies, are the new co-editors-in-chief of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum academic journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. |
In the Media
This section of Dialogue features external media coverage faculty, staff, and students in our college received. Links are sourced from UT System News Roundup.
WYMT: UT, UK announced $50 million manufacturing project for Army (Chemistry)
The University of Tennessee, the University of Kentucky and the U.S. Army will pursue a $50 million project aimed at advanced manufacturing to develop advanced military equipment.
Chattanooga Times Free Press: Tennessee students don’t learn enough Black history, professors say (History)
Tennessee’s social studies curriculum requires instruction on a wide range of social, racial and economic justice topics that cover state history, but some history professors say few students enter their classrooms having learned much about Black history and even fewer have learned about how Black people and people of color influenced Tennessee history… Robert Bland, a history professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, said it’s common in his course for college students to discover new aspects of history that they feel have been “hidden from them.”
The Washington Post: It’s natural to feel happy and sad at the same time. Here’s when it can become a problem (Psychology)
Wrestling with two opposite feelings at once is called ambivalence. It’s a normal part of being human, but at times such internal conflict can be unhealthy. Ambivalence means “feeling both good and bad,” Jeff Larsen, a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. Feeling bittersweet or nostalgic are common forms of it. “Think about how you might feel when you’re at the top of a roller coaster: excited but also terrified.”
Knoxville News Sentinel: This University of Tennessee scientist is answering critical questions about the Red Planet (Earth & Planetary Sciences)
Linda Kah has spent her entire career working remotely. Literally. Her paleontological expeditions have taken her from the deep Sahara Desert to the high Andes mountains to the eerie silence of the remote Canadian arctic. Kah, an associate professor of geology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, studies some of the oldest life on Earth. Now she is bringing that expertise to Mars for the second time.
WBIR: University of Tenessee professor gives context as thousands flee Afghanistan after U.S. withdrawal (Political Science)
The Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was set to complete its troop withdrawal after a costly two-decade war…. A Global Studies Fellow and associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Gary Uzonyi, gave some context about the situation in the country.