Streamkeeper Nick Chen shares career navigations with IAS students

IAS alum Nick Chen recently spoke with faculty member Raissa DeSmet’s senior students about his career navigations since graduating in 2016. Chen is a Restoration Technician and Ecologist at Adopt A Stream Foundation who earned his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies. Chen originally ...

March 26, 2019

Aarshin Karande publishes “I Know Why the Mockingbird Sings: Between America’s Blackness and Whiteness”

IAS alum Aarshin Karande has published “I Know Why the Mockingbird Sings: Between America’s Blackness and Whiteness” in The Republic. In his essay, Karande reckons with America’s identity and its binaries. He contends, “America as we know it is in the midst of many changes—the postponed reckoning of its many discontents. Changes that will decide, among other things, whether the journey from President Obama to President Trump represents a triumph of diversity or an omen of immorals. The looming answer lies ...

March 26, 2019

Winners Announced in MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics and Essay Press Book Contest

Essay Press and the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Poetics are happy to announce the winners of their collaborative book contest: of color by Katherine Agard and The War Requiem by Kaia Solveig Preus! Both books will be published in the coming year, and the authors will be invited to read on campus at part of the From the Convergence Zone reading series. This year's ...

March 26, 2019

Discovery Core: The Science and Medicine of Harry Potter

Seldom is there a college class where students have read more on a topic than the professor, but that might be the case with The Science and Medicine of Harry Potter. It’s one of the Discovery Core classes for first-year, pre-major students at the University of Washington Bothell. IAS faculty member Laura Harkewicz is a Harry Potter fan...

March 19, 2019

Faculty and students collaborate on Viaduct podcast: Taxpayer Time Machine

IAS faculty member Amoshaun Toft and Community Radio Journalism student Kristine Kim (Interdisciplinary Arts) collaborated with the Culture Hustlers to record thoughts and reflections from attendees of a public festival where Seattle residents said goodbye to the “Alaska Way Viaduct” – a crumbling two story freeway that runs across the waterfront in downtown Seattle. The interviews were done in four vintage 1950s trailers on ...

March 15, 2019

Amaranth Borsuk and Shannon Cram speak at “Earthly Impressions” symposium

IAS faculty members Amaranth Borsuk and Shannon Cram spoke last week at a symposium organized by faculty in UW's Textual Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Earthly Impressions considered points of contact between the history of the book and the environmental humanities. Borsuk spoke about "Destruction and Durability in Artists' Books," with particular attention to the holdings of the University of Washington's Special Collections. Cram discussed ...

March 11, 2019

Alka Kurian publishes “#StopThisShame, #GirlsAtDhaba, #WhyLoiter and more: women’s fight against sexual harassment didn’t start with #MeToo”

IAS faculty member Alka Kurian published an article "#StopThisShame, #GirlsAtDhaba, #WhyLoiter and more: women's fight against sexual harassment didn't start with #MeToo." This article claims that "while the success of #MeToo testifies to the power of social media in putting the spotlight on the culture of misogyny across the world ...

March 8, 2019

Comics aficionado T. Andrew Wahl curates exhibit and launches speaking tour

In February, IAS alum T. Andrew Wahl began traversing the state with his presentation, Four-Color Reality: How Comic Books and the Real World Shape Each Other, as part of Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau. In this interactive presentation, he explores how everything from social movements to business concerns to changing demographics have shaped the reality seen in the pages of comics. Wahl’s talk will bring him to dozens of communities on both sides of the Cascades throughout 2019 and 2020. Wahl has also ...

March 7, 2019

Ted Hiebert and Jin-Kyu Jung: At the intersection of art and geography

As IAS faculty members, Ted Hiebert and Jin-Kyu Jung have been colleagues for a long time. But they seldom had occasion to talk until they found themselves commuting on the same bus. Those commuter conversations a few years ago led to a creative collaboration of researchers from two different fields. Recently, Jung and Hiebert received a UW Royalty Research Fund (RRF) Scholar award for nearly $39,000 for a research project called “Imagining the Details: Creative-Critical Engagement of Mapping and Imagining.”

March 7, 2019