As a college freshman in 1994, Darby O’Donnell wasn’t sure what to major in — until he found the answer right in his own backyard. While helping his father build a deck at their Newport News house, they discovered an archaeological site. “We were digging new post holes and found old ceramics and handblown glass,” O’Donnell recalls. “I’d worked as a historical interpreter in the Jamestown glasshouse, so I knew it was old stuff.” O’Donnell began working toward a double major in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Virginia and was drawn back to his yard again and again to dig deeper...
With the release of her memoir, Kiara Whack is spreading awareness on how to make living a healthy lifestyle not just a diet. Through personal experiences and a psychology degree from the University of Virginia, the Hampton native realized her mental health recovery was directly tied to what she ate.
Millennials Akshita and [UVA alumna] Mrinalika M Bhanj Deo of Mayurbhanj, Odisha, make royalty relevant today by using their status to create positive change.
(Podcast) Mike Wells, a native of West Virginia, received his BA degree in history from the University of Virginia and his JD degree from Wake Forest Law School. He has practiced law in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for 45 years. Over 15 years, he has written nearly 200 widely acclaimed essays collected as “On the Way to the Courthouse.” Several have appeared on NPR and in print across the state in newspapers and professional journals.
A few familiar places in and around Charlottesville have historic roots. Three UVA alums are now digging into how these staples in Charlottesville functioned years ago and the ways they impacted Black people. Catherine Ziph, Susan Hellman and Anne Bruder are the architectural historians on the project, mapping out safe havens for Blacks during the ’60s.
Hajjar Baban has a shy smile that flickers across her face when she speaks about her work. Her voice is confident, but interrupted by long, contemplative pauses. “I’m someone who just cares a lot, maybe too much sometimes, about everything.” Still in her early 20s, Baban has already earned international notice for her intense and sometimes harrowing poems. We spoke with Baban from Charlottesville, where she is currently pursuing a graduate degree from UVA, about her work and what wonder means to her.
Demilade Adewole is in her second year at the University of Virginia. The daughter of a Navy veteran, she has received two scholarships from ThanksUSA to support her studies. “This scholarship is actually very important, especially this year,” Adewole said. “I was kind of short money this year, because the housing expense increased. When ThanksUSA came in, which was the last scholarship, it took care of the expense that I had been worried about. So that’s how important it is for me to afford college. Like, literally, it was the difference between me having to pull out a loan this year and bein...
(Podcast) The restorative potential of urban green space is described by Jenny Roe, professor and director of UVA’s Center for Design and Health.
Despina Louca, a University of Virginia condensed-matter physicist, says her students are primarily working with in-house instruments, including x-ray machines in her lab and a nearby single-crystal diffractometer. “The basic stuff we can do here. We can’t just sit here waiting; we would be out of business.”
Slicing up liberal cities carries some risk for Republicans, however. In the long term, demographic changes can cause even gerrymandered districts to flip Democratic, as they did in Atlanta’s suburbs over the past 10 years. In Texas, “the Republicans have been using this to torment Austin for a long time, but they may have spread themselves a bit too thin,” said J. Miles Coleman, a political cartographer at UVA’s Center for Politics. Austin’s sole Democratic district, represented by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, covers only about a quarter of the city’s population and extends to San Antonio, some 8...
J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics, said that “suburban counties like Loudoun and Henrico, which used to be swingy, are solid blue now. So the best Youngkin can hope to do is keep McAuliffe’s margins down in places like that.”
According to Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics, 19 Democratic-held House seats are considered toss-ups in 2022, compared to just two held by Republicans. The redrawing of districts based on the 2020 Census is expected to give Republicans a minor advantage in the House.
Virginia’s first election for governor, in 1851, featured Democrat George Summers versus Whig Joseph Johnson. It was the first time Virginia allowed for people who were not landowners to cast a ballot, although voting was still restricted to white males. “In the 1851 Constitution, they do, at that point, reach something like universal white male suffrage,” said A.E. Dick Howard, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia. “And at the same time as the on the other side of the coin, they’re saying, ‘Well, let’s be careful now, there’s still some people that don’t belong.’”
The proliferation of jaywalking laws is a particularly American phenomenon. “Although most of our (safer!) peer nations in Europe have no corresponding rule, jaywalking laws are ubiquitous in U.S. cities. As UVA historian Peter Norton has written, these regulations date back to the beginning of the automotive era, when they were introduced by car-industry-aligned groups eager to shift blame for fatal crashes from drivers to pedestrians.”
Another panelist, Rita Koganzon, assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, focused her comments on the “political theory” behind the secular attack on religious schools. She said that it holds that education should aim at opening “as many doors as possible” for children and young people. Education that precludes many life alternatives is regarded as “a bad education.” She referred to the legal philosopher John Rawls, who said that children should be educated for an “open future, or for autonomy.” They should be able to “critically examine and revise their conceptions of th...
Many doctors aren’t impressed with doctor-recommendation sites. “I’m a physician, and maybe I’m a little sensitive, but their comments, positive or negative, can get overblown,” says Mohan Nadkarni, a professor of medicine and chief of general internal medicine at UVA Health.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center, pulled the Census tracts and blocks for Haymarket, Clifton and Middleburg and compared the numbers to 2010. Clifton lost 39 residents and Middleburg lost four, which Lombard said seems to be symbolic of the problems with numbers in small areas. In Haymarket, however, one particular tract stood out, so Lombard used county real estate records and satellite imagery to examine the area. Based on that look, it appears that although Haymarket may have been affected somewhat by the algorithm, it was overcounted in 2010 by showing nearly...
Andrew Block, a professor at the UVA School of Law and the director of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice from 2014 to 2019, said, “Cases like these are in many ways the hardest cases because you [often] have the adult-like nature of what the child has done but also the fact that they are still very young. … That adult system is not good at rehabilitating kids.”
Following the traumatic year Haiti has seen, many Haitian scholars are calling out what is most familiar in pop culture: performative advocacy in the form of heartbreak emojis, prayers, and hashtags on social media. Marlene Daut, a professor of African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, recognizes the public outcry as opportunistic and meaningless, highlighting the role of disaster capitalism on other Caribbean islands, like in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria. “I think a lot of people when they do charity, they want it to be easy,” she said. “If you really want to d...
Nicki Minaj’s mostly young, very online fans – known as the Barbz, after her alter ego Harajuku Barbie – found themselves called to defend her. Their defense of Minaj’s rhetoric isn’t really about politics. It’s about their shared affinities and their sense of self. “I think we’re now more likely to read political intent behind fan actions that might not be political in and of themselves,” says Lori Morimoto, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia who studies fan culture. “When [a] celebrity is attacked, it can feel personal in a very real way.”