When More Hall was built in 1946 as the new home for UW’s Civil Engineering Department, architects Bebb & Jones emphasized function over form. The building’s art deco design incorporated lighting from large windows to convey the feeling of spaciousness, while the buildings location adjacent to the Northern Pacific Railroad allowed for a spur track [...]

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James Clauss admits he was never much of a student. That is, until he was given the opportunity to teach. Growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania, Clauss recalls being a “below average” student until high school, when, “in order to escape biology and chemistry,” he signed up to take two years of ancient Greek. Much to [...]

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As a college student living in Chicago’s suburbs, I would often cope with the city’s dreary, frigid winters by imagining I was instead living in another similarly snow-bound location—somewhere in Alaska, perhaps, or maybe Finland. There was a romantic quality to imagining oneself into another world entirely; stepping into a mental space where those all-too-familiar [...]

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Growing up, Charlotte Sanders didn’t know what social work was. She did, however, know “what it felt like.” Her mother, a worker with the Department of Social and Health Services, would participate in donation drives for members of the Toppenish farming community on the Yakama Indian Reservation and Charlotte would help out. “She showed me [...]

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If aliens were ever to land, Michael Berry thinks his music theory students would be prepared. “I want my students to be able to figure out what makes their music tick,” Berry says, calling up connotations of the scene in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which aliens and humans communicate through a [...]

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If Adam Warren could time travel, he might head to Mexico City in the 1920s—the period immediately following a decade of revolutionary war that was, in his view, “a moment of radical new ideas and imagining how Mexican society might be transformed.” Then again, Warren says he’d have to consider other areas of his research [...]

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To understand trolls is to understand oneself—and professor Lotta Gavel Adams knows them better than most. But Gavel Adams, professor emerita and Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies at the University of Washington, insists she’s neither troll scholar nor folklorist. “I am an historian of literature and culture who looks at what trolls look like [...]

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“The pursuit of happiness.” It’s a phrase that helped form our basis as a nation, but could it be that the pursuit of “happiness” is leaving us less happy than ever before? What is happiness, anyway? Those are questions Annie Nguyen explores in the writing classes she teaches as a lecturer at the University of Washington Tacoma; [...]

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Step into Steve Herbert’s office in Smith Hall at the University of Washington and it’s the art that immediately catches your eye. On a back wall above his desk hang two large pen-and-ink drawings of labyrinthine detail, imbued with a spinning sense of motion through thousands of short hatch marks made by a ballpoint pen. [...]

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For some, traveling the world conveys a sense of freedom. For Sonal Khullar, associate professor of art history at the University of Washington, however, the act of crossing borders all too often illustrates the strictures and stumbling blocks of globalism in the twenty-first century. “One of the things I’ve noted is that we usually think [...]

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For any academic, the moment of holding your first published book is one of accomplishment, elation, and total triumph. But for Alexes Harris, a professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, that moment came on the heels of learning her life hung in the balance. A year earlier, she’d been working out when she [...]

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Deep in a cavernous concrete basement, Jennifer Bean sits stooped over a Steenbeck machine. The large, flatbed editor helps her hand-control the frame-by-frame movement of a filmstrip nobody has seen in eighty years. Like all filmstrips produced before the mid-century introduction of acetate safety stock, it is made of nitrocellulose, a highly flammable material prone [...]

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