
Ocean waters prevent release of ancient methane
Environmental scientist Katy Sparrow ’17 (PhD) set out to discover whether ancient-sourced methane, released due to warming ocean waters, survives to be emitted to the atmosphere.

‘Inclusive habits of the mind and heart’: Diversity, justice, and higher education
In this essay, Sasha Eloi-Evans ’05, ’17 (W), the academic programming coordinator for the Office of Minority Student Affairs and a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, reflects on diversity in higher education in the nearly 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

Mark Bils named fellow of the Econometric Society
Bils’s work has focused on how wages and prices respond to the business cycle, and is one of 20 fellows named to the prestigious international organization this year.

‘You can dance if you want to:’ Five things you might not know about dance at Rochester
Did you know you can major in dance? Or take a course in dance even if you’ve never danced before? As the annual inspireDance Festival gears up later this month, learn more about how dance and Rochester go hand in hand.

Looking at urban history as a fight for space, power
Chicago and Delhi. Rome and Rochester. The students in the 100-level course “The City: Contested Spaces” take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?

Humboldt Research Awards support professors’ collaborations in Germany
Two University faculty members—William Jones of the Department of Chemistry and Xi-Cheng Zhang of the Institute of Optics—have received prestigious Humboldt Research Awards.

New book explores ‘ethical turn’ of critical theory
Professor Robert Doran focuses on iconic 20th-century philosophers like Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Gayatri Spivak, and Richard Rorty, and explores critical theory’s pivot away from a narrowly focused investigation of meaning and text.

Introductory Painting course turns Rochester waiting rooms into ‘welcome rooms’
Students in Heather Layton’s classes this year have worked with staff and community members at the Jordan Health Centers to fill these spaces with art.

The mysterious aftermath of an infamous pirate raid
Just before dawn on May 18, 1683, pirates stormed the port city of Veracruz, capturing around 1,500 people and selling them to the slave markets of Haiti and South Carolina. Pablo Sierra Silva, assistant professor of history, is on a mission to trace what happened to them.

Chemists go ‘back to the future’ to untangle quantum dot mystery
For more than 30 years, researchers have been creating quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable properties. But quantum dot synthesis has occurred largely by trial and error. Thanks to the work of two Rochester chemists, that may be about to change.