Police brutality incidents, such as the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, have made the issues surrounding policing and racism more visible than ever before. The social movements sparked by these incidents, and dozens like them in the last decade, have caused many, including Puget Sound students and professors, to ask tough questions about the current American justice system.
Author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s earliest memories are of being separated from his parents. The hazy recollections of his family’s escape from Vietnam in 1975 and arrival in the United States fuel his work as a writer to reconcile his dual identities as both an American and a refugee. Nguyen spoke this month at University of Puget Sound, where he gave the fall 2021 Susan Resneck Pierce Lecture in Public Affairs and the Arts.
Born in a multi-ethnic region of China, Yu Luo, Puget Sound’s Suzanne Wilson Barnett Chair in Contemporary China Studies and assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, didn’t realize how little she knew of her heritage until college. It was through her doctoral fieldwork in her home province that she noticed how unique her perspective could be as both an insider and outsider of her own culture. We talked with Yu about her research on China’s ethnic minority groups, what it’s like studying something so personal, and how her research translates to teaching.
Academia is in Steven Neshyba’s DNA. The son of an oceanographer, the chemistry professor recalls that dinner table conversations while he was growing up were always very intellectual. “My father ... did a lot of work in the Arctic and the Antarctic, so when he brought that home, that kind of got into my blood,” he says. Neshyba’s research centers on ice, specifically ice in clouds and how global warming is changing the makeup of that ice. In the classroom, he has received attention for his “class flipping” approach to teaching, which challenges traditional higher education models.
It was nearly 2 p.m., and summer camp at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma was wrapping up for the day. Linnea, a Puget Sound psychology student, is working at the museum this summer as a “learning experiences” intern, teaching dozens of children about science, technology, and art. She found the internship through RISE (Reflective Immersive Sophomore Experience), a new Puget Sound program designed specifically for second-year students.
A self-professed “outdoor bum,” Peter Hodum, professor of biology and environmental policy and decision making, spends his nonteaching days by the sea studying birds. Seabirds were a passion he discovered as a first-year student doing summer research at Bowdoin College. That opportunity was “revelatory and transformative,” he says. Now, his research centers on seabird conservation, specifically community-based conservation—an approach that centers local communities in the work.
Books and movies often portray medieval Europe as a highly regimented, theologically conservative society marked by strict gender roles and a total absence of queer people, but according to history major Chloe Shankland ’23, that view isn’t accurate. While few sources exist, literature from the period hints at a vibrant world of nonheteronormative art and culture.
Shankland worked with her advisor, Professor of History Katherine Smith, to examine poems, legal documents, and church records from 1000 to 1250 A.D. in search of references to queer identities and fluid gender roles.
