I arrived in the Unites States 30 years ago, penniless but wide-eyed. I did not come to be a graduate student. I came as a migrant, fleeing war. I was fortunate. I met my first wife in Ecuador and she was a US citizen, I therefore did not come undocumented. Since I had only […]
From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee
By Indrani Chatterjee In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager […]
From PhD to Public Advocate: My Path
By Yael Schacher In my first year on the job market in the fall of 2015, with a fresh PhD in American Studies from Harvard, I did not get an interview for a job at another university where I had been teaching as an adjunct (and getting stellar evaluations) for three years. This kind of […]
From There to Here: Lina de Castillo
By Lina de Castillo In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I […]
From There to Here: Susan Deans-Smith
I came to Texas from England over thirty years ago, now. My prior experience of living in the U.S. had been during my year abroad as part of my undergraduate degree at the University of Warwick, embedded in the department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although unbeknownst to me at the time my […]
From There to Here: Yoav Di-Capua
by Yoav Di-Capua (UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.) I wish I could introduce clarity, coherence and a sense of purpose into the story of my arrival to this country from my native city of Jerusalem. I wish I could say that it was meticulously planned and well-executed. That […]
From There to Here: Toyin Falola
By Toyin Falola (UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.) This Spotlight, this City In my space and time of growth, The long metallic snake of screeching hisses And novel magical magnetic movement Became a muse of songs and fantasies Making the urge for voyage ineluctable And from a tender […]
From There to Here: Julie Hardwick
by Julie Hardwick (UT History faculty come from all over the world. Here are their stories.) I came here, aged 21, on 15 August 1984 to join a study abroad program in Wisconsin with every intention of returning to the UK to become an accountant in London – and in fact I had a nice job […]
Three-year-olds on the world stage
By Nathan Stone When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern […]
The Public Archive: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions
Kolaches (Credit: Whitney, via Flickr) Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and […]