UA alumna and long-time donor Melody Robidoux -- who is passionate about policy related to women's rights and social justice -- will fund the Melody S. Robidoux Foundation Fund Chair, which includes an Innovation Fund. Brint Milward, the director of the School of Government and Public Policy, will hold the Chair. "Since the school was created, Melody has been there helping to make a huge difference in what we can do," Milward said. More

This semester, thanks to a donation from Barbara Martinsons, the Department of English is training graduate students and faculty to help with prison writing workshops, offering an undergraduate course on prison writing, and piloting a reading course with incarcerated veterans. More

Community members can learn more about teaching and learning creative writing in prison at the SBS pavilion at the Tucson Festival of Books.

Alex Braithwaite and Faten Ghosn, associate professors in the School of Government and Public Policy, have launched a new international research project, "Refugee Flows and Instability," which is supported by a nearly $1.4 million Minerva Initiative grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, to study the mass displacement of people from conflicts since 1990. The team will investigate why people move, the routes they take, where they eventually settle, and what impact their movement has on host communities and countries. More

In her new book "Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro," anthropologist Jennifer Roth-Gordon explores what she calls the "comfortable racial contradiction" that exists in Brazil, a country that prides itself on its history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. The book explores how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro's residents.More

Roth-Gordon will be speaking about her book at the Tucson Festival of Books. She will be part of the panel "A Conversation on Segregated Spaces" at the College of SBS pavilion. More

Five years ago, Benjamin Fortna, the director of the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, was given access to a trunk filled with previously unexamined papers about Esref, an Ottoman special operations officer active between 1908 and 1920. Through his recently published biography of Esref -- who is sometimes called the "Turkish Lawrence of Arabia" -- Fortna sheds light on the Middle East during a period that witnessed the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic. More

In this Q&A, Ander Monson, director of the creative writing program, talks about the essay and its surge in popularity, David Foster Wallace, the pull of the Midwest, and how writing can be both a form of citizenship and a way to construct culture. Monson and six contributors to his most recent publication, "How We Speak to One Another," will appear at the Tucson Festival of Books, reading from their work and exploring the essay as a vibrant and multifaceted literary genre. More 

Drawing on the strengths of the UA's widely recognized Arabic program, the new B.A. in Arabic will help students be competitive for a variety of exciting careers. Offered by the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the Arabic B.A. will graduate students with proficiency in the Arabic language and knowledge of Arab cultures. The school currently has more than 50 students participating in its Arabic Flagship Program and the Project Global Officer Program, which are both federally funded by the National Security Education Program, who can benefit from the new major. More

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the annual Sabbagh Lecture, presented by the School of Anthropology, and sponsored by Drs. Vivi and Adib Sabbagh! Every year, through the generosity of the Sabbaghs, an expert in Arab cultures is brought to campus. This year -- on Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Tucson Marriott University Park -- Orit Bashkin, a professor at the University of Chicago, will speak about "The History of Iraqi Jewish Children -- In Israel and Iraq." The lecture and the reception immediately following are free and open to the public! More

* Andrea Gerlak, an associate professor in the School of Geography and Development, wrote an op-ed titled "Potential for agreement? Reinvesting in Americas' water infrastructure." More 

* Adela C. Licona, interim director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and associate professor of English, has been invited to return to the editorial board of Feminist Formations, one of the premier journals of anti-racist feminist thought and politics.