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The College of Liberal and Fine Arts

Contents

Celebrating Teaching

Celebrating Teaching

Professors in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts are being recognized in a variety of ways for excellence and innovation in teaching.

Practical PR

Practical PR

Unity PR, a student-run public relations firm, lets students experience the real world of PR while aiding nonprofit clients in San Antonio.

Cool It

Cool It

Anger is a completely normal human emotion, but not everyone handles anger gracefully. When it sours work and relationships, it's time to get help, says UTSA psychology professor Ephrem Fernandez. He's developed a new anger management therapy.

Witness to the Fall

Witness to the Fall

Dr. Jerald Winakur, a San Antonio physician, captures the poignant moments of a lifetime in telling the story of his father, an Alzheimer's sufferer, in his book, Memory Lessons.

Voices Unheard

Voices Unheard

The largely unknown story of Texas farm workers, especially the role of women, is being told in a film documentary by UTSA sociology professor Raquel Marquez.

Music on the Move

Music on the Move

Three UTSA music instructors explore the power of music to soothe, to excite and to move the soul.

Alumni Profile Brenda Davidson-Shaddox

Alumni Profile: Brenda Davidson-Shaddox '89

Photographer and UTSA alumna Brenda Davidson-Shaddox captures the essence and beauty of Myanmar's ethnic tribes and landscape.

Connections

Dean Daniel Gelo

One of the great pleasures of involvement in the liberal and fine arts is watching how students awaken to the possibilities that lie across the traditional boundaries of knowledge. “Interdisciplinary learning” is one of the buzzwords of modern higher education, but it means more than taking some team-taught courses. Becoming a learned person, today more than ever, means moving comfortably among different intellectual domains and yielding at least sometimes to raw curiosity and the desire for self-expression.

Our college is especially fertile for this kind of discovery because it brings the arts, humanities and social sciences close together, and because it involves virtually all UTSA students in these subjects through the core curriculum. And so, although we are duly proud that COLFA is the largest UTSA college, and more UTSA students are majoring in the liberal and fine arts than other disciplines, we also cherish our role in helping all UTSA students prepare broadly.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music … I get most joy in life out of music.*

- Albert Einstein

Among the most ardent and generous supporters of the college are several who have been highly successful in careers in business, law, medicine and technology. Some have spoken wistfully about not having followed their passion for music, painting, acting or archaeology. Most, however, have preserved such interests as a dimension of their lives, pursuing creative or scholarly work themselves (and often at distinguished levels) or nurturing it in others. These individuals are great exemplars for our current students.

Longtime COLFA supporter and teacher Dr. Jerald Winakur has garnered nationwide praise for his book Memory Lessons for its sensitive and personal exploration of aging and for the superb quality of this geriatrician’s prose. Businesswoman and English alumna Brenda Davidson-Shaddox is a thriving photojournalist whose program of exploration in Myanmar is at once ecological, artistic and anthropological.

Mary Pat Stumberg understands the enriching power of music. She has made an unusual, visionary scholarship gift specifically to support students from the science and technology majors who are also studying music. Another wonderful gift comes from Drs. Rajam and Somayagi Ramamurthy. These distinguished physicians are well-known for their advocacy of classical Indian dance. Their new endowment in the Department of Music will support visiting artists and scholars in Indian dance, music and culture and will be foundational to our new dance program.

Thanks to such imaginative benefactors, and through the hard work of a talented and devoted COLFA faculty, our world will be populated with more physicists who see their lives in terms of music; attorneys with the sensibilities of the historian and sociologist; teachers, pharmacists and accountants whose lives exude art and poetry.

Dean Daniel J. Gelo

*"What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," for the Oct. 26, 1929, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.