Vanderbilt University

[Heart of the Mosquito Anopheles Gambiae]

The mosquito heart is a long muscular tube tethered to the dorsal cuticle (the mosquito’s back), extending the length of the abdomen. To obtain this fluorescence microphotograph, a mosquito was dissected, isolating the dorsal portion of the abdomen.…

[Hundreds of Galaxies in the Perseus Cluster]

This image shows the central region of the Perseus cluster, which contains hundreds of galaxies, even more invisible dark matter, and is one of the most massive objects in the universe. Each orange dot in this map is a galaxy. In all, the SDSS…

"An Interview with Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor" from Vanderbilt Literary Magazine, "Vagabond"

In April 1959, Flannery O’Connor traveled from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, to Nashville. She visited with the Cheneys, and agreed to sit for an interview at Vanderbilt with fellow writer and friend Robert Penn Warren. She spoke with Penn…

Sensuality and Textuality: Professor Hanna Roman’s Remarks

Professor Hanna Roman discusses her interest in rare books and in bringing learning outside of the classroom in this exhibition that highlights Eighteenth Century literature from the Morris Wachs Collection of the W.T. Bandy Center.

[Academics in Action Editors with Dean Camilla Benbow]

Reading before Reading: Sensual Elements as Social Indications

Bonnie Griffin, a graduate student in Hanna Roman’s spring 2016 “Rethinking the Enlightenment French Novel” class, examines the physical composition/materiality of eighteenth-century books in the Morris Wachs Collection. Drawn to the exquisite…

Touching the Text: Reading Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century

Kate Devine, a graduate student in Hanna Roman’s spring 2016 “Rethinking the Enlightenment French Novel” class, discusses how we can imagine the relationship between the reader’s body and the body of the text in eighteenth-century literature in the…

Eroticizing the Exotic in Eighteenth-Century French Literature

Cara Wilson, a graduate student in Hanna Roman’s spring 2016 “Rethinking the Enlightenment French Novel” class, discusses how the development of reading for pleasure, and specifically the pleasure derived from reading depictions of the foreign and…

Knowing Dangerously: An (Im)moral Education

Abby Broughton, a graduate student in Hanna Roman’s spring 2016 “Rethinking the Enlightenment French Novel” class, speaks to the evolving role of fiction as a more or less dangerous tool for social education in the eighteenth century as seen in the…

The Art of the Book: Making a Medieval Manuscript

Danielle Pettiti, an undergraduate in Professor Elizabeth Moodey’s spring 2016 Art of the Book class, describes the way illuminated manuscripts were created in the medieval period. Pettiti notes that her favorite part of the class was “decoding” her…