When Cynthia Simpson was 10 years old, she had no intention of becoming

a professional musician—and certainly not a professional French horn player.

She was in fifth grade at the time, and her father was the band di-rector at her school. He needed horn players, so she played horn. She couldn’t have guessed that 15 years later, as a graduate student at The University of Ala-bama, she would be ranked the second best French horn player in the Western Hemisphere.

“The horn is not always a gratify-ing instrument to play,” Simpson said. “It’s very difficult, and, as a fifth grader, I didn’t have enough motivation.”

For years she tried to quit, but her dad wouldn’t let her, remind-ing her that success would take time. In high school she made first chair, and by the time she was ready to apply for college, Simpson was finally a competitor.

Her hard work and persever-ance led to acceptance letters at some of the best horn programs in the nation—Boston University,

Northwestern University, and The University of Alabama.

“I chose The University of Alabama in part because it was close to home and offered in-state tuition,” Simpson said. “But ultimately, it also had the program I wanted.”

Simpson explained that at other universities, graduate students typically get the best experience. They play in the top ensembles, and they play in the best chairs. But at UA, the program is cen-tered on undergraduates.

“Undergraduates are held more accountable here,” Simpson said. “Consequently, they play in top en-sembles at a much younger age.”

Another reason she chose UA was the faculty—particularly the horn studio director Dr. Charles “Skip” Snead.

“Skip isn’t just our teacher,” Simp-son said. “He’s like our studio dad.”

For decades Snead has been in-volved with the International Horn Competition, so when Simpson decided to participate in 2011,

MUSICIAN RECOGNIZED INTERNATIONALLY

Cynthia Simpson, a graduate student in the School of Music, was named the Western Hemisphere’s second best French horn player.

2016 VOLUME 6 NO. 1

EXCELLENCECelebrating

See Horns, page 2

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

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he was there the whole time, coaching her to success.

“The International Horn Com-petition is the most prestigious competition for horn players in this hemisphere,” Snead said. “Success in that competition essentially means you’re the top rung on the ladder.”

Typically, the biennial competition has 70 to 100 competitors in two di-visions, collegiate and professional. With Snead’s help, Simpson made it to the collegiate semifinals in 2011, but for her that wasn’t enough.

Simpson felt that she could do better, so she took a four-year break from the competition to practice. In 2013 she graduated from UA and went on to the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance in order to pur-sue a performer’s certificate. There, she also played for the Kansas City Symphony as a substitute horn.

In 2015, she returned to UA as a graduate student, and in April of that year, she was ready to try the international competition for the second time.

From April to August, her typical three-hour practices stretched to four-and-a-half to six hours a day, and she began listening to dozens of recordings for the four pieces she had selected for the competition.

“I needed to know what level I had to be playing at,” she said. “And I had to consider everything from the amount of sleep I got to how hydrated I was.”

The three-day competition was held at the University of Nebraska at the end of August, and Simp-son’s hard work paid off.

“My experience from four years ago helped me to formulate a plan,” she said. “I feel like it gave me a little bit of an edge knowing exactly what to expect.”

Simpson floated through the pre-liminary round and the acapella semifinals, focusing on each one in the moment. The judges chose her for the final round, and in front of roughly 200 people—including professional judges and horn players she’d always admired—Simpson played one of the most challenging staples in horn repertoire, Strauss’s “Horn Concerto No. 2.”

Cynthia Simpson, a graduate student in the School of Music, has played the horn since she was 10 years old. She is one of many UA students who have won or placed in international competitions.

“It’s one of those pieces that professionals perform their entire career,” Simpson said. “Each time you hear it or play it, you learn something or feel something more.”

Her performance hit the mark, and in the end, she was award-ed second prize, becoming the second best horn player in the Western Hemisphere.

“It was the longest 24 hours of my whole life,” Simpson said. “But it was everything I could have asked for and expected.”

At only 10 years old, Simpson wanted to give up. In high school, she wanted first chair. But now, Simpson’s goal is no longer about herself. At 25 years old, she has realized that music is not about the musician—and it’s not about perfect performances either. It’s about connecting with audiences and feeling something together. “Perfection is irrelevant,” Simp-son said. “I don’t need to have a ‘perfect’ performance because my abilities don’t make people feel; it’s the music that makes them feel.” •

Simpson is not the first UA student to reach the finals of an international competition. In fact, the University has a history of producing nationally recognized horn players.

“The University of Alabama has been consistently in the ranks of finalists and winners—more than any other university in the country over the last two decades or more,” Snead said.

In addition to the International Horn Competition, UA has had more than 60 finalists and winners at the International Horn Society Spon-sored Workshops, 11 winners in the Music Teacher’s National Association competitions, and 2 winners of the Yamaha Young Art-ists Awards.

Graduates have found profes-sional placements in more than 30 symphony orchestras and bands and hundreds of public schools throughout the nation. Many also teach at the university level—covering 19 institutions across the country.

“I tell my students that when they go to a major competition, the same level of competition they face outside the University is the same level of competition that they see at UA every day,” Snead said.

“Students come here with the knowledge that this is a nationally and internationally recognized program,” Snead said. “They come here with the knowledge that we have a long-established reputa-tion of helping students be very successful in the professional world—and we intend to continue that legacy.”

Not to Toot Our Own Horn, But...We’re Pretty Good

Horns, from page 1

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CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

With at least two attention-driven mass shootings in the last year, it has never

been more important to accurately understand the minds of killers—especially those who kill for fame.

Dr. Adam Lankford, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, has been studying fame-seeking mass shooters since the aftermath of 9/11. In the past year, his research on the subject has been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, along with many other national and interna-tional media outlets. “I was studying things like suicide terrorists,” Lankford said, “when I began to see psychological and be-havioral similarities between suicide terrorists and some of these mass shooters. Not all, but a lot of suicide terrorists also want to be famous.

“In places like Palestine, they get celebrity treatment. There are murals in the neighborhoods of previous suicide attackers.”

Wanting to know more about these fame-seeking mass shooters—how many there are and the similarities between them—Lankford decided to start a catalog of all the shooters who had explicitly sought fame.

“It was like trying to figure out how many of the offenders like chocolate,” Lankford said. “I wasn’t going to know unless they said so.” Consequently, Lankford limited his definition of fame-seeking mass shooters to those who explicitly said—verbally or in writing—that they were seeking the public’s attention. There may be others who were not so open about their inten-tions, but rather than speculating, Lankford wanted the study to be as accurate as possible. In all, he found 24.

Lankford said one shooter from 1997 initially planned to commit suicide, but instead decided to kill

others because, in the shooter’s own words, “[My friend] said that my face and name would go across the world. He said I’ll be-come famous.”1

Another said in 2014, “I had to act weird in order to gain attention. I

WHEN FAME BREEDS INFAMYShooters who want attention, a growing phenomenon

See Lankford, page 8

them with other mass shooters, Lankford found that fame-seekers kill an additional 4.2 victims on average. Unfortunately, more victims usually means more publicity—driving these shoot-ers to kill in increasingly unprec-edented numbers.

A striking 75 percent of the offend-ers who explicitly seek fame are from the United States. Only six of the 24 were from other countries.

“To say that the culture in the United States creates a breeding ground for fame-seeking mass shooters is too strong,” Lankford explained, “because these shoot-ings are still such rare events.” However, he added, the culture does create a context in which these events are more likely to occur.

“Young Americans seem to priori-tize fame more than previous gen-erations,” he said. “One study from the Pew Research Center, which does surveys, found that 51 percent of Americans age 18 to 25 said that being famous is one of their gen-eration’s most important goals in life. By contrast, older generations put higher priorities on becoming spiritual, helping people, and being leaders in the community.”

In the article, Lankford predicts three outcomes if the culture of the United States does not change: First, the number of fame-seeking shooters will continue to grow. Second, these shooters will attempt to kill more victims in order to dis-tinguish themselves from previous offenders. Third, these shooters will find unprecedented places and methods of killing in order to gener-ate more attention.

He also suggests that, with the global spread of American media and entertainment, fame may be-come increasingly sought-after in other cultures—potentially leading to a greater number of these types of shootings worldwide.

While the debate about how to de-ter mass shooting largely revolves around gun control, bullying, mental health, and responsible media cov-erage in the aftermath of shootings, Lankford adds his own thoughts about resolutions to the mix.

Most disconcerting of all, however, is that these fame-driven crimes are on the rise. In the ‘60s there was only one—and the same is true of the ‘70s. In the ‘80s there weren’t any, but in the ‘90s the number jumped to six, and since 2000 there have been 15.

“The United States has approxi-mately 31 percent of the world’s offenders,” Lankford wrote in an article that was published in Aggression and Violent Behavior earlier this year.

was tired of being the invisible, shy kid. Infamy is better than total obscurity.”2

But those 24 stand out in more ways than their explicit fame-seeking. According to Lankford’s study, they also tend to be younger. While the average mass shooter is 34.5 years old, the average fame-seeking mass shooter is only 20.4.

What’s more, these young, fame-seeking shooters are also likely to kill more people. When comparing

Dr. Adam Lankford, an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, studies the similarities between fame-seeking mass shooters.

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

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Dr. Fred Andrus says he would never do this to you, but if he pulled one

of your teeth, took it to his lab, and dissolved it, he could tell you about where you lived as a child. How? By analyzing iso-topes, or variations of chemical elements.

“Isotopes are used to detect every-thing from steroid use to the paths that medicines and nutrients take in your body,” said Andrus, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences.

“They can help an ecologist learn how an element cycles through a wetland, or they can help the FBI figure out where a murder victim was born.”

He points to marble samples on his desk.

“We’re using those to detect forged works of art for a museum.”

Most recently, Andrus and Celeste Marie Gagnon, a professor at Wagner University, used isotopes to deconstruct the chemistry of beer—Peruvian beer—in order to explain differences in bone chemistry. Their research was published in the Journal of Archae-ological Science: Reports and was covered in an article in Forbes.

For nearly 15 years, Andrus studied climate change in Peru, and in the process he conducted research on water chemistry.

Gagnon also studies ancient Peru, and in the process of doing a foren-sic study on human skeletons, she noticed something strange.

Typically when two people grow up and live in the same area, they have a similar bone chem-istry. But after analyzing the oxygen isotopes in the teeth and bones of some skeletons in the Andes, Gagnon noticed that the bone chemistry of the men did not match the bone chemistry of

the women. Her first hypothesis was that they might have ingested different water sources.

She contacted Andrus, knowing he had analyzed water in Peru, and asked him if differences in water source—whether a well, a spring, an irrigation canal, or a river—might explain the difference.

BEER IN YOUR BONESGeologist reconstructs past civilizations using chemistry

Dr. Fred Andrus, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences, analyzed the chemistry of ancient Peruvian beer to learn more about bones.

“The beer is made in part by boil-ing water and corn paste in open containers,” Andrus said. “So the water evaporates a lot, and when you evaporate water, you change its chemistry pretty dramatically.”

In particular, the ratio of light oxygen isotopes to heavy ones severely decreases.

“She and I happened to have some students in Peru, who grabbed some additional water samples,” Andrus said. “And we found differences, but not any that would explain the disparity in the bones.”

After brainstorming, Gagnon and Andrus thought that maybe water wasn’t the difference; maybe it was beer. In Peru, particularly ancient Peru, people drank large quantities of a type of beer called chicha, which is made from maize.

“It takes less energy to evaporate a light molecule than a heavy one,” Andrus said. “So when you heat water, causing evaporation on the surface of the water, you’re remov-ing more of the light molecules and retaining more of the heavy ones.”

This is why, Andrus explains, beer has such a different chemistry from water even though it is largely made of water. Because chicha is boiled in an open con-tainer, all of the light molecules that evaporate are lost, and the beer left over is isotopically

heavier than the water that was used to make it.

In modern Peru, women are re-sponsible for manufacturing beer, and the researchers hypothesized that in the past this might also have been true, and maybe there were gender disparities in drinking beer as well—which would explain the variations in the bone chemistry.

“It was a plausible hypothesis,” An-drus said, “but we didn’t know the chemistry of chicha. No one had ever bothered to measure it before.”

Not ready to give up, Gagnon and her undergraduate students at Wagner took on the task of making chicha themselves.

“First they tried to make it by mashing up corn and boiling it down in an open container,” An-drus said. “And as a control group, they duplicated the process with just water.”

“They would send the water samples to me, and we would run it through the stable isotope lab,” Andrus said. “When the first waves of data came in, our hy-pothesis looked plausible: there was a pronounced difference between the plain old water and the developed beer.”

However, in the process of making the beer, Gagnon realized that there might be a difference between her chicha and the real thing. Wanting to double-check her results, she went to Peru and made the beer with a traditional chicha maker. Again, she sent the samples to Andrus, and the results confirmed what they had already found.

“Our analysis showed that the beer likely influences people’s skeletal chemistry—and people in Peru have been drinking beer for millennia,” Andrus said. “So anyone who does forensic re-search in South America needs to take beer into account when they are analyzing bones.” •

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

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bigger the fish, the more likely it is to have been contaminated.

“I go out to the hydroelectric dams on our river and actually interview fishermen about what their knowl-edge is of these advisories, so that we can hopefully work toward more consistent, reliable information that is not so difficult for people to find,” Overton said.

Overton’s work in environmental advocacy is relatively unique, but it is—and was—even more unique as an undergraduate course of study.

“I feel very fortunate,” Overton said, “because I am one of the few people I know who went to college to do exactly what I do in the professional world.”

As a New College student, Overton was able to tailor her degree to the exact goals she had for the future. She took courses on everything from environmental management and endangered species to paleo-climatology and cooperation and conflict, all of which culminated in her depth study in environmental advocacy and public health.

“I changed my major several times before I found New College,” Over-ton said. “None of the majors I had gave me the freedom I needed in my coursework or the ability to cultivate real relationships with my professors and classmates, but

Growing up, Justinn Overton, a native of Birmingham, spent many of her Saturdays

barely awake and fishing on Logan Martin Lake in the Coosa River system with her parents.

“I have a distinct memory of feel-ing the wind on my face in this little john boat we had at the time and learning how to bait my own hook,” she said.

Today, Overton, a 2010 New College graduate, is the execu-tive director of Coosa Riverkeeper, and she spends every day helping to protect and raise awareness of the 220 miles of Coosa waterways she loves so much.

Southern Living honored her dedicated work on the river in November, naming her one of four “women of worth.”

Coosa Riverkeeper was founded in 2010 and has only two staff members, but together with the help of interns and nearly 150 volunteers, the nonprofit organi-zation covers 5,000 square miles of terrain, which makes up nearly one tenth of the entire state. Its main goal is clean water.

“There are about 500,000 people who live, work, or play in and around the lakes and creeks that we work to protect,” Overton said. “But water is something that I think we often take for granted. Only once it’s compromised do you realize how many layers of your life are influenced by your access to clean water.

“For instance, when you’re swim-ming in a lake or a creek, most of the time you don’t think, ‘Could there be E. coli in here?’ Most of the time, you just jump in.”

Though there are systems in place to clean water, Overton said that the population increase in various parts of the watershed has made the infrastructure for keeping the water clean inadequate. Sewage

PROTECTING THE COOSANew College graduate leads environmental nonprofit

overflow and industries that don’t comply with their pollution permits are two of the main problems.

“Obviously if there is a sanitary sewer overflow or weak pollution permits,” Overton said, “that compromises the integrity of the water that you’re swimming in.”

The Alabama Department of En-vironmental Management is not required to test inland lakes and streams for E. coli, which is why the team at Coosa Riverkeeper took on the task themselves.

Each summer, Overton and her team test 18 sites over the course of 18 weeks throughout the watershed, and with the data they collect, they create what they call the Coosa River Swim Guide.

“We test every week during the summer months because the public should know that the water that they are swimming in is not going to give them gastrointesti-nal discomfort or ear, nose, and throat issues,” Overton said.

If the tests ever indicate that water is not safe to swim in, the team sends out free text messages and email messages to those who have subscribed to the alert system. Currently the system has more than 150 subscribers.

Monitoring the water, however, is only one of the many goals of Coosa Riverkeeper. Overton is also concerned with the river’s biodiversity and fish population. In 2013 the team removed a dam from Big Canoe Creek in Spring-ville, Alabama, in order to restore natural fish migration for the first time in 130 years. Overton also helps inform fishermen about the 26 fish-consumption advisories on the Coosa River.

Though it is not illegal to eat fish in advisory areas, it is discour-aged because the fish may be contaminated with mercury and other toxic chemicals. And the

New College made me feel like my goals were important and that they could come true. I wanted to work in an environmental nonprofit in Al-abama and I get the opportunity to do that now—on my home river.” •

Justinn Overton, a New College graduate, is pursuing her dreams as the executive director of Coosa Riverkeeper.

COOSA CANOE & KAYAK FISHING TOURNAMENT: Each spring Coosa Riverkeeper organizes a fishing tournament to raise funds and promote fish con-servation. Competitors catch bass, measure them, and then release them back to the wild—saving the lives of many fish.

CHEERS TO THE COOSA: Coosa Riverkeeper’s recurring dinner fundraiser teams up with local farm-ers and breweries to showcase how, as Overton said, “It takes good rivers to brew good beer and grow honest foods.” The next dinner is Thursday, June 9 at Cahaba Brewing Company.

KEEP AN EYE OUT: The best way to contribute to local waterways is to report anything that seems unusual. If there are dead fish, strange smells, or unusual colors in the river, contact a local environmen-tal organization. “A lot of the pollution that we address is reported by citizens like you and me,” Overton said.

For more information, visit coosariver.org.

Get Involved

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

6

Prior to her stroke, Nancy Taylor, a client at the Speech and Hearing Center at The

University of Alabama, loved learn-ing. She was social and vibrant, and then one day—the day she had her stroke—she lost her ability to talk.

“I feel like I’ve had to do life over,” Taylor said. “People treated me like I was handicapped, but I’m just trying to find my words.”

Taylor has aphasia, an acquired language disorder, and until re-cently she relied solely on individual sessions with UA clinicians for her language therapy. But with the opening of Bama Perks, a coffee house for aphasia clients, Taylor and many others are able to get more than just their language back; they’re getting their lives back.

“So many people with Aphasia become depressed and lonely,” explained Mary Ray-Allen, a clini-cal supervisor and instructor in the Department of Communicative Disorders. “They withdraw from society and the social activities that they used to do.”

Bama Perks gives clients the opportunity to put the skills they learn in their therapy sessions into real-life practice. They or-der their own coffee; sit down with other clients, students, and

clinicians to drink it; and have casual conversations. “We’re hoping to help them gain the confidence to talk to lots of individuals and to do community activities that they had lost interest in doing—or even had a fear of do-ing,” Ray-Allen said.

“We want them to be comfortable enough to go to a restaurant and order something off the menu or go to a drive-through—the things that clients tell me on a day-to-day basis that they struggle with,” she added.

Ray-Allen came up with the idea for Bama Perks after learning about the home-like clinic called the Aphasia House at the University of Central Florida. Her adaptation of the house was realized when UA clients and their visitors entered the coffee shop for the first time in February.

The shop is open to clients and their visitors Tuesday through Thursday from 9-12, free of charge. It has two coffee pots, offering regular and

COMMUNICATING OVER COFFEECoffee shop restores confidence after brain injury

tion, communicate effectively, ask questions, or use any other types of communication techniques—such as gesturing or writing.”

While at the coffee shop, the students and clinicians talk to the clients naturally, without out pen and paper, and then after their con-versation, the clinicians move to an adjoining room to transcribe their mental notes about the interaction.

At the end of the semester Tucker will collect all the accrued data and then analyze it over the summer to make her conclusions.

Dr. Angela Barber, the chair of the Department of Communicative Disorders, said “Bama Perks is absolutely an example of how we, as a department, can meet all of our goals: We can train our students. We can conduct meaningful research. And most importantly, we can meet a criti-cal need for this population.”

Bama Perks has received grant funding from the College Academy of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity through the Col-lege of Arts and Sciences as well as monetary support from the de-partment itself. Its student associa-tion, the National Student Speech

decaf each day, with a lot of differ-ent flavor options as well.

To test how well the coffee shop is actually working as contextualized therapy for the clients, graduate student Marie Tucker has taken on Bama Perks for her master’s thesis.

“There are two sides to Bama Perks,” Tucker said. “There is the clinical side, which is all about making sure that clients receive good therapy, and then there’s the research side where we’re proving the feasibility of this coffee shop.”

As part of her research, Tucker measures various aspects about the participants—their quality of life, the amount of interaction that they have outside of therapy, and their language capabilities—but she will also design protocols for how Bama Perks and future aphasia coffee shops should be run.

One of the many ways she gathers data is from the clinicians and re-search assistants.

“Every time the participants come, the undergraduate assistants and the clinicians who interact with them will grade the clients according to a competency rating scale,” Tucker explained. “Basically it’s a scale that looks at whether or not the partici-pant was able to initiate conversa-

I feel like I’ve had to do life over. People treated me like I was handi-capped, but I’m just trying to find my words.

—Nancy Taylor

Clients with aphasia come to Bama Perks to practice the skills they learn during therapy in a simulated real-life situation.

Bama Perks is a coffee shop at UA’s Speech and Hearing Center that is designed to help aphasia clients get their confidence back.

See Bama Perks, page 8

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE

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Celebrating EXCELLENCE

Robert F. Olin, Ph.D.Dean, College of

Arts and Sciences

Stephanie KirklandDirector of

College Relations

Courtney CorbridgeEditorWriter

Designer

Kathy YarbroughDirector of

Development

PhotographyStephen Gross

Bryan HesterZach Riggins

Matthew Wood

Celebrating Excellence is published in the spring

by the College of Arts and Sciences at

The University of Alabama.

We welcome your comments and suggestions.

Please send these to Courtney Cobridge, editor, at

cacorbridge@ua.eduVisit us at www.as.ua.edu

or scan this QR code:

A LEADER’S LEGACY Bringing life to Renaissance literature

Four hundred years ago, at the age of 52, William Shakespeare died. He left

behind a legacy of nearly 200 plays and sonnets, which students, scholars, actors, and directors have been reading, studying, and adapting ever since.

In anticipation of the anniversary of his death on April 23, Dr. Sharon O’Dair, a professor of Shakespeare in the Department of English and director of UA’s Hudson Strode Program in Re-naissance Studies, wondered why, after 400 years, Shakespeare is still one of the most well-known writers in history. In her words, she wanted to know why isn’t Shakespeare dead?

Though answers to the question are numerous, O’Dair’s own career—from her scholarship to her leader-ship with UA’s endowed graduate program in Renaissance studies—is perhaps the best evidence for why Shakespeare studies continue to thrive.

According to O’Dair, her love for Shakespeare grew out of an in-terest in social psychology and the ways in which society and social institutions both shape and empower people.

“It seems to me that theatre is like life in a way that narrative and poetry aren’t,” O’Dair said. “I really like the way that char-acters on stage have to interact, and I am interested in the way re-search and theory in sociology or social psychology can mesh with theatrical practice; that’s been something I’ve been mulling in my head my entire career.”

Consequently, O’Dair’s Shake-speare studies are often about much more than Shakespeare alone. While she has written tra-ditional criticism on tragedy and character, she also has written pieces relating Shakespeare to queer theory, class structure, the environment, and more.

In 30 years, O’Dair has written 49 articles—with the 50th on its way—and worked on four books.

But she contributed more than just her scholarship to The University of Alabama. For the last 10 years, she has also led the Hudson Strode Program—and the students in the program—to success.

ENHANCING RENAISSANCE STUDY

When Hudson Strode and his wife Thérèse died in the early 1990s, they left behind a considerable sum for the enhancement of the University’s teaching mission. O’Dair was at the University at the time, but she was still what she called a “mere assistant professor pup.”

For 20 years she worked in the Renaissance program, making a name for herself, and in 2006, fol-lowing the departure of Professor

Gary Taylor, she stepped up to be the director.

The Strode Program provides enhanced stipends for students and allows the University to bring nationally and interna-tionally recognized scholars to campus to participate in the bi-ennial Strode seminars and the annual Strode lecture series. It also provides funds for students to attend workshops and semi-nars at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and has enabled the creation of the Shakespeare on Film Series and the staged reading series Im-probable Fictions.

“Under her expert guidance, the Strode symposia became must-attend events,” said Dr. Sugata Iyengar, a professor at the Univer-sity of Georgia.

Dr. Sharon O’Dair, the director of UA’s Hudson Strode Program in Renais-sance Studies, is retiring from the University after 30 years.

See O’Dair, page 8

OFFICE OF THE DEAN

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TUSCALOOSA, AL 35487-0268

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Bama Perks, from page 6

Language Hearing Association, has also offered to purchase some patio furniture to help expand the coffee shop into the outdoor atrium at the Speech and Hearing Center.

“In the summer we may offer other beverages like lemonade,” Ray-Allen said. “I can just see it evolving each semester.”

For clients like Taylor and Jason McNeil, the shop is already making a difference.

“We’ve been through different things,” Taylor said. “But we are all here getting helped, and it makes me want to get up and come.”

McNeil feels similarly.

“It gives us a chance to talk to the people in similar situations and learn about their lives,” he explained. “I like seeing that I’m not alone.” •

With topics ranging from Hur-ricane Katrina to American In-tegration, O’Dair has managed to pull Shakespeare out of his elite canonized shell and push him back into the realm of the every-day, contemporary life.

At the Katrina symposium in 2007, O’Dair brought in scholars who were directly affected by the historic storm. They talked about their experiences in relation to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Her most recent symposia have revolved around the 400th anniver-sary of Shakespeare’s death, and for the anniversary in April, poets from across the nation came to UA not only to talk about how Shake-speare influenced them, but also to share poems that they wrote specifically for the occasion.

“O’Dair has hosted faculty and students from far beyond Tusca-

loosa at her symposia,” said Scott Newstok, founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College.

He added that her commitment to bringing a wide array of scholars comes from her certainty that any-one could have something to say about works by Shakespeare and the other Renaissance authors.

The symposia are an excellent resource for scholars—but also for her students.

Nic Helms, a 2015 Ph.D. gradu-ate, worked with O’Dair for five years as her student and as-sistant. He explained that the symposia offered some of the best scholastic exposure of his university experience.

“The wide array of guest lectur-ers she’s brought to the program, both in symposia and in our two lecture series, is simply stagger-ing,” he said. “In one place, I was

exposed to the wealth of early modern literary studies.” MENTORING YOUNG SCHOLARS

Dr. Phil Beidler, who has been at the University since the Strode Program was founded, said of O’Dair’s leadership, “If there is a distinguishing feature, it is the heavy mentorship responsibility that she takes on with her students.”

“She’s always got someone in the office sitting with her,” he said.

O’Dair said that her mentorship is just a product of trying to do her job well, but to her students it has been the tipping point of their success.

“She gave me meticulous page-by-page comments on drafts for virtually everything I wrote while at UA,” Helms said. “She urged me to write for a wide audience, valu-ing clarity and concision and always upping the stakes for whatever is-sue I might be tackling in my work.”

O’Dair’s enthusiasm for scholar-ship outside of the classroom led Helms to create UA’s Improb-able Fictions, a group that per-forms staged readings of Shake-speare’s plays.

“She was supportive of my work with Improbable Fictions every step of the way,” Helms said. “It’s been great to have a mentor who wants me to excel not only in tra-ditional academic pursuits but in community outreach as well.”

In May, O’Dair will be leaving her 30-year post at the University to return to her native California. She plans to research full-time for another year, after which she will retire from academia.

“The challenge of the Strode Program going forward is to live up to Sharon’s legacy,” Helms said. “These past years under her directorship have been a perfect time to study the Renais-sance at Alabama.” •

O’Dair, from page 7

“Sometimes people feel powerless after these attacks,” Lankford said. “And as individuals we are power-less to change the culture on our own, but we do have the power to influence our kids, our friends, and our friends’ kids.”

Lankford advises people to remem-ber that fame is not a magical elixir of happiness. In fact, pointing to various psychological research, Lankford said, “If your goals are things like fame or image or money,

which are considered extrinsic goals, you are much more likely to suffer from things like anxiety, narcissism, and depression.

“Healthier goals, things like per-sonal growth or social relation-ships, are intrinsic.”

Individuals can change a society bit by bit. •1. Katherine S. Newman, Cybelle Fox, Wendy Roth, Jal Mehta, and David Harding, Ram-page: The Social Roots of School Shootings (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

2. “The Manifesto of Elliot Rodger,” The New York Times (2014).

Lankford, from page 3