By Sharon Pound

Each year, thousands of bright and talented students arrive at UT with immeasurable promise, but they are sometimes a little unclear about where to devote their creative energy. For many upperclassmen, an undergraduate research experience helps them discover and define their passion. Grace Levin is a shining example.

As an “undecided” freshman, Levin took a class taught by Micheline van Riemsdijk, assistant professor of geography. Impressed by Levin’s performance, van Riemsdijk persuaded her to sign up for an undergraduate research experience the next semester, even though she would “only” be a sophomore.

Levin’s first foray into the realm of research involved conducting literature searches and fact-finding about the recruitment practices of human resource managers in the information technology industry in Bangalore, India.

Concurrently, she developed her own independent project using many of the same research methods to write a paper on microfinance.

“I didn’t start college intending to conduct research in the geography department,” Levin said. “But working on a major project revealed many facets that appealed to my interests.”

Grace Levin presents her project at EURēCA in 2012.

Levin’s first paper, “Critique of Microcredit as a Development Model,” was published in the University of Tennessee’s Pursuit Undergraduate Research Journal, and won a division award at UT’s Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement (EURēCA) in 2012. The paper detailed her investigation of the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India, during which a large number of Indian farmers committed suicide. The crisis was attributed to pressure by lending institutions to repay exploitive loans.

“This work showed me that we are connected in ways not previously understood,” said Levin, referring to a common sentiment in the United States that we live in a bubble, seemingly untouched by the impact of unstable loaning practices in developing countries.

Levin is now a junior Honors student double-majoring in global studies and sustainability with minors in geography and French. Her most recent project involved a month-long trip to Oslo, Norway, supporting van Riemsdijk’s investigation into stakeholder involvement in skilled migration policymaking.

Initially, the project focused on the recruitment and retention of international skilled workers in the information technology industry.

While in Oslo, they set up shop at the Institute for Labor and Social Research and gathered empirical data by speaking with officials and executives familiar with the issue of skilled migration. As the project progressed, Levin assisted by developing probing interview questions and conducting interviews. She also was responsible for contacting and arranging interviews with human resources managers in Kongsberg, a city located fifty-four miles southwest of Oslo.

“Throughout this project, I kept getting affirmations that I could do this,” Levin said.

Living with a group of Norwegian students and observing a culturally different work environment greatly enhanced Levin’s research experience, which was made possible by UT’s Undergraduate Research Summer Internship program and the Ready for the World Initiative.

Faculty mentor Micheline van Riemsdijk.

After returning home and analyzing the data, it became clear that the information technology industry in Norway is not as internationally diverse as van Riemsdijk and her team expected. Consequently, the study is being expanded to include the oil and gas industry. The analysis indicated that independent consultants play a key role by establishing connections between local actors and international companies. They also discovered that immigration organizations provide valuable cultural capital to newcomers by organizing events that teach about local and national culture.

For her involvement, Levin said the project has given her confidence, sharpened her communications skills, and helped shape career plans that have shifted from “undecided” to a near-certain focus on sustainability.

An active, service-oriented individual, Levin has discovered her personal concern lies with the apathy of society toward making smart decisions that could sustain our planet and quality of life.

“I want to help people live better lifestyles without telling them what to do,” she said. “A sustainable planet is an investment, a worthy goal.”

As she winds up her junior year, Levin is contemplating her next steps. Although she can’t pinpoint exactly what her future holds, she has definitely been bitten by the research bug.

“I don’t think I could simply work with theory,” Levin said. “If I go to graduate school, the opportunity to be involved in research will be a deciding factor.”

Karen Lloyd

Karen Lloyd, assistant professor of microbiology, was the lead author on a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature on April 11, 2013. The paper revealed that Archaea, single-celled, microscopic life-forms, digest protein as a major food source. For this study, Lloyd and her colleagues collected ocean mud from Aarhus Bay, Denmark, pulled a single individual microscopic cell, sequenced most of its genome, and determined the presence of extracellular protein-degrading enzymes predicted in that genome. The finding has implications for understanding what is the bare minimum needed to support life.  How these microbes are able to survive in extreme conditions has puzzled researchers for years. Even though they are everywhere on our planet, scientists have never known how they survive in harsh environments with scarce food sources.

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Jimmy Mays

Jimmy Mays, professor of polymer chemistry and UT-ORNL distinguished scientist, was one of seven UT professors named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to the 2012 class of fellows. He was cited for “seminal contributions to controlled synthesis and thorough characterization of tailored macromolecular architectures, allowing elucidation of novel structure-property relationships and correlation with theory.” The appointment of seven new AAAS fellows gives UT a total of forty-five.

Mays received his B.S. degree in polymer science from the University of Southern Mississippi and his Ph.D. degree in polymer science at the University of Akron. He then worked in industry for five years with Hercules, Inc., prior to joining the chemistry faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Mays moved to Tennessee in 2002 to accept a joint appointment at the University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Laura Nenzi

Laura Nenzi, associate professor of history, is a specialist in the social history of early modern Japan. She recently received a prestigious fellowship for the Spring semester of 2014 from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for her second book project, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko.

This project examines the life of a nineteenth-century Japanese peasant woman, Kurosawa Tokiko. A rural teacher, poet, and fortuneteller, Tokiko became a political activist in the 1850s. Fluent in the language of prophecy, she cast herself as the interpreter between the chaotic world of humans and the orderly world of the gods.

Nenzi previously received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to complete her first book, Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (2008).

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By David Brill

John Rawls never occupied a seat on a presidential cabinet, organized a political movement, or faced down Chinese government tanks. Nevertheless, his theory of justice has found its way to all those places.

As a philosopher, Rawls is regarded by many as the preeminent political thinker of our age. His criticism of the “welfare state” for marginalizing and undermining the self-respect of capable, productive citizens influenced President Clinton’s 1996 sweeping reform of the US welfare system. And his belief that all citizens have a valid claim to the basic resources needed to make meaningful use of their liberties helped to shape President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Acts of nonviolent protest, from Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to render taxes to a government that condoned slavery, to the civil rights marches in the Jim Crow South, reflect Rawls’ insistence that civil disobedience in the face of grossly unjust laws is not merely a citizen’s right but an obligation. His argument for the priority of extensive and constitutionally assured basic liberties helped rouse the Chinese student protestors who, in 1989, amassed in Tiananmen Square. According to media reports, some of the protestors brandished copies of Rawls’ magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), in the faces of government oppressors.

For the lay reader, Rawls’ writing can drift into the ether and address theories and principles that seem remote from the day-to-day travails that occupy members of our diverse democracy. “But Rawls was writing for and about us as free equals; the joint authors of our institutions and collective actions,” says David Reidy, Rawls scholar and head of the UT Department of Philosophy.

At one point, it was feared that Rawls’ work might lose its relevance. But thanks to Reidy and a newly formed cluster of scholars under his direction, UT has become a premiere destination for the study of Rawls’ theory of just democratic societies.

Reidy first read A Theory of Justice as an undergraduate at DePauw University in the early 1980s. “It’s a difficult book,” he says, “and I didn’t understand much of it at the time.”

David Reidy

After earning a law degree from Indiana University in 1987 and beginning his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Kansas, Reidy became reacquainted with Rawls’ book and experienced something of an epiphany: “All of a sudden, the book spoke to me in a way that it hadn’t before,” says Reidy. He came to the realization that Rawls was addressing a practical question faced by all democratic citizens: how can we reasonably and fairly exercise the political power that is given to us?

Midway through Reidy’s graduate studies, Rawls published a second book, Political Liberalism, and Reidy saw “an opportunity to enter, at ground level, the conversation that was going to happen about it.” He also discerned a reasonable focus for his future academic career.

As Reidy drafted his dissertation, two “fortuitous” things happened. First, in October 1995, Reidy attended a symposium commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of A Theory of Justice at Santa Clara University where he was able to meet Rawls.

Second, in 1996, Rawls published a revised edition of Political Liberalism. Reidy had kept in contact with Rawls after meeting him in Santa Clara and followed up with phone calls to discuss the new edition. The timing allowed Reidy to produce a dissertation that “was about as current and informed on Rawls’ latest work as anything could be.”

Reidy’s dissertation—a finalist for the 1996–98 Council of Graduate Schools Dissertation Award—gained him national visibility and quickly led to a number of publications on Rawls, including articles in Res Publica and the Journal of Social Philosophy.

After joining UT’s Department of Philosophy in 2000, Reidy sought a short-term, high-profile project that would earn him tenure. Rawls, once again, intervened.

In 1999, Rawls published his third book, The Law of Peoples, in which he set out the principles that a just democracy should follow in its relationships with other nations. The book, which Reidy describes as “shorter and less ambitious” than A Theory of Justice, received consistently negative reviews in scholarly literature. “Even some of the leading proponents of Rawls’ earlier work trashed the book,” says Reidy. “I felt they were missing its point.”

In Reidy’s view, the book, though overshadowed by the enormously influential A Theory of Justice, advanced a number of worthy ideals. But to act as Rawls’ defender would require knowledge of international law, human rights, and foreign policy. Reidy spent the next year and a half boning up before publishing a series of articles defending The Law of Peoples against “waves of criticism.” As he did, the scholarly tide began to turn.

“By 2006, a sizeable group of influential scholars who had been mostly silent came out in support of Rawls’ book,” says Reidy. His defense not only helped establish the merit of Rawls’ final work, it also helped Reidy earn tenure.

Following Rawls’ death in 2002, Reidy detected a “creeping thought among philosophers that we had entered a post-Rawlsian phase,” he says. “I thought that was entirely premature.”

Reidy set out to secure Rawls’ continued relevance by articulating the “synoptic vision that Rawls had of his own work.” In 2008, he garnered a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to peruse Rawls’ archived papers and interview family members and former colleagues.

Reidy is now at work on a monograph, tentatively titled John Rawls: A Democratic Vision; and has forthcoming two edited collections, The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon and The Blackwell Companion to Rawls.

Reidy’s reputation has attracted other likeminded academics to his department, including three promising philosophers with substantial interests in Rawls: Adam Cureton, Jon Garthoff, and Markus Kohl. Together, they are an impressive lot: a Rhodes Scholar and two Woodrow Wilson “Newcombe” Fellows with advanced degrees from Oxford, UCLA, Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill.

UT’s Rawlsian research “cluster” is also attracting graduate students from around the world, including doctoral students and visiting scholars from the People’s Republic of China, one of whom serves as China’s leading translator of Rawls’ collected papers.

“Beyond our interest in understanding and extending Rawls’ own work, we’re influenced by his approach to doing philosophy, which regards the history of philosophy as relevant to contemporary questions,” says Cureton.

Rawls lived just long enough to see the dawn of the new millennium. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly be disappointed that social and political justice continues to elude countless millions around the globe. But it’s also likely that he would find solace in the notion that his idea of a just and fair polity, as Reidy continues to demonstrate, remains relevant–even vital–to a world ever struggling to find its way.

Maria Stehle

Maria Stehle, assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, specializes in German and European Cultural Studies, Gender and Media Studies, and Cultural Histories of Germany since 1945. She recently received a prestigious three-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her current research project, Technologies of Popfeminist Activism, in collaboration with Dr. C. Smith-Prei (University of Alberta). In this case study of German “popfeminist” protest and performance art culture, Stehle and Smith-Prei examine the reconfiguration of German feminist activism in the twenty-first century through digital technologies.

In 2012, Stehle published her first monograph, Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes, with Camden House, a leading German Studies press. This monograph questions the popular—and oversimplified—post-1989 narrative of the newly united Germany as a peaceful, worldly, and cautiously proud nation and examines instead ongoing struggles with racism, provincialism, and the perceived Other, especially as manifested in urban environments.

Stehle is also a member of the Cinema Studies Committee, a core faculty member of the Faculty Research Seminar on Modern Germany, and the faculty leader of the biennial mini-term trip to Berlin in connection with the upper-level German course, Metropolis Revisited.

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