On March 7th anthropology student Alexis Harris was announced as the winner of a national Cover Girl search on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show". Alexis won a $20,000 prize and will be featured in a Cover Girl photo shoot with Ellen DeGeneres. Alexis was chosen, in part, because of her work with a non-profit she established a year ago called the SMILE Movement. It stands for Students Making an Impact in Lives Everywhere. Her hope is that it inspires other students to "stand up for what's right and give back to the community".

You can see the touching video of Alexis on Ellen HERE.

Andrea Anwei Chen, who received her BA in communication from UTSA in 2008, worked as the visual effects production manager for the Oscar-nominated motion picture, Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film also won top honors at the Sundance Film Festival.

Andrea, who is now attending San Francisco's Academy of the Arts, headed up a 33-person team responsible for 81 of the film's 120 visual effects shots. A tremendous fete for the 24 year old whose interest in film was sparked during an internship she did at the Austin Film Festival during her years at UTSA.

We are proud of our alum and encourage you to read more about Andrea and her budding career at her IMDB page.

8th Annual Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film, and the Arts  

Art by Brianna M. Burnett

When: February 28 - March 1, 2014

 Where: San Antonio, Texas

Who: Sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,  

The objective of this interdisciplinary, multicultural conference is to examine, celebrate, and enjoy the variety of ways in which food has been represented in the humanities and the arts throughout time around the planet.

Writers, artists and poets, scholars in literature, history, art history and film, cooks, psychologists, sociologist, anthropologists, and more are invited to contribute to this dialogue.

  Deadline to Submit Abstract: 10/18/2013

Please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words, written in any of the languages taught at The University of Texas at San Antonio (English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic).

Proposals for special panels will also be considered. Submit via

email (Microsoft Word document attachment only) or hard copy to:

• Professor Santiago Daydí-Tolson, Conference Chair
   Department of Modern Languages & Literatures
   e-mail: santiago.dayditolson@utsa.edu 

For more detailed and updated information and Convivium Artium, the electronic journal on food representation in literature and the arts, visit the conference blog: http://foodinlitart.blogspot.com.

Mary E. McNaughton-Cassill , Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, recently published a book titled, Mind the Gap, Coping with Stress in the Modern World. The book "explores the stress of modern life and how thoughts and feelings can both create and bridge the gap between what we have and what we want.

Unlike standard textbooks in the field that tend to take a theoretical approach to stress, this conversational, accessible book focuses on helping readers identify and understand the sources of stress in their life from a practical perspective. The text explores how stress is generated in the brain and body, and provides realistic suggestions for learning to manage these responses."

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The February 2013 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science recently published an article by Department of Anthropology faculty and students and Center for Archeological Research  staff members titled "Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis of hunter - gatherers from the Coleman site, a late prehistoric cemetery in central Texas". Featured faculty, staff, and students were Robert J. Hard, Cynthia M. Munoz , Kirsten Verostick, Nathanael Dollar, and Raymond P. Mauldin.  

POLITICAL SCIENCE & GEOGRAPHY----------------------------------------