College of Humanities & Earth and Social Sciences

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences is now part of the UNC Charlotte Data Science Initiative, joining the College of Computing and Informatics, Belk College of Business, and the College of Health and Human Services as part of this strategic partnership. Jean-Claude Thill, Knight Foundation Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Director of Project Mosaic, has agreed to serve as the DSI Director for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

UNC Charlotte is among five colleges and universities selected to share the 2016 Higher Education Civic Engagement Award presented by The Washington Center. Honorees were selected based upon their leadership and innovation in civic engagement.

UNC Charlotte’s team that is conducting archaeological excavations on Mount Zion in Jerusalem has discovered a rare gold coin bearing the image of the Roman Emperor Nero. The coin is exceptional, as the first example of a coin of this kind turning up in Jerusalem in a scientific dig.

Writing is foundational to the overall success of all UNC Charlotte students. When faculty in the University Writing Program started discussing changes to the first-year writing curriculum, the focus was on discovery of the best way to provide knowledge and support.

Anita Blanchard, associate professor of psychology and organization science, is among the five finalists for one of UNC Charlotte’s highest honors – the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence. Blanchard’s students frequently use one word to describe her approach to teaching: passionate. Her teaching philosophy is focused on active learning, teaching with technology, co-creating knowledge and developing enthusiasm for learning.

Mary Jo Shepherd, public policy, and Jinglin Li, computing and informatics, are the 2016 recipients of the Graduate School Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. The award is presented annually in the categories corresponding to the national competition jointly sponsored by Council of Graduate Schools and ProQuest Dissertations Publishing​.

As Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, people worldwide converged around TVs to witness the devastation of an iconic city and government’s response to the storm. This catastrophic, life-altering event served as a pivotal point in UNC Charlotte researcher Cherie Maestas’ career.

The soil in the ancient Cyprus field is the color of parchment paper and packed hard. On an early summer day with temperatures that creep toward 100 degrees, UNC Charlotte researchers Steven Falconer and Pat Fall carefully dig through centuries of archaeological sediments, inch by painstaking inch.

Students in UNC Charlotte geologist William Garcia’s classes can imagine they have stepped back in time to the Mesozoic era, as they follow an interactive path of dinosaur footprints newly installed on the university campus. His students and others on campus are now able to step outside the customary lecture-based classroom setting and participate in a hands-on, kinesthetic learning experience.

In the fragile pages of recipe books from the early modern period, UNC Charlotte researcher Jennifer Munroe and her students find traces of life and death. They decipher the words and absorb the daily struggles and joys of the women who created these chronicles of life between 1550 and 1800. These books are much more than repositories for recipes. Through the process of transcription, scholars worldwide are digitizing images of each page of old books, transcribing the vocabulary and script and publishing the content in online databases for the world to study and share.