by Julija Šukys
It’s 2017. At the University of Texas, I admire the Tower’s smooth sides with bas-relief figures carved down its arched front. The flag flies at half-mast, but I don’t know why. I find the Tower beautiful. Not everyone agrees with my assessment: some scholars have called it a mongrel and a hybrid. No matter. I like hybrids of all kinds.
Opened in 1937, the 307-foot-tall landmark measures only four feet shorter than the nearby Texas Capitol. For years, it served as a popular tourist attraction, offering visitors a free view of the campus and surrounding city. Once the campus library, today the Tower houses administrators’ offices. Faculty Council meetings take place inside. The university president’s office throws autumn welcome parties on its roof. After sports victories or other campus achievements, orange lights set its walls aglow in celebration.
I walk around to the back of the Tower and come across a pond. It takes me a beat to realize that this is the Tower Garden. In its waters swim a few carp or koi, and some minnows. Turtles line a slick log, all stretching their necks long. A sweet pair of red-eared sliders snuggles on a nearby rock. As I sit and watch the creatures of the pond, I overhear a conversation. A young woman asks her friend, “So what happened? What does the pond commemorate?”
On August 1, 1966, twenty-five-year-old Charles Whitman lugged an arsenal of weapons to the top of the Tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Dressed in coveralls, he blended into his surroundings. Even if his grades were middling, UT was his school.
Several floors below, a receptionist lay dying behind a couch where Whitman had dragged her after splitting her head open with the butt of one of the rifles. By the time he arrived at the Tower, the former UT student and ex-Marine had killed his mother and wife. Such a sequence of events is not unique. When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, analyzed FBI data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, results showed that fifty-seven percent of such attacks included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the targets. What’s more, sixteen percent of these shooters had previously been charged with domestic violence. It appears, then, that violence against family members serves as a psychological training ground for mass bloodshed—yet another reason, beyond recognizing the rights of women, children, and other vulnerable family members to live free of violence, and to act on what was for too long considered a private matter.
Like so many other murderous men and, though less frequently, women—think of Karla Homolka, the accomplice to Canadian serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo—Charles Whitman conformed to notions of dangerous charm and good looks, as Saul Pett and Jules Loh put it in their article “Whitman’s Trail” in a 1966 issue of the Houston Post, shortly after the Tower shooting: “good old Charley, the nice guy . . . the good friend, the earnest student, the playful kidder, the reliable altar boy, the smiling paper boy, the first Eagle Scout around at the age of 12, the sharp-eyed deer hunter of the Everglades, the boy who never forgot to say ma’am and sir, the best college roommate a fellow ever had—the boy, the adolescent, the man who always appeared on the sunny side of promise.”
He was the epitome of what people call an all-American boy. These days, the squeaky-clean image can increasingly only be deployed ironically as ever more campus rapists and fraternity house murderers are described in such terms. But that was 1966, an ostensibly more innocent time. Whitman deftly shattered that illusion.
Every campus shooter’s biography contains traces of trauma, abuse, and mental illness. Whitman is no exception. His father, C. A. Whitman, whom the son hated with passion, was an abusive man. I suspect that the father’s own brokenness stemmed from his abandonment to a children’s home at age six. Whitman Senior beat his wife and his children and was unrepentant to the end.
***
Ghost memories of that day roam the streets and enter conversations in bars. Quieter and possibly more troubled spirits have settled into the archives, tucking themselves neatly into manilla folders and document boxes and slumbering there for years. At the University of Texas’ Briscoe Center, I find a small collection documenting what administrators called the campus “catastrophe” and containing the then university president’s records. There, I read an extensive medical report that weighs and ultimately rejects a series of physiological or neurological explanations for Whitman’s killing spree. Alongside it, I find letters from concerned alumni and correspondence laying out plans to support students injured in the shooting.
Most of the records documenting the Tower shooting are held not at the University of Texas but at the Austin History Center, located next to a large public library. When I arrive at the municipal archives, I don’t know what I will find, nor do I have a good sense of what I am looking for. I sift through the sobering collection in an inviting reading room furnished with large wooden tables and green-shaded lamps. For thirty-five years, the vestiges of Charles Whitman’s life lay locked away, stored as police evidence. But on Tuesday, December 17, 2001, that changed. The Austin History Center opened the Tower Archive—a collection of hundreds of documents, including the contents of Whitman’s wallet, his suicide letter, and his journals—to the public. I read police reports, newspaper clippings, and magazine stories. I steady myself as I flip through albums of original crime scene photos and Whitman’s so-called murder letters.
Rebecca Rich-Wulfmeyer, the History Center’s archives and manuscripts curator, took on the task of cataloging the collection that documents Whitman’s murders. A press photograph shows her seated at a reading table with one of the Tower files open before her. Austin police had long tried to hand over the files to the University of Texas, the State Library, or another institution, but without success. “No one, it seemed, had the resources to preserve the collection,” the curator explained. Until, that is, the Austin History Center accepted them.
When we talk by Zoom one spring day, Rebecca tells me that when the Whitman materials first became public, the event drew a lot of media attention. Journalists asked her to comment on the collection and to give interviews.
“Not my forte,” she laughs, shaking her head. “What I said is that ‘professionally, I don’t have an opinion. My job is to catalogue and describe.’”
When I ask her how the materials came to be archived at the Austin History Center, Rebecca grows animated. “Hector Ravalis was a homicide sergeant,” she says. “He recognized the significance of that collection. He realized that the police department wasn’t the best custodian of those records. So, researchers would come in and they would just be put in an interrogation room. And they’d be left alone. Who knows what kinds of things walked.” She adds that the gun from the Whitman shooting kicked around an Austin police officer’s desk for decades. Nowadays, she says, there’s no way those things would just become office curios. “So, Hector called around. He called UT and he called the Austin History Center and people said, no, that they didn’t want those records. He kept trying and, somehow, he got in touch with me. So, I was new to that job when those papers came.” Rebecca was around thirty-five at the time. “I didn’t have a whole lot of experience as an archivist or manuscripts curator at that time.” She tells me she felt as if this were the most significant collection she would ever work with.
***
The obvious question in the aftermath of a mass shooting is why? Why would a man climb to the top of a building and kill strangers? It’s so incomprehensible that we look for singular explanations: What was wrong with Whitman? There had to be something amiss. No healthy person would do such a thing.
In the case of the Tower shooting, a large proportion of its record circles the question of whether an almond-sized tumor (“a little piece of brain in a jar,” as the archives describe it) removed during a post-mortem examination was responsible for Whitman’s rampage. Writers and researchers before me have made much of the growth found inside the shooter’s head during the autopsy that Whitman had requested be conducted after his death. The tumor provides a potential answer to the question of why. It is, I suppose, a reasonably easy way to explain horrific actions and, even better, it removes the imperative to condemn or absolve the killer. The tissue sample made its way into a brain collection that the Texas State Lunatic Asylum bequeathed to the University of Texas in 1986. As far as anyone knows, 200 jarred brains and brain fragments were housed in the basement of the university for twenty-five years, until Scientific American Magazine sent photographer Adam Voorhees to document them. Upon arrival, Voorhees found only 100 specimens remained. Among the relics that had vanished without explanation or trace was Charles Whitman’s. Though it’s unclear if it was stolen, broken, or simply discarded, when I read that the tumor jar eventually disappeared, I feel a curious sense of relief.
It seems to me that Whitman’s troubles and his violence lay not in his brain cells and tissues but in the brutality that created him. This is not to say that we should forget or that we should keep no record. For better or (more likely) worse, the archives document Whitman’s poisonous fifty-year-long legacy. They hold, for example, songs and plays about him. I feel a wave of nausea pass over me when I read a 2006 Austin American-Statesman article called, “Whitman musical douses Tower horror with hilarity.” The text announces with glee that, “He sings! He dances! He shoots students with a rifle!” It gets worse: “hippies are shot dead and fetus hand puppets burst from their abdomens to argue with each other.” I learn from press clippings that, once upon a time, you could buy souvenir t-shirts in Austin featuring Whitman’s face against the Tower in the background. “Be true to your school,” commanded the shirt.
The author of Whitman’s autopsy report confirms my hunch. He rejects the theory that a brain tumor caused Whitman to kill. It ends with the following diagnosis:
Fatal injuries to the head and to the heart.
Additional finding: a small brain tumor in the white matter above the brain stem, composed of connective tissue elements of the brain, mixed with numerous enlarged blood vessels; no evidence of malignantly fast growth but that of partial tissue death, necrosis (Astrocytoma). No correlation to psychosis or permanent pains.
The report is signed by C. de Chenar, M.D., Pathologist, Neuropathologist. Handwritten by the archivist on the bottom of the page I find, “Copied from Inquest Records [Travis Co], Stored in AHC’s Basement.”
***
“I’m a little bit of a hoarder,” says Rebecca. “Appraisal is very difficult for me because I really want to keep things. I’m not a very good appraisal archivist because I want to keep everything. So, with the Whitman stuff, we kept everything because everything was valuable.”
Archivists try to honor original order in their work, because the arrangement of documents reflects the mind of the creator. The records Rebecca received, however, had no discernable order. They had been passed around for so long that there was no creator whose mind to reflect.
“The collection has grown far beyond the original police documents that formed the first sliver of the Whitman archives,” she says. “Today, a researcher will encounter an extensive press archive as well as an extensive collection of interviews and oral histories conducted by researchers over decades.”
Librarians and archivists measure physical holdings of books and printed material in linear feet, that is, by the amount of space they take up on shelves. It took Rebecca seventeen months to sort and catalog the collection into eleven archival boxes. Four-and-a-half feet long, the Charles Whitman Collection is not huge, but big enough for a researcher to scan and mark documents for photocopying rather than read every document on site. It is the Austin History Center’s most famous and, as Rebecca puts it, “most sensational” collection.
“What I appreciate about the collection,” I say to Rebecca as we talk, “is that it’s not just the police stuff—I can see why people are drawn to that: it’s dramatic and it’s upsetting. But it’s the oral histories that I found amazing: all those interviews with ambulance drivers and nurses and doctors. And the way they keep doing them—ten years after the shooting, twenty years after the shooting, thirty years after the shooting. You get a portrait of a community in its wake.”
Rebecca nods. “I think it’s more honest in that way. It’s not just the teddy bears and the sympathy cards that people put on the shrines. It’s first-person accounts. It’s not just, ‘here’s our PR response to what happened.’ It’s from before all that.”
“It predates all the scripts,” I add. Rebecca nods in agreement.
Finally, I ask the question that’s been on my mind for months: What’s more dangerous in the case of a collection like this: too much gatekeeping or too little?
The Austin History Center is the archives of the City of Austin, Rebecca reminds me. “When a record is designated with the status of ‘enduring value,’ that doesn’t mean that it needs to go to an archive or a museum and be preserved as an artifact to be revered. It just means that you can’t get rid of it. And lots of departments have their records of enduring value that they keep on site.
“As librarians, we are generally anti-censorship and anti-gatekeeping. These records belong to the residents of Austin and all residents have the right to access them. We are here for the residents and taxpayers of Austin. Records are there for accountability. I think we have a responsibility to be respectful in the way that we maintain and make available the records.”
***
Whitman’s first shot from the Tower rang out at 11:50 AM. From his perch, the gunman killed fourteen people and an unborn baby: Thomas Ashton (24), a student attending a Peace Corps training class; Robert Boyer (33), a math professor on his way to lunch; Thomas Eckman (18), a student leaving an anthropology class; Mark Gabour (16), a youngster visiting Austin for a family vacation and his Austinite aunt, Marguerite Lamport (56); Thomas Karr (22), a passerby walking adjacent to campus; Claudia Rutt (18), who was visiting campus with her boyfriend, Paul Sonntag (18), the grandson of the Austin television news director whose shock and grief were recorded, as he learned of his grandson’s death on air; Roy Schmidt (29), an electrician who just happened to be in the area; Billy Speed (22), an Austin police officer; Edna Townsey (51), the Tower receptionist who confronted Whitman and whom he killed at close range; Harry Walchuk (38), a UT graduate student; high-school student Karen Griffith (17), who died a week after the shooting; David Gunby, an engineering student who survived the initial attack but died in 2001 at the age of 58 from complications to the wounds he’d suffered that day. And finally, baby boy Wilson died in his mother Claire Wilson’s womb. Sometimes the Wilson baby is included in official counts. Sometimes not. Out of respect for his mother, I count him here.
Neither Rebecca nor any of the other archivists I encounter in Austin are old enough to remember the Tower shooting directly. To them, as to me, it’s history. And if history is about what happened and why, then my way of working in the archives is about grappling with the consequences of what’s transpired and trying to hear its echoes in the lives of witnesses and survivors.
On my way back to my hotel, I can see the state legislature off in the distance. There, on August 1, 2017, Texas lawmakers signed campus carry into law. Opponents have argued that allowing guns on campus would increase the likelihood of mass or accidental shootings. Even Ray Martinez, the police officer credited with killing Whitman, called the law stupid, saying it would open Pandora’s box.
***
Of all those shot outside the Tower, Tom Eckman and Claire Wilson stood closest to Whitman. He hit them first. Tom appears as Number 9 on the map I consult at the Austin History Center. Below his name I read, “Unborn child of Claire Wilson.” Claire has no number of her own on the map. From his perch above campus on that August morning, Charles Whitman aimed at eighteen-year-old Claire Wilson’s pregnant belly and didn’t miss. “I felt this huge jolt, like I’d stepped on a live wire,” she said in the 2016 film, Tower. “Like I’d been electrocuted.” When she fell, Tom, her boyfriend of two months, reached for her and cried out. He, too, was eighteen years old and, to this day remains the great love of Claire’s life. For months, I have held this young couple in my imagination. I marvel at how extraordinary it feels to learn that a young boy should fall in love with a girl who is six months pregnant. Perhaps it should not feel so surprising, but it is.
Of the two lovers and the unborn baby, only one lived. But their story did not end that day on the mall. The tale never ends the moment the shots ring out. A researcher could choose any life and follow it year after year, through these files, papers, and recordings, tracking each anniversary and milestone. Every life story: a book. As for me, I make my choice instinctively: the story of two young lovers beckons.
Throw a stone into a calm lake, and you will observe how the moment of impact echoes. Though the projectile disappears in an instant, its ripples remain. It’s this ripple effect that interests me in the archives.
***
Claire and Tom had been taking an anthropology class together that summer and were crossing the mall to feed their parking meter when shots rang out. Seconds after Claire fell, Tom was hit, too. For ninety minutes, Claire lay bleeding on the scorching concrete, unable to move. Tom—the son of a poet and himself a nascent writer—lay lifeless beside her. The baby boy Claire would have birthed in a few short weeks died of a bullet wound to the head.
Whitman, it seems, could have aimed at Claire’s head, as he had in Tom’s case, but witnesses agree that he deliberately aimed for her pregnant belly. With no understanding of what had happened, the expectant mother fell to the ground. The baby fell to one side of her body and then never moved again.
Two teen boys, fresh out of high school, rescued Claire after she’d been lying on the burning pavement for ninety minutes. They took her by the arms and legs and carried her to safety. One, dressed in a light t-shirt, was James Love. The other, Artly Snuff (a name he chose years after the shooting), wore all black. “Like an idiot,” he later remarked. Snuff’s thick-rimmed glasses kept sliding down his sweaty nose and threatened to fall from his face with each step. A third youngster carried Claire’s beloved Tom. In grainy film footage from that day, I study the big beef of a guy struggle to gather up the young poet’s lanky and limp body.
From a document called “Crimes Against Persons Offense Report”:
Victim’s Name: Thomas F. Eckman
Location: University of Texas Tower & Mall
The above victim was pronounced DEAD ON ARRIVAL at BRACKENRIDGE HOSPITAL at 1:35 P.M., next of kin listed as Father, PROFESSOR F. W. ECKMAN, BOWLING GREEN, OHIO. Victim suffered from a gunshot wound just below the left neck in the shoulder.
Tom’s fingerprints also appear in the file. I stare at them for a good long while before marking them for photocopying: a piece of him. Sort of.
***
Tom Eckman’s papers reside with those of his father, in the Special Collections of Bowling Green State University. They arrive piecemeal by email, as the archivist in Ohio scans and then deposits them into an electronic folder for me. So, that’s how I read them—in batches and in the order they come. The first letter I open is from Tom. Printed in an even and easily decipherable hand, but lacking addressee, signature, and even date, I deduce that it may be a draft. Context puts its writing around June 8 or 9, 1966, about seven weeks before the shooting. Context also allows me to surmise that Tom was writing to his mother. He tells her that he’s found a place to live. It’s a student-organized co-op, he writes, and he’s got a roommate. He seems satisfied with the arrangement. The co-op is where Tom met Claire. At the time of writing, he would have known her for only a week.
***
Two weeks before he died, Tom wrote a letter—also now kept among the Bowling Green State documents—to his paternal grandfather, H. B. Eckman, who had been recently hospitalized. Tom wrote to him of Austin’s heat, foreshadowing the infernal temperatures of the pavement on the day of the shooting. It ends with everyday pleasantries—greetings to aunts, uncles, cousins. He wishes his grandfather well and then signs off. The letter’s final goodbye haunts me.
The grandfather’s response, dated July 26, 1966, and written only four days before Tom’s death, appears in a shaky pencil script. Whether Parkinson’s disease or something else made his hand quake, I don’t know, but the letters make me long for an earlier time of handwritten missives. Each writer with a unique script. Coffee rings on paper, pressed flowers, tear stains, doodles: I mourn what we’ve lost since we largely stopped sending letters like these. H. B. writes that it’s warm up in Ohio, too, and reports that Tom’s uncle is off on vacation. He then tells Tom to “keep still” to Fred about the spending money he’s enclosed, a final sweet secret between grandfather and grandson. He then closes the letter with love.
The promised check resides in the archives. Dated July 25 and made out for twenty-five dollars—which amounted to about two-thirds of Tom’s monthly rent—it was never cashed.
***
The last letter Tom’s mother Mary sent to her son, and the final one that must have reached him, is dated July 25, 1966. She sent it from New Mexico, where she had moved to work for an anti-poverty program called VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). After shepherding her boy through the ruins of her marriage to his father, Mary was starting over. Writing five days before her son’s death, she tells of her arrival in a place called Mountainair. There, Mary had a new life and was finding fresh purpose in a beautiful location. In a letter full of hope and vivid detail, she describes the widow in whose house she was now living, and whose Mexican cooking she loved. As I read, I wonder if Tom had told his mother about Claire, the baby, and their newfound love. I wonder if they’d had time to celebrate his happiness before the darkness came.
As I’m trying to piece together a portrait of Mary, I come across an article in the Albuquerque Journal from August 2, 1966 (that is, the day after the shooting). Its headline declares, “Mother Faints on Hearing Son Killed By Sniper.” The article mentions Mary’s age, forty-three. I draw in my breath when I realize that she was younger then than I am now. All too cruelly, Mary learned of her boy’s death from a radio broadcast. The author of the short newspaper report repeats this fact about the radio three times in the short span of the article, as if from disbelief:
“[. . .] under heavy sedation here Monday night following her collapse when she heard of her son’s death on the radio.”
“[. . .] collapsed and lost consciousness when she heard of her son’s death on the radio.”
“[. . .] listening to the radio, heard her son’s name and collapsed.”
“Be a good man,” writes Mary to Tom, by way of concluding that final letter to her son. I can only imagine how many times she longed to rewind the clock, to go back in time, and stop her boy from going to campus.
I cannot account for how Tom’s mother Mary continued on without him. After collapsing in the kitchen upon learning of her son’s death, she disappears from the newspapers and archives without a trace. I can only imagine how excruciating the days and years that followed August 1, 1966, must have been for her, but I also want to imagine that this woman, who had become a single mother after her divorce, likely had a reserve of strength to get her through. I want to believe that.
***
The idea of searching for Claire Wilson comes to me one day, out of the blue. I find her quickly on social media. She is so easy to locate that I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it earlier. Along with a few photographs of herself from the 1960s, I find an image of Tom on her timeline. He smiles and leans forward in front of a bookcase. It feels like a candid shot, unposed. His hair is dark, wavy, and tidy and he wears a light blue, possibly denim buttoned shirt. Tom’s eyes sparkle and he flashes a smile at the camera.
Like Mary, Claire too lost a boy that day, a child on the cusp of entering the world. “I so wanted a baby, and I so missed my baby,” Claire is quoted as saying in the 2008 Austin American-Statesman article, “Her grief remains.” She continues, “For years, even now, I have dreams that somehow I found my baby and I do something really stupid and I somehow lose it. I misplace him.” A photograph taken a few months after the shooting shows a young woman with wide-set eyes and clear, open face. Her hair is long, dark, and glossy. “She was beautiful,” one of Claire’s classmates tells me over the phone. On campus, she hung with what he calls “the radical people.” Something about her drew others in, and not just young men. Claire was “top dog” among the women. “The center of attention. Pregnant and proud.” But after the shooting, he said, she disappeared.
The most extraordinary thing that Claire has to say is about Charles Whitman, the man who shot her. She offers it on screen, in Tower:
Through the years, he remained largely [. . .] wooden in my mind but the longer I’ve lived, and the more I’ve seen these precious little children who grow up and do sometimes horrible things, the more I have come to think of him as a very confused, very damaged young man. He died at about twenty-five. There’s a picture of him standing at three years old holding a rifle on either side on the beach. I just think of him as that three-year-old who would’ve been sitting in my lap. You know, I’m a teacher and I love that age. So much promise and so much hope. How can I hate somebody like that? I can’t hate him, in spite of the incredible damage that he’s done. I can’t hate him. I just can’t do that.
[Interviewer] Do you forgive him?
I forgive him, yes. [Claire smiles lightly when she says this.] How can I not forgive if I’ve been forgiven so much?
I am not as good as Claire. Unlike her, I have no forgiveness, no understanding for Charles Whitman. I have nothing but disdain for this man who believed that strength lay in violence and in weaponry. And so, in this story—despite the disappearing brain specimens and ominous medical reports—Claire, not Whitman, remains its greatest mystery.
***
In medicine, the term “retrospectroscope” describes a process whereby doctors go over past cases to see what they missed and to learn how to do better. The reflective process can not only help doctors grieve lost patients but also to anticipate and avoid similar mistakes. In the best-case scenario, a retrospectroscope aims not to assign blame but to allow physicians to learn and do better next time.
What if we thought of archives in a similar way? That is, as a retrospectroscope? What if we considered these collections—fragmented records of the past—as occasions for grieving, compassion, and as sites of healing? What if archives, too, were about learning to do better?
Perhaps it’s a pessimistic use of the retrospectroscope to focus in on the destruction of the Tower shooting. But what is to be gained from sugar-coating pain? The archives are no place for false cheer. There, a somber stance is in order. After all, in the archives, our job is to listen without shrinking. Our task is not only to grieve but also to anticipate. To ask: what is to be learned from such loss? Here, again, it is Claire who offers wisdom.
“A campus is a sacred place,” Claire said on one of two occasions that she testified against campus carry at the Texas Capitol. Her words and pain carried little weight with Texas lawmakers. They snatched the retrospectroscope from her hands and smashed it against the floor of the legislature.
***
It is spring 2025. As summer nears, I recall that every August 1, Austinites call local talk radio stations to tell the stories of where they were and what they were doing when a sniper took aim at people from the Tower on the University of Texas campus. Each semester, I debate whether to add a university-provided clause to my syllabus asking students not to bring firearms into my office. As I look up at the buildings on our beautiful campus, called The Forty Acres, I note that the “GUN-FREE UT” signs, freshly printed when I first photographed them back in 2017, still hang in office windows. They have yellowed and gone crooked. The Tower continues to stand watch over our campus as it did in 1966. I now pass it every day on the way to my office. An ex-UT grad student tells me that you can still find bullet marks in the concrete of the plaza, so whenever I cross it on my way to Faculty Council meetings, I look around to see if I can discern any such scars at the Tower’s base. After three years of scrutiny, I still can’t tell what I’m looking at.
Since the Tower shooting, at least six mass shootings (with four or more victims, as defined by The Violence Project) have taken place on college campuses in the United States, including the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that left thirty-three dead. Called the 9/11 of Education, legislators and university administrators loudly declared, “never again.” But then, a year later, the Northern Illinois shooting claimed five student lives. In 2012 a former student at Oikos University in Oakland, California, killed six students and a receptionist on campus. In 2015, a student opened fire on his professor and classmates at Umpqua Community College, killing eight peers and their instructor. On and on it goes. So much for the retrospectroscope and for “never again.” So much for institutional memory.
Still, I want to believe that archives represent a hope that those who come after us will do better. Perhaps this is delusional: a case of expecting a different result after a series of identical actions—the very definition of insanity, that is. But still, I hope, because what choice do we have? May our students heed the warnings of our archives. May they succeed where we have failed. May they look back on our stupidity and stubbornness in horror, or at least bemusement. May they emerge from the shadow of the Tower and walk through campus without fear.
Julija Šukys is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives (2025), Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017), Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (2012), and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahr Djaout (2007). In her work, Šukys draws on archives, interviews, bibliographical research, and observation to write about everyday lives in marginal places, about women’s life-writing, and about the legacy of violence across generations and national borders. In Fall 2022, she held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at York University in Toronto.
