Image from the Skä•noñh – Great Law of Peace Center

A series of 15th- and 16th-century papal edicts continues to shape policies that include land usage and mineral extraction across the globe and undergird notions of white supremacy and religious extremism. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the edicts, in ruling that a 1763 land sale by the Piankeshaw Indian nation to British citizens was invalid because the Piankeshaw nation did not have the right to transfer ownership of the land. The case, Johnson v. M’lntosh, would ultimately shape the future of international property law.

Two hundred years after the Supreme Court ruling, the wider impacts of the papal edicts, known collectively as the (DoCD), persist, illustrated by phenomena as varied as extremist rhetoric and destructive weather events caused by climate change. The history and current context of the edicts will be discussed at a major conference at the University later this fall.

“” will take place on campus Dec. 8-10. Its main sponsor is the Henry Luce Foundation, which awarded the University a to examine and challenge the theology and legal theory of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery.

National experts on racism, white supremacy and religious extremism will participate in the upcoming conference, highlighting the College of Arts and Sciences’ role amid important global conversations that challenge the ongoing impacts of 15th-century Vatican policies on Indigenous, Black and brown people.

Philip Arnold

“The issues around religious extremism and the religious roots of white supremacy did not start yesterday,” says , faculty in the Department of Religion and conference organizer. “They are part of the framework of colonialism that has its origins in the 15th century and we still see manifested today.”

, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and author of (September, Simon & Schuster) is among high-profile speakers on the conference agenda.

A “sense of divine entitlement, of European Christian closeness, has shaped the worldview of most white Americans and thereby influenced key events, policies, and laws throughout American history,” Jones . “The contemporary white Christian nationalist movement flows directly from a cultural stream that has run through this continent since the first Europeans arrived five centuries ago.”

Jones is referring to the DoCD, the series of papal edicts that declare that European civilization and Western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions and was seen as justifying colonization and oppression.

Also scheduled to speak are , a historian of African American and American religion and professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and , a Mexican American historian of religions at Harvard Divinity School who focuses Mesoamerican cities as symbols, and the Mexican-American borderlands.

The conference also will include:

• Leaders of the Haudenosaunee, the Indigenous peoples on whose ancestral land Syracuse University stands
• Undergraduate poster projects
• Academic paper presentations
• Podcast session by
• Dinner and tour at , a Haudenosaunee cultural center near Syracuse focused on telling the story of the Native peoples of Central New York through the lens of the Onondaga Nation
• Art competition, gallery and talks
• “,” performed by George Emilio Sanchez
• Partnership with Danielle Boaz of the Coalition to Combat Religious Racism

The conference is the latest initiative of the Luce grant, for which Arnold is principal investigator. The grant also has supported a , open-source publications, research and conference attendance. It runs through 2025.

The DoCD has been used to justify land thefts and the erasure of Indigenous culture, language and spirituality. It continues to influence policies across the globe related to property rights, Indigenous rights and environmental policies, according to conference organizers.

“Multinational corporations are using it to justify resource extraction in various places around the world,” Arnold said. “It goes back to those papal bulls: ‘You’re just savages and the land is empty, so we can take the gold and gems and oil.’ This is still active as a principal of law. It connects a lot of urgent issues of today.”

Organizers expect up to 300 participants. Some conference events will be open to the public. For more information, contact Arnold at info@indigenousvalues.org.

Mosab Abu Toha G’23

The title poem in the debut collection of begins with a plea that the surgeon repairing his punctured eardrum save the things he cherishes: his mother’s voice, songs in Arabic, poems in English, chirping birds. “When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear,” he .

As for the sounds of drones, F-16s, bombs or rockets, “Rid my tiny ear canal of them all,” Abu Toha, a student in the creative writing M.F.A. program, writes. The book, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear” (City Lights, 2022), is a finalist in the sought-after , which recognize the best books written in English in the United States in six categories.

The collection also won in the Creative Awards category of the 2022 Palestine Book Awards. Sponsored by the news outlet Middle East Monitor, the awards recognize books for contributing to the diversity of submissions and genres featuring the Palestinian narrative.

Palestinian writer Abu Toha previously was a visiting poet and scholar at Harvard University and a visiting librarian-in-residence at Harvard’s Houghton Library. His writing has appeared in outlets that include Poetry, The Nation and Arrowsmith. Drawn from firsthand experience living under Israeli restrictions and attacks, his poetry is characterized by close attention to intimate details amid political violence and personal loss.

“We are so honored to have Mosab in our midst at Syracuse University,” says , associate professor of English and department chair. “He is a brilliant poet whose gift for creating imagery subtly draws the reader into the experiences and scenes he describes, often leaving them riven between feelings of wonder and horror.”

In February, he gave a well-received reading at Syracuse’s . “When I read my poems to people aloud, I feel what I’m reading as if it’s happening again,” Abu Toha says. “It is a great experience to read to people and see how they react to your poems.”

When he finishes his studies at Syracuse in August, he will return home to Gaza to his wife and their children, ages 3, 6 and 7, and to his job teaching English in an elementary school, and continue to write in English and Arabic.

In this Q&A, Abu Toha describes how poetry helps him understand his life in Gaza.

Debra Adams Simmons

Debra Adams Simmons ’86, a national leader in journalism and a champion of diverse media organizations, inclusive editorial coverage, increased accountability journalism and a strengthened local news ecosystem, will deliver the alumni keynote address at the  on Saturday, May 13. The celebration will be held at 8:30 a.m. in the JMA Wireless Dome.

A dual English and broadcast journalism graduate with three decades of extensive journalism experience as a reporter, editor and senior editorial executive, Simmons was named vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at National Geographic Media in 2022.

In that role, she helps lead diversity initiatives across the company’s parent organization, The Walt Disney Company, including efforts to amplify underrepresented voices through authentic storytelling. This guiding principle was honed in part by her English classes and liberal arts professors at A&S | Maxwell. “As a journalist you think, ‘What are the stories that can move the needle here, that can make a difference?’” says Simmons.

Before that, Simmons had worked since 2017 as executive editor of history and culture for National Geographic, the 135-year-old magazine known for its striking photojournalism and focus on the history and lived experiences of people and places around the world.

In her convocation remarks, Simmons will address one of the critical issues facing American society today: the imperative to build a stronger local news and information ecosystem as the number of community news outlets continues to shrink and the industry battles for survival. “If local news vanishes, can local democracy, civic engagement and accountability survive?” Simmons asks.

She also will discuss the importance of mentors, whether professors, alumni in a formal program like  or professionals in the workplace, in helping emerging journalists and other young professionals launch and successfully navigate their careers.

Following the path of her interdisciplinary student experience, Simmons has maintained deep alumni relationships with Syracuse University. She is vice-chair of the College of Arts and Sciences’ dean’s advisory board, which she recently hosted at National Geographic’s office in Washington, D.C. She has funded an endowed Our Time Has Come Scholarship to support Arts and Sciences students and is helping the Syracuse University chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. reach an ambitious $1 million scholarship goal. She also was among Newhouse’s 50 Forward, recognized as part of the school’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2015. She will serve as a facilitator and keynote speaker for the summer 2023 Newhouse DEIA Campus Immersion experience.

Lois Agnew, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, says, “I am thrilled that our graduating students will have the opportunity to hear Debra Adams Simmons speak at Convocation. Debra has built a high-profile, noteworthy career by combining an incredible talent for writing with a real passion for making positive change in the media industry. At A&S | Maxwell, our students go on to help make the world healthier, more hopeful and more humane. Debra is an outstanding example of the liberal arts’ power to do just that.”

About Simmons’ Career

In her first reporting job at the Syracuse Herald-Journal, which she began one week after graduating from Syracuse University, she wrote an award-winning story on abuses in the Syracuse-area foster care system. She continued writing about underrepresented communities when she later covered public city schools for the Detroit Free Press and the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant.

Simmons moved into management in 1995 as education editor at The Virginian-Pilot where she later served as metro editor and as deputy managing editor for local news. She was the managing editor and editor of the Akron Beacon Journal before serving in the same roles at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer. In 2014, she was named vice president of news development for Advance Local, the Newhouse family-owned company that includes The Plain Dealer as well as The (Syracuse) Post-Standard and Syracuse.com.

Along with her commitment to DEI, Simmons has prioritized accountability journalism—holding people and institutions responsible for their words and actions—and has worked to cultivate a new generation of news leaders. She spent a year as a fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 2016 examining how best to create inclusively led, digitally focused media organizations.

A record of robust media leadership includes serving on the boards of the News Leaders Association (formerly the American Society of News Editors) and the International Women’s Media Foundation and serving as president of the Associated Press Media Editors Association and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She also has been an adjunct faculty member of Kent State University’s journalism and mass communications program teaching media ethics and media marketplace classes. Simmons currently serves on the board of Signal Ohio, a statewide nonprofit news organization launched by the American Journalism Project, a group focused on addressing the news and information needs of citizens across the country.

Her broader work includes helping organizations implement journalism projects to help address news voids that exist in many communities. Simmons has participated seven times as a Pulitzer Prize juror (including in 2023) and spent five years as the Midwest judge for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, a program of the University of Michigan Knight Wallace Fellowship. She also is a longtime judge of the Newhouse School’s Mirror Awards.

“Every moment in my career has been a DEI moment because in the 1980s and ’90s there weren’t that many women senior leaders,” Simmons says. “When I became the editor of The Plain Dealer [in 2010], I think there were two Black women executive editors in the country.”

Today’s newsrooms in such cities as Dallas, Houston, Charlotte and Miami are led by women, many of whom Simmons has mentored and supported.

Simmons advises students to seek and nurture mentors and, when more experienced, to guide and support the next generation. “I’m hoping to smooth the path for future generations of leaders,” she says.

Lisa Manning

Two Syracuse University physicists have been named fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), the latest professional recognition highlighting the increasing visibility of the department’s faculty and research. , professor of physics and founding director of the , and , professor of physics, earned the honor, given to just half of 1 percent of the professional organization’s membership. In addition, , professor of physics, was named an APS Fellow last year. .

“The string of recent honors and accomplishments reinforces both Syracuse’s status as an R1 university and the caliber of the department,” says Alan Middleton, associate dean of research and scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences. “As a member of the physics department myself, I know how outstanding it is to have two members of an institution named APS Fellows in one year,” says Middleton, a 2010 APS Fellow. “Our physics faculty are some of the most accomplished in the discipline.”

Manning’s APS citation notes her work in microscopic theory of flow and rigidity in disordered and biological materials. Her current research includes investigating when materials like glass will fail. “This is an honor typically received later in your career,” she says. “It’s exciting and humbling.”

Christian Santangelo

Santangelo’s citation notes his work using geometry and topology to understand the elasticity of soft materials. Recent work focuses on designing materials that can be controlled by conditions such as heat and creating tiny self-folding structures. “As a theoretical physicist, the extent to which people pay attention to my work is really all I have to gauge its impact,” he says. “To me, this means that maybe I have advanced the field a little.”

Manning has earned several more awards recently. In early October, she received the Emerging Leader Award from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2008.

That award came on the heels of a trip to Beijing, where she delivered a plenary talk at the 2019 International Workshop on Glass Physics, hosted by the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her Sept. 27 talk addressed her research on predicting when materials will fail.

Manning also co-chaired the highly selective, international Gordon Research Conference on Soft Condensed Matter Physics in August 2019 at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire. To attend, conference guests must apply and be accepted. In 2021, Manning will chair the event, and in 2023 Ross will be chair.

Jennifer Ross

The recent recognitions reflect “the success of the research we have going on at the BioInspired Institute,” Manning says of the center that supports research by life sciences, engineering, physics and chemistry faculty. Ross and Santangelo are research directors of teams working on two of the institute’s three focus areas: development and disease and smart materials.

“These are real signs that we are right on the cutting edge with some of the best in the world in this area,” Manning says. “We want to take areas where we are world-class and build upon them.”

Other Syracuse physicists continue to draw accolades as well for groundbreaking research. Recent highlights include:

•  was awarded two National Institutes of Health grants to study protein-protein interactions.
•  have determined a way that matter and antimatter behave differently.
• , professor of physics, uncovered new information about a class of pentaquarks.

“This is a planning meeting to see if we have enough common research interests to create a compelling case for writing large grants,” says religion professor . “The collaboration gives each department access to funding opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic.”

The symposium will explore future research collaborations on two different subjects. One, the study of latent normative texts, focuses on the ways people use old texts, typically sacred books, to justify contemporary political and legal positions. For example, some use the Hebrew Bible verse from Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” to condemn homosexuals. People use references in other texts to justify defending racism, war and land claims, Watts says.

James W. Watts

“People use ancient scriptures to defend practices and institutions that seem threatened by progressive changes in social norms and legal expectations,” Watts writes in the grant application. “Normative texts can also be used to promote social change as a return to lost values and principles, that is, as ‘reform’ or ‘revival.’”

The collaboration with CERES could create historical and contemporary case studies that offer insight and guidance about how to evaluate and manage such attempts to revive old normative texts. “This is a theme we want to look at on a comparative level,” Watts says.

The American-German team also will research changes in physical spaces, such as native temples turned into churches or churches transformed into mosques. The study of space and place includes large-scale national claims to cities (like Jerusalem) and territory (such as the partition of India, Native American land claims, and Israel and Palestine).

Religious spaces play a prominent role in politics and international affairs, Watts notes. “We hope to gain the ability to describe some larger patterns and begin to think in terms of responses and policy decisions about things,” he explains. “You begin to think about how the transitions can be handled gracefully rather than with conflicts.”

The collaboration builds on the expertise of several scholars. Watts, for example, leads the , which investigates how books and texts function as material objects of social power. In 2015-16, he was a Käte Hamburg Kolleg visiting fellow at Ruhr University. His work with CERES spurred conversation with his German colleagues about a longer-term collaboration.

’s works on how the 500-year-old Doctrine of Discovery still shapes legal decisions about native land claims. Arnold, associate professor and chair of the religion department, is founding director of the Skä·noñh Great Law of Peace Center on Onondaga Lake, which highlights the significance of that sacred site for the Onondaga Nation.

, Bishop W. Earl Ledden Professor of Religion, addresses the relevance of early Christian theology on contemporary ecological thought in her new book, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). And religion professor edited (Springer, 2016). It includes essays on new or changing religious organizations in Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, Hong Kong and other locations.

Ten CERES faculty members will join Syracuse faculty at the March 4-5, 2019, symposium. A $5,000 CUSE Seed Grant, awarded in April, also supports the project. SU’s religion department and CERES this semester initiated a graduate student exchange program.

“The Delmas and CUSE grants will make it possible for us to embark on this rare experiment in research collaboration between religion departments,” Watts says. “We expect it will expand our understanding of how both places and texts change with the societies that cherish them.”

In a paper published recently in the prestigious international journal World Englishes, professor of linguistics and director of South Asian languages asserts that the immigrant’s low English skills and the barriers and discrimination he experienced as a result could have motivated the worst mass killing in New York state.

Tej Bhatia

“The way I see it, the key source of his trauma is the English language,” Bhatia explains. “Always society is mocking his acts and making fun of him. He shoots the other immigrants because he saw the English class as the oppressor.”

The trauma of constant discrimination takes a toll, Bhatia says. “There are people who are criticized and get traumatized,” he says. “They are shattered. In some psychological makeups, you can find other ways to combat that trauma. In this case, he could not.”

Wong’s deadly act highlights what Bhatia calls accent discrimination. It’s a form of discrimination at play when a reporter in 1992 asked then-U.S. presidential candidate Bill Clinton why–despite attending Oxford University and Yale Law School–the Arkansas-born politician talked “like a hillbilly.” President Trump recently called Alabama-born Attorney General Jeff Sessions “a dumb southerner.” Accent discrimination also played a part in the Ebonics controversy of 1996, when critics said calling African American Vernacular English a legitimate language devalued standard English in schools and society.

published this month, comes amid the United States’ increasingly polarized debate about immigration–an atmosphere Bhatia fears could traumatize people who do not speak standard English. “These problems have been amplified now because of the heightened tension in this country,” Bhatia says. “In this political context, there is more and more evidence of intolerance. This discrimination will become more pronounced.”

Accent discrimination “is the most powerful and overlooked feature responsible for social discrimination,” Bhatia says. “We talk about gender and height and ethnicity. Language is the most invisible and powerful source of discrimination and we don’t talk about it.”

Southerners, Latinos, African Americans and others often make an effort to change–or eliminate–their accents through language lessons or cosmetic surgery. But accents have a biological aspect, and after puberty, it’s very hard to change them, he explains.

“If you do, you are shedding your identity,” he says. “Second, it’s not do-able. Third, it’s unnatural. No matter what happens, your natural accent will show up in unconscious speech.”

Accents are more about social biases than language itself, he adds: “The implication is, ‘You don’t belong to my club. You are subordinate to me.’”

The “desirable” accent in a certain society is that of the powerful. “The language and accents of prestigious and dominant people are viewed as prestigious and powerful simply because they are used by powerful groups,” he writes. “Conversely, the language of the less powerful and lower-status groups is often characterized as ‘non-standard’ and ‘improper’ language, which often becomes an object of ridicule or stigmatization.”

When people point out or mock an accent, “you cannot underestimate the trauma,” Bhatia says. “Your self is shattered the moment you are mocked.”

The topic hits home for Bhatia, who was born in India and has lived in the United States most of his adult life. “If I try to shed my Indian accent, it would take a toll on myself professionally with South Asians,” he explains.

Bhatia encourages diversity programs to add accent and language discrimination to their agendas. “It’s fascinating because it touches on social biases on the deepest level where we sometimes cannot even articulate it,” he says. “People get very defensive about it, but deep down we do it. If we are serious about diversity, this topic cannot be overlooked.”

On May 17, 1968, two Roman Catholic priests with Syracuse ties entered Local Draft Board No. 33 in Catonsville, Maryland. There Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Rev. Philip Berrigan and seven others snatched Selective Service records, then burned them with homemade napalm to protest the Vietnam War. This action and the high-profile trial that followed brought Christian nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War into the public consciousness and spurred heated debate about the role of clergy in anti-war efforts.

Two children of Philip Berrigan and Liz McAllister (another member of the Catonsville Nine) who carry on their parents’ legacy and two activists who live out the Catholic social justice tradition will speak at the seventh annual Borgognoni Memorial Lecture on Monday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. “The Berrigan Brothers and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition in Syracuse” will take place in Maxwell Auditorium in Maxwell Hall. Admission is free. Parking is available at the Irving Avenue Garage and other locations on or near campus.

The panelists are:

• Frida Berrigan, social activist living in New London, Connecticut, and daughter of Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister
• Jerry Berrigan, social activist living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and son of Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister
• Kathleen Rumpf, longtime Syracuse social activist who served time in prison for Plowshares protests and worked with the Berrigans on anti-war and prison reform projects
• Fred Boehrer G’01, co-coordinator of Emmaus House (Albany Catholic Worker), who wrote his dissertation on the Catholic Worker Movement (communities started in 1933 to encourage life “in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ”)

The Berrigan brothers in a family photo.

The program marks the 50th anniversary of the Catonsville Nine. Dan Berrigan (1921-2016), a Jesuit priest; Phil Berrigan (1923-2002), a Josephite priest who later married; and Jerry Berrigan (1919-2015), a longtime Syracuse educator and social activist, “came to define the Catholic anti-war movement,” says , chair of the Borgognoni Fund’s faculty steering committee. Thompson is based in the Maxwell School, where she serves as associate professor of history and political science and as a senior research scholar of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.

Images of the Fathers Berrigan in clerical collars and handcuffs shocked many. Their vehement and public opposition to the Vietnam War led some to praise them as prophets of peace and others to dismiss them as anti-American troublemakers. Time magazine featured an illustration of Dan and Philip on its Jan. 25, 1971, cover. Dan Berrigan has come to be associated with “the radical priest” Paul Simon refers to in his 1972 song “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”

Throughout their lives, the Berrigans applied their Catholic faith to a broad social justice agenda, including civil rights and poverty. In the 1980s, they turned their attention to opposing nuclear weapons. The first Plowshares protest—a reference to the Biblical injunction to “beat their swords into plowshares”— took place in 1980, when the priest brothers and six others trespassed onto the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. There they damaged a nuclear warhead and poured blood on documents. The participants were charged, convicted and served federal prison time. Since 1980, more than 100 Plowshares demonstrations have taken place.

The three activist brothers (raised in Syracuse with three more brothers) “from the very outset  had commitments to Catholic social teaching,” Thompson says, referring to Catholic doctrine on matters of human dignity and the common good of society.

While the Catholic activists were not “universally loved, they were certainly influential,” she adds. “They helped to translate the tradition of civil disobedience to Catholic tradition. They worked in an interfaith context. They had a vision of social justice that allowed them to address a range of issues.”

The Borgognoni Lecture is made possible by the late Monsignor Charles L. Borgognoni (a.k.a. Father Charles), longtime Roman Catholic chaplain of the St. Thomas More Campus Ministry. Before his death in 2007, Borgognoni established a fund in memory of his parents, Joseph and Amelia, to promote the study of Catholic theology and religion in society at Syracuse.

The Borgognoni Fund also relies on the generosity of friends and alumni, including Judith Pistaki Zelisko ’72, a member of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Board of Visitors, and Charles Borgognoni ’76, nephew of Father Charles, both of whom spearheaded fundraising efforts.

For more information about the Borgognoni Fund or to contribute, contact Christopher Lukowski at 315.443.0354 or clukowsk@syr.edu.

Philip Arnold

“He loved sports and was deeply involved with the Creator’s Game, what we call lacrosse, among different Haudenosaunee nations,” says , associate professor and chair of the religion department in the College of Arts and Sciences and president of the Indigenous Values Initiative, the event’s sponsor. Arnold is former founding director of the Skä·noñh—Great Law of Peace Center. The Indigenous Values Initiative is a nonprofit organization that supports the work of Skä·noñh and other initiatives to educate the general public about the indigenous values of the Haudenosaunee.

“Randy asked me and my wife, Sandy Bigtree (also Mohawk), for help bringing the game back to Onondaga Lake,” Arnold says. “He gave us a leather ball that his team had won in a master’s tournament elsewhere in the Confederacy. At this event, we honor Randy and the origins of the game.”

The first Wooden Stick Festival was in 2013. The free festival returns to Onondaga Lake, sacred to the six nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and birthplace of lacrosse, Dehontsigwa’ehs (“They bump hips”).

The Randy Hall Memorial Box Lacrosse Tournament will include 10 games beginning at 10 a.m. Friday at the Onondaga Lake fields and continuing Sunday at 10 a.m. Four teams will compete. The players will use a leather ball and are encouraged to use wooden sticks.

The festival, also at Onondaga Lake, runs 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to noon on Sunday. World-renowned lacrosse stick maker Alf Jacques, a member of the Onondaga Nation, will speak both days at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Social dancing and music will be at 1 p.m. both days.

“Over 1,000 years ago the game was first played at Onondaga Lake to help bring five warring nations together in peace,” says Tadodaho Sid Hill, the traditional leader of the Onondaga Nation and the six-nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy. “CNY has benefited from this rich legacy, and as a result this area is a hotbed for lacrosse.”

Nearly one million athletes in the United States play lacrosse today, and the game continues to be the fastest-growing sport in the world, according to . “Unlike other sports, lacrosse offers us a unique educational opportunity to teach these Haudenosaunee values to young athletes and enthusiasts,” Arnold says.

Hall loved lacrosse and was committed to the Onondaga Athletic Club, where he coached and played. He was an avid sports enthusiast, playing and coaching many lacrosse and basketball teams of the Onondaga Athletic Club and Mohawk Express. Hall also advocated traditional medicines and gardening.

Hall was born in Massena, New York, and grew up in Syracuse. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam from 1965-68. He was among about 500 Native Americans who participated in the 1972 American Indian Movement takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. That action followed the cross-country Trail of Broken Treaties, intended to bring attention to issues including living standards on reservations and Native American sovereignty and treaty rights.

For more information, visit , and .

LaToya M. Hobbs

In the (CFAC) exhibition “Salt of the Earth,” hopes to spur a dialogue about the perception of Black womanhood. “In thinking about women as ‘preservers’ in service to others, I want to highlight the importance of self-preservation and examine how Black women engage in acts of self-care or the lack thereof,” she says in her artist’s statement.

The exhibition, which feature 15 pieces in a variety of mediums, runs through Nov. 3. An opening reception and artist talk—a conversation between Hobbs and , assistant professor of African American Studies (AAS) in the College of Arts and Sciences—will be 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, at CFAC, 805 E. Genesee St.

“The pieces in the exhibition hum with energy and evoke dynamism and rhythm,” says CFAC’s outgoing interim director Kal Alston. “The work gives viewers an opportunity to meditate on the role, centrality, vitality and spirit of Black women at a personal, community and global level.”

Alston is also associate dean of academic affairs and a professor of Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse’s School of Education and an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies in A&S. She has served as CFAC interim director since October 2016. The center, founded in 1972, is a unit of AAS.

“Queen Wawa” Oil, Acrylic and Collage on Canvas 30” X 24

“Salt of the Earth” is part of the Department of African American Studies Colloquium Series and was brought to CFAC by Gibson, an expert in 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and culture.

Hobbs, a native of North Little Rock, Arkansas, earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art with an emphasis in painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Purdue University. She is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has appeared at numerous exhibitions, including at the Tulipamwe International Artists’ Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia (Africa); Prizm Art Fair; Art Basel Miami and the National Wet Paint Exhibition in Chicago. Her work has been featured in Transition: An International Review, a publication of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Another Hobbs solo exhibition, “Sitting Pretty,” is at Goucher College’s Rosenberg Gallery through Oct. 25. That show features 15 large-scale woodcut and mixed media monotype portraits that “confront European expectations of beauty and hairstyle with boldness, rebellion, self-confidence, and a spiritual consciousness.”

Her CFAC exhibition aims toward “redefining what motherhood looks like in the 21st century for Black women,” Gibson says. The exhibition illustrates “the continued resiliency and beauty of Black women in all of their many manifestations.”

Glenn Wright and Vivian May

Two Syracuse University projects have received 2018  awards. Glenn Wright, director of , and , director of the  and professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, received funding to enhance doctoral training for humanities Ph.D.s in ways that prepare them to pursue a wide range of meaningful careers, both within the academy and outside it. , associate professor and director of graduate studies in the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of Art and Music Histories, received funding for research and preparation of a book on paintings by 20th-century Pueblo artists of the southwestern United States.

The Syracuse awards are among $18.6 million in NEH grants to support 199 humanities projects nationwide. The NEH, created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.

“The NEH is so important, because it provides critical support for humanities research, teaching, preservation and programming,” says , senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Not only does it benefit the scholars who receive funding to pursue their research, but also students and the public, who are able to enjoy fruits of the work done by those researchers.”

This year’s NEH awards are especially welcome following President Trump’s March 2017 call to eliminate the NEH, along with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other arts and cultural agencies. The  , passed by Congress and signed by President Trump last month, included increases of about $3 million to the NEH and NEA, raising their annual budgets to about $153 million each.

“Continued federal funding provides support for a wide variety of efforts,” Greenberg says. “The NEH supports educational programs for veterans, provides funding for libraries, museums and theaters, and has the potential to benefit pretty much everyone in society throughout the entire country. There is no question we all would be missing a lot if the NEH weren’t around.”

Recent NEH-supported projects at Syracuse include the Humanities Open Book Program (a joint project with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), which allowed Syracuse University Press to digitize 23 titles from its Irish Studies and New York State series; and the creation of a digital atlas of nearby Onondaga Lake that includes Rachel May, director of sustainability education; Jane Read, associate professor of geography in Maxwell; and Phil Arnold, associate professor and chair of religion in A&S.

In addition, more than five Syracuse scholars have received NEH summer stipends in the last decade. Recent awardees include associate professor of history Michael Ebner, who conducted archival research in Rome for a book on Italian Fascism, and , associate professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art and Music Histories, who did research in the United Kingdom for her book project “From Two Leaves and a Bud: Visualizing Tea in Colonial and Modern India.”

Thanks to 2018 funding, Wright and May are co-directing an ambitious initiative that includes four projects aimed at advancing the University’s capacity to place its humanities doctoral graduates in a wider range of positions. “Reimagining Doctoral Training in the Humanities” received $24,997. It is one of four projects the NEH funded in the category Next Generation Ph.D., totaling $89,146.

The project is a response to what Wright and May see as “the disquieting imbalance between the number of Ph.D.s emerging from humanities programs and available full-time faculty positions.” They will oversee a four-pronged approach that will research potential initiatives Syracuse may implement by academic year 2019-20.

Working groups made up of about 25 faculty, students and alumni across humanities disciplines will address these four topics: curricular reform, professional development and career preparation, creation of a Ph.D. alumni mentoring network and development of resources to enable non-monographic dissertation projects.

“NEH funding will allow us to develop actionable plans and take concrete steps to diversify career preparation for humanities Ph.D. students,” says Wright. “These initiatives are a necessary complement to the work we have always done to prepare doctoral graduates for faculty careers.”

“Rather than diminish or eliminate humanities doctoral training, it is imperative to highlight the essential value of the intensive research, writing and analytic skills honed in humanities doctorates. At the same time, we need to transform how we approach doctoral training and mentoring to meet the evolving needs of our wider society and the changing higher education landscape,” says May. “These changes will help our students find fulfilling careers in a variety of contexts. And, in fact, we have already begun to see the kind of job placement success that can come from thinking more broadly about humanities doctoral research and its wider impact via alumni of our “Humanities New York” Public Humanities Graduate Fellowships at the Humanities Center.”

Sascha Scott

Scott received a $6,000 summer stipend for her second book, “Modern Pueblo Painting: Art, Colonization, and Aesthetic Agency.” Hers is one of 65 grants totaling $390,000 that support full-time scholarly work for two months. Scott also received a Howard Fellowship, awarded by the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation through Brown University, to support a research leave for academic year 2018-19. Scott began work on this project as a faculty fellow at the Humanities Center this year.

She will spend this summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, researching in museums and archives and meeting with tribal liaisons and relatives of the early 20^th-century artists she is writing about. Those consultations improve her research and help her to avoid writing about material Pueblo communities might find sensitive.

Her book challenges conventional narratives about American Indian arts produced in colonial contexts by shifting the narrative away from an emphasis on colonial markets and Anglo-American patronage and instead highlighting the artists’ aesthetic agency, or their ability to navigate complex cultural and political systems. “While these paintings were the product of crosscultural contact,” she says, “they do not merely pander to outsider markets. Pueblo paintings are testaments to the artists’ and their communities’ resilience and creativity as they responded to a rapidly changing world.”

Martin Alberto Gonzalez, left, with children during a Reading Circles workshop at La Casita

More than 160 student volunteers and interns worked this year with La Casita, says Tere Paniagua ’82, executive director of the ’ Office of Cultural Engagement for the Hispanic Community. That number increases by about 40 percent each year, she says.

La Casita volunteers and interns, including about a dozen students seeking practicum opportunities in bilingual education, work with La Casita’s bilingual library and dual language Reading Circles. An annual book project offers learning opportunities in publishing including editorial work, graphic design and marketing.

“La Casita’s bilingual library is a resource for La Casita’s various bilingual programs and for communities that interact with us daily, including local residents and University faculty and students,” Panaigua says.

The organization “serves communities on and off campus, by providing a cultural and language immersion experience that is impossible to come across anywhere in our city and our region,” she adds. “In just seven years, it has evolved into a unique project that positions the College of Arts and Sciences and Syracuse University as a leading Hispanic cultural engagement institute and partner in developing groundbreaking cultural heritage research in the CNY region.”

La Casita currently serves 67 children in its weekly literacy programs—a core mission of the center. Dual language literacy programs continue to grow, with four weekly workshops, including two preschool groups and two elementary school-level groups. Plans are underway to offer a high school program in collaboration with the ’s program.

This year’s “Diversity in Reading” events include:

• 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 11: Martín Alberto González will present a talk on his book “21 Miles of Scenic Beauty and Then Oxnard.” González’s 2017 book is based on personal experiences growing up as a first-generation Xicano in Oxnard, California. He is a doctoral student in the Cultural Foundations of Education program and oversees La Casita’s dual-language literacy program, working with the children of the Spanish Action League youth programs.

Proceeds from book and sticker sales at this event support the annual campaign. Collaborating on this program is Syracuse’s Xicanex Empowering Xicanex (XEX) student organization.

• 1 p.m. Saturday, April 21: La Casita will release its third bilingual children’s book, written and illustrated by the children of La Casita’s weekly afterschool Reading Circles. “Gabi in Her Little World” will be released during the opening reception of the annual Young Art exhibit at La Casita.

This program is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Latino-Latin American studies program. Assisting with the project were Dashel Hernández G’18, who is studying public administration at the , and and Tajanae Harris ’18, an anthropology major at Maxwell. Hernández and Olivia A. Hager ’18, a retail major at the , oversaw the book’s graphic design and composition.

At this event, the children will also present a Spanish translation of Elizabeth Schoonmaker’s children’s book “Square Cat” (La gata cuadrada). Children’s illustrations will be on display.

• Throughout April: Supporters may also donate money or books. . Supporters can .

“Children’s bilingual books are always in demand at La Casita,” Panaguia says.  “Even the smallest donation will be greatly appreciated.”

About Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and , Syracuse University offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of Syracuse University is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Edna Susman

 with Edna Susman G’78 as part of the , a program of the Half Hollow Hills Community Library in Suffolk County, New York. She’s one of nearly 90 U.S. military veterans Susman has interviewed since 2014. “I’m trying to get the word out so libraries see this as history and outreach,” Susman says. “People are dying, and I want to get their stories to share with younger generations.”

Susman discussed the project during her keynote address March 3 at the  (FiTS stands for Filling in the Spaces) at the (iSchool). The  organized the annual event, which featured topics of interest to LIS graduate students that are outside the regular curriculum. Workshops addressed issues including professional resumes vs. CVs, nature programming for libraries and LGBTQ representation in middle grade and young adult literature.

Susman started the project after realizing the busy library where she had worked for 20 years offered no specific outreach for local veterans. She described how the project works, saying that other library staffs can replicate it easily and inexpensively. She advertises and invites veterans to participate, then records interviews with them and creates a DVD. She uploads the interviews to the , which patrons can access via the library’s website. The library also holds an annual reception for the year’s interviewees, and each veteran receives a DVD.

Some interviews happen after Susman spots someone wearing a hat with military insignia and tells them about the program. Others hear about it and call to learn more. She understands that some veterans will be sharing painful memories.  “I tell them if there’s anything they don’t want to talk about or don’t remember, that’s fine,” she says.

“Some say ‘I have nothing to say’ or ‘I didn’t do anything interesting,’” Susman adds. But she disagrees, calling the vets “wonderful people with amazing stories.” The oral histories of veterans of World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and military service during peacetime preserve important memories for families and historians, she says.

Susman interviewed one woman who served in the medical corps in Afghanistan who “didn’t go into details.” A World War II veteran who worked on the atomic bomb “knew top secret stuff.” One Vietnam vet volunteered to become a combat photographer “because he didn’t want to kill anyone.”

After Susman’s program was underway, she learned the Library of Congress had started the  (VHP) in 2000. The national project collects interviews, correspondence and memorabilia from veterans and their families. Susman applied some VHP procedures to her project and sends the Library of Congress copies of the DVDs she produces.

Susman grew up in Syracuse and earned a degree in music from the University of Indiana. She still plays and teaches flute. She credits a neighbor, longtime iSchool professor Marta L. Dosa, with encouraging her to enroll in the School of Information Studies. Pauline Atherton Cochrane, another longtime iSchool professor, also served as a mentor.

“Without them, my life would have been very different,” she says.

After completing her master’s degree, she sought jobs as a music librarian. Cochrane tipped her off to a three-month position at the Library of Congress, “a dream job” in Washington, D.C. Susman spent five years teaching congressional and library staff to search the Library of Congress system.

Online research, then in its infancy, “was all command driven,” she explains. “Nobody knew how to do it. We’d type in ‘search and retrieve.’” She loved working at “the mother of all libraries,” she says. “You really felt like you were making a difference.”

She and her husband moved to Long Island, where she raised their two daughters, both Syracuse University graduates. After several part-time jobs—including three at once—she started working at Half Hollow Hills Community Library. She describes library work as “giving people the information they need.”

The job has changed dramatically since her iSchool days. “People can Google everything,” she says. “Now we help people download material and work with their devices.”

She enjoys interviewing veterans “because I get to know them,” she says. “When they come in the library, they’re family. I’m in awe of these people.”

About Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and , Syracuse University offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of Syracuse University is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

Heather Hirsch

“This trajectory makes a lot of sense,” says Hirsch, an internist and assistant professor specializing in women’s health at . “My career path blends my internal passion, which has always been science and women’s health.”

WGS courses “opened a perspective I’d never seen before,” Hirsch says. “I was learning not just about the history of women, but all the things that led to the discrimination we still see today.” She describes “numerous gaps for care for women that come from sexism and ageism, and it’s not just the obvious areas like reproductive care.”

After a residency in internal medicine at SUNY Upstate, Hirsch completed a fellowship in women’s health at Cleveland Clinic. The clinic attracts “women from all over the country because no one would prescribe the hormone therapy that they needed,” she explains. “I thought this was an area where there was a dramatic need and I could make a difference.”

Like many liberal arts students, Hirsch’s career path did not follow a straight line. At one point, she planned to pursue research, until “I realized I really loved patient interaction.” She started her residency in obstetrics and gynecology (OB-GYN) because she “always had a strong passion to take care of women,” she recalls. But, she found, “I wasn’t good at being up in the middle of the night.” A two-year fellowship at Cleveland Clinic reinforced her commitment to women’s health throughout the reproductive cycle. After “delivering a few hundred babies,” her practice now focuses on office gynecology and internal medicine.

Hirsch’s dual major provided “two lenses: quantitative science, where I could drift [into] the lab, and qualitative reading and thinking and writing.” She seeks the same balance in her medical practice. “I get to spend real time with patients, about 40 to 60 minutes for the initial intake,” she says. Her patients come from all walks of life. “We also typically get to talking about philanthropy at Planned Parenthood or sex trafficking or paternity leave,” she adds. “We’re looking at these broader issues and how they shape medicine and the health and lives of women.”

Her focus on menopause makes sense because “internists are used to thinking about chronic conditions,” she says. “It’s a chronic change. It lasts forever.” Teaching physicians means she “can reach tons more patients,” she adds. “I’d like to help more physicians become knowledgeable about this. Half the population goes through menopause. A third of their life is spent in menopause, and if no one discusses the implications or how your body is changing, that is sexist and unfair.”

In her January visit, Hirsch addressed SUNY Upstate medical students, residents and faculty. “They said this was information no one has talked about in a long time,” she says. “Menopause is a topic where the pendulum is swinging back to the side where we know there are a lot of benefits to replacing your hormones. A lot of women were and still are needlessly suffering. We still have a lot of work to do.”

Hirsch, a Remembrance Scholar, wrote her application essay about the honor she felt at representing one of the 35 Syracuse students who died in the 1988 Pan Am 103 terrorist bombing. She also wrote about her grandfather, who was an OB-GYN. “He was always passionate about women’s health,” she says. “I think it is in my DNA.”

About Syracuse University

Syracuse University is a private, international research university with distinctive academics, diversely unique offerings and an undeniable spirit. Located in the geographic , with a global footprint, and , Syracuse University offers a quintessential college experience. The scope of Syracuse University is a testament to its strengths: a pioneering history dating back to 1870; a choice of more than 200 majors and 100 minors offered through 13 schools and colleges; nearly 15,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students; more than a quarter of a million alumni in 160 countries; and a student population from all 50 U.S. states and 123 countries. For more information, please visit .

James Gordon Williams

 first heard Prince’s music as a high school student. “The album Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) was popular then and Prince’s music videos were available via MTV-style music video channels,” recalls Williams, assistant professor of African American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I also had a cursory awareness of “Purple Rain,” but did not grasp the cultural significance of the landmark album and the subsequent movie at that time,” he adds.

Williams is a critical musicologist, composer, improviser and pianist whose research focuses on understanding how African-American musical activist texts connect with what the late eminent scholar Cedric Robinson called the Black Radical Tradition.

Williams saw Prince perform live twice. The second performance was the May 10, 2015, Rally 4 Peace concert in Baltimore. The concert was dedicated to healing Baltimore and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, the ongoing international debate over the way the police treat people of color.

At the Baltimore concert–a year before he died–Prince released “Baltimore,” a protest song dedicated to Freddie Gray, a song Williams contends was a critique of the system that leads to this type of incidents. “Baltimore” is linked to what Williams describes as Prince’s “covert, but avid, support of social justice initiatives that support black humanity.” His essay  was published in the September 2017 Journal of African American Studies, a special issue that focuses on the life of Prince Rogers Nelson. The academic journal presents the first scholarly collection of articles on Prince.

Prince at the Coachella Festival in 2008 (Photo by Scott Penner)

“Though Prince is considered a popular musician by many people, his music disregarded genre and has layers of depth that require deep study,” Williams says. “No two Prince compositions are the same and his songwriting craft never stopped developing due to his work ethic and insatiable appetite for creativity practice.” The essay “was an opportunity to articulate ideas about his music in a way that I could not have done 30 years ago.”

In May 2017, Williams presented a paper at “Purple Reign: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Life and Legacy of Prince” at the University of Salford in Manchester, England.

Scholarly articles written about Prince after his death will be markedly different than scholarship written when he was alive, Williams says. “Various devotees read Prince in a plethora of ways which have to do with culture, world geography, sexuality and many other factors. Yet much of the critical scholarship on Prince before his passing discussed his work in culturally ambiguous terms. The historical evidence tells us that black musicians like Prince were invested in helping the core community that supports them.”

About Syracuse University

Founded in 1870, Syracuse University is a private international research university dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching excellence, rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11 academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence in the liberal arts, sciences and professional disciplines that prepares students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main campus and extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three continents. Syracuse’s student body is among the most diverse for an institution of its kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent all 50 states and more than 100 countries. Syracuse also has a long legacy of supporting veterans and is home to the nationally recognized Institute for Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their families.

Erika Haber

A new book by , associate professor of Russian language, literature and culture in the , examines the circumstances behind Volkov’s work and compares the contexts and details of the two versions of the perennially popular tale. “Oz Behind the Iron Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His ‘Magic Land’ Series” (University Press of Mississippi) took Haber from Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery, where Baum’s family is buried; to Chittenango, which hosts an annual festival honoring all things Oz; from Moscow, where Volkov lived and wrote his stories; to Siberia, where she researched Volkov’s papers. She also dug into Syracuse University’s Special Collections Research Center, which houses the .

“I was interested in how Baum’s story was able to transcend cultural barriers during the Cold War and how Volkov transferred this story into his culture,” Haber says. “Both books were politicized, but what’s more important is the context in which their work fit into children’s literature.”

Baum, born in 1856, worked as a salesman and a journalist, and wrote, produced and performed in theatrical productions before writing children’s books. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” was published in 1900. He wrote 13 more Oz volumes before he died in 1919.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released “The Wizard of Oz,” the film starring Judy Garland as Baum’s Dorothy Gale, in 1939. Volkov, born in 1891 in what is now Kazakhstan, published “Wizard of the Emerald City” the same year. He significantly revised the book in 1959 and wrote five more original volumes in his Magic Land Series before his death in 1977.

“Oz Behind the Magic Curtain: Aleksandr Volkov and His ‘Magic Land’ Series” (University Press of Mississippi)

The first Russian Oz book came about as Volkov translated Baum’s novel from English to Russian. But Volkov changed more than the language. Dorothy became Elli, Aunt Em became Aunt Ann, Toto became Totoshka (in a later revision the dog speaks.)

“He corrected facts,” Haber explains. “He saw a lot of problems with the logic.” He makes Elli’s house a trailer, more likely to lift off and twirl than Baum’s house. He changes Baum’s Tin Woodman to an Iron Woodman because iron rusts and tin does not. When Elli melts the Wicked Witch, Volkov logically leaves her clothes and shoes behind.

Although Volkov worked amid the threat of Stalin’s purges, his changes do not “Sovietize” the story. “Here and there he tweaked only a few small details to make the story more familiar to a Russian-speaking audience,” Haber writes. “It’s remarkable he got it out there.”

Scholarship on both his and Baum’s works typically focuses on the Cold War context of Soviet vs. American. But it is far more constructive to examine their work within the context of their own lives and within the context of the development of children’s literature in both societies, Haber adds.

For many years, critics, scholars and librarians largely ignored or dismissed both writers, whose work they considered “culturally significant but critically suspect.” And both were misread as political and social commentators. “They are imaginative writers,” Haber says. “They made it up.”

Her book includes detailed biographical sketches of both writers. Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), was a prominent suffragist, writer and activist. Baum and Maud Gage were married in Gage’s Fayetteville home, now the site of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation.

Haber notes another Syracuse connection. Baum’s great-uncle, Philip Baum, was grandfather to  ’09. Dwight Baum designed Hendricks Chapel, the College of Medicine and Maxwell School of Citizenship. As if to reinforce the coincidences that characterized Haber’s research, her book was released one day after Syracuse Stage opened its adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz.”

“I came to appreciate both stories,” Haber says. “They evolved from children’s literature and remain cultural icons.”

About Syracuse University

Founded in 1870, Syracuse University is a private international research university dedicated to advancing knowledge and fostering student success through teaching excellence, rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinary research. Comprising 11 academic schools and colleges, the University has a long legacy of excellence in the liberal arts, sciences and professional disciplines that prepares students for the complex challenges and emerging opportunities of a rapidly changing world. Students enjoy the resources of a 270-acre main campus and extended campus venues in major national metropolitan hubs and across three continents. Syracuse’s student body is among the most diverse for an institution of its kind across multiple dimensions, and students typically represent all 50 states and more than 100 countries. Syracuse also has a long legacy of supporting veterans and is home to the nationally recognized Institute for Veterans and Military Families, the first university-based institute in the U.S. focused on addressing the unique needs of veterans and their families.

Thelma Bonzek

“I love to play, and I can read anything,” she says as she plays “How Great Thou Art.” “I don’t like recitals, but I like to play for people’s enjoyment,” she adds.

Now 94, she spends much of her time reading, knitting and entertaining visitors in the home built by her husband, Joe. Bonzek has lived in the neighborhood since 1929, when her family moved to Syracuse’s West Side.

She and her late brother, Paul Guenther ’39, graduated from Syracuse University. They were children of the Depression, coming of age between the world wars. Her parents—a seamstress and a carpenter—graduated from high school and taught them the value of a dollar. “They wanted us both to have a college education to have a better life,” she says.

Bonzek displays her first-grade report card: nothing below 90. She later skipped part of fourth grade. “I was smart,” she says matter-of-factly. Growing up, she played golf, baseball and tennis, winning a 1941 city park tennis championship. In high school, she took a journalism course and became sports editor of the school paper–the first girl to do so.

“I was a feminist before my time,” she says. “I thought I was equal to any boy or man. I could hit the ball farther than the boys.”
It was the piano that first led her to Syracuse University, and it’s the piano that provides rhythm and comfort in her tenth decade. She started playing at age 7, practicing for an hour before school. In those days of pinching pennies, her mother bought three sheets of music for a dollar. “I learned classics and pop music,” she says.

Bonzek, second from left, with some of her sorority sisters

When she was a high school junior, Bonzek’s skills surpassed her teacher’s. Her mother signed her up for piano lessons at Crouse College. “I would walk from Central High School to the University,” she says. “I walked up Adams Street and turned on Crouse.”
A few years later, she enrolled at Syracuse as a piano major; worried about supporting herself as a piano teacher, she also took courses in music education.

“Everyone who lived in the city and went to college, went to SU,” she recalls. “You didn’t go out of town. You lived at home. No one had a car. No one had credit cards or checks.” She remembers tuition costing $200 for the fall and $175 for the spring semester.

Despite worries about World War II, Bonzek remembers the era as an elegant time. “You dressed up to go downtown,” she says. “It was absolutely beautiful and had so many beautiful shops.”

She joined Theta Phi Alpha sorority, then at 756 Comstock Ave.; Sigma Alpha Iota, a musicians’ honor society; and a women’s athletic organization. “We had more fun,” she says, paging through yearbooks. “We had so many good times.”

Still, she was practical, knowing she’d have to earn a living. “You got a job because you needed money,” she says. “No one talked about a career.”

While she was in college, her brother served in the Army. He and a friend, Joe Bonzek, were recovering from malaria in Sicily in 1943 when Joe spotted her photo. He asked Paul if he could write to his sister. The two corresponded for two years before Joe visited Syracuse; they married in 1946.

Thelma started working right after graduation, teaching music in Chenango Forks, near Binghamton, and in Skaneateles. She taught piano at home while raising their three children. After they were grown, she returned to Syracuse University for graduate courses in education, then taught kindergarten at Seymour School for 15 years.

“I loved it,” she says. “They were wonderful parents and wonderful kids. They just needed some love.”

In her opinion, every classroom needs a piano. “It’s the answer for children who have emotional needs,” she says. “You can sing, you can dance, you can teach math with it. It’s another way to connect with kids.”

One chapter of her life is immortalized in Sean Kirst’s “” (SU Press, 2016). Kirst, a former Post-Standard columnist and University publications writer, described how Thelma helped her husband locate the survivors of Jesse Gallardo, a fellow soldier killed on a French mountainside during World War II. Years later, the Bonzeks traced Gallardo’s brother, Francis, to an Ohio nursing home, and explained–in “an emotional phone call”–the circumstances of his brother’s death.

Joe, Thelma’s best friend, died in 2012 at age 91. Since then, she finds solace in journaling and playing the piano.

Thelma Bonzek playing piano

She credits her husband with teaching her why some children act out. “He grew up dirt poor. He only knew Polish as a child and was teased by his classmates,” she explains. “He helped me to understand that if you’re hit at home, the first thing you want to do is hit people.”

She’s proud of a lifetime “standing up for the underdog” and respecting people—even the most difficult students–as individuals. “I feel good I’ve been able to help people,” she says. “I get down on my knees every day and I hope I can do something to make other people happy. I still stand up for people. Somebody has to.”

Bonzek looks around her living room and nods with satisfaction. She’s lost her parents and brother, her beloved Joe, friends and sorority sisters. But her heart and home still overflow with memories of all that she loves. Including her piano.

Tej Bhatia

Bhatia, professor of linguistics in the and director of South Asian Languages, heads next month to Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as a visiting research professor. Immediately afterwards, he goes to New Delhi, India, to conduct collaborative research on multilingual schizophrenia with a team of psychiatrists at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, one of India’s most prestigious medical schools.

His research in Singapore will touch on social networks in the Indian diaspora there. In addition, Bhatia will give public lectures on forensic linguistics, which uses language to decode a person’s identity. He has previously written about the FBI’s use of forensic linguistics in identifying Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, the serial killer involved in a series of crimes between 1978 and 1995.

Bhatia described in , an online publication of the Museum of the Moving Image, how the FBI used Kaczynski’s writings in their investigation. Science & Film commissioned Bhatia to write about the case to coincide with the Discovery Channel’s eight-part series “Manhunt: Unabomber,” released in August.

“With the Unabomber, there were no hair samples, no fingerprints, absolutely no forensic evidence,” he explains. “The investigator used language as a fingerprint.” Forensic linguistics “looks at patterns of language,” he adds. “When people are not carefully editing themselves, they leave clues about themselves. Those are individual fingerprints, which can be used to identity a criminal when there is an absolute poverty of evidence.”

What else is on his plate these days? Popcorn, for one thing. Make that curry-flavored popcorn. He’s studying the language of perception and cognition, particularly the language of taste–focusing on curry flavored popcorn.

“Around the world, curry is used in every possible product,” Bhatia explains. “When it’s used with popcorn, what does that mean to each community? Is it bitter? Is it spicy? Is it sweet? What basic taste descriptions does the word ‘curry’ convey in the global lingua franca, English? In essence, I want to explore the psycholinguistic world of tastes and flavors. What is the semantic mapping of tastes and words? Interestingly, although the word ‘curry’ is pretty universal in the world of cuisines, it means different things in different cultures.”

Bhatia has had a busy year. He is the newly elected president of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) and the newest member of the Editorial Advisory Board of IAWE’s journal, World Englishes. The organization is comprised of members from at least 50 countries.

He recently organized and chaired IAWE’s 22nd international conference at Syracuse, attended by more than 200 presenters from 35 countries. The June 30-July 2 conference “showcased our university, research and leadership in this field,” he says.

The term “World Englishes” refers to emerging localized varieties of English, especially forms that have developed in territories influenced by the United Kingdom or the United States.

“English has outgrown its parent varieties (British and American Englishes),” Bhatia says. “New ‘Englishes’ are evolving and innovating across the globe, as a medium of communication and commerce. This is a big part of the future of global communication, international education and global partnerships. As we prepare our students as global professionals, knowledge of world-varieties is not just a laboratory curiosity, but a compelling necessity.”

David Yaffe (Photo by Ellen M. Blalock)

In another favorable review, The Atlantic calls “Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Key to the book’s success, reviewers note, is Yaffe’s unprecedented access to Mitchell, notorious for her disdain for the press and reputation for distancing herself from people who displease her. His meticulous research included interviews with 60 of her friends, lovers and bandmates.

“Making the most of his proximity, he pulls off the feat that has eluded so many of his predecessors,” the Atlantic writes of Yaffe’s 10-year project. “He forges an intimacy with Mitchell on her own, uncompromising terms by truly listening to her, as closely and as generously as she’s always deserved.”

Yaffe, assistant professor of humanities in the and a music critic, will discuss his book at a reading at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, at Barnes and Noble, 3454 Erie Boulevard E., DeWitt. It is the only local appearance for Yaffe, who has been busy with media interviews and readings since before the book came out in October.

Interviews and reviews are piling up, appearing in outlets including , , , , and

, Yaffe describes his approach. “I knew right away that I wanted to do a portrait, which meant not talking about every song and telling every story,” he says. “I’d pare it down, so that all is essential and in the service of a coherent narrative. The trick is to find the information that is most compelling.”

The cover of “Reckless Daugher”

Yaffe, a songwriter and music journalist, also authored “Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown” (Yale University Press, 2011) and “Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing” (Princeton University Press, 2006). His work has appeared in outlets including The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Slate, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The Daily Beast.

Two years as the Dean’s Fellow in the Humanities allowed him “to write the book exactly the way I wanted to.” He has taught courses on Joni Mitchell since 2008; about 20 students are in that class this semester.

During a long interview about writing and music, Yaffe discussed the challenges and rewards of writing about Mitchell–a musician he has admired since he was a teen. He pulled out his cellphone several times to play recordings of Mitchell’s songs and explain the chord progressions and the lyrics’ origins.

Mitchell, he says, is fiercely independent and often a provocateur–a “pot stirrer.” She can be cutting and cruel–she refused to talk to Yaffe for years, even as he was writing her biography.

“I don’t think it was her goal to be famous,” he says of the musician who grew up in Saskatchewan and worked with Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Herbie Hancock and David Crosby. Yaffe sympathetically chronicles her experience with polio, giving up a daughter to adoption (then reuniting with her) and frustration with the music business.

She began touring in the United States in 1965, first identified as a folk singer. But her music was more complex than that—mixing jazz, pop, classical and acoustic elements to create her distinctive style, Yaffe says.

Her songs include “River” (1971), “Both Sides, Now” (1969) and “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970). She did not attend Woodstock, but wrote one of the best-known songs about the 1969 festival: “I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm/I’m going to join in a rock ʼn roll band/I’m going to camp out on the land/I’m going to try an’ get my soul free.”

She won nine Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.

Yaffe last interviewed Mitchell before she suffered an aneurysm March 31, 2015. She celebrated her 74^th birthday this month.

“She never cared about perception,” Yaffe says, “Think about all it took to be who she was. We get to enjoy it more than she did. I feel like there’s a wound in her that cannot be healed, a hole that can’t be filled.”

In a CBC interview, Yaffe upon the book’s publication. “I was so fortunate that I had the opportunity to listen to you, to learn from you,” he writes.

Mitch Soderberg

Soderberg’s research involves measuring how neutrinos–subatomic particles with no electric charge–change from one type to another. The experiments he is involved with are central to moving the understanding of physics beyond the Standard Model–the 1970s theory of fundamental particles and how they interact.

The three-year $858,000 award funds work on experimental particle physics in Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers (LArTPC) technology, and continues Soderberg and his group members’ involvement on several experiments, including the MicroBooNE experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago. The technology can record three-dimensional images of particle trajectories.

The 2017 NSF grant is the fourth NSF grant Soderberg has received at Syracuse; all fund his group’s involvement in the Fermilab neutrino program.

Soderberg leads , a multinational project also known as Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment. In October 2015, the group of more than 100 scientists observed MicroBooNE’s first neutrino interaction. Soderberg’s team also helped build the MicroBooNE detector at Fermilab.

DUNE experiment, which will feature a giant TPC, located 1-mile underground in an old gold-mine in South Dakota, receiving a neutrino beam that originates from Fermilab.

Soderberg has worked since 2006 on developing LArTPCs to study neutrinos, including a role with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF). He and Assistant Professor Denver Whittington are already working on the design details of LBNF/DUNE, which had a groundbreaking ceremony on July 21 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota. When completed around 2027, LBNF/DUNE will be the nation’s largest experiment devoted to the study of neutrino properties.

This grant will primarily fund salaries of Soderberg’s group, which includes four graduate students (two based at Fermilab and two at Syracuse) and one postdoctoral researcher (based at Fermilab), and two undergraduates working on projects at Syracuse. The grant will also allow Soderberg to hire a postdoctoral researcher to work on a project based at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Syracuse group members manufactured 3000+ sense wires, that are barely visible in the foreground of this object, here at SU. The machine shop at SU also manufactured a lot of the metal pieces that make up the MicroBooNE Time Projection Chamber structure in this image.

Soderberg’s neutrino experiments, like the groundbreaking gravitational waves research Syracuse physicists are working on, use large computing resources, develop custom detection techniques and work in huge international collaborations with scientists from all over the globe. Syracuse University physicists were among the global team that recently observed the collision of two neutron stars that confirm the origins of heavy metals like gold and platinum.

“Existing neutrino experiments did not see anything associated with this discovery, which was a bit disappointing,” Soderberg says. “It is possible that certain kinds of astrophysical events, like the neutron star merger that LIGO [the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] just discovered, would also produce a burst of neutrinos that could be detected by large neutrino experiments such as DUNE.”

The new grant supports the group’s research, which will make interesting physics measurements and test new hardware techniques for future experiments. The research could, for example, inform cosmology by providing “some insight into how the universe came to be dominated by matter,” he explains.

“The development of detector technology to study neutrinos is interesting in its own right, and perhaps will have applications in other realms of physics or industry down the road,” Soderberg says.

James Watts

, professor in the Department of Religion in the , has written a new book about the ritualizing of the Pentateuch–the first five books of the Jewish and Christian bibles. “The Pentateuch depicts itself as a physical object from the start,” he says. “It’s not just the text that’s important, but how you use the object.”

Watts, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern textual traditions, wrote “” (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) as a Käte Hamburg Kolleg visiting fellow at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. He spent a year there as part of an international research group at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES).

His new book and the fellowship reflect his interest in the symbolic or “iconic” uses of books and other texts. The same concept underlies the  at Syracuse University, which Watts co-founded in 2001.

Biblical studies typically focus on the interpretation rather than how people use the physical books of the scriptures, the bibles and Torah scrolls, Watts explains. His book aims to provide “an understanding of how scriptures function traditionally and today.” Readers and students will learn “how the contents of the Pentateuch established and modeled those forms of textual rituals throughout Jewish and Christian history,” he adds.

According to the Book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible (Christians call this the Old Testament), God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. But the Bible never describes anyone reading this list of laws. Instead, Moses reads a Torah scroll to the Israelites. “The Tablets of the Commandments are for possessing,” Watts explains. “They are an icon. They are the physical evidence of the covenant with God.”

Their meaning, he says, is similar to that of documents like driver’s licenses, passports and property deeds. “Those are iconic texts,” he explains. “There’s identity and rights attached to them. You rarely talk about people reading them. It’s all about possession and display.”

Because the Pentateuch (Torah) was the first part of the Bible to become scripture, its model set the precedent for how subsequent forms of Jewish and Christian scriptures would function.

In October, Watts delivered the keynote address at the “Books as Sacred Beings” international conference at Seoul National University. The conference was organized by the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts, which grew out of the Iconic Books Project. Watts will also present “Ritualizing the Size of Books” and respond to studies of the Ten Commandments at the American Academy of Religion/ Society of Biblical Literature Nov. 18-19 in Boston.

Brian Konkol

About two weeks after starting his new role as dean of Hendricks Chapel, the Rev. was walking to a meeting. He ran into Leah Fein, Hillel’s campus rabbi. The two started walking together; about a minute later they encountered Amir Duric, the Muslim chaplain, heading the same way.

Konkol admits his first thought was about a pastor, a rabbi and an imam walking into a bar–the premise for endless jokes. “I actually wanted us to find the nearest watering hole and walk in, just to have some fun with it,” he shares. They didn’t, but he also quickly recognized the metaphor created by the clergy trio.

“That walk symbolizes the mission of Hendricks Chapel,” he says. “We accompany. We journey alongside others, recognizing and embracing our diversity, to educate and bring us all a bit closer to the dream of a common good.”

Konkol, a native of Amherst Junction, Wisconsin, is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He previously served as chaplain of, and taught in, the Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies program at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. He also ministered at a Wisconsin church and in Guyana and South Africa.

He will be installed as the seventh Hendricks dean at 4 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 7, at the chapel. The ceremony is open to the public and all are invited. Ahead of that celebration, Konkol discussed his hopes for Hendricks. Here are excerpts of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Barley assisting injured woman after 2015 Nepal earthquake. (Photos courtesy of Citta)

When Christopher Barley ’89 learned a 7.8 magnitude earthquake had hit Nepal in April 2015, he quickly traveled there to provide medical assistance in the region near the capital city of Kathmandu. “Little towns were just rubble,” he says. “Every building was down. People were in disarray and there was no communication. Electrical wires were down everywhere. It was devastating.”

Barley, an internist who practices in New York City, spent a few weeks helping with search and rescue efforts following the natural disaster that killed about 9,000 people and injured at least 22,000 more. The remote, rugged communities were familiar territory because he had visited the area about a dozen times with , a nonprofit development and relief organization he co-founded in 1999.

In August, Barley returned for the opening of the Doctor Christopher Barley Hospital in Sindhuli, about four hours from Kathmandu. The facility, with 20 beds and an emergency room, is the only hospital serving about 50,000 people.

The earthquake “affected a lot of our employees and friends,” Barley says. “We may employ one person, but they have a family of 20. They may have a home that was ruined. Electricity was out forever. We knew no one was going to do much for our people. This is why we wanted to build a hospital there.”

New hospital in Nepal named in Barley’s honor this past summer

Citta built the hospital at a former housing complex used by engineers building the B.P. Koirala Highway, which links Kathmandu Valley with Nepal’s Eastern Terai region.

“It might as well be 5,000 miles if they have no money, which they don’t,” Barley says. “There are a lot of injuries because they are working the fields and the mountains by hand. We are the front line for the terrible traumas that happen on the highway. There are massive cliffs, so there are a fair amount of accidents.”

About 300 people attended a free clinic a week before the hospital opened. “If they’re critically ill, we will transport them a couple hours away,” Barley says. The Nepali people endure “every infectious disease you would expect in semi-tropical, developing countries,” he explains. “They deal with poor water supplies, sewage, infectious diseases—things we don’t see in the West.”

Although the people work hard, many smoke and their diets “are not particularly healthy,” Barley says. “Infant and child mortality are high. They have diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, strokes—whatever we have times 10.”

The hospital complex includes housing for 50-plus staff members. “Our goal is to give the community health care and to empower the local women because they play such a strong role in the family,” Barley says.

The conditions in Sindhulu are similar to those in other areas where Citta works. The organization’s projects include a hospital and school in Odisha, one of the poorest states in India; a girls school in the Thar desert region northwest of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India; and a women’s center in the city of Bhaktapur, Nepal.

“Without education, no one is going to go anywhere or do anything,” Barley says. “People have dreams and should have the ability to fulfill them as I do.”

Opening Ceremonies for the Doctor Christopher Barley Hospital in Sindhuli

Barley grew up in Canastota, a Madison County village about 25 miles east of Syracuse University. “I grew up dreaming of being an Orangeman,” he says. “I went to Jim Boeheim’s summer basketball camps.”

He majored in biology in the  and took religion courses that spurred interest in Buddhism and Hinduism. He spent his sophomore fall semester in London. “I traveled every weekend and loved it,” he recalls.

While attending George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., Barley and some friends scraped together the money to visit India. In a poor, rural part of the country, he worked with a physician who had a hospital connected to his home. That spurred his interest in health care policy and international medicine.

After starting a career in private practice, Barley joined international medical missions. “We would be part of a team taking care of people in all parts of the world,” he says. He and Michael Daube, a New York City artist, co-founded Citta to build clinics and schools in India; Daube serves as executive director and Barley is board president.

“We work in the poorest part of India,” Barley says. “We eventually convinced the government to build roads and bring in electricity.” He typically visits each of Citta’s projects every year, meeting local politicians. He also spends a lot of time fundraising for the organization.

After the devastating 2015 earthquake, Barley traveled back to Nepal to help provide medical assistance to injured.

The nonprofit’s name, Citta, is a Sanskrit word that refers to heart and mind and the interdependence of thoughts and emotions.

“Whether a doctor takes care of rich or poor patients, when a person is sick or dying or being born, all you have is the heart and soul,” Barley says. “That’s the commonality of all people. It just worked out that I take care of some of the richest people and some of the poorest. It keeps me in touch with my own heart and soul.”

Barley calls the people in Sindhulu “remarkable and generous and inspirational.” The first woman who gave birth in the new hospital wanted to name her daughter Christopher in his honor. “I lost my mom last year,” Barley says. “I suggested they name her after my mom, Elizabeth. They call her Eliza.”

Alexei Abrahams

The family moved to South Africa after apartheid ended in 1994 and President Nelson Mandela invited expatriates to return and help rebuild the country. “From my father’s experience and history, I felt a kind solidarity with the Palestinian struggle,” says Abrahams, a research fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (Woodrow Wilson School).

Abrahams, a dual math and economics major at Syracuse, was previously a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative (Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center) and the University of California at San Diego’s Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation. He also is a consultant for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

Syracuse’s offer of a Coronat scholarship cemented his college choice. Abrahams, who finished high school in St. Louis, was among the first nine Coronat scholars, highly accomplished, first-year students planning to major in the liberal arts.

The Coronat program was established by the University and the  in 2004. The award includes full scholarships as well as financial support for study abroad, summer study, research, volunteer work and other opportunities.

Abrahams remembers annual retreats at Minnowbrook, the University’s conference center on Blue Mt. Lake in the Adirondacks. He also remembers a trip to Ottawa and other Coronat activities. “Some of those other scholars became long-term friends,” he says.

He describes a monthlong visit to the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank the summer before his senior year as “pretty influential.” He studied Arabic, volunteered and met NGO representatives, government officials and activists.

That summer trip spurred him to focus on Palestinian issues for his senior honors thesis. He credits his advisor and economics professor  and math professor  with helping him focus his scholarly interests.

Zacharia, who provided him an independent study program in algebra, suggested he continue at Syracuse as a graduate student in math. “I love math,” Abrahams says. “But I knew I needed something I thought was making a tangible impact in the here and now that was still mathematical.”

Doctoral programs in economics offered the right balance, and he ended up at Brown University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2015. Abrahams was a graduate student as the Arab Spring was unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa. “With my background visiting Palestine and knowing some Arabic, I realized this was an opportunity,” he says.

The Coronat program allowed him to take his time finding his career path. “The Coronat frees you to try all these different things,” he says. “You’re not constantly anxious about debt.”

The liberal arts curriculum also let him “diversify and try things.” “My first semester, I was co-enrolled in engineering school,” he says. “I did just fine in those courses, but I wanted some more perspective and abstraction.”

One highlight was working with Ernesto V. Garcia, then the Alan and Anita Sutton Distinguished Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow, on an independent study in Western philosophy. “I had been exposed to philosophy, but I needed to hear it from the beginning,” he says. “I needed a perspective to situate what I was doing.”

Abrahams’ experience illustrates the goal of the Coronat Scholars Program, says director Susan S. Wadley. “When the program was founded, we sought to recruit the very best graduating high school seniors through special invitations to apply to Syracuse with additional essays and a two- day intensive interview process,” she explains.

“Alexei and his classmates, and those in the 10 graduating classes thus far, have proven the value of the program,” she says. “We truly value their time on campus and their later accomplishments.”

Abrahams’ dissertation studied the effects of Israeli army checkpoints inside the West Bank on the employment of Palestinians. He lived in Ramallah about a year, negotiating access to census data to analyze.

“The truth is complicated,” he says. “The numbers do not cleanly support one narrative or another. When I began it, Palestinians told me for sure you’ll find the checkpoints reduced employment.” His research, though, found that the Palestinians who were commuting “were indeed victimized by the checkpoints, but the ones on the other side benefited.”

His current research uses the United Nations’ daily reports of rocket attacks, airstrikes, ground incursions and other events relevant to the conflict in the West Bank. “We’ve shown pretty convincingly the conflict is not really a tit-for-tat cycle of violence,” he says. “We’re showing that the conflict is episodic. The violence will not end today if the Israelis stop shooting. The violence is motivated by other stuff.”

The point of research, he says, should be to make the world a better place. “The purpose of gaining knowledge is not to get a nice job or a fancy house or season tickets for basketball,” he says. “Academic research in the social sciences should be motivated by a desire to change things for the better.”

Lori Ginzberg

“Rights and Racism: The Complex Legacies,” will be at 4 p.m. at Maxwell Auditorium. A reception will follow the lecture, and parking is available for $5 in Irving Garage. The State of Democracy Lecture Series is sponsored by the with generous funding for this event by the Norman M. and Marsha Lee Berkman Fund. The lecture is in partnership with the Campbell Public Affairs Institute and the Department of African American Studies.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) will be available for this event. If you have requests for accessibility and accommodations, please contact the Equal Opportunity, Inclusion and Resolution Services (EOIRS) office at 315.443.4018.
Lecture respondents will be Kristi Andersen, professor emeritus of political science, and Marcia Robinson, assistant professor of religion.

“Rights and Racism” and two November events mark the centennial of women’s suffrage in New York state.

“While winning the vote in New York state was a major victory for the suffrage movement, these events will not be purely celebratory,” says Carol Faulkner, associate dean of Maxwell and professor of history. “Instead, we want to portray the complexity of the history of suffrage, and its different meanings for different groups of women.”

With the national centennial of women’s suffrage approaching in 2020, “it is important to remember that not all women won the right to vote in 1920 and that some women already had the right to vote,” she says. “Voting rights was one aspect of a larger, contentious struggle for equal rights. It is also a right that was, and is, vulnerable.”

As Stanton lobbied for women’s suffrage, she “descended to some rather ugly racist rhetoric along the lines of, ‘We educated, virtuous white women are more worthy of the vote,’” Ginzberg tells NPR in a 2011 interview about her book. Stanton “certainly claimed that she fought for the rights of all women,” Ginzberg says. “But when she said ‘women,’ I think … that she primarily had in mind women much like herself: white, middle-class, culturally if not religiously Protestant, propertied, well-educated.”
Ginzberg is associate professor of history and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University. She also authored “Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005) and “Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990; paperback, 1992).

The November events are:
Nov. 9: University Lecture with Jill Lepore, 7:30 p.m. at Hendricks Chapel. Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her publications include “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” (Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 American History Book Prize, and “Joe Gould’s Teeth” (Knopf, 2016). She is currently writing a history of the United States. She writes about American history, law, literature and politics for The New Yorker.

Nov. 27: Black Feminists and the Transformation of American Public Life, 6 p.m., Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium, 140 Newhouse 3. Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Paula Giddings and Beverly Guy-Shetfall will discuss their careers and the past and future of black women’s activism.

Cole is senior consulting fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, principal consultant at Cook Ross and president emerita of Spelman College and Bennett College. Giddings is E. A. Woodson 1922 Professor Emerita, Afro-American studies, Smith College. Guy-Shetfall is Anna Julia Cooper professor of women’s studies and English and founding director, Women’s Research and Resource Center, Spelman College, and adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies.

The event is part of the Humanities Center symposium, which has the theme of “Belonging.” It is sponsored by the Humanities Center, Maxwell and the Council on Diversity and Inclusion.

Kaya Oakes

The lecture, titled “Nones, Dones, Seekers and Doubters: Navigating Religion in a Secular Age,” is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow the lecture. For more information, contact the in the at 315.443.3863.

The lecture is made possible by the Borgognoni Fund, held in the religion department.

Oakes plans to provide “a post-election update to the swing of a lot of people away from religious practice to being Nones.” The growth of the Nones—people who do not affiliate with any religion—represents one of the most important religious trends of the day. A quarter of U.S. adults do not affiliate with any religion, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, which found in 2016 that the number of unaffiliated young people increased from 10 to 39 percent since 1986.

Religiously unaffiliated voters, especially young ones, played a role in the 2016 presidential election, Oakes says in telephone interview. “The (Bernie) Sanders phenomenon was mostly young voters. He is a boomer None,” she says. “Younger voters attached themselves to Sanders and (Donald) Trump because they are considered outside the party. Neither is particularly religious.”

The largest group of Nones are former Catholics, Oakes notes. “There is cause for the church to worry,” she says. “We don’t know how many will boomerang when they get older and come back to the church. Statistically, not many ex-Catholics come back, but many are wondering if Pope Francis will influence them.”

Oakes addresses the growth of the Nones in her most recent book, “The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Believers, Seekers and Those In-Between” (Orbis Books, 2015).

“Religion often fails to meet us where we arrive, hauling the complex baggage of modern life,” she writes in the introduction. “And, perhaps, many young Americans are culturally moving into a way of being beyond organized religion. … Passionate, committed and loving people want to meet other passionate, committed, and loving people, and oftentimes they don’t meet them in church.”

A review in the independent praises Oakes for moving past the data to tell the stories of young people. The book is “not a harsh indictment but a sober analysis,” the review says. “Entrenched institutions are more often responders than harbingers of change.”

Oakes writes about her own experience as a “revert” to institutional religion in “Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church” (Counterpoint Press, 2012). Oakes is a senior correspondent at Religion Dispatches, a contributing writer at America: The Jesuit Review and a contributing editor at . Her work has appeared in many other print and online outlets, including Sojourners, Commonweal, Narratively, Foreign Policy, The Guardian and Religion News Service, and on the public radio show and podcast “On Being.”

Her recent work focuses on connections between religion and social activism. published in June at Religion Dispatches, highlighted the contradiction between Catholic social teaching at Catholic colleges and universities that fight unions for adjunct instructors.

“Kaya Oakes brings an insightful and engaging eye to the spiritual state of our society today. Her ideas are conveyed with passion, wisdom and more than a little wit,” says , chair of the Borgognoni Fund’s faculty steering committee. Thompson is based in the Maxwell School, where she serves as associate professor of history and political science and as a senior research scholar of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.

The Borgognoni Lecture, now in its sixth year, is made possible by the late Monsignor Charles L. Borgognoni (a.k.a. Father Charles), longtime Roman Catholic chaplain of the St. Thomas More Campus Ministry. Before his death in 2007, Borgognoni established a fund in memory of his parents, Joseph and Amelia, to promote the study of Catholic theology and religion in society at Syracuse.

The Borgognoni Fund also relies on the generosity of friends and alumni, including Judith Pistaki Zelisko ’72, a member of the College of Arts and Sciences’ board of visitors, and Charles Borgognoni ’76, nephew of Father Charles, both of whom spearheaded fundraising efforts.

For more information about the Borgognoni Fund or to contribute, contact Christopher Lukowski at 315.443.0354 or clukowsk@syr.edu,

At last year’s Wooden Stick Festival, Alf Jacques, a member of the Onondaga Nation and a renowned lacrosse stick maker, demonstrates his craft.

Three events at Syracuse University and the Onondaga Nation Sept. 28-Oct. 1 will highlight lacrosse’s sacred place among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Understanding lacrosse’s indigenous roots and cultural significance provides insight into the Haudenousaunee’s enduring lessons on “the proper, reciprocal relationships between human beings and the natural world,” Arnold says.

Lacrosse–which the Haudenosaunee call Deyhontshigwa’ehs, “they bump hips”–was played more than 1,000 years ago at Onondaga Lake, where five warring nations came together in peace. The game’s popularity and the prominence of Haudenousanee lacrosse players tell the story of the community’s efforts to maintain its identity and sovereignty.

“Central New York has benefited from this rich legacy and, as a result, this area has become the hotbed for lacrosse,” Arnold says.

Arnold and his wife, Sandy Bigtree, are organizing the weekend through , a nonprofit organization that supports the mission of teaching the enduring values of the Haudenosaunee. “The center is the Onondaga Nation, and this includes the values embedded in the game of lacrosse,” Arnold says.

For nearly 30 years, Arnold has studied New York state’s history and religious landscape in the context of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the People of the Longhouse.

Lacrosse fans, as well as educators and students, will enjoy the weekend, which concludes with a Carrier Dome scrimmage featuring the Iroquois Nationals, Syracuse and Team Israel. “We are showcasing world-class lacrosse, but the reason we are involved is that the wooden stick is a reference point for teaching people about the values of the Haudenosaunee,” Arnold says.

The Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival will take place Thursday, Sept. 28, to Saturday, Sept. 30, on the Onondaga Nation. The educational festival will showcase speakers and demonstrations of lacrosse, wooden stick making, native food, arts, traditional dance and culture, and sovereign representation at the United Nations. will be shown twice daily. The documentary, produced by One Bowl Productions in partnership with the Haudenosaunee, premiered in Syracuse in June and features Haudenosaunee leaders and lacrosse players. Admission to the festival and film are free.

The 2017 Lacrosse All Stars North American Invitational (LASNAI) runs Sept. 28-30. The tournament brings elite box lacrosse players from around the world to play in the Tsha’ Thon’nhes (“where they play ball”) on the Onondaga Nation, south of Syracuse. Twenty-one teams from six nations will participate in games from 8 a.m. to midnight in the fieldhouse and outside (free outside games). Tickets are $15 per day or $25 for the tournament.

Presentations by the Thompson brothers (Jeremy, Hiana, Miles and Lyle, all Nationals team members) and N7 camp for Native American youth will take place at the Onondaga Nation’s softball fields Friday, Sept. 29, and Saturday, Sept. 30. The Thompsons will also play in the box lacrosse tournament and the Dome scrimmage

Syracuse University Lacrosse hosts international lacrosse scrimmages at 12:30 and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 1, at the Carrier Dome. Tickets are $10 and parking is $5.

For information, contact Arnold at pparnold@syr.edu.

Carol Quinn

As a doctoral student in philosophy, studied Hebrew for two years and traveled to Israel, where she interviewed Holocaust survivors. She concedes she took a nontraditional approach to researching her dissertation, . “Everybody else was writing philosophical dissertations in the armchair and I had to go across the world and get the real scoop,” she says. “I didn’t want to read about it in books.”

Quinn, recently promoted to full professor in the philosophy department at Metropolitan State University (MSU) of Denver, continues to think outside the philosopher’s box. She is one of two women in a department of 15, and her promotion makes her the first—and only—female, full professor of philosophy at the university.

“It has been difficult,” Quinn says. “There are so few women in the discipline.” A backed that up, noting that “gender disparity remains large in mainstream Anglophone philosophy.” Women make up 25 percent of faculty in top-ranked philosophy departments, 28 percent of recently placed Ph.D.s, 29 percent of recent philosophy Ph.D.s in the United States, 24 percent of American Philosophical Association (APA) members who reported their gender and 13 percent of recent authors in five elite journals, according to the study.

Although she praises the APA for efforts at making the discipline more welcoming to women and other marginalized groups, the study of philosophy “caters to what I consider to be masculine ways of engaging each other,” Quinn explains. “Philosophy is famous for making arguments and presenting the best case. More often than not, this becomes rather combative. For women, this can be a turnoff. This is typically not the way we like to engage one another.”

Quinn remembers that female graduate students were a minority when she studied in Syracuse’s College of Arts and Sciences. She credits women and men in the philosophy department, including Linda M. Alcoff, now professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, for their support. She singles out Samuel Gorovitz, an expert in medical ethics who served as her dissertation adviser, as “a phenomenal feminist force” and mentor.

“He’s my go-to person for support and advice,” Quinn says. “Sam, more than anyone at Syracuse, showed me that I am only limited by my imagination. I wanted to be a messy, hands-on philosopher. Sam supported me every step of the way. He’s always there when I want to push boundaries.”

Now Quinn is paying it forward, supporting young female philosophers. At MSU Denver, she and a colleague founded the Women’s Philosophy Group to help recruit and mentor female-identified students. The group organized and hosted the first national Undergraduate Women’s Philosophy Conference in April 2016. A second conference was held in spring 2017.

She received MSU Denver’s 2017 Outstanding Female Faculty Award, sponsored by the university’s Institute for Women’s Studies and Services, for her outstanding contributions to the campus community, including individuals who are LGBTQ+ identified.

Quinn continues to push academic boundaries as the author of philosophical novels, fictional stories that incorporate philosophical lessons. Perhaps the most famous example of the genre is “The Stranger,” the 1942 novel by author Albert Camus that focuses on the philosophy of the absurd and existentialism.

Contemporary examples include the novels of Iris Murdoch and “Sophie’s World” by Jostein Gaarder (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991). Gaarder’s book is frequently used in middle and high school classes as well as college-level introduction to philosophy classes. “Philosophical novelists have had a hard time convincing the philosophical world to take us seriously,” she says. “Our work is not considered rigorous enough.”

Quinn’s first philosophical novel, “,” coauthored with Kyle Cottengim and Kait Cottengim, was published in 2016 (Rock’s Mill Press). The novel focuses on the existence of God, the nature of knowledge, feminist critiques of Western philosophy and what it means to live a good life.

Rock’s Mill Press will publish two more philosophical novels—both solo-authored—in the next two years. They are “The Glorious Life of Jessica Kraut: An Adventure in Eastern and Indigenous Religions and Philosophies” and “Afterlife Inc,” which deals with comparative religions.

In addition, a nonfiction book that draws on Quinn’s dissertation, will be published this fall by Lexington Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield. “Dignity, Justice, and the Nazi Data Debate,” is dedicated to Gorovitz.

Quinn calls writing philosophical novels her passion. “They’re geared toward general audiences, people who might be put off by the dry text of philosophy,” she explains. “It’s a friendlier, less combative approach. Maybe we can change the whole understanding of what philosophy is and broaden how it has been defined.”

“Son of Saul”

László Nemes’ 2015 film ” has earned a slew of awards, including the Cannes Grand Prix, a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Set in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of the war, it also has spurred debate over the appropriate way to portray the Holocaust in film. , a symposium Thursday, March 30, to Saturday, April 1, will feature a screening of the film and discussion of the complex issues it raises.

The Place of Religion in Film, presented as part of the 2017 Ray Smith Symposium, will include panels featuring 44 papers by scholars from 12 countries. It also includes screenings of “Son of Saul” and (Joaquim Pinto, 2013) and plenary sessions, which are free and open to the public.

“I was drawn to this topic because of my research,” says , religion professor and symposium organizer. “I was already attuned to the structural aspects of film that point to religious meaning. This goes beyond images like a crucifix or clerical collar.”

“Son of Saul,” Friday’s featured film, does not focus directly on the many horrors of the concentration camp, but on what of the protagonist’s world. Saul belongs to the Sonderkommando, prisoners–usually Jewish—that the Nazis forced to guide people to the gas chambers, collect valuables from corpses and dispose of bodies.

“The film is part of this larger conversation about Holocaust art,” Hamner says. “It’s very beautiful and very thoughtful. It is definitely troubling, as I think a movie on the Holocaust should be. The movie has its own aesthetic compulsion that leads us to think about the Holocaust.”

Sarah Horowitz and June Hwang

The plenary features , professor at York University, Toronto, and , associate professor of German at the University of Rochester. Horowitz is author of “Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction” (State University of New York Press, 1997). She has published extensively on Holocaust literature, women survivors, Jewish American fiction and pedagogy. She is working on a book titled “Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory.”

Hwang specializes in 20th-century literature, film and culture, with an emphasis on German Jewish identity, Holocaust studies, questions of modernity, film theory and critical theory. She is the author of “Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity” (Northwestern University Press, 2014).

“What Now? Remind Me” documents a year in the life of Portuguese filmmaker Pinto and his husband, Nuno Leonel, as Pinto undergoes experimental drug treatment for AIDS. an “intimate and finely wrought self-portrait” that depicts Pinto’s “condition with incisive visual imagination and takes his current situation as a springboard for free flights of memory.”

“This film reminded me of what Roger Hallas calls a visual essay,” Hamner says. “Pinto wanted to record the pains and pleasures of this year. It’s poetic and beautiful.” The film “takes the opportunity to think about the condition of his human life as well as the condition of all human life and the preciousness of those everyday moments. It’s this incredible poem about life.”

While the religious theme of “Son of Saul” is obvious, here it’s much more subtle. “About a third of the way through the film, Pinto picks up Augustine’s ‘Confessions,’” she says. St. Augustine of Hippo wrote “Confessions” around CE 400 to outline his conversion to Christianity.

“To anyone thinking about memoir, this is a huge reference,” Hamner explains. “It’s a foundational text in religion. From that point on, you begin to see references to Christianity in the film.”

Pinto will speak at the plenary session following screening of his film. He is a sound designer, producer and director who has worked on more than 100 films, including several projects with Leonel. “What Now? Remind Me” won a Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Award at the Locarno Film Festival and Best International Film awards at FIDBA (International Documentary Film Festival) and DocLisboa.

Panels on Friday and Saturday focus on topics that include postcolonial imaginary, spiritual experience in film, theological effects of place and religion across film genre. The diversity of scholars, disciplines and topics in the symposium “shows the draw of what we can offer here,” Hamner says.

“These panels and plenaries are scholarly efforts that give all of us opportunities to think more deeply about the fraught nature of place,” she adds. “The conflicting histories and memories of a place sediment into soil, buildings, agriculture, and paths worn by countless footsteps. These histories and memories form the lived religious and political edges of place, in all of their joy and violence.”

Here is the schedule of public events:

Friday, March 31: “Son of Saul”

• 2-3:45 p.m., Screening, 141 Newhouse 3
• 6 p.m., Plenary featuring Sara Horowitz and June Hwang, 469 Newhouse 2

Saturday, April 1: “What Now? Remind Me”

• 1:30- 4:15 p.m., Screening, Watson Auditorium
• 4:30-5:30 p.m., Plenary featuring Joaquim Pinto, director, Watson Auditorium

Ahead of Syracuse’s symposium, Pinto will participate in , a film festival at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Two of Pinto’s films will be screened there. That event highlights regional interest in his work. Hamner says. Pinto’s visit to the United States this spring has been jointly organized by Hamner and Haverford College professor and co-organizer of Strange Truth, Vicky Funari.

Sponsors for the symposium include the Syracuse University Humanities Council, Humanities Center and Religion Department. Pinto’s plenary session is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ 2017 Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds Grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.

Jim Wiggins

A few days after Samuel Clemence was named co-chair of the committee charged with conducting a comprehensive review of Hendricks Chapel, former Department of Religion chair called him. “He offered me a copy of his report from 1980,” Clemence says. In early 2016, 15 years after retirement, Wiggins “was still invested in the University and in Hendricks Chapel.”

Wiggins, Eliphalet Remington Professor of Religion Emeritus and religion department chair from 1980 to 2000, died Feb. 20 at his Syracuse home. He was 83. A memorial service is set for Saturday, March 4, 11 a.m. at University United Methodist Church, 1085 E. Genesee St., Syracuse.

In his 38-year Syracuse career, Wiggins served as director of graduate studies in religion, interim dean of Hendricks Chapel, University senator and University marshal. After retiring in 2001, he served as executive director of (formerly the Interreligious Council of Central New York) and was active in several civic and faith organizations. He is remembered by colleagues and friends for his dedication to the University and his lifelong advocacy for religious study as a way to understand others.

“Jim Wiggins was a friend and counselor to me and many Syracuse Chancellors, as well as a distinguished scholar, department chair and interim dean of Hendricks Chapel,” Chancellor Kent Syverud says. “He cared deeply about the people in this institution and in the city and region. I count myself fortunate that our times at Syracuse overlapped.”

Wiggins chaired the Hendricks review committee in 1979-80, in advance of the chapel’s 50th anniversary and amid a sometimes-contentious debate about the facility’s role on campus. Then Chancellor Melvin Eggers accepted the seven recommendations of the so-called Wiggins Committee. Changes included placing the chapel under the administrative direction of the chancellor, creating an advisory board for religious affairs, and encouraging more coordination among denominational chaplains. The committee also recommended that the chapel dean no longer serve as Protestant chaplain, but oversee the chapel’s programs, facilities and staff.

“He really served at a critical time in the history of Hendricks Chapel,” says Clemence, interim dean of Hendricks Chapel, longtime member of the University’s Spiritual Life Council and professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering. “His recommendations set the course for the chapel over this many years. His work was pivotal in making the chapel a significant presence on campus.”

Wiggins, ordained as a United Methodist minister, came to Syracuse in 1963 after earning a Ph.D. at Drew University. A native of Texas who never lost his drawl, he was an expert in Western religion and culture. His many publications include “Religion as Story” (Harper & Row, 1975) and “In Praise of Religious Diversity” (Routledge, 1996). From 1983 until 1992, he served as executive director of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the largest academic organization dedicated to the study of religion. For several years, he hosted “Religion Matters,” a local public television show.

“In many ways, Jim was the architect of this department. While his particular area was Western religions, his constant emphasis was interreligious understanding and respect,” says , religion department chair. “He would bring into our department world-renowned academics like David Miller, Huston Smith, Charles Long, Charles Winquist, as well as an impressive stream of visiting luminaries. This all served to place us among the top 15 graduate programs of religion in the United States.”

In May 1980, Wiggins was appointed interim dean of Hendricks Chapel, an assignment he accepted with “considerable trepidation.” In “Hendricks Chapel: Seventy-Five Years of Service” (SU Press, 2005), Wiggins explained the University had long operated with “a clear distinction between the academic study of religion that is the work of the department and the practice of religion that is the task of the chapel.”

As interim dean, Wiggins developed a new appreciation for interfaith relationships. “Real interreligious work is demanding and challenging,” he wrote. “A university chapel setting, however, is one of the most promising and auspicious sites within which to pursue such work just because of its setting in a larger institutional context of open inquiry and serious debate.”

Religion professor Jim Watts, who chaired the department from 2009 to 2015, says Wiggins urged people to recognize not just the commonalities among religions, but to understand and respect their differences as well. “He knew that’s the much harder work,” Watts says.

For Wiggins, interfaith understanding was akin to human understanding. “It was a question of, ‘How are we going to understand each other on this planet or in this local community if we don’t understand different religions?’” Watts says, “He thought this was essential knowledge for understanding ourselves in this world.”

Wiggins’ applied that perspective to his role as AAR executive director, a position he held, while serving as department chair, from 1983 to 1992. “He pushed that organization to broaden its perspective worldwide and across religions traditions,” Watts says.

As director of InterFaith Works from 2002 to 2009, Wiggins is credited with expanding the agency’s community outreach and advocating compassion and understanding in an increasingly diverse world. “He had done the scholarship, but engaging people in interfaith work is different,” Watts says. “It became a personal mission for him after he retired. He felt it deeply in many ways.”

Richard Pilgrim, associate professor emeritus of Religion and Wiggins’ successor as chair, praised his colleague’s advocacy for the study of religion. “He was very effective in making our department, especially the graduate program, better known,” Pilgrim says. “Because of his close association with the AAR, our program shined a little brighter in the academic world.”

Wiggins “was a bridge between the department and the chapel, from the department to the rest of the University, and from the University to the community on behalf of the study of religion,” Pilgrim says.

From 2009 until 2016, Jim Wiggins served as director for youth development programs at First Tee Syracuse. Wiggins was responsible for organization and oversight of the First Tee curriculum, which promotes core values such as honesty, integrity and responsibility through the game of golf. He provided mentorship and guidance to the many young people served by First Tee.

A few weeks before his death, Wiggins penned three brief essays for “CNY Inspirations,” a Syracuse.com feature coordinated by Interfaith Works. “Teachers of compassion consistently recommend making a commitment daily to perform some act that demonstrates compassion to the point that doing so becomes a habit,” he wrote. “Giving such gifts is transformative. For those with eyes trained by practice to see, opportunities to act compassionately are all around us.”

background is steeped in India’s place in the history of tea production. She grew up in Kolkata (also known as Calcutta), a descendent of one of the pioneering Indian tea planter families in Bengal. Her expertise as an art historian and her family legacy mingle together in her current research project: an academic book that analyzes the visual cultures of the Indian tea industry anchored by the colonial and contemporary histories of India.

Ray has received two prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awards to support research for the book, tentatively titled “From Two Leaves and a Bud: Visualizing Tea in Colonial and Modern India.” A 2014 Summer Stipend Award allowed her to do research in the United Kingdom; a yearlong award in 2016 took her to India and Sri Lanka, and back to the UK.

In the last five years, received an average of 1,178 applications per year and funded only 80 awards a year.

“I wanted to write a book that spans the history of Indian tea, going back to the 18^th century when the British first came up with the idea of planting tea in India,” says Ray, associate professor of art history and chair of the . “In India, the contemporary era still resonates with colonial traditions.”

Over cups of peppermint tea, she explained how tea made its way from China to India and how an indigenous variety of tea was found in Assam in northeast India. In the 18^th century, the East India Co. started the Canton tea trade. In order to break China’s monopoly on the desirable commodity, the British started growing tea in India.

“You see how colonial history is inseparable from today’s tea industry and how complex the modern-day tea industry has become as it balances globalizing trends like fair trade and organic tea production with scientific research, changing climactic conditions and India’s labor laws,” Ray says. “How does this living history straddle both past and present? That is one of the key questions I am researching.”

Ray has conducted research in tea plantations, museums and herbaria, and combed through the archival holdings of tea companies, tea brokers, private planters, botanical gardens and numerous archives in the UK, India and Sri Lanka. She has also consulted with planters, botanists and tea industry organizations, including the Tea Research Association, Indian Tea Association and the Indian Tea Board.

Ray’s book begins with the tea plant itself. Tea plants can grow 20 feet and higher, she explains. “What you see on plantations are the plants pruned down to bushes.” She learned that “for the botanist, the flower is important. For the planter, if the plant is flowering, it’s in distress.”

Botanical illustrations chart both the scientific and artistic history of tea, she notes. “Even the technologies of transporting tea plants in boxes are historically important, she says, “because tea has also been a very valuable commodity.”

With the eye of an architecture and landscape design expert, Ray considered how plantations are organized and designed. “The bungalows on plantations follow a very specific form of architecture that synchronizes with their surroundings,” she says. “The plantation is a tapestry of multiple landscapes.”

She also sought details about the planters—a task more challenging in India than in the United Kingdom. “I had to pry out records,” she says. “It requires a tremendous amount of time and patience.” But her Indian background helped. “I speak multiple languages. This helps break the ice. All the people I met across the board were very receptive to my project, so my research progressed at a steady pace.”

Depending on the tea growing area, historically, laborers were brought in from other states and from the neighboring country of Nepal. “Descendants still work on plantations,” Ray says. “Indian-owned plantations become places to claim both Indian and regional identities.”

Her great-grandfather, Tarini Prosad Ray, was founder and chairman of the Indian Tea Planters Association in British India. “I grew up on a very steady diet of stories about him,” she says, so returning to his first plantation “was very nostalgic.”

After the Times of India, a major national newspaper in India, published a , Teabox, which sells Indian and Nepali tea online, invited Ray to contribute to the company’s blog. In Ray describes her visit to the East India Docks along the Thames, where “ships that operated under charter or license to the East India Co. sailed with their precious cargo of tea and porcelain from eastern shores.”

As she concludes our interview, Ray apologizes for the grocery store tea she served. “Real tea connoisseurs drink loose leaf tea,” she says. “People who know tea can tell where it came from,” like a wine expert knows the grapes’ origins. “When you’re drinking something beautiful, of course you know.”

She confesses to drinking more coffee than tea when in the United States. Still, “I think tea is best served in fine porcelain cups,” she says. “It’s not a drink that can be rushed. You need to sip your tea. It invites a pause.”

Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, New York

annual field trip, “The Underground Railroad in Central New York,” will take 38 AAS and other University community members to the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, New York. The tour will be Friday, March 31, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tubman, an escaped slave, was known as the Moses of the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War, she moved to Auburn. The historic site includes Tubman’s brick residence, the Tubman Home for the Aged, and a historic barn. A new national park is to be established at the site. Last year, the U.S. Treasury Department announced a plan for Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill.

The AAS tour will include a tour of the department’s , 805 E. Genesee St. Syracuse. The event is free for participants. AAS students must R.S.V.P. by Feb. 24 (email recole@syr.edu with the heading, “#Tubman2017) to reserve seats. After this date, seats will open to the University community.

“Students will learn how Harriet Tubman rose from slavery to freedom to become essential to the stories of the Underground Railroad, gender equality and American democracy,” says , associate professor of history and AAS chair. “In our own times, it is a story essential to us inculcating the Tubman spirit and understanding how African Americans, women and working people can challenge inequality on the path to equality and freedom.”

AAS is also co-sponsoring with the a traveling exhibit that celebrates the September 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“A Place for All People” is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with OHA. Posters highlight key artifacts that tell the rich and diverse story of the African American experience. The display features a 6.5-inch by 8.5-inch photo of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who settled in Rochester. He was a well-known abolitionist and writer, and he gave frequent talks in Syracuse during the 1840s and 1850s.

The photo from the OHA collection is thought to have been taken about 1848 by the Boston photography firm Southworth & Hawes, the preeminent daguerreotypists of notable Bostonians and world figures. The photo, one of nine known daguerreotypes of Douglass, recently received conservation treatment to prevent further deterioration.

Frederick Douglass

The exhibit also includes objects from OHA’s collection, such as original photographs, artwork, newspapers and visual biographies of African American citizens. OHA, 321 Montgomery St., Syracuse, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends. The display continues through March 19.

Here are other events AAS is presenting or co-sponsoring this semester:

Feb. 23 to 26: , Community Folk Art Center. All events are free and open to the public.

• Thursday, Feb. 23, 6 p.m.: “200 Cartas” and performance by the University’s Raices Dance Troupe
• Friday, Feb. 24, 6 p.m.: “Legends of Ska” and 8 p.m.: “Harder They Come” and performance by Kalabash, the University’s Caribbean dance team
• Saturday, Feb. 25: 11 a.m.: “Songs of Redemption”; 1 p.m.: “Murder in Pacot”; and 4 p.m.: “Erika The Aftermath”
• Sunday, Feb. 26: 11 a.m.: “Sunday Brunch” (catered by Jerk Hut); noon: “Cu-Bop”; and 2:30 p.m.: (shorts) “Exil,” “Tears of Joy” and “Tormented”

Friday, Feb. 24: “Soul Food Junkies,” (film and Q&A), 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., Sims 219

Thursday, March 2: Professor Renate M. Simson Memorial, 5 to 7 p.m., Sims 219

Monday, March 20: “Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More: 1964-1972,” (film and Q&A), 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., Sims 219

Friday, March 31: 8^th Annual AAS Field Trip: Harriet Tubman Home and CFAC tours, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Wednesday, April 5: 34^th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Public Affairs Lecture, featuring Dr. Quintard Taylor (theme: “The History of the African American West”)

Thursday, May 4: AAS graduation ceremony

Friday, May 12: Itanwa Orinwa/Black Graduation, 8 to 10:30 a.m., Hendricks Chapel

The memorial will begin with a 49th day memorial service at 11 a.m. at the , 266 W. Seneca Turnpike, Syracuse. The service will be followed by a 12:30 p.m. luncheon sharing of memories in the Kilian Room, 500 Hall of Languages.

Smith’s respect for and practice of Buddhism make the 49th day memorial service appropriate, says Shinge Roshi Roko Sherry Chayat, a longtime friend of the University who knew Smith well.

“Buddhists believe that when someone dies there is still a consciousness or an energy force that continues after the physical body disintegrates,” she explains. “That consciousness takes a new birth after 49-day period of transition. Although he was a Christian, he was very drawn to

Huston Smith. Photo by Heidi M. Kettler.

Buddhism and he would appreciate that he would be remembered in this ceremonial way.”

Chayat, abbot of the Zen Center of Syracuse, says Smith was very supportive of the creation of the Zen Center. She also worked with Smith to bring the Dalai Lama to campus in 1979.

The 49th day service will be held at the Zen Center’s Carriage House. Guests are asked to arrive at 10:45 a.m. and are asked to call the center at 315.492.9773 to R.S.V.P.

Smith was an early champion of religious pluralism and interfaith respect. He remains well known for his 1958 book “Religions of Man,” later revised, expanded and renamed “The World’s Religions.” The two versions have sold more than three million copies. It remains a popular introductory textbook and is often on the syllabus for Syracuse’s Religion 101 course, according to , chair of the religion department.

Lunch will include videos of Huston Smith. That will be followed by anecdotes shared by Smith’s friends and colleagues, including Chayat, Arnold and others.

“Huston made profound contributions to the comparative study of religion, which have marked our department, Syracuse University and the wider community,” Arnold says. “This memorial event allows us all to express our respect and admiration for him and his legacy.”

Snow scene from Atlanta Ballet’s “Nutcracker.” Photo by Charlie McCullers.

A new partnership between the in the and Atlanta Ballet creates a unique opportunity for a student to get hands-on arts experience. The new program, which starts in July 2017, follows the same pattern as Janklow internships with the Florida Grand Opera in Miami and the Seattle Art Museum. One student will receive a fellowship that includes a year of academic coursework at the University, followed by a yearlong internship at Atlanta Ballet.

“This extended relationship creates an internship that is integrated with and complements the student’s studies,” says , professor of practice and founding director of the Janklow Program. “It allows the student to develop a deep professional relationship with the organization and its staff. The student also gains a much better understanding of the organization, the larger context in which it operates, and the issues it faces while participating in meaningful projects that really contribute to the organization.”

While studying on campus, the fellow will receive online and Skype mentoring from Atlanta Ballet staff as well as research projects related to his or her coursework. At the completion of the academic year, the student will then join the ballet for an extended on-site internship to work on the implementation of projects researched the previous year.

Founded in 1929, is the longest continuously performing ballet company in the United States, as well as the official Ballet of Georgia. “Although a renowned leader in the promotion and education of dance, Atlanta Ballet’s roots have been firmly grounded in the community and play a vital role in the city’s cultural growth and revitalization,” says Arturo Jacobus, president and CEO of Atlanta Ballet. “We are committed to connecting the community with this amazing art form, which would not be possible without the combination of our talented dancers onstage and the dedicated administrators behind the scenes.”

Janklow strives to give students opportunities to work with top-tier companies and organizations that exercise the best practices defined in the classroom. “As a leading arts institution and one of the nation’s premiere ballet companies, Atlanta Ballet is a fantastic fit for this program,” Nerenhausen says.

The Janklow Program is a 15-month, 39-credit master’s program that trains leaders of nonprofit and for-profit organizations in the creative and performing arts. Based in the Department of Art and Music Histories, the program is named for Morton L. Janklow ’50, one of the country’s most influential literary agents and arts advocates.

The internship program began with a partnership with the Seattle Art Museum in 2015, and the Florida Grand Opera internship started the next year. Janklow also has local partnerships with Point of Contact Gallery, the Red House and Friends of Syracuse Chamber Music.

“As a premiere ballet company in the Southeast, Atlanta Ballet has an ongoing commitment to educating the next generation of young leaders in the arts community at large,” says Steven Libman, chief advancement officer at Atlanta Ballet. “We are thrilled to partner with Syracuse University and look forward to extending our influence to students in the Janklow Arts Leadership Program and beyond.”

Janklow continues to develop new partnerships, adds Nerenhausen. “We are working to better integrate these internships with the program,” he says. “One of our next steps is to bring together representatives of our partner organizations to benefit from their advice in developing the Janklow Program and these internship models.”

WayneFranits

“Wayne has made tremendous contributions to the field of art history, to the College of Arts and Sciences and to the entire University,” says Wheatly. “His scholarship in 17^th-century Dutch and Flemish art has earned him international distinction among his peers, and his prolific writings and presentations will have a lasting impact on the field. An outstanding teacher, scholar, leader and role model, he is deeply deserving of this distinction.”

A nominating letter praised Franits’ work as “copious” and “well regarded,” and noted “he has achieved unmatched international renown.” The letter applauded his extensive publications and service contribution to his field, including at the University and on the board of directors for the Historians of Netherlandish Art.

In addition to having written numerous articles, book chapters, essays in exhibition catalogues and book reviews, Franits has been particularly active as an author and editor of books. His first three books (1993, 1997 and 2001) were all published with Cambridge University Press. Thereafter, he wrote a widely acclaimed survey on genre painting published by Yale University Press in 2004, which appeared in a paperback edition in 2008. Additionally, Franits has published monographic studies on, among others, the 17th-century Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch (2006), Hendrick ter Brugghen (2007; co-authored with Leonard J. Slatkes), Dirck van Baburen (2013) and Johannes Vermeer (2015). He also edited two well-received studies focusing on the state of scholarship with respect to 17^th-century Dutch art (1997; 2016). Franits’ research for these projects has repeatedly been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society.

Franits is frequently invited to speak on his specialty. In fact, just this past year (2016) he delivered lectures at three European venues: a keynote address on the occasion of the publication of a catalog of Dutch genre paintings at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, The Netherlands (December 2016); a lecture at “Beyond Caravaggio,” a two-day international conference at London’s National Gallery (November 2016); and a lecture on Godefridus Schalcken’s three self-portraits at an international conference in Cologne, Germany (January 2016).

Franits is currently completing a book on the London period of the late 17th-century Dutch painter Schalcken (1643-1706). In 2015, he wrote an essay on Schalcken’s time in England and 10 entries for the catalog for the exhibition “Schalcken; Painted Seduction,” held at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Germany, and the Dordrechts Museum in Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

Franits earned his Ph. D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1987. That year he began his Syracuse University career as assistant professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories (formerly the Department of Fine Arts). He was promoted to associate professor in 1993 and to professor in 2004. He served as department chair from 1995 to 2009.

Kwame Dixon

Kwame Dixon, assistant professor of African American studies in the , will discuss Afro-Brazil and the global struggle for human rights from 5:30-7:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 2, in 319 Sims Hall. The event, “The Afro-Brazilian Experience as a Model for 21st Century Pan Africanism,” is a program of the Africa Initiative, a Universitywide project that focuses on Africa as an important site of knowledge by highlighting related work by Syracuse University scholars.

Dixon will talk about his book, “Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia” (University Press of Florida, 2016). He will examine 21^st-century Pan Africanism by looking at how Afro-Brazilians have influenced politics and democratic institutions in Brazil.

Dixon’s research focuses on social exclusion (racial and gender discrimination) in the context of international human rights, democracy and conflict resolution. His research on Latin America and the Caribbean examines how racialization and gender and other forms of social discrimination lead to human rights violations against at-risk populations. He is interested in ways in which excluded communities are integrated into the fabric of democratic structures across the Americas.

His book uses the city of Salvador da Bahia in Brazil as a case study to track the emergence of black civil society groups and their political projects. As Brazil transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s, its black population worked to claim new citizenship rights, tested new anti-discrimination and affirmative action measures, reclaimed rural and urban land, and increased political representation. Dixon’s book is among the first to explore how Afro-Brazilians influenced politics and democratic institutions in the contemporary period.

“Given Brazil’s strategic importance to the larger world economy, its status as a leading player in Latin America and its vibrant civil society and social movements, this new books provides insights into alternative ways of thinking about democracy and human rights,” Dixon says.

After the lecture and question-and-answer session, a reception and book signing will be held in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library on the second floor of Sims Hall. Dixon’s book will be available for sale (cash only.) This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, contact the Department of African American Studies at 315.443.4302.

Huston Smith (Photo by Heidi M. Kettler)

It was only through visits with then-Onondaga Chief Leon Shenandoah and Onondaga faith keeper Oren Lyons ’58, H’93 that he understood “the significance of this totally new area of world religions,” Smith wrote in “A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom” (University of California Press, 2006).

Smith described a visit to the Onondaga Nation during which he met leaders of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee). When the official meeting began, Lyons told Smith he could not join the chiefs in the longhouse, a sacred place. Smith felt not rejection, but “a surge of exultation” at the incident. “It was simply thrilling that there were still people on our planet who think that there are things sacred enough that the profane—meaning those for whom these things are not equally sacred—would desecrate the substance itself with their presence,” he wrote.

Huston Smith (R), on the set of the popular TV series “The Religions of Man” in 1955. Smith later wrote a book of the same name, updated to “The World’s Religions,” which remains a popular religion textbook.

Smith’s appreciation for indigenous traditions profoundly changed the way the scholar thought about religion, says Philip Arnold, chair of the religion department. “He was trained, like all graduate students in religion, to acknowledge only the great world religions and their influence and see primitive religions in thinking about early formation of ‘civilized’ traditions,” he says.

As Smith got to know the Onondagas, he learned their practices were “a living thing and were so sophisticated,” Arnold adds. “He had sold millions of copies of his book by then. He didn’t have to do anything, but he decided to shift and include these traditions. That says a lot about Huston and his ability to continually be inspired.”

Smith was the son of missionary parents in China. He was ordained a Methodist minister but chose teaching over preaching, saying he had no desire to “Christianize the world.” Throughout his life, Smith immersed himself in religious practice (including experiments with psychedelic drugs) to experience different forms of spirituality.

An early champion of religious pluralism and interfaith respect, Smith is perhaps best known for “Religions of Man,” which he revised and expanded in 1991 and renamed with the gender-inclusive title “The World’s Religions.” The two versions have sold more than three million copies. It remains a popular introductory textbook, and is often on the syllabus for Syracuse’s Religion 101, Arnold says.

Huston Smith’s popular textbook, “The World’s Religions.”

The book, widely considered the most important study of comparative religions, includes one of Smith’s core ideas, that all faith traditions express the Absolute. He urged mutual respect among people of different faith traditions, writing, “If, then, we are to be true to our own faith, we must attend to others when they speak, as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.”

James B. Wiggins, Eliphalet Remington Professor of Religion Emeritus, recalls Smith as a popular and influential professor. “He approached his studies in a way that was quite remarkably different from what was big at the time in the setting of academic religion,” says Wiggins, who chaired the religion department from 1980-2000.

“He became a practitioner of at least six religions,” he explains. “He went to the sites where they practiced and did his best to learn and participate in different ways of being religious. He became convinced, as a Christian, that there were many different paths up the mountain and he wanted to personally experience as much as he could, to travel as a Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu or whatever.”

Smith was interested in finding out what religions had in common, Wiggins says. “Each was and is a different path to the ultimate truth,” he explains. “Doctrine and dogma were not high on his list. Practice was what was to be studied and learned.”

Smith, Wiggins adds, “was one of the most gentle and thoughtful colleagues I ever had. My regard for him couldn’t have been higher.”

Smith wrote more than 10 books, including volumes on Buddhism, Islam, the Native American Church and a memoir, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine” (HarperOne, 2010). His final book, with Phil Cousineau, “And Live Rejoicing: Chapters from a Charmed Life” (New World Library), was published in 2012.

He was also widely known for the five-part Bill Moyers PBS series “Wisdom of Faith.” Each of the 1996 shows opens with this Smith quote: “If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.”

Smith is credited with introducing Americans to the Dalai Lama and facilitated the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader’s 1979 campus visit. In the 1990s, he helped the Native American Church get legal status for its sacred peyote rites. Although the Supreme Court ruled against the Native Americans, the case led to later rulings seen as supporting religious liberty.

Huston Smith, in a photo dated 1973, the year he began teaching at Syracuse.

He believed that for the United States to have freedom of religion, people need to know about other religions. “We’ve always had this tension in American culture between trying to understand and engage others and having a real commitment to our own traditions,” Arnold explains. “Huston was able to navigate that in really important ways. We haven’t taken up his work as much as we should.”

Smith, former Thomas J. Watson of Religion and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, taught at Syracuse from 1973-1984. He previously taught at the University of Denver, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After retiring from Syracuse, he was visiting professor of religious studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

He received an honorary degree from Syracuse in 1999 and last visited campus in 2005 for a screening of “A Seat at the Table,” which features Smith in conversation with eight Native American leaders.

A 49th-day memorial service is planned for 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 19, at the Zen Center of Syracuse, 266 W. Seneca Turnpike. The service will be followed by a 12:30 p.m. luncheon in the Kilian Room, 500 Hall of Languages.

Smith’s death has spurred praise from friends and colleagues worldwide. “Happy eternity, Huston Smith, you are always loved,” concludes a piece in the Hindu magazine Swarajya.

John W. Borchert

“The class is going to raise critical questions about the power of digital technology as it intersects with religious practice,” says John W. Borchert G’13, a Ph.D. student in the in the College of Arts & Sciences. “As students and thinkers in this class, we have a chance to be highly conscious of what shapes religion online.”

Borchert’s class, “Digital Religion” (REL 320), will include readings from media scholars of the early and mid-1990s predicting the potential of religion online. “They were either overly optimistic or dystopic,” he explains. “Religion online would save the world and bridge all the gaps, or it would destroy everything.”

The course is “a chance to see how certain theoretical approaches may help understand this,” he adds. “We get to create our own methodological lenses.” Students will consider how digital technology changes religious practice and how religious practice changes digital technology. They’ll also ask: What is religion online? What is online religion? How has the study of religion and the digital changed as technology changes?

Examples of digital religion include fully rendered 3D temples and churches, prayer and confession apps, digital shrines and offerings, virtual graveyards and online pilgrimages. These intersections between digital and specifically religious practices raise questions about whether the barrier between the digital and the non-digital experience dissolves, Borchert says.

Screenshot of the digital app, Mecca 3D. (Courtesy: Mecca3D.net)

For college students who have been raised and shaped by digital culture, “This is a time to pause and think about digital practices and how they shape human beings and how those human beings change shape,” he says. “Technology is not imposed on human beings. It’s something humans create and cultures shape and reshape and make it do work for them.”

Borchert has been studying religion and digital culture for about 10 years. “Online ritual is fascinating to me,” he says, noting that via the app Mecca 3D “you are able to walk the Hajj in Mecca. (Participating in the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam, required of every adherent at least once in his or her lifetime.)

People can also participate in virtual Puja, a Hindu prayer ritual, and the Tibetan Buddhist leader Dalai Lama has said that in spinning a virtual prayer wheel, the computer’s hard drive can mimic the prayer wheel, Borchert explains.

“The point of the class is not to go on a field trip, but to be highly conscious of the ways technology makes religion available to whom and when,” he says.

Ahmed Abdel Meguid

Abdel Meguid and his friends were learning about the coup attempt via social media as the world watched the Turkish army take over a television station to declare martial law and announce a curfew. Thousands of people—even those who oppose the autocratic policies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—headed to the streets in defiance of a military takeover.

Despite the chaos and danger, Abdel Meguid stayed put, compelled to stand as a witness to history.

“I wanted to be part of that moment,” he says. “I felt a moral and religious obligation to stand there with people.”

By the next day, Erdogan had reasserted control and arrested thousands of military personnel. More than 300 people were killed and more than 2,100 were injured.

“I was lucky,” Abdel Meguid says. “I saw people shot. People died in the streets defending this democratically elected president. You can criticize Erdogan’s actions after the coup, but the Parliament was bombed by its own military.”

It’s not the first time Abdel Meguid, who is from Egypt, found himself in the middle of a Middle East coup. He was in Cairo on July 3, 2013, when Egyptian army General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coalition to remove President Mohamed Morsi from power.

“The military in Turkey were like the thugs of (former President Hosni) Mubarak’s regime, who went above buildings and shot into Tahrir Square,” he says. “The Turkish people were very courageous and determined and dignified in standing their ground.”

Western media failed to accurately portray this summer’s coup attempt, Abdel Meguid says. “The main sentiment among almost all Turkish people was the extreme hypocrisy of the American media coverage,” he explains. “CNN claimed the coup was successful. That was complete nonsense. The arrogant Western media did not apologize and Secretary of State John Kerry was slow to condemn it as a coup.”

The response to the coup attempt “is hypocritical and does not help the image of the United States in the Middle East,” he says. “The Turkish people feel America is against any Islamically oriented government, even if it is democratically elected.”

Although many journalists and intellectuals remain imprisoned, life in Turkey is returning to normal. But media outlets continue to exaggerate the danger, harming the economy. “Istanbul is safe to visit,” he says.

Abdel Meguid has taught at Syracuse since 2011. His research draws on Islamic and German philosophy. He has published and has forthcoming articles in the European Journal of Political Theory, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies and Philological Encounters. He is currently working on a book about modal logic in classical and early to late modern Sunni theology and philosophy.

About 65 students, most of whom are not Muslim, are taking “Discovering Islam,” and current events provide frequent class discussion topics. “I try to show students what philosophy says in theory has an application in practice,” he says. “When we talk about the coups in Egypt and Turkey, I talk about tyranny in Plato’s ‘Republic.’”

While he finds students generally eager to learn about Islam, he worries that comments by now-President-elect Donald Trump stir anti-Islamic sentiment. “The ignorance in his discourse is stunning,” Abdel Meguid says. “What he says might incite hate. The question is not Trump himself, but if it reflects the real view of the American population. Even if people are open, there is a lack of knowledge.”

In his view, the same ignorance infects media coverage and U.S. foreign policy. “People are not taking into consideration Islamic thought and philosophy as a reconstruction of historic authority,” he says. “They see it as the white man’s burden, a backwards tradition to be fixed.”

Abdel Meguid tries to maintain an optimistic outlook, despite frustration and disappointment at the lack of knowledge about his rich culture. “I know what is good about the American academic tradition, with universities and disciplines working together,” he says. “America has a great potential for relating to different cultures. It’s time for the great academic tradition to lead America.”

Sheila Ragunathan

To get a broader view of U.S. antiracist feminist scholarship and its connection to neocolonial power structure, Ragunathan is pursuing a (WGS). A graduate student in sociology at Goethe University, she will return to Germany in January.

“In Germany we don’t talk about race,” Ragunathan says. As a result of German history, the word “race” got eliminated from everyday conversation as well as from scholarship about discrimination in Germany, she explains.

Still, “racism in Germany is a problem, and when it comes to the issue of immigration, increasing attacks on refugee camps show that Germans still want to hold on to a narrow understanding of ‘Germanness,’” she says,

Ragunathan was inspired to come to Syracuse University after meeting Distinguished Professor of WGS and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who spent 10 days last December as the Angela Davis Guest Professor for International Gender and Diversity Studies at GU’s Cornelia Goethe Center. Mohanty is an internationally recognized scholar of postcolonial and transnational feminist theory.

“We talked about the antiracist and feminist movement in Germany and struggles of women of color in and outside academia,” Ragunathan says. “She said it’s important to broaden your view and see yourself in the context of transnational feminism. To analyze your politics, you have to see yourself in comparison to other women.”

Mohanty is pleased Ragunathan chose to use her scholarship from the Hans-Boeckler-Foundation from Germany to pursue a Certificate in Advanced Studies in WGS at Syracuse University. Her experience teaching at Goethe University made it clear that the precise intellectual and theoretical questions that are at the heart of Syracuse’s WGS curriculum were highly sought after by graduate students like Ragunathan.

Mohanty hopes that graduate students from other European universities find their way to Syracuse’s WGS. “Students like Sheila bring a much-valued comparative perspective on racialized gender and the materiality of lived experience in an increasingly multiethnic, multiracial Europe,” she says.

Ragunathan especially enjoys Syracuse’s graduate seminars taught by women of color. “I never experienced that in Germany before, and this has a huge impact on the class atmosphere and the quality of the syllabi,” she says.

She had read work by Mohanty and , associate professor of African American studies and sociology and co-director of the in the College of Arts and Sciences. “In Germany, women’s and gender studies students know who they are,” she says. “Attending their classes is a unique opportunity not only for me but also for other students at Syracuse University.”

She marvels at an entire department dedicated to women and gender studies, and notes that in the 1980s, U.S. universities began including race in discussions of gender. “In Germany, this is still something we struggle with,” she says. “You have to remind people that intersectional theory is not just something you read about.”

She’s also pleased to see a broader look at colonialism. “In Germany, it’s a narrow concept,” she says. “We talk about European colonialism, not settler colonialism. Germany also practiced colonialism, but in school you don’t talk about it.”

Lots of Germans don’t know their country colonized Africa in places including Cameroon and Namibia, she explains. “The descendants of Namibians who live in Germany are reminded that Germany does not care about their history,” she says.

Ragunathan’s research is partially motivated by her experiences growing up as a mixed race child in Germany: Her mother is a white German and her father is a Tamil from Sri Lanka. On a warm, mid-October day, she sat on the Quad and commented on the ease with which students of different races interact. “In Germany, if you have brown eyes and darker skin, it’s immediate: You’re not from Germany,” she says. “They don’t just question your race. It’s always connected to your nationality.”

But here, she says, “I can talk about it and people don’t question my nationality.”

Ragunathan knows not all the country–or even Syracuse, for that matter—is as welcoming to diversity as what she’s experienced on campus. “It’s kind of a bubble, but it’s an amazing bubble,” she says.

Peppie Calvar

The award recognized Calvar’s outstanding contribution to the art of choral performance for the community. Since arriving at Syracuse University four years ago, Calvar has been active with several community choral groups, including serving as guest conductor of the Syracuse Vocal Ensemble and Syracuse Children’s Chorus.

In June 2015, he was named artistic director of the , an adult, non-audition community choir in operation since 1953. At least four Hendricks Chapel Choir alumni sing with Chorale.

CMM honored , associate professor and director of choral activities, in 2012; the group honored , chair of Setnor’s music education program, in 2006.

Calvar says it makes sense for Syracuse University’s musicians to collaborate with community groups. “If any choral organization anyplace thrives, everyone benefits, including us,” he says. “It behooves us on the hill to help others succeed. Their success is our success.”

Teaching college students and working with adults who participate in community choirs requires different philosophical approaches, he says. “At the university, the rigor I demand and how I enforce it is different than how I work with people who have worked all day and dealt with their families before coming to rehearsal,” he explains.

Calvar has also been chosen to participate in the of the American Choral Directors Association. He will spend 10 to 14 days this summer in Latin America.

This semester, he started Sung Evening Prayer, a half-hour Sunday worship service at Hendricks Chapel. Hendricks Chapel Choir sings at the 7 p.m. event. Calvar calls it “an academic service of compline with elements of vespers,” referring to evening prayer.

Sung Evening Prayer features , university organist, and special lighting provided by Hugh Jones, Julia Tucker and chapel staff. It’s followed by light refreshments and is open to the community.  “I’ve tailored it to be as open and ecumenical as I can,” he says.

Professional musicians, music majors, non-majors and amateurs reap benefits from singing, he says. “The benefit is the opportunity to use the abilities they have to come together and produce a product that’s satisfying on a level that transcends the personal,” he says.

Robert Rubinstein

That insight highlights Rubinstein’s pioneering work on the anthropology of peacekeeping and the role of anthropology in international security policy. His work has long been widely cited by scholars, government and military organizations. Now the American Public Health Association (APHA) has recognized his research and advocacy on peace and human rights by naming him recipient of the 2016 Victor Sidel and Barry Levy Award for Peace. Rubinstein will receive the award Nov. 1 during APHA’s 2016 Annual Meeting and Expo in Denver.

The award is given to an APHA member who has made outstanding contributions to preventing war and promoting international peace. It draws attention to the profound health consequences of war and how public health workers can help prevent war and promote international peace, according to the APHA website.

“My work has been to look at how it is that the organizational culture of military and humanitarian groups affect their success in working together and how those cultures interact with local cultures,” he said. “The idea is, better understanding might improve the cooperation of the actors in these situations. If they understood one another and the local context better, they might make delivery of humanitarian aid more effective.”

Rubinstein’s research combines his expertise in political anthropology and public health, and evolved from the U.N. peacekeeping role. “There are tremendous health consequences of war, both physical and psychological,” he says.

In the 1990s, the nature of many conflicts changed, with many internal crises, he explains, pointing to Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda as examples. “One of the underlying causes of these complex emergencies is that there are inequalities among people,” he says. “Understanding the politics on the ground is important for interveners to understand.”

Rubinstein is the author of “Peacekeeping Under Fire: Culture and Intervention” (Routledge, 2008). He is a co-editor of “Practicing Military Anthropology: Beyond Traditional Boundaries and Expectations” (Kumarian Press, 2012); “Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State” (SAR Press, 2011); and “Building Peace: Practical Reflections from the Field. Bloomfield” (Kumarian Press, 2009).

The APHA award also recognizes Rubinstein’s work organizing international peace research. He was a longtime member of the board of directors of the , which awards grants to initiatives aimed at preventing nuclear weapons and promoting regional peace and security. He is also co-founder and chair of the Commission on Anthropology, Peace and Human Rights of the .

The award acknowledges that Rubinstein’s work has been used by government and military organizations analysts to improve the design of their interventions in complex emergencies. He has served as a consultant to organizations including the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services, the National Research Council, the U.S. Army Peacekeeping Institute and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.

Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly addresses the attendees at the IT Girls Retreat.

In addition to plugging the iSchool’s relevance to diverse career fields, Wheatly reminded the high school students to take pride in their achievements and talents.

“I’m wicked smart,” she said, and the girls responded, “That’s me!”

“I like to do challenging things,” and “I’m going to change the world,” Wheatly prompted. After each bold acclamation, the girls yelled, “That’s me!”

The dinner was part of the sixth , an iSchool initiative to build confidence, inspire and create a pathway for girls to study information technology. The two-day event also jumpstarts the networking process, creating meaningful connections among professional women, iSchool alumnae who work in the IT industry and the girls.

The program targets the significant gender imbalance in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. While women hold nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. economy, they hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs, according to , a report by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Ernst & Young, JP Morgan Chase, IBM and Synchrony Financial sponsored the retreat. Representatives of the companies, some of them iSchool grads and past It Girls retreat participants themselves, volunteered to lead workshops.

About 550 girls have attended It Girls retreats, and more than 80 of those girls decided to attend Syracuse University, according to , the iSchool’s Undergraduate Recruiting Specialist.

Worden told the girls they’re entering college at an exciting time of technology and information possibilities. “I’m interested to see what the next 16 years look like,” she said, recounting how much progress has been made since the attendees were born. “How will you influence it?”

Workshops offered the girls a taste of real problems they might tackle as IT professionals. Sessions introduced them to skills the iSchool emphasizes: public speaking, collaboration and brainstorming.

Girls showed their creativity in a workshop on wearable technology. Among their inventions: earrings that buzz when the wearer slouches; a head band that measure how much the wearer sweats and how much water she needs to drink; and an improved Apple Watch, featuring a flashlight; and more fitness-tracking options.

Participants share highlights of their time at the retreat during the closing event in Hendricks Chapel.

“Any job you’re going to get you’re going to need to understand technology,” said McKenzie Miller, a member of the inaugural It Girl cohort and a 2016 iSchool graduate who works as a technology advisor at Ernst & Young.

Rosaly Salcedo, a senior  major and an IT Girl, said the retreat – and the school—can help students find their strengths. “Whatever your end goal is, know it, envisioning, get to it,” she advises.

The weekend also included entertainment and fun—notably the traditional sleepover at Archbold Gymnasium. By the closing event Monday, a speakout at Hendricks Chapel, many of the young women were eager to proclaim their places as new IT Girls.

“I already knew coding,” said one girl who hopes to work in the health field. “I wanted to find my own path. I think I found it by coming here.”

Religion Department chair Philip Arnold and his wife, Sandy Bigtree, speak to middle and high school teachers during a workshop on the ecology and history of Onondaga Lake.

The topic is close to the heart of religion department chair and Skä•noñh director . “We’re talking about the indigenous origins of democracy, the origins of women’s rights, lacrosse, the indigenous food movement. All these things are important to understanding the past and creating a future based on indigenous values,” he says.

Arnold, who took over as department chair this semester, focuses on Native American traditions of the Americas in his research. For more than 35 years, he has studied New York state’s history and religious landscape in the context of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the People of the Longhouse and the Iroquois, the name given them by French Jesuits in the 17th century.

Arnold teaches about the role of lacrosse as a sacred game to the Haudenosaunee in “Religion and Sports,” a popular course in person and online. He is the author of “ (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2012). Skä•noñh will host the Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Festival on Oct. 8.

The festival will include Haudenosaunee food, social singing and dancing, and crafters, and a presentation by famed stick maker Alf Jacques of the Onondaga Nation. Coach John Desko and members of Syracuse’s 2017 lacrosse team are expected to attend. Sponsors include Syracuse’s Athletic Department, Department of Religion and the Humanities Center.

Arnold’s roles as department chair and director of Skä•noñh highlight the ongoing collaboration between Syracuse University and the Onondaga Nation. “Syracuse and ESF have taken great steps to acknowledge we are on Onondaga Nation territory,” he says. “This is an important relationship to maintain.”

Skä•noñh (pronounced “SKAH-no”) means “peace and wellness” in the Onondaga language. The center is on the former site of the Sainte Marie Among the Iroquois museum, which commemorates the French-fortified mission that occupied Onondaga Lake from 1656 to 1658. The center explains the Great Law of Peace, the political and spiritual center of the confederacy, and the significance of Onondaga Lake to the Haudenosaunee.

The center tells that story from the Haudenosaunee perspective—the version of history not in textbooks and preserved via oral tradition. “You’re not going to get the whole story from the Jesuit Relations,” Arnold says, referring to the written records Jesuits kept of their trips from New France to Haudenosaunee territory from 1632 to 1673.

Skä•noñh aims to present “non-Haudenosaunee people with a view of the past that they haven’t thought about and a way to think about a more viable future based on those values,” Arnold says. “I see it as a living space that has to be populated with people and events and has to keep going.”

Tadodaho Sid Hill, spiritual leader of the Onondaga Nation, talks about the Thanksgiving address at Skä•noñh–Great Law of Peace Center in Liverpool.

The center has an interdisciplinary focus, drawing from departments including museum studies, women’s and gender studies, anthropology and religion. “We think of our mission as a cross-cultural discussion in an appropriate way,” he says. The collaboration between the Haudenosaunee and Syracuse University is itself an important and unusual cross-cultural relationship, he notes.

Several groups from the Honors Program and the College of Arts & Sciences’ First-Year Forum visited the center this semester. “It’s a way to orient students to the history and significance of Syracuse and Onondaga Lake,” Arnold says.

More than 90 teachers applied for 32 spots in this summer’s program, “The Ecology and History of Onondaga Lake: Exploring Haudenosaunee and Scientific Perspectives.” The workshop was structured around the Thanksgiving Address, which opens every formal gathering of the Haudenosaunee people. “We are thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life …” it begins.

“The values are what we want people to come away with,” Arnold explains. “It’s a human message: Isn’t it a good thing we wake up? Isn’t it a good thing there’s water? It’s a reminder to be grateful.”

The workshop also reminds teachers to respect the sacred aspects of Haudenosaunee culture. “It’s to amplify their voice, not to speak for them,” he says. “This was very successful and we have the basis for creating future sessions.”

Dana Spiotta

For more information, call the Arts Branch of the YMCA at 315.474.6851, ext. 328.

Spiotta’s “Stone Arabia” (Scribner, 2011) won the 2012 CNY Book Award for fiction. The award is sponsored by the DWC. “Stone Arabia” also was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction.

Her most recent novel, “Innocents and Others” (Scribner, 2016), was released in March to critical praise. She “has created a new kind of great American novel … [she] writes radiant, concentrated books that, as she has put it, consider ‘the way things external to us shape us: money, technology, art, place, history,’” The New York Times Magazine says in a February 21, 2016, story. “She has been compared with Don DeLillo and Joan Didion,” the magazine continues, “but her tone and mood are distinctly her own: She’s fascinated, not alienated.”

“Innocents and Others” has drawn praise from countless other publications: “A brilliant, riddling clip-montage of a friendship” (The New York Times Book Review); “an original and strangely moving book” (The Los Angeles Times); and an “astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism” (Vanity Fair).

George Saunders G’88, professor of English, considers Spiotta a wonder. “[Her novel] is a daring and beautiful meditation about selfishness and selflessness, and how to be in the world,” he writes. “A powerful book that will stay with me and continue to speak to me for a long time.”

Adds Mary Karr, the Peck Professor of Literature: “Spiotta is emerging as perhaps the major contender for fiction’s next generation. Her aim is nothing less than redemption, and she delivers.”

Spiotta’s “Eat the Document” (Scribner, 2006) was a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her debut novel is “Lightning Field” (Scribner, 2001). She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and won the 2008-09 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Spiotta discussed the kinds of characters that inhabit her novels with the online literary magazine The Millions: “I am interested, broadly, in how people respond to the enormities of the wider world, or even the harsh realities of a local, quiet life,” she says. “I’m not so interested in truly ‘bad’ characters. I’m interested in bruised idealists.”

Founded in 1999, the Arts Branch of the YMCA serves thousands of residents each year through a variety of programs, including the YMCA After School Arts Program; private music lessons; the East and Northwest YMCA Arts Studios; the Y-Arts Scholars Program; and the DWC, which provides adult and teen creative writing workshops, free literary readings, the CNY Book Awards and the journal Stone Canoe.

Ann Gualtieri

She spent her first two years at Syracuse University in the art school, majoring in painting. But as she contemplated a career as an artist, she realized, “I’m only 19 years old and I don’t have anything to say,” she recalls. “I felt that as an artist I had the technique, but I felt very keenly that I had not begun to grapple with the deep and important themes of life.”

To fill that void, she changed her major to Arts & Science’s . “It seemed like if I wanted to study the important themes of life and the history of the world, that seemed like the place to do it,” she says.

The change “was absolutely right,” she says. “I fell in love with it. There was no empirical basis for my idea to study philosophy, but it was exactly correct.” She spent her senior year studying at the University of London’s Bedford College, then decided to pursue a doctorate in philosophy.

“A lot of people think of philosophy as this fluffy thing, but it’s not,” she says. “It’s highly intellectual. I loved the rigor of it. I liked how it strengthened my mind. It made me smarter.”

Although Gualtieri loved the subject matter and taught while a graduate student, she didn’t want an academic career. She considered a career in law, earned a degree in gerontology and started a business. While completing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, she earned an M.B.A. as well. “The M.B.A. opened up a much wider world for me,” she says.

Her teaching experience served her well in the business world. “So much of business is communication,” she says. “If you have good teaching skills, you become a good communicator. I took that love of teaching and applied it to the business world.”

The analytical skills she learned studying philosophy also transferred well to her career. “Philosophy is extremely rigorous and precise, so it was really easy for me to do statistics and math and finance,” she says.

She first worked as a consultant with the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick—a job she calls “a post-doc in business.” Next she joined Abbott Laboratories, the healthcare manufacturer that helped create modern laboratory diagnostics and developed one of the first antiretroviral treatments for HIV.

She also worked in mergers and acquisitions and human resources for Searle, the pharma division of Monsanto. She was there when the company launched the blockbuster drug Celebrex. She retired in 2009 from DuPont, where she held senior leadership roles in investor relations, corporate strategy and human resources.

Gualtieri now shares the skills she developed at Syracuse and honed over a successful career as a board member for two nonprofit organizations. She’s treasurer for Cancer Care Connection, a Delaware-based organization that links people affected by cancer with resources. She also serves as vice chair of the board of trustees for the National Park Trust, which promotes park preservation and stewardship.

“Because of my experience, I end up on boards doing strategic plans and straightening out finances,” she says. “I am very aware that I have been very lucky in my life. Those of us who have resources and live a good life should give some of it back.”

That tradition of innovation, coupled with an approach department chair notes “is broadly and unapologetically situated in the liberal arts,” has inspired recent graduate projects that earned an unusually high number of awards for their scholarly writing.

“It’s a strength of our program that we’re small but have a diversity of experience,” Agnew says. “We help graduate students pursue research that reflects their interests. We see that in the wide variety of writing projects that were honored this year.”

Syracuse’s nationally recognized CCR doctoral program trains students to develop as scholars and to teach writing at the college level. A March 2010 college-mandated external review by three nationally recognized reviewers listed it as among the top five programs in the country. The department boasts a 90 percent placement of its graduates in tenure-track positions, and that success is due to their achievements and preparation, says CCR director Eileen E. Schell.

“The CCR program is a small, focused and highly selective doctoral program,” Schell says. “We focus on developing students’ individual research interests while working to help them to gain a broad understanding of the discipline of rhetoric and composition studies.”

The Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition teaches WRT 105 and WRT 205, which are all-university requirements. Graduates of its bachelor’s degree program in writing and rhetoric find careers in a variety of professional fields, including law, education, public relations and social media. Writing Center consultants assist students in 5,500 to 6,000 appointments a year, and more than half of the appointments are with international students.

From the all-university writing center to the doctoral program, the department aims to focus on student writing across academic levels and disciplines. “All of us are trying to help students think like writers who are prepared to respond to varied rhetorical contexts,” Agnew explains. “We’re teaching them to think about how writing is directed at a specific audience and trying to achieve a specific action.”

The department’s rhetorical roots include the idea that writing prepares people for citizenship, which includes preparing students to compose successfully for a variety of rhetorical situations and purposes, including for digital environments. Rhetoric is “the strategic use of language in communicating experience, promoting community, and establishing and resisting power,” Agnew says. “Teaching students to write with rhetorical sensitivity is central to our program.”

Here are the awards that CCR alumni from the past few years have received in the last six months. These students are part of a dynamic group of over 50 CCR alumni who are making strong contributions to rhetoric and writing studies:

• Allison Hitt G ’15 received the Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award for
• Hitt also received honorable mention for the James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation Award.
• Seth Long G ’15 received the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s 2016 Outstanding Dissertation Award for “Visualizing Words and Knowledge: Arts of Memory from the Agora to the Computer.”
• Tim Dougherty G ’15 received the 2016 Kneupper Award for his article The Kneupper Award recognizes the outstanding article published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, a top national journal in rhetorical studies.
• Laurie Gries G ’10 received the CCCC the Advancement of Knowledge Award and the Research Impact Award for “Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics” (Utah State University Press, 2015). The book was developed from .
• Ben Kuebrich G ’15 won the 2016 Braddock Award for his article “’White Guys Who Send my Uncle to Prison’: Going Public within Asymmetrical Power,” published in the June 2015 issue of College Composition and Communication. This annual award is given to the outstanding article published in the journal.

Tom Nardacci

Nardacci, who runs the successful Albany-area public relations firm , hopes his new co-working space and business incubator in downtown Troy will foster the same kind of advice for writers, graphic designers and filmmakers. , slated to open this summer, will offer a professional space for creative entrepreneurs to share ideas, expertise and moral support.

“If I had access to a space like this, my business would have taken off much more quickly,” Nardacci says. “These spaces are a natural way to cross-pollinate ideas. You have someone who is new sitting next to someone who has been in business 15 or 20 years.”

The Garage’s Creative Business Incubator program will allow six to 10 entrepreneurs to compete for free membership. Unlike the majority of co-working spaces and business incubators that cater to tech start-ups, the Garage focuses on creative businesses.

While studying at Syracuse, Nardacci didn’t plan on a public relations career. Instead, he pursued a history degree from the after a high school guidance counselor told him, “Do what you like.”

An interest in history led to his for first job: working on policy issues for former U.S. Rep. Michael McNulty in Washington, D.C. When his interest shifted to the communications end of politics, he became McNulty’s press secretary. He worked for several years in Albany in a similar role for former state Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari.

“I learned to write taking major history topics and synthesizing the information for papers,” he recalls.

He later earned a master’s degree in strategic communications from Columbia University and worked PR jobs in Manhattan. When he and his wife returned to the Albany area in 2006, “I just decided to hang out a shingle,” he says. His firm now employees 15.

Gramercy Communications will operate out of about a third of the Garage’s 14,000 square feet. The building housed a Pierce-Arrow car dealership in the early 1900s. Nardacci calls his new initiative the Garage as both a nod to the building’s history and the tradition of people starting businesses in their garage. Participants in the Creative Business Incubator must host one social or educational event each month. That’s part of the company’s commitment to social entrepreneurship—a business model that seeks not just to make profits, but to improve the world.

“We’re not renting offices and desks,” Nardacci says. “We’re creating a community.”

Tulipe Hosenn

Her commitment to shared identity and values led her to apply to intern with Disney ABC Television Group in Burbank, Calif. She will spend the summer in the company’s . “It feels like a dream opportunity,” she says. “Disney is a name that decorated my childhood. As a Disney intern I’ll get to be part of an incredible team.”

Hosenn can name all the Disney princesses (Anna from “Frozen” is her favorite), and she’s a Minnie Mouse fan. “I actually know how to draw Minnie,” she confesses. “I like to draw the ears and fill in the nose.”

Disney, she says, is one of the most powerful brands in the world, and it use its power to promote social consciousness and philanthropy, through a corporate commitment to sustainability, diversity, education, arts and culture and more. Her appreciation for unity around common values stems from her Bangladeshi heritage.

She’s traveled extensively, thanks to her mother’s career as a pediatrician and a former director of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health. “I spent half my life in airports and hotels,” she says. “I went on my first flight when I was 5. It was very normal for me to be dragged out of school to go to the next country.”

Her exposure to many cultures inspired her work with UNICEF. She is the president of UNICEF at Syracuse University and serves on the Campus National Council of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, representing the New York and New England regions. UNICEF at Syracuse presents two major events each year: the Snowflake Ball and Water Week. Each event seeks to educate, advocate and raise funds to alleve difficult situations in which millions of children live around the world.

“As a social justice activist, I have had the opportunity to explore various nonprofit platforms and how they stand on their values and embrace broad goals of making an impact on their communities,” she explains. “These goals must extend to the corporate world, and that’s why I was interested in working with Disney.”

For her first two years at Syracuse, Hossen was undecided about her major, considering broadcast, nutrition, public health, English and engineering. “I don’t recommend everyone follow that path, but it worked for me,” she says. “I’ve been more driven by the experiences outside the classroom.” She finally settled on a political science major.

Tulipe Hosenn

Outside experiences include an internship this semester at U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer’s Syracuse office. She also tutors for Say Yes to Education; volunteers occasionally at Citrus TV and Z89 radio; and serves as a peer educator with , an alcohol awareness campaign. She’ll spend the fall semester with , where she’ll study and hold an internship.

She’s looking forward to connecting her interests in this summer’s internship at Disney ABC Television Group. “Just like when I applied to Syracuse, I had to research it to see what their values are,” she says. “I found that Disney is world renowned for its corporate citizenship.”

She agrees that Disney’s traditional princesses represent stereotypical female roles. But she’s encouraged that newer Disney stories reflect more diverse characters and experiences. “Disney is en route to embracing the power of diversity and inclusion, and female empowerment has embraced change,” she says. “I wouldn’t even apply to work in a company that wouldn’t represent the values that I personally believe in or values that impact me as a Millennial.”

Marcia McNutt

, a world-renowned geophysicist who is editor-in-chief of the nation’s most prominent scientific journal, Science (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science), will deliver the annual Geoffrey O. Seltzer Lecture & Norma Slepecky Lecture on Friday, April 15, at 1 p.m. in the Life Sciences Complex auditorium (Room 001).

Titled “Climate Intervention: Promise and Peril,” the lecture will be accompanied by the Norma Slepecky Research Prize Award Ceremony, recognizing the research and creative accomplishments of students in the sciences, mathematics, engineering and related disciplines.

Free and open to the public, the program concludes with a brief reception. For more information, contact Sharon Alestalo (WiSE) at 315-443-3419 or Sarah Hill (Department of Earth Sciences) at 315-443-2672.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Earth Sciences; WiSE, with special assistance from Shobha Bhatia, program co-director and the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence in the ; the Norma Slepecky Endowment and the Geoffrey O. Seltzer Lectures Fund.

Professor Cathryn Newton, host of McNutt’s visit, underscores this historic opportunity for members of the University community to hear a leading expert speak on an issue of historic and global significance: “Marcia McNutt has a sterling record as a prominent scientist with a lifelong interest in questions critical to society. This is a remarkable chance to hear her perspectives on this crucial issue, with the power to shape and reshape our world.”

Cathryn Newton

Newton, who also serves as the University’s only professor of interdisciplinary sciences and a Provost’s Faculty Fellow, notes the aptness of the timing of McNutt’s visit. The lecture comes only days before the United Nations’ April 22nd initiation of the signing ceremony of the Paris Agreement, which 120 nations are expected to support.

Pundits are hopeful that the Paris Agreement will increase the chances of nations rising to the challenge of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Some scientists question, however, whether or not emissions may be curbed quickly enough to prevent unacceptable consequences from climate change, beyond what humankind and the ecosystems can tolerate. Hence, the growing interest in climate interventions, such as carbon dioxide removal and albedo modification (i.e., spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet).

“Marcia McNutt’s strong research profile and influence across the sciences makes her a tremendous role model for the young women in STEM fields being celebrated by the Slepecky Award,” says Linda Ivany, professor of Earth sciences and organizer of the Slepecky lecture and prize program. “The subject she has chosen to take on for her lecture is far-reaching, and goes to the core of the values embodied by Geoff Seltzer’s career.”

McNutt has achieved impressive success in a male-dominated profession. In addition to being Science’s first female editor-in-chief, she becomes the first woman to lead the academy, effective July 1.

The academy is a private, nongovernmental institution, composed of a highly selective, elected society of scholars that advises the nation on issues pertaining to science and technology.

An expert in marine geophysics, McNutt uses a variety of remote sensing techniques from ships and space to probe the dynamics of the mantle and overlying plates far from tectonic plate boundaries. McNutt also is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, and has made important contributions to the study of the rheology and strength of the lithosphere.

In addition to chairing two committees at the academy on climate interventions, McNutt has held various faculty positions at MIT and Stanford University; served as president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, where she established an underwater autonomous vehicle center and the first deep-sea cabled observatory; and directed the U.S. Geological Survey, where she led the response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“This is someone of great courage and intellect,” Newton says of McNutt.

McNutt is a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America and the International Association of Geodesy.

Newton applauds McNutt for using her voice as an editor to challenge gender bias in letters of reference and discrimination in peer reviews. “This is someone of great courage and intellect,” says Newton, adding that McNutt also is committed to mentoring young scientists. “The same courage and derring-do that took her into the ocean and took her to intervene in the BP disaster has led her to take stands on gender discrimination and to weigh in on policies of science.”

The Norma Slepecky Research Prize is awarded each year by members of the WiSE community. Slepecky was a distinguished ECS scholar and mentor in the sensory sciences who died in 2001.

The Geoffrey O. Seltzer Lecture annually brings eminent speakers to campus. The series celebrates the life and career of Seltzer, a brilliant Quaternary scientist who died in 2004.

Professor James W. Watts in the baroque library of Admont monastery in Austria.

A fellowship funded by Germany’s Ministry for Education and Research has allowed religion professor to apply his work on the Syracuse University-based to a broader study of the interaction of religion and the senses.

Watts is completing a year as a visiting fellow at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. He is part of an international research group at the .

Watts, an expert in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern textual traditions and former chair of Syracuse’s Department of Religion, founded the Iconic Books Project in 2001. The project catalogs and describes the symbolic or “iconic” uses of books and other texts. The idea, Watts explains, is that books themselves are considered valuable separate from the words and ideas they contain.

Examples include a Catholic priest kissing the Gospel, or, in the Jewish tradition, rules that govern how to handle the Torah. Secular examples include the respect afforded Shakespeare’s folios or the U.S. Constitution.

“Nobody has thought much about the iconic use of books,” Watts says. “It’s a whole new realm not just of religious studies but of the humanities. The value of books comes not just from what books say and their meaning on the page, but their ritual uses as physical objects.”

Watts will host “Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Tasting Sacred Texts,” on April 7 and 8. The international symposium he organized will feature scholars from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Korea and the United States. Watts will present “Scripture’s Iconic Touch” at the symposium.

Watts has been surprised at the prevalence and consistency of ritual uses of books across traditions and time periods. Art from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for example, depicts people displaying scrolls the same way a rabbi holds up the Torah—as a demonstration of the book’s importance.

After the CERES symposium, Watts will edit and publish the papers as a collection. His research also is informing his book in progress, “Understanding the Pentateuch as a Scripture.” (The Pentateuch consists of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.)

In addition to the history of biblical interpretation, his book will also cite ritual and performative uses to explain how the Torah and Bible became important to Judaism and Christianity. “It turns out that seeing, hearing and touching the books in rituals has played a large role in establishing and maintaining scripture’s influence,” he explains.

Watts late last year presented research papers on iconic books and texts and on performing and translating scriptures. He will also lecture April 22 at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; May 12 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland; and May 26 at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, before returning to Syracuse to teach in the fall.

Deyara Morris

Like many students, Deyara Tabu Morris ’16 hit a few bumps during the transition from her hometown of Baltimore, Md., to life at Syracuse University. As graduation approaches, though, she’s sad to be leaving the place she’s come to consider home. “I am so glad that I came to Syracuse,” says Morris, a student who is graduating magna cum laude with a double major in mathematics and art, along with a minor in African American Studies. After graduation, she’s returning to Baltimore to teach secondary mathematics (grades 7 to 12) through . As part of the two-year program, she will also pursue a master’s degree in secondary education at Johns Hopkins University.

Tell us a little bit about life before Syracuse University.

I was very busy in high school. I was in as many clubs and organizations as they would allow me in, including the varsity cheerleading team. Every summer I volunteered at Towson University’s Summer Art Camp at the Community Art Center. That’s where I decided that I wanted to work with children. I was also a diligent student who worked very hard to get to college. I knew that getting an education was the most important thing for me to accomplish to help my mother and me improve our lives.

Why did you choose Syracuse University?

I really wanted a university where I could be a mathematics major while also being able to pursue my passion in art. Syracuse offered the freedom to do so. SU also offered me a good financial aid package that made it possible for me to attend.

What’s your favorite thing about attending Syracuse University?

(OMA). It’s really my home away from home. Every single person who works in that office has looked out for me as if I was family. They helped me transition into the university and stayed by my side during the rough times. I will miss OMA and its staff the most.

Is there a member of the faculty that has had a significant influence on your academic trajectory?

, of OMA, and , associate professor and interim chair of the African American Studies Department, have both been there for me since the first day they met me. Professor Bryant is always looking out for opportunities I would be interested in and takes the time to hear me out and keep me on track academically. Since Marissa was assigned my staff mentor through the my sophomore year, she has been my rock. She has pushed me to keep going when I wanted to give up, and she has always encouraged me to reach my full potential.

What’s the best way to spend free time as a SU student?

Truth be told, I don’t have much free time. Between work, classes, and various organizations, I do not have that much down time. However, on the rare occasions I do have some time I like to get some extra sleep or catch up on all the shows I missed out on during the week, or maybe attend an event thrown by OMA or one of the fraternities.

In what extracurricular activities are you currently participating?

I’m a peer mentor to incoming freshmen in the fullCIRCLE Mentoring Program and I serve on the .

Are you involved in any research projects or volunteer work?

I am interning at Southwest Community Center as the group leader of Intelligent Young Minds, an after-school group for children ages 11 to 13. During the summer, I was camp coordinator for the center’s six-week program.

How is Syracuse University helping you to achieve your goals and aspirations?

One way SU helps me achieve my goals and aspirations is by having so many academic opportunities available. The College of Arts and Sciences allowed me to spread my wings and explore all of the parts of myself without trying to pigeonhole me.

What are some of the activities you like around Central New York that aren’t Syracuse University affiliated?

I like to attend shows put on by The Redhouse. I recently saw “Dreamgirls,” and it was spectacular. I also like going to Destiny USA because it literally has anything you would ever want or need to do in one place.

Where is your favorite place to study or do homework on campus?

Other than my room, my favorite spot is Carnegie Library. As a mathematics major, I spend a lot of time in that library already, so it is a good place to get homework done between classes. It is also very quiet; people seem to overlook it and go to Bird Library instead.

Christen Brandt

Christen Brandt ’10 counts Maheshwari as a success story for She’s the First. The young woman grew up in rural India, a member of the Dalit—the “untouchable” caste. She lived in a country where only 20 percent of women can read and write, and she appeared destined to early marriage, motherhood and a lifetime of exhausting chores.

Instead, in 2012 Maheshwari became the first in her family to graduate from high school. She attended Shanti Bhavan boarding school, a partner of She’s the First (STF), the nonprofit Brandt co-founded in 2009. Maheshwari, , earned a college degree in biotechnology and genetics; now she’s in graduate school.

In a stark departure from India’s culture of arranged marriages and deference to males, Maheshwari’s brother rallied the community to raise money so she could attend graduate school. “That’s pretty remarkable,” Brandt notes. “He saw the obstacles she faced and was willing to put his earnings on the line for her education. It’s really validation that what we’re doing is working.”

Brandt, a dual major in English in the and magazine journalism in the , serves as chief programming officer for STF, traveling overseas several times a year to visit international partners and create sponsorships. She belonged to , which began at Syracuse University.

STF encourages girls and women to raise money to provide scholarships for girls in low-income countries. The goal is that education will open doors for first-generation high school graduates.  STF has 194 chapters at high schools and colleges.

Last year, STF passed a major financial milestone, raising $1 million. In its six-year history, STF has helped 712 scholars in 11 nations obtain 1,779 years of education. The organization’s goal is to provide 10,000 years of education to girls around the world by 2020. “I have every intention of meeting that,” Brandt says.

STF’s work, which includes an aggressive social media campaign, filmmaking and mentoring, caught the attention of the online nonprofit  . The organization named Brandt and STF’s co-founder Tammy Tibbetts among its . They will be honored as “powerhouses who prepare teens for the next level” at a May 6 dinner in New York.

Christen Brandt, second from right, with She’s the First Scholars in Tanzania. The organization’s co-founder, Tammy Tibbetts, is second from left.

“Education is the starting block for girls,” says Brandt, who was raised by a single mother. “Without scholarships, I never would have been in college. The importance of education just rings really true to me.”

Brandt previously worked for Glamour and Parents magazines. She won a 2010 Chancellor’s Citation for her work on STF. She was recently named to the , an alumni group that mentors undergraduates.

Brandt, who recently returned from three weeks in Africa, finds the girls’ stories inspirational. “When you offer someone a scholarship, you are offering them an opportunity, but you’re also asking a lot of them,” she explains. “You’re asking them to change and bear the brunt of what it means to be the first. They’re incredibly strong to do so.”

Rembrandt, “Self Portrait Drawing at a Window” (1648)

“I learned how building an exhibition works, framing and spacing the display and deciding whether to organize by theme or chronologically,” she says. “There are all these things you don’t think about when you go to an exhibit. There’s a lot of work that goes into it to make it flow.”

The exhibition features roughly 30 works on paper from the and a private collection. It includes etchings, engravings and drawings by Northern Baroque masters including Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan van de Velde II and others.

Garcia and Olivia Pek ’15 G ’17 researched the selected artwork and artist biographies and wrote some of the exhibition’s didactic labels, which provide context for the artists and their work.

Most people are more familiar with the paintings of17th-century masters, Franits notes. But printmaking was “a booming field in those days,” he says. “Many of these artists’ names are not household names, but they were famous in their own day,” he adds.

On display are six Rembrandt etchings that the University owns. Franits describes etching as “a complex process that included copper plates and needles and wax.” Rembrandt, he adds, “was a master of this, as he was of everything.”

“Self Portrait Drawing at a Window” (1648) is “sort of a mid-career selfie,” Franits says. “Rembrandt experimented a lot with the copper plates to get different lighting effects.” Sheet of “Studies with a Woman Lying Ill in Bed” (c1641-1642) show Rembrandt using copper plates as a sketch pad, showing several vignettes. Pictured is Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia, who died several months after giving birth to their only surviving child.

Rembrandt shows a more whimsical side with two small etchings. Side by side in one frame are two pieces from 1634: “A Peasant Calling Out: ‘Tis Vinnich Kout’ (‘It’s bitterly cold’)” and “A Peasant Replying: ‘Das Niet’ (That’s nothing).” “They’re meant for the wealthy, leisure class, who appreciated caricatures of peasants as ragged and stupid,” Franits says.

A highlight of the graduate seminar was the chance for students to see in person the artwork they were studying. “While we teach art from a broad context, we still think it’s important for students to work with real objects rather than jpegs on a PowerPoint,” he says. “It allows students to understand these artworks as actual objects.”

Garcia enjoyed that aspect of the project. “We were able to look at them with a magnifying glass and see the details and see how ornate they are,” she says. “Most are very small. But it’s incredible how much detail is in a tiny 5×7 drawing.”

She hopes the exhibition inspires viewers to learn more about 17th-century Dutch art. “These sketches and drawing are a good starting point,” she says. “It’s a good representation of the historical period.”

The SUArt Galleries will host a gallery reception, with Franits and the student curators in attendance, 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 18. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-4:30 p.m., and Thursdays 11a.m.-8 p.m.

Eddie Gulino

Eddie Gulino ’16 grew up in Windham, a small, rural ski town in the Catskill region of New York. How small is Windham? About 1,700 people live there. Gulino attended the same school, from kindergarten to 12th grade, and had 39 people in his graduating class. That’s approximately a quarter of one percent of Syracuse University’s full-time undergraduate enrollment. Small-town living has taught Eddie the importance of personal interaction, mutual respect and strong civic involvement.

Although he loved his bucolic upbringing, Eddie knew he wanted to go away to college, preferably to a mid-sized university. At Syracuse, he is a double major in economics and international relations, taking classes in the and the . Although he graduates in May, Gulino already has a job lined up in Ernst and Young’s Business Advisor Program. He hopes to parlay his small-town roots and urban college experience into a lifetime of business and public service.

Why did you choose Syracuse University?
Syracuse affords me a nationally recognized name with a mid-sized campus feel. It’s the dream campus. It’s allowed me to specialize, while giving me room to explore new academic paths.

What do you like most about it?  
The people. The students I’ve met come from familiar backgrounds and worldly settings. They’re supportive, outgoing and extremely proud to be Orange. You instantly feel a connection with anyone from the University.

Is there someone here who has influenced you? 
From my coffee-side chats with professors to everyone in [in A&S] who have helped me identify my post-graduate goals, I can truly say that I’ve benefited from the mentoring of many different people.

Syracuse helped me land a 10-week internship with JPMorgan Chase & Company. During my semester abroad in Madrid, I was able to use the Spanish I had learned [on campus] to study the structure of the European Union’s political and economic partnership.

Sue Casson, director of Career Development and Services in A&S, encouraged me, and helped me realize that I had a lot of potential. I just needed to tweak a few things to hone my skills to the fullest.

Also, I wouldn’t have come to Syracuse, if it weren’t for the annual . I placed first in it, and, as a result, was awarded a four-year academic scholarship.

How do you spend your free time?
There’s nothing like hanging out on Marshall Street on game day. I grew up in a family that embraces the game-day culture, and there’s no lack of it at Syracuse. Getting a slice of pizza before a big game and then walking to the Carrier Dome with a group of friends is a great way to spend an afternoon.

Extracurricular activities?
I belong to a community-outreach group that aims to economically unite the City of Syracuse with student consumers on campus. I’ve also belonged to Phi Kappa Psi since my sophomore year.

What else do you do?
I am completing my international relations capstone research project. This 25-page thesis analyzes a topic within my focus of global trade and international markets.

I also like to go to cultural festivals and “eats” around town. Going downtown to the Irish or Italian festival, or having dinner at a local establishment is a lot of fun.

Where do you study?
The Panasci Lounge in the Schine Student Center. It has a real “lounge” feel to it, with a lot of electrical outlets and a ton of comfy couches. Did I mention there’s a gas fireplace and a Dunkin’ Donuts right below it?

How is the University helping you achieve your goals?
It’s exposing me to a diverse community, giving me opportunities, academically and socially, to interact with individuals who challenge my views. It also is shaping my perspective of things, through my involvement with the to New York City and my semester in Madrid. Syracuse has changed my outlook on both the job market and the global community.

Dympna Callaghan

The last 20 years have seen an “explosion of textual, literary and historical scholarship” on the Bard of Avon, says Callaghan, who is based in the Department of English. “A lot of it is just really digging and sustained research,” she explains. “We know vastly more about the context in which he wrote. We know more about London as a city and the theaters and how he worked.”

Callaghan has two books about Shakespeare coming out this semester. One just out is (Bloomsbury, 2016), which she has co-edited with Suzanne Gossett. The book is a project of the Shakespeare Association of America, which Callaghan presided over from 2012-2013. The publisher calls the essay collection a “‘state of the nation’ look at Shakespeare criticism” and a “stimulating exploration of where Shakespeare studies will go next.”

Due out next month is a new edition of “A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), another collection that Callaghan edited. The book’s 10 new essays include one by Amanda Eubanks Winkler, professor of music history and cultures in Arts and Sciences, who writes about Shakespeare’s music. Amy Burnette, a graduate student in English, writes about “The Winter’s Tale” for the anthology.

The first leg of Callaghan’s leave was a fellowship at the Bogliasco Centre for Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy. She spent a month at the Liguria Study Center on the Italian Riviera, working with religious historian Lori Anne Ferrell on a project examining Shakespeare and religion.

“This is a big and important topic,” Callaghan says. “Scholars have been reticent to claim Shakespeare’s treatment of religion as relevant in any substantive way to the present.” She points out that “Shakespeare wrote about the major belief systems of his day—Islam and Judaism and, most obviously, Christianity, the European faith so badly fractured by the advent of the Reformation.”

Callaghan and her co-author set out to make a bold claim. “We may never know Shakespeare’s own religious temperament,” Callaghan says. “We can discern, however, the specter of sectarianism that underwrites Shakespeare’s plots. [Polish political activist] Jan Kott once famously claimed that, in violent, incomprehensible and arbitrary times, Shakespeare is our contemporary. Yet too few scholars dare to make and sustain this claim today—on behalf of literature, on behalf of the humanities, on behalf of Shakespeare.”

In the next stop on Callaghan’s leave, she served as a visiting professor at Claremont Graduate University, and pursued research at San Marino’s Huntington Library, which holds early editions of Shakespeare’s works. Callaghan’s book “Hamlet: Language and Writing” (Bloomsbury, 2015) was published last spring. While at the Huntington, she gave several lectures, including “Murder Most Foul: What Makes Hamlet Great.” At the California Shakespeare Festival, she delivered a keynote address about freedom of speech in Shakespeare’s England.

Callaghan concluded her travel with a visit to Australia, where she gave a presentation at the University of Melbourne, and was the Lloyd Davis Memorial Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland. There, she taught a graduate seminar on the relationship between poetry throughout history and political and personal freedom. She also delivered the 10th anniversary memorial public lecture for Davis, an expert in the verse, drama and prose of the English Renaissance, who died in 2005.

Callaghan’s whirlwind career reflects the eternal interest in Shakespeare, she says. The question that spurs her work is “How is it that a world before democracy, before freedom of speech, before freedom of religion produced the greatest writer that ever lived?”

Scholars and theater-lovers remain interested in Shakespeare because of universal ideas he wrote about and the language in which he expressed them, she explains. Amid social, religious and political turmoil during England’s Reformation, Shakespeare “found a place for discourse in theater,” she says. “For example, Montague is the name of a prominent Catholic family in Elizabethan England,” she notes, referring to “Romeo and Juliet.” “The most obvious feud in that time was religion,” she says, “and the play raises questions about arranged marriages, sexual choice, identity—topics in the news today. A 2012 Iraqi production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as Sunni vs. Shiite, for example, shows the deep animosity people harbor on the grounds of race and religion. We can still learn from that.”

“Othello”’s focus on racism reminds us that “you can’t read what’s in someone’s heart,” she says. “People who are different from you are either hated or desired.” With so much discord in the world, “That’s where we should address our controversies—in art, not on the battlefield,” she says.

In addition to her scholarship, Callaghan is working on the strategic plan for Arts and Sciences. She served as interim director of the Humanities Center, which is administered by Arts and Sciences, from 2013-2014. A highlight of her fall semester was introducing Stephen Greenblatt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary scholar, at the Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series in Syracuse. Greenblatt, a Harvard University professor who contributed an essay to “Shakespeare in Our Time,” spoke to her class about “Twelfth Night.”

In 2019-20, Callaghan will return to the Huntington Library, where she has been awarded the Fletcher-Jones Distinguished Fellowship, an endowed position that honors a leading specialist in history or literature.

In the meantime, Callaghan is working on a book on Shakespeare’s poetry and the form of his verse, and is finishing up a new edition of “Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts” (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), due out this spring. She’s also working with Carol Faulkner, professor of history in the , on a project about the reception of Edwin Booth’s “Hamlet” during the Civil War. Booth’s acclaimed performance as Shakespeare’s Danish prince coincided with his brother John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

“Shakespeare is so unique in his expression of ideas,” Callaghan says. “There’s still so much to learn.”

Thomas Fox

Titled “Pope Francis and the New Reformation,” the event will take place on Monday, Oct. 5, at 7 p.m. in Maxwell Auditorium. It is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the in the at 315-443-3863.

The lecture is made possible by the Borgognoni Fund, held in the religion department.

Fox will offer a personal assessment of contemporary Catholicism, both in light of the dynamic Francis papacy and a rapidly changing world. Although a Francis supporter, he questions if the pope has the strength—or time—to make the changes required for Catholicism to unleash the fullness of its gospel and sacramental missions.

“Tom Fox is unquestionably one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable commentators on the church in the modern world, and I look forward to his honesty and insight,” says , chair of the Borgognoni Fund’s faculty steering committee. Thompson is based in the , where she serves as associate professor of history and political science and as a senior research scholar of the .

Under Fox’s leadership, NCR, in 1985, became the first news outlet to publish an investigation of clergy sex abuse and link the case to a systemic pattern of cover-ups by bishops. Despite criticism from readers and church leaders, the Missouri-based NCR continued to cover the issue aggressively. Secular news outlets and diocesan newspapers (the latter of which are overseen by bishops) largely ignored the scandal, until the Boston Globe’s groundbreaking coverage in January 2002 of the Archdiocese of Boston.

Fox is the author of four books, including “Sexuality and Catholicism” (George Braziller Inc., 2000), and is co-founder and director of Global Sisters Report, a sister website to NCR, specializing in the coverage of women religious around the world.

Now in its fourth year, the Borgognoni Lecture is made possible by the late Monsignor Charles L. Borgognoni (a.k.a. Father Charles), longtime Roman Catholic chaplain of the St. Thomas More Campus Ministry. Before his death in 2007, Borgognoni established a fund in memory of his parents, Joseph and Amelia, to promote the study of Catholic theology and religion in society at Syracuse.

The Borgognoni Fund also relies on the generosity of friends and alumni, including Judith Pistaki Zelisko ’72, a member of the College of Arts and Sciences’ board of visitors, and Charles Borgognoni ’76, nephew of Father Charles, both of whom spearheaded fundraising efforts.

For more information about the Borgognoni Fund or to contribute, contact Karen Weiss Jones at 315-443-2028 or kmweissj@syr.edu.

Ishion Hutchinson

On Wednesday, April 22, the award-winning poet will participate in an audience Q&A session at 3:45 p.m., followed by a reading of his own work at 5:30 p.m., in Gifford Auditorium. Events are free and open to the public.

The Carver Series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing, in conjunction with the English department’s “Living Writers” course, ETS 107. For more information, call 315-443-2174.

Hutchinson is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and editor of .

He is perhaps best known for his collection “Far District: Poems” (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. The book—and his poetry, in general—has been praised for its “genuine insight” and “gorgeously textured language … [that] stretches over far-reaching narratives of landscape and culture.”

The idea of territory is central to the Jamaican-born poet. “The word ‘district’ is always a rural location for a Jamaican and can carry pejorative overtones,” he has been quoted as saying. “So a ‘far district’ is even deeper in the country, deeper away from the polis, where thoughts are shaped and officiated.”

Hutchinson is also the recipient of the Whiting Award and Larry Levis Reading Prize. His work has appeared in publications all over the world, including The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Review, Granata, Ploughshares and Poetry International.

The Carver Series is named for the great short-story writer and poet who taught at Syracuse in the 1980s.

Members of the Syracuse Chorale portray the Hutchinson Family Singers at a January event at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center in Fayetteville. The ensemble will perform at the April 19 concert at Hendricks Chapel.

The Syracuse Chorale presents “A Lincoln Legacy” Sunday, April 19, at 4 p.m. at Hendricks Chapel. The concert marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and Central New York’s role in the abolition and suffrage movements during the Civil War era.

Advance tickets are $12. Tickets at the door are $15; children under 12 admitted free. Parking is available in the Q1 lot and other open lots on campus.

The concert will include performances of the “Lincoln Funeral March” by William Wolsieffer; “Lincoln and Liberty” by William Burleigh, “Dirge for Two Veterans,” by Ralph Vaughn Williams with words by Walt Whitman; and two arrangements of “Battle Hymn of the Republic. The chorale is directed by Warren Ottey and accompanied by Bill Verity.

Members of the Syracuse Chorale will wear period dress, and an ensemble will portray the Hutchinson Family Singers, a popular 19th-century group that sang about abolition and suffrage. Syracuse media personality George Kilpatrick will narrate the event, which will include a script with numerous mentions of local places, events and people. Audience members are encouraged to wear period dress.

Members of the U.S. 12th Regiment, Company A, Civil War re-enactors, will set up an encampment near Hendricks Chapel, and several re-enactors will participate in the performance. A collection of Lincoln memorabilia will be on display at Hendricks.

The concert is the culmination of the chorale’s 2014-2015 theme, focusing on Abraham Lincoln’s connection to Central New York. Lincoln died April 15, 1865, a day after John Wilkes Booth shot him. Lincoln’s funeral train stopped briefly in Syracuse on April 26, 1865.

This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.

Syracuse Chorale was formed in 1953, and the choir rehearses Tuesday nights at First United Church of East Syracuse. For more information, see www.syracusechorale.org.

Ron Padgett (Photo by John Sarsgard)

The Carver Series is presented by the M.F.A. program in creative writing, in conjunction with the English department’s “Living Writers” (ETS 107) course. For more information, call 315-443-2174.

The University’s Richard Elman Visiting Writer, Padgett is the author of “Collected Poems” (Coffee House Press, 2013), which won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Poetry Society of America (PSA)’s William Carlos Williams Prize. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his previous collection, “How Long” (Coffee House Press, 2011).

Padgett’s other honors include the 2015 Robert Creeley Award (which he received recently), the PSA’s Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and grant awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets whose work has been translated into 18 languages.

“Ron Padgett loves life so much, he finds the stuff of poetry everywhere,” says Thomas Lux, the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Jr. Chair of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “His most serious poems are playful, and his most playful poems are serious. He’s mischievous!”

Adds Charles Simic, co-editor of The Paris Review: “Reading Padgett, one realizes that playfulness and lightness of touch are not at odds with seriousness. … As is often the case, leave it to the comic writer to best convey our tragic predicament.”

Padgett’s publishing career began as a teenager, when he collaborated with poet Ted Berrigan to create the avant-garde journal The White Dove Review. The publication ran for only five issues but featured works by luminaries such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

During the mid-1960s, Padgett fell in with the heady Downtown New York literary crowd. He eventually became associated with the second generation of New York School poets, whose works were largely informed by Abstract Expressionism. Padgett became known for not only his humor and collaborative spirit, but also his ironic, urban sensibility. Not one for labels, he has since downplayed his New York School involvement, calling it “stuff only critics and professors, rather than poets, care about.”

Padgett is the author of more than 20 collections of poetry and is an accomplished prose writer, translator and teacher.

James Tate, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says Padgett’s poems “sing with absolutely true pitch.”

“They are human-friendly,” he adds. “Their search for truths, both small and large, can be cause for laughter or at least a thoughtful sigh.”

The Carver Series is named for the great short-story writer and poet who taught at Syracuse in the 1980s. The final reader of this semester’s series is poet and essayist Ishion Hutchinson (April 22).