Echoes fromTerezín

FeministEconomics

No PlaceLike Om

CalculatedCollaboration

Deciphering Virginia Woolf

www.american.edu/cas/connections | sPrinG 2010

Some of our greateSt diScoverieS result from looking at familiar things from new angles. In this issue of Connections, we highlight faculty, alumni, and students whose unique points of view led them to unexpected findings, poignant projects, and outstanding achievements.

Sometimes all it takes is time to cultivate a new perspective on previous work. Literature professor Roberta Rubenstein and historian in residence Melvin Urofsky both revisited subjects they had worked on at the start of their careers, developing new insights that led to acclaimed books. The Program on Gender Analysis in Economics recently honored Barbara Bergmann, professor emerita and feminist economics champion, in an inaugural event that brought the field’s strongest voices together to examine its evolution and formulate goals for its future. And art professor Don Kimes let a devastating house flood inspire him to revisit 25 years of his sketches and works on paper.

Other times, a unique experience allows us to see our surroundings, our interests, and our goals through a different lens. Anthropology PhD student Kalfani Ture’s on site research and volunteerism in the Barry Farms community in Southeast D.C. opened his eyes to the civic component of anthropological study. Performing arts alumna Jennifer Corey’s work as an education outreach apprentice for the Washington National Opera gave her the chance to see music from the point of view of D.C.’s elementary school students. And performing arts professor Gail Humphries Mardirosian used her Fulbright-sponsored trip to Prague as a springboard for launching Voices of Terezín, a series of college-wide reflections on human rights that focuses on life in the Nazi-run ghetto, where many of Czechoslovakia’s eminent artists and scholars were interned before being sent to extermination camps.

The spirit of collaboration often inspires us to look at research problems through the eyes of our colleagues, coworkers, peers, and students. Math professors Jeffrey Adler, Jeffrey Hakim, and Joshua Lansky recently won a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to facilitate their work with mathematicians across the country and around the world. History professor Alan Kraut and language and foreign studies professor Jack Child were recently named University Professors in recognition of their exceptional interdisciplinary research and teaching. Psychology professor David Haaga’s project with the Maharishi University of Management led to a study of Transcendental Meditation and stress reduction that garnered attention from many major national news outlets. And the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Fund was created to help promote socially conscious analysis of teaching materials in the classroom.

We are pleased to share these stories of discovery with you and invite you to share yours with us.

Happy reading,

Letter fromthe Dean

On the Cover Lilly Edna Amit (Bobasch) // Candle,Boat, and Warning Lights //1940s—created at Terezín during WWII

Magazine ProductionPublisher: College of Arts and Sciences // Dean: Peter Starr Managing Editor: Jessica Tabak // Writers: Anne Lacy, Ariana Stone, Jessica Tabak, Mike Unger // Editor: Ali Kahn, UP Designer: Juana Merlo, UP // Editorial Assistants: Heather Kinsman, David Lewis // Webmaster: Thomas Meal Senior Advisor: Mary Schellinger // Send news items and comments to Jessica Tabak at casnews@american.edu.

Peter StarrDean, College of Arts and Sciences

Letter from the Dean

Joining the RanksUniversity Professorships for Jack Child and Alan Kraut

Evolution of a RevolutionHow Barbara Bergmann brought gender perspectives to economics at AU

A Calculated CollaborationJeff Adler, Jeff Hakim, and Joshua Lansky getting a little help from their friends

Endowment for the AgesMaking the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Library an enduring legacy

Academia Meets ActivismAnthropologist Kalfani Ture’s journey from field to Barry Farm

Deciphering Virginia WoolfRoberta Rubenstein’s return to her scholarly roots

Echoes from TerezínRestoring humanity to Holocaust victims through the arts

After the FloodHow Don Kimes transformed personal tragedy into artistic inspiration

Opera out of the BoxJennifer Corey’s education outreach for Washington National Opera

Being BrandeisMelvin Urofsky’s examination of the life of Justice Louis Brandeis

No Place Like OmDavid Haaga’s findings on depression, anxiety, and Transcendental Meditation

Achievements

www.american.edu/cas/connections | april 2010

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LAsT FALL, TWO MeMBeRs of the College of Arts and Sciences faculty were named University Professor. Only a handful of AU faculty have held this highly selective rank in recognition of exempla-ry cross-school teaching and research.

Jack Child, professor of language and foreign studies, and history professor Alan Kraut are affiliate faculty members in the School of International Service, where, respec-tively, they teach courses on Latin American culture and on immigration.

“The University Profes-sorship stresses the idea that we are not tied down to one discipline,” says Child. It also brings an added responsibility to foster interdisciplinarity

across campus, says Kraut. “Being named a University Professor carries with it an obliga-tion to be a presence on campus, a voice for aca-demic stimulation, and to use whatever means one has to create intellectual excitement,” he says.

Last year, Child published his 13th book, Miniature Messages: The Semiotics and Politics of Latin American Postage Stamps (Duke).

His most recent project is an exploration of the evolution of Peruvian ratablos—tiny, diorama-like altars brought by the Span-ish to the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

“They were on the run, they were fighting, they were conquering, and

they did not have time to be setting up full altars,” Child says. After the Spanish started building permanent churches in the 1600s, the role of the objects evolved, with contemporary ratablos often depicting political and cultural scenes.

Kraut, an expert on American immigration and ethnicity, is currently examining the American-ization of immigrants to the United States.

“Every time our country has had a big wave of immigration, it raises the question of how people become inte-grated into American society,” he explains. “How do they go from aliens to Americans—not just in a legal sense, but in a social sense?”

In addition, Kraut is working with a university-wide team to design an undergraduate cur-riculum for the cross-disciplinary public health program in development. He also serves on an advisory board for the Frederick Douglass Scholarship Program, a university initiative that will provide support and internship opportunities

for minority and first-generation students.

Patricia Aufderheide of the School of Commu-nication was also named a University Professor. An affiliate faculty member in the history department, she teaches History of Documentary, and her Center for Social Media engages faculty members from across the College of Arts and Sciences.

Joining the Ranks

by Jessica Tabak{

Sam

antha Saleh

Courtesy of Jack C

hild

social sciences

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WHeN THe DePARTMeNT

of Economics began planning an inaugural event for its Program on Gender Analysis in Economics (PGAE), Bar-bara Bergmann’s name kept coming up. Given the role that the emerita professor played in the department’s adoption of feminist economics, this was no surprise. “In the end, it was really Barbara who brought these gender issues to the department,” says Caren Grown, scholar in residence and PGAE cofounder.

On February 19, the Department of Econom-ics honored Bergmann’s contribution to feminist economics at AU with a public panel on progress toward gender equity in economics. Panelists included University of Massachusetts–Am-herst professor Nancy Folbre, Cornell professor Francine Blau, and Heidi Hartmann, president of the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

When Bergmann came to AU’s economics de-partment in 1988, femi-nist economics—a field that explores women’s impact in the workforce and on the family, as well as the conflicts between these two spheres—was virtually unexplored.

“It was being taught nowhere,” she recalls. “The outstanding view of the profession was that all the differences between men and women in the labor force—in terms of pay, in terms of posi-tions—were a response to different talents and tastes. There was no problem so there was nothing to complain about.”

Bergmann believed oth-erwise. A self-described feminist who has en-

countered gender-based workforce discrimination since applying for her first job in the late 1940s, she became one of the first scholars to address the unique role of women in the economy. In 1986 she published the seminal Economic Emergence of Women. The book, which examines evidence from labor discrimination cases involving women, is still used in gender econom-ics classes today.

Bergmann’s tenure at AU marked the beginning of the university’s role as a leader in incorporating gender issues into eco-nomics education. Shortly after arriving, she founded the university’s first two courses in gender and economics. And her influence helped bring the first annual meeting of the International Association for Feminist Economics to AU in 1992.

Since then, the demand

for gender analysis of economic issues has increased considerably. Despite this, “there are still very few places that teach it,” says Grown. “We see a huge demand and not many places supplying it.”

Last year, Grown and economics professor Maria Sagrario Floro founded AU’s Program on Gender Analysis in Economics to help meet the growing interest in this field. The PGAE includes a graduate cer-tificate, a track in the MA, and a PhD field on gen-der analysis in econom-ics. All three components require that students complete Gender Per-spectives on Economics Analysis: Microeconom-ics and Macroeconomics, a two-part course derived from Bergmann’s original graduate course.

“Founding the PGAE was the right idea at the right time,” says Grown. “Feminist economics is now 25 years old, and there is a lot of great scholarship from which to create a really rigorous and well-rounded curriculum.”

AU’s location in the nation’s capital will also allow the PGAE to pro-duce graduates well- positioned to obtain jobs in Washington´s high-profile policy agencies.

“At the end of the day, this field’s potential influence on policy is so important,” says Floro. “You really want to help instigate adoption of poli-cies that make a differ-ence for single mothers, health and child care issues, and poverty reme-diation strategies.”

Evolution of a Revolution

by Jessica Tabak

Sonia Frederickson

“ You really want to help instigate adoption of policies that make a difference for single mothers, health and child care issues, and poverty remediation strategies.”

Barbara Bergmann (left)

science

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A Calculated Collaboration

by Jessica Tabak, interview by David Lewis

WHiLe THe eveR-length-ening list of new com-munication technologies makes it easier to bridge distance, sometimes there’s still nothing like good, old-fashioned face-to-face contact. “Despite the usefulness of e-mail and the telephone and Skype, it’s actually very helpful to work in the same room with your research colleagues,” says Jeff Adler, profes- sor of mathematics and statistics.

Adler should know. For many years, he, Jeff Ha-kim, and Josh Lansky, all colleagues in the Depart-

ment of Mathematics and Statistics, have collaborated with fellow mathematicians at aca-demic institutions across the country and around the world.

This fall, the global group won a multi-institu-tional grant from the Na-tional Science Foundation that allows Adler, Hakim, and Lansky to meet with their counterparts from such schools as the University of Michigan, Purdue, MIT, the Universi-ty of Toronto, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, India. The participating

institutions were collectively awarded $1.2 million, to be distributed over three years. AU will receive the largest percentage at more than $520,000.

How important is this personal dimension? Hakim offers an analogy: “If I decide I want to play basketball and I find a hoop and start shooting by myself, it probably won’t lead to much. But if I am on a team playing with others, I’ll want to give more of myself to the effort. I’ll be chal-lenged more, and we’ll all accomplish more in the process.”

And, adds Lanksy, with many of their col-laborators being top researchers in their field “it’s like having Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippin and Dennis Rodman on your team.”

The project, Charac-ters, Liftings, and Types: Investigation in p-adic Representation Theory, involves a branch of mathematics that ex-plores the link between geometry and arithmetic by expressing elements of abstract algebraic structures in geometric terms. Representation theory provides, among

other things, a conceptu-al foundation for math-ematical engineering, mathematical physics, physical chemistry, and materials science.

“In school, every-one studies arithmetic and everyone studies geometry, and they come across as two very different things,” Adler says. “[Our research is based on] a series of conjectures going back to the ’60s that say—in a very precise sense that is difficult to describe in elementary terms—these things are really the same deep down.”

“It’s like having Michael

Jordan and Scottie Pippin

and Dennis Rodman on your team.”

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Sam

antha Saleh

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LARissA GeRsTeL,

BA elementary education ’00, exemplified the AU alumna: bright, enterpris-ing, and committed to diversity and service.

As an education can- didate and teacher in training, she emphasized to her students the impor-tance of critical literacy—the ability to recognize and reflect on the social and cultural messages communicated in texts—and she founded AU’s first critical literacy group.

After Gertstel’s untimely death in 2005, her family worked with Bender Library and the School of Education, Teaching, and Health (SETH) to create the La-rissa Gerstel Critical Lit-eracy Collection, located in Bender’s Curriculum Materials Center.

Funded with a $10,000 donation from SETH plus additional donations, the collection features books about multiculturalism and social justice for educa-tion students, as well as for children.

“Larissa [was] an engaging and inspired student,” says SETH dean Sarah Irvine-Bel-son. “When we learned about her passing, we decided we wanted to do something to commemo-rate her life and the lives of teachers.”

To maintain and grow the collection, library

staff—including university librarian Bill Mayer, assis-tant librarian and SETH professor Alex Hodges, and associate director of library development Jennifer McMillan—joined SETH faculty and Ger-stel’s family to establish the Larissa Gerstel Criti-cal Literacy Endowment. Funded exclusively by her parents and extended family, the endowment helps to cover the cost of new books, electronic resources, and events.

“Endowment giving really speaks to some-thing that people want

to support in perpetuity,” says McMillan, noting that endowments es-tablished a decade ago continue to sustain the library’s mission.

“We hope our student teachers can . . . continue to build on the work that she did,” says Hodges. “And we hope her family knows that these commitments are there and [Larissa’s] legacy will live on.”

You can donate to the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Fund through www.american.edu/anewau/giving.

by Ariana StoneEndowment

for the Ages

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“ We hope our student teachers . . . can continue to build on the work that Larissa did.”

Courtesy of S

chool of Education, Teaching, and H

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FOR KALFANi TURe,

research and volunteerism intersect at Barry Farm Public Dwellings, a public housing complex just off the Anacostia Freeway. Since the anthropology doctoral candidate began conducting ethnographic research in the Barry Farm community in 2007, he has also taken on roles as a volunteer member of its resident council.

Ture became involved with Barry Farm while writing a paper on the site’s archaeological significance. The land, once part of a plantation, was purchased shortly after the Civil War by the Freedman’s Bureau. The federal agency parceled out one-acre plots to ex-slaves and free blacks.

“Social forces from then on have pushed the majority of low-income African Americans to the southeast quadrant, where Barry Farm is located,” says Ture.

These findings inter-ested him both as an an-thropologist and a social activist, and they inspired him to write his doctoral dissertation on the Barry Farm community.

As a recent presi-dent of AU’s Graduate Leadership Council, Ture organized two academic conferences for graduate students that facilitated communication between students and residents of Barry Farm and similar local communities.

“My goal was for graduate students to realize that Washington is a living laboratory with real social justice issues,” says Ture. “Student involvement in the wider community makes sense because theoretical learning is best confirmed through practice.”

Ture’s commitment to social justice stems from his childhood. Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, in the wake

of the 1967 riots, Ture remembers listening to his parents theorize about the role that discrimina-tory treatment of African Americans may have had in causing the riots.

“[The stories] were about absence of appreci-ation for human life, about the thousands of lives affected by racism and oppression in devastating ways,” Ture recalls.

He sees similarities between pre-riot Newark and present-day Barry Farm, and he believes the social activism taking place there is helping to avoid similar unrest.

Ture served as a police officer in the Atlanta metropolitan area prior to pursuing his doctorate in anthropology.

“I worked in at-risk spaces with the hopes

of resolving community homicides and violence among African American adolescent males,” he says. “The experience helped me realize that at-risk children are not born that way, but created by social policies, commu-nity and infrastructural disinvestment, displace-ment, and the introduc-tion of guns and drugs [into their communities].”

After graduation, Ture intends to stay commit-ted to his own volunteer-ism while impressing upon his students the importance of maintain-ing a strong academic presence in the public service sphere.

“My training in anthro-pology,” he says, “has [made] me realize that so-cial transformations must begin with students.”

Academia Meets Activism

by Anne Lacy

Sam

antha Saleh

humanities

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ROBeRTA RUBeNsTeiN

can’t say what she was thinking. Forty years ago, she wrote to Leonard Woolf to ask for help interpreting pages of handwritten notes on Russian writers by his late wife, Virginia.

“I don’t know what I thought he would do,” the literature professor recalls. “I guess I thought he might say to send him a few pag-es, and he’d see whether he could decipher some of the unreadable words.”

Instead, the 87-year-old Woolf invited the then-PhD student to his home in Sussex, England, which he and his wife had once shared. Over the next year, the two sat at the Woolfs’ kitchen table and pored over the author’s notoriously illegible script. In the process, they became friends.

A Fulbright fellow at the University of London, Rubenstein was re-searching the influence of nineteenth-century Rus-sian writers on Virginia Woolf’s fiction and liter-ary criticism. In the early 1900s, short stories, nov-els, and plays by Chek-hov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev were being translated into English, most of them for the first time. Woolf was among the critics who reviewed them enthusiastically. Her

reading notes and several published essays, says Rubenstein, reveal the extent to which she was affected by them.

“Each of the Russian writers held a different [place] in her imagina-tion,” says Rubenstein. “Their works entered her experience at a vital mo-ment in her own develop-ment when she was try-ing to break free of older literary conventions.”

After finishing her dissertation, Rubenstein accepted a teaching position at AU and began looking for a publisher for her work. No one was interested. “When I told people what my disser-tation was about, they would say, ‘Oh, it’s on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the Edward Albee play?’” she recalls. “In the early 1970s, that was the main way in which Woolf’s name was recognized in the United States.”

It would be another decade before the pub-lication of Woolf’s letters and diaries would make her a popular subject of academic study. By then, Rubenstein had moved on to other scholarly pursuits. “I sort of forgot about the dissertation,” she admits.

Until five years ago. A paper on Woolf’s relation-ship to these writers, she learned, had been

presented at a conference in Russia. It was the spark she needed. “I started looking at my disserta-tion again and I realized how little still had been done with this subject,” she says. “And here were all my transcriptions of Woolf’s notes on Russian writers that had never seen the light of day.” She decided it was time to bring her work forward.

Revisiting her early scholarship brought new

insights into her subject. And a new CD of digital files containing Woolf’s complete works, includ-ing handwritten letters and diaries, allowed Rubenstein to view at her computer what previously had required trips to three libraries on two continents.

This time, Rubenstein had no trouble finding a publisher. Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (Palgrave Macmil-lan) was released in

September 2009 to high praise, including a favor-able review in the Times Literary Supplement last December.

“The dissertation writ-ten so many years ago and the just-published book seem like widely separated bookends for my scholarly career,” says Rubenstein. “Of the sev-eral books I’ve published, this one has undoubtedly been the most thrilling to see in print.”

Deciphering Virginia

Woolf

“ Of the several books I’ve published, this one has undoubtedly been the most thrilling to see in print.”

humanities

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by Jessica Tabak

Courtesy of R

oberta Rubenstein

Photo by S

amantha S

aleh

arts

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DURiNG WORLD WAR ii,

the Nazis transformed the Bohemian fortress of Terezín into a camp-ghetto for Czech Jews. Those garrisoned inside its walls were subject to the dehu-manizing brutality preva-lent in the Nazi forced labor camps in Western and Central Europe.

“Like other ghettos, Terezín was essentially a way station to the exter-mination camps,” says Pamela Nadell, history professor and director of Jewish studies.

But the Jews interned at Terezín, whose ranks included eminent Czech scholars and artists, countered the horror around them through an unexpected means: art.

“All of these extraor-dinary minds and talents were confined in this town, and they started to create,” says Gail Humphries Mardirosian, performing arts profes-sor. “Choreographers and artists taught classes, musicians and conductors held perfor-mances, scholars gave lectures. And somehow the arts helped them tran-scend their situation. The arts became the means by which they defied the repressive degradation of their circumstances.”

The College of Arts

and Sciences is com-memorating this unique legacy with Voices of Terezín, its contribution to the university-wide Human Rights Initiative. The project will focus on art’s power to humanize in the face of degradation and despair.

“For many, the Holo-caust is a stark example of the kinds of human rights violations that can take place in the world,” says Ellen Feder, philosophy professor and project coordinator. “Despite the atrocities that occurred, the art that was produced at Terezín speaks to the humanity and the possibili-ties not just of an individual person but of a people.”

The project’s cen-terpiece is the Depart-ment of Performing Arts production of Voices of Terezín: An Artistic Tribute in Two Parts. Cospon-sored by the Embassy of the Czech Republic, the show will be held March 19–21 in the Katzen Arts Center’s Abramson Fam-ily Recital Hall. Part one will feature the American University Chamber Singers’ performance of Songs of Children, Robert Convery’s musical adaptation of nine poems written by the children of Terezín. This choral piece will be followed by the

United States premiere of Smoke of Home, a one-act play written by Zdenek

Eliáš and Jirí Stein while interned at the camp.

Director Humphries

Mardirosian first learned of the play in spring 2008, several months before she went to Prague on a Fulbright grant. Fellow Fulbright Scholar Lisa Peschel shared the script with her; the following spring, Humphries Mard-irosian directed the play in Prague and took its on-site premiere to Terezín.

Her decision to stage Smoke at AU inspired the cascade of related pro-grams that have evolved into the Voices of Terezín project. Along with the theatrical event, the project includes movie screen-ings, crossdisciplinary panels, an art exhibit at Bender Library, and a visiting professorship by Stanislav Kolár of the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic.

The project also includes curriculum initiatives on and off campus. With Nadell’s help, Humphries Mardirosian has developed a curriculum for an honors colloquium on Terezín, which the performing arts professor is leading this spring. In addition, arts management student Inga Sieminski is launch-ing a curriculum outreach program in conjunction with Wilson High School. The program will focus on Terezín and culminate with students attending the two-part performance.

“We want to engage the students before they come to the theatre so that the performance has a deeper impact on them,” says Sieminski. “We hope this will make them more alert to cur-rent atrocities and willing to stand up to them.”

Echoes from Terezín

by JessicaTabak

“ We hope this will make them more alert to current atrocities and willing to stand up to them.”

Sam

antha Saleh

Unknown Artist. Poster created at Terezín labor camp. Loaned by Murry Sidlin, dean of the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, Catholic University of America

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DON KiMes AND His WiFe,

Lois, had been away just over a week when they got a call from a neigh bor back in D.C. Water was streaming under their front door, down their steps, and onto the sidewalk.

His wife rushed back to Washington and by the following day, the AU art professor’s worst fears were confirmed. A water pipe had burst, leaving his entire art studio— including his computer, thousands of clippings and slides, most of his family photographs, and 25 years’ worth of sketchbooks and works on paper—under four feet of water. “When my wife told me, my knees just gave out,” he recalls. “I was 50 years old and, in essence, the record of my life as an artist had been erased.”

For months, Kimes would return home from teaching and spend his evenings trying to salvage portions of his photos, drawings, and paintings. “I would peel them apart, trying to get some pieces of the pictures back,” he says. Over time, more and more of the original images would be lost, leaving only shadowy impressions.

But after several months, Kimes saw some-thing beyond destruction in the traces of color and line. “I don’t know why, but suddenly I found a strange beauty in them.”

Kimes began to create new abstract images based on the remnants of the old. In the seven years since the flood, he has amassed a collection ranging from small works on paper to his custom-

ary large canvasses. A selection of these pieces will be featured in Pen-timenti: After the Flood, from March 20 to May 1 at the American Univer-sity Museum.

“I spent years and

years talking about loving Pompeii or the ruins of Agrigento or walk-ing through an Etruscan archway because of the way nature takes everything back, caus-ing nature and culture

to intersect in beautiful ways,” he says. “When this happened to me, this external idea suddenly became very real and very personal.”

“The flood,” he adds, “turned out to be a gift.”

After the Flood by JessicaTabak

“ I don’t know why, but suddenly I found a strange beauty in them.”

Memoria. 2008. Mixed meda on canvas

Flying with Galileo. 2009. Mixed media on paper Premise. 2008. Mixed media on canvas

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“iF yOU COULD HAve dinner with anyone, who would it be?” The ques-tion was put to Jennifer Corey, BA performing arts ’09—and a contes-tant for the Miss National Sweetheart Pageant—during a mock interview in December 2008.

For Corey, the answer was easy: Plácido Do-mingo, the famous tenor and director of the Wash-ington National Opera (WNO). Corey, a music major with a concentration in vocal performance, is an opera aficionado. (As a Miss America contestant in January, she sang “O Mio Babbino Caro.”)

As it happened, one of the pageant interviewers worked for the WNO. He asked Corey to apply for an internship. She followed the lead and was hired. That was nearly a year ago. When her in-ternship ended, the WNO asked Corey to stay on as an apprentice in their Edu-cation and Community Programs Department.

Her main responsibil-ity is to create DVDs and other multimedia products that educate viewers about the WNO. It isn’t your typical 9-to-5 desk job. In September,

she single-handedly wrote, edited, recorded, and produced a WNO commercial that aired at Nationals Park. And three or four times a week, she and other department members go into the city to teach D.C. youth about opera.

Through Student Look-In, one of the WNO’s programs, local students have an opportunity to attend a kid-friendly performance of a current WNO opera. Drawing on their experience, the students spend the rest

of the school year writing their own version of the opera, which they per-form in the WNO’s studio for other D.C. public school students.

“The kids may be in third grade and learning geometry or simple math when they’re making a set,” says Corey. “We work with the teachers to take what the students are learning in class and apply it to the things that they’re learning through the opera.”

The days can be long. Sometimes Corey starts

with a school visit at 8 a.m. and goes until 11 p.m. if there’s a perfor-mance. “When you’re a student at AU, you live in the AU bubble and you don’t get to see a lot of the other parts of the city,” says Corey. “Because of my job now, I’m in Southeast [D.C.], I’m in Anacostia, I’m in Northeast almost every single day.”

Working for the WNO certainly has its perks. Corey gets to see any performance for free. She has access to some of

the world’s most talented opera singers. She has been asked to stand in and perform in education department programs. And the costume depart-ment even designed her dress for the talent competition in the Miss America pageant.

“This is my dream job,” says Corey. “I get to sit in my office and listen to renowned opera sing-ers singing down the hallway from me all day long and [also] work with kids all day long. It is so much fun.”

Opera out of the Box

by Ariana Stone

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“ We work with the teachers to take what the students are learning in class and apply it to the things that they’re learning through the opera.”

Patrick G

. Ryan w

ww

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By ANy MeAsURe, Louis Brandeis was a mountain of a man. One of the country’s preeminent lawyers, a reformer dur-ing the Progressive era, a leader of the Zionist movement, and perhaps the most influential Su-preme Court justice in his-tory, Brandeis lived a life that profoundly impacts the world even today.

Capturing the true essence of a man as complex as Brandeis in a singular, definitive biography is not easy.

Yet through diligent research and a thirst to understand the man and his work, Melvin Urofsky, a historian in residence at American University, deftly accomplishes that in his new book, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz declared the biography “monumental, authorita-tive, and appreciative” in the New York Times Book Review on September 27, 2009, and the Economist named it one of the best books of 2009.

Satisfying praise, un-doubtedly, to Urofsky, who first delved into Brandeis’s world as a graduate student at Columbia University nearly 50 years ago. “I got into his papers and was fascinated by what I found,” he says.

In 1965, Urofsky and a colleague won a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to edit Brandeis’s letters. With the blessing of the jurist’s daughters and the University of Louisville

Law School, where the letters were housed, he worked on what would become seven volumes of text. The publication of the letters led to a handful of Brandeis biographies in the ensuing years, but Urofsky’s is the first since the 1980s.

“I had a different take on him in terms of his having four intermeshed careers,” says Urofsky, a professor of law and public policy at Virginia Commonwealth Univer-sity. “Yet the careers all intersect. One of his law clerks once told me that Brandeis had a ‘mind of one piece.’”

In the book, Urofsky explores Brandeis’s roots as the son of Czech-Jewish immigrants, his lucrative career as an at-torney (in the late 1800s he made $50,000 a

year—roughly equivalent to $900,000 today—when most lawyers were making less than $5,000), his championing of the state of Israel, and his celebrated career on the bench. “In his life and his work, he was always the idealistic pragma-tist,” writes Urofsky, “one whose faith in time remained great.”

The book contains in-sights into Brandeis’s pri-vate life as well. “He could be, to people who didn’t know him well, cold and austere,” Urofsky said. “He was an extremely efficient man who did not like to waste time. On the other hand, to people who knew him well, he was a good friend. He couldn’t tell a joke—but he liked jokes. He started laughing before he could tell the punch line.”

Brandeis Being

Adapted from The Life of Louis Brandeis by Mike Unger, American Today (December 8, 2009)

“ I got into his papers and was fascinated by what I found.”

“ In his life and his work, he was always the idealistic pragmatist.”

Jeff Watts

science

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FeeLiNG sTResseD OUT?

Common stress-related conditions may be con-trolled simply by adding a meditation practice to your daily routine.

A recent study coau-thored by AU psychology professor David Haaga, clinical psychology PhD student Melissa Tanner, and researchers from the Maharishi University of Management indicates that practicing Transcen-dental Meditation (TM) at least once a day for 20 minutes may reduce depression, anxiety, and high blood pressure in college students.

The results of the study, published originally in the American Journal of Hypertension (Decem-ber 2009), have drawn attention from news out-lets across the country, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times online and U.S. News and World Report.

The study provided TM training and monitoring, in three-month cycles over two years, to 298 D.C.-area college students, 159 of whom were at risk for hypertension. Participants practiced TM—which involves focusing silently on a mantra while seated with eyes closed—for 20 minutes at least once a day. Blood pressure, psychological distress, and coping ability were

measured at the beginning and end of the three-month interval.

Results showed that TM had positive psycho-logical effects on all of the students in the sample. In addition, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure decreased in the at-risk subgroup, with post-TM levels associated with a 52 per cent lower risk of developing hypertension later in life.

These findings are especially important to college students, who face a perfect storm of stress factors.

“Students often arrive at school accustomed to [parents] controlling when they eat, when they sleep, and when they go to school,” says Haaga. “Learning to manage all those factors on their own can be a challenge.”

The study’s findings also have implications for the general popula-tion, particularly those individuals prone to high blood pressure.

“Past research has shown TM to be useful for people who already have hypertension,” says Haaga. “I think our study encourages further ap-plication of TM to include the members of the general population at risk of hypertension.”

No Place Like Om by

JessicaTabak

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achievements

13

Appointments& HonorsIn October, Jack child (language and foreign studies/SiS) and alan kraut (history/SiS) were named University Professors. This is the university’s highest professorial rank and recognizes outstanding scholarship, teaching, and influence. (See article on p. 2.)

The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities granted kyle dargan (literature) a 2009–2010 Individual Artist Fellowship. Founded in 1968, the organization promotes local artists, organizations, and activities through grants, programs, and educational activities.

Bill leap (anthropology) won the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Best Anthology for Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World, the third volume in his series on LGBTQ anthropology. Leap shared the prize with series coeditor Ellen Lewin of the University of Iowa. The prize is awarded annually by the American Anthropology Association’s Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. It is the third time the pair has been presented with the award.

GrantsMathematics and statistics professors Jeff adler, Jeff hakim, and Josh lansky collaborated on a multi-institutional grant from the National Science Foundation to facilitate major research with academic institutions around the world. The total grant awarded for the group of institutions was $1.2 million. It will facilitate a three-year project, Characters, Liftings and Types: Investigation in p-adic Representation Theory. (See article on p. 4.)

anna amirdJanova (mathematics and statistics) received a two-year project grant from the National Science Foundation for Stochastic Evolution Equations Driven by Nonmartingale Random Fields and Related Topics. Her projected award is $81,330, to be distributed over two years.

vikki connaughton (biology) is contributing to a research project that recently received a $427,758 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Connaughton, with several colleagues from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is studying how sensitivity to methylmercury in zebrafish is affected when they express glutathione-related human genes.

amos golan (economics) has received a grant from the U.S. Department of the Treasury to establish the Info-Metrics Institute under the Department of Economics. The institute will offer courses, workshops, and conferences that

promote interdisciplinary research to solve economic problems using real-world data. Golan will receive $375,300 over the next four years.

Publications & ProductionsIn October, conductor daniel aBraham (performing arts) released the CD Passion and Lament: Choral Masterworks of the 17th Century (Dorian Recordings), performed by the Bach Sinfonia and Sinfonia Voci. The recording includes works by Heinrich Biber, Salamone Rossi, and Giacomo Carissimi, and a solo by AU’s Barbara Hollinshead (performing arts).

matthew clavin (Phd history ’05) has published his first book, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (U. of Pennsylvania, 2009). The book examines the United States perception of the Second Haitian Revolution, from 1791 until 1865. Clavin is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Florida.

This fall, film director Terence Davies optioned the rights to Mother of Sorrows (Vintage, 2006) by richard mccann (literature). The collection of interconnected short stories, narrated in the first person, relates an Eisenhower-era coming-of-age in suburban Washington, D.C.

roBerta ruBenstein (literature) published Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The book explores

the influence of Russian literature on Woolf’s critical and personal approach to fiction writing. (See article on p. 7.)

Historian in residence melvin urofsky (history) published Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon, 2009). The book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review (September 27, 2009). (See article on p. 11.)

maría eugenia verdaguer (Phd sociology ’02) published Class, Ethnicity, Gender and Latino Entrepreneurship (Routledge, 2009). The book examines the social and economic relations of first-generation Latino entrepreneurs.

Don Kimes. Book. 2009. Mixed media on paper

Impressions

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