Why add another book to those bulging shelves?

Because the six-month lead-up to D-Day illuminates Eisenhower’s singular diplomatic skills, Paradis writes in The Light of Battle, and his “underappreciated role in America’s rise as a superpower.”

Paradis—a human rights lawyer, historian, and fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School—does this by focusing on the six months leading up to the invasion, starting with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to select Eisenhower over General George C. Marshall as supreme allied commander.

Paradis draws on deep archival research and newly found letters to build a compelling portrait of Eisenhower’s character and capabilities. The future U.S. president’s “most fateful choices” were diplomatic, Paradis writes, as he tactfully navigated the political and logistical difficulties of planning such a high-risk, high-reward operation. He managed to double the size of the planned invasion and persuade Winston Churchill and the British, among other international leaders, to go along with the plan.

In vivid, humanizing detail, Paradis brings out the roiling drama centered around Eisenhower, who often had to project optimism even when he knew the venture was on the verge of collapse.

“By avoiding the grandiosity associated with great power,” Paradis writes, and beaming American openness and opportunity, “Eisenhower made it easy to believe that there was nothing to fear. He wore his ambition lightly … [in]service to a cause greater than himself.”

Strange recently announced a new album produced in part by Jack Antonoff (who has worked with Taylor Swift, Lorde, St. Vincent, and Fordham grad Lana Del Rey, among others). Due out in February, Horror is inspired by his experiences growing up Black and queer in Oklahoma.

“Sober,” the incredible new single from the album, is Strange at his best: honest, raw, and vulnerable. In his own words, “This song is about falling short in a relationship, over and over, and drinking because of it. Being in love but not being the best at showing it or feeling successful within it.” Falling musically somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and the War on Drugs, the song is a culmination of the immense talent Bartees Strange has shown in such a short period of time. I, for one, cannot wait to see where the new music takes this amazing musician and songwriter.

WFUV Discovery is a new music recommendation from Russ Borris, music director at WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org), Fordham’s public media station.

Featuring Matthew Capodicasa, GSAS ’15

The Glass Cannon Podcast is the flagship show of the Glass Cannon Network, a company that specializes in “actual-play podcasts”—live playthroughs of tabletop role-playing games (a genre that includes, most famously, Dungeons & Dragons). The podcast began in March 2015, when a group of five friends—including Matthew Capodicasa, a 2015 Fordham playwriting MFA graduate—decided to record themselves embarking on a campaign of the Pathfinder series’ Giantslayer Adventure Path. Almost 10 years later, Capodicasa and his fellow founders have expanded the Glass Cannon Network to include more than a dozen other shows covering multiple game systems. The cast members of The Glass Cannon Podcast also frequently put on a Glass Cannon Live! show, drawing fans to venues across the U.S. and Canada to watch Capodicasa and his fellow players go through the ups and downs of the game—and trade comedic banter—in person. They recently closed out their 2024 tour with a sold-out show at City Winery in Philadelphia, and their 2025 tour is set to kick off in February in Austin.

Less than 24 hours after “a wildfire ripped through postcard-perfect Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui,” Vigliotti and his Los Angeles-based national news team were on a deep-sea fishing boat “carving a coast-hugging path through the swelling Pacific.” It was the only way to bypass police roadblocks that residents told him were “less about protecting people from danger than preventing journalists from documenting a crippled emergency response and growing humanitarian crisis.”

Vigliotti got his start as an undergraduate at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station. Since graduating in 2005, he has reported on “historic hurricanes, thermometer-shattering heat waves, record-breaking droughts, megawildfires, back-to-back ‘hundred-year floods,’ unprecedented blizzards, and never-before-seen mudslides,” he writes.

In the book’s four sections—fire, water, air, and Earth—he examines the conditions of each of these catastrophic events and the consequences of government inaction. He blends the harrowing stories of “everyday Americans” struggling to survive in “a habitat threatening to erase their ways of life” with scientific context and glimmers of hope from conservationists.

The result is a persuasive call to make the changes needed to save our home before it’s too late.

Fast forward to April of this year, when the band announced a massive tour to go along with a new record deal with XL and a brand-new song called “Starburster.” The band’s rise in such a short time has been incredible to witness, and the latest single—from the forthcoming album Romance—takes the group to an entirely new plane. Singer Grian Chatten took inspiration from a real-life panic attack and included gasps in the song’s chorus, creating a most unexpected hook for the track. Chatten displays a confident swagger, and his phrasing is nothing short of hypnotic as he weaves his way through the song like a frontman 20 years his senior.

It’s an exhilarating direction for a band poised to make good on the promise to become the “next big thing.”

WFUV Discovery is a new music recommendation from Russ Borris, music director at WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org), Fordham’s public media station.

Disorderly Men: A Novel

In Disorderly Men, Fordham English professor Edward Cahill evokes New York City in the mid-20th century, several years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising catalyzed the movement for LGBTQ+ rights. The novel opens with a police raid on Caesar’s, a mob-owned gay bar in Greenwich Village, where Roger Moorehouse, a Wall Street banker and World War II veteran with a wife and children in Westchester, was about to leave with “the best-looking boy” in the place. “Fragments of his very good life—the fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, the house in Beechmont Woods, Corrine and the children—all presented themselves to his imagination as fitting sacrifices to the selfish pursuit of pleasure,” Cahill writes.

Also caught up in the raid are Columbia University professor Julian Prince and his boyfriend, Gus, a “serious-minded painter” from Wisconsin who gets knocked unconscious by a police baton; and Danny Duffy, a Bronx kid who helps manage the produce department at Sloan’s Supermarket. They’re charged with “disorderly behavior,” and their lives are upended—Roger is threatened by a blackmailer, Danny loses his job and family and seeks revenge, and Julian searches for Gus, who goes missing.

Cahill depicts their crises with pathos, humor, and suspense. And like the best historical fiction, Disorderly Men not only evokes a bygone era but also feels especially vital today.

Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham

The cult writer H. P. Lovecraft was not well known during his lifetime, most of which he spent in his native Providence, Rhode Island. But the so-called weird fiction he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s—a blend of horror, science fiction, and myth—has “entranced readers” and influenced artists in various media ever since, David J. Goodwin writes in Midnight Rambles.

From shows like Netflix’s Stranger Things to the films of Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro to the novels of Stephen King and beyond, artists have been inspired by Lovecraft’s “vivid world-building and bleak cosmogony.” They’ve also been repulsed by his racist and xenophobic views.

Goodwin, the assistant director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, deals with this head-on in Midnight Rambles, a chronicle of the writer’s love-hate relationship with New York and the city’s effect on him and his writing. He describes the brief period—from 1924 to 1926—when Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, drawn there by Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian Jewish émigré he met at a literary convention in Boston. Their marriage soon fell apart, and he moved back to Providence, where he died in 1937 at age 46. “An extended encounter with a great city reveals and exaggerates the strengths, foibles, attributes, and flaws of a character in a film or a person in the flesh-and-blood world,” Goodwin writes. “This is certainly true of Lovecraft and his years in New York City.”

Veteran Sportswriter Jack Curry Gives Readers a Behind-the-Scenes Look at ‘The Greatest Team Ever’

When Jack Curry, FCRH ’86, began interviewing players for a book about the Yankees’ 1998 season, he asked Hall of Fame shortstop Derek Jeter to describe the team. “Greatest team ever,” Jeter told Curry. “That’s what comes to mind.” And that’s how the subtitle of Curry’s latest book, The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever (Hachette, 2023) was born.

Curry has been covering the team for decades. He co-wrote Jeter’s 2000 book, The Life You Imagine: Life Lessons for Achieving Your Dreams, and he’s also written books with former Yankees Paul O’Neill and David Cone. Since 2010, he’s been an analyst on the YES Network, and for more than two decades prior to that, he was a sportswriter for The New York Times, including during the 1998 season.

Now, 25 years later, he takes readers through the team’s incredible 125-win season, from a sluggish 1-4 start through an impressive postseason run that culminated in the Yankees’ 24th World Series title (they’ve added three more since then). And while Curry recounts all the big moments fans know so well, he also peels back the curtain so readers can appreciate the back stories and see how the players—and a dramatic season—came together.

Curry shares how the night before David Wells threw a perfect game, he was out drinking until the wee hours with then-Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon; how a connection General Manager Brian Cashman made the season before helped the Yankees sign a contract with pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, who defected from Cuba on Christmas Day, 1997; how closer Mariano Rivera came across his signature cut fastball during a game of catch; and how Scott Brosius went from “a player to be named later” in a trade to World Series MVP.

For Yankees fans and baseball fans alike, Curry’s latest book offers a front-row seat to the team’s journey from a heartbreaking playoff loss in 1997 to the top of the world just a year later.

—Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15

Jerry McGill Explores Family Dynamics, Betrayal, and Forgiveness in The Color of Family

In his latest novel, The Color of Family (Little a, 2023), Jerry McGill shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume—made all the more evident when twins from France, the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs, arrive on the family’s doorstep.

One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between them—wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative.

Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—them all. They each may have moved on, but it’s only through forgiveness and coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present.

Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is fewer than 300 pages long, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning summer read.

McGill is the author of two other novels, including Bed Stuy: A Love Story, and a memoir, Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. Read our 2012 profile of McGill and review of his memoir.

Award-Winning Novelist Andrew Krivak Evokes the Effects of War on Four Generations of a Pennsylvania Family

The title and epigraph of Andrew Krivak’s century-spanning new novel come from the Book of Joel. Warning of ecological disaster, the biblical prophet compares a plague of locusts to war horses: “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, they run.”

The proverbial war horses run through each generation of the family at the heart of this lyrical, moving book. Homecomings are both longed-for and fraught, as each generation is haunted by the moral complexities of war, and by their own struggles to survive battles intensely physical and psychological.

The novel begins in 1933, when a teenage Bexhet “Becks” Konar flees fascist death squads in Hungary. He appears at the Dardan, Pennsylvania, homestead of Josef Vinich, who saved his infant life at the end of World War I. Vinich, now co-owner of a roughing mill, treats Becks like a son. Eventually, Becks and Vinich’s daughter, Hannah, fall in love, marry, and have two children, Bo and Samuel, before Becks is sent to fight for his adopted country in World War II.

He returns from the war a shell of his former self, and in 1949 he’s killed in a hunting accident—shot through the chest by Paul Younger, whose father had been forced to sell his land to Vinich years earlier, and whose family becomes even more intimately linked with the Konars.

In the 1960s, Samuel enlists in the Marines, becomes a prisoner of war, and develops a heroin addiction. Both he and Bo eventually learn about their father’s battles in World War II, which include a charge of desertion, imprisonment, and a bloody stint as part of the Romani resistance.

From one generation to the next, peace is elusive. And while Krivak depicts the violence of war with frightening intimacy, he’s also attuned to the persistence of beauty and grace in nature and in what love endures.

In 2012, when Krivak received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which recognizes “the power of the written word to promote peace,” he dedicated the award to the people who shaped him, including his immigrant grandmother, whose stories about life in what is now Slovakia continue to inform his fiction.

“They’ve all done their work. They’ve all found their peace,” he said in an acceptance speech. “What remains is for us to keep telling of it as well as to keep praying for it, to keep insisting upon it as well as to keep hoping for it, and to keep listening so that we’ll know when to act, whether it’s out in the world … or at work on a sentence, alone in a room with words.”

Like the Appearance of Horses (Bellevue Literary Press) is the culmination of Krivak’s Dardan Trilogy, a saga that began with his 2011 debut novel, The Sojourn, which focuses on Josef Vinich’s experiences as an Austro-Hungarian conscript in World War I. Each book in the series, which also includes 2017’s The Signal Flame, can stand on its own.

Krivak is also the author of the 2020 novel The Bear (read an excerpt), a collection of poetry, and A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a 2008 memoir about his eight years as a Jesuit.

—Ryan Stellabotte

A Bridge to Justice: The Life of Franklin H. Williams

People tend to view 20th-century civil rights heroes through a “sepia lens,” Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, once said. But those leaders were not “superpeople deposited from some other planet.” They were “ordinary people of extraordinary intellect” and courage who still have the power to show us how to create “a true democracy.” Ifill was speaking at a 2018 Fordham Law School event celebrating the legacy of civil rights attorney and diplomat Franklin H. Williams, LAW ’45.

In A Bridge to Justice, Enid Gort and John M. Caher recount Williams’ “profound impact on the (still unfinished) struggle for equal rights.” Born in New York City in 1917, he attended Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black university, before enrolling at Fordham Law School in 1941. Service in the segregated U.S. Army interrupted his legal studies and “scarred Williams,” the authors write, but he earned his law degree in 1945 and soon joined the NAACP.

For the next 14 years, he worked on seminal civil liberties cases that overturned racially restrictive housing covenants and school segregation. And he often put his life on the line, once barely escaping a lynch mob in Florida, where he defended three Black youths falsely accused of rape. He went on to help organize the Peace Corps; serve as ambassador to Ghana; lead a nonprofit dedicated to advancing educational opportunity for Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans; and chair a New York state judicial commission, now named in his honor, that works to promote racial and ethnic fairness in the courts. Williams died in 1990, but his life story, the authors write, “is an object lesson for those with the courage and fortitude to … help this nation heal and advance through unity rather than tribalism.”

Cross Bronx: A Writing Life

“The most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories,” Peter Quinn, GSAS ’75, told this magazine in 2017. For more than four decades, the Bronx native has been a remarkably accomplished storyteller—as a novelist, chief speechwriter for New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and witty, humane chronicler of New York City and the Irish American experience. In the past two years, Fordham University Press has reissued four of his novels, including Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award; and an essay collection, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007). Now comes this delightfully funny and frank memoir of his Catholic upbringing, his enduring affinity for his native borough (“I don’t live in the Bronx anymore, but I’ll never leave”), and the circuitous, consequential path of his writing life. His journey took him from Fordham grad student to chief speechwriter for two New York governors and corporate scribe for “five successive chairmen of the shapeshifting, ever-inflating, now-imploded Time Inc./Time Warner/AOL Time Warner,” a chapter of his memoir he cheekily calls “Killing Time.” He also writes of meeting and courting his wife, Kathy, of the “intense joy and satisfaction of fatherhood,” and of coming to terms with his own emotionally distant father. “Looking back, what I’m struck by most is luck,” he writes. “What I feel most is gratitude.”

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

For nearly 40 years, Jill Jonnes has been among the most persistent chroniclers of the Bronx, giving eloquent voice to the citizen activists who have driven its revival. In 1986, when she published the first edition of South Bronx Rising, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment. “Today,” she writes in the third edition of the book, “we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying [Bronx] neighborhoods.”

The revival began with “local activists and the social justice Catholics … mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.” Countless Fordham students, faculty, and alumni have contributed to this movement, helping to establish and sustain groups including the Bronx River Alliance and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. It’s not all roses: The South Bronx remains part of the country’s poorest urban congressional district; the “calamity of COVID” hit communities hard; and gentrification threatens to undo hard-fought progress. But Jonnes provides ample reason to celebrate and continue the work.

Contrast that with the modern World Cup. Every four years, more than twice as many national teams bring some of the world’s greatest athletes to compete in state-of-the-art stadiums plastered with lucrative advertisements, all watched by millions of fans in person and billions more on screens around the world. (As for the questionable officiating, advanced technology has helped remove at least some human error.)

How we got from there to here is laid out in great detail in The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet’s Biggest Sporting Event by Clemente A. Lisi, FCLC ’97. Lisi—who has covered the event as a journalist in places like Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow—fell in love with soccer as a 6-year-old in 1982, when he was on vacation with his family in Italy as that country’s national team captured the World Cup in Spain. His book, published last month by Rowman & Littlefield, provides a thorough tournament-by-tournament overview, recapping matches, describing on-field trends, and providing the historical and cultural context for each installment. Legends Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi get spotlighted, but the book also tells the stories of the countless other players, coaches, and executives who’ve made the World Cup into the global phenomenon it is today.

In the process, Lisi, a professor of journalism at the King’s College in New York City (and a former sports editor of The Observer), explores how the World Cup has evolved over the years, not just in terms of the ever-changing format of the tournament itself, but how advances in mass media led to slicker marketing that helped revolutionize the event. Perhaps most significantly, he shows how the tournament exploded in popularity as the sport became increasingly awash in money starting in the 1960s—a phenomenon that has also sometimes led to trouble.

Indeed, the book doesn’t shy away from the World Cup’s many (many) controversies, from the 1934 installment in Mussolini’s Italy to the myriad modern scandals of FIFA, which Lisi calls “one of the most corrupt organizations on the planet.”

This year’s tournament, currently happening in Qatar, unfortunately offers no shortage of material for Lisi, from allegations of bribery during the bidding process, to the loud opposition to holding the organization’s flagship event in a country where homosexuality is illegal, to the mistreatment of the estimated 2 million foreign workers who built the stadiums and infrastructure necessary for the tournament to take place. That the World Cup is happening now, in November and December, is itself a point of controversy: Qatar’s sweltering summer heat necessitated a change in scheduling, disrupting the sport’s usual calendar.

The book ends with a team-by-team preview of the 32 squads competing in Qatar, including a U.S. team that failed to qualify for the tournament four years ago. It also sets up the next chapter (figuratively speaking) in the World Cup’s story: a 2026 tournament jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada—one that will feature an expanded group of 48 teams and include matches played in the New York City area, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

—Joe DeLessio, FCLC ’06

In 2010, she co-designed and led Evoke, a future-simulation game for the World Bank that was pitched as a 10-week “crash course in saving the world.” It attracted more than 19,000 players in 150-plus countries. She asked them to envision the year 2020 and consider what they’d do to help themselves and others amid compounding crises—raging wildfires, the collapse of a power grid due to severe weather and aging infrastructure, the rise of a group called Citizen X that spread disinformation and conspiracy theories online, and a global respiratory pandemic.

In early 2020, as these story lines were playing out in all-too-real life, McGonigal began hearing from people who had participated in her simulations. “I’m not freaking out,” one person wrote to her at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it 10 years ago.”

In her latest book, Imaginable (Spiegel and Grau, 2022), McGonigal lays out the tools people can use to “unstick” our minds and consider the “unthinkable,” balance our hopes and fears about the future; practice “hard empathy” to see the world from someone else’s point of view, and envision ourselves in various scenarios—some harrowing, some hopeful—in 2033.

The kind of “mental time travel” she espouses is not meant to be abstract. If it’s going to rain, it’s about “vividly imagining yourself in the rain, trying to pre-feel the rain on your skin.”

“The more vividly we imagine the worst-case scenario,” she writes, “the more motivated we feel to try to prevent it.”

McGonigal’s approach calls to mind St. Ignatius, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits, who encouraged his companions to practice imaginative prayer—to put themselves in the Gospel stories, activating all their senses, as a means of feeling God’s presence in their lives and making choices about the future.

“A social simulation,” she writes, “is a springboard to making a better world.”

It’s a message McGonigal has been sharing for years, ever since she earned a B.A. in English from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1999 and a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. Citing research in cognitive and behavioral science, and drawing on her own experience as a game designer and futurist, in several books, including Reality Is Broken (Penguin, 2011), she has made a compelling case that games can be a platform for people to improve their lives and solve real-world problems.

For McGonigal, prognostication isn’t the point of imagining the future; it’s about stretching “our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the ‘unthinkable’ happens.” And it’s about developing a sense of “urgent optimism”—an ability to think “creatively and confidently right now about the things you could make, the solutions you could invent, the communities you could help.”

It’s an approach that Andrew Dana Hudson, FCLC ’09, shares. In his debut novel, Our Shared Storm (Fordham University Press, 2022), he imagines five possible climate futures for the world based on decisions we make between now and 2054, when the novel is set.

McGonigal’s message also calls to mind something Fordham’s new president, Tania Tetlow, has said about a Fordham Jesuit education being right for this moment, “when young people are passionate about wanting to question assumptions and fix systems.”

In 2009, a decade after graduating from Fordham, McGonigal told Fordham Magazine that “the Jesuit idea of being in service has stayed with me. I see the games I create as helping to create a better community.”

It’s an inspiring message—and her optimism is not just urgent, it’s necessary, generous, and contagious.

Carter began to garner a bit of widespread attention in 2018, when her grandson Stephen L. Carter published Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster. Several years earlier, the writers of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire created a character who, like Carter, was largely responsible for the conviction of a Prohibition-era mobster. (At the time, the character spurred mocking among viewers, who were sure that such a person—a Black female prosecutor—was pure fantasy.)

In Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice, Marilyn Greenwald and Yun Li use transcripts, letters, and other archival sources to illuminate Carter’s rich life, from her participation in the Harlem Renaissance and her devising the strategy that would crack open the Luciano case to her involvement with the United Nations and the Pan-African Congress, which helped increase awareness of racism and spur independence movements. Despite all this, though, the authors note that she was “low-key” and “she didn’t boast about her accomplishments.”

Born in Atlanta, she grew up in a family dedicated to social justice. Her father, William Alphaeus Hunton, was a Black YMCA administrator who fought to establish facilities for people of color. And Carter’s mother, Adelina “Addie” Hunton, “never one to remain stationary and tend to the home,” traveled extensively as a civil rights activist and women’s suffragist, including to France during World War I to help rally Black U.S. troops serving there.

Carter earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College—only the second woman in Smith history to earn both within four years. After graduating from Fordham Law School in 1932, she started a private law practice. But it was her 1935 appointment to special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey’s “Twenty Against the Underworld” legal team that ultimately led to her lasting renown.

As the authors write, “Carter’s decades-long commitment to organizations that furthered racial equality in this country and overseas has long been a footnote in the story of the nation’s civil rights and feminist movements,” but her “dogged determination, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work” allowed her to shape history. Carter followed in her parents’ footsteps when she became a national leader of the YWCA and a member of the U.S. National Council of Negro Women, taking up William’s YMCA torch and Addie’s dedication to women’s suffrage. She served as the liaison to the Women’s Day Court when she was an assistant district attorney, as well.

Fordham Law School recently established the annual Eunice Carter Lecture in her honor. Earlier this month, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” and author of the new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, delivered the inaugural lecture.

During the event, held via Zoom and in person at the Lincoln Center campus, Fordham Law Professor Catherine Powell shared some reflections on Carter with a combined audience of more than 500 people, including Carter’s great-granddaughter Leah.

“When I looked up Eunice’s story and realized her work at the U.N.—in advancing the status of women—and her work with the Pan-African Congress, I thought this woman actually embodies the kind of work that I’ve been trying to do since graduating from law school,” Powell said. “Your great-grandmother worked on these issues before we had the term ‘intersectionality.’”

Leah Carter said she believes her great-grandmother would have been “incredibly honored” by the event. “Eunice blazed trails and broke glass ceilings. And, like so many who do, she gained power and influence within deeply imperfect institutions,” she said. “But she tried to make a difference where she could.”

The annual PROSE Awards, given by the Association of American Publishers since 1976, honor authors, editors, and publishers of works that exhibit scholarly excellence and significantly advance their fields.