The gathering, which took place in two sessions in the Lowenstein Center’s 12th-Floor Lounge, featured 32 students who shared the results of their research with friends and colleagues.

“It feels so great. It really feels like a relief to be able to gather in a room and talk to students about their research,” said Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, Ph.D., assistant dean for juniors and transfer students.

“We’ve had Zoom events the last two years, and those were a reasonable substitute, but there really is nothing like having the energy that comes from being together in one room.”

Stark-Gendrano said that social justice was a common factor in many of this year’s presentations, but that the projects spanned many disciplines.

Disinformation Through the Years

Inspired in part by his experience interning with NBC News/MSNBC in 2019 and 2020, Gabe Samandi, an international studies major, presented “A general history and theory of Mind Control,” which he completed under the mentorship of Mathias Klang, Ph.D., professor of communications and media studies.

The idea for the project, which traces the history of techniques associated with misinformation and manipulation of public perception since the 1950s, came to him when he started hearing people saying that critical race theory (CRT) was being taught in elementary schools. He had studied critical race theory during his time in Fordham’s study abroad program at the University of Pretoria in 2020.

“I can assure you it’s not,” said Samandi, who studied CRT during Fordham’s Ubuntu program in 2020, between his two internships at NBC News/MSNBC.

“I had to go all the way to South Africa to learn about it. So I was really curious about how misinformation could spread so quickly,” he said.

Critical race theory is not being taught in elementary schools, but anti-racist curriculum is, and the two are being conflated in disinformation campaigns.

“A lot of conspiracy theories and misinformed narratives actually end up having a lot of grains of truth, and, interestingly, common roots in real historical events that have historically gone ignored or underreported.”

One example, he said, is Operation Paperclip. The secret United States intelligence program featured the U.S. government recruitment of more than 1,600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians after the end of World War II, for work in the Cold War arms race. It has been a common starting point for a lot of right-wing misinformation and conspiracy theories, including QAnon, because it’s held up as proof of the U.S. government’s willingness to work with criminals.

“I wanted to provide a historical record about some of the common routes of these conspiracy theories and set the record straight about some of the most confusing and truly alarming aspects of the history of psychological and information warfare in the United States,” he said.

Koreans who Call Japan Home

In addition to a posterboard, Kia Fatahi Faz Abad, also an international studies major, had on display newspapers from his visit to Japan this past summer. He traveled to Tokyo to conduct ethnographic research on ‘Zainichi Koreans’ — Koreans who migrated to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea and have lived there since the early 1920s, along with their descendants. His finished project “What’s It Like Being Korean in Japan? The Complex Identity of Zainichi,” was overseen by Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history.

Abad visited 10 schools in Tokyo that were originally established to promote the teachings of former North Korean president Kim Il-sung, and interviewed Zainichi people. But the idea that because the Zainichi attend the schools, they are ideologically tied to North Korea, is a misconception held by many Japanese.

“They have transitioned from the ideological education, and are more tied to the perseverance of the Korean identity as a whole, dating back to when Japan occupied Korea,” he said.

That’s because even though many Zainichi were born in Japan and have spent their whole lives there, in the eyes of the Japanese state, they are still Korean.

“If you’re born in America, you receive an American passport, and you’re considered American, regardless. But in Japanese immigration law, they view you as Korean,” he said.

“This creates a much more complicated identity. Zainichi have suffered discrimination and also hate speech from right-wing parties and Japanese nationalists. They are not viewed as a different ethnic identity, but as a foreigner.”

The Zainichi’s plight begs the question: What does it mean to have a homeland that you’ve never visited? For Abad, whose parents are from Japan and Iran, the question was worth the hassle of COVID-related travel restrictions that made the trip challenging.

“It was one of the most important life lessons for me. This was the first time I’ve conducted independent research. It took a lot of paperwork, but it worked.”

A More Inclusive Dining Experience

Hannah Kang, an English major, and Sayema Abedin, a political science major working on an M.A. in ethics and society stayed close to home for their research. In “Islamic Foodways: Texts, Cultures, and the Practical-Political Ethics of Campus Dining,” they detailed the ways they felt that Fordham could improve dining for Muslim students such as Abedin.

For the research, which they conducted under the guidance of associate theology professor Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., the students surveyed schools and universities in New York City to better understand how they accommodate Muslim students. They also explored ways to help non-Muslims understand the importance of Halal food, which is available at the Lincoln Center campus.

“Instead of thinking of it as a restriction, we want people to think of it as a lifestyle. Our main goal is to just educate everyone on what it is, and why we follow these rules,” said Abedin.

“We also talk about the social lives of students, and how we can make them feel more comfortable.”

Although the University has made strides to welcome Muslim students to campus, Kang and Abedin said additional steps to improve the dining experience, including lowering the price of Halal meals, and making them more widely available. They are also advocating for separate prayer rooms for men and women and a Wudu station, which allows for washing before prayers.

Kang said they interviewed students from Fordham’s Muslim Students Association and contacted the Interfaith center of New York City, which provided them with policy proposals for K-12 schools.

“We would love to conduct more quantitative work, but for this moment, this was just making sure we have a foundation for others who want to do further research,” she said.

Peeking into the Brain

Across the room, Rabia Gondur, an integrated neuroscience major, shared the findings of “Left-handedness and language: A brainwave analysis of semantic processing and familial left-handedness.”

Her research, which she conducted under the supervision of Sarah Grey, Ph.D., assistant professor of Spanish and linguistics, featured 25 volunteers who were asked to read sentences while their event-related potential (ERP) waveforms were measured.

In the majority of the population, language is thought to be predominantly controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, but in left-handed, or familial sinistral people, it’s thought to be controlled by the right hemisphere. The effect is thought to also affect blood relatives of left-handed people, a phenomenon known as familial sinistrality. This means they process language in a fundamentally different way.

The goal of the study was to see the effects of familial sinistrality on language processing in real-time, via ERP waveforms. In the experiment, participants visited Grey’s Rose Hill campus lab, and were asked to read a sentence aloud. Familial sinistrals were expected to show a greater N400 brainwave activity while those who were non-familial sinsitrals were excepted to show smaller P600 or N400 waves.

Because the research was interrupted by the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, the number of participants who were familial sinistrals was lower than ideal, and as a result, Gondur said she didn’t get enough results to make a firm conclusion about familial sinistral participants. She was still excited to talk about the work in person though.

“While we weren’t able to see a lot of significant results for our familial sinistral group, we were able to see that non-familiar sinistrals showed a bigger P 600 response. This shows that they use a different mechanism to process semantic information. They look at grammar cues to pick up semantic information.”

She said that while some people prefer Zoom, she feels it’s easier to be in person.

“Because I talk so fast, and I don’t know if everyone knows the terms and stuff, this gives me enough time to explain them,” she said.

“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

On Aug. 26., in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state restrictions on mass gatherings, fall classes at the University commenced under the auspices of a brand-new flexible hybrid learning model.

The model, which was laid out in May by Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., Fordham’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, is designed to be both safe and academically rigorous. After being forced to pivot to remote learning in March, professors and instructors, aided by Fordham’s IT department, spent many hours this summer preparing to use this model for the fall.

Today, some classes are offered remotely, some are offered in-person—indoors and outdoors—with protective measures, and still others are a blend of both. Whatever the method, professors are engaging students with innovative lessons and challenging coursework.

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., a professor of art history, said the pandemic spurred her department to reimagine one of its hallmark courses, Introduction to Art History. The course, which covers the period from 1200 B.C. to the present day, is being taught both in-person and in remote settings to 327 students in what’s known as a “flipped” format.

Before classes are held, students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, reading material, and videos, such as Art of the Olmec, which Mundy created with the assistance of Digital and Visual Resources Curator Katherina Fostano and her staff. When students meet in person or via live video, they then discuss the material at length. The content was changed as well; it now also addresses the representation of Black people throughout history and showcases artists who tackle themes of racism.

“Because we were looking at a situation where we couldn’t just do business as usual, I proposed that we take this moment to really rethink our intro class, which we’ve been teaching for decades,” Mundy said, noting that the department has expanded in recent years to include experts in art from more diverse sections of the world.

Contemplating the Bard

Before the COVID crisis, Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, presented materials to students in her Shakespeare & Pop Culture class and encouraged them to generate their own ideas on them during live discussions. Now she breaks her students up into pairs, and later “pods,” of about six students on Zoom, to form a thoughtful argument about a particular work of art, video, film, or theater.

“An argument is not a description,” said Bly. “It has to have some evidence or context to make their argument, say, for example, ‘This film is a racist portrayal of the play for the following reasons,’ or, ‘The director of this film pits the values of pop culture against Shakespeare and the British canon.”

To propel the conversations, she created a series of video-taped lectures with Daniel Camou, FCLC ’20. In some cases, students are expected to respond with a video of their own.

Embracing New Technologies

Paul Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Businesses, is teaching Advanced Accounting to undergraduates and Accounting for Derivatives to graduate students this semester. Of the five classes, four are exclusively online, and one is exclusively in person. For his remote classes, he’s turned to Lightboard, which allows him to “write” on the screen. He jokingly refers to it as his Manhattan Project.

“I love being in the class with the students. I enjoy the interaction, and I thought that was missing,” he said. “This gives me the ability to let the students see me as if I was in class writing onto a transparent whiteboard.”

He said he hasn’t had to change much of the content. The only major difference now is that instead of passing out equations on printed paper, he emails students custom-made problems in PDF format, and then edits within that document after they’re sent back.

“I’ve always given them take-home exams, and always worked off Blackboard, so it’s just a natural extension of what I used to do in class,” he said.

In Jacqueline Reich’s class Films of Moral Struggle, students are using the platform Perusall to examine how films portray moral and ethical issues. They watch and analyze films like Scarface, a 1932 movie about a powerful Cuban drug lord, and The Cheat, which shows the early representation of Asians in American films, said Reich, a professor of communication and media studies.

Among other things, students can use Perusall to annotate scenes from movie clips, such as the classic film Casablanca, where they identified shots ranging from “establishing” and “reaction” to “shot/reverse shot.”

“It’s a really good exercise to do in class when you’re teaching film language or talking about editing or lighting, because students can pause and comment on a particular frame,” Reich said.

She meets with 11 students on Zoom on Thursdays and another eight in person at the Rose Hill campus on Mondays.

In another virtual classroom, Peggy Andover, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, is teaching undergraduates at Rose Hill how the laws of the environment shape behavior in an asynchronous class called Learning Laboratory. Andover said that platforms like Panopto, which transcribe her lessons, can make it easier for students to look for specific information.

“Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you see the word ‘contiguity’ in your notes, and you don’t remember what it means. You don’t have to watch the entire lecture again—you can search for ‘contiguity’ and see the slides and the portion of the lecture where we were talking about it,” Andover said.

Graduate students teaching in the psychology program are also using Pear Deck to make their virtual classrooms more engaging on Google Slides, she said.

“You have this PowerPoint that’s being watched or engaged in asynchronously, but [Pear Deck] allows you to put in interactive features,” including polls and student commentary, she said.

“Our grad students found it’s a way to really get that engagement that they would potentially be missing when we went to online learning.”

Learning from Classmates

Aaron Saiger, a professor at the Law School, made several adjustments to Property Law, a required class for all first-year law students. Instead of meeting in person twice a week for two hours, his class of 45 students meets on Zoom three times a week for 90 minutes, an acknowledgment that attention spans are harder to maintain on Zoom.

The content is the same, but the way he teaches it had to change. While he was able to record four classes’ worth of lectures to share asynchronously, that wasn’t an option for everything.

“I’m spending less time talking to students one-on-one while everyone else listens, which is the classic law school teaching mode; we call it the Socratic method,” he said. “Everyone else is supposed to imagine that they’re the person being called on.”

Saiger’s solution is having students share two-sentence answers to questions in the Zoom chat function to gauge what everyone’s thinking about a topic, having them do more group work, and leaning more on visual material.

“The difficulties are not insubstantial, but I think we are meeting the challenges and finding a few offsetting advantages that will make it a good semester for everyone.”

Getting Creative with Lab Work

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, holds most of his experimentation class in person, with a few students attending remotely.

The in-person group is working on a hands-on solar project that allows them to learn about the material, electric, programming, and optical components of physics.

Students who are attending the class remotely are doing related mathematical work as a part of their semester-long project.

“One student is studying interference coding in optics, so I have him looking at designs in a paper,” he said. “He’s learning all the underlying physics for what goes into a portion of these mirrors that are used in laser systems.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, is sending lab kits to the students in his general chemistry class so they can conduct experiments from home.

“We were between a rock and hard place—you can’t have the kids in the lab, and at the same time, we can’t not have some kind of hands-on,” he said.

The kits will allow students to participate in labs virtually through a Zoom webinar with their professor, as well as in breakout rooms with their lab teams.

“We adapted as many of our experiments as we could to just use simple household chemicals that are all completely safe,” he said.

Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physical and biophysical chemistry, likewise sent a kit to students that they can use to build a spectrometer. Students can build it out of Legos, using a DVD and a light source to create different wavelengths of light. They capture them using their computer’s webcam which processes the data. They will then design an experiment that everyone in the class will conduct.

“Designing an experiment so that you learn something, that answers the question you set out to answer, and gives a protocol that someone else can follow so they can get the same results that you got, is really at the heart of what it is to do scientific research,” she said.

—Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, and Tom Stoelker contributed reporting.

The exhibit represents the culmination of a productive post-doctorate project by Fordham’s Asato Ikeda, PhD, assistant professor of art history, also the exhibit’s curator.

Ikeda culled “A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints” from more than 2,500 Japanese woodblock prints in the museum’s collection, the largest of its kind in Canada. The images depict adolescent males in Edo-period Japan, who have yet to go through the traditional coming of age ceremony but who were considered sexually active and attractive by the society.

“In the exhibition we’re developing a new definition of gender,” said Ikeda. “It’s not just determined by biological sex, but also age, role in sexual hierarchy, and appearance.”

By focusing on the topic of gender and sexuality, the exhibit provides relevance to contemporary audiences grappling with the issue, said Ikeda.

Most of the prints are from the Edward Walker Collection, which was given to the museum in 1926, but were largely underexplored. With Ikeda’s expertise in Japanese art, the museum was able to begin an overall assessment, while simultaneously curating a show.

“There were boxes that nobody had opened for years,” she said. “It was very challenging because not much was on the museum database, so we had to record all of the information.”

The museum kept a blog of the process, but outside of the database and blog very little of the collection has been seen online. Digitizing would be a costly 5-to-10-year process, said Ikeda. As such, the exhibition represents a rare opportunity not only to examine the wakashu, but also an opportunity to view significant pieces from the collection.

“The museum collection is so comprehensive that we were able to choose such a specific theme,” she said.

Ikeda collaborated on the project with Joshua S. Mostow, PhD, an expert in the gender structure of Japan’s Edo Period, which lasted from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries.

In the process, the curators consulted with the Canada’s LGBT community, social workers, and activists through workshops. The concept was very well received with great interest in the historical aspect of gender issues and appreciation that an established museum would explore the subject in in such depth, said Ikeda.

“We try to be clear that the wakashu are not identical to LGBT culture today,” said Ikeda. “But certainly its culture is very important in terms of thinking about diverse gender and sexuality practices.”

“For example, the word ‘gay’ is very specific to our contemporary culture. It’s very democratic, egalitarian, and individualistic, and you have claim to your identity. In 17^th-century Japan, however, you couldn’t really claim your identity. It was imposed on you by age, gender, and class.”

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to contemporary identity issues, but some of it is also devoted to different gender and sexual norms and ideals—from the pederasty of ancient Greece to 19^th-century binary gender norms in Victorian England to the “two spirited people” of the first nations.

Traditional Form, Edo to the 20th Century

Ikeda’s own area of research and expertise centers on fascist paintings celebrated by the Japanese government and authorities during World War II. “The desire was to return to quote-unquote ‘traditional,’” said Ikeda, “The fascist paintings don’t look violent and don’t show soldiers, but those peaceful looking paintings were meant to evoke pride in Japanese traditions and justify the war against the West.”

When Ikeda was young, stories her grandfather told her sparked an interest in the fascist art. He was from southern Japan, where the kamikaze planes lifted off.

“My grandfather was obsessed with kamikaze and he was ultranationalist,” said Ikeda.

She noted that only since the turn of the century did scholars begin to look at Japanese wartime art. The dominance of the Japanese right-wing in politics, which resulted from the strong U.S.-Japan alliance since the Cold War, prohibits the kind of self-examination engaged in by German people after World War II, she said.

“Japan has trouble understanding this part of history,” she said. “In Germany you can’t deny the holocaust and the Germans collectively tried to be apologetic, but that’s not the case for Japan, where people can publicly claim that the Nanking massacre never happened. There is no consensus. Basic historical facts continue to be contested and dismissed.”

As she worked on her soon-to-be-published book, Soldiers and Cherry Blossoms: Japanese Art, Fascism, and World War II, she discovered that some relatives of wartime artists remained resistant to allowing her to publish the material.

In both the case of the wakashu and the case of the fascist art, Ikeda is taking an unflinching look at history; however, she refuses to make a judgment call on whether the art is good or bad. That, she said, is not an art historian’s job. Instead, her job is to situate artworks in historical context.

“The art is not just important historically, it’s very important politically and ethically,” she said.