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.

When he was an undergraduate student at Texas Tech, McDonald, now a third-year history Ph.D. candidate at Fordham, was tasked with imagining how a person living through America’s bloodiest conflict would have shared their thoughts on Twitter about, say, the Battle of Gettysburg. From the very beginning, the project was probably doomed, he noted, as it only counted for 5% of students’ grades, making it harder for them to feel invested in it.

“We also realized after our first series of tweets that some of us didn’t do well tweeting, and others had a hard time stepping into their character. The first few tweets weren’t very interesting or well put together, so we sort of pooled them into a private chat, where only a select group of people could see them,” he said.

“At that point, not only were the students not interested, it had no clear identification with the outside world. Then the question was, what was the point? That entirely turned me off for a long time to the idea of tech in the classroom.”

Preparing Future Faculty

As he embarks on teaching his first class at Fordham this fall, McDonald is much less reticent about using digital tools in the classroom, thanks in part to “Should I Use Digital Media in My Classroom?” a two-hour workshop co-hosted by the Preparing Future Faculty program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), the Graduate Student Association’s Digital Humanities Group, and the Fordham Digital Humanities Consortium.

The workshop, which was held in April at the Rose Hill campus, was attended by graduate students studying the humanities, and featured presentations by Grace Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of history; Ralph Vacca, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies; Katherina Fostano, visual arts coordinator in the department of Art History; and Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history.

Vacca focused on digital tools such as MaxQDA, which allow students to pull and analyze social media posts, chart music data, and scrape sites for content. Mundy and Fostano showed how they use online projects to help students interpret imagery, such as Mundy’s digital project, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. And Shen talked about the ways students can integrate the social reading platform Perusall and the multimedia book platform Scalar into their classwork.

The Preparing Future Faculty program was started two years ago by Lillian Cicerchia, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate and GSAS higher education leadership fellow. Cicerchia said the goal is to give Ph.D. students—many of whom will teach—tools that will help them in the job market upon graduation.

Six Competencies

It’s built upon six workshops dedicated to specific competencies: discipline-based pedagogy, teaching with a mission, classroom observation/mentorship experience, digital pedagogy, perspectives on diversity, and improvement through reflection.

“Graduate students often don’t know when they first start teaching what lengths they have to go to articulate and develop their own teaching philosophy,” Cicerchia said.

“You can have success by articulating what it is that you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and not just replicating the patterns you’ve seen before and how you were educated. It actually requires some conscious work.”

Cicerchia, who facilitated all six of the workshops, said the digital pedagogy meeting gave her plenty of ideas that she plans to use for her classes in the future. She learned about the social annotation reading program Perusall, for instance, which gives students the ability to write discussion questions, comment on content, and see each other’s comments and questions.

Something to Be Proud Of

Another attendee at the digital pedagogy workshop was Patrick Debrosse, who like McDonald is pursuing a Ph.D. in history, with a focus on Medieval Studies. Debrosse presented at Fordham’s International Symposium on Digital Scholarship in June; he said workshops like it made it clear that while technology is great for showcasing and storing research, what’s most exciting is the way it can make research itself collaborative. Digital projects can also live on in the public sphere, he said, and can thus burnish a students’ resumes.

“These tools provide an opportunity for student to invest in the work they’re doing. It’s not just something they’re receiving, but something they can be proud of, and they’ve achieved, working with a professor instead of just receiving something from them,” he said.

“You also have to think about what the after effects of a digital project are, and couple that with very simple, do-it-yourself approaches where you don’t hire an expensive software engineer to do the latest and greatest thing, because that’s going to fall apart within a decade or so. Instead, you should use the tools that you know are going to be durable, and figure out how to do the digital work yourself.”

Using technology to make research widely available to the public was another topic widely discussed in the technology workshop. McDonald said that when he teaches future history course, he’s considering assigning students a Wikipedia page to research and update, so it reflects how historians understand events and people’s roles in history.

“Having students reinvigorate common bases of knowledge on the internet with good research can really be a benefit for everyone,” he said.

For decades, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi had been hiding in plain sight at Fordham. This year, it was part of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art took in the exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque from late July to mid-October this year, one of the paintings they likely saw for the first time was The Adoration of the Magi. For more than a century, it had been seen only by visitors to the Fordham president’s office in Cunniffe House.

The 1683 painting depicts the famous scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham during the mid-19th century, shortly after the University’s founding, and likely first put on display at Fordham sometime around 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. During his lifetime, he exported paintings widely throughout Latin America. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early 17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, was touted as one of the highlights of the Met show, along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall masterpiece Villalpando also painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American art in the American Wing at the Met, said The Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine. “The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity and his mother’s is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

A Chance Rediscovery

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus long before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino studies at Fordham, stumbled upon a mention of it in the University archives while researching several other paintings in the Fordham collection.

“It must have been in 1999 or so,” she said, “when the president’s office asked me to look at four paintings in the council room that somebody thought might be from Latin America. It turns out they were not particularly good or notable paintings, but in doing a little research on them I found mention of a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando. That intrigued me because he’s an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like a Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

The document she found, an inventory of art at Fordham that was taken during the 1940s, described the Fordham Villalpando as being more than eight feet tall. But when she tried to determine its whereabouts, nobody seemed to have any information—until she mentioned the subject matter.

“That’s when someone said, ‘You know, there’s a big painting of the Epiphany in the president’s office.’ So people understood its imagery and the subject matter, although they had no recognition of the painter himself,” Mundy said. “Of course, Villalpando’s not exactly a household name, so it wasn’t until the Met show that people realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really important.’ I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

The show, Mundy said, was years in the making. After seeing the Fordham Villalpando, she contacted Clara Bargellini, Ph.D., an academic in Mexico who would go on to serve as a co-curator of the Met exhibit. “We had the painting photographed, and I would bring people in to see it, so word got out about this painting among specialists.”

An Extensive Restoration

Getting The Adoration of the Magi from Rose Hill to the Met was no simple task, however. “The painting was literally nailed into the wall, at least since the 1940s,” Mundy said. So in September 2016, the Met sent a team of specialists to Fordham, and they worked closely with Fordham’s carpenters to make sure the painting could be removed safely, without damaging either the 334-year-old artwork or the wall itself.

Because of its size—78 inches wide and 99 inches high—the painting was Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for nearly 10 months, during which time she traveled to Mexico to see other examples of Villalpando’s work during the same period in his life.

Before she could begin, however, she had to determine how best to proceed. “What’s varnish? And what’s an old paint? It’s a technical examination to be sure that we can separate the original from the later restoration, and that process takes some time,” she said. “Then we began the restoration work: cleaning the picture and cleaning off the old repairs, most of which were terribly discolored.”

Mahon said that the varnish coating the painting had to be delicately removed and replaced, and although the structure of the painting was in good condition when she received it, the backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced. “It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration was painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives.

A Broader Perspective

At a July 24 preview of the Met show for members of the media, Diego Gómez Pickering, consul general of Mexico in New York, said the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated 1 million Mexican Americans living in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom, like Villalpando, hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country. We cannot understand the fabric of American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said, calling the exhibition “a chance to build … bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies, and nations.”

Mundy said she’s pleased that the exhibition has called greater public attention to the “extraordinary quality and beauty and richness of Mexican painting.” She said she sees the show as part of a trend in which big U.S. museums are looking beyond traditional subject matter.

“Before, maybe 20 years ago, people thought Europe had it all. But there’s been a growing sense that art history and art heritage doesn’t just come from Europe,” she said. “And this of course reflects the changing demographics in the United States, where more people, American citizens, are coming from Spanish-speaking countries.”

As an example, Mundy cited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2016 show Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910 to 1950, which the museum described as the most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art in the U.S. in 70 years. Mundy was teaching a course on modern Latin American art at Fordham at the time, and she decided to give her students the opportunity to see the show. “We hijacked a Ram Van and went down there on a Saturday,” she said. “This was a class that had a lot of art history majors in it, so they were really jazzed about being able to go.”

One of those students, Peter Vergara, called the exhibition a “cornerstone show for the Latin American art scene as a whole,” and he said seeing it and the Villalpando exhibit at the Met have been formative experiences for him.

“Seeing these enormous exhibits of Latin American and Mexican art in the U.S., and how they are promoting dialogue and cross-cultural interaction between American visitors and Mexican art, and also between Mexican tourists and American cultural centers, is exciting,” he said. “It makes the gaps feel a little smaller.”

Vergara, a Fordham senior who is writing his final seminar research paper on the Fordham Villalpando painting, knows firsthand the value of cross-cultural experiences. He was born in Washington, D.C., but moved with his family to Spain as a toddler when his father took a job in Madrid. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, and spent countless hours at the Prado Museum.

“As a child, I was there all the time. My parents and I would go together in the morning. We would stay for an hour or two, and then they would go to lunch or to see other things, and I would stay for hours,” he said. “My earliest memories are of just lying on the floor of the gallery.”

Vergara moved to the U.S. to attend Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, and enrolled at Fordham in 2014. As a first-year student, he developed a passion for art history through two courses in particular, including one on colonization in Latin America, and with support from Mundy and other Fordham professors, landed a string of internships—at the Hispanic Society, the Cloisters, and Sotheby’s.

“I was aware of this world of Latin American art from freshman year, and now it’s shaping where I want to go with my career,” said Vergara, who has applied for a Fulbright study grant to Mexico, where he has been accepted into a master’s degree program at Universidad Iberoamericana.

A Painter and an Inventor

Vergara said his research paper would focus in part on the complex exchange of influences in Villalpando’s art. “While Mexico is heavily tied to Spain through the viceroyalty in Villalpando’s time, how much is European and how much is newer? How much are these artists breaking away and how much are they staying with tradition?”

He’s also focusing on the iconography in the work. “Some of it is very clear,” he said, “like we have wheat on the floor next to Mary and Jesus, and that’s a clear reference to the Eucharist.” But the meaning of other elements in the painting is less clear. For example, he said, “We might have a self-portrait of Villalpando near the back, where he’s looking around the column,” near the figure of Joseph, who is depicted wearing a green robe. “That’s a classic pose for a self-portrait,” he said, and it was common at the time for artists to include themselves in paintings of the Epiphany, to show themselves as “witnesses to the incarnation, among the very first.”

Vergara said that although the painting is “a big, big nod to Rubens,” an argument can be made that Villalpando is also staking a claim not simply as an imitator of the day’s European masters but as an artist in his own right. “He signs this one ‘Villalpando invento ipinto,’” Vergara said. “So he invented and he painted.”

Mundy called the inclusion of The Adoration of the Magi in the Met exhibit a long-overdue recognition for a masterpiece that for many years was hidden in plain sight. She’s especially taken by Villalpando’s ability to “paint the emotion in scenes,” she said. “You can see the response of all of the figures to the Christ child. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face.

“What’s also fabulous is the big crowd scene behind them,” she added. “Every member of the crowd who is peering in to see the Christ child has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art take in Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque, a new exhibition opening on July 25, one of the pieces they’ll see for the first time is the Adoration of the Magi.

For a little over a century, the painting has only been seen by visitors to Fordham’s Office of the President in Cunniffe House. The 1683 painting depicts a scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham shortly after the University’s founding and first put on display in 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early-17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, is being touted as one of the highlights of the show along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall canvas that he painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American Art in the American Wing at The Met, said Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine.

“The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity (and his mother’s) is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus for nearly a century before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino Studies, stumbled upon a mention of it in 2001 in the University’s archives while researching four other paintings.

“I couldn’t believe it, because Villalpando is an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like the Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

“I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

Because of its size, (78 inches wide and 99 inches high), it has been Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for the past 10 months. Mahon noted that over the years, the varnish coating the painting had become discolored and needed to be delicately removed and replaced. The backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced as well.

“It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration is painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives. As part of the restoration process, Mahon traveled to Mexico to see in-person other examples of Villalpando’s works from that same period.

At a July 24 press preview at the Met, Diego Gómez Pickering, Consul General of Mexico in New York, said the timing of the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated one million Mexican Americans living in the New York Metropolitan area. who, like Villalpando, primarily hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country, along with the African American, European and the Indian American community.  We cannot understand the fabric of the American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said.

“I hope you will enjoy the exhibition and have a chance to build with us bridges that will cross boundaries, bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies and nations, bridges that no wall will ever tear apart.”

Mundy called the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 15, a long overdue recognition for a masterpiece that was hidden in plain sight.

“Villalpando has a very special way of painting the emotion in scenes. In this one, you can see that response of all of the figures to the Christ Child, who is seated on Mary’s lap. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face, and the way she’s holding the baby,” she said.

“What’s also fabulous is, the big crowd scene behind them, and every member of the crowd whose peering in to see the Christ Child as he’s seated on his mothers’ lap has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., professor of English and American Studies and author of The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard, 2015)

“At the top of my summer book stack is Laura Kipnis’ new book,  Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Harper, 2017). Kipnis’ investigation of the Title IX excesses on many American campuses has a personal side: When she wrote an article about a Title IX investigation at her own university, she found herself the subject of an investigation, too–and that inquiry helped to inspire this book. This is a book about current events, indeed.”

Bill Baker, Ph.D., director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education

“My summer reading gets a double dip as I read sitting in the lantern room of a lighthouse we care for in Nova Scotia (Henry Island). This year I’ll be reading Enough Said (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Mark Thompson, the New York Times Company president and former BBC Director General. He has written a powerful book about what’s gone wrong with the language of politics. I’ll also be reading The Naked Now (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009) by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar who writes some of the most powerful meditative philosophy I’ve ever read. A lighthouse is a good place to read about God and the spiritual light.”

James McCartin, Ph.D., associate professor of theology

“As a father of three young kids, I’ve grown to appreciate books that offer a window into how children see the world–maybe in an effort to figure out my own kids. Therefore, my summer reading season begins with two childhood memoirs. The first is Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years a-Growing (J.S. Sanders Books, 1998), set on a remote island in the southwest of Ireland a century ago, and the second will be Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2004) which narrates his story as an immigrant growing up between Cuba and the United States in the 1960s. Then, I’ll pick up a book I started last summer but put down as the school year began, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. As to Dostoyevsky, I’ve long been embarrassed to say that I’ve never read him, so now’s my chance to put the embarrassment behind me.”

Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John D. Boyd, S.J. Chair in Poetic Imagination and the director of Poets Out Loud

“A growing pile of books in my field has been staring at me balefully from my night table for some time, and before they topple over I hope particularly to read more  sections of two of them that I have dipped into only briefly before: Brian Cummings’ The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford, 2002) and Reuben Brower’s Fields of Light (Greenwood Press, 1980). I am in the middle of an extraordinary magical realist novel, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017), as well as some volumes of poetry, such as Alicia Ostriker’s latest, Waiting for the Light (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Christina M. Greer, Ph.D., associate professor and associate chair of the political science department

“Since I am preparing to write a lot this summer, I tend to read fiction to help me ‘hear’ language better. Right now I am finishing a series of short stories by Mia Alvar, In the Country (Oneworld Publications, 2016) about Filipino migrations and relationships. I plan on finishing Luther Campbell’s’ memoir The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City (HarperCollins, 2015) about Liberty City, Miami, Florida. He’s a controversial figure, but his analysis of residential racism and segregation in Miami is fascinating. I am also going to read Underground Airlines (Random House, 2016) by Ben Winters, an alternative history of life in the U.S. had the Civil War never happened. [And] since I am teaching Congress in the fall, I’ll likely begin rereading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate (Vintage Books, 2003), about my favorite president and brilliant congressman, LBJ.”  

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history

“My summer reading list is heavy with books on cities, a topic I’ve written a lot about. At the top is Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a novel set in New York in the 1940s, and I’m getting ready to devour it as soon as I get through my end-of-year reports. David Lida is a Mexico-City-based writer; I can dip into his book of short essays, Las llaves de la ciudad (Sexto Piso, 2008) [Keys to the City], whenever I need to be transported to one of my favorite cities in the world. And then there’s Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens (Rockport Publishers, 2003) by Tara McLellan; I’m downsizing to an apartment and trying to figure out how to cram all my cooking gear (fermentation is much on my mind) into a smaller space.”

Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center

“The number one book on my summer reading list is Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved By Beauty (Scriber, 2017), by Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy.  When I was a high school student at Xavier, we sometimes went to the Catholic Worker House on the Lower East Side, and I had the honor to meet Dorothy Day a couple of times.  When Kate Hennessy spoke at the Fordham Rose Hill campus this year, I was unable to attend, so I’ll make up for missing that event with reading her book.”

Laura Wernick, Ph.D., professor of social work in the Graduate School of Social Service

“Given our political climate and the rise of the alt-right, coupled with ongoing investigations and hearings surrounding Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign, my reading list is focused upon understanding this context and history. Having just read Dark Money and Trump Revealed (Doubleday, 2016), my summer reading list has included All the President’s Men (Pocket Books, 2005) and The Final Days (Simon & Schuster, 2005), along with Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face (Riverhead Books, 2012), a critical read to understand the rise and power of Putin. I plan on following this with a series of edited volumes about hope and moving forward from the resistance movement.”  

Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., associate professor of pastoral counseling and director of the Pastoral Care and Counseling program at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education

“I will be reading The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015) by Bessel van der Kolk. The book examines holistic approaches to trauma work. I’m interested in the way that spirituality relates to stress related growth, which is the examination of positive psychological consequences of moving through stress. I have a book contract related to the topic. This book touches on related themes of trauma and whole body healing.”

–Veronika Kero

However, in 1521 the Spanish conquistadors arrived, bringing with them foreign diseases and advanced weaponry, and the city succumbed. A letter from Hernán Cortés, who led the expedition through Mexico, to King Charles V of Spain reports that Tenochtitlan had fallen and that his army had “destroyed and razed it to the ground.”

There is one problem with Cortés’ account, though, says Barbara Mundy, PhD: it isn’t true.

The Aztec empire endures

Mundy, a professor of art history who specializes in pre-Columbian America, takes Cortés to task in a new book released this summer, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (University of Texas Press, 2015). In it, Mundy argues that the fall of the mighty Aztec empire was not a clear-cut victory for Spain. Tenochtitlan was not utterly destroyed by the conquistadors. Moreover, it remained a distinctly Amerindian city ruled by Aztec elites decades after the Spanish invasion.

“The Spaniards presented themselves as totally self-sufficient and in charge once they conquered Tenochtitlan, but it wasn’t like that,” said Mundy, who is the co-creator of the NEH-funded website Vistas, a digital collection of visual culture in Spanish America, and a fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

“There were 300 Spaniards and all around them were tens of thousands of conquered natives. So there was a delicate balance to maintain.”

The balance that was created, said Mundy, was more of a “working relationship” in which the native elite was given just enough power to keep the city running. The Spaniards still depended heavily on the Aztecs to maintain functionality.

Mundy first noticed this historical discrepancy while perusing ancient Aztec texts (she has studied the Aztec language of Náhuatl). Although the famed Tenochtitlan king Moctezuma was killed during the conquest, his reign did not end with his death, Mundy said. His descendants ruled for decades afterward, keeping the Aztecs squarely in power.

“Part of the reason they were so powerful was because they controlled the labor. When you needed 60,000 workers to do something, the Spanish viceroy couldn’t just clap his hand and make it happen—but the Aztec overlord could,” Mundy said.

The ecological genius of Tenochtitlan

Unlike the invading Spaniards, the Aztecs, who called themselves the Mexica (pronounced meh-SHEE-kah), were also master urbanists in an ecologically difficult region. Built on an island in the middle of a saltwater lake, Tenochtitlan drew its potable water from a system of dikes the Mexica built to collect and preserve fresh water that flowed in from the West. These dikes also helped during the rainy seasons, when Tenochtitlan was prone to flooding.

The city included a network of canals and aqueducts to irrigate massive chinampas (floating gardens) that the Mexica cultivated and to dispose of waste in order to curb the spread of water-born diseases such as cholera.

“The Mexica had very sophisticated knowledge of their environment,” Mundy said. “They offer a positive model for us today as we deal with drought and climate change. I think we can take some lessons from the Mexica about how to better cohabitate with Mother Earth and live in our world in a less destructive way.”

A confluence of histories

The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan also describes the Mexica’s brutality—they are infamous for offering human sacrifices to their gods. And yet, Mundy points out in her book, this style of warfare—albeit brutal—was far nobler than that of their European counterparts.

“Mexica warfare was fought among men as a valiant exercise. The idea was to capture your enemies alive, because the most noble thing you could do was bring your captives back and sacrifice them in your temple,” she said.

“The Spaniards were very different. They defeated the Mexica by breaking the water system in Tenochtitlan and starving everyone into submission—including women and children, whom the Mexica would never harm in battle, because behaving like that would compromise their sense of what it means to be human. So, to the Mexica, the Spaniards were horrible barbarians.”

Mundy’s message in the book, and in her research overall, is frank: History does not belong solely to the winners. We have to be attentive to other historical accounts—from both the conquered as well as the conquerors.

“There’s never just one historical narrative. The victors may get to tell their story first, but there are these other enduring stories that belong to other groups of people, and it’s important to understand that those histories have legacies that influenced the way the world is shaped today.”

Eight years ago, Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., associate professor of music and art history, found herself struggling to dig up resources on the colonial period to use in a course on colonial Latin American art.

As an art history scholar who had veered early in her career toward researching the cartography of New Spain (as Mexico was once called), Mundy was doubly aware of the reasons for such thin source material: Nations such as Mexico and Peru, who won their struggle for independence from Spain in the 19th century, wanted little to do with their Spanish heritage.

“The colonial years were looked upon as a time when these nations were in bondage to Spain, so there weren’t a lot of art history resources from the period,” Mundy said. “Nowadays, however, scholars have become more interested in the idea of cultures in contact with each other. Suddenly, the colonial moment in Latin America seems pregnant with possibilities.”

Given the changing scholarly landscape, Mundy and a colleague, Dana Leibsohn, Ph.D., associate professor of art at Smith College, created VISTAS, Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820, a collaborative visual research project that includes a website (www.smith.edu/vistas) and a CD. The VISTAS site houses 350 high-resolution images of Latin American art and visual culture.

In devising the project, Mundy and Leibsohn placed themselves at the forefront of a new paradigm, both in concept and in execution.

“Traditional art history looks at monuments created by elites—sculptures, portraits—and those are what one encounters in museums of art,” Mundy said. “But people have created things, and have paid attention to visual qualities in a whole range of creations—things like a tobacco bag, or a teapot. A big challenge of VISTAS is to not only include the canonical monuments, like the cathedral in Mexico City, but also include objects that reflected the creations of a wider span of people, particularly indigenous people.

“We are broadening the canon so that we don’t look at elite works in isolation,” Mundy said, “but actually view them in dialogue with a much wider sphere of visual products from people from many ranks of society.”

Along with filling a gap in scholarship, Mundy said the VISTAS project seeks to inspire a new approach to scholarly narrative as well. Unlike a textbook, which presents the narrative to a student, the CD and the website enable users to devise their own narrative and to expand on learning styles.

“There are any possible number of paths through VISTAS,” Mundy said. “We’re trained to value the [existing]narrative, but in pedagogy, that’s not actually how we learn. It’s much more effective to explore a topic oneself.”
Mundy’s interest in seeing things from all angles developed early, when she realized, while studying pre-Colombian art, that Aztec civilization was only really known through “hostile sources.”

“I wanted to know, How do you actually find the truth about this culture?” she said.
Mundy started digging through colonial source material. She found a corpus of maps of New Spain, made by both indigenous people and Spaniards, that hadn’t been written about. The result of her study was a book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (University of Chicago Press, 1996), which explored the notion of a map as a culturally subjective work of art that reveals both geography and a fuller sense of a community’s and a people’s history. To Mundy, reading a map is less about where one is going than where one has been.

“At the time there was an open question as to whether cartography was really a Western phenomenon—partly for lack of evidence of other cartographic traditions,” she said. “So the book was news to a lot of people that there was actually a mapping tradition that existed independently of European mapping. These maps revealed a deep wellspring of traditional indigenous mapping, with a different set of understandings [of the environment].

“Mapping is the result of cultural negotiation,” she said. “In that the final map is not just the product of one artist, but an agreed-upon vision of what the community looks like.”

For Mundy, who is embarking on new research exploring the transition of 16th century Mexico City from the Aztec capital to the Spanish colonial capital, understanding that cultural negotiation in the creation of art is the common thread running through her scholarship.

“The art of this period was not just created by Spaniards alone, although they were culturally dominant, but it was really the result of interchange between this huge indigenous society and the Spaniards,” she said. “And to get at those interchanges, or mergers, is what I work on.”

– Janet Sassi