But Crisanti knew she needed to move to the United States to finish her research.

“I was this Italian scholar in Italy studying the impact of Americanization on Italy during the Cold War. I realized there was no better way to complete my studies than by coming to the U.S.,” she said.

She came to New York in part to work with Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., a Fordham history professor who specializes in the socio-cultural history of modern Italy and has written about nationalism, gender, race, and the making of national identities.

“I knew and appreciated her work, but most of all, I liked the idea that her specific area of expertise was close to mine, but not equal,” Grisanti said.

“To me, this meant that she could be an ideal mentor, but also leave space for my personal initiatives and ideas, which she did wonderfully.”

‘Europeans are Lovin’ It?’

Crisanti’s final dissertation is titled “Europeans Are Lovin’ It? Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and the Challenges to American Global Businesses in Italy and France, 1886 – 2015.” The goal of the paper, for which she was advised by Patriarca and Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., is to refute widely held assumptions that American corporations have succeeded because they promote uniquely “American” products around the world.

Backed by archival sources spanning three languages and two continents, Crisanti makes the case that companies such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were themselves changed as much as they changed the local culture where they established subsidiaries.

“In a context in which more and more, we tend to associate globalization with enduring American hegemony and enduring forms of American imperialism, what is American globalization actually?” she asked in an interview.

Influence Goes Both Ways

In fact, Crisanti makes the case that the soda, hamburgers, and French Fries associated with the two companies are not exclusively American, due to the influence of Europeans on their development.

The success of these firms rests on being “glocal,” she said, which is why a McDonald’s in Rome is technically an Italian company that caters to the local population by offering a McCrunchy Bread with Nutella for dessert.
Crisanti argues that a better alternative to this kind of globalization is embodied in groups such as the anti-globalization movement spearheaded by French farmer José Bové and Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement, which are rooted in—and support—local culture but also “glocal.”

She has worked with groups like these that she says “valorize” cultural traditions and hopes her research will support them further.

“The dissertation became an opportunity to study not just the reaction against Americanization, but also the reaction against globalization and the role played by major multinational corporations,” said Crisanti, who is currently interviewing for post-doctoral opportunities in Italy and the U.S. and hopes to get a position combining research and teaching.

Learning from the Past

Dietrich said what made Crisanti’s research so exciting is it tells a new story about not only the influence of American businesses in Europe in the 21st century but also the influence of European governments and societies on those American businesses and their adaptability.

“We all know the classic stories of Coca-Cola being associated with U.S. soldiers in World War II, but to see how McDonald’s met building codes to fit into Italian town life and hear how Coca Cola bottlers worked to develop their networks and made arguments for Coca Cola being part of those cultures, it’s really quite interesting,” he said.

“Today, we’re so caught up with and passionate about politics, and that extends to our understanding of corporations and their place in society, and I think it’s important for us to take a step back for a moment. Studying the diplomacy of business helps us understand that there are a lot of different factors at play in major decisions, and I don’t think we can get today right unless we have some distance from it.” By going all the way back to 1886 and the beginnings of Coca-Cola, he said, “she reminds us to take that distance.”

Crisanti said she knew moving to New York City would take her out of her comfort zone but ultimately found it to be an experience for growth. A big reason for this, she said, was that the history department at Fordham values cooperation over competitiveness.

“I believe that any program should first encourage students to cooperate and improve, and Fordham does that,” she said. “The human aspect is as valued as the academic/scholar aspect.”

“Once the order to go home came through, there was so much panic that we all needed to take a walk,” Roche said of the atmosphere in the newsroom.

Several members of the staff headed to Central Park to regroup. They decided that the edition set to go to press would move forward, albeit with a new headline: “New York State of Emergency.”

“We had to suspend production of print [after that], of course, but we kept the online edition running all through all of our remote classes and through this semester until just a few weeks ago when we put out our first print edition again,” Roche said of the late March issue.

Roche is graduating from FCLC with a degree in English and a minor in new media and digital design. He credited the Observer with giving him an outlook on communications that emphasizes linguistic and visual clarity, as well as pragmatism about the bottom line. The combination has prepared him well for a virtual internship he’ll have this summer in public affairs and web design at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Reporting During the Pandemic

He also gleaned some valuable lessons from rolling with the punches and learning how to pivot. As the 2019-2020 school year concluded, Roche said, the staff decided to focus on student success stories as well as pandemic-related news.

“We were concerned that we had to balance to the story of our time, but make it matter for Fordham; everyone could scroll through Twitter and get their dose of daily doom for the day,” he said. “We started covering what students were doing on their own, new hobbies, and community-building initiatives that were born of necessity.”

During his editorial tenure, despite the lockdown, the paper won a first-place award from the American Scholastics Association Newspaper Awards.

Anthony Hazel, FCLC ’07, student advisor and former editor at the paper, credits Roche with inspiring the staff at a critical time.

“He was rallying everyone to continue to participate and publishing at a moment and time when the Observer was more than a club,” said Hazel. “It was something genuinely needed, for information on how students were affected, how the University was operating—and when no one knew what was coming next.”

Business Experience

This school year, Roche stepped down as editor and moved into the more nuts-and-bolts role of business manager at the paper. There, he served in three capacities: club treasurer, advertising coordinator, and fundraising coordinator. He designed a new media kit for the paper and introduced its website to online advertising platforms (Google Adsense, Infolinks) for the first time. He also orchestrated a Giving Tuesday 2020 fundraiser and managed ad sales for the Observer 40th anniversary magazine.

Merging Media

Though he was steeped in copy as a newspaper editor, Roche also considers himself a visual media artist. As a digital native, he doesn’t make hard distinctions between the visual components of his work and the text.

“If you’re not doing both then you’re not telling the whole story, right?” he said.

Though his minor is called new media and digital design, Roche often reaches back to old-school analog for inspiration. He’s been studying the work of Keith Haring, often riffing on his work with doodles of his own.

“Visually he’s so just efficient,” he said of the ’80s pop art icon. “He’s able to communicate and very clean, clear ways,” he said.

He said that it was easy to make the jump from his Haring doodles to clean corporate work. At a summer internship at Printfly graphic apparel company in Philadelphia, for example, clients supplied unfinished artwork for him to translate into crisp logos.

Roche holds to the dictum of many an English major that being a better reader makes him a better writer. He said his biggest challenge in class was getting through Moby Dick. He added that while he came to Fordham with a personal writing style, his coursework forced him to consider the substance of his writing.

“I’m a fan of em-dashes and paragraph breaks, and at the Observer you could write quick punchy text, but in the English department I’ve been forced to dwell profoundly on analysis,” he said. “You are required to understand what is being talked about in a text and you have to communicate that effectively, sometimes by using a particular literary theory.”

Missing His Home Away from Home

Though currently studying remotely from his childhood home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, he said he misses his friends—and New York and the diversity of his FCLC classmates.

“It’s been tough to be away from that,” he said.

Though he will be doing his Chicago internship remotely, he said that he feels well-positioned to take a job anywhere when the pandemic is over.

“I really feel I can go anywhere and follow my passion,” he said. “It’s rough not to get to Chicago, but I’m hoping that this summer I can find out what it takes to be a writer who designs and a designer who writes.”

Below: In a stylistic departure from his corporate work, Roche combined his love of English with graphic art.  “I acquired a taste for vintage print media and an appreciation for old layouts,” he said. The “self-challenge” was to represent three Emily Dickinson poems in graphic format. The poems were Hope is the Thing With Feathers, My Life Had Stood — A Loaded Gun, and I Many Times Thought Peace Had Come.

Alexander Hendra Dwi Asmara, S.J., lives in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. But the homogenous society, he said, has bred intolerance, discrimination, and even violence against religious minorities. 

“People are very afraid that there will be war in the name of God. I believe religious education is one way to [defuse situations],” said Father Asmara, who will graduate this year from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education with his Ph.D. in religious education. “I want to make a religious education model that unites people from other religions.”

‘Education Is in My Blood’ 

Father Asmara was born and raised in Ambarawa, a small town in Indonesia. His parents, an elementary school teacher and a junior high English teacher, inspired him to pursue a career in higher education. But he also wanted to become a priest, like the ones who led services at the Catholic church beside his childhood home. 

Father Asmara earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Driyarkara School of Philosophy in Indonesia in 2008. Five years later, he received his master’s degree in theological studies from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. In 2014, he was ordained a priest.  

“As a Jesuit priest, I could fulfill my dream of being a person who works in education,” Father Asmara said. “And education is in my blood.” 

His Jesuit supervisors assigned him to Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where he taught Catholic religious education for two years. Then they asked him to earn a doctorate in religious education. 

Finding A Fordham ‘Family’ in America 

Father Asmara found Fordham, a Jesuit school that aligned with his values and offered courses in a city unlike any other in Indonesia—the biggest, most diverse city in the world, he said. In 2016, he moved to New York, where he learned about the Black Lives Matter movement and, for the first time in his life, visited neighborhoods that overflowed with diversity. 

“I went to Queens and saw every kind of Asian—Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Indian … I went to Brooklyn, where there were many different cultures, and the Bronx, with many Latinos,” Father Asmara said. “I was so happy [to be here].”

He lived in Fordham’s Jesuit community at Spellman Hall, where he was welcomed by priests who helped him adjust to life in America.  

“I found a family here,” Father Asmara said. “I made the right choice to come to Fordham.” 

A New Education Model to Address A Nationwide Problem

Over the next four years, he said, his classes taught him how to think critically and analyze situations from multiple perspectives—as a Catholic, as a priest, and as a human being. His professors also helped him develop a dissertation on a topic close to his heart: the deescalation of religious conflict in his native country.

“In the U.S., people are divided by race,” Father Asmara said. “In Indonesia, we are divided by religion.” 

His dissertation, “Educating for Unity in Diversity: Religious Education for Transformation in the Context of Everyday Religious Conflict in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia,” proposes a “live-in” religious education curriculum where students live in a home with people from a religious community different from their own.

“Live-in provides students with an opportunity to have an experience of living in another religious community. It guides students to become deeply rooted in their own religious tradition, while being open to learning from and collaborating with people of other religious traditions,” said Asmara’s dissertation mentor, Harold D. Horell, Ph.D., associate professor of religious education. “Hendra further develops the model of live-in education currently used in some Jesuit schools for young people in his country. The model of interreligious education he has developed could inform religious educational efforts in other contexts about how to address religious conflict by nurturing interreligious understanding and solidarity.” 

Last fall, Father Asmara returned to his job as a lecturer in Catholic religious education at Sanata Dharma University. He said he sees himself serving as a bridge between different faiths for the rest of his life. 

“As a religious teacher, I teach my students to have an inclusive way of thinking through the Catholic tradition,” Father Asmara said, speaking over Zoom from his home in Indonesia. “I want to make sure that my students have an open mind, the spirit of dialogue, and a way of thinking that doesn’t claim one religion is the only right religion.”

“I know what it’s like to be an inner-city kid, and it’s not always easy. I feel like I can help kids who may not like school, who may see me as part of the establishment. I want to let them know that I’m someone just like them, who ended up accomplishing their goals and actually getting into their career, regardless of what my background was or what people thought I could do,” said Chevalier, a 2020 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill who will be graduating this May with her master’s degree in adolescence education for social studies from the Graduate School of Education. 

Chevalier grew up in a single-mother household on Bailey Avenue in the Bronx. She attended public schools with many students who looked like her, but she said only two of her teachers were women of color: a Latina second-grade teacher who taught English and a Puerto Rican high school social studies teacher. 

“Those two inspired me to become a teacher because I never had anyone who looked like me in the classroom,” Chevalier said. 

Culturally Relevant Teaching

This past year, Chevalier was a student teacher at IN-Tech Academy MS/HS 368—the same high school she graduated from. She said her goal in all her classes is to create a culturally relevant curriculum where her students feel represented. One recent example is an American history lesson plan where she taught students about not only the 1776 Declaration of Independence, but also another relevant event from that same year—a petition for freedom by slaves. 

“Instead of just teaching my kids about the Declaration of Independence alone, I taught them about how the language of freedom not only inspired the enslaved in the United States, but all over the world, including Haiti,” Chevalier said. “I bring in primary sources that reflect another population that is usually ignored. I want to create a 360-world view of one issue instead of a 180-world view, which is what we’re accustomed to in our history education.”

Her longtime mentor Diane Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of curriculum and teaching at GSE, said Chevalier is a natural educator who helps her students understand social studies differently.  

“Teaching is not only helping students understand new concepts, but also helping them reexamine how they think,” Rodriguez said. “As a teacher, this is very powerful. In Chantal, it’s innate.” 

As a Fordham undergrad, Chevalier was able to volunteer at a high school in the Bronx, where she taught in a classroom for the first time and realized she was passionate about teaching. This inspired her to pursue her master’s degree in education through the five-year track at GSE, she said. 

“That opportunity provided by Fordham was the catalyst for me becoming a teacher,” said Chevalier, who was accepted to the University through the Higher Education Opportunity Program. 

Anti-Racism Commitment at Fordham Was ‘Life-Changing’

Chevalier said the Graduate School of Education also showed her how to put anti-racism at the forefront of her teaching pedagogy.

“It’s been life-changing to see all of my classes talk about race, especially since many of my classes are Caucasian-driven. They make sure that people who are Caucasian are recognizing the racist ideologies in our society and advocating against them by being anti-racist,” Chevalier said.

A decade from now, Chevalier said she wants to start a nonprofit that provides early internship and college access for inner-city high school students, who often lack opportunities to network and explore potential career paths. For now, her goal is to stay in the Bronx and serve the community she came from. 

“My ultimate goal in life is to make sure that I touch as many students as I can in a positive way, and that students remember me for my rigor, passion, empathy, and ability to connect with them as human beings,” Chevalier said. “I hope I can inspire young Black and brown girls and boys to reach their dreams and to work hard for them, no matter how difficult they are.”

“I fell in love with the research process, and I realized that you can still make an impact on people’s lives as a scientist,” said Daso, a graduating senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who will begin a Ph.D. program in biomedical engineering at Northwestern University this fall. “You don’t have to be a physician to practice medicine and create cures for people.” 

Daso is a chemistry major and philosophy minor in the Honors Program at Fordham College at Rose Hill. She is a 2020 Clare Boothe Luce Summer Scholar who has received multiple undergraduate research grants from Fordham and tutored peers in chemistry and biology. Her research has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals outside Fordham, including Biotechnology Journal and ACS Omega. She is also co-valedictorian of her class with a 4.0 GPA; she’ll address her classmates with a recorded speech during FCRH’s virtual diploma ceremony later this month. 

Bringing Damaged Tissues Back to Life

Over the past three years, Daso has conducted research in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine under Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., professor and chair of the chemistry department. Their goal is to use chemistry to help repair damaged tissues in the human body. 

“If you damage your skin, it grows back pretty fast. But there are other tissues like bones that are a lot harder to grow back,” Daso said. “I work in the field of regeneration, where we’re trying to create materials that encourage cells and tissues to grow and heal after an injury.”

Banerjee said her mentee displays all the qualities of a good scientist, especially curiosity. 

“She has that fundamental quality: ‘I want to figure this out, I want to see how this works.’ She understands the concepts, and she’s interested at the conceptual level,” Banerjee said. 

Not everything runs smoothly in the lab, however. Experimental cells have become contaminated with bacteria. A carefully curated cell culture once became unusable after miscommunication between a classmate, and the entire experiment needed to be restarted, said Daso. But when their experiments are finished and ready to share with the world, it’s an incredible feeling, she said.

Blending Abstract Science with ‘Real-World Ethical Issues’

Through her bioethics courses at Fordham, Daso said she realized that scientists need to prioritize clear, consistent communication about their research with the public. 

“That’s something Fordham has encouraged me to do through all my liberal arts classes, and I hope to bring that to the science field,” said Daso, who has co-presented her research at several national and regional conferences. “That’s how you’re going to develop the best products for people—when you can communicate with the people you’re developing a product for.”

Daso is also grateful for her philosophy minor, which encouraged her to explore her work from the perspective of people.

“I love how it incorporates analytical thinking with real-world ethical issues,” Daso said. “We need to start thinking about who we are engineering these materials for and how it can impact the social dynamics of our society.” 

A Mentor for Women in STEM

Daso grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, as the oldest of four siblings. Her parents graduated from the same Ohio university, but their eldest daughter wanted something different for herself. 

“Everyone in my family had always gone to school in Ohio, but when it came time for me to decide where to go for college, I decided I wanted to go on my own adventure and explore somewhere new for four years,” said Daso, who also played the trombone for Fordham Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

Ten years from now, Daso said, she hopes to become a strong female mentor in the STEM field, like the faculty mentor who first welcomed her into her lab.  

“Without Dr. Banerjee, I don’t know if I would have been able to make it in research and realize my full potential,” Daso said. “I would love to play that same role for other women in STEM.”