“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.

It’s a story that Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., is well-versed in.

Soyer, a professor of history, specializes in American immigration history, American Jewish history, and the history of New York City. His most recent book is The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920(NYU Press, 2012), which he co-authored with Annie Polland, vice president of education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

It is the second of a three-volume history of the Jews of New York called City of Promises, which was named the Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Soyer’s and Polland’s volume focuses a great deal on the built environment.

“We wanted to show the interaction between this group of people and the city as a whole,” he said. “They left a mark, literally, on the streets and the structures of the city, many of which survived Jewish communities in certain neighborhoods. You can still see many of these buildings today even if they’re not occupied by Jewish people anymore.”

In the 1920s, the city’s population was 25 percent Jewish. Jewish communities could be found in all the boroughs. The Bronx was 43 percent Jewish and, by 1910, Brownsville, Brooklyn had a stronger Jewish identity than Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side is the site of two of Soyer’s favorite historical landmarks: The Forward building on East Broadway, and the Jarmulowsky Bank on Canal Street. The Forward was the leading Yiddish daily newspaper in the world and the biggest socialist daily paper in the country.

Reliefs of socialist leaders Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Liebknecht above the entrance of the building illustrate the paper’s status as the center of the socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century.

“In the second decade of the 20th century, when the building was built, the Socialist Party was for a short period of time the leading party in the Jewish districts,” Soyer said. “It elected a congressman from the Lower East Side, a number of state assemblymen, city aldermen, and a municipal judge.”

Not far away from what Soyer termed a monument to immigrant socialism is the Jarmulowsky Bank, a monument to immigrant capitalism. Sender Jarmulowsky was a Russian Jew who arrived in the 1870s, Soyer said, which was “very early in this wave of Yiddish-speaking Jews.” He started a successful ship ticket money transfer business and built the bank.

“Immigrant banks were very common at the time. Some of them survived and became sizable institutions. The Jarmulowsky Bank actually collapsed right after World War I, [when]there was a run on the bank.”

The pushes and pulls of those two economic systems in New York’s Jewish immigrant community figure in some of Soyer’s upcoming work.

His paper, “Making Peace with Capitalism? Jewish Socialism Enters the Mainstream, 1933-1944,” was published in Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012). And “Support the Fair Deal in the Nation; Abolish the Raw Deal in the City: The Liberal Party in 1949,” is forthcoming in New York History.

Soyer details how the American Socialist Party splintered into several factions after the Russian Revolution and the New Deal, with one group in New York joining with other independent liberals and labor leaders to create the American Labor Party.

“The New Deal enacted things like social security, unemployment insurance, all kinds of government regulations, and an inheritance tax. Fairly moderate socialists in the mold of modern European Socialist Democrats started saying, ‘This isn’t exactly socialism but it is what we’ve been demanding short of socialism—old age pensions, disability pensions, unemployment insurance,’” he said.

Those who formed the American Labor Party in 1936 took advantage of a quirk in New York state election law to endorse other parties’ progressive, pro-labor candidates, like Republican Fiorello LaGuardia.

This lasted until 1944, when a faction allied with the Communist Party seized control of the ALP. Anti-communist members left to form the Liberal Party. As recently as the 1990s, the Liberal Party endorsements were sought after by candidates looking for support from the left; at its height, it helped re-elect John Lindsay mayor in 1969 and elect Rudy Giuliani in 1993.

“As one Liberal Party activist once put it, ‘We can’t guarantee that a Democrat running for state office will win if we endorse him, but we can guarantee that he will lose if we don’t.’ So that’s where their power came from,” Soyer said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Liberal Party’s influence gradually waned. In 2002 it lost its spot on the New York state ballot.

“This kind of politics is descended from the Jewish immigrant labor socialist politics that you see at the beginning of the 20th century,” Soyer said. “The core of the Liberal Party came out of that experience. In fact, Jewish politics shaped New York’s politics to such an extent that it is central to a full understanding of the history of the city.”

It’s a story that Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., is well-versed in.

Soyer, a professor of history, specializes in American immigration history, American Jewish history, and the history of New York City. His most recent book is The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920(NYU Press, 2012), which he co-authored with Annie Polland, vice president of education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

It is the second of a three-volume history of the Jews of New York called City of Promises, which was named the Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council. Soyer’s and Polland’s volume focuses a great deal on the built environment.

“We wanted to show the interaction between this group of people and the city as a whole,” he said. “They left a mark, literally, on the streets and the structures of the city, many of which survived Jewish communities in certain neighborhoods. You can still see many of these buildings today even if they’re not occupied by Jewish people anymore.”

In the 1920s, the city’s population was 25 percent Jewish. Jewish communities could be found in all the boroughs. The Bronx was 43 percent Jewish and, by 1910, Brownsville, Brooklyn had a stronger Jewish identity than Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The Lower East Side is the site of two of Soyer’s favorite historical landmarks: The Forward building on East Broadway, and the Jarmulowsky Bank on Canal Street. The Forward was the leading Yiddish daily newspaper in the world and the biggest socialist daily paper in the country.

Reliefs of socialist leaders Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Liebknecht above the entrance of the building illustrate the paper’s status as the center of the socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century.

“In the second decade of the 20th century, when the building was built, the Socialist Party was for a short period of time the leading party in the Jewish districts,” Soyer said. “It elected a congressman from the Lower East Side, a number of state assemblymen, city aldermen, and a municipal judge.”

Not far away from what Soyer termed a monument to immigrant socialism is the Jarmulowsky Bank, a monument to immigrant capitalism. Sender Jarmulowsky was a Russian Jew who arrived in the 1870s, Soyer said, which was “very early in this wave of Yiddish-speaking Jews.” He started a successful ship ticket money transfer business and built the bank.

“Immigrant banks were very common at the time. Some of them survived and became sizable institutions. The Jarmulowsky Bank actually collapsed right after World War I, [when]there was a run on the bank.”

The pushes and pulls of those two economic systems in New York’s Jewish immigrant community figure in some of Soyer’s upcoming work.

His paper, “Making Peace with Capitalism? Jewish Socialism Enters the Mainstream, 1933-1944,” was published in Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012). And “Support the Fair Deal in the Nation; Abolish the Raw Deal in the City: The Liberal Party in 1949,” is forthcoming in New York History.

Soyer details how the American Socialist Party splintered into several factions after the Russian Revolution and the New Deal, with one group in New York joining with other independent liberals and labor leaders to create the American Labor Party.

“The New Deal enacted things like social security, unemployment insurance, all kinds of government regulations, and an inheritance tax. Fairly moderate socialists in the mold of modern European Socialist Democrats started saying, ‘This isn’t exactly socialism but it is what we’ve been demanding short of socialism—old age pensions, disability pensions, unemployment insurance,’” he said.

Those who formed the American Labor Party in 1936 took advantage of a quirk in New York state election law to endorse other parties’ progressive, pro-labor candidates, like Republican Fiorello LaGuardia.

This lasted until 1944, when a faction allied with the Communist Party seized control of the ALP. Anti-communist members left to form the Liberal Party. As recently as the 1990s, the Liberal Party endorsements were sought after by candidates looking for support from the left; at its height, it helped re-elect John Lindsay mayor in 1969 and elect Rudy Giuliani in 1993.

“As one Liberal Party activist once put it, ‘We can’t guarantee that a Democrat running for state office will win if we endorse him, but we can guarantee that he will lose if we don’t.’ So that’s where their power came from,” Soyer said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Liberal Party’s influence gradually waned. In 2002 it lost its spot on the New York state ballot.

“This kind of politics is descended from the Jewish immigrant labor socialist politics that you see at the beginning of the 20th century,” Soyer said. “The core of the Liberal Party came out of that experience. In fact, Jewish politics shaped New York’s politics to such an extent that it is central to a full understanding of the history of the city.”