Hoffman was widely respected at Fordham for her interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative spirit. 

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., a professor of English, said that despite their different fields of study, they grew to be fast friends.

“I always knew we spoke the same language. Decade after decade, our conversations about one another’s work were immensely gratifying,” she said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, called Hoffman “a beloved member of Fordham’s Jewish Studies community” and said her work was marked by “great erudition and disciplinary depth.” 

“In her 1991 work on the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, she deployed a wide range of theoretical tools, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminist theory,” Teter said.

“She placed Agnon in conversation with other writers, such as James Joyce, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. … She was able to handle, with equal care and knowledge, traditional Jewish text and modern philosophy.

Hoffman was born on June 19, 1946, in New York City and grew up, along with her younger brother, David, in Brooklyn. She earned a bachelor’s in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She was a special member of Columbia’s Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

She joined Fordham in 1979 and taught courses in Israeli literature and film as part of Fordham’s Middle East Studies program. In 1992, she created the annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue series, which brought together Jewish and Christian scholars to address questions pertinent to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. In 2002, she also helped found Fordham’s Jewish Texts Reading Group, which still meets today. 

Hoffman was an accomplished painter. In 2015, she opened up about her creative process in a lecture at the Walsh Library. Last November, her art was displayed at Fordham’s Butler Gallery. 

Hoffman was known at Fordham as a skilled instructor and generous mentor. Fordham professor of biology Jason Morris, Ph.D., said she taught him how to be a better teacher.

“I learned so much from teaching with Anne. She appreciated nuance: she had a deep mistrust of facile answers and sharply drawn lines,” he wrote in an email.

“Her integrity and her empathy (and despite what she said, her expertise) came across in everything she said and did.”

In 2003, she was honored with Fordham’s Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities Award, and in 2019, she was recognized for 40 years of service at Fordham. She retired in 2023 and was named professor emerita.

Nikolas Oktaba, a 2015 graduate, took a class with Hoffman, and like many students, he kept in touch with her after graduation. He called her a “fount of tranquil wisdom.” 

“Not only did she put her students first, but she did so in a way that allowed them to see the perseverance, resilience, and strength that they already held within them,” he said. 

At the time of her death, in addition to her painting, she was teaching writing skills at the Fortune Society, teaching Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and conducting friendship-focused writing groups at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh via Zoom.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Anne’s husband of 57 years, said that he would forever hold onto a memory of the two of them walking together when she was an undergraduate and he was attending medical school.

“We had one of those adolescent discussions of the time: would we marry someone who was not Jewish? I responded very quickly, ‘That is an academic discussion because I am going to marry you.’ She was shocked, but the rest is history,” he said.

“We were not tied at the hip, but we were tied with our brains and our love.”

In an interview last year, Hoffman recalled what her late father-in-law said when she received her first summer grant to travel to Israel to explore Agnon’s archive. 

“He observed that it truly is the ‘goldeneh medineh’ (a Yiddish term referring to the U.S. as the golden land) when a Catholic university gives a Jewish girl money to go to Israel to work on Agnon,” she said. 

“Even more than the material support, his remark captures something of the openness and generosity that have been my experience of this university, my academic home for over 40 years.” 

Hoffman is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen.

A memorial service open to the University community will be announced at a later date.

But according to New York Times-bestselling author and Fordham President’s Council member Adriana Trigiani, author of 18 books with numerous producing and directing credits to her name, our only limitations are the ones we place on ourselves. That’s the message she delivered to a room of approximately 200 women — many who identified themselves as aspiring writers — at the eighth annual Fordham Women’s Summit on Oct. 16. 

‘Find Out What the Men Are Making’

During the summit’s keynote session, Trigiani took part in an inspiring and often hysterical conversation with Fordham’s Mary Bly, chair of the English department and author of bestselling romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James. Trigiani offered advice on topics spanning from how to keep to a writing schedule, how to handle the naysayers, and most of all, how to get paid what you deserve. 

“The number-one job of getting paid properly is finding out what the men are making,” said Trigiani, who is also a Fordham parent. “It doesn’t take much. Sometimes just half a cocktail and I can get the numbers out.”

Her tell-it-like-it-is delivery sent one wave of laughter after another through the crowd of career and philanthropy-focused women, many of whom were Fordham alumni or current students. She also offered words of encouragement and reassurance that touched on the real obstacles writers are facing today. 

‘You Cannot Create Without Engaging the Soul’

One such moment came when Trigiani addressed the looming specter of the new AI text generators that threaten the craft with occasionally convincing imitation. 

“Everybody’s worried about AI, but something’s missing there. That’s our secret — they don’t know, but the Jesuits would know. It’s that you cannot create without engaging the soul. It can look like it. It can walk like it. But it’s like one of them handbags in the street. It looks like a Birkin, but if you put two things in it the handles fall off,” said Trigiani. 

Giving with a Purpose

The attendees were encouraged to join Fordham Giving Circles, a form of collective philanthropy where groups of individuals donate to a pooled fund. Emmy Award-winning content creator Isabel Rivera, FCRH ’90, who served as the summit’s emcee, highlighted the Fordham Women’s Summit Scholarship Giving Circle, created to make a Fordham education accessible to students of all backgrounds. Since 2017, more than 100 Giving Circle members in 20 circles have joined forces to give more than one million to Fordham, Rivera said. 

For Trigiani, who along with Bly pledged to join a Giving Circle during the keynote session, it’s a worthy cause. 

“I like that I’m looking at the world at Fordham,” said Trigiani. “It’s not just privileged people … Every country in the world is represented. Every religion. Those Jesuits are sharp, because they know the meaning of the word Catholic. It means everybody.”

According to professor Jordan Alexander Stein, Ph.D., there are deeper truths left to explore through the lens of fantasy: Simone’s fantasies about herself, as well as those residing in our cultural imagination. 

“Fantasies always express something that is at some psychic level genuine to the person expressing them,” writes Stein in his new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press, September 2024). The book is an exploration of Simone’s life and work, and the ways she constructed her artistic persona to claim race and gender privilege that weren’t available to her otherwise. It’s also an exploration of the public’s relationship with Simone, and how we’ve lost some of her complexity in making her an icon. 

A professor of comparative literature in Fordham’s English department, Stein draws his conception of fantasy from psychoanalysis, which holds that, like free association and “Freudian slips,” our idle daydreams offer insight into the unconscious mind. 

“Yes, fantasies can contain lies, falsehoods … and any number of other conscious or unconscious delusions,” Stein writes. “Yet the appearance of these dishonesties … tends very much to reflect things we honestly wish or desire.”

Breaking Barriers

According to Stein, who drew upon a vast archive of her performances, images, and writings for the book, we can find clues to Simone’s desires in her subtle artistic choices. The way she injected a word with unexpected melancholy, or the songs she chose to cover and the way she chose to cover them, often point to a wish to rise above the confines of her marginalized identity as a Black woman.

For example, Stein notes, when Simone covered Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, she rarely switched the pronouns from “she” to “he” when singing about a love interest, as many singers do. Her choice to cover these white male artists at all is notable. Through her music, “she’s claiming certain kinds of race and gender privilege that weren’t afforded to her in other ways,” Stein said. 

A One-of-a-Kind Icon

So, why choose Nina Simone’s music for this exploration? Because, Stein said, “There’s nothing like it.” 

He related a story about ’90s musician Jeff Buckley covering “Lilac Wine” and calling it a “Nina Simone song” without seeming to realize he was covering a cover. “[Her music] is so unique and beautiful that people don’t even understand this is secondhand material. She’s so thoroughly made it hers. It’s a power that some artists have, but not many,” said Stein. 

And what about our collective fantasies of Nina Simone? Psychoanalysts might say she’s reached archetypal status, a shorthand for Black female genius, empowerment, and transcendence. Stein notes that it’s easy to forget she never got to view herself from our future vantage point, a distance that blurs much of the messy nuance of an extraordinary life. 

He hopes to restore some of it. 

“The reputations people have after they die are not always the complexity they lived in,” he said. “To honor both things and not collapse them into each other is part of the project of the book.”

Your book Monstrilio is a poignant literary novel and a horror story at the same time. What is it that draws you to horror as a way to explore deeper themes?

I think horror is an immediate way to be excited or creeped out or invested in something. And I think that atmospheres and feelings that horror can evoke are visceral. I like the idea of not everything being intellectual, but rather when a piece of work can also evoke raw emotion.

Monstrilio is very much in line with the trend of “elevated horror” that can be seen in films such as Get Out or Hereditary. Was this an influence on you?

With elevated horror, it’s done something to the culture that is like ‘OK I can do something different.’I think horror has also been pushed aside as not serious, and I think that has been a benefit in some ways because it’s like ‘I can do whatever I want if nobody’s going to take me seriously anyway.’

Being in that space allows you to do things you might not do if you’re just trying to be a ‘serious’ literary writer—I can be entertaining, but also smart.

The central mythology of Monstrilio—which involves the loss of a child—is explained in a folktale that one character tells another while they are in Mexico. Was this based on something?

This particular tale is something I came up with, but I wanted it to feel like it was old. I’ve seen this idea of bringing things back to life in so many folklores from around the world. The idea of losing a child has such an impact and so many tales around it—the Changelings, where you get a child that’s not your own, La Llorona in Mexico. I think all of those influenced me.

What was your initial spark of inspiration when you started writing the book?

I wanted to see if these characters could love something that’s monstrous. How far can love be stretched? Does it break? So I wanted to test the family and see if they could love a monster, and could that hold up? Not just love they have for each other, but self-love too.

Monstrilio has a very unique form that uses four different perspectives. How did you arrive at that?

Before I became a writer, I studied film and photography. One of the things I learned is how you place photographs on a wall for an exhibition and I found that really fascinating—how you create a sequence and how you think about negative space on the wall and what that creates between images. I was interested in seeing if I could do that in writing. I didn’t quite pull that off on that first try—it felt like four novellas mashed together. So I decided to do a continuous story in four different versions and that ended up making sense for Monstrilio’s character.

How has your experience at Fordham been so far?

I love the freedom I have to teach here, my colleagues are great, and my students are so dedicated. It’s been so much fun to read their work—it makes me think a lot about writing, so I’m learning a lot too. Students come up with great ideas and pick up on things I never would have.

The nonprofit serves as a professional association for women in media, including the publishing industry, digital media, newspapers, TV, film, and more. It awards scholarships each year to students in New York city colleges and universities to help “support the education of future publishing professionals who have demonstrated leadership in advancing literacy and promoting diversity/underrepresented voices in our industry.”

This was the first year the group added Fordham to its list of schools that receive awards each year, with Allen being the first recipient. As a part of the award, Allen received a $2,000 scholarship toward her education and three years of membership in the organization.

Nevin Mays, co-chair of scholarships and fellowships for the organization said that they ask applicants to talk about their experiences, leadership skills, and goals for diversity in media, which is what Allen said she did for hers.

“I wrote an essay to get the scholarship about how I want to go into publishing as a career and uplift women’s voices through publishing and writing,” she said.

Allen, who’s looking to pursue a career in the publishing industry, said that she always knew she wanted to work in the field.

“I’ve always loved books since I was little—I always knew it was my passion and that I wanted to be an English major when I got to college,” she said adding that she really enjoys autobiographical books because they help tell “people’s stories through challenges and triumphs,” and that helps her relate to different people.

Allen said that she was grateful to Fordham’s English department, particularly the creative writing faculty, for helping her enhance her skills.

“I think I’ve become a better writer throughout my four years,” she said, adding that her creative writing classes were small and interactive. “It was rigorous. The writing workshops we would do—every single student would give you feedback on your writing. It definitely helped me.”

Mary Bly, chair of the Fordham English department, who is a member of the group, said that the membership in the group is “by far the most useful” part of the award, since students get to attend events, network with the members, and participate in workshops.

Mays agreed that the networking and membership are the biggest benefits of the award, as usually the organization is open to women who have been in the field for 5+ years.

“They can take full advantage of everything we offer. We have so many great events that our event committee comes up with,” Mays said, citing a few recent ones on women in power, branding workshops, and a featured event with dancer Misty Copeland.

Bly said that she hopes this will help create more excitement for future applicants and create a cycle of women in the group from Fordham.

“So next year, we’ll have a new senior, but Sera will still be a member, and so we’re hoping we can have revolving memberships,” she said. “This [award]is a very exciting one.”

Allen said she’s already been to a few WGA events, including one for Black History Month.

“I’m really happy and grateful I got this experience, and happy to be a part of the group for the next three years,” she said.

“Asian American literature always responds to the historical moment, whether it’s Japanese American incarceration, whether it’s 9/11, Asian American writers always want to remind us that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge people based upon how they look,” Sohn said at the April 25 installation ceremony.

In this case, Sohn highlighted how the COVID-19 pandemic and its roots in China spurred a rise in racism and attacks against Asian Americans. But, Sohn noted, Asian American writers have to tackle the issue of racism against their community “every 20 years” or so, dating back to Japanese internment camps during World War II.

“It reminds us that we’re all interdependent, meaning that we all have to rely on each other to create a collective social awareness, that we need to treat each other with complexity,” he said.

Since 2020, more than a dozen books have been published by Asian American authors on the pandemic, and for his lecture, Sohn read all of them, aiming to find common patterns and themes. As he was reading, he said he was most drawn to the “life writings,” such as memoirs, essays, and autobiographies.

He cited three examples that provided a deeper understanding of the pandemic period: disability advocate Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger essay collection; The Monsoon Diaries: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing from the ER Frontlines to the Far Reaches of the World by Dr. Calvin Sun, who worked as an emergency room physician; and Laura Gao’s Messy Roots graphic narrative.

“[They’re] telling us that we have to be careful about the different vulnerable subjects,” he said. “And it’s not just Asian Americans, obviously, it’s lots of other communities, it’s disabled communities. It’s health care workers like Dr. Sun. And it’s everyday individuals like Laura Gao, who just want to be connected with their family.”

In Gao’s graphic novel, she depicts herself playing ping-pong with a woman in January 2020 who keeps talking about China in a racist way, until Gao gets fed up. At first, Sohn showed that it was just her dealing with this one instance of racial aggression, but later in the piece, Gao shows a multitude of examples from news coverage of Asian Americans being blamed for the pandemic and abused in response to it.

“It tells us about the social structure that has changed in that three month period, and ramped up, and it’s something affecting a larger group of people,” he said. “You can’t have this individual microaggression without that larger social structural overlay.”

A Connection with Tom Mullarkey

Sohn was officially hired to fill the Mullarkey Chairin January 2020, but with the pandemic, the official installation ceremony was put off. He recalled how when he first found out about the position, he felt a tug to apply due to some of the parallels between him and Thomas Mullarkey, one of the chair’s namesakes.

“I share a key affiliation with Tom as we’re both the children of immigrants who no doubt saw America as a land of opportunity and refuge,” Sohn said.

But Sohn also noted that their interactions with Korea overlapped—Mullarkey had served in Korea in the armistice period from 1954 to 1956, which was exactly what Sohn was researching for his book project. This “strange parallel” helped encourage Sohn to apply.

Sohn also shared with the audience some history about Mullarkey, who was a double Ram—graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1954 and Fordham Law School in 1959. He served on the Board of Trustees for almost 10 years before he passed away in 1993.

“The legend goes that [Mullarkey] originally planned to major in business, but a Jesuit tapped him on the shoulder and told him, ‘No, you should probably go into the humanities. It would be better for you,’” Sohn said. “He ascended the ranks of Wall Street and was very successful in finance. But what you might not know is that he was always well known for his abilities to write and speak eloquently—skills no doubt cultivated in part by his time as an English major here at Fordham.”

This inspired Mullarkey to want to give back, Sohn said, something continued by his wife Theresa, who received an honorary doctorate from the University in 2005.

Sohn said that becoming the Mullarkey Chair has been “transformative.”

“I’ve been able to travel, go to archives, do the kind of research that I’ve always wanted to do without some of the obstacles that we would traditionally have,” he said. “So it means everything to me to have this opportunity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“We were talking about the difficulties we were sharing, and also the beautiful accords that can occur when you can be your full self when others accept you and your work. Often writers of color are in places where they can literally be policed. People will say ‘No, you shouldn’t use Spanish here,’ or ‘Someone’s grandmother really wouldn’t say that,’” she said.

“So, it’s about thinking about the freedom that could exist within an Asian American space.”

After 14 years at the Rose Hill Campus, Kundiman, the nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature, has expanded to include students at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

For the past four years, Kundiman has hosted Fordham College at Rose Hill students in paid internships that were funded by the University.

Paid Internships

This summer, when the time came to renew the partnership, Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, and Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, teamed up to contribute funding for the internships. In June, the first four FCLC students began working with Kundiman, which promotes artists through workshops, lectures, performances and an annual retreat.

For Auricchio, the partnership was appealing because it offers Lincoln Center students an intellectual, educational opportunity that also gives them real-world experience and networks. It also contributes to the college’s anti-racist initiative. 

“That took on particular urgency last year as we were seeing an increase in attacks and anti-Asian hate crimes thanks to misunderstandings about COVID-19 that were sometimes blamed on people of Asian descent,” she said.

“It’s about artists who are fully engaged in making the world a better place, so its fully living Fordham’s mission of being people for others, making art for the others, and having a transformative impact on the artists themselves and the community beyond.”

Practical Skills and a Warm Community

Bea Mendoza, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who is majoring in psychology and English with a creative writing concentration, began interning at Kundiman last summer as an operations intern. This fall, she joined the grants-writing team. A poet herself whose family hails from the Philippines, Mendoza has both participated in classes held by the group and helped coordinate them. She’s found the process of learning to write grants to be especially gratifying.

“It’s been such a warm community to be a part of,” she said. 

“Interning with Kundiman has really opened my eyes to how much I want to continue working in literary nonprofits and to stay in the literary world.”

Stefan Valenti graduated in December from Fordham College at Lincoln Center with a degree in new media and digital design and a double minor in psychology and marketing. He began working with Kundiman as a communications intern in the fall, and has stayed on as an intern this spring. 

“The idea of going into the workforce is a little intimidating because you’re never really sure of the culture you’re going to walk into, but Kundiman has been very supportive and understanding of newer workers,” said Valenti, whose father is Italian and whose mother is Indian. 

“I feel like this position really strikes a balance, because it allows me to be creative through copy writing and graphics, but I’ve also learned practical skills I can use for marketing or advertising.”

Valenti also said working with Kundiman has also widened his perspective about writing. A recent reading of Monsters Under the Bed by the poet W. Todd Kaneko, a Kundiman fellow,  was especially compelling.

“The whole world of poetry is something I wasn’t into before, but after reading some of the fellows from Kundiman, I’ve opened my eyes a little bit. There are some poems where I read them, and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting, but then there are other poems where I read it, and I say, ‘Oh, that is objectively good, I understand this,’” he said.

An Understanding of Nonprofits

Mast said funding student internships at Kundiman was a no brainer, given how much of a difference the group makes through programming geared toward high school and college students .

“I also think of the high school students who they work with, who have this first exposure to a Asian poet or fiction writer. For them to see themselves means they can see their future. That has a tremendous impact,” she said.

At Fordham, she said, “they’ve really brought those students into understanding how nonprofits work, with the fundraising, the publicity, the working with donors, but also building the community.” 

She agreed that the partnership was an example of better coordination between her and Auricchio, similar to the Cultural Engagement Internships program that kicked off in May.

“Our students see themselves as Fordham students first, then they see themselves as Fordham College at Rose Hill students, and of course they have a campus identity, and that’s terrific,” she said.

“But we are one faculty of arts and sciences, one curriculum of arts and sciences, and I think the partnership I have with Laura has inspired me to think differently about programs supporting our students. We’re a good creative team, and when we work together, we’re able to do so much more because we’re able to build off each other.”

“Jonathon was a caring and compassionate educator who had the kind of multilayered career that one can only marvel at,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in an email to the University community. “He was thoughtful and creative, with a talent for drawing connections among disciplines.” 

Appels taught in Fordham’s English, African and African American studies, anthropology, dance, history, communication and media studies, Middle East studies, theology, and visual arts departments, as well as the religious studies, comparative literature, and urban studies programs, from 1996 to 2002 and 2009 to 2021. He offered a colorful mix of courses, including “Madness and Literature” and “LGBT Arts and Spirituality: Mystics and Creators,” mostly at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“His mind was eclectic and his education and curiosity was unmatched,” said Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies. “Endlessly curious, he always had a new story of the latest lecture or performance he had attended. He was a wonderful storyteller, with a rich laugh. He took me out to a vegan restaurant once, hoping to encourage me in more healthy habits. He was always cold and wandered the halls draped in wonderful scarves.”

Appels was a scholar, poet, musician, sculptor, and art critic who conducted research in 20 countries, largely in Europe; he was also a member of nine humanities associations. 

“He had a very probing mind, and he was very good at connecting the dots between various disciplines and departments,” said his husband, David LaMarche. “He was a very animated and inquisitive person with strong opinions, but not rigid … a free spirit and sort of counterculture, since the time that we were born in, the early sixties, and a sensitive man who loved every branch of the arts.”

His First Love

But what most academics weren’t aware of, said his husband, was his love for dance.  

“He loved teaching, but his first love was probably choreography,” LaMarche said. 

Appels was a dancer and choreographer who founded his own dance company, Company Appels, in 1979. He performed across the country and the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to international stages in France, Germany, and Portugal. He choreographed modern dances for scores of performers, principally graduates of the Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, and North Carolina School of the Arts. One of his favorite courses he taught at Fordham was part of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, run jointly with the Ailey School, said his husband. Even off stage at more casual venues, you could find him dancing.

“He loved disco dancing and he loved to dance, even into his sixties. If we ever went to a gala party or something like that, he’d always be on the dance floor, wild,” said LaMarche, a pianist who first met Appels at a dance class in San Francisco. 

Appels’ passion for the arts was recognized worldwide. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach modern dance at the National Dance Academy in Hungary. (He received another Fulbright to study the archives of a famous philosopher in Belgium in 1991.) In addition, he received an artist fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and a William Como Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

In a 2014 reflection, a Fordham alumnus praised Appels for showing him the beauty of dancing through his course called Lincoln Center Arts. 

“I never considered dance to be very interesting, running the other way when friends would suggest going to the ballet … I now found myself discussing Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and Dance Theater of Harlem with anyone who would listen,” wrote Jason McDonald, who took the course as a Ph.D. student.

‘Now Keep That Big Smile’ 

Appels was a thoughtful instructor who wanted his students to take away something meaningful from his classes, said Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., co-chair of Fordham’s comparative literature program and associate professor of English and medieval studies. 

“Jon really wanted his students to become exposed to very different ideas. He was a very curious and open-minded person, and it seemed that his lessons as a result were full of that same spirit,” O’Donnell said. “He cared about his students very deeply. For every student that I would talk to him about, he had some story or insight about their biography and who they were. He really wanted to get to know the students so he could help them better.”

He loved speaking with students about their work over the phone, said LaMarche. Before their calls ended, he left them with a unique message. 

“He ended almost every phone call with a student by saying, ‘Now keep that big smile,’ which I thought was so cute,” LaMarche said, chuckling. “You can’t see someone smile over the phone, but he would always say that to them.” 

An ‘Off-the-Grid Educational Experience’ 

Appels was born on May 17, 1954, in Falfurrias, Texas. His father, Robert C. Robinson, was a sales executive for oil companies and a financial planner; his mother, Patricia Robinson, neé Hosley, was an elementary school teacher. When he was a child, his family frequently moved because of the nature of his father’s job, said LaMarche. He lived in Nigeria and Libya and later settled in California. 

“He was exposed to a lot of different cultures as a youngster … He got his B.A. at Western Washington University at a college called Fairhaven College, which was a very experimental educational institution at that time,” said LaMarche. “That started his off-the grid educational experience.”

Appels earned a bachelor’s degree in art and society from Western Washington University, a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a master’s degree in poetry from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York. 

Outside of Fordham, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and his alma mater Western Washington University. He enjoyed yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, acupuncture, and other forms of Eastern medicine and healing. Instead of ironing his shirts and wearing a suit jacket like many professors, he preferred a loose and casual style, LaMarche said. He was a spiritual man who loved nature, especially walks through the woods and summers spent with LaMarche in Ithaca, where they swam in waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. He disliked technology, especially computers—in fact, he never owned one, said LaMarche, who managed his husband’s online accounts.  

In addition to LaMarche, Appels is survived by his father, Robert; brother, Robert H. Robinson and his partner, Ilona Robinson; and his sister, Carol House, her husband Roger House, and their son Josiah. A memorial service will be held for Appels sometime early next year, said LaMarche.

“As an English professor, I have to say, I think that literature can be one of the things that guides you through the toughest moments in your life,” Bly said at the outset.

Though Lizzie & Dante is the first novel she’s penned under her real name, Bly is also a romance author. Since the late 1990s, she has published more than 30 bestsellers and sold more than 7 million books under her pseudonym, Eloisa James.

In the novel, heroine Lizzie Delford embarks on a vacation to the Italian island of Elba, accompanied by her best friend and his boyfriend, as she decides whether or not to pursue cancer treatment. As she struggles to make some life-changing decisions—up against the clock—she meets a chef named Dante, his 12-year-old daughter Etta, and their dog Lily. What follows is a tale riddled with dilemmas: Is it morally right to fall in love and begin a relationship if you don’t have much time left? What if you do fall in love: Will it inevitably lead to broken hearts? And in the case of Etta, is it better for her to remain motherless or to embrace Lizzie as a mother figure for however long she’s available?

Fordham English Professor Stuart Sherman, Ph.D., a friend and frequent classroom collaborator of Bly’s, moderated the discussion.

“We’ve been friends for almost a quarter-century, taught at two schools together,” he said. “I read the book pretty much the day it dropped and completely fell in love with it, so it’s just a joy to be here.”

Earlier this month, alumni had an opportunity to purchase Lizzie & Dante and meet Bly during Homecoming weekend at Rose Hill, where she was on hand to sign copies under the tent on Edwards Parade. And prior to the first discussion, registrants were emailed a “Book Club Kit” chock full of digital goodies to help them prepare for the discussion and become immersed in Lizzie and Dante’s world. The kit included a welcome letter from Bly, a link to the novel’s cover reveal, discussion questions, a Spotify playlist of “Lizzie & Dante’s love story,” recipes for food and a signature cocktail, and even an excerpt from Paris in Love (Random House, 2012), a memoir Bly wrote as Eloisa James.

Alumni in attendance could use Zoom’s chat feature to submit questions and join the conversation, which Sherman focused largely on the novel’s resemblance to parts of Bly’s life. Though the book isn’t a memoir, some of the characters, aspects of the plot, and even the setting are drawn from Bly’s experiences—from Lizzie’s profession as a Shakespeare professor and her cancer diagnosis to the island of Elba itself, where Bly’s family frequently vacations.

Asked what it was like to create characters and events based on her own life and then dramatize them, Bly said that once she starts to build something, it “takes off. You take it, and you just let it go. That’s a wonderful thing about being a novelist.”

Bly also shared some insight into the writing and publishing process. Unlike her historical romance novels, which she writes quickly—about one book every year—she spent more than four years writing and rewriting Lizzie & Dante.

“If you have four and a half years, and you don’t have a contract, there’s no pressure” from your publisher, she said. “I’ve always had a book due since 1999. I am honored to be a lead author with Harper Collins, but if you’re a lead author, you cannot be late.”

With Lizzie & Dante, Bly said there was less deadline pressure, “the great gift of the literary novelist,” though she’s not sure if she wants to do it again.

“My editors would quite like me to write another [Mary Bly book], but I’m not sure because so much of me went into this book,” she said. “And you can’t bring all [the]threads together again without doing something fake, I think.”

Phillip Cicione, Ed.D., FCRH ’87, an English teacher in New York’s Commack school district, will moderate the second part of this fall’s alumni book club discussion, to be held on Wednesday, November, 10 at 8 p.m. EST. Learn more and register.