An expert on Russia and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Rosenthal published numerous books and articles, including New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (Penn State U. Press, 2002)—seen as an authoritative study of Nietzsche’s influence in Russia. Her work was cited repeatedly by scholars around the globe.

She joined the faculty of Fordham in 1970 and taught undergraduate and graduate students for 45 years. In 1990, she became the first woman promoted to full professor in the history department. 

In 2010, at a ceremony where she was honored for 40 years of service at Fordham, Rosenthal was lauded for having “earned a place in the star-studded pantheon of European historians.” 

Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Medieval Studies at Fordham, said that when she arrived on campus in 1982, Rosenthal was part of a faculty group called Women at Rose Hill that advocated for issues such as fair pay.

“It was a huge influence during my first years, not only because it allowed me to meet many of the other female faculty at the University but also because of the supportive community it provided at the time,” she said.

She also taught courses focused on Tsarist and 20th-century Russia, European intellectual history, and religion and revolution. Among students, Rosenthal was also known for her classes on the history of food, women in modern European history, and the occult. She was often sought after as an expert on the Soviet Union; she appeared on television a show on Ivan the Terrible for A&E’s Biography Series.

Rosenthal was born on March 24, 1938, in New York City and grew up, along with her brother Bernard, in the South Bronx. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history from City College of New York, a master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago, and in 1970, a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

Her daughter Lara said some of her most vivid memories of her mother include her sitting in a black leather reclining chair with a book and a yellow notepad. When Lara was 8, her friends visited for a sleepover, and instead of playing games, she said, they tried to count how many books her mother had on the wall.  

“In high school, sometimes I would leave one of my books from English class or a history class on the coffee table, and when I came home from school, she would have read the whole thing, cover to cover in one day,” she said. 

“Her superhuman reading speed astounded and completely annoyed me, as I was just a mere mortal in my reading speed.”

Although Parkinson’s Disease took a toll on her mother, Lara said as her body got weaker, her spirit grew stronger, and they grew closer.

“Many years ago, Bernice said she wanted the words Eshet Chayil, which is Hebrew for ‘a woman of valor,’ on her headstone. At that time, I was annoyed at her and just said something along the lines of ‘Ok, fine,’” she said.

“These last few years, we were able to have some very honest and healing conversations that were not possible earlier in her life, and this meant the world to me. She has earned her Eshet Chayil and it will be on her headstone with my love and my blessing.”

Rosenthal is survived by her daughter and her brother Bernard. A funeral was held on June 9.

The Fordham University historian Magda Teter follows the spread of these deadly allegations, which exploded after the successful Trent prosecution, in her 2020 book, Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. The work’s accompanying maps trace more than 100 such accusations, delineating them by criteria such as whether there were “legal proceedings” (73 yes, 30 no) or “Jews killed” (31 yes, 55 no, 13 unknown).

Research from Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham, is included in the scholarship published Oct. 21 in the Fordham Urban Law Journal  ahead of the scheduled oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi on Nov. 7. In the case, the court will decide whether a 30-year-old law banning firearms for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders violates the Second Amendment on its face.

Just over a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled in another case (NYSRPA v. Bruen) that gun regulations must reflect the ways such laws were applied at the time of the Second Amendment, which led the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the ban on domestic abusers.

“The Fifth Circuit said, well, domestic violence has been around for a long time. They didn’t take away people’s guns. Therefore, you can’t take away people’s guns.” 

But Cornell argued there is a good reason why guns weren’t taken away in the 18th Century. “Although domestic violence is not new, at the time of the Second Amendment, domestic violence perpetrated with guns was just not an issue, because guns took too long to load and were not a good choice for impulsive acts of violence.” 

“There’s a lot of complicated problems with how you would even begin to in good faith apply their method,” Cornell said. “There’s a huge opening for some kind of scholarship to give the court some direction,” Cornell said.

The published work includes statistical analyses, historical analyses such as Cornell’s, and descriptions of the ramifications of different legal decisions from some of today’s most influential experts in the fields of gun violence, public health, gun regulation, and the Second Amendment. These scholars author amicus briefs, which judges rely on for insight, and serve as expert witnesses in court.

The Fordham Urban Law Journal’s editor-in-chief, Joseph Gomez, said he expects their work to be used as source material when the justices write their opinions in Rahimi. “These scholars will be the most relevant source of expertise,” he said.

The field of weapons and gun law historians is small, and Cornell is in high demand as an expert witness in firearms regulation cases across the country. He said he currently is involved in 20 active cases ranging from extreme risk protection order decisions to whether people applying to be foster parents should have to lock up their weapons.

Confusion Over Bruen

“I’ve been working on gun regulation and the Second Amendment now since 1999,” said Cornell. “And because the Supreme Court last year issued this opinion that has created chaos in the lower courts, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. versus Bruen, it was clear to me and lots of people I talked to that since they changed the framework for evaluating laws, nobody knows how to implement the framework.”

Before the Bruen decision in 2022, lower courts looked to both historical tradition of gun regulation and “important government interest,” such as public safety considerations, he said. But in the Bruen decision, the Supreme Court said public safety can only be considered if there were comparable laws at the time of the Second Amendment that took public safety into account. Cornell said this “basically means you either have to find an analogous law, or at least a tradition, that seems to resemble the law in question today. And the big problem is life was very different in the 18th Century.”

Lower courts must rely on the Supreme Court’s guidance when interpreting gun laws. The pending Rahimi case provides the court with an opportunity to clarify how lower courts should apply the new framework laid out in Bruen, according to Kelly Roskam, J.D., the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, who participated in the scholarship as well as the 2023 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium on “Public Health, History, and the Future of Gun Regulation After Bruen” that Cornell helped organize at the Fordham School of Law on Oct. 13.

The Fordham Urban Law Journal, Northwell Health Center for Gun Violence Prevention, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Gun Violence Solutions co-hosted the event.

‘Not Usually How We Do Things’

Cornell said, “I know a lot of people in the gun violence prevention community, and many of them were concerned that if history is what’s going to drive [the decision], does that mean all this great research we do about what actually is the problem and what is the solution is now irrelevant? It would be kind of crazy that they would just rely on what was known back then. I mean, that’s usually not how we do things.”

The Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision next June.

Very little is known about who they were.

Shadows on Stone, a new crowd-sourced digital history project that began in a Fordham history class, seeks to fill in that gap and, in doing so, help restore the humanity of a group of people who have historically been dismissed as irredeemable.

The goal of the project is to transfer digitized records that were entered when prisoners first arrived at the prison. Since only a very small number of the inmates ever wrote about their time there, these “mini-biographies” of their lives before imprisonment offer the only glimpses of who they were.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Analyzing Data in a Fordham History Class

The project first began in 2018, when Fordham undergraduate students in two honors history classes were tasked by now-retired professor Roger Panetta, Ph.D., to analyze some of the entries from the first set of names. The data was then uploaded to the crowd-sourcing research site Zooniverse.

The students published two reports based on their findings: The NYC Criminal and Sing Sing Penitentiary in the 19th Century and Paved with Good Intentions: Origins of the New York Penitentiary. They also created an entry that is currently on the Sing Sing Museum’s webpage.

Open to Public Volunteers

Panetta, who is writing a book about Sing Sing, decided to expand the project and open it to the public. A soft launch for the Shadows on Stone took place in August; it will fully go live in October.

Anyone who would like to help is welcome to try their hand at transforming the hand-written documents into legible text that will eventually be entered into a searchable database.

Panetta said the data on these inmates was originally collected as part of a movement in the 19th century to identify the so-called “criminal class.”

Using ‘Fragmented Biographies’ to Gain Insight

“When I first saw the records, I thought, ‘Oh, this is great stuff.’ So-and-so grew up here, lived on this street, committed this crime, had no parents. Or, one parent was a Catholic, one spoke Italian, one could read, one could not read, one had these scars on his body, and so on,” he said.

“I began to wonder if these would constitute a kind of fragmented biography, which could give us an insight into who they were. We could then begin to challenge the popular view that they’re just bad, horrific people.”

In 2015, the State of New York let Ancestry.com scan all the logbooks containing these records and make them publicly viewable. They’re still handwritten, though, so it’s fallen to volunteers to decipher the handwriting and record it digitally for further analysis.

For those who have trouble reading the handwriting, there are tools allowing users to zoom in on the entry as well as a forum for discussing them.

Influencing Conversations on Mass Incarceration

In time, Panetta said he hopes that understanding the past of a place as legendary as Sing Sing can influence current conversations around incarceration in the United States.

“The contemporary view of victims of mass incarceration is they’re Black, they’re poor, they’re undereducated,” he said, adding that there’s much more at play and even characteristics like dyslexia can play a role.

“[Mass incarceration] is a problem. We think it has to do with race. We think it has to do with economic conditions. We know it has to do with educational levels. And so the thinking is, ‘Maybe we should look more closely.’ That can help us break the cycle of incarceration.”

In One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song, Fordham history professor Asif Siddiqi, Ph.D., and 15 other writers attempt to answer those questions. They each delve into the history of a song from the past 60-plus years, and their essays, Siddiqi writes, “show the undiminished power of the pop song.” He sees them as “distillations of important flashpoints,” and he hears in them “ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform[ed] for succeeding generations.”

The idea for the book blossomed at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in June 2019. That’s when the University’s O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism provided funding for a workshop where Siddiqi and other contributors began to flesh out the cultural reflections they noticed in pop songs across the decades.

“We knew that there were a couple of running themes,” said Siddiqi, the book’s editor. “One was that technology was everywhere, not only in terms of recording studios [and instruments] but also media, like CDs and streaming, etc. And the other thing that was everywhere was, of course, capitalism, because of the business of making music.”

Siddiqi, a former Guggenheim Fellow, is best known for his books on the history of space exploration, including The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957. But he is also a guitar player and music lover with a keen interest in the technology of music production.

He said he was wary of gravitating too far toward the kind of classic rock often seen as the canon by fans and critics, so he encouraged contributors to highlight a diversity of artists and sounds. Their selections run the gamut from Afropop to hip-hop and span nearly five decades, from “Indépendance Cha Cha,” the 1960 Congolese anthem by Le Grand Kallé and African Jazz, to M.I.A.’s 2007 hit, “Paper Planes.”

Along with Siddiqi, four other Fordham professors or graduates wrote essays for the book, which was published last fall as part of Routledge’s Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.

“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin

Esther Liberman Cuenca, Ph.D., GSAS ’19, a medieval historian, wrote about Led Zeppelin’s obsession with medievalism, evident in the J.R.R. Tolkien references and Viking allusions in their lyrics—the latter most prominent in 1970’s “Immigrant Song.” With its hard-charging riff and wordless, wailing chorus, the song “made an ideal conduit through which ideas about the medieval world of the Vikings were communicated in popular culture,” Liberman Cuenca writes.

Inspired by a triumphant stop the band made in Iceland on their way to the Bath Festival in England, the swaggering machismo of the track was in part simple braggadocio about their “conquest” of foreign music markets, but Liberman Cuenca notes that there may have been a bit of British tongue-in-cheek humor in the band’s nod to colonization.

“Led Zeppelin’s particular brand of medievalism,” she writes, “banked on a type of nostalgia for an idyllic, rural Britain reflecting the postwar, post-industrial anxieties that many British youth in the 1960s and 1970s experienced. … For the British, the failed [Viking] colony of Vinland represented their fears of how carefully calibrated imperial projects could fail.”

“Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie

The capitalist spirit of the music industry—and its focus on reaching foreign markets—is on full display in Fordham English professor Glenn Hendler’s essay on David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” from 1974.

While the best-known version of the song, from the album Diamond Dogs, is a fairly straightforward rock song, Bowie decided he wanted to incorporate the sounds of Latin music for the U.S. single. In the mid-1970s, though, with album-oriented rock—and its mostly white purveyors—dominating FM radio playlists, the prominence of castanets and congas in the U.S. single meant that it was relegated to the AM dial, where listeners would find almost all non-rock (and non-white) sounds. And while that version still managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100 chart, it was replaced by the U.K. version after several months.

“The marketing did not match the product,” Hendler writes, “at least not in a context in which rock was being starkly differentiated from soul music, R&B, dance music, and Latin music. The U.S. single of ‘Rebel Rebel’ largely fell between the cracks of race, culture, format, and genre. The shape of those cracks would define the U.S. music market for years to come.”

“Mmmbop” by Hanson

In 1997, two decades after David Bowie released two versions of “Rebel, Rebel,” a different kind of marketing decision—opening direct lines of communication to fans via fast-growing online spaces—helped the brothers in Hanson turn their hit song “Mmmbop” into a springboard for building a devoted following, which is explored in an essay by Louie Dean Valencia, Ph.D., GSAS ’16.

Through the band’s official website and other online forums, Hanson’s fan engagement allowed the group to survive, Valencia writes. “The boy band singing about the ephemerality of relationships used digital technology to maintain their relationships with their fans—attempting to adapt to the digital era in real time.”

“Candle in the Wind 1997” by Elton John

Elton John released “Candle in the Wind 1997,” a tribute to the late Princess Diana, in September 1997, two weeks after her death. It’s an update to the 1974 version written in honor of Marilyn Monroe. In One-Track Mind,
Christine Caccipuoti, FCLC ’06, GSAS ’08, describes how the song—a massive hit and cultural phenomenon that John has protected from widespread commercial usage—tapped into the same shifting modes of consumption as Hanson’s hit “Mmmbop” did that year.

“As the still-nascent internet became a site for growing personal expression in the late 1990s,” Caccipuoti writes, “many chose to create memorial websites. … These mostly female-run sites included many of the same features: photographs of Diana, writing about the host’s personal grief, and the lyrics to ‘Candle in the Wind 1997.’”

“Paper Planes” by M.I.A.

In the book’s last chapter, Siddiqi tackles technology on the music-creation side—specifically the practice of digital sampling, which has shaped the sound of pop music in the past 30-plus years. He writes about M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” a 2007 song by a Sri Lankan–British artist that samples the Clash’s 1982 song “Straight to Hell”—itself a critique of British and American colonialism—to explore the hustles necessary to survive in the colonialized Global South.

As a cheap technology, sampling has both democratized music creation and, at times, led to more unlicensed co-opting of “global” music by established European and American artists, Siddiqi notes. But its predominant use in hip-hop points to a certain reclaiming of history.

“As with writers and historians who liberally quote from prior works, by analogy, hip-hop artists using the digital sampler invoke, echo, and cite earlier artists through mechanical reproduction,” he writes. “The digital sampler here is not simply a musical instrument, a technical artifact, it also becomes, as M.I.A. shows in ‘Paper Planes,’ a tool for writing and rewriting history for those for whom history has always been written by others.”

As a whole, One-Track Mind offers plenty of opportunities to see the way that pop songs contribute to the writing and rewriting of history.

“Every song has a life cycle from birth to out into the world,” Siddiqi said. “And to write that biography is actually to talk about a moment in time. So I think you can read these stories if you are just interested in social and cultural history. Even if you don’t know the song, it might tell you something.”

“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.

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.”

According to Saul Cornell, Ph.D., that’s the lesson of a decision last month by the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals that ruled in favor of states limiting who can carry a gun in public.

Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, was cited multiple times by both the majority and dissenting opinions in the decision Young V. State of Hawaii. The justices in the case based their decision partly on his research on the models of gun regulation that were developed in the United States outside of the Slave South.

Rather than relying on the words of slave-owning judges in the antebellum South to guide their understanding of history, Cornell’s approach urges judges to take into account the history of all parts of the country when using the past as precedent.

The case began when George Young sued the state of Hawaii in 2012 for denying his application to carry a concealed or openly visible handgun. Hawaii law stipulates that the police chief may only grant such licenses to those who need a gun for their job or who show “reason to fear injury” to their “person or property.”

Young claimed this violated the 2008 Supreme Court decision Heller vs. District of Columbia, which was the first Supreme Court case to decide that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, and that was not just a right intended for state militias.

There is a catch though. When he wrote the Heller majority opinion, the late Antonin Scalia, a proponent of the legal theory originalism, cited the 1846 case Nunn vs. Georgia, which interpreted the right to bear arms in expansive terms.

Proponents of originalism assert that the Constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding “at the time it was adopted.”

But since the Nunn case was a product of the Slave South, and not the era when the Second Amendment was written, courts have since 2008 been considering whether it represented the attitudes of a majority of the country or just one region. Once Scalia linked the constitutionality of today’s laws to establishing a historical genealogy, it set off a legal scavenger hunt of sorts for scholars like Cornell, who first tackled the issue of the history of regional differences in A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control (Fordham Law Review, 2004).

Regional Gun Cultures

“Since Heller, we now ask not just ‘What is the history of the right to bear arms?’ but ‘What is the history of regulation?’ And when you start doing the history, what you discover is, America was a very complicated place even back in its early history,” he said.

“One of the most interesting and important qualities of America then that still exists today is the existence of regional gun cultures.”

Working with colleagues at places such as the Duke University Center for Firearms Law, Cornell has been excavating that history, most recently in History, Text, Tradition, and the Future of Second Amendment Jurisprudence: Limits on Armed Travel under Anglo-American Law, 1688–1868, 83 (Law and Contemporary Problems, 2020). It was one of the sources cited in the Young case, which runs to 215 pages and traces the arc of gun regulation over five centuries from English common law, which is the basis of much of American law, and has profoundly shaped today’s law.

“Heller stuck very close to a narrow range of sources, mostly case law. What Young did is, it took Heller’s injunction to look at the history of regulations as guideposts for judging,” Cornell said.

“It turns out the history is much more friendly to regulation than Scalia or gun rights activists would have imagined.”

In addition to finding clear examples of regulations in England before the American Revolution, Cornell found statutes in Massachusetts that prohibited “armed travel in populous areas.”

The irony, Cornell said, is that Scalia just assumed that the gun regulation laws in the slave-holding South would evolve in the same way as New England or the Midwest, where Cornell found examples of gun regulations from the 19th century. Originalists, including Justice Scalia, were so confident that the precedent set by the South would be commonplace, and history would bear out their view, they never bothered to consider other examples from different regions.

“I think what we’ve seen time and again since Heller—and it’s really quite striking—is that almost all the serious historical scholarship has found that Heller’s history is just demonstrably false in important ways.” he said.

“The authors of Heller went big on the history, but never anticipated or thought, ‘What happens if the history doesn’t support us?’ They were completely naïve because their view of history was just so simplistic. They really don’t think history changes, and that’s the essence of their originalism.”

Historical Precedent for Providing a Reason for Gun Ownership

Ultimately, Cornell said decisions such as Young show that if activists’ goal is to let any American buy a gun and carry it without a good reason, history will not be as helpful as they assume. The attitudes that Southerners had about guns were not representative of the whole country in the 19th century, and that remains true today.

“One of the funny things about modern gun debate is, gun rights activists say that asking someone to provide a reason to own a gun is unreasonable. But it turns out have having a reason has always been reasonable in most places in America.”

“With the pandemic, the possibility of a physical conference collapsed, and so we decided that we would look for something more timely, something that would be useful, both intellectually but also pedagogically,” said W. David Myers, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham and a member of the Board of Directors of the  Renaissance Society, which relocated to the Rose Hill campus last year.

As historians, they did what they are trained to do: They brought the past into the present.

The new symposium, titled “Plagues, Pandemics, and Outbreaks of Disease in History” will take place virtually on Friday, Nov. 13, beginning at 10 a.m. The symposium is free but participants need to register in advance.

Myers said the goal of the symposium is to show how history helps us see the current moment, as well as how the current moment can help us understand the past.

“What can we bring to the study of the modern pandemic, from our historical experience, but just as much, what can we bring to the study of past plagues?” he said. “ How will this experience–as human beings in this sad world at the moment–alter or affect the way we study?”

The morning session will feature a round table on the intellectual and scholarly significance of the present moment in historical terms. The participants–Hannah Marcus, Ph.D. (Harvard), Colin Rose, Ph.D. (Brock University, Ontario), and Lisa Sousa, Ph.D. (Occidental College)–are experts in the global consequences of plagues from the Black Death in Europe to smallpox in the conquest of the Americas.

Central to the planning of the symposium, Myers said, has been Christina Bruno, associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies and a Fordham Ph.D. in medieval history who has also published in Renaissance Quarterly.

Myers said the event, which is co-sponsored by the society as well as Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies and the Departments of Art History and Music, Classics, and History, will also allow graduate students at Fordham to present and discuss their work in front of an international audience.

Rachel Podd, a Ph.D. student in history; Camila Marcone, an M.A. student in medieval studies; Mark Host, an M.A. student in medieval studies; and Katherina Fostana, the visual resources curator in art history will participate in the session called “Developing Pedagogy: Roundtable and Discussion.”

Some of these students will talk about how they’ve taught materials on the plague and other historic pandemics to their classrooms in the New York City area. A few of their examples will be presented at the symposium, including how Podd gave a lecture for high school students in the spring on the Black Death plague and Marcone put together a project on the plague for a high school in New Jersey.

“We’re showing that our students really are reaching out to the community and recognizing that education at the university and college level is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

“[Our scholars] are trying to incorporate a whole world of study, from archeology to medical study to our history, in order to help students today understand the historical experience and place themselves in history somehow,” Myers said. The partnership between Fordham and the Renaissance Society of America helps bring together scholars from across the world and helps to elevate the work of Fordham graduate students, he said.

“[Renaissance Society of America] gets to tap a population of scholars and the population of students and workers who are vibrant and energetic and interesting,” Myers said. “It brings an internationally important and significant organization in the humanities into the world of Fordham and allows us to tap that experience.”

With that, the issue of housing in American suburbs became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is, and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta Ph.D., a recently retired professor of history and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb (Fordham University Press, 2006) and The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb (The Historical Society of Rockland County, 2010). He also co-wrote Kingston: The IBM Years (Black Dome Press, 2014).

Full Transcript Below:
Roger Panetta: How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration?

Patrick Verel: On July 29th of this year, President Trump shared this message with the world on Twitter, “I am happy to inform all the people living in their suburban lifestyle dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH rule. Enjoy.”

And just like that, the issue of housing in American suburbs shifted to the foreground of the 2020 presidential campaign. And although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta, a recently retired professor of history at Fordham and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb, and the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb. He also wrote Kingston: The IBM Years, which came out in 2014. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing or AFFH rule? And why is Trump so eager to advertise that he’s getting rid of it?

RP: Your opening statement about Trump saying how happy we should be because he is eliminating this rule is a wonderful example of his political genius. Fact-checking his statement, of course, gives us the general pattern of a pile of errors. The rule does not enforce any construction, any zoning law changes. In fact, the Fair Housing Assessment rule simply implies study. And it was meant to be a tool in order to enable the Fair Housing and the Affirmative Furthering Program to find ways to know and assess, by community, whether or not they were complying with fair housing rules. And deliberately and specifically, it required no actions by communities without public approval. So it did not threaten to build public housing, it did not threaten to build multiunit housing. In fact, it promised no change. It simply required an assessment of whether or not that community was complying with the fair housing regulations. That’s all it did.

So he very cleverly has escalated that. I think what he has done is struck a nerve, and a very important nerve, and that nerve is my house, my home, my community where I live. And that’s why it’s incredibly politically shrewd. He’s cut to the chase. Right to the heart of what it means to live in the suburbs, to own your house, your principal lifetime economic investment. And he has promised not to endanger that.

PV: As I understand that this Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which just really rolls right off the tongue, this came out of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal to discriminate against people in housing. So this was an update to that 1968 act. Why would that be necessary? Why would there need to be an update?

RP: I think for about 40 to 50 years, the Fair Housing Act has not been able to successfully grapple with the issues of suburban housing and the segregation of suburban housing. So in order to try to give it some teeth without legislating the construction or the planning of those units, what it did is decided, let’s have communities do an inventory, assess where they are on the fair housing continuum, and tell us where they are and then suggest to us remedies they would make, that they would take, in order to create a more fair housing community where they were residing. So that’s all. And Obama was very careful, specifically implied there would be no imposed housing construction. So Trump’s saying there’s going to be public housing because of this action is absolutely inaccurate. I don’t think that matters. And I think to quarrel with him over the inaccuracies over this or whether or not the statements are fair misses the point. He’s striking a nerve.

PV: Besides legalized discrimination, which is what the 1968 act was meant to prevent, what were some of the other ways that suburbs were historically kept segregated?

RP: Now what Scarsdale and other communities had been doing for years is using restricted covenants. That is a group of community homeowners would agree, in writing sometimes, by specificity, naming the group, no Jews allowed, who could buy and purchase a home in that community. Some of those covenants actually got legal standing. It took a long time for the courts to overturn them, so community residents had formal written documents prescribing who could buy a home in that suburban community. And that expresses a fundamental problem here that people living in the suburbs want to live in a community of sameness. And that’s sameness is broad-based, it’s class, it’s ethnicity, it’s race, it’s probably political preference. It’s all of those things. And that they define as both comfort and safety. Those are the hallmarks of the suburb. And I think they’re very powerful and deeply embedded in the popular culture. Very hard to remove that.

And the long battle of Westchester, which Trump points to as ground zero, is very interesting. For almost a decade, they resisted the requirements of the Fair Housing Act to create more dense, racially mixed housing units throughout Westchester. And that was a bloodbath. It’s recently that they have conformed to that. And they’ve gone to introduce some community construction, but that bow is very interesting as a telltale marker about the way in which suburban communities resisted, politically, the notion of equal distribution of fair housing.

PV: Did you see the movie that they did on the guy in Yonkers? It’s like We Need a Hero, or something like that?

RP: Yes, so for a while I lived in Yonkers and there was a great diversity. And I remember a terrible, terrible story in my life. I lived in an apartment building that was racially integrated, 50% black, 50% white, and my wife were very committed to staying. And you could see it beginning to tip. You could see whites leaving in faster numbers. And there was a fire in the building one day and I had a two-year-old child and a fireman came up to me in the hallway. The fire was in our hall in the incinerators. And he said, “You know, those fires are caused by the super. He’s throwing paint rags down the incinerator, and you’re going to have an explosion.” And then he grabbed me by the throat and he said, “When are you getting out of this building?”

PV: Oh my God, really?

RP: Yes, he said, “When are you getting out of this building? What are you doing here? Why are you still here?” And he never said, of course, he meant, “Why are you as a white person are still here?”

PV: Wow.

RP: And that stayed in my head. And then we moved to Hastings. And when we moved to Hastings, my five-year-old daughter at that point said, “Where have all the black people gone?”

PV: I read that a 2018 survey experiment found that even politically liberal homeowners tend to oppose increasing development in their communities, even when they’re told that such development helps the disadvantaged. Any thoughts on how to counter that?

RP: Patrick, I thought that’s why your opening quote and the whole idea of this was so on target. It really gets to the very core of this issue we’re in now with Black Lives Matter. I wrote a letter to the president of the university and to the Bishop of the Episcopal church where I’m a member. And I said, “Really, I think what’s called upon now is for me to acknowledge my role in the patterns of racism. The blind privilege I have, and the advantages I have had as a white, professional, educated person.” I need to acknowledge those. And I think before I do anything else, I must create consciousness of how I fit in this in ways I do not see.

That’s exactly what you’re asking me here. How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration. But when it comes near my house, when you want to put multiple units in my community, when you want to put low-income housing, or fair housing in my community, you threaten the cost and the value of my primary life investment.

And when you do that, all of my political liberalism goes out the window. We need to confront that. And the studies you talk about raise another interesting issue, how and why do we not as a public know that about ourselves? So part of this question you’re asking is our sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness, do I understand what’s going on here? And I know what I feel. And it doesn’t matter to me if one black professional person moves next door to me, because that person somehow seems like me in some ways. It’s the notion of multiple units. It’s the notion of people I don’t know. So we’re prepared to allow slow accretions of blacks in the suburbs, but we’re not prepared for an open acknowledgment that the fundamental imbalance of that racially, and building the kind of multiple units in the centers, that we need to correct that. It’s a remarkable area of blindness, if not self-delusion.

PV: Do you think about this when you think about the ways that you… You were just telling me about how you moved from Yonkers to Hastings, which are very different places within Westchester. Do you think about that much now?

RP: Yes, I don’t know why. I think that was an important experience at Yonkers for my wife and I. I think we were very committed to that integrated living. We had terrific pangs of guilt when we left about what we had done. It was a matter of conscience, but that fireman shaking me by the neck, scared the wits out of me. And he pointed to my child and he said, “How could you be living here with your child? Are you a responsible father?” And I thought, “Gulp.” So it was a blow. It was a belly blow. And we continued to think about that. And so now, wherever I am, I tend to look around and see whether this place is white or black. Is this a mixed community? I can go four or five days and not see a black person? And that question always comes to my mind. I never want to let that go.

PV: Are there any suburbs that you’ve come across that have really embraced housing pattern changes that can be looked to as a model?

RP: There was a book recently done in 2019 by Amanda Hurley called Radical Suburbs. And what she did is she went back to the thirties and fifties and found experimental community developments in the suburbs that were based on more communitarian values, that were racially integrated, that had fair housing, inexpensive housing units, that really attempted to create and live up to the fair housing law before there was a Fair Housing Act. And that we have a history of that. That’s the irony. It’s not something we just need to look at places like Portland, where they have done a good deal of work creating more fair residential communities in the suburbs, but we have a history of it. And, again, it’s my deep feeling about our needing to come into contact with that information to realize about what were they trying to do, who were these places?

And, by the way, this also raises for me the other issue of the need to begin to study in our curriculums at the university level, the real estate history of the state, and the city, if not the country. Because in that real estate history, we have one of the fundamental issues of civil rights. American historians have been negligent in examining the place of real estate. And we live in a city that is governed and held by real estate. And we have a president whose reputation and power is rooted in real estate.

PV: Do you think we’re painting suburbanites with too broad a brush? Are there more progressives in the suburbs than we realize when it comes to this particular thing?

RP: Yes, and I think too broad a brush and really tells us about the power of popular culture in shaping our views of the world. I think we need to take a much more critical posture to how we know what we know and whether we think we know that. And so if I look at the white picket fence, the sort of house with a little backyard, all those images that really… The community of common people sharing common views. All of those very powerful images are stuck in our minds as what the suburb looks like. Tom Sugrue at NYU has done a lot of work in the last couple of years in trying to show us that the suburb is much more diversified than we think. And he has outlined a kind of phases of suburbs. For me, the easiest way to manage that, and for your audience, is to think of a series of concentric circles.

That series of concentric circles was first used in the 1920s at the University of Chicago to describe the development of cities. You can still use that now, and it’s very helpful to understand the suburbs. The suburbs have a series of concentric circles, not exactly, but it’s a helpful visualization. At the center of that may be the diverse suburb. And there are increasing numbers of those that Sugrue points out. Places like Yonkers, and the communities around Yonkers in lower Westchester. Indeed, lower Westchester is a good example of a diverse community that has a balance between, and the numbers fluctuate, between blacks, whites, and brown or Latinos. Those numbers also use the older housing stock to attract whites. So whites looking to buy houses find some of the old houses in Yonkers extremely attractive and affordable. So they buy them.

The end result of that process is to create a mixed suburban community. Now, the difficulties are those communities, those mixed communities, is they have a hard time holding the line. They slowly slide into segregated communities, which is a second form of suburban community. And that’s very old. We have black suburbs going back to the 19th century. And then in the third phase of the third circle of our concentric circles, we have communities that are mostly white. And then in the fourth circle, what we call the ex-urb, we have almost fundamentally white communities. That’s the Trump stronghold. So the profile is much more mixed than we tend to look and really has a much more politically diverse looking model for us.

PV: Yeah, it’s interesting. He should have been pitching not to suburban voters, but to ex-urban voters. It’s a whole different class.

RP: The point he’s also trying to make is that, and I’m fascinated by it, and I don’t know an answer to this, is this tipping point. When those diverse suburbs get too black or brown, and I don’t know what that number is, whites begin to leave and eventually diverse suburbs become segregated suburbs. It’s hard to hold on to them, their diversity. Now the question is why? What makes whites think, “This is going. I can feel it, and I have to flee?” And is there a way that we could subsidize those home values to stabilize those communities? We do not, I do not, you do not, we do not have experience of living with, working with African-Americans and browns the way we should. They remain, in our minds, the creatures of popular culture. So when my neighborhood increasingly becomes black, I think, “What do I know?” I go back to popular culture and it tells me what’s going to happen. Can we counter that? If we can’t, diverse suburbs all will eventually evolve or devolve into segregated suburbs.

PV: Why does red lining matter so much when it comes to the racial makeup of places like the New York metropolitan area?

RP: It’s a very good question because it gets behind the issue. It asks, what is the process by which these communities have been segregated and the way in which communities are shaped? And redlining is also a very good word, because it’s the actual red line that you would see on real estate maps. It’s the actual redline. And in historic documents, when we found those maps from banks, or communities, and you saw the red line, people said, “What was that?” And slowly they figured out it was used by banks to determine the value of property and where they would and would not grant mortgages. So redlining meant, if you were inside that red line, you were not going to get a mortgage. Indeed, the value difference between redlining and outside the red lining is about one half. So houses redlined were devalued by one-half houses not redlined.

PV: Wow, is that dramatic.

RP: Very dramatic. And then of course the difficulty is the banks think, “You’re asking for $150,000, but I valued your house only at $25,000. I can’t do that.” But I’ve made that number because I’ve redlined. And redlining is… And this is a word I want to hold on to. This is so pernicious. It’s hidden. People don’t see it, it’s subtle. It took a very long time from the 1930s to the 1970s to really outlaw the practice. And it still goes on. It goes on in other kinds of loans, it goes on and other kinds of banking procedures, it goes on in credit cards. It goes on in a whole series of things because I use those measures to determine whether you’re loan worthy.

PV: It reminds me of the conversations that you hear about race in the sense that racism hasn’t gone away, per se, it’s just that we’re better about using euphemisms to cloak it. So like when you think about a neighborhood you’re not talking about, “Okay, we’re not going to come out and say, ‘We don’t want a multiple dwelling apartment building because we don’t want poor people.'” You’ll say things like, “It’s going to ruin the character of the town.”

RP: What you’re talking about is the subtlety and sophistication of racism now. In a lot of communities where there have been proposals for multiunit housing, the very liberal community members respond to that by pointing to the environmental impact. So, “We’re not arguing about the unit, the numbers, or who. That building is going to damage our environment. And that has nothing to do with the race.”

PV: What gives you hope that things will change for the better?

RP: I don’t want to be a Pollyanna. And I don’t want to say I’m filled with hope. Because my first feeling about this problem is there’s something about it that’s intransigent. The government, political leaders, have had a crack at it for several decades and we have not moved the needle very far. It’s a problem that I think the public has found ways to dodge, to hide. And I think the word I keep coming back to how insidious this is. There is a battle here about whether this is a class or race issue, and suburbanites like to say, “I’ll let you into the suburb if you can really meet the economic level of life here.” So that’s a class issue. I don’t object to you based on race. We know from recent studies that the black incomes in the United States are going up, black professional incomes are going up.

The number of blacks with advanced degrees is going up. And the general economic condition, and the number of blacks in suburbs is going up. So all of those hallmarks tend to show that they’re beginning to have the badges that we have required for entrance into the suburb. So I tend to think that may be a method of change more readily than the way in which we tried to do this through the law.

As a matter of fact, this is a very good question, that people will qualify for what you think is the standard. And, again, “I’m going to let you in one by one, not in 25 units.” So the pace of this is abhorrent, but that’s where the change is coming. It’s very difficult, based on all the evidence and what you’ve said, to get communities to openly acknowledge, “We have been wrong here. We have to figure out a way how to change this.” I have a hard time seeing that change of consciousness unless I admit that I am part of the problem. And the first way the response, for me, to Black Lives Matter is to think, how have I contributed to this, and how do I change? I need to find ways to publicly say to my community, we need to open this up now. No matter what the danger is to what we think is our primary asset, our home value.

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

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

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

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

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

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

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

Contemplating the Bard

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

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

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

Embracing New Technologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from Classmates

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Creative with Lab Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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