That’s the topic of a recent book by Richard Teverson, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history, who puts a spotlight on something that tends to be overlooked in histories of conquering powers: the hopes and dreams of the conquered.

Studying such “past futures” is growing more popular in the humanities and social sciences, said Teverson, author of Visions of the Future in Roman Frontier Kingdoms 100 BCE–100 CE, published in September by Routledge. “You can’t get a full picture of a decision that someone makes in the past,” he said, “unless you have a sense of what they thought could happen.”

Teverson gained this sense by examining public art created during the empire’s expansion. He got the idea for the book from his students—when they wrote in a midterm exam about the imagined futures reflected in the Arch of Constantine in Rome, he decided to apply this idea at the former empire’s edge and beyond it, to structures created by people who later came under Roman rule.

Nations or groups being taken over deserve to have their aspirations understood rather than being told to simply “get on board” with their new ruler’s vision, he said. 

“Even people who you might think are on the losing side of history have a future that they’re envisaging and, especially if it’s no longer feasible in some way, are engaged in a really complicated idea about how to fit their aspirations to reality,” he said.

Protecting Rights Through Art

In 14 BCE, as Alpine tribes were falling to Roman conquest, the local ruler Cottius made a deal with the Romans to absorb his kingdom into the empire and remain as magistrate.

To proclaim the new order, he commissioned an archway that, Teverson argues, was designed with the future in mind: As opposed to the Romans’ usual depictions of peacemaking, which might show a vanquished barbarian kissing the hand of a Roman general, the arch contains a relief of Cottius shaking hands with the Roman emperor Augustus.

It also shows tribes receiving citizenship tablets—a way of codifying certain rights and privileges in case they were later challenged, Teverson argues. “This seems, to me, pretty direct in its aspirations and its concern for documenting a ritual of political transfer,” he said.

‘A Divinely Ordained Future’

Another example comes from Kommagene, in modern-day Turkey, a kingdom conquered by Rome in 17 CE. Before that, as wars involving Rome and other powers clouded the kingdom’s future, its ruler, Antiochos I, built a hilltop complex containing icons and images meant to convey a glorious destiny for the kingdom.

That was also his goal, Teverson argues, when the king took the unusual step of including an engraving of his own horoscope so that worshippers would compare it with the night sky and be reminded, “‘Oh, we are working in a kingdom that has a divinely ordained future,’” he said.

Crafting ‘the Futures They Need to Survive’

Through this and other stories of artistic expression, Teverson illustrates how people “craft the futures they need to survive” in the face of uncertainty about what’s coming. It’s an idea that resonates from ancient Rome to today’s marginalized communities who may have a picture of their own future in mind—but face strong headwinds in making it a reality, he said. 

An example might be city planners envisioning a future for a neighborhood—like Harlem, where Teverson lives—without consulting with the residents, he said. “If you want to understand the problems of Harlem, you need to, in some ways, ask yourself, well, what does Harlem think its future is going to be?” 

While writing the book, he was thinking of the looming problem of climate change and the questions that future generations might ask about the future we’re trying to shape today.

“Maybe even in my daughter’s lifetime,” he said, “they’re going to look back and [say], what were you planning in 2024?”

“I’m grateful that they gave me a shot to come here,” said Bernard Anderson, a mixer at Greyston. “[When I] came here,” Anderson said, “I stopped going to jail.”

He and other employees who have flourished at Greyston tell its story in a documentary recently co-produced by Gabelli School of Business professor Michael Pirson, Ph.D. It’s the latest outgrowth of research by him and his colleagues about how businesses can succeed by tuning in to their employees’ humanity.

Addressing the Great Resignation

Key to this approach is promoting employees’ dignity, according to an Oct. 30 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Pirson, Gabelli School professor Ayse Yemiscigil, Ph.D., and Donna Hicks, Ph.D., an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The article describes how to lead an organization with dignity—by defining it clearly, recognizing people’s inherent value, and acknowledging dignity violations, among other things. The goal is creating workspaces “where people feel seen and heard, and where they can collaborate at the next level” because of it, said Pirson, the James A. F. Stoner Endowed Chair in Global Sustainability at the Gabelli School.

Yemiscigil said it’s an urgent topic because of the so-called Great Resignation and “the epidemic of low employee engagement.”

“There are all sorts of indicators showing that the way that we manage and lead organizations is not working for the majority of people,” she said.

Creating a dignity culture, Pirson and Yemiscigil said, involves such things as listening to understand people, acknowledging employees as whole human beings, and giving employees a greater voice in the organization. “It doesn’t take long” for this culture to take hold if there’s enough intention and commitment, Pirson said.

Inspired by Sesame Street

Helping companies make this shift is the idea behind the documentaries Pirson started co-producing about four years ago after he happened to meet some of the (human) cast members of Sesame Street through a Gabelli School connection. Inspired by the show’s emphasis on human potential, he set out to feature companies that exemplify humanistic management, working with co-producer Alison Bartlett, a writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress who was a Sesame Street cast member.

His second short film, Zen Brownie, focuses on Greyston Bakery, a supplier of Ben & Jerry’s founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, a physicist and Buddhist monk. (One of Glassman’s friends, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, narrates.) The bakery’s dignity-based open hiring policy creates “a virtuous cycle of trustworthiness,” Pirson says in the film. “Trust that you place in other people typically gets trust back” and often inspires the recipient to want to live up to that, he says.

Studying Student Behavior

His team has shown the documentaries at film festivals; they’re looking for a distributor and planning a few more films. He and Yemiscigil are also working on studies, soon to be submitted to the Journal of Business Ethics, that show how dignity can boost employees’ motivation and engagement as well as teams’ performance. Some of their findings come from a study of 800 Gabelli School students preparing for a consulting competition, working in teams.

Dignity is important not only for companies but for society because it frees us to think more about large-scale problems, Pirson said, giving climate change as an example.

Without “dignity wounds” occupying our minds, he said, “we move from a defensiveness into a space of abundance where we can create, and that is what’s necessary for our species to actually survive.”

Last month Fordham celebrated Yan’s appointment to the Robert Bendheim Chair in Economics and Financial Policy, which was established in 1996 with a gift from the Leon Lowenstein Foundation. He found time to talk about his work before leaving for a trip to China and Taiwan to meet with Gabelli School graduates and potential donors interested in supporting the school’s research.

Your current area of research is ESG—the environmental, social, and governance issues that corporations consider when making business decisions. Why are you drawn to this field and how does the Gabelli School emphasize this in its course offerings? 

That’s part of the strategic research area of the Gabelli School. And also, of course, it’s something I’m passionate about. I spend a lot of time doing this research, trying to see what’s going on, what is wrong, and how we should be trying to educate the students, the market, and the investors. 

Financial Markets and Responsibility is a core course for our Master’s in Finance program and one of the classes I teach. It serves as the starting point for our students to approach [ESG] in more holistic ways and in more scientific ways. And then after this core course, we have electives which are taught by adjuncts working in the field because the ESG landscape has been changing all the time. So those professionals…help our students to really get a hold of the most contemporary issues and challenges. 

The Gabelli School [also]has a student-managed investment fund course that includes an ESG fund. This gives students first-hand experience in managing the portfolio in a sustainable way.

You delivered a lecture on ESG at your installation ceremony. What were the key takeaways?

The takeaway is that ESG is always part of strategic management. It used to be more opportunistic to game the system a little bit and to focus on one [pillar]while sacrificing another one. The recent development seems like the firms, they don’t do this trade-off anymore. My conjecture is, the financial market has become more sophisticated so they can recognize such opportunistic behavior [and they don’t reward it].

There seems to be a backlash against ESG right now. In 2022 Ron DeSantis associated the term with “woke capital.” At the start of this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a story with the headline, “The Latest Dirty Word in Corporate America: ESG.” What’s happening here?

I think it’s just unfortunate, right? It’s a lot of political pressure…but many firms—Unilever, Microsoft—are still [practicing ESG]. They have chief sustainability officers, CSOs. So it tells you they still want to do it. And many people talk about climate risk and how to help the climate. So that’s still there. ESG as a term could be in trouble. But as a practice, I still think many firms are still practicing it, although they may use a different phrase. 

You teach at a Jesuit institution and you received your Ph.D. from one. What is it about this tradition that speaks to you?

Cura personalis [care for the whole person], that’s the key part. Of course there are different ways to talk about a whole human being, but I think one way [is]: just do the right thing. In the current world, you have so much information, different extremes, social media. Sometimes you get lost. I think we’re just trying to [teach]students—think about what’s the right thing to do…follow your value system.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

That tech, called generative AI, holds the key to a new system “that not only anticipates potential attacks but also prepares systems to counteract previously unseen cyberthreats,” said Mohamed Rahouti, Ph.D., assistant professor in the computer and information science department and one of Fordham’s IBM research fellows.

He and a crew of graduate students are working on new systems that, he said, are needed to get ahead of sophisticated attacks that are constantly evolving. Their focus is a type of easy-to-launch attack that has proved crippling to companies and government agencies ever since the internet began.

Denial of Service Attacks

Cybercriminals sometimes overwhelm and freeze a company’s or government agency’s computer systems by bombarding them with way more internet traffic than they can handle, using multiple computers or multiple online accounts. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS.

A typical attack could cost a company $22,000 a minute, he said. Nearly 30,000 of them take place every day around the world. Many of them are foiled by programs that use machine learning and artificial intelligence.

But those programs don’t always know what to look for, since they typically rely on snapshots of past traffic, Rahouti said. Another challenge is the growing number of internet-connected devices, from smart watches to autonomous vehicles, that could provide cybercriminals with new avenues for attack.

Generative AI

Hence the research into using generative AI, which could produce a far wider range of possible attack scenarios by working upon computer traffic data to make new connections and predictions, he said. When it’s trained using the scenarios produced by generative AI, “then my machine learning/AI model will be much more capable of detecting the different types of DDOS attacks,” Rahouti said.

To realize this vision, Rahouti and his team of graduate students are working on several projects. They recently used generative AI and other techniques to expand upon a snapshot of network traffic data and create a clearer picture of what is and isn’t normal. This helps machine learning programs see what shouldn’t be there. “We were amazed at the quality of this enhanced picture,” Rahouti said.

This bigger dataset enabled their machine learning model to spot low-profile attacks it had previously missed, he said.

Large Language Models

For their next project, they’re studying a large language model—the kind that powers ChatGPT—for ideas about how generative AI can be applied to cybersecurity. They’re using InstructLab, an open-source tool launched by IBM and Red Hat in May.

With all the companies and university researchers invested in new uses for generative AI, Rahouti is optimistic about its future applications in cybersecurity. The goal is to develop a system that runs on its own in the background, detecting both existing and emerging threats without being explicitly told what to look for.

“At present, we don’t have a fully autonomous system with these capabilities,” Rahouti said, “but advancements in AI and machine learning are moving us closer to achieving this level of real-time, adaptive cybersecurity.”

Jenn Lilly, Ph.D., and Rose M. Perez, Ph.D., both of the Graduate School of Social Service, have dedicated large parts of their careers to studying the emotional and psychological complexity of Latin American communities. Their findings inspired their respective film projects: one highlighting the unique grief of Cuban Americans who’ve left behind their homeland, and the other exploring the mental health challenges faced by many young Latinas. 

Longing for a Lost Homeland

Perez’s film, Cuba es Mí Patria: The Homeland I Keep Inside, explores the experiences of the Cuban diaspora through the framework of “ambiguous loss,” a theory she’s researched extensively. Unlike other forms of grief, ambiguous loss can lack closure and keep the “lost object” psychologically present indefinitely. 

According to Perez, the experiences of the film’s interviewees who left Cuba after the 1959 revolution exemplify this phenomenon. Like a ghosted lover or the parents of a missing child, many Cuban Americans live with unanswered questions that can make letting go impossible, like: Will I ever see my relatives again? Will Cuba’s political and economic situation ever improve? And, will I ever be able to return? 

The conversations were often emotional, especially the interview Perez’s colleague conducted with her father. Perez and her family left Cuba in 1971. “He was so teary throughout the interview that it was really hard to edit his piece,” she said. 

The film appeared in several national and international festivals and won the Best Original Story award at the Touchstone Independent Film Festival in July. Locally, the next screening will be at the AMT Film Festival in Hell’s Kitchen Nov. 8-10. 

Perez says Cuba es Mí Patria is an excellent tool for educators, and will be relatable to anyone from an immigrant background. She hopes viewers will walk away with a “greater appreciation for the hidden trauma people don’t know we carry.”

Speaking Up about Latina Mental Health

In the short film Nuestro Apoyo (Our Support), which Lilly wrote with a group of young Latina collaborators, the drama on screen reflects a culture of silence around mental health issues in many Latin American families. With insights taken from Lilly’s academic research on Latina mental health, the short film depicts a young, first-generation woman’s struggle to bridge a generational and cultural divide with her parents and discuss her thoughts and feelings. 

To create the script, Lilly brought together a group of five young Latina writing partners — all Fordham students or alumni — and drew inspiration from their personal experiences. 

“One of my biggest takeaways was that this new generation is very aware of mental health and interested in preventive behaviors, but they’re encountering some difficulty in reconciling that with their families or their cultural views, which are often about keeping things within the family and not discussing things that could bring stigma,” said Lilly. 

Post-production work on the film wrapped in late September. Lilly plans to submit Nuestro Apoyo to some film festivals and then seek a distributor. Whatever happens next, she already experienced a moment of victory watching the film over Zoom with the five young writers. 

“It was really fun to see their reactions, especially when their names appear in the credits,” she said. “We all felt very emotional by the end. It was maybe the highlight of my career.”

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.”

But like AI, the technology has raised ethical concerns. If used improperly, it could cause harm or violate a patient’s privacy.

Fordham researcher Laura Specker Sullivan, Ph.D., was awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in August to assess the usefulness of ethics guidelines currently geared toward neurotechnology researchers.

“Neurotechnology is this really rapidly growing area of science and technology. There’s a lot of interest in it, and there’s a lot of money in it, so it’s not surprising that there are a lot of ethicists thinking about how we should do it and what direction it should go in,” said Specker Sullivan, an associate professor of philosophy who helped to write some of the guidelines herself. Her research project involves bringing researchers and ethicists together to see how they’re being used.

“Unless we connect ethicists with the people doing that scientific and technological advancement, it’s not going to have any effect. And we are going to have a technological future that we don’t have control over.” 

Titled “Principles to Practice: Ethical Guidance for Neurotechnology Researchers,” Specker Sullivan’s three-year project will be conducted with Anna Wexler, Ph.D. assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennslyvania.

A Growing Field

The field of neurotechnology–which involves creating and using technology that impacts the brain and generates data from it—is expanding rapidly. According to the Harvard Business Review, the global market for neurotech is growing at an annual rate of 12% and is expected to reach $21 billion by 2026. 

The technology being developed varies from things like a computer interface that can detect (and potentially even prevent) a potential seizure to implants that stimulate parts of the brain to affect mood and cognition.

Over the past few years, Specker Sullivan and Wexler helped create some of the first guidelines for researchers, but Specker Sullivan realized that there was no meaningful follow-up to see if researchers working in neurotechnology were aware of them, reading them, or finding them useful.

Connecting Ethicists with Researchers

As part of the research, they’ll be attending neurotechnology conferences and hosting roundtables that bring ethicists and neurotechnology researchers together”.

“If we find out that researchers are not using ethics guidance for X, Y, and Z reasons, we really want ethicists to know about those reasons,” she said. “We want other researchers to reflect on that and hopefully work to decrease that gap.”

Potential Pitfalls

Privacy is one of the project’s biggest concerns.

“Companies are already getting profiles of what we’re looking at on the internet. Imagine if they could do that with the actual electrical impulses that are coming from your brain. There are going to be intimate things that you would maybe never say to anyone,” she said.

Safety is another concern. The brain is so complex that if a treatment targets one specific symptom, it’s possible that there can be a cascade of effects that are not always anticipated. 

Specker Sullivan cited deep brain stimulation, which is being used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, as a good example. The goal is to reduce tremors and allow patients to perform motor tasks. The treatment, however, can also lead to personality and mood changes.

Specker Sullivan is optimistic that ethics guidelines can be useful for researchers in determining whether neurotechnology is good for people.

“If we’re just focusing on physical benefit, we might be thinking about one kind of definition of “good,” but what about other definitions of well-being?” she said.

“Philosophers bring the ability to ask incisive questions, but also an understanding of the broad range of possibilities for how we define ethical concepts, like good or bad or right or wrong.”

Their focus is women and children who came to New York City from Mexico and found their way to the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service in East Harlem. There, they received holistic support that not only met their immediate needs but also empowered them to improve their circumstances, help others, and be leaders.

The agency “has been doing really effective work with diverse communities in a very complicated city and … developing power in a community that is typically disempowered,” said Fordham theology professor Brenna Moore, Ph.D. She and Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish at Fordham, are co-authors of Mutuality in El Barrio: Stories of the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, out this month from Fordham University Press. A book launch takes place May 20.

Creating Pathways Out of Poverty

The Little Sisters of the Assumption, a Catholic order, founded its East Harlem agency in 1958 to create opportunities for families to escape poverty. The first executive director was Sister Margaret Leonard, GSS ’67, who codified the agency’s idea of mutuality.

It called for forming mutually enriching relationships with clients, “eschewing a binary framework of helper and helped in an effort to cocreate new realities in East Harlem that benefit all parties,” the book says.

That meant listening to migrants’ stories, offering mental and spiritual support, and unlocking their strengths over the long term. Sometimes it meant bringing them together so they could address common problems, like mold in their public housing. Former clients often return as volunteers and staffers or serve other New York City organizations in leadership roles.

What mutuality is not, Kasten said, is “looking for immediate effects.”

“It’s willing to be in conversation with someone for years and understanding that sometimes it does take that long,” she said. “The things that people are asked to do when they come to this country don’t take just a week.”

Success Stories of Migrants

Eight Fordham students worked on the book project, gaining research experience by helping Moore and Kasten with interviewing migrants the agency served over the past few decades. The students included theology, Spanish, and communications majors, as well as students in the Graduate School of Social Service. Most migrants quoted in the book used pseudonyms.

The interviewees included Sonia, a onetime teenage mother whom the agency helped navigate prenatal care, develop parenting skills, and enroll in a pre-nursing degree program. The nuns also called upon her to provide nursing care to another Little Sisters client in her building.

And they stuck with her through crises—like being jailed on a false accusation from her child’s father, who had beaten her. The sisters prayed and sang hymns outside the jail overnight, giving her hope until charges were dropped the next day. She later moved to Florida, married, raised three children, and became head nurse in a hospital’s radiology department—at one point, overseeing the care of an ailing relative of Sister Margaret, who Sonia said is “like family.”

Another young mother, Yolanda, gained parenting skills through the agency and later joined its staff after earning her bachelor’s degree. “They began supporting me, motivating me,” she says in the book. In the words of another client: “They make you see what you don’t see in yourself.”

Blame it on the mulberry, birch, and oak trees if you’re in Manhattan, said Guy Robinson, Ph.D., where Fordham University maintains the only official pollen monitoring station in the city. Those three species dominated Robinson’s latest sample slides heading into what’s traditionally the peak pollen weeks of the season—the first two weeks of May.

Robinson maintains and collects pollen samples from the station, located at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on 60th Street east of Columbus Avenue, as well as another station at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk, New York. Throughout the spring and summer, he feeds the data to the National Allergy Bureau of the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and posts a spreadsheet on @FordhamPollen on X as a public service.

Robinson has been at it for 25 years, while teaching biology and paleoecology in the Department of Natural Sciences, first as a senior lecturer at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, now as a visiting scholar. Once a week, on Tuesdays, he hops up on a wall outside the McMahon residence hall on 60th Street and unwraps a clear inch-wide strip of tape from a cylinder in the Burkard spore trap. The cylinder makes one complete turn in a week. The top of the machine spins like a weather vane, capturing the microscopic particles that cause the seasonal suffering of so many.

After coiling the tape into a metal canister, he carries it to a biology lab in Lowenstein. There Robinson snips the tape into segments—one for every 24-hour period. Then he begins the tedious process of counting pollen particles. 

On April 30, peering through a microscope while working a rudimentary clicker counter with his left hand and making notes with his right, Robinson said that by now, he recognizes most of the different tree pollens “just at a glance.” That’s how he gets the number we all know as the “pollen count”—the number of pollen particles per cubic meter of air. 

He added, “Humans are still better at counting pollen than any machine.” 

No More Sycamores

Robinson has a paper in review now for the Urban Design and Planning Journal suggesting that municipalities should take into consideration the effects of allergens when creating their tree-planting plans.

“They do not need to be planting sycamores in the city,” he said, noting that the species is highly allergenic. Fortunately, the sycamore pollen numbers are already subsiding for this season.

Trees like cherry, hawthorne, and pear, with noticeable flowers, he said, are not major contributors to allergies because they are insect pollinated (the pollen is not carried by the wind).

Those wreaking the most allergy havoc are oak, birch, alder, walnut, sycamore, and elm. Pine pollen is not a major allergen, although pines produce a lot of pollen, he said.

Every year is slightly different in terms of timing and quantity of pollen, said Robinson. But tree pollen nearly always peaks in the same order each year, with sycamore pollen appearing first. 

So what can you do if you are allergic to pollen?

“What we learned during COVID is that what does seem to have helped is wearing a mask,” Robinson said.  “Even the cheapest ones filter out most of the pollen.”

Funded through a nearly $25,000 grant awarded to Dougnon by the Wenner-Gren Foundation in September 2023, the Water and Migration Project is a comprehensive ethnographic research program that analyzes the effects of post-drought migration patterns on housing, community, and livelihoods across three villages in Mali.

“Many scholars work on water and migration, but mostly as a future scenario, Dougnon said. “I’m looking at a group of people who really, collectively, left their region and settled in new places … this is concrete data.”

The Sahel region of western Africa, where Mali is located, suffered two notable periods of drought in 1973 and 1984. This devastated the local agrarian economy and displaced its inhabitants, leading to mass migration.

The project aims to collect data from those impacted communities through first-hand interviews, field observations, and archival records from entities such as local churches and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Working for the Marginalized

When Dougnon reached out to organizations for data on these migratory communities, those institutions weren’t just willing to pitch in—they were eager.

Little information is available on the long-term effects of these droughts on mass migration, and researchers like Dougnon are working to fill a crucial gap that will hopefully lead to actionable relief efforts. Mali has continued to deal with droughts, affecting about 400,000 residents each year and reducing crop revenues by $9.5 million annually.

“I’m so proud that not only are the migrants interested in my research, but also the institutions,” Dougnon said. “The state and NGOs are interested in these results because …these [migrants] are facing challenges.”

For Dougnon, this human aspect is the key that has driven his work throughout his long career.

“All of my research has this humanitarian aspect—defending the marginalized,” Dougnon said.

Dougnon, who is currently on leave from Fordham to work on the project, has been conducting this research for the first six months of the grant. He will spend the remainder of the year compiling a report on his findings that he will present to the foundation, as well as to a workshop of Fordham community members studying comparable issues.

How Do Communities Adapt?

At Fordham, Dougnan teaches a variety of undergraduate and master’s level courses that combine his expertise in French with subjects like African society and the environment. An anthropologist by trade, Dougnon has been surveying the humanitarian effects of climate change, such as how natural resources get depleted and how that impacts internal migration, for more than 25 years.

Dougnon stressed that these small-scale examples of the effects of climate change—and how agricultural communities respond to them in real time—could provide key insights into managing potentially larger resource scarcity.

“My project wants to look at how they have been able to adapt to new places in the south of Mali,” he said. “How do they transform this landscape by bringing in technologies, social organizations, and so on?”

Dougnon hopes to use his findings to create a new, more robust project that can replicate these methods on a larger scale—ideally encompassing multiple countries in Africa.

On March 3, 46 employees were celebrated at present-day Fordham for 60, 40, or 20 years of service during the annual University Convocation ceremony at the Rose Hill campus.

Forty-six faculty, staff, and administrators were recognized in Keating Hall, with their family, friends, and colleagues in attendance. 

The longest-serving honoree was Constantine “Gus” N. Katsoris, a former Greek olive oil and cheese salesman turned tax law expert. Katsoris earned his bachelor’s degree from the Gabelli School of Business in 1953 and graduated first in his class from Fordham Law School in 1957. For more than three decades, he led the law school’s annual Supreme Court bar induction ceremonies, which have admitted more than 1,000 alumni and faculty. This year, he is celebrating his 60th anniversary as a faculty member at Fordham Law, where he holds the title Wilkinson Professor of Law Emeritus. 

Other honorees include a professor who was a Truman Scholar, a duty supervisor who shepherded the University community through the pandemic, an analyst who previously worked at several Fortune 100 companies, and a department leader who is also an award-winning filmmaker. 

The honorees’ accomplishments at Fordham are wide ranging and diverse, from directing scholarships and financial services for thousands of students to conducting research on marginalized communities and mental health data. They hail from across the world, including Italy, Ireland, and Bulgaria. All of them arrived at Fordham in the 1900s, remaining for decades at the University they now call home. 

Bene Merenti Medal | Sixty Years 

Constantine N. Katsoris

Bene Merenti Medal | Forty Years 

Esther Solomon 

Bene Merenti Medal | Twenty Years

Gregory Acevedo • Ipsita A. Banerjee • Robert Henry Borrero • Melkana A. Brakalova-Trevithick • Elizabeth P. Cosenza • Anne E. Fernald • Paolo Galizzi • David D. Hamlin • Evangelos Katsamakas • Winnie W. Kung • Michael E. Lee • Sara L. Lehman • Christopher R. Maginn • Jennie Park-Taylor • Alessandro Polcri • Rosa Romeo • Nina A. Rowe • Mark F. Street • Kelly Ann Ulto • Alessia Valfredini • Gary M. Weiss • Akane Zusho 

Archbishop Hughes Medal | Forty Years 

John W. Buckley • Frank McLaughlin 

Archbishop Hughes Medal | Twenty Years 

Dennis Cassidy • Rien Chy • Steven M. D’Agustino • Jennifer Giorgio • Jaime Lyn Harkin • Dean K. Mavrovitis • Kevin D. Munnelly • Lynn Parliman • John D. Williams • Tsvetelina T. Zlatareva 

1841 Award | Forty Years 

Linda M. Perri 

1841 Award | Twenty Years

Joseph J. Arenas • Marie Hall • Robert Heihn • Robin R. Joseph • Vinetu Mamudoski • Susan K. Perciasepe • Matthew N. Peters • Maria V. Totino • Michael Woods