“A University can be no greater than its faculty,” said Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., during opening remarks. “At the time each of you were hired, we selected you because we saw

great potential in you as a teaching scholar … we were confident that over time, you would demonstrate the fulfillment of your potential.”

It was the third annual faculty celebration, a tradition that began in 2022.

Eighteen faculty members were recognized at the ceremony. Each was introduced by their college’s dean: Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center; Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business; Ji Seon Lee, Ph.D., acting dean of the Graduate School of Education; Debra McPhee, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Social Service; Bennett Capers, associate dean for research at Fordham Law School; Ann Gaylin, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Bob Hume, Ph.D., acting dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

The deans also read out a list of the faculty members’ accomplishments, ranging from publications in prestigious academic journals to bringing in millions in grant funding for research to the University. 

President Tania Tetlow delivered closing remarks, congratulating the faculty members and thanking them for their service to Fordham, on behalf of the University and its students.

The honorees promoted to professor were as follows: 

• Christopher Aubin, Ph.D. (Physics and Engineering Physics)
• Lauri Goldkind, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D. (Computer and Information Science)
• Robert Hernández, Ph.D. (English)
• Ron Lazebnik (School of Law)

The faculty members who earned tenure were: 

• Norrinda Brown (School of Law)
• Natasha Burke, Ph.D. (Psychology)
• Rufus Burnett Jr., Ph.D. (Theology)
• Leah Feuerstahler, Ph.D. (Psychology)
• Elizabeth Gil, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Education)
• Lauren Kopajtic, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
• Elizabeth Matthews, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Dominik Molitor, Ph.D. (Gabelli School of Business)
• Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D. (Communication and Media Studies)
• Rahbel Rahman-Tahir, Ph.D. (Graduate School of Social Service)
• Fadi Skeiker, Ph.D. (Theatre)
• Nicholas Smyth, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
• Laura Specker Sullivan, Ph.D. (Philosophy)

The fund dovetails with one of the key priorities of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, with its emphasis on equity and inclusion as well as the wellness of every student. Here are five examples of the numerous activities it has made possible:

No. 1: Ignatian Q.

With support from the fund, 10 Fordham students traveled to St. Louis University in April for this annual conference organized by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities to promote community and spirituality among LGBTQ students. (Fordham hosted Ignatian Q in 2023 with support from the wellbeing fund.) In the words of one Fordham graduate student who attended, Tatum Allen, FCLC ’24, “it offered me a space to feel less alone as a queer person of faith.”

No. 2: Students Together for Acceptance, Respect, and Support (STARS).

Piloted last year by professors and students in the psychology department and the Graduate School of Social Service, this network brings Fordham students together with local high school students seeking to engage with LGBTQ peers, find support, and build community. Two of the high schoolers also took part in a year-long research project on LGBTQ experiences in school and presented their research at the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Philadelphia.

No. 3: Oral History Project with SAGE Center Bronx.

Last year, undergraduate students in a communications class—titled Photography, Identity, Power—worked with residents of the SAGE center, a community center for LGBTQ seniors, to produce a digital exhibition of their photography that includes an oral history element. Students in an art class, Visual Justice, later met with the seniors and made portrait photographs of them.

No. 4: Queer Prayer Book.

The book Queer Prayer at Fordham was developed in 2023 and distributed at Ignatian Q when it was held at the University. 

No. 5: NYC Interfaith Pilgrimage/Retreat

This daylong retreat at the Lincoln Center campus, held in February, centered on art as a way to explore the intersection between spirituality and queerness. About two dozen students and alumni gathered for morning presentations, toured sites important to the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village, and reconvened on campus to produce their own art. 

No. 6: Urban Plunge and Global Outreach Scholarships.

With support from the wellbeing fund, LGBTQ students received scholarships to take part in Urban Plunge and Global Outreach, two programs of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Sources: Fordham Campus Ministry, Center for Community Engaged Learning 

She had spent a year as a hospice volunteer, learning to provide support to seriously ill patients and their families. She started working with four patients per week, but soon found herself working with 10 per week because the work was so rewarding. 

“It’s a privilege to be able to see people in that time and provide them support,” she said. “It was fulfilling in that sometimes you could see that, even if just a little bit, you were making this very difficult process a little easier for some people.”

A Scholarship in Memory of Meredith Barnhart 

Pursuing her Master of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Service, Smith is learning in depth about helping people work through the myriad issues and questions that come with serious illness, such as end-of-life planning. As a recipient of the graduate school’s Palliative Care Fellowship, she takes part in specialized seminars and workshops, and she interns in palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. 

She’s received crucial help from fellowships and scholarships—including the Meredith J. Barnhart, Ph.D., GSS ’20, Memorial Endowed Scholarship, named for a woman who earned her doctorate at the Graduate School of Social Service.

Barnhart’s family established the scholarship after she passed away suddenly at her home in 2020, just four months after she had earned her doctorate. The scholarship is designated for someone who has an interest in palliative and end-of-life care or oncology. 

“The Barnhart scholarship is really helpful—I’m paying for my graduate degree myself, so it made it more financially accessible,” Smith said. She has also received the graduate school’s Kathy and Brian MacLean Scholarship in Palliative Care.

After receiving the Barnhart scholarship, Smith met with Barnhart’s fiancée, Jeffrey Knapp, and attended a presentation on Barnhart’s doctoral work, focused on serving families in which cancer strikes a parent and a child at the same time. Smith said she’s honored to carry on Barnhart’s legacy and her passion for “serving people in this really difficult time in their lives and their loved ones’ lives.”

Discovering Social Work

Smith first got the idea of being a social worker around the time of her graduation from Barnard College in 2022. When she learned that her grandmother needed more health care support, she researched government programs that might help her, just as a social worker might connect a patient with services. She found she liked the work. And then there was the memory of her late grandfather and the social workers who helped him during hospice care. 

“Thinking about how there were people who were there, to make sure he was comfortable and helping, made me feel better,” she said.

During her time as a hospice volunteer, at Constellation Health Services in her home state of Connecticut, “I was able to sort of do for other people what had been done for me,” she said.

Being with people at the end of life means a lot to her. Sometimes, she said, “you could just really see some of the patients didn’t have anyone else.” 

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.”