“It’s common for historians and the general public to say that there are little to no sources about women from the past. There’s actually a ton of material, but it hasn’t been integrated into the way that we tell the history of the city,” said Gribetz, an associate professor of theology who was recently awarded a $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on her book. 

“I want to shift our focus away from the usual suspects—King David, Emperor Constantine, Sultan Salah ad-Din—and toward the many women who made contributions to the city,” she said. 

Jerusalem: A Feminist History will serve as a historical account of the city from Biblical times to the present—a period that spans more than 3,000 years. Instead of focusing on the city’s male leaders, it will highlight women from all social classes, from the queens of Jerusalem to enslaved women and servants from wealthy households, said Gribetz. 

A Heroine from the First Century

Among the featured women will be Helena of Adiabene, a first-century queen. A native of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Helena converted to Judaism and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When she arrived, the city was suffering from famine. She used her wealth to import figs and other agricultural products from nearby countries. Thanks to her philanthropic efforts, she became a beloved figure in Jerusalem, said Gribetz.

“Helena is a woman from outside of the city who becomes a hero within Jerusalem. In the many centuries after her death, Jews and Christians continue to tell stories about her,” Gribetz said. “She’s actually a relatively minor character in the first century, but she helps us see new things about the city’s history.”

The city of Jerusalem itself is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, Gribetz said. 

“In our earliest written sources about Jerusalem, people imagine the city as a sister, mother, partner, or widow. That personification of Jerusalem often happens when the city is in danger of coming under foreign rule or destruction in times of war,” Gribetz said. 

New Insights From Tombstones and Old Records

Gribetz said the inspiration for her book emerged during her first years at Fordham, when the Center for Medieval Studies asked her to teach a course on medieval Jerusalem. 

“I kept noticing women in ways that I had never thought about, in terms of Jerusalem’s history,” said Gribetz, who taught the course for several years, beginning in 2016. “At a certain point, I realized that the way I constructed my syllabus was in line with this very standard narrative of Jerusalem’s history, but there were many other ways to tell that history.”

In the following years, she received research grants and support from Fordham, including the theology department’s Rita Houlihan grant, which allowed her to research topics that led to her book. She is currently living in Jerusalem, where she is interviewing scholars and locals, participating in city tours, and studying texts at libraries, museums, and archives. The texts include funerary inscriptions on tombstones from the Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, as well as other archaeological remains, including from synagogues, churches, and mosques. 

“Our literary sources often focus more on men than women, so we have to get creative with the kinds of sources that we use to reconstruct history,” said Gribetz. “But there are still many ways to find traces of these women.” 

‘This History Belongs to Many Different People’

Through her book, Gribetz said she aims to push back against the idea that we’re limited in the kinds of stories we can tell. 

“If we’re creative with the questions we ask and the sources that we use, then we can tell history in a way that incorporates the stories of a much broader segment of the population, whether it’s in Jerusalem or in other cities or contexts,” said Gribetz, who has also written Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). 

Gribetz will spend the coming few years writing the book, which will be published by Princeton University Press. In addition to exploring the history of women in Jerusalem, Gribetz said she also hopes that her book weaves together the stories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims and shows that the city’s diversity is a strength, rather than a liability. 

“I would like to think that my book may help encourage people in all these different communities to appreciate what a beautiful thing it is to share such a deep history with the city, rather than to compete over who has exclusive claims to it,” Gribetz said. “I hope that my book conveys how complicated, interesting, and beautiful this history is, and that this history belongs to many different people.”

“Power failures can lead to great economic loss and greatly impact on our daily lives,” said Chen, who was awarded the grant last December. “My goal is to improve people’s lives by ensuring the security and resiliency of our energy system.” 

Electric power systems are a critical component of society that provide power to our homes, businesses, and devices. But when they fail, they can have devastating consequences, said Chen. Disastrous events have previously shut down the electric grid and left millions of people without power, including the 2019 Manhattan blackout and the 2021 Texas power crisis.  

Thanks to advances in technology, many electric power systems now use energy devices that can be controlled remotely through smartphone apps and other Internet-based devices. These devices, known as Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled energy devices, can be found in solar panels, wind generation systems, and electric vehicles, said Chen. They can also be found in commonly used household appliances like air conditioners, water heaters, and electric ovens. 

A Weakness with Potentially Devastating Consequences

The original goal of using IoT-enabled energy devices was to improve operational performance through greater reliability and sustainability, said Chen. However, he said that these devices are weak in one critical area—cybersecurity.  

“IoT-enabled energy devices are easy to hack because they are not built with a high level of security. These devices have limited capabilities, and they are incapable of running sophisticated encryption and authentication mechanisms, which our computers have,” Chen said. “These devices are also often operated under factory settings with a default password, so it can be relatively easy to hack them.” 

Hackers can compromise devices in a coordinated manner, said Chen. The attacker first gains control of a group of IoT-enabled energy devices and then forms an IoT botnet—a network of infected devices that can launch a large-scale attack and disrupt the normal operations of an entire power energy system. 

“This can disrupt the supply-and-demand chain of energy suppliers and consumers. It can also create a power surge that makes our electric grid more unstable and potentially lead to a power failure that causes economic loss and human injury,” Chen said. “The cyberattack initially leads to a local power failure. An energy supplier will try to restore the power, but the power failure could propagate and lead to a major blackout due to the highly complex and dynamic nature of grid operations.”

Increasing Protection in the Field and at Home 

In a two-year-long project, Chen and his team of graduate and undergraduate students will conduct a comprehensive study of modern electric power systems, analyze the behavior of potential hackers, and develop defensive strategies to protect the power systems from cyberattacks. Their overarching goal is to create cost-effective mechanisms to improve the security and resiliency of electric power systems under IoT botnet attacks. Collectively, these mechanisms can serve as a guide for grid operators who are responsible for protecting the electrical power system, said Chen. 

Right now, everyday people can protect their personal IoT devices from cyberattacks by taking one simple step—changing their devices’ default passwords, said Chen. 

“Many people ignore this step and leave their devices in a very vulnerable situation. An attacker can guess their passwords very easily and have complete control over their devices,” Chen said. “We also need to regularly patch and update the software systems on our devices, just like we do with our smartphones.” 

Chen said that his team’s research results will be integrated into a new course at Fordham called Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity. The course, which will provide students with cross-disciplinary training in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and informatics, will potentially be offered in 2023. 

“What excites me most is the nature of this project,” said Chen. “This is a societal problem that will potentially have a lot of impact on our daily lives.”

Chen will work to alleviate some of this injustice and inequality by serving as the inaugural project director for Clinical Mental Health Services in the Bronx Community (CCMH), an initiative being funded by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation for 2021.

The new CCMH project aims to provide free telehealth mental health services for specifically Black, Latino and immigrant children and youth in the Bronx, a group that have been hit the especially hard amid the pandemic due to co-occurring financial and racial issues.  The generous funding from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation (more than $20,000 each over 12 months) will allow the five selectively chosen Division of Psychological and Educational Services graduate assistants pictured above to serve these individuals:

Read the full story in Fordham GSE News.

“The idea is to support women who are seeking asylum and to make their transition and waiting period more bearable and sustainable,” said Marciana L. Popescu, Ph.D., website co-founder and associate professor in the Graduate School of School Service. “We want the ability to preserve confidentiality and anonymity for online visitors. This is extremely important because we’re dealing with a population that lives in fear.”

More than 79 million people are displaced worldwide, according to a 2020 report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and more than half are women. Tens of thousands are in New York City alone. Few attempt to seek health care services in fear of deportation, and the pandemic has worsened the situation, especially for women asylum seekers, said Popescu. 

Her Migrant Hub was built thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. In addition to accessing resources on the site, asylum seekers can share best practices and meet women who have experienced similar struggles. The project began in January; the website was launched in late June in honor of World Refugee Day. 

“It’s designed by the women, down to the colors that are used on the website, the images, the graphics, the logo, the website name itself—everything was done collaboratively and driven by the women who are part of this group,” said Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., website co-founder and GSS professor who specializes in mental health. 

Showing the Experts What’s Missing

The website was developed by a team of about 20 people, including a Fordham graduate student and an alumnus. Because Her Migrant Hub was developed in conjunction with the target audience—the women asylum seekers themselves—it is unlike many resources developed by experts and scholars, said Popescu and Alonzo. 

“They are teaching us what it means to be an asylum seeker, to live in NYC and not be able to get the services you need,” said Alonzo. “They are looking at the website and saying, ‘This is what we’re missing.’” 

Among them is Marthe Kiemde, 36, who fled political persecution in Burkina Faso with her husband while pregnant in 2016. She said that during their first four years in the U.S., they raised their newborn in New York City shelters, where they also received career training and got back on their feet. 

“I know many immigrant women who are struggling right now. They don’t know where to go to get any services, especially in health care. They are afraid to go because they don’t have any papers … But this website is secure,” said Kiemde, who helped research immigration and childcare policies for Her Migrant Hub and now works as a hospital dietary associate. “With this program, we’re going to help many, many women.” 

Another website collaborator is Vanessa Rosales-Linares, 40, an asylum seeker from Venezuela. She said she was an anesthesiologist who fled her native country in 2017 with her husband and 8-year-old daughter after giving medical treatment to government protesters and fearing punishment from political leaders. Rosales-Linares said she now wants to help people who were once in her position. 

“[The website has] good information because it’s from many people who have in the past had the same problems. They are telling their histories and teaching how to improve their situation for new immigrants,” said Rosales-Linares, a website designer for Her Migrant Hub and a nursing student at Lehman College. 

‘A Window Into What Is Happening’

In addition to providing local health care resources, Her Migrant Hub simplifies the asylum seeking process and an asylum seeker’s rights in New York City through text and graphics. It also provides an online forum where women asylum seekers and allies can share their experiences and read stories that help them feel less alone, said Popescu and Alonzo. 

This fall, the website will launch several new features, including expanded translation services; a workshop webinar series designed and co-taught by women asylum seekers; and Her Migrant World, an educational page that takes a deeper look at global migration and the people at the center of it all. 

“We hope that Her Migrant World will be a window into what is happening and why people take so many risks to come here and the reality on the ground,” Popescu said. 

‘This Feels Like Home’ 

After project funding ends in December, Popescu said she is confident that her team will continue to make a difference in the lives of women asylum seekers across the city. Within their team, they have also found a home. 

“We talk all the time. All our joys and sorrows started to be shared in the group, so the group provides support,” said Popescu, adding that they chat via WhatsApp. “At our second meeting or so when we first met, one of the women said, ‘This feels like home.’”

The grants—totaling $600,000— have been awarded by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. They will fund University efforts to provide mental health services to young people, help women asylum seekers, and teach English language learners.

Fordham Provost Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., said he’s grateful to the foundation for supporting the University’s work in the community.

“Fordham is deeply committed to applying its academic and programming expertise in partnership with organizations in the surrounding neighborhood to help address the most pressing needs within the Bronx community,” said Jacobs. “Through the generous support of the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation, Fordham is particularly focused on how it can assist those who have been most devastated by the interconnected crises of 2020.”

The Mother Cabrini Health Foundation provides grants to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable New Yorkers, aiming to eliminate barriers to care. The foundation’s values reflect Fordham’s mission and those of the organization’s namesake, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was known during her lifetime as a staunch advocate for immigrants, children, and the poor. The foundation originated from the 2018 sale of Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health insurer run by the bishops of the Catholic dioceses of New York.

Virtual Mental Health Services

The first grant of $300,000 will support a virtual mental health program to be run by the Graduate School of Education called Clinical Mental Health Services in the Bronx Community. It will use telemental health services to reach at-risk students between the ages of 8 and 16. The program responds to the pandemic-related suspension of existing programs that Fordham delivered at schools and community organizations before the crisis began. Four cohorts of 25 students in need of help—whether from stress related to gun violence, racism, the pandemic, or other factors—will be assessed and receive therapy. The program will offer two 45-minute intensive sessions per week for the students. Anita Vazquez Batisti, Ph.D., associate dean for educational partnerships at GSE, helped facilitate the grant and GSE psychology professor Eric Chen, Ph.D., will direct the program.

Helping Women Asylum Seekers

A second grant of $150,000 will be used to help women asylum seekers in New York City gain access to much-needed mental health care. According to a 2020 report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, more than 79 million people are displaced worldwide, more than half are under the age of 18, and more than 50% are women. In 2019, there were 46,000 asylum seekers in New York City alone, said Associate Professor Marciana Popescu, Ph.D., of Graduate School of Social Services (GSS). Popescu has extensively researched the problem and will be directing the program with GSS Professor Dana Alonzo, Ph.D., a specialist in mental health treatment. With increasingly restrictive policies pushing asylum seekers to go underground, few attempt to access mental health care services, said Popescu. The pandemic has only made the situation worse—for asylum seekers in general, and for women in particular. The project aims to identify the challenges of these women and connect them to services that are within their rights.

English as a Second Language

An additional $150,000 will go toward expanding the Institute of American Language and Culture’s Community English as a Second Language Program (CESL). That grant follows a $116,000 grant awarded by the foundation in 2019. The program provides free ESL instruction primarily to adults in the Bronx in partnership with churches and other community organizations. The CESL program began in 2018 with financial support from the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, which has annually renewed funding, scoring the program’s attendance, educational gains, and program management as “above standard.” The Cabrini grant will help the initiative continue to grow. CESL serves more than 300 students and hopes to serve at least 500 a year by 2023.  Institute director James Stabler-Havener will continue to direct the program with Jesús Aceves-Loza, who serves as the institute’s advisor for Latin America.  In spite of the pandemic this year, students continued learning and instructors continued to teach virtually via apps and cell phones. In the coming year, the group plans to build on existing partnerships with community organizations and the city to offer citizenship courses as well. The growing initiative will also provide internship opportunities to underrepresented students at the University.

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center welcomed 28 scholars and journalists to Fordham from March 20 to 22 for the first seminar in its five-year research initiative on Orthodox Christianity and human rights.

The meetings brought together an international group of experts in Orthodox Christianity from several disciplinary backgrounds and areas of specialization to discuss the major issues surrounding Orthodoxy’s complicated and often contentious relationship to human rights discourse.

According to center co-director George Demacopoulos, the goal of the project is to “flood the field” with publications analyzing multiple facets of Orthodoxy’s relationship to human rights: the history and theology of human rights in the Orthodox tradition, as well as current engagements with human rights among Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Over the next five years, the participating scholars will not only publish their research in academic books and journals but, in consultation with journalists, will disseminate their work through popular media to promote a more nuanced public understanding of Orthodoxy and human rights.

The three-day seminar, held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured sessions offering a broad overview of the current state of the field.

Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck introduced participants to the Russian Orthodox Church’s recent statements on human rights, especially in debates in the United Nations over the family and “traditional values.” Stoeckl said that over the last decade, Russia has become the global leader in challenging Western understandings of universal human rights and has sought to transform human rights language to promote its “traditional values” agenda.

Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation led a discussion on Christians in the Arab world, where their status as religious minorities has led to a different relationship to human rights than in Orthodox-majority countries like Russia. For Middle Eastern Christians, negotiating questions of human rights is fundamentally an issue of survival, not one of values, he said.

The center also welcomed as a guest speaker Samuel Moyn, a leading historian of human rights at Yale University, who offered a historical overview of the origins of 20th-century human rights discourse through the work of Roman Catholic “personalist” philosophers like Jacques Maritain and their promotion of human dignity. Discussion turned to Maritain’s links to Russian Orthodox personalists who fled to Paris following the Bolshevik revolution, as well as to the role of Lebanese Orthodox thinker Charles Malik in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights.

Major support for the project is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support provided by Leadership 100.

–Nathaniel Wood

At a luncheon held on the front porch of Calder Hall, the Gatsby-esque mansion perched on a 680-foot-high bluff just 25 miles north of New York City, students, faculty, and staff took stock of all the scientific research that has been conducted at the center since its founding in August, 1967. The afternoon celebration also honored the legacy of the Calder family, which was represented by Louis Calder’s grandson Peter Calder.

A Shared Commitment to the Natural World

A year before the center was established, the estate of paper magnate Louis Calder deeded the property—then known as Rockmoor Estate—to Fordham, with the understanding that the “premises will be used primarily as a reserve for the study of the natural environment and other fields of ecology.”

Speaking to the group of about 50 faculty members, students and staff, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said the research conducted at Calder—more than 200 Ph.D.s and master’s degrees have been awarded to students whose work was based there—is crucial to solving some of the most vexing problems of our time, such as climate change.

Related: A Day In the Wildlife: Amid the Ecosystems and Ecologist at the Calder Center

He noted that Calder staff and students are following in the footsteps of early Jesuits who were committed to learning about the natural world, and who reported their findings back to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus. One of them, Georg Joseph Kamel, S.J., a 17th-century pharmacist who made medicines from plants, is credited as the namesake of the Camellia flower, he said.

“Everything flowed to Rome, and on the basis of this, younger Jesuits were trained using what they had learned. So, we have in our blood this interest and delight in everything in the world, especially the world of nature,” he said.

“Every day that Calder is active, open, and making discoveries, you deepen our University’s connection to these Jesuit roots.”

Father McShane cited Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the environment and sustainable development, Laudato Si, as a present-day manifestation of that commitment to the natural world.

“In one of his most important addresses to the world, [Pope Francis] holds up for all the world with all the moral authority he can muster the needs of our common home, the world. As he holds up the needs of our common home, he points to exactly the work you do here,” he said.

‘A Conservationist of His Day’

In a presentation about the history of the property, Tom Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Calder Center, described Louis Calder’s career and the way he used the estate. He displayed several photographs, including one image of Calder and a hunting party.

“Hunting and fishing were very important to him. He was a conservationist of his day. We don’t necessarily think of conservation now as hunting and fishing, particularly in the Northeast, but sportsman, hunters, and fishermen had great respect for the land and the resources. It showed in his work at [paper company]Perkins Goodwin, and it showed in his handling of this property,” he said.

Supporting Undergraduate Research

Daniels also announced that the Calder Foundation had just contributed $210,000 toward an endowment that supports the Calder Summer Undergraduate (CSUR) program, which hosts undergraduate students doing research over the summer. The program, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, currently hosts five students; the Calder gift will enable it to host two more.

Father McShane dubbed the Calders “exemplary companions in mission and colleagues in service.”

Addressing Peter Calder, he said, “Your family and the foundation gave us all of this, and you gave with it a mission to learn, to preserve, and to be evangelical about ecology preservation. We could never adequately thank you and your entire family enough.”

In acknowledging Father McShane’s thanks, Calder stood up from his front row seat, turned around and delivered impromptu remarks to the assembled group.

“The family appreciates all of your comments, but it’s really Fordham and its people that have made this a success. And I thank you for that,” he said.

50 Years Later, a Very Different Place

A running theme of the day was how much has changed since 1967. The aviary, outdoor swimming pool and “toboggan run” are long gone. Labs and classrooms have been constructed in Calder Hall and the Lake House, and a residence hall and a new greenhouse have been built in the last five years.

A primary driver behind much of that change was John Wehr, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences, who was director of the center for 30 years before stepping aside in 2014. He was honored at the presentation for all his contributions, including founding the CSUR program 20 years ago.

Daniels summed up the three main tenets of the center’s mission: understand the world we live in, show people nature so that they ascribe value to it; and make new scientists.

“We still have much to do. We have real science we have to do,” he said. “With the people we currently have at the EPA, environmental stewardship has never been more important.”

One grant, for $360,000, comes from the Henry Luce Foundation, while the other, for $250,000, comes from Leadership 100. The center received the Leadership 100 grant in February, and the Luce grant in March.

The Center will use the grants to fund an interdisciplinary, international research initiative on Orthodox Christianity’s complex, even turbulent, engagement with human rights discourse.

Center co-director George Demacopoulos, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Father John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies, said he and his colleagues will bring together the world’s foremost scholars to collaborate with journalists, public intellectuals, and policy makers for the study.

The goal of the project is to create and disseminate comprehensive analyses of the contemporary relationship between Orthodox Christianity and human rights that can be shared with Orthodox leaders and heads of state around the world .

A Resistance to the West

The issue is especially pressing today, because the Russian Orthodox Church, which counts 70 million of the world’s 260 million Orthodox Christians, has in recent years disputed the modern definitions of universal human rights. In former Soviet Union countries where a majority of the population is Orthodox Christian, leaders are ambivalent about a universal conception of human rights that they perceive to be dictated by the West.

Demacopoulos said that the feeling is not universal though. In countries such as Syria or Turkey, where Orthodox Christians form the majority of the Christian component of society but are still very much in the minority overall, those Orthodox Christian communities absolutely embrace human rights and the notion of religious freedom.

In addition to addressing leaders within the Orthodox Christian faith, Demacopoulos said the project, which will rely on the research of 15 scholars, will offer guidance to authorities such as the U.S. State Department and the European Union. The scholars will meet at an annual three-day meeting over the five-year period and will publish academic books and articles as well as op-eds, blogs, and new media.

“We want to provide leaders with more comprehensive, nuanced, and sophisticated understanding about what is actually going on here, so they don’t just take propaganda pieces and assume that the entire Orthodox world or even the entire Russian world believes this,” he said.

Offering a Nuanced Perspective

Fellow co-director Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., professor of theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture, said the Russian Orthodox Church has been trying to redefine human rights language in such a way that allows them to uphold “traditional values” for the last decade. This understanding of human rights doesn’t protect a band like Pussy Riot from protesting in a Church, or art that’s deemed blasphemous, and it’s consistent with laws that ban gay marriage and homosexual “propaganda.”

“Normally people would say, that’s a violation of human rights, and some Orthodox Christians want to say ‘No it’s not. We have our own particular interpretation of human rights, and we are justified in doing that because the West’s concept of human rights is biased and anti-Christian,” he said. “Our project hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of Orthodox Christianity’s relation to human rights language than the diametrical opposition proposed by certain Orthodox Christians, especially in the post-communist context.”

Papanikolaou further noted that the Russian government also uses the language of human rights and the defense of religious freedom to justify its ongoing military intervention in Syria.

“It’s a big post-Communist issue, and it’s of a piece a wider, global critique of western liberalism,” he said.

“Western theorizers of human rights have got to pay attention to Russia, and more broadly to the Orthodox Christian world.”

Fordham is one of 28 colleges and universities to win a Next Generation PhD matching grant, which aims to overhaul doctoral programs in the humanities to better prepare students for 21st-century job prospects within and outside of academia.

“The future of doctoral training in the humanities depends on innovative models that will deliver the competencies and skills that doctorate holders need to succeed in a variety of career pathways, in addition to traditional faculty lines,” said Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of GSAS and grant director, alongside co-director, Matthew McGowan, PhD, associate professor of classics.

“As a graduate school within a Jesuit university recognized for its strengths in the humanities, GSAS is uniquely situated to ask what it means truly to prepare our doctoral candidates for the fast-changing world of higher education and for the new knowledge economy,” Badowska said.

Historically, doctoral programs have prepared graduates solely for work in academia. However, with a 30 percent decline in academic job postings in the humanities since 2008, this singular focus is no longer realistic for students graduating from these programs.

“Thousands of professors are currently in the business of preparing thousands of graduate students for jobs that don’t exist,” Leonard Cassuto, PhD, professor of English and a collaborator on the project, said in his recent book, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2013).

The $25,000 planning grant, to be matched by an additional $25,000 from GSAS, will not only propose rethinking Fordham’s five doctoral programs in the humanities (classics, English, history, philosophy, and theology), but will also examine what a 21st-century PhD program at any institution should encompass. For instance, what advanced transferrable skills should be taught at the doctoral level? Should skills such as collaborative teamwork and advanced digital proficiency be treated on a par with traditional emphases, such as mastery of field-specific knowledge and independent research skills?

In addition to Badowska and McGowan, the project includes a Core Planning Group and Constituent Advisory Group comprising GSAS faculty, current doctoral candidates, alumni, and community leaders who would benefit from hiring graduates with doctoral-level expertise.

At the end of the academic year, the group will produce a white paper detailing the proposed model.

“We want to rethink how we deliver the PhD at our University, but also make it scalable to other institutions and humanities programs,” said Melissa Labonte, PhD, associate dean of GSAS and associate professor of political science. “To do right by the students in these programs, we need to rethink the entire model. This planning grant will allow us to begin this process.”

A key part of the grant will address making doctoral programs in the humanities more inclusive of underrepresented, underserved, and marginalized communities, Labonte said. Within these groups, the percentage of students who enroll in a doctoral-level program has dropped precipitously in recent decades.

“We’re trying to find ways to counter this trend,” Labonte said. “This part of the grant falls very much in line with Fordham’s mission. If we’re going to embrace progressivism and social justice models, then we have to think about how PhD programs in the humanities will address the needs of people from underserved communities.”

The NEH announced the Next Generation PhD grants winners on Aug. 9 as part of $79 million in grants for 290 humanities projects and programs across the country, an initiative the group undertook to mark its 50th anniversary year.

Funded by a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Varieties of Understanding project came to a close on June 24 with the capstone conference drawing multidisciplinary international scholars to the Lincoln Center campus. The three-year project has underwritten research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and theology on the question of how we understand the world.

The scholars who participated in the project have collectively generated significant research in their respective fields, Grimm said. Ten books were accepted or published by major printing presses, including Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press, and 52 journal articles were published or accepted in journals, including Nous, Cognition, Child Development, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Faith and Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies—with more than 40 more articles currently under review.

“We have helped found a new field of inquiry, the study of understanding,” said Grimm. “This vibrant new field has led to more inquiry, more discussions, more debates, all of which are helping to increase our understanding of understanding itself.”

Grimm produced four papers for the project and will continue his research this fall as a visiting fellow at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. Among his research interests are two different kinds of understanding: one by which we “grasp” the world, and another that the world presents to us.

“One of the capstone speakers, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, said that you read well when you let the novel or the poem grasp you—you’re not trying to grasp it or tinker with it. You’re being receptive to it, looking to see what it is pointing out to you,” Grimm said.

“There are some kinds of knowledge that we ‘grasp,’ such as the causal structure of the world. But then there are things like literary understanding that is more receptive and attentive. That’s a different kind of understanding.”

The Limits of Understanding

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson’s plenary talk, “How We Talk!” cautioned against becoming overconfident in our capacity to understand. She focused on academia’s use of scrupulously precise and reductionistic language, which she said gives an air of communicating truth.

Language, though, is “complex and endlessly open to new complications,” she said, “more like a brilliant companion of humanity than its creation.”

“It’s like living with a creature, like a cat or something. You begin to find out it has its own ways of operating, that you can’t coerce it or control it,” she said. “We know language is alive, because it can be lifeless. It dies in captivity.”

Language is taken captive when academia—particularly social sciences, Robinson said—clings to jargon for the sake of being precise. Often, that precision becomes conflated with truth, leading us to overestimate just how much we actually understand about a given subject. Respecting the complexity and vitality of language keeps us intellectually humble, she said.

A Multi-University Effort

The $3.56 million Templeton grant and more than $640,000 in supplemental funds were used to distribute approximately $2.6 million in subawards to fund new research on the psychology, theology, and philosophy of understanding. Twenty projects were selected from nearly 400 proposals.

Tania Lombrozo, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Strevens, PhD, professor of philosophy at New York University; and Gordon Graham, PhD, the Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary directed the distribution of awards for psychology, philosophy, and theology, respectively.

Lombrozo directed empirical and theoretical research out of her Concepts and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Berkeley on the psychology of human understanding. Her team conducted a survey of how people generally view the ability of science to understand. Most people, the team found, believe that science is limited to empirical data.

In other words, science is useful for elucidating the world around us, but it fails when it comes to explaining phenomena such as romantic love or religious beliefs.

For a full description of the project, visit the Varieties of Understanding website.

WHO GAVE IT: The New York State Department of Health
WHO GOT IT: Edward Dubrovsky, PhD, professor of biology
HOW MUCH: $77,005
WHAT FOR: A grant to explore the role of mutations in a gene called ELAC2 in prostate cancer

Orthodox Christian Studies

WHO GAVE IT: The Carpenter Foundation combined with a Fordham Faculty Fellowship
WHO GOT IT: George Demacopoulos, PhD, the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies
HOW MUCH: $30,000
WHAT FOR: A yearlong sabbatical for his project, “Colonizing Christianity: Prejudice and Sex in the Crusader East”

Art History

WHO GAVE IT: National Endowment for the Humanities
WHO GOT IT: Nina Rowe, PhD, associate professor of art history
HOW MUCH: $50,400
WHAT FOR: To complete a book on late medieval illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts

Arts and Sciences

WHO GAVE IT: Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
WHO GOT IT: Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and doctoral candidate in philosophy Joseph Vukov
HOW MUCH: $2,000
WHAT FOR: A grant to study how Fordham graduate students perceive their education in the context of the University’s mission

Graduate School of Education

WHO GAVE IT:  Marie Noelle Chynn, GSS ’60 and Kuo York Chynn, M.D
WHO GOT IT: Graduate School of Education
HOW MUCH: $104,000
WHAT FOR: Dr. J.T. Vincent Lou Memorial Endowed Fellowship

Irish Studies

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Brautigam, TMC ’74, and Richard Brautigam, FCRH ’73
WHO GOT IT: Irish Studies
HOW MUCH: $6,000
WHAT FOR: Four Irish Cultural Events in the Spring of 2016

Engineers Without Borders

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Jane McCartney, TMC’ 68 and George McCartney, FCRH ’68, LAW ’72
WHO GOT IT: Engineers Without Borders
HOW MUCH: $13,000 challenge grant
WHAT FOR: A challenge grant that raised $27,000 to support EWB’s trip to Uganda to build fish farms

Physics

WHO GAVE IT:  Christa and John Reddy, FCRH ’77
WHO GOT IT: Department of Physics and Engineering Physics
HOW MUCH: $10,000
WHAT FOR: Supplies for Experiments

Other major grant-winners last year included:

• Yilu Zhou, PhD, professor of information sciences, who received a National Science Foundation grant to research age recommendations on mobile apps;
• Winnie Kung, PhD, associate professor of social work, who received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the impact among Asian survivors and rescuers exposed to the World Trade Center attack; and
• Lise Schreier, PhD, associate professor of French, who won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her research on the 18th-century practice of “child-gifting.”