The minor is part of Fordham’s new Asian American studies program, which faculty members hope to continue to expand.

“The student population is really diverse,” said Stephen Hong Sohn, Ph.D., English professor and Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature. “Not only do we want Asian American students and Asian students to have a place to explore their backgrounds and identities, but it’s really important for all students to take these types of classes because they need to learn about other cultures, other identities.”

Coursework

The minor will require students to take six courses: Introduction to Asian American Studies; four electives, such as Asian American Art and Representing Asians in Journalism and Media; and one course in another race and ethnic studies area such as African & African American studies.

Students will pay particular attention to themes such as race, gender, sexuality, capital, and empire.

Faculty said the minor will help provide students with skills and knowledge they can utilize for future graduate studies as well as careers in law, education, health care, government, journalism, and more.

“Being able to give students greater vocabulary to contextualize the things that are actually going on—and the currents that are going on with Asian American populations—and to think of them with more complexity, that’s the key,” Sohn said. “It’s always about thinking more broadly, thinking more expansively, so that you’re not in a rush to make sort of surface-level judgments.”

The program involves faculty from a variety of disciplines, including literature, journalism, and history.

“No one discipline, or even set of disciplines, is really adequate to understanding Asian America as a political project, Asian America as a social relation, Asian America as an identity,” said James Kim, Ph.D., associate professor of English and comparative literature, who helped lead the efforts to launch the program. “You need all these disciplines—and the conversations that get generated between these disciplines.—in order to have any type of understanding of Asian America.”

A New York Education

Kim said that New York City will be a large part of the learning experience for students, through partnerships and experiences with local organizations, like the Museum of Chinese in America or the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“One thing that’s going to make us distinctive is we’re in New York,” he said. “This is home to the largest Asian American population in the continental United States, so we’ll be able to create a bunch of learning opportunities for our students.”

Kim also said that they’ll be working closely with Fordham Law School’s Center on Asian Americans and the Law.

“One of the founders [of that program]is the Hon. Denny Chin [senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit], and he’s very eager to collaborate with the minor, do things like guest lectures, co-teaching, maybe event programming,” Kim said.

A Better Understanding of History and Culture

Faculty members who had been developing the program said it became even more necessary in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased discrimination against Asian Americans, as well as the 2021 shooting of Asian American women in Atlanta spas.

“There was a clear need on campus for spaces and conversations around Asian American identities and backgrounds,” Sohn said.

Kim said that having an Asian American Studies program is essential to helping students understand the “larger social, historical, and political forces that are producing these kinds of crises,” particularly because these types of “traumatic events change communities.”

Both Kim and Sohn said there was strong interest in and support for the program, both from current students and alumni.

“Asian American communities have been going through a pretty traumatic time for the past few years, and I would love for students to gain a sense of historical perspective that we have been here before, this has happened before,” Kim said.

That thread of connection didn’t stop unspooling after four years, though: When Spiro returned to the D.C. area after graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2007, she joined the Fordham Alumni Chapter of Washington, D.C., and that ultimately led her to her first job, as manager of information services with the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU).

Today, more than 10 years later, she’s not only the vice president of communications at AJCU, which comprises all 27 Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S., but also president of the Fordham alumni chapter that helped jumpstart her career. And now, as always, her focus is on helping fellow Rams connect with each other.

This month, the D.C. chapter is hosting two events: an outing to a Washington Spirit soccer game on September 17 and a September 21 reception welcoming Fordham’s new president, Tania Tetlow, as part of her tour to meet with alumni throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Finding Fordham—and Herself

Each year, Spiro’s high school welcomed back graduates from the previous year, inviting them to share experiences from their first semester at college with current students. It was during this assembly that she heard from a former theater acquaintance about Fordham and realized that it ticked her college checklist boxes.

“I had applied to, I think, about seven other schools besides Fordham,” Spiro said. “But the first time that I went there in the fall of my senior year with my dad and my brother, it was really just love at first sight.” (Spiro’s brother, John A. Howes Jr., also became a Ram, graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2009.)

A communications and media studies major, Spiro made the most of her time on campus, having grown up being encouraged by her parents to get involved “not just in extracurriculars or hobbies that were passions … but also through service, too,” she said.

In addition to being a part of the Fordham Club, a combination honor society, advisory group, and fraternity; and a tour guide with the Rose Hill Society, Spiro was able to explore one of her passions: singing. She was a member of the University Choir for four years and vice president of the choir her senior year. She performed with the choir at Carnegie Hall during her first year and went on a singing trip through Spain the following summer.

Amid her classes, extracurriculars, and excursions, though, Spiro said the most important thing Fordham taught her was how to find herself—and her place in the world.

“In those formative years between 18 and 22, when you’re trying to figure out your place in the world and how your talents can really contribute and how you can make a positive contribution—I think that Fordham really helped me figure that out and navigate the next chapter in my life,” she said.

Sweet Symbiosis: The AJCU and the Fordham Alumni Chapter of D.C.

Since accepting that first position at AJCU in 2007, Spiro has served as the organization’s director of communications and, since June 2020, vice president of communications. She joined the Fordham alumni chapter’s board at roughly the same time, serving as president for almost a decade now. While the two roles may not seem intertwined from the outside, to Spiro, her work at each organization informs and benefits the other, with collaboration and teamwork underlining it all.

“The work that I do with the alumni chapter overlaps and has helped strengthen my work when it comes to alumni relations at AJCU,” she said. “We all want to achieve the same goal,” bringing people together for mutual benefits.

On the AJCU side, one way she’s done that is by advocating the sharing of resources and a sense of pride among Jesuit colleges and universities. Spiro was behind the #JesuitEducated campaign when Pope Francis, the first Jesuit priest to be elected pope, came to the United States in 2015. She and her collaborators used a tagline, “Transformational leaders are Jesuit educated,” as the basis for a marketing campaign. They wanted to highlight that more than just preparing students to get a job, Jesuit colleges and universities prepare students for careers of impact by teaching them how to think, dig deep, and seek a greater purpose.

And on the Fordham side, the chapter supports the Alumni Chapter of Washington, D.C., Endowed Scholarship, which helps make it possible for more high-achieving students from the Washington, D.C., area to pursue full-time undergraduate study at Fordham.

A Balancing Act

Heading up communications for a national association is a high-profile, demanding job, but Spiro said one of the things she loves about working at the AJCU is the work-life balance—which for her has meant the ability to pursue graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a master’s degree in communications in 2012, and to start a family. She married Peter Spiro in 2017, and they now have a 9-month-old daughter, Holly.

“Even before becoming a mom, I was always afforded the opportunity to have a really good work-life balance,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a busy job, but I’ve been able to do other things along the sides,” such as accept gigs as a freelance singer.

She’s performed the national anthem at various Jesuit colleges and universities, including Creighton, Gonzaga, and even Fordham before the Homecoming game in 2015. Lately, however, Spiro’s performances are tailored for an audience of one: She performs The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi,” theatrical hand signals and all, for her infant daughter, Holly.

Over the years, she said she’s been able to commit her time to a number of activities and organizations close to her heart, from handling media relations for a major North American Lithuanian folk-dance festival in 2016—her mother’s family is Lithuanian—to singing in a professional choir for a year, requiring her to sing for 10 Masses between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

“I was able to do that because I had a very supportive boss who understood that this was a passion of mine,” she said. “And I have a piano in my office, and so as long as I practice before work and after work and got my work done, I was able to do that as well.”

The Next Chapter

Though she’ll be stepping down from her role as leader of Fordham’s Washington, D.C., alumni chapter at the end of the academic year, she’s “proud of the way that we’ve been able to continue reaching alumni where they are and producing a variety of events to fit all of the needs in all of the different stages of life”—whether that’s through a baseball game outing, a happy hour, or a service project.

Spiro has had some “really extraordinary moments” as president, from dining at the Supreme Court in 2015 when the chapter gave the Brien McMahon Memorial Award for the Distinguished Public Service to Justice Sonia Sotomayor to simply rallying around one another during the pandemic.

“I just feel so strongly connected to this school,” she said, thinking about the University’s effect on her life to date. “And every time that I return there, it just feels like a home away from home. Fordham really helped me to just figure out who I was and who I was going [to be].”

Fordham Five (Plus One)

What are you most passionate about?
My family and friends, music—I play the piano and have a side career as a singer— writing, cooking, reading, spending time outdoors, and traveling.  And, of course, Jesuit higher education!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Now that I’m a mom, I often reflect on two recent pieces of advice from both of my parents. From my dad: “The most important thing you can do for your children is to smile at them.” From my mom: “Always be confident in what you are doing as a parent.” I’m very grateful to have my parents living nearby, and for the many ways they help my husband and me with our daughter!

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
I actually never visited it until after graduating from Fordham, but the Brooklyn Bridge has become my favorite New York landmark in recent years. In a similar vein, the Eiffel Tower in Paris is one of my favorite places in the world; both are such staggering feats of engineering, architecture, and design that never fail to astound me!

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I was such a bookworm growing up, but kind of lost my love of reading for pleasure in my 20s, due to work, graduate school, etc. So, in my 30s, A Gentleman in Moscow was the book that helped me to get back into reading for pleasure and even start a virtual book club with family and friends that is still thriving, even as we (hopefully!) get out of the pandemic.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire(d) most? 
There are four professors—several of whom I have been fortunate to keep in touch with over the years—who were particularly helpful in teaching me how to become a stronger writer and more engaged student of the world: Christine Firer Hinze, James Kim, James van Oosting, and Andrew Tumminia. I also want to give a special shout-out to Rob Minotti, who conducted the University Choir during my four years at Fordham and helped me to grow as a singer and performer.

What are you optimistic about?
My daughter! Holly was born in November 2021, right between the Delta and Omicron phases of the pandemic. I’m convinced that she (and all other pandemic babies) is going to save the world. If they can make it through this crazy time in our history, they can make it through anything.

When Rankine, recipient of Fordham’s 2016 Reid Writer award, shares passages of the book with the University community on April 15, at least one student will be paying extra special attention.

Matthew Schlesinger, a senior philosophy major at Fordham College at Rose Hill has read Citizen closely and has found a subtle but important undertone of feeling: disconcertedness.

For his final assignment in his Theories of Comparative Literature class, Schlesinger took the lessons about affect theory that he’d learned from Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005) and applied the theory to an examination of the feelings of disconcertedness in Rankine’s Citizen.

“Ngai focuses on feelings that are generally ignored in the literary cannon,” he said. “There’s already lots of talk about rage, anger, love—big grand emotions that make for good stories. She picks things you normally wouldn’t think would be subjects of great literature, minor feelings like anxiety, envy, or irritation.”

In Citizen, Schlesinger argues that “the disconcertedness of the speaker is the speaker struggling with racism, [and]in making the reader feel that disconcertedness, it [also]makes the reader ask all kinds of questions.”

When he submitted the paper at the end of the 2015 fall semester, it grabbed the attention of his instructor, James Kim, PhD, assistant professor of English and co-director of the Comparative Literature program. Ugly Feelings is one of the landmark works of affect theory, Kim said, and is not easily digested.

“I deliberately chose it because I knew it would be a challenge. I wanted to give students something fairly recent that would test their familiarity with literary theory at a pretty high level,” Kim said.

The biggest challenge of mastering affect theory, he said, is sorting out what part of a chapter is actually the main point—as opposed to just background information or context.

“From a student’s point of view, it’s all new, so everything sounds like a huge over arching claim, whereas if you’re more deeply grounded in literature, and more knowledgeable about that field, you can say ‘Oh, that’s been a topic of conversation for the last 30 years; that’s already well known.’ The difficulty is orienting oneself in an argument. Matthew just knows how to do that.”

Kim was so impressed with Schlesinger’s paper that he encouraged him to submit it to the prestigious American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for inclusion in its annual meeting. They worked together to reformat it, and the paper was accepted.

Schlesinger presented it at a panel for undergraduates at Harvard University on March 17.

Kim said it’s exceedingly rare for an undergraduate to have a paper accepted by the ACLA. In fact, in his 12 years at Fordham he had never recommended one before.

But mentor opportunities like this are the reason he got into teaching in the first place.

“When I get to work with a student who’s talented and genuinely interested in the material, who’s capable of asking sharp questions and pursuing creative, interesting ways to address those questions that draw on an existing body of theory that he’s mastered, it’s very rewarding,” he said.

Schlesinger plans to teach English in Colombia upon graduation. After that, he’s hoping to follow in his father and grandfather’s steps and enter a doctoral program for comparative literature.

He credits Kim with helping him discern his future path.

“He’s been a great help as I work out these questions about grad school; he offered to work with me over the summer on my application, and I’ll eventually use this paper as my writing sample,” he said.

“Prof. Kim went out of his way to make this happen.”

Rankine will be at the Fordham Lincoln Center campus on Friday, April 15 at 11:30 a.m. to accept the award. For more information, visit the English department’s website.