Hoffman was widely respected at Fordham for her interdisciplinary expertise and collaborative spirit. 

Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., a professor of English, said that despite their different fields of study, they grew to be fast friends.

“I always knew we spoke the same language. Decade after decade, our conversations about one another’s work were immensely gratifying,” she said.

Magda Teter, Ph.D., the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham, called Hoffman “a beloved member of Fordham’s Jewish Studies community” and said her work was marked by “great erudition and disciplinary depth.” 

“In her 1991 work on the Hebrew writer and Nobel Prize laureate S.Y. Agnon, she deployed a wide range of theoretical tools, ranging from psychoanalysis to feminist theory,” Teter said.

“She placed Agnon in conversation with other writers, such as James Joyce, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. … She was able to handle, with equal care and knowledge, traditional Jewish text and modern philosophy.

Hoffman was born on June 19, 1946, in New York City and grew up, along with her younger brother, David, in Brooklyn. She earned a bachelor’s in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She was a special member of Columbia’s Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

She joined Fordham in 1979 and taught courses in Israeli literature and film as part of Fordham’s Middle East Studies program. In 1992, she created the annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue series, which brought together Jewish and Christian scholars to address questions pertinent to Jewish-Catholic reconciliation. In 2002, she also helped found Fordham’s Jewish Texts Reading Group, which still meets today. 

Hoffman was an accomplished painter. In 2015, she opened up about her creative process in a lecture at the Walsh Library. Last November, her art was displayed at Fordham’s Butler Gallery. 

Hoffman was known at Fordham as a skilled instructor and generous mentor. Fordham professor of biology Jason Morris, Ph.D., said she taught him how to be a better teacher.

“I learned so much from teaching with Anne. She appreciated nuance: she had a deep mistrust of facile answers and sharply drawn lines,” he wrote in an email.

“Her integrity and her empathy (and despite what she said, her expertise) came across in everything she said and did.”

In 2003, she was honored with Fordham’s Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities Award, and in 2019, she was recognized for 40 years of service at Fordham. She retired in 2023 and was named professor emerita.

Nikolas Oktaba, a 2015 graduate, took a class with Hoffman, and like many students, he kept in touch with her after graduation. He called her a “fount of tranquil wisdom.” 

“Not only did she put her students first, but she did so in a way that allowed them to see the perseverance, resilience, and strength that they already held within them,” he said. 

At the time of her death, in addition to her painting, she was teaching writing skills at the Fortune Society, teaching Freud at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and conducting friendship-focused writing groups at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh via Zoom.

Leon Hoffman, M.D., Anne’s husband of 57 years, said that he would forever hold onto a memory of the two of them walking together when she was an undergraduate and he was attending medical school.

“We had one of those adolescent discussions of the time: would we marry someone who was not Jewish? I responded very quickly, ‘That is an academic discussion because I am going to marry you.’ She was shocked, but the rest is history,” he said.

“We were not tied at the hip, but we were tied with our brains and our love.”

In an interview last year, Hoffman recalled what her late father-in-law said when she received her first summer grant to travel to Israel to explore Agnon’s archive. 

“He observed that it truly is the ‘goldeneh medineh’ (a Yiddish term referring to the U.S. as the golden land) when a Catholic university gives a Jewish girl money to go to Israel to work on Agnon,” she said. 

“Even more than the material support, his remark captures something of the openness and generosity that have been my experience of this university, my academic home for over 40 years.” 

Hoffman is survived by her husband, Leon Hoffman, M.D.; her children, Miriam Hoffman, M.D. (Steven Kleiner, M.D.) and Liora Hoffman, Ph.D. (Rob Yalen); her brother, David Golomb; her niece, Danielle Golomb, M.D.; her nephew, Jesse Golomb; and her grandchildren Shoshana, Elisheva, and Hillel Hoffman Kleiner and Greta and Max Yalen.

A memorial service open to the University community will be announced at a later date.

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

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

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

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

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

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

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

Contemplating the Bard

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

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

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

Embracing New Technologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from Classmates

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Creative with Lab Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the start of the book, Adam’s life is at a standstill. He has little to show for his research of the cult of the dead in ancient Israel, until he discovers a tablet that sheds light on shadowy underworld figures known as the Healers in Canaanite myth and the Bible. While the Healers are mentioned frequently in the ancient texts, their theological role and origin have never really been fleshed out, said Morris.

On the day Adam finds the tablet, he loses his grandfather, the man who raised him. As Adam mourns, he labors to interpret the text. Are the Healers ancestors of the ancient Jews? Are they the original inhabitants of the land? Are they gods? Or all three? As Adam examines the tablet for answers, he unwittingly unearths family secrets that test his loyalties and entangle him in the police investigation of Danny, an old family friend.

Morris said his grief over the death of his grandfather—with whom he was very close—was an inspiration for the book. In Jewish tradition, Morris said, burying the dead is seen as the last act of kindness one can do for a loved one. He recalled his grandfather’s funeral:

“I remember taking the shovel and not wanting to give it up, that I felt like this was my last opportunity to have this deep, personal, physical connection, to be able to do something for my grandfather, and I was very reluctant to share that,” said Morris. “Of course, I did, because it’s a community of mourners who all need to be able to participate, but it was a wrenching thing to give the shovel away.”

The characters developed quite apart from Morris’ own story. However, that the character Adam can only permit himself to explore his grief through texts and study, is not too far from Morris’ analytic approach to life. Elsewhere, Adam’s best friend is a “disaffected gay Catholic biologist” and his love interest is a liturgical composer “struggling to hold on to her belief.” As for the Healers, Morris said he first learned of them in a college course.

“They merited only a short discussion in the class, but they loomed very large in my imagination and I read as many books as I could over the years that addressed the relationship between Judaism and Canaanite culture,” he said.

As a scientist, Morris didn’t take writing fiction lightly. He is very involved with several faculty groups around the University and counts several English professors among his friends. He said he looked at the novel, which he self-published, as something to be “built,” and the scientist in him wondered, “What makes this work?” His process was very practical.

“When I first started working on the book, I wouldn’t call it my novel, I called it ‘my folly,’ because it felt hubristic. What’s a geneticist doing writing a piece of fiction?” he said. “How could I presume to do something like that?”

As the novel developed he showed it to colleagues who were “incredibly supportive” and offered constructive feedback. Several Fordham professors are thanked in the acknowledgments. Karina Martin Hogan, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, helped Morris with his Hebrew grammar “because she knows this stuff inside and out,” he said. But the archeological research was his own.

“The philology, where Adam is actually trying to interpret the tablet, understanding what’s happening, and the Bible studies, these have been passions of mine for a very long time,” he said.

He said ultimately, the idea of a scientist writing fiction isn’t that big a deal at a place like Fordham.

“One of the things people say about a Jesuit university, particularly about Fordham, is that you can bring your whole self to work,” he said. “If you have passions outside of your particular field, that still informs who you are and you have the opportunity to bring those passions to your relationships with your colleagues or to your students or to your scholarship.”

On Feb. 2, Fisher, a professor of theology, used his final address to his colleagues to tell his own families’ story.

“I was determined not to do one of those ‘My family is crazier than your family’ kind of histories, because I wouldn’t know how crazy anybody else’s family is,” said Fisher, who is retiring in May to spend more time in California with his son Charlie, who is autistic.

“But the complementarity of [mine and Charlie’s]cognitive systems is such a positive thing, I started to get much more positive feelings about my own family’s history. I wondered about people who may help me understand who we are.”

He discovered, among other things, that his great grandfather moved from Brooklyn to Panama in 1906 to work as a plumber on the Panama Canal. There, he became Chief and Senior Sagamore of the fraternal organization the Improved Order of Redmen.

“They wanted to transplant all the putative virtues of white American Christian Republicanism to this utopian community on the Isthmus of Panama. The Improved Order of Redmen was one of these kinds of organizations,” Fisher said, noting dryly that membership was not, in fact, open to Native Americans.

“I had to readjust the longevity of my father’s side of the families’ devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. I’d been off by 12 to 15 centuries. My great grandfather was nobody’s idea of a Roman Catholic. He was in fact, a pagan.”

He died under mysterious circumstances, and Fisher’s great grandmother moved back to Brooklyn, where Fisher discovered she lived in Vinegar Hill, next door to William Sutton, the infamous bank robber who was credited with saying he did it, “Because that’s where the money is.”

His family, which would also later call Woodbridge, New Jersey, home, also belied the popular model of Catholic immigrants flocking to parishes to create a sort of “old world communal setting.”

“My father’s family presented itself as the ultimate exemplar of just that model, but empirically it was not true. They lived where the work was; they lived on the waterfront in Brooklyn, Manhattan and North Jersey,” he said.

And although his grandparents experienced the terror of a resurgent of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s, they did just fine in the end.

“They were homeless in the 1930’s. By 1946, because of the war, my grandfather worked up in his job, and sent their sons to the University of Notre Dame—the eighth wonder of the world for American Catholics,” he said.

Fisher’s talk was part of Arts and Sciences Faculty Day. This year, honorees included
Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, who was honored for excellence in teaching in science and math;

Jim Fisher, Ph.D.,professor of theology, who was honored for or excellence in teaching in arts and humanities

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, who was honored for excellence in teaching social sciences;

Maryann Kowaleski, P.h.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies, who was honored for excellence in teaching in graduate studies.

The evening also celebrates 12 members of the arts and science faculty who have been chosen to work together to discuss innovative teaching techniques. The group, which includes graduate students and cuts across campuses and disciplines, meets five times a semester for two semesters to share recent scholarship in the field of teaching stories, and techniques. This year’s cohort includes:

Emanuel Fiano, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Abby Goldstein, associate professor of visual arts

Henry Han, Ph.D., associate professor of Computer and Information Science

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry

Jesus Luzardo, Ph.D. candidate of philosophy, Graduate School of Arts and Science

Jason Morris, Ph.D, associate professor of biology

Meenaserani Murugan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communications

Silvana Patriarca, Ph.D., professor of history

Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology

Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., associate professor of communications

Richard Teverson, assistant professor of art history

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., assistant professor of English

Alessia Valfredini, Ph.D., lecturer of Italian

“It took me a couple of hours,” along with some prodding from his roommate, said Valim, FCLC ’14, before he could bring himself to read its contents—which turned out to be good news. “It felt like a big weight off my shoulders,” he said.

Such was his eagerness to deeply explore the aspects of plant genetics that had captured his interest. Today, as a Fulbright scholar, he’s studying in Germany at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and the nearby Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology, delving into the ways that plants manipulate their environment to fend off threats.

But his path to this highly focused research interest was circuitous, and took him into many diverse corners of the sciences during his time at Fordham.

(See recent story, “Fordham named a top Fulbright producer.”)

A native of Brazil who moved to central Florida as a child, Valim was drawn to Fordham’s big-city setting, and found that attending lectures around town—sometimes to meet course requirements—stoked his interest in a research career. He originally planned to major in history or international studies, but it wasn’t long before he was turned on to science.

It happened freshman year, in an honors natural science course designed to integrate science disciplines and apply them to lots of current topics. Valim was a standout student who “asked really good, interesting, original questions,” said the instructor, Jason Morris, Ph.D., associate professor of natural science.

The following summer he brought Valim into his laboratory to take part in research into fruit fly genetics, and helped him land an internship at the IGC Gulbenkian Institute in Portugal the summer after that. There, too, he was studying Drosophila, but a lecture at the institute piqued his interest in a different area, one that would form the basis of his Fulbright application.

The topic was plants—specifically, he said, “all these things that plants do chemically … that people don’t usually really think about,” such as protecting themselves from insects by releasing chemicals that prompt other insects to attack the offending critters.

He prepared for his current research by adding a minor in bioinformatics to his major in natural science. In Germany he is studying a particularly resilient, but genetically diverse, brand of tobacco to help cultivate “smarter” crops. These could offer an alternative to crops designed to produce their own pesticides—a modification that Valim likened to “giving the plant a single hammer” that it keeps replicating.

“Insects very quickly learn to either avoid that hammer, or they basically learn to deal with that pretty quickly when it’s something that’s really putting a pressure on them,” he said.

The plants he’s studying, on the other hand, “have this ability to use a lot of different tools, and they know how to turn on and turn off things when it’s needed and it isn’t. And that’s the type of thing that we’re most interested in understanding.”

It’s a project that has relevance for protecting biodiversity as more food is produced to feed the world’s burgeoning population, he said. His enthusiasm for his work is apparent—in addition to conducting research, he takes part in events to educate the public about the work being done at Friedrich Schiller University and the Planck Institute.

“There’s a big focus on teaching people about science that is being done here, which I’m really excited to be a part of,” he said.