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.

The International Symposium on Digital Scholarship took place from June 3 to 5 at Birkbeck College and Fordham’s London Centre. Sponsored by the University’s Office of Research, it featured a mix of lectures, workshops, and formal and informal gatherings geared toward furthering research opportunities and international collaborations.

If last year’s gathering illustrated how cross-border collaboration is key to tackling vexing challenges of our time, the London gathering showed how, in the digital realm, no one discipline can go it alone.

Bringing Technology and Scholarship Together

“Digital scholarship is notable for its interdisciplinary nature, since it involves not only IT and computer science, but also the humanities, social sciences, and schools of education,” said Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., the academic coordinator for the digital symposium.

The Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies and curator of Fordham’s Medieval Sources Bibliography, Kowaleski has deep connections to both London and the digital humanities.

In London, she delivered a keynote address, “Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Acknowledging Collaborative Work in Digital Scholarship Projects.” She also presented a research project that touches on both London and the digital realm, titled “Prosopography, Database Design, and Linked Data in the Medieval Londoners Project.”

The project is a collaboration with Katherina Fostano, visual resources coordinator in the department of Art History, and Kowaleski said it was notable that Fostano presented at the conference, as did Elizabeth Cornell, Ph.D., director of communications at Fordham’s department of information technology. Adding professional staff such as librarians and graduate students to the mix, was key to the conference’s success, she said.

“One of the things that my research shows, and that I have experienced, is how crucial librarians are to digital efforts now. I’m grateful that Fordham has included them in this program,” she said.

London and New York, Working as a Team

Representing the Graduate School of Education (GSE), Professor of Childhood Special Education Su-Je Cho, Ph.D, and doctoral student Kathleen Doyle jointly presented “Using a Digital Learning Platform to Increase Levels of Evidence-Based Practices in Global Teacher Education Programs.” It detailed Project REACH, a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that makes widely available the best evidence-based practices for training prospective teachers.

George Magoulas, Ph.D., Alex Poulovassilis, Ph.D., and Andrea Cali, Ph.D., members of Birkbeck College’s Knowledge Lab, helped them collect and analyze data through the website.

Working with a partner in London made sense for this project, Cho said, because one of her goals is for Project REACH to get more use internationally. She, Doyle, and the GSE’s Alesia Moldavan, Ph.D., assistant professor of mathematics education, will collaborate with Christine Edwards-Leis, Ph.D., associate dean of research, and enterprise and doctoral student Jennifer Murray from St. Mary’s College in London on a new endeavor geared toward student teachers’ mental health. Once finished, it will be incorporated into Project REACH.

“The student teaching experience is very stressful, because it’s not their own classroom they have to student teach in. It’s someone else’s classroom. By providing this kind of platform, they can also share their concerns and knowledge and frustrations with the students overseas,” she said.

For Doyle, the trip was an opportunity to see how colleagues from other disciplines assemble collaborative teams.

“I really appreciated learning across the fields. Being in the Graduate School of Education, I’ve been mainly focused on that field. It was refreshing to hear about the other ways digital scholarship is utilized in other disciplines,” she said.

Urban Challenges That Cross Borders

Gregory T. Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies, presented “Keeping Place in ‘Smart’ Cities: Situating the Settlement House as a Means of Knowing and Belonging in the Informational City.” The project, which he is developing with the assistance of Melissa Butcher, Ph.D., reader in social and cultural geography at Birkbeck College, will highlight the efforts of New York City’s Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center and London’s Toynbee Hall.

The project will focus on the “settlement house” model of community center that was founded a century ago to confront segregation and displacement and promote belonging.

“New York City and London are examples of global cities that are going through significant technological change, both in terms of the cities themselves becoming more digitized as well as the economy and the kinds of jobs and the kinds of education that’s being elevated. With that comes all kinds of difficult changes and gentrification that causes displacement,” said Donovan, who is also organizing November symposium at Fordham called Mapping (in)justice.

“We’re going to look at how we might network [Lincoln Square and Toynbee] through digital technology and think about how they’re managing to keep pace in these communities that are often being displaced in this kind of digital gentrification.”

The daylong conference, “Reading and Writing in City, Court, and Cloister,” will be held on March 7 at 10 a.m. at Lincoln Center’s Corrigan Conference Center.

Maryanne Kowaleski, the center’s director, said that Erler has served on the medieval studies executive committee, helped to organize conferences, and taught a wide range of interdisciplinary courses in the field.

“She’s an internationally renowned scholar and she has helped the conference to become a distinguished venue for new research in the field,” said Kolaleski, the Joseph Fitzpatrick, SJ, Distinguished Professor of History and Medieval Studies.

Martin Chase, SJ, associate professor of English said there has been a desire to honor Erler over the last few years and “it seemed a natural thing to do.”

In assembling the conference, organizers asked Erler’s colleagues and collaborators to submit papers that slanted toward her interests, which include late medieval women’s reading and book ownership, early English printing, devotional literature, and early English drama—to name but a few.

Speakers include: Michael Sargent, Joyce Coleman, Kathryn A. Smith, Caroline Barron, and Sheila Lindenbaum.

Erler began her graduate work after she raised her two children and saw them off to high school. Contextualizing medieval literature was a fairly new practice when she started her research in the early 1980s, said Father Chase.

“As a feminist scholar, she is pioneer in researching what women studied, what books they owned, and who they were,” he said.

The program’s five distinguished presenters are all Erler’s collaborators, colleagues, and friends. And the chairs of each session will be former mentees and students of Erler, each whom has started their own academic careers.

“Mary is a key attraction for grad students to come to our program to begin with,” said Father Chase. “They come here because they want to work with her and she’s just really good at it—a real pro.”

Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., is at the helm of an “Occupy” movement.

And although the oft-forgotten peasantry of medieval England—the “90 percent”—might not galvanize the protesters of Zuccotti Park, her “Occupy the Middle Ages” rally was well received among North American medievalists this spring.

In March, Kowaleski, the Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., Distinguished Professor of Social Science and outgoing president of the Medieval Society of America, used her final presidential column for the Medieval Academy News to make a case for peasants. By and large, she said, North American medievalists devote ample research to the flashier figures of medieval society, yet tend to overlook the other 90 percent of the population.

“Royalty, aristocrats, clergy, mystics, barbarians, and even marginal people such as lepers and heretics make the cut, but not the social group responsible for the vast majority of the preindustrial economy,” she said.

This discrepancy was especially noticeable when Kowaleski, who is director of Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, was vetting applications for a position in the medieval history faculty. Of the hundreds of applications received, none focused on medieval peasants or agriculture, and remarkably few of their syllabi devoted even an entire class lecture to peasants.

The reasons for this neglect of medieval peasants vary. Some scholars say it is more important to expose students to those who wielded power in society. Others argue that today’s increasingly urbanized or suburbanized societies make it difficult for students to connect with the agrarian peasantry.

Moreover, more prominent medieval figures are easier to study because scholars have access to primary texts written by and about them; peasants leave a fainter documentary trail.

“There’s a tendency to underplay the importance of peasants because they couldn’t read or write and they didn’t leave texts, so people say they were powerless,” she said. “But [they]vastly outnumbered the kings, popes, and poets we know so well.”

Kowaleski has promoted study of the peasantry since early in her career. While a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, she wrote her licentiate thesis on peasant land markets and her doctoral thesis on the interaction of rural and urban trade.

Peasants may have been poor, illiterate, and thus ostensibly unimportant, but they were the bedrock of the English economy.

“The gross national product of England was completely agrarian. Its chief export was wool,” she said. “So to understand medieval England’s balance of trade, you need to know where the wool was coming from and how agriculture was organized—and it’s peasants who were raising the sheep or growing the grain, which was another significant English export.”

It is one thing to deduce peasants’ importance based on trade—but without a wealth of documents to chronicle their lives, how else can one understand their role in society?

Kowaleski’s presidential address for the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in April focused on how new developments in the study of humans can paint a more complete picture of peasant life. Three approaches are particularly valuable: demography, the quantitative study of past human populations via mortality, fertility, and migration rates; osteoarchaeology, the study of human skeletal remains; and paleopathology, the study of ancient diseases.

Information from censuses and skeletal remains, for instance, tell an interesting story about the migrations of young peasant women. English poll taxes, which recorded the populations of rural and urban areas alike, indicate that more women lived in towns than in the countryside. Scholars deduce that, because of restrictive inheritance customs that typically passed over daughters, many young women left home to find work as servants in towns. Migration also tended to delay the age at which women married.

“If you migrate, you need to settle in, make some money, meet someone,” Kowaleski said. “Generally, these women were probably getting married in their early twenties, whereas if they stayed home on the farm, they might be getting married at 17 or 18.”

Osteoarchaeological studies corroborate this theory. Excavated skeletons reveal that the mortality rates of urban women peaked later, between the ages of 25 to 34, as opposed to 17 to 25 for rural women. Since childbirth was a leading cause of death, scholars can infer that mortality peaking at older ages points to a later age of marriage for urban women.

Bones also reveal many of the specific illnesses that felled peasants. They also show at what stages of their life they may have experienced malnutrition, and indicate the hard physical labor that peasant women in particular endured, compared to their urban sisters.

“Paleodemography is a useful entry point for understanding the silent majority of the medieval ages,” she said. “It’s a way to get at people who don’t leave written texts, because the evidence is written on their bones.”

Currently, Kowaleski is writing Living by the Sea: An Ethnography of Maritime Communities in Medieval England. She received a 2011 Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Fellowship to conduct research for the project at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., which earned her Fordham’s 2012 Funded Research Scholar Award in the Humanities.

The ceremony, the second of its kind, capped a day-long event, Growing Research at Fordham! Out of the Tower: Fostering the Public Intellectual. The annual event recognizes and promotes research that elevates both Fordham’s profile, and the goals of its Jesuit-centered higher education.

Recipients of this year’s Funded Research Scholar Award were:

J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., assistant professor of biological sciences, for his numerous externally funded projects to preserve species here in the northeast, as well as his work hosted by the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. Dr. Clark’s research in New Zealand and Australia is to determine whether these countries’ colonies of little blue penguins demonstrate enough genetic variation to warrant separating them as species, or whether they’re merely distant biological cousins — a question critical to their legal status for conservation.

Qin Gao, Ph.D, associate professor of social work in the Graduate School of Social Service, who has received funding from the Fahs-Beck Fund, New York Community Trust, and the Silberman Fund, explores issues of income inequality caused by rural to urban migration within China, as well as the well-being of Asian American families and children here in New York City. In addition to her expertise in social work and that of her collaborator in economics, Dr. Gao’s work is also inspired by her own experience of having immigrated not only from China to the United States, but also from rural China where she grew up to Beijing.

Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., Joseph Fitzpatrick S.J. Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Medieval Studies, who received a 2011 Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Fellowship for research on the Medieval Coastal Properties of Battle Abbey, which she conducted at the presitigious Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.  Dr. Kowaleski’s current project, and this award, are the continuation of a diverse interdisciplinary research agenda that has placed Medieval Studies under the lens of gender studies, analyses of commerce and trade, and at the forefront of digital humanities.

Faculty members received their awards from Nancy Busch, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and the University’s chief research officer.

In presenting the awards, Dean Busch referred to Fordham statutes that cover the importance of research as leading to “the creative expansion of the teacher’s vision,” the training of students in “scholarly inquiry, “ and the fulfillment of “the university’s responsibility to expand the horizons of knowledge to the ultimate benefit of society.”

“At Fordham, I think we do it for a slightly different reason,” Busch said. “Within Fordham’s Jesuit tradition, we believe that research has a special role in serving the greater good. We acknowledged that knowledge applied is crucial in addressing the ills of today’s society, whether related to human misery versus human dignity, or part of environmental degradation versus protection.”

The winners were chosen from a pool of 88 faculty, whose eligibility was determined by having been cited in one of Fordham’s past three annual President’s Letters for having received a new award of external funding in support of their research.  Over 300 almunai, faculty, students and staff then responded the University’s call for nominations from amongst this pool for one award in each of three categories: Humanities, Sciences, and the Social Sciences & Professions.

James Wilson, director of faculty development, said that the nine finalists—three in each category—were identified in consultation with the Office of Sponsored Programs and in accord with a weighting process for these nominations devised by the University Research Council (URC) in order to consider peer commentary, project impact and longevity of funding, among other factors.  Each member of the URC then considered the nine finalists’ career research contributions and/or demonstrated potential before forwarding his or her individual choice to receive one of these three coveted awards.

The final three were chosen by members of the URC, each of whom made his or her individual selections independently.
The remaining finalists were:

David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), under the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Silvia Finnemann, Ph.D., associate professor of cellular biology, funded by the National Eye Institute.

Susanne Hafner, Ph.D., assistant professor of German, funded by the South Central Modern Language Association/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Veterans Affairs Department, and the W.E. UpJohn Institute for Employment Research.

Philip Napoli, Ph.D., associate professor of communications & media management in the Fordham University Schools of Business, funded by the Soros Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.

Thierry Rigogne, Ph.D., associate professor of history, funded by the American Society for 18th Century Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Philosophical Society.

The celebration, which was sponsored by the Office of Research, was held at the Rose Hill campus. It included a presentation and workshop by the OpEd Project, a pilot project with universities to help increase the number of women’s and minority men’s voices on the op-ed pages of major publications. The workshop was run by project’s founder and director, Catherine Orenstein.

“The French of England is not a coterie of literature but a large elephant in the living room of Middle English,” said Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Ph.D., professor at the University of York and co-director of Fordham’s French of England Project, who delivered the opening address. “And it’s a large elephant in the outhouse of Continental French.”

“The French of England” is a term that describes French texts that circulated in medieval England. In fact, French was a major language of literary, cultural and other pursuits in England for more than 400 years, yet it remains a relatively under-researched field.

Fordham launched the French of England Project, which is also co-directed by Thelma Fenster, Ph.D., professor of French at Fordham, in 2001 and it’s now co-sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York in England. The project was created to increase awareness of and access to the francophone texts of medieval England.

Maryanne Kowaleski, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham and director of the Center for Medieval Studies, said the conference showcased “the innovative curriculum, graduate student research and website development connected to the French of England project at Fordham.”

Keith Busby, Ph.D., professor of French at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, offered the conference’s opening lecture on the circulation of French literature in medieval England, including its existence beyond London city limits, outside of the upper class and within English monasteries.

He also gave attendees a glimpse into one of the many manuscripts he is attempting to decipher — a list of titles found in the Shrewsbury School manuscript 7, page 200.

“I’ve spent many years puzzling over this thing,” he said. “What is this list? Please tell me!”

Busby, however, believes he has uncovered the meaning of several items on the list. “This appears to be French poems on pure Irish topics, and the finger of suspicion points to Irish monks,” he said. “This is the only real evidence we have of poems in old French that deal directly with the history of Irish mythology.

“This raises the whole question of the transmission of Celtic material into French,” he said. “It affords us a tantalizing glimpse into the transmission and mechanics of old Irish texts in French.”

For Wogan-Browne, knowledge and understanding of the French of England along with other closely related areas of research can provide a window on how the West developed.

“The French of England is itself one example of the overlaps and coexistences of different languages in medieval cultures,” said Wogan-Browne after the conference. “We could also talk about the French of Scotland, of Wales, of Ireland, of northern Italy and of Sicily, for instance. The French of England is one part of a wider and dynamic reappraisal of the Middle Ages currently happening in our culture as we seek to understand the formation of the West in medieval Europe and the history of the West’s relations with the wider world.”

A sister conference focusing on linguistic accommodation and culture hybridity will be held at the University of York in July.

By Maja Tarateta