“I want to show how diabetes can teach you meaningful lessons that can be applied to sports, family, [and] friends,” said Shah, a general science and anthropology double major who aspires to become a pediatric endocrinologist.

Within its first week of publication this past February, the book reached #1 in Amazon’s New Releases in Children’s Books on Physical Disabilities, #1 in New Releases in Children’s Disease Books, #1 in New Releases in Children’s Nonfiction Health Books, #5 Best Sellers in Physical Disabilities, and #13 Best Sellers in Children’s Disease Books, said Shah.

Watch the video above to learn more about Shah’s new book, Shots at Life, and what it’s like for Shah to live with diabetes as a college student.

Check out our video featuring Nushelle de Silva, a new faculty member in the art history department originally from Sri Lanka, and Matteo Torres, a first-year student from San Francisco who is studying at the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center. They sat down with Fordham News to share some insights from their first few months and how they’ve come to find a second home here.

Additional reporting by Kelly Prinz.

“They get the summer to actually focus on their research, instead of having classes or jobs or other things going on,” explained Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., Fordham College at Rose Hill faculty director for undergraduate research. “And they get to interact with other students outside of their disciplines, in a way where they’re watching each other generate knowledge.”

Students in the program worked closely with faculty to pursue topics that they find interesting.

“Everyone was very very helpful, and there were workshops if you didn’t know what you were doing, or if you needed help,” said Diana Paradise, a rising junior who worked on a psychology research project this summer. “It was a really great experience. I wouldn’t have been able to find what I found or learn what I learned without this program.”

Maura B. Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, attended the presentations, and spoke to the students on day two.

“This program is amazing. I’m so excited that you all get to learn from each other and that we get to learn from you,” Mast said. “And I’m really grateful for [our donors’]  support. We are able to fund this because we get amazing support from our alumni; they’re the ones who gave the money so that you could have this incredible experience.”

Hear from four of our summer scholars in in this video series, including the video below:

“They’re writing for the academic audience, but what about us high school students?” asked Suvanni Oates, a high schooler from Bronxdale High School who is an intern for the project. “What about us students who can’t receive that message that they’re trying to send in that way?” 

From June 14 through 16, Fordham welcomed 12 scholar-authors from multiple universities alongside local New York City high school students and Fordham undergraduates for a writing workshop where they could all learn from each other. 

Creating New Articles—and TikTok Videos

“High school students were introduced to undergraduates [and they are]working with linguistic anthropologists, our authors. We prepared student teams to each read one author’s paper and give feedback on what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what spoke to them,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Fordham and founding director of both the Demystifying Language Project and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, which is launching next year. 

During the workshop, held at the Lincoln Center campus, teams of undergrads and high school students worked with their author to “transpose” previously published articles into two-page digital pieces in language teens can understand. Students even spent a day making TikToks that conveyed the main messages of the articles.

“To hear [the authors’]perspective and actually work with them in person, that was the cool part,” said one of the Bronxdale high schoolers, Athalia McCormack.

The resulting 12 papers will be published as a multimedia open educational resource on the website for Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology.

“Our long-term goals include housing these 12 digital pieces on an interactive website that will be free to use,” said Fader. “We hope that this is going to be a resource for high school teachers to use in existing curricula and also for high school students to experiment with social science, especially linguistic anthropology, which is not part of most curricula in NYC public schools.” 

Fordham Students See the Impact

Sitara Vaidy, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in May with a psychology and sociology major, was one of the Fordham students working on the project. She said the workshop “allowed the high school students to better understand the significance of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and the interesting and important work that they produce.”

Theater and anthropology major Ashira Fischer-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, who also worked with the teams, said she appreciated the justice aspect of the work.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to have met so many fascinating, driven people working for social justice,” she said. 

Expanding into Communities

The DLP is also planning to use the short articles in a summer institute for high school students, where they will study language and power in their own communities. The following summer they plan to host a teacher-training institute. 

“By demystifying students’ own experiences with language, the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, potentially life-changing set of social justice tools for high school students and teachers and the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them,” Fader said.  

The DLP has been externally supported by a Spencer Conference Grant and a Wenner-Gren Workshop Grant. Internal support comes from an Arts and Sciences Dean’s Challenge Grant and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who hosted the pilot project in 2019, and will be collaborating on future programs. Fordham members of the organizing committee include Johanna Quinn, Ph.D. (sociology); Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D. (MLL); and Crystal Colombini, Ph.D. (the Writing Center), who were joined by Mike Mena, Ph.D. (Brooklyn College); Justin Coles, Ph.D. (UMass); Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D. (UMass); Bambi Schieffelin, Ph.D. (NYU), and high school teacher Scott Storm (Harvest Collegiate). 

On June 1, the three parts of the team gathered in person for the first time at Fordham’s LITE Center at Rose Hill to show off their work and speak more about the exciting new app that they are hoping to complete.

The app will allow users to walk around New York City and use their phones to pull up 3D models, images, and information about medieval-inspired structures that once stood where they are standing. It will also show viewers medieval-inspired elements that still exist in the city today.  

“We have [created] these … walking tours … that showcase points [around the city] that aren’t medieval, but are medieval in a way that’s understood very broadly,” explained Christina Bruno, Ph.D., co-director of the project and associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

These points include examples of medievalism in architecture around the city, like coats of arms, statues and monuments that depict medieval figures, and places that have collections of medieval objects (like the Met Cloisters). In addition, they have included spots that speak to what New York itself looked like during what we think of as the medieval period, between 500 and 1500 CE, before contact with Europeans.

“[This] will hopefully be supported by a mobile application with audio guides, AR/VR content; and that is how we got involved with the New Rochelle High School students,” Bruno said.

Katherina Fostano, visual and digital resources director at the Center for Medieval Studies, happens to be friends with the chair of the math department at New Rochelle High School.  

“She connected us with a class of architecture students who went on to become very interested in the project and [began] to build 3D models of structures around the city that no longer exist,” said Bruno.  

Building Castles in 3D

One student in particular was especially interested in working on the project: New Rochelle senior Maximiliano Aguilar.  

The Center for Medieval Studies gave Aguilar incomplete pictures and drawings of medieval-style castles built during the 19th century that used to exist in New York City. Using only the pictures, Aguilar was able to construct 3D scale models of these formally impressive structures. In the year he’s been working on the project, he has been able to build two castles, Libbey Castle and Paterno Castle, fully, and plans to finish a third model that he has started over the summer.

“[The coolest thing] was the introduction to a new type of architecture,” said Aguilar, who will start at Fordham this fall. “In class, it was just simple house designs, and when I got introduced to this, I got introduced to castles … which was definitely something new to me.”

The castles that Aguilar has built and is building are the AR/VR element of the Medieval New York Project. When a user opens the app near where the castle once stood, they will be able to see through the camera a 3D model of what the castle would have looked like.

“We realized that we have a valuable opportunity to leverage emerging technologies and capture and share medievalism throughout New York City,” said Nicole Zeidan, Ed.D., assistant director, emerging educational technology and learning space design at Fordham.

As a bonus, enjoy our blooper reel below:

“There’s something really important about the fact that we are in the business of teaching,” said Tetlow. “If there’s anyone who should understand how to spread information, how to help people understand—it’s us. So how do we model our own pedagogy with each other?”

Tetlow spoke on the Twice Over Podcast, which was developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to find meaning and connection during a turbulent time. Over the past two years, it evolved into a platform where students, faculty, administrators, and guest speakers at other academic institutions share effective practices in their work and build connections through candid conversations. More than 40 guests have been interviewed by the podcast’s two hosts: Steven D’Agustino, director of online learning, and Anne Fernald, special advisor to the provost. They conduct recording sessions in a sound-controlled studio within the Learning, Innovation, Technology Environment, a new center in the basement of Walsh Library where students, faculty, and administrators use cutting-edge technology for their research.  

The podcast episode featuring Tetlow was published on Nov. 28. For nearly an hour, Tetlow speaks in depth on many topics, including why she decided to work in higher education and how her second grade teacher changed her life. The podcast episode can be streamed on Twice Over’s website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and YouTube. 

The evening showcase, The Movement, Melodrama, and Melodies of NYC, featured dance solos from the Ailey/Fordham students and performances of the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile, as well as popular rhythm and blues song Route 66 by the Fordham Jazz Ensemble. Members of Fordham Theatre also performed an excerpt from the play Indecent, which celebrates the love, magic, and hope of the theater. Following the showcase held in Costantino Room, guests wined and dined at a reception held in the adjacent Soden Lounge and Bateman Room. 

In her closing remarks at the end of the showcase, Tetlow thanked the students for their “stunning” performance and their ability to evoke emotion. 

“There’s a world where we would have our business school students discuss a business plan, and watch the law student try to brief, and have a calculus problem on a whiteboard, just to demonstrate their talent and discipline and hard work, but none of them would have made us feel what you made us feel tonight,” Tetlow said. 

She also praised the students for their courage to perform on stage and admired the dancers’ agility. (Watching the Ailey dancers almost made her pull a muscle, she joked.) In addition, she highlighted the students’ nod to American history. 

“I think that you, tonight, really earned our spot on San Juan Hill. I feel the spirits of the people who lived here who were so important in American history and in American cultural history, from Zora Neale Hurston to Thelonious Monk. And you have made it such that we deserve this spot of their making and deserve our spot as part of Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts because we are part of this grand experiment to bring together such amazing culture of this country and in the world,” said Tetlow. “So thank you for demonstrating what Fordham is and your own talent and for making the kickoff to this inauguration so special.” 

Last summer, Saul Cornell, Ph.D., the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, weighed in on U.S. Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. At the heart of the case is a 1911 law that says New Yorkers who carry a concealed firearm outside their home must demonstrate a special need for self-protection. 

Gun-control activists want to keep this law because it will prevent some people from carrying guns and committing violent acts, said Cornell. However, National Rifle Association conservatives want to get rid of this law so more people can carry guns without having to give a reason, he said. The court is now trying to decide whether or not this law violates the Second Amendment. 

Cornell, a historian whose work has been widely cited by legal scholars, said that history supports the notion of needing a reason to carry a gun. However, conservative justices who will decide the case are claiming their decision is based on historical precedent, yet willfully ignoring actual historical facts that support the regulation of guns, he said.

“To understand the constitutionality of a law, we need to ask three questions: What does that law mean to Americans today? What does it mean to the courts? And what did it mean at the time that it was written and enacted?” Cornell said in this faculty mini-lecture filmed in March. “In most cases, the answers to those questions do not overlap at all. And in the case of guns, the disjuncture between those questions is, in some ways, wider than almost any other area of American law.”

In the video, Cornell explains his role in the court case, which follows a cascade of shootings across the country: in New York, most recently in a Buffalo supermarket and a New York City subway car, and in Texas, the tragic shooting in Robb Elementary School, where 21 people were killed—19 of them children. 

The final decision from the court may arrive this June, said Cornell, who also recently wrote an opinion piece for Slate on the matter. 

“Given these horrific events, it is hard to fathom how the U.S. Supreme Court could be contemplating striking down a century-old New York gun regulation,” he wrote in the May 19 Slate piece, “but based on the oral argument in the case, this unthinkable reality seems almost inevitable unless the court comes to its senses … and recognizes the long history of gun regulation and enforcement in America, including limits on public carry.”