AMERICAN.EDU/CAS/CONNECTIONS | SPRING 2013
Making
History
Painting
Borges
The Origin
of a
Species
A Poet
Finds
Her Voice
Reaching
for the
Stars
achievements
On the Cover
Magazine Production
Laura Delgado //
Detail from Funes,
The Garbage
Heap II, 2009 //
Mixed media
on canvas
Publisher: College of Arts and Sciences //
Dean: Peter Starr // Managing Editor: Charles Spencer //
Writers: Steven Dawson, Josh Halpren, Angela Modany, Mary
Schellinger, Charles Spencer // Editor: Ali Kahn, UCM //
Designer: Nicky Lehming // Webmaster: Thomas Meal //
Senior Advisor: Mary Schellinger // Send news items and
comments to Charles Spencer at casnews@american.edu.
Join our conversation
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twitter.com/AUcollege
Appointments
& Honors
TATE STRICKLAND (graphic design) received
a 2013 IxDA Interaction Award for his work as
lead designer on the mobile app and strategy for
President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Grants
& Research
Education Portal named AU’s AUDIO TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM as number one in the nation.
Books
& Productions
STEPHEN CASEY (mathematics and statistics) received $145,537 from the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research for a three-year
study, “New Techniques in Time Frequency
Analysis: Adaptive Band, Ultra Band and MultiRate Signal Processing.”
IVY BRODER (economics) received the
2012 Milton and Sonia Greenberg Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning Award for her online
course, Economics of World Regions, and for
her paper evaluating the experience, which she
presented at the AEA’s National Conference on
Teaching and Research in Economic Education.
Letter
from
the
Dean
IT’S NO ACCIDENT THAT, since its inception, the magazine devoted to the work of College of
Arts and Sciences faculty and students has been called Connections. For connections are
what draw us together as scholars, teachers, and students, and as members of the broader
American University community.
In the College’s Department of History, it is the connections that faculty members have with
one another, in some cases going back decades, that explain why no fewer than eight faculty
books have come to fruition in the past year.
For Michael Brenner, founder of Germany’s only Jewish studies program to date, joining the
College as the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies is an opportunity to help
AU’s path-breaking Center for Israel Studies build bridges to the many similar programs that
have been founded in its wake.
Sociology graduate student Erik Kojola, also profiled in this issue, keeps connected with his
childhood and growing up in a union household through research linking the interactions of
labor with the environmental movement. And thanks to Audio Technology Program faculty
member Greg Smith’s connection with National Public Radio, AU students get invaluable
broadcast experience through exclusive internship opportunities at NPR.
The arts, too, illustrate the vital role of connections. In a major exhibit at the American University
Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 16 Latin American artists enter into dialogue with the works
of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges and with one another. Poet Valzhyna Mort—an alumna of the
Department of Literature’s MFA program and the youngest person ever featured on the cover
of Poets and Writers magazine—recalls the importance of the connections she made at AU
with mentors like literature professor David Keplinger.
In the sciences, biology professor Chris Tudge owes his identification of a new crab species
on a remote Belizean island in large part to his longtime friendship with a pair of worldrenowned crustacean experts who invited him on a research trip. Environmental sciences
professor Kiho Kim collaborates with his students on a study demonstrating that going
trayless in dining halls significantly reduces food and energy waste. And physics student Terri
Poxon-Pearson has had the extraordinary experience of connecting with three mentors at
three separate research institutions.
Happy reading,
Peter Starr
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
A poem by KYLE DARGAN (literature) was
featured February 28, 2012, on “Poem-A-Day”
and February 18, 2013, on poets.org.
MARY GRAY (mathematics and statistics)
is featured in Margaret W. Rossiter’s book
Women Scientists in America: Forging a New
World since 1972 (Johns Hopkins, 2012) as a
founding member of the Association for Women
in Mathematics and for her expert testimony for
Senator Edward Kennedy’s bill establishing a
National Science Foundation advisory committee
on women and minorities.
GAIL HUMPHRIES MARDIROSIAN
(performing arts) received a Likhachev
Cultural Fellowship for her project “Theatre
as a Conduit for Cross-Cultural Dialogue, the
Cabaret Phenomena Revisited: A Convergence
of Cabarets.”
DAN KALMAN (mathematics and statistics)
and Nathan Carter received the Trevor Evans
Award from the Mathematical Association of
America at the MAA MathFest 2012 in Madison,
Wisconsin, for their article “Harvey Plotter and
the Circle of Irrationality.”
The History of Education Society gave Lessons
from an Indian Day School: Negotiating Colonization in Northern New Mexico, 1902–1907
(University Press of Kansas, 2011) by ADREA
LAWRENCE (education) an Outstanding Book
Award honorable mention.
MARIANNE NOBLE (literature) was elected
to the editorial board of the MLA journal
American Literature.
JACK RASMUSSEN (American University
Museum) received a Likhachev Cultural Fellowship, thanks to which he will meet with potential
collaborators in Russia.
ANITA SHERMAN (literature) won the Open
Paper Competition of the Shakespeare Association of America for her paper titled “Fantasies of
Private Language in Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and
Turtle.’” She will deliver the paper at the association’s annual meeting in Toronto in April.
Zelenka: The Capriccios, the fifth commercial CD
by DAN ABRAHAM (performing arts) with the
Bach Sinfonia, was featured worldwide on the front
page of iTunes Classical as “New and Noteworthy.”
LAURA BEERS (history) and Geraint Thomas
coedited Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the
Wars (Institute of Historical Research, 2012).
(See page 3.)
JULIET BELLOW (art history) is consulting
scholar for the National Gallery of Art exhibition
Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes
1909 –1929: When Art Danced with Music, opening in May 2013. Her book, Modernism on Stage:
The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde
(Ashgate), was released this year.
RICHARD BREITMAN AND ALLAN J.
LICHTMAN (history) published FDR and the
Jews (Belknap/Harvard, 2013). (See page 2.)
DAVID KEPLINGER (literature), published
a new book of poetry, The Most Natural Thing
(New Issues, 2013).
ALAN KRAUT (history) and David A. Gerber
coedited Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream:
Shaping the Nation’s Immigration Story (Rutgers,
forthcoming 2013). (See page 3.)
PETER KUZNICK (history) and Oliver Stone
coauthored and published The Untold History
of the United States (Gallery Books, 2012).
(See page 2.)
ERIC LOHR (history) published Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard, 2012).
(See page 3.)
PAMELA S. NADELL AND KATE HAULMAN
(history) coedited and published Making Women’s
Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (NYU,
2013). (See page 3.)
DAVID PIKE (literature) published Canadian
Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the
World (University of Toronto, 2012).
VIVIAN VASQUEZ (education) published her
sixth book, Perspectives and Provocations in Early
Childhood Education (Information Age Publishing,
2012). Her book Technology and Critical Literacy
in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2012),
coauthored with Carol Branigan Felderman, was
published in Kindle format.
DANIEL FONG (biology) was awarded $10,000
by the Cave Conservancy Foundation to study
“Analyses of the Melanin Pigment Synthesis Pathway in Subterranean Amphipods and Isopods.”
KATHLEEN FRANZ (history) was granted
$18,710 from the Smithsonian Institution for her
project “American Enterprise Exhibition.”
DAVID HAAGA (psychology) was the recipient
of a $30,000 award from the Trichotillomania
Learning Center for “Efficacy of COMB Model
of Treating Trichotillomania.”
MARY HANSEN (economics) received
$55,963 from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges to research “Opening New Views
into Bankruptcy and Credit Markets Using Court
Records.”
STEPHEN MACAVOY (environmental science)
was awarded $15,000 from the University of the
District of Columbia to study “Episodic Ion and Nutrient Inputs to the Anacostia River: Constructing
a Chemical Hydrograph of an Urban Streams
Response to Periodic Rainfall.”
CHRISTOPHER K. MORGAN (performing arts),
AU dance artist in residence, received a $20,000
unrestricted fellowship from the Native Arts and
Cultures Foundation.
MICHAEL ROBINSON (mathematics and
statistics) transferred a $65,000 grant to AU
from the University of Pennsylvania (funded by
Princeton University/Air Force Office of Scientific
Research) for “Sheaf Invariants for Information
Systems.” He also received a $35,000 award from
the Department of Defense through the University
of Pennsylvania to study “Algebraic-Topological
Sensor Data Exploitation.”
SUE ANN TAYLOR (anthropology) was the recipient of a $43,690 grant from the National Park
Service for her “Washington, D.C., Civil War
Contraband Ethnography Study (1861–1877).”
JONATHAN TUBMAN (psychology) received
$2,486,981 from the National Institutes of Health
to fund a five-year project, “Multisite SchoolBased Evaluation of a Brief Screener for Underage Drinking.”
13
AMERICAN.EDU/CAS/CONNECTIONS | SPRING 2013
Letter from the Dean
Making History 2
History faculty publishing prolifically
Painting Borges 4
Argentine author’s work setting theme for Latin artists’ exhibition
A Champion for Israel Studies 6
Michael Brenner joining AU as Abensohn Endowed Chair in Israel Studies
The Origin of a Species 7
Biologist Chris Tudge honored with eponymous crab
Going Trayless 8
Environmental scientist Kiho Kim supporting effort for sustainable practice
A Poet Finds Her Voice 9
Valzhyna Mort, MFA ’11, proving her literary mettle
Linking Labor and the Environment 10
Erik Kojola, MA sociology ’13, exploding myths about union attitudes
Tuning in to NPR 11
Audio tech program offering exclusive internship with public broadcaster
Reaching for the Stars 12
Terri Poxon-Pearson, BS ’13, going nuclear in pursuit of her research passion
Achievements 13
humanities
humanities
Making
History
THE COLLEGE’S Depart-
ment of History has
just made some history of its own.
During the past year,
five faculty-authored and
three faculty-coedited
books have been published, an impressive
feat considering that
researching, writing, and
publishing an academic
book can take 10 years.
“It’s astonishing the
number of people who
have books out,” says
Pamela Nadell, the
department chair who
herself coedited a book
published this year.
“I’ve been at AU for
2
over 30 years, but I don’t
recall a year like this.”
How to explain it?
“Some of it is about
the new faculty who
have joined us, like
Anton Fedyashin, who
are remarkably productive,” Nadell says.
“But there’s also an
exciting synergy in the
department. Richard
and Allan’s book [Distinguished Professors
Breitman and Lichtman’s
FDR and the Jews],
for example, came out
of a friendship of more
than three decades.”
Here’s a brief rundown of the Department
by
Charles
Spencer
of History’s crowded
shelf of recently published books, starting
with those authored
by faculty members:
Richard Breitman
and Allan J. Lichtman:
FDR and the Jews
(Belknap/Harvard)
Discovering “a previously unknown document
reconstructing an April
1938 conversation in
which FDR said he would
like to get all the Jews
out of Europe,” combined
with other previously
unavailable sources, says
Breitman, “convinced
me that one could now
do a more nuanced and
for writing his book,
Friedman recalls Jacques
Chirac’s attempt, based
on the French president’s
experience as a conscript
in Algeria, to warn the
United States against
getting involved in a war
in Iraq—and the subsequent irrational American
umbrage (freedom fries,
calls to dig up fallen soldiers from their graves
in Normandy) which led
him to French president
Charles DeGaulle’s eerily
similar warning in 1961
to President Kennedy
about going into Vietnam.
“And you know what
a lot of Americans did?”
Friedman asks. “They
burned French flags, they
poured good wine down
the drain. A member of
Congress, I kid you not,
gave a speech saying we
should dig up our boys
from Normandy and bring
them home because
French soil was no longer a fit resting place for
our American heroes.”
Peter Kuznick and
Oliver Stone (director):
The Untold History
of the United States
(Gallery Books)
The collaboration
between Kuznick and
Academy Award–winning
director Stone produced
a companion volume
for a 10-part Showtime
documentary series.
“It’s been a great
project,” Kuznick says.
“Eight of my grad students have worked on it,
mostly as paid researchers, and I’ve had a lot of
input from other graduate students and some
undergraduates who
have assisted in other
ways. And I couldn’t
have done it without my history department colleagues. It’s
an enormous project.”
Eric Lohr: Russian
Citizenship: From
Empire to Soviet
Union (Harvard)
“I entered Russian
studies right when the
Soviet Union collapsed
and questions of citizenship and nationality
were in the headlines
every day, yet historical study of the region
was largely focused on
other issues. No one
had written a history
of Russian citizenship.
I was able to find sources
that had not yet been
studied. It proved to
be a very complicated
topic that required many
subsequent trips to the
Russian archives.”
Here are the department’s current facultycoedited books:
Laura Beers and
Geraint Thomas:
Brave New World:
Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building
in Britain between
the Wars (Institute of
Historical Research)
“Brave New World
grew out of a conference
which [we] organized
at Newnham College,
Cambridge, in April 2009
to encourage dialogue
between young scholars based primarily in the
U.S. and Britain. Several themes emerged,
notably the changing
role of national and
imperial identity in postWWI Britain. The book
attempts to draw out this
Photo by Vanessa Robertson
thorough study of Roosevelt, showing how his
attitudes and policies
evolved over time. When
I decided that I had to do
Roosevelt’s early life and
politics in great depth, I
went to the best American political historian I
know: my friend and colleague Allan Lichtman.
Allan agreed to work with
me, and FDR and the
Jews is the product of
an equal partnership.”
Anton Fedyashin:
Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization
and Civil Society in
Russia, 1866–1904
(University of Wisconsin)
“I wanted to examine
the vibrant liberal culture
that flourished in the
late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to
Russia’s rich literary
culture, political philosophy, and social trends.
I also wanted to challenge assumptions about
Russia’s intellectual history and cast the country’s nascent liberalism
as a distinctly Russian
blend of self-governance,
populism, and other cultural traditions. The book
stands as a contribution to the literature on
imperial Russia’s nonrevolutionary intellectual
movements that emphasized the role of local
politics in modernization
and the evolution of civil
society in an extraparliamentary environment.”
Max Paul Friedman:
Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of
an Exceptional Concept
in American Foreign
Relations (Cambridge)
Explaining the impetus
theme and tell a broader
story about the complex
relationship between
nationalism, communication, and modernity.”
Alan Kraut and David
A. Gerber (SUNY–Buffalo): Ethnic Historians
and the Mainstream:
Shaping the Nation’s
Immigration Story (Rutgers University Press)
Eleven autobiographical essays by historians, including Kraut and
National Jewish Book
Award winner Deborah
Dash Moore, explain
how their authors’ ethnic
backgrounds influenced
their scholarly work.
“It’s astonishing the number of people who
have books out. I’ve been at AU for over 30
years, but I don’t recall a year like this.”
—
­ Pamela Nadell
Pamela S. Nadell
and Kate Haulman:
Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National
Perspectives (NYU)
In their introduction,
Nadell and Haulman write
that the collected essays
examine a world in which
women and their ideas
were routinely ignored,
a “world transformed by
considering the intellectual and political production of women’s history
across time and space.
In 10 chapters, scholars,
who have all published
significant works in women’s and gender history
in diverse national, imperial, and geographic
contexts, stand atop historiographically defined
vantage points, including
Tsarist Russia, the British
empire in Egypt and India,
Qing dynasty China, and
the U.S. roiling through
the 1960s.” 
3
arts
arts
Painting Borges
by
Mary
Schellinger
IN CONCEIVING Paint-
Laura Delgado. The Female Other—We Were So Similar and So Different, 2009. Mixed media on canvas
4
ing Borges: The Exhibition, opening April 6 at
the American University
Museum in the Katzen
Arts Center, curator
Jorge J. E. Gracia sought
to look at the connections between literature,
art, and philosophy.
He began by selecting a literary figure, which
was easy for Gracia,
who holds the Samuel
P. Capen Chair in the
Department of Philosophy and is a professor
of comparative literature
and Distinguished Professor at SUNY–Buffalo.
He chose Argentine author Jorge Luis
Borges, one of the most
prominent and profoundly
philosophical writers of
the last century. Borges’s
stories, says Gracia, are
filled with conceptual puzzles that provoke readers
to reflect on the central
issues of our existence.
Gracia selected a
dozen of those stories
and organized them by
topic into three groups:
identity and memory,
freedom and destiny,
and faith and divinity.
The next step was to
find artists. While Borges’s work has inspired
many from Buenos Aires,
Gracia wanted to include
artists from other cultures. A culturally diverse
group, he felt, would
best illustrate the many
different creative paths
that artists take as visual
Carlos Estevez. The Rose of Paracelsus, 2009.
Pencil and gouache on paper
Nicolás Menza. The Garden of Forking Paths, 2000. Pastel on paper
interpreters of literature.
And Gracia was looking for artists who would
truly and fully interpret
Borges’s stories rather
than simply represent
a story or a theme.
He ultimately chose
16 visual artists—Argentines and Cubans and
Cuban Americans “who
were as American as
Cuban”—to interpret
the 12 stories. Some
of the artists had had
experience interpreting
Borges; others were
undertaking the challenge for the first time
for the exhibition.
The 16 artists are Luis
Cruz Azaceta, Alejendro
Boim, Miguel Cámpora,
Ricardo Celma, Laura
Delgado, Héctor Destéfanis, Claudio D’Leo, Carlos Estevez, José Franco,
Etienne Gontard, Mirta
Kupferminc, Nicolás
Menza, Mauricio Nizzero,
Estela Pereda, Alberto
Rey, and Paul Sierra. 
Painting Borges: The
Exhibition runs April 6–
May 26 at the American
Etienne Gontard. The Interloper, 1991. Acrylic on canvas
University Museum in
the Katzen Arts Center.
Jorge J. E. Gracia’s
book Painting Borges:
Philosophy Interpreting Art Interpreting Literature (SUNY, 2012)
will be available for
purchase in the Katzen Museum Store.
Mauricio Nizzero. 2. The Other, 2009. Ink and coffee on paper
5
humanities
sciences
Courtesy of Michael Brenner
of Natural History and Darryl
L. Felder of the University of
Louisiana−Lafayette’s Department of Biology Laboratory
for Crustacean Research—
have known Tudge since he
first came to Washington in
1995 as a postdoc research
fellow at the Smithsonian.
They’ve been collecting
specimens on the tiny Belizean island for decades, and
for more than 10 years they’ve
asked Tudge, who specializes
in the structures of crustacean reproduction and how
they relate to the creatures’
evolutionary history, to join
them on one of their semiannual research outings. Finally,
in February 2010, there he
was with a pair of the world’s
leading crustacean authorities on a tiny island covered
with hundreds of species
of their favorite fauna.
It was crab heaven for a
bunch of crustacean guys.
“We would collect on the
reef crest, go and turn over
coral boulders on the reef flat,
snorkel over the sea grass
beds. We pumped sand and
mud to get things out of the
ground. We walked into the
mangroves and collected crustaceans from under the mangrove roots. We even snorkeled
r
That’s the name of a new
species of hermit crab discovered by AU biology professor
Christopher Tudge on the barrier reef off the coast of Belize.
After flying from Washington, D.C., to Miami to Belize,
and then taking an hour-long
speedboat trip, Tudge finally
stepped onto the coral sand of
a one-acre island shaded by
a few dozen coconut palms.
The Australian-born Tudge
has been interested in biology
his whole life, from boyhood
trips to the beach collecting
crustaceans to his undergraduate and PhD work in zoology
and biology at the University
of Queensland. He’s collected
specimens all over the world,
from Australia to Europe to
North and South America.
But he’s never had a species
named after him. And as is
standard practice following the
highly formalized ritual of naming a new species, he found
out about the honor only after
reading a published paper.
The two crustacean taxonomists and authors of the paper
who named the minute crab
after Tudge—Rafael Lemaitre of
the Department of Invertebrate
Zoology at the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum
de
says Peter Starr, dean
of AU’s College of Arts
and Sciences. “We are
indebted to Lillian and
Seymour Abensohn
for having the vision
to create a permanent chair in this field
that American University helped to create.”
Brenner comes to
AU with an impressive
academic background.
AREOPAGURISTES TUDGEI.
by
Charles
Spencer
F el
6
articles, and editor of
a major Jewish studies
book series, Brenner is
taking an extended leave
of absence from the
University of Munich to
assume the Abensohn
Chair and advance AU’s
Israel Studies program.
“Dr. Brenner is a worldrenowned historian who
brings an exceptional
record of scholarship,”
Species
re and Darryl L
.
an internationally
respected scholar who
started Germany’s
first Jewish history and
culture program, is
joining AU as the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Endowed Chair
in Israel Studies.
The author of six
books, coauthor of
numerous journal
of a
mait
MICHAEL BRENNER,
challenges Israel faces
today to be regarded as a
‘normal state,’” he says.
His goals at AU include
bringing in visiting scholars from Israel to demonstrate the spectrum of
opinions and research
there. Two conferences
are already planned. He
also hopes to take students on regular trips to
Israel to experience the
country on a deeper level.
Brenner’s lifetime
fascination with Jewish studies starts with a
rich personal history.
“I grew up in a small
town in Germany as the
only Jewish kid of my
age,” he says. “My parents were both Holocaust survivors who
actually had planned to
go to the United States
after the war but never
did so. I learned from
sy
l Le
“Dr. Brenner is a worldrenowned historian who
brings an exceptional
record of scholarship.”
­— Dean Peter Starr
After studying in Heidelberg and Jerusalem, he
received his PhD in Jewish history from Columbia University. He has
taught at Indiana University, Brandeis, Stanford,
Johns Hopkins, University
of California–Berkeley,
the University of Haifa,
the Central European
University of Budapest,
and l’École des hautes
études in Paris.
He was also the Ina
Levine Invitational Scholar
Fellow at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where
he researched modern
German-Jewish history.
His current research
“deals with the tension
between the original
Zionist vision to bring
normalcy to the Jewish
people by establishing a
state of their own and the
by
Charles
Spencer
rt e
fae
for Israel
Studies
Origin
Cou
Ra
Champion
The
of
A
early on what it meant
to be an outsider and
was curious to further
explore the history and
fate of Jews in different
parts of the world. After
beginning to study Jewish history in Germany,
I continued in Jerusalem
at the Hebrew University
and then did my graduate work at Columbia
University in New York.
Having lived and studied
in many diverse places,
I feel that this history is
so rich and diverse that
you need a few lifetimes to fully understand
it, and I am continually fascinated by it.”
Brenner actually follows his wife, Michelle
Engert, in teaching at
AU. While working as
assistant federal public
defender in Baltimore,
she taught a class in
AU’s American Studies
Program. After taking
a break from practicing law to teach in the
Department of American Studies at LudwigMaximilians-Universität
in Munich, she is returning to Washington to
work with the Office
of Defender Services
and will teach as an
adjunct on AU’s faculty.
“AU is a top-notch
university, it is placed in
the capital of the United
States, and it was the
first one to establish an
Israel studies program,”
Brenner says of his decision to join American
University. “I like the idea
of working with American students and thinking and teaching about
Israel through the prism
of the United States.” 
in the channels in the mangrove islands,” Tudge recalls.
But discovering the new species was much simpler: Tudge
turned over a coral boulder in
an intertidal area, saw 50 or so
tiny crabs scrambling around,
and stuck a dozen or so specimens in a bottle before going
on with his work. Only later
in the lab, under the microscope, was it determined that
this isolated little group of hermit crabs might be unique.
So now Areopaguristes
tudgei—a tiny hermit crab differentiated from others in its
genus by such characteristics
as the hairs growing on some
of its appendages—has joined
the list of about 3 million known
species. Lemaitre emailed him
a PDF of the finished article. A
note said only, “Here’s a new
species. What do you think?”
The note had a smiley emoticon.
“You go through several
emotions when a species has
been named after you,” says
Tudge’s AU colleague Daniel
Fong. “It is truly an honor, in
the most formal sense of the
term, that your colleagues have
thought of naming a species
after you. It is a very special
type of recognition of your
contribution to your research
field by your colleagues.” 
7
7
alumni
Photo by Jeff Watts
Going Trayless
“Removing trays is a simple way for
universities and other dining facilities
to reduce their environmental impact
and save money.”
­— Kiho Kim
DINING HALL TRAYS at universities across the country are going the way of
beanies and sock hops.
Area institutions such as
Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, James Madison, and the
University of Virginia have all
dispensed with using trays,
according to the Washington
Post. These institutions, following the same reasoning as AU
since 2009, operated under the
belief that going trayless would
cut waste substantially and save
energy by reducing clean-up.
Now, a new paper in the Journal of Hunger and Environmental
Nutrition, coauthored by environmental science professor Kiho
Kim and Stevia Morawski, environmental studies ’12, provides
the first hard evidence to back
up those assumptions, based
on an experiment in 2009.
8
A previous study conducted by Kim and his class just
prior showed similarly promising results. But Kim decided
they needed more methodological rigor. So the class redid the
experiment more carefully to have
a firmer basis for its results.
“Our concern was that all of
these other institutions were
jumping on the bandwagon in the
absence of data,” Kim says of
the trend of universities tossing
out trays. “Really, the only substantive study people were referring to was an industry study.
We made the argument that you
can’t entirely trust the industry.”
Industry studies provided
no information on methodology, Kim notes. “They simply
said, ‘We surveyed a bunch of
places and they show a 30 percent reduction in food waste.’
But how do we know it’s a
VALZHYNA MORT, MFA ’11,
by
Charles Spencer
scientifically credible study?”
So in 2009, Kim’s environmental science class set
out to rectify that problem.
Over six days in February
through March 2009 at AU’s
Terrace Dining Hall, Kim and his
environmental science students
made dining hall trays selectively and randomly available or
unavailable during lunch and
dinner. The students collected dishes from the students
and weighed food waste.
Results for the 360 diners
surveyed showed that going
trayless led to a 32 percent
reduction in food waste and a
27 percent reduction in dish
use. Those findings, Kim and
his coauthor note, suggest that
“removing trays is a simple way
for universities and other dining
facilities to reduce their environmental impact and save money.”
The study points out that
each day AU’s dining halls
serve about 3,200 meals, and
that removing trays reduced
food waste by 12,000 kilograms
(26,455 pounds) per semester. Perhaps just as important
is the message that the realworld impact has on students.
“These opportunities really
give them a sense of being
able to think about solving
problems based on a good
set of facts—data that can be
collected relatively easily and
straightforwardly,” Kim says.
“A lot of students think of
science as something a small
group of people do,” Kim says.
“But these are things we do,
not just as scientists but as individuals, where we try to understand how the world works. We
employ the scientific method in
our lives every single day.” 
is the youngest person
ever featured on the
cover of Poets and Writers magazine. But she
says that means nothing
about her—or her poetry.
“What does age have
to do with writing?” asks
the AU alumna and visiting assistant professor
at Cornell University.
“Mikhail Lermontov wrote
his famous long poem,
Demon; his canonical
novel, A Hero of Our
Time; [and] was exiled,
served in a war, and was
killed in his second duel,
[all] before he turned
27. Arthur Rimbaud
gave up writing by the
time he was 25, while
81-year-old Toni Morrison published her latest
novel, Home, [last] year.”
While Mort downplays
the importance of age,
there is no denying her
accomplishments.
“Valzhyna came to us
fully formed,” says literature professor David
Keplinger of his former
student. Before she
came to AU to pursue
an MFA in creative writing, Mort had already
published a collection of
poetry, Factory of Tears,
and had guest-lectured
in Keplinger’s graduate translation class.
“I learned from her,”
says Keplinger, recalling
her words to his graduate students that day:
“‘Poetry in translation is
like a person; when it’s
beautiful, it’s rarely faithful.’” What she meant,
he says, was that it’s difficult “to write a translation that is completely
true to the beauty of its
Courtesy of Valzhyna Mort
sciences
A
Poet
Finds Her
Voice
source. But the best
translators are able to
do just that—her poetry
in English does.”
When Mort signed
up for his course a few
years later as a graduate student, Keplinger
says, it was odd having her in class. But for
her it was a highlight.
“It was like walking into
Christmas for two and a
half hours every week,”
she says. “I would be on
the subway on my way
to translation class like
a kid in that Coca-Cola
commercial: ‘Translation
class is coming! Translation class is coming!’”
Mort says she chose
AU because she wanted
a creative writing program
that emphasized literature courses and allowed
her to experiment with
other genres of writing.
“I wanted to study literary
translation.” She adds,
“I wanted to have famous,
good-looking professors,
and a great library.”
Born in Minsk, Belarus,
Mort writes and reads
her poetry in English
and Belarusian. Her
recently published Collected Body is her first
collection of poems written entirely in English.
She says there was no
singular inspiration or
thought process behind
the collection. But if there
were, she says, she
would not talk about it.
“Remember the ending
by
Angela
Modany
“Working with Valzhyna . . . was
always more like having a conversation
with a peer than [with] a student.”
­— Erik Dussere
of Faulkner’s Light in
August? ‘My, my. A body
does get around.’ So, it’s
a book about a body getting around,” says Mort.
Her reference to
Faulkner is a nod to literature professor Erik
Dussere, with whom she
took an independent study
course on the author.
“Working with Valzhyna, particularly on
the Faulkner project,
was always more like
having a conversation
with a peer than [with] a
student,” he says. “She
was teaching writing
herself at the time, and
she would tell me how
she had pulled something
out of the latest Faulkner
book we were working on and used it as an
exercise for her class.”
Still hard at work,
Mort is busy with new
poems and two anthologies, one of Russian
modernist poetry and
the other of contemporary European poetry.
“Valzhyna loves poetry,” Keplinger says.
“She is suspicious
of accepted ideas, is
vibrantly intelligent,
and eternally witty.” 
9
social sciences
arts
Tuning in to
Linking
Labor
and the
Environment
“Labor unions are increasingly
collaborating with the
environmental movement.”
­— Erik Kojola
ERIK KOJOLA’S passion
for workers’ rights runs in
his blood. The secondyear sociology master’s
student grew up in a
union household. His
fascination with unions
and labor-related issues
began during his undergraduate years at Oberlin
College, where he organized students in support
of campus workers.
Working with sociology professor Chenyang
10
Xiao to study the interactions between labor and
the environment, Kojola
has managed to merge
his passions. He presented “Greening Labor
Unions? Environmental
Attitudes of Union Members” at the 2012 annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver and at
George Mason University’s Public Sociology
Graduate Conference.
“At their core,” says
Kojola, “unions are meant
to promote social and
economic justice. They
help workers to feel that
they have power at work
and that they are key
parts of the economy.”
His research sheds
light on the relationship
between the environmental and labor movements.
“Labor unions are
increasingly collaborating
with the environmental
by
Josh Halpren
movement, especially
around green jobs,” says
Kojola. “In many cases,
the same corporations
that are degrading the
environment are also
exploiting workers. Yet
there has been no empirical research on the
environmental attitudes
of union members, which
is important for understanding perceptions
of a ‘jobs versus the
environment’ trade-off.”
Using data from the
General Social Survey
(1993, 2000, and
2010), Kojola looked
at the strength of union
members’ pro-environment beliefs, members’
willingness to pay for
environmental protection, and specific issues
that concerned them.
He also sought to identify any tension between
their environmental and
economic concerns.
He found no significant difference between
the attitudes of union
and nonunion workers
regarding the environment. “There is no
evidence that unions
influenced their members to be more proenvironment or that the
more liberal political
beliefs of union members translates into
more pro-environmental
attitudes,” says Kojola.
“But these results contest the assumption that
union workers are antienvironment. In fact,
results show that union
members share many
values with the environmental movement.”
Kojola’s work earned
him the Kianda Bell
Scholarship. Established
Photo by Josh Halpren
by
Steven Dawson
in memory of AU sociology doctoral student
Kianda Bell, the award
supports master’s candidates in sociology who
demonstrate exceptional academic merit.
“In order to be successful, we have to push
environmentalism beyond
the corporate image it has
taken on,” says Kojola,
who hopes to pursue a
doctorate in the field.
“True environmentalism means taking care
of the Earth, but it also
means being safe at
work, having access
to ‘real food and real
jobs,’ and eliminating
much of the racial
and class discrimination that holds people
back. We can’t address
environmental issues
without also addressing social issues.” 
AU’S AUDIO Technology Program is the leader of the pack.
“We are the only school in the
The burgeoning program,
named by Education Portal
country that has a permanent
as number one among top
internship with NPR.”
audio engineering and productionC=0,
schools
in K=0
the coun-NPR CMYK color logo for light background, coated stocks
M=80, Y=70,
­— Paul Oehlers
try—and
which
has
close toUse at any scale
C=100, M=35, Y=0, K=100
100 students, including 15 Downsize the “®” when the using logo on oversized applications
C=70, M=35, Y=0, K=0
such outdoor advertising and large exhibit displays
graduate students—offers
students valuable internships
asset to his education at AU.
has a permanent internship with
at such marquee locales as
“I was constantly presented
NPR, which is pretty exciting.”
Quad Recording Studios in
with opportunities to probe new
The goal of the audio technolNew York, the Cutting Room,
ogy internship is to give students areas and new ways of doing
National Geographic, Capital
things,” he says. “I can already
hands-on experience working
Audio Post, and other recordwith audio engineers at NPR, for say with confidence that simply
ing studios and radio stations.
which they can earn class credit. being there drastically shaped
Now, add an exclusive internthe trajectory of my education.
Interns help run the audio conship at National Public Radio
Having been given the means
sole for NPR morning shows,
headquarters to the mix.
to explore at NPR, I’ve shifted
working the mix levels, recordGreg Smith, the newly hired
my academic focus and rejuveing programs, and making sure
professorial lecturer in the
nated my desire and ability to
everything conforms to formats.
performing arts department’s
learn new concepts, new fields,
“I’ve been observing the masaudio tech program, worked
and new ways of thinking.”
ter control, which is the switchwith NPR and AU to set up the
Students apply for the interning and routing of all the different
internship. Smith’s experience
ship through AU. Audio tech
audio streams,” says spring
includes time at NPR on Mornfaculty interview the appliintern and experienced first-year
ing Edition, Lucasfilm, and Imax.
cants and recommend three
graduate student Brian Chew.
“This is completely something
candidates to NPR for the
“I’ve learned a lot there, talkthat Greg did,” says program
final selection process.
ing with the guys about fault
director Paul Oehlers. “Greg
Initial feedback from
tolerance and the delicacy of
has been great because he
NPR has been positive.
everything. I have also sat in on
came from that public broad“It is difficult to get in at
the recording of Tell Me More.
cast background, and because
NPR,” Oehlers says. “There
That was great, because I got
of that experience he was able
is a very established hierarchy
to see them run the show and
to make those connections easand process for getting hired
I got to do some pre-producily. He said he thought we could
there. It’s not conducive to just
tion on some audio bits. It was
establish permanent internships
walking in the door and askreally dynamic and interesting.
at NPR, so he set up one for the
ing for an internship; you have
So I hope to be doing more
School of Communication and
to lay the groundwork.” 
with that, and possibly fixing up
journalism and one for our audio
some audio clips for them.”
The NPR logo is a registered service
technology students. We are the
Chad Miller, the fall intern, saw mark of National Public Radio Inc.
only school in the country that
the experience as an invaluable
NPR has not sponsored this story.
11
11
sciences
Reaching
Stars
“I would be surprised if Terri
didn’t end up in a job where
research plays a significant
role. She’s a natural.”
­— Ulysses J. Sofia
WHEN SHE WAS a junior in
high school, Terri PoxonPearson, BS physics ’13,
almost dropped her
physics class. Twice.
“Things I thought
were really basic were
much more complicated,
and I really like figuring
out things that I can’t
understand,” she says.
“So I kept working at
it, and at a certain point
it just clicked. It didn’t
get easier; I just found
joy in figuring it out.”
Poxon-Pearson is
currently working on her
AU capstone in nuclear
physics at the University
of Maryland, following
an intensive summer
research project through
a National Science Foundation program at the
12
University of Notre Dame.
For 10 weeks, she
worked closely with
an advisor, a nuclear
astrophysicist, studying
a certain kind of nuclear reaction that occurs
inside stars. “In order
for atoms to fuse, they
have to get really close
together,” she explains.
“Because all the protons repel each other,
you have to smash them
together really fast.
This [creates] a lot of
energy. Although stars
are really hot, these
reactions don’t actually
happen that often. It’s
really hard to measure
how often it happens
because it’s so rare.”
The research focused
on this type of carbon
fusion because it could
be the reaction that fuels
the weak s-process, a
nuclear process in stars
responsible for creating
many heavy elements.
Among the many learning experiences afforded
her through the program,
Poxon-Pearson had the
opportunity to run the particle accelerator at Notre
Dame to measure the rate
of this carbon reaction.
She presented her
research at the fall 2012
meeting of the American Physical Society
Division of Nuclear
Physics in California.
At the University of
Maryland, Poxon-Pearson
is working with physics
professor Carter Hall to
identify a rare nuclear
reaction, which, if found,
would challenge the
current understanding
of particle physics. (The
reaction is so rare that
there can be almost
no radioactive background in the detector.)
She is conducting
research to determine
whether Cobalt-60 is
a significant possible
by
Angela
Modany
Photo by Angela Modany
for the
source of background
radioactivity. Materials
in these experiments
are selected for their
natural low radioactivity. The detector she
worked with was mostly
made of copper.
“The particular copper
was extracted and then
machined in France,” she
says. “The copper spent
20 days at sea level
while it was rolled and
processed and then 45
days at sea level while it
traveled by boat between
France and the U.S.
In that time, something
remarkable happens:
the low background
material that left France
is now more radioactive.
This is because at sea
level, without hundreds
of feet of shielding, cosmic rays are constantly
bombarding the material.
Some of these rays react
with the copper, and
Cobalt-60, a radioactive material, is formed.”
Poxon-Pearson says
her research experience
has taught her that
“you learn as you go.
You don’t necessarily
know what you’re doing
all the time, but there are
people there to help you
learn as you’re doing it.”
It’s also given her
a direction and defined
her passion for particle
physics. She would like
to land a job with a large
research component.
“I have caught the research bug,” she admits.
What she loves
most about research
is when all of the hard
work comes together.
A researcher can do a
lot of work, she says,
before really understanding what the work
means. “At a certain
point, it all begins to
fit together and you
can really understand
why you are doing
whatever it is you are
doing,” she says. “It is
a rewarding feeling.”
AU physics professor Ulysses J. Sofia, who
mentored Poxon-Pearson
in the past, also sees
research in her future.
“I would be surprised if
Terri didn’t end up in a
job where research plays
a significant role,” he
says. “She’s a natural.”
The two worked together on a project to calibrate data for a French
satellite that observes the
sun to study its effects on
global climate change.
“The breadth of
Terri’s research experiences to date is exceptional,” Sofia says. “It’s
extremely rare in physics
for an undergraduate
student to work on three
different projects with
three different mentors
who are at three different universities.” 
achievements
On the Cover
Magazine Production
Laura Delgado //
Detail from Funes,
The Garbage
Heap II, 2009 //
Mixed media
on canvas
Publisher: College of Arts and Sciences //
Dean: Peter Starr // Managing Editor: Charles Spencer //
Writers: Steven Dawson, Josh Halpren, Angela Modany, Mary
Schellinger, Charles Spencer // Editor: Ali Kahn, UCM //
Designer: Nicky Lehming // Webmaster: Thomas Meal //
Senior Advisor: Mary Schellinger // Send news items and
comments to Charles Spencer at casnews@american.edu.
Join our conversation
Facebook
facebook.com/AUcollege
Twitter
twitter.com/AUcollege
Appointments
& Honors
TATE STRICKLAND (graphic design) received
a 2013 IxDA Interaction Award for his work as
lead designer on the mobile app and strategy for
President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Grants
& Research
Education Portal named AU’s AUDIO TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM as number one in the nation.
Books
& Productions
STEPHEN CASEY (mathematics and statistics) received $145,537 from the Air Force
Office of Scientific Research for a three-year
study, “New Techniques in Time Frequency
Analysis: Adaptive Band, Ultra Band and MultiRate Signal Processing.”
IVY BRODER (economics) received the
2012 Milton and Sonia Greenberg Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning Award for her online
course, Economics of World Regions, and for
her paper evaluating the experience, which she
presented at the AEA’s National Conference on
Teaching and Research in Economic Education.
Letter
from
the
Dean
IT’S NO ACCIDENT THAT, since its inception, the magazine devoted to the work of College of
Arts and Sciences faculty and students has been called Connections. For connections are
what draw us together as scholars, teachers, and students, and as members of the broader
American University community.
In the College’s Department of History, it is the connections that faculty members have with
one another, in some cases going back decades, that explain why no fewer than eight faculty
books have come to fruition in the past year.
For Michael Brenner, founder of Germany’s only Jewish studies program to date, joining the
College as the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies is an opportunity to help
AU’s path-breaking Center for Israel Studies build bridges to the many similar programs that
have been founded in its wake.
Sociology graduate student Erik Kojola, also profiled in this issue, keeps connected with his
childhood and growing up in a union household through research linking the interactions of
labor with the environmental movement. And thanks to Audio Technology Program faculty
member Greg Smith’s connection with National Public Radio, AU students get invaluable
broadcast experience through exclusive internship opportunities at NPR.
The arts, too, illustrate the vital role of connections. In a major exhibit at the American University
Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 16 Latin American artists enter into dialogue with the works
of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges and with one another. Poet Valzhyna Mort—an alumna of the
Department of Literature’s MFA program and the youngest person ever featured on the cover
of Poets and Writers magazine—recalls the importance of the connections she made at AU
with mentors like literature professor David Keplinger.
In the sciences, biology professor Chris Tudge owes his identification of a new crab species
on a remote Belizean island in large part to his longtime friendship with a pair of worldrenowned crustacean experts who invited him on a research trip. Environmental sciences
professor Kiho Kim collaborates with his students on a study demonstrating that going
trayless in dining halls significantly reduces food and energy waste. And physics student Terri
Poxon-Pearson has had the extraordinary experience of connecting with three mentors at
three separate research institutions.
Happy reading,
Peter Starr
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
A poem by KYLE DARGAN (literature) was
featured February 28, 2012, on “Poem-A-Day”
and February 18, 2013, on poets.org.
MARY GRAY (mathematics and statistics)
is featured in Margaret W. Rossiter’s book
Women Scientists in America: Forging a New
World since 1972 (Johns Hopkins, 2012) as a
founding member of the Association for Women
in Mathematics and for her expert testimony for
Senator Edward Kennedy’s bill establishing a
National Science Foundation advisory committee
on women and minorities.
GAIL HUMPHRIES MARDIROSIAN
(performing arts) received a Likhachev
Cultural Fellowship for her project “Theatre
as a Conduit for Cross-Cultural Dialogue, the
Cabaret Phenomena Revisited: A Convergence
of Cabarets.”
DAN KALMAN (mathematics and statistics)
and Nathan Carter received the Trevor Evans
Award from the Mathematical Association of
America at the MAA MathFest 2012 in Madison,
Wisconsin, for their article “Harvey Plotter and
the Circle of Irrationality.”
The History of Education Society gave Lessons
from an Indian Day School: Negotiating Colonization in Northern New Mexico, 1902–1907
(University Press of Kansas, 2011) by ADREA
LAWRENCE (education) an Outstanding Book
Award honorable mention.
MARIANNE NOBLE (literature) was elected
to the editorial board of the MLA journal
American Literature.
JACK RASMUSSEN (American University
Museum) received a Likhachev Cultural Fellowship, thanks to which he will meet with potential
collaborators in Russia.
ANITA SHERMAN (literature) won the Open
Paper Competition of the Shakespeare Association of America for her paper titled “Fantasies of
Private Language in Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and
Turtle.’” She will deliver the paper at the association’s annual meeting in Toronto in April.
Zelenka: The Capriccios, the fifth commercial CD
by DAN ABRAHAM (performing arts) with the
Bach Sinfonia, was featured worldwide on the front
page of iTunes Classical as “New and Noteworthy.”
LAURA BEERS (history) and Geraint Thomas
coedited Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the
Wars (Institute of Historical Research, 2012).
(See page 3.)
JULIET BELLOW (art history) is consulting
scholar for the National Gallery of Art exhibition
Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes
1909 –1929: When Art Danced with Music, opening in May 2013. Her book, Modernism on Stage:
The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde
(Ashgate), was released this year.
RICHARD BREITMAN AND ALLAN J.
LICHTMAN (history) published FDR and the
Jews (Belknap/Harvard, 2013). (See page 2.)
DAVID KEPLINGER (literature), published
a new book of poetry, The Most Natural Thing
(New Issues, 2013).
ALAN KRAUT (history) and David A. Gerber
coedited Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream:
Shaping the Nation’s Immigration Story (Rutgers,
forthcoming 2013). (See page 3.)
PETER KUZNICK (history) and Oliver Stone
coauthored and published The Untold History
of the United States (Gallery Books, 2012).
(See page 2.)
ERIC LOHR (history) published Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard, 2012).
(See page 3.)
PAMELA S. NADELL AND KATE HAULMAN
(history) coedited and published Making Women’s
Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (NYU,
2013). (See page 3.)
DAVID PIKE (literature) published Canadian
Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the
World (University of Toronto, 2012).
VIVIAN VASQUEZ (education) published her
sixth book, Perspectives and Provocations in Early
Childhood Education (Information Age Publishing,
2012). Her book Technology and Critical Literacy
in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2012),
coauthored with Carol Branigan Felderman, was
published in Kindle format.
DANIEL FONG (biology) was awarded $10,000
by the Cave Conservancy Foundation to study
“Analyses of the Melanin Pigment Synthesis Pathway in Subterranean Amphipods and Isopods.”
KATHLEEN FRANZ (history) was granted
$18,710 from the Smithsonian Institution for her
project “American Enterprise Exhibition.”
DAVID HAAGA (psychology) was the recipient
of a $30,000 award from the Trichotillomania
Learning Center for “Efficacy of COMB Model
of Treating Trichotillomania.”
MARY HANSEN (economics) received
$55,963 from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges to research “Opening New Views
into Bankruptcy and Credit Markets Using Court
Records.”
STEPHEN MACAVOY (environmental science)
was awarded $15,000 from the University of the
District of Columbia to study “Episodic Ion and Nutrient Inputs to the Anacostia River: Constructing
a Chemical Hydrograph of an Urban Streams
Response to Periodic Rainfall.”
CHRISTOPHER K. MORGAN (performing arts),
AU dance artist in residence, received a $20,000
unrestricted fellowship from the Native Arts and
Cultures Foundation.
MICHAEL ROBINSON (mathematics and
statistics) transferred a $65,000 grant to AU
from the University of Pennsylvania (funded by
Princeton University/Air Force Office of Scientific
Research) for “Sheaf Invariants for Information
Systems.” He also received a $35,000 award from
the Department of Defense through the University
of Pennsylvania to study “Algebraic-Topological
Sensor Data Exploitation.”
SUE ANN TAYLOR (anthropology) was the recipient of a $43,690 grant from the National Park
Service for her “Washington, D.C., Civil War
Contraband Ethnography Study (1861–1877).”
JONATHAN TUBMAN (psychology) received
$2,486,981 from the National Institutes of Health
to fund a five-year project, “Multisite SchoolBased Evaluation of a Brief Screener for Underage Drinking.”
13
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