www.american.edu/cas/connections | SPRING 2010
Echoes
from
Terezín
Feminist
Economics
No Place
Like Om
Calculated
Collaboration
Deciphering
Virginia
Woolf
Letter
from
the
Dean
On the Cover
Magazine Production
Lilly Edna Amit (Bobasch) // Candle,
Boat, and Warning Lights //1940s—
created at Terezín during WWII
Publisher: College of Arts and Sciences // Dean: Peter Starr
Managing Editor: Jessica Tabak // Writers: Anne Lacy, Ariana
Stone, Jessica Tabak, Mike Unger // Editor: Ali Kahn, UP
Designer: Juana Merlo, UP // Editorial Assistants: Heather
Kinsman, David Lewis // Webmaster: Thomas Meal Senior
Advisor: Mary Schellinger // Send news items and comments
to Jessica Tabak at casnews@american.edu.
Some of our greatest discoveries result from looking at familiar things from new angles.
In this issue of Connections, we highlight faculty, alumni, and students whose unique points
of view led them to unexpected findings, poignant projects, and outstanding achievements.
Sometimes all it takes is time to cultivate a new perspective on previous work. Literature
professor Roberta Rubenstein and historian in residence Melvin Urofsky both revisited
subjects they had worked on at the start of their careers, developing new insights that led to
acclaimed books. The Program on Gender Analysis in Economics recently honored Barbara
Bergmann, professor emerita and feminist economics champion, in an inaugural event that
brought the field’s strongest voices together to examine its evolution and formulate goals for
its future. And art professor Don Kimes let a devastating house flood inspire him to revisit 25
years of his sketches and works on paper.
Other times, a unique experience allows us to see our surroundings, our interests, and our
goals through a different lens. Anthropology PhD student Kalfani Ture’s on site research
and volunteerism in the Barry Farms community in Southeast D.C. opened his eyes to the
civic component of anthropological study. Performing arts alumna Jennifer Corey’s work as
an education outreach apprentice for the Washington National Opera gave her the chance
to see music from the point of view of D.C.’s elementary school students. And performing
arts professor Gail Humphries Mardirosian used her Fulbright-sponsored trip to Prague as
a springboard for launching Voices of Terezín, a series of college-wide reflections on human
rights that focuses on life in the Nazi-run ghetto, where many of Czechoslovakia’s eminent
artists and scholars were interned before being sent to extermination camps.
The spirit of collaboration often inspires us to look at research problems through the eyes
of our colleagues, coworkers, peers, and students. Math professors Jeffrey Adler, Jeffrey
Hakim, and Joshua Lansky recently won a prestigious National Science Foundation grant
to facilitate their work with mathematicians across the country and around the world. History
professor Alan Kraut and language and foreign studies professor Jack Child were recently
named University Professors in recognition of their exceptional interdisciplinary research
and teaching. Psychology professor David Haaga’s project with the Maharishi University
of Management led to a study of Transcendental Meditation and stress reduction that
garnered attention from many major national news outlets. And the Larissa Gerstel Critical
Literacy Fund was created to help promote socially conscious analysis of teaching materials
in the classroom.
We are pleased to share these stories of discovery with you and invite you to share
yours with us.
Happy reading,
Peter Starr
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
www.american.edu/cas/connections | April 2010
Letter from the Dean
Joining the Ranks 2
University Professorships for Jack Child and Alan Kraut
Evolution of a Revolution 3
How Barbara Bergmann brought gender perspectives to economics at AU
A Calculated Collaboration 4
Jeff Adler, Jeff Hakim, and Joshua Lansky getting a little help from their friends
Endowment for the Ages 5
Making the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Library an enduring legacy
Academia Meets Activism 6
Anthropologist Kalfani Ture’s journey from field to Barry Farm
Deciphering Virginia Woolf 7
Roberta Rubenstein’s return to her scholarly roots
Echoes from Terezín 8
Restoring humanity to Holocaust victims through the arts
After the Flood 9
How Don Kimes transformed personal tragedy into artistic inspiration
Opera out of the Box 10
Jennifer Corey’s education outreach for Washington National Opera
Being Brandeis 11
Melvin Urofsky’s examination of the life of Justice Louis Brandeis
No Place Like Om 12
David Haaga’s findings on depression, anxiety, and Transcendental Meditation
Achievements 13
humanities
social sciences
2
across campus, says
Kraut. “Being named
a University Professor
carries with it an obligation to be a presence on
campus, a voice for academic stimulation, and to
use whatever means one
has to create intellectual
excitement,” he says.
Last year, Child
published his 13th book,
Miniature Messages: The
Semiotics and Politics of
Latin American Postage
Stamps (Duke).
His most recent project
is an exploration of the
evolution of Peruvian
ratablos—tiny, diorama-like
altars brought by the Spanish to the Americas during
the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.
“They were on the run,
they were fighting, they
were conquering, and
they did not have time to
be setting up full altars,”
Child says. After the
Spanish started building
permanent churches in
the 1600s, the role of
the objects evolved, with
contemporary ratablos
often depicting political
and cultural scenes.
Kraut, an expert on
American immigration
and ethnicity, is currently
examining the Americanization of immigrants to
the United States.
“Every time our country
has had a big wave of
immigration, it raises
the question of how
people become integrated into American
society,” he explains.
“How do they go from
aliens to Americans—not
just in a legal sense, but
in a social sense?”
When the Department
Courtesy of Jack Child
of the College of Arts
and Sciences faculty
were named University
Professor. Only a handful
of AU faculty have held
this highly selective rank
in recognition of exemplary cross-school teaching
and research.
Jack Child, professor
of language and foreign
studies, and history
professor Alan Kraut are
affiliate faculty members in
the School of International
Service, where, respectively, they teach courses
on Latin American culture
and on immigration.
“The University Professorship stresses the idea
that we are not tied down
to one discipline,” says
Child. It also brings an
added responsibility to
foster interdisciplinarity
by
Jessica
Tabak
In addition, Kraut is
working with a universitywide team to design an
undergraduate curriculum for the crossdisciplinary public health
program in development.
He also serves on an
advisory board for the
Frederick Douglass
Scholarship Program, a
university initiative that
will provide support and
internship opportunities
for minority and firstgeneration students.
Patricia Aufderheide
of the School of Communication was also named
a University Professor. An
affiliate faculty member
in the history department,
she teaches History of
Documentary, and her
Center for Social Media
engages faculty members
from across the College
of Arts and Sciences. 
of Economics began
planning an inaugural
event for its Program
on Gender Analysis in
Economics (PGAE), Barbara Bergmann’s name
kept coming up. Given
the role that the emerita
professor played in the
department’s adoption of
feminist economics, this
was no surprise. “In the
end, it was really Barbara
who brought these gender
issues to the department,”
says Caren Grown,
scholar in residence and
PGAE cofounder.
On February 19, the
Department of Economics honored Bergmann’s
contribution to feminist
economics at AU with a
public panel on progress
toward gender equity
in economics. Panelists
included University of
Massachusetts–Amherst professor Nancy
Folbre, Cornell professor
Francine Blau, and Heidi
Hartmann, president of
the Washington-based
Institute for Women’s
Policy Research.
When Bergmann came
to AU’s economics department in 1988, feminist economics—a field
that explores women’s
impact in the workforce
and on the family, as well
as the conflicts between
these two spheres—was
virtually unexplored.
Sonia Frederickson
Last fall, two members
Samantha Saleh
{
Joining
the
Ranks
Evolution
of a Revolution
by
Jessica
Tabak
Barbara Bergmann (left)
“You really want to help instigate
adoption of policies that make
a difference for single mothers,
health and child care issues, and
poverty remediation strategies.”
“It was being taught
nowhere,” she recalls.
“The outstanding view of
the profession was that all
the differences between
men and women in the
labor force—in terms of
pay, in terms of positions—were a response to
different talents and tastes.
There was no problem
so there was nothing to
complain about.”
Bergmann believed otherwise. A self-described
feminist who has en-
countered gender-based
workforce discrimination
since applying for her
first job in the late 1940s,
she became one of the
first scholars to address
the unique role of women
in the economy. In 1986
she published the seminal
Economic Emergence of
Women. The book, which
examines evidence from
labor discrimination cases
involving women, is still
used in gender economics classes today.
Bergmann’s tenure at
AU marked the beginning
of the university’s role as
a leader in incorporating
gender issues into economics education. Shortly
after arriving, she founded
the university’s first two
courses in gender and
economics. And her
influence helped bring the
first annual meeting of the
International Association
for Feminist Economics to
AU in 1992.
Since then, the demand
for gender analysis of
economic issues has
increased considerably.
Despite this, “there are still
very few places that teach
it,” says Grown. “We see
a huge demand and not
many places supplying it.”
Last year, Grown and
economics professor
Maria Sagrario Floro
founded AU’s Program
on Gender Analysis in
Economics to help meet
the growing interest in
this field. The PGAE
includes a graduate certificate, a track in the MA,
and a PhD field on gender analysis in economics. All three components
require that students
complete Gender Perspectives on Economics
Analysis: Microeconomics and Macroeconomics,
a two-part course derived
from Bergmann’s original
graduate course.
“Founding the PGAE
was the right idea at the
right time,” says Grown.
“Feminist economics is
now 25 years old, and
there is a lot of great
scholarship from which to
create a really rigorous and
well-rounded curriculum.”
AU’s location in the
nation’s capital will also
allow the PGAE to produce graduates wellpositioned to obtain jobs
in Washington´s highprofile policy agencies.
“At the end of the
day, this field’s potential
influence on policy is so
important,” says Floro.
“You really want to help
instigate adoption of policies that make a difference for single mothers,
health and child care
issues, and poverty remediation strategies.” 
3
science
education
A Calculated
Collaboration
Endowment
for the Ages
by Jessica Tabak,
interview by
David Lewis
ening list of new communication technologies
makes it easier to bridge
distance, sometimes
there’s still nothing like
good, old-fashioned faceto-face contact. “Despite
the usefulness of e-mail
and the telephone and
Skype, it’s actually very
helpful to work in the
same room with your
research colleagues,”
says Jeff Adler, professor of mathematics
and statistics.
Adler should know. For
many years, he, Jeff Hakim, and Josh Lansky, all
colleagues in the Depart4
ment of Mathematics
and Statistics, have
collaborated with fellow
mathematicians at academic institutions across
the country and around
the world.
This fall, the global
group won a multi-institutional grant from the National Science Foundation
that allows Adler, Hakim,
and Lansky to meet with
their counterparts from
such schools as the
University of Michigan,
Purdue, MIT, the University of Toronto, and the Tata
Institute of Fundamental
Research in Bombay,
India. The participating
institutions were collectively
awarded $1.2 million, to
be distributed over three
years. AU will receive
the largest percentage at
more than $520,000.
How important is this
personal dimension?
Hakim offers an analogy:
“If I decide I want to play
basketball and I find a
hoop and start shooting
by myself, it probably
won’t lead to much. But
if I am on a team playing
with others, I’ll want to
give more of myself to
the effort. I’ll be challenged more, and we’ll
all accomplish more in
the process.”
And, adds Lanksy,
with many of their collaborators being top
researchers in their field
“it’s like having Michael
Jordan and Scottie Pippin
and Dennis Rodman on
your team.”
The project, Characters, Liftings, and Types:
Investigation in p-adic
Representation Theory,
involves a branch of
mathematics that explores the link between
geometry and arithmetic
by expressing elements
of abstract algebraic
structures in geometric
terms. Representation
theory provides, among
other things, a conceptual foundation for mathematical engineering,
mathematical physics,
physical chemistry, and
materials science.
“In school, everyone studies arithmetic
and everyone studies
geometry, and they
come across as two very
different things,” Adler
says. “[Our research is
based on] a series of
conjectures going back
to the ’60s that say—in
a very precise sense that
is difficult to describe in
elementary terms—these
things are really the
same deep down.” 
BA elementary education
’00, exemplified the AU
alumna: bright, enterprising, and committed to
diversity and service.
As an education candidate and teacher in
training, she emphasized
to her students the importance of critical literacy—
the ability to recognize
and reflect on the social
and cultural messages
communicated in texts—
and she founded AU’s
first critical literacy group.
After Gertstel’s
untimely death in 2005,
her family worked with
Bender Library and the
School of Education,
Teaching, and Health
(SETH) to create the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Collection, located
in Bender’s Curriculum
Materials Center.
Funded with a $10,000
donation from SETH plus
additional donations, the
collection features books
about multiculturalism and
social justice for education students, as well as
for children.
“Larissa [was] an
engaging and inspired
student,” says SETH
dean Sarah Irvine-Belson. “When we learned
about her passing, we
decided we wanted to do
something to commemorate her life and the lives
of teachers.”
To maintain and grow
the collection, library
Courtesy of School of Education, Teaching, and Health
While the ever-length-
Larissa Gerstel,
Samantha Saleh
“It’s like
having Michael
Jordan and
Scottie Pippin
and Dennis
Rodman on
your team.”
by
Ariana
Stone
staff—including university
librarian Bill Mayer, assistant librarian and SETH
professor Alex Hodges,
and associate director
of library development
Jennifer McMillan—joined
SETH faculty and Gerstel’s family to establish
the Larissa Gerstel Critical Literacy Endowment.
Funded exclusively by
her parents and extended
family, the endowment
helps to cover the cost
of new books, electronic
resources, and events.
“Endowment giving
really speaks to something that people want
to support in perpetuity,”
says McMillan, noting
that endowments established a decade ago
continue to sustain the
library’s mission.
“We hope our student
teachers can . . .
continue to build on
the work that she did,”
says Hodges. “And we
hope her family knows
that these commitments
are there and [Larissa’s]
legacy will live on.”
You can donate to the
Larissa Gerstel Critical
Literacy Fund through
www.american.edu/
anewau/giving. 
“We hope
our student
teachers . . .
can continue
to build on
the work that
Larissa did.”
5
social sciences
For Kalfani Ture,
Deciphering
Virginia
Woolf
As a recent president of AU’s Graduate
Leadership Council, Ture
organized two academic
conferences for graduate
students that facilitated
communication between
students and residents
of Barry Farm and similar
local communities.
“My goal was for
graduate students to
realize that Washington
is a living laboratory with
real social justice issues,”
says Ture. “Student
involvement in the wider
community makes sense
because theoretical
learning is best confirmed
through practice.”
Ture’s commitment
to social justice stems
from his childhood.
Growing up in Newark,
New Jersey, in the wake
by
Jessica
Tabak
Academia
Meets
Activism
by
Anne
Lacy
6
of the 1967 riots, Ture
remembers listening to
his parents theorize about
the role that discriminatory treatment of African
Americans may have had
in causing the riots.
“[The stories] were
about absence of appreciation for human life, about
the thousands of lives
affected by racism and
oppression in devastating
ways,” Ture recalls.
He sees similarities
between pre-riot Newark
and present-day Barry
Farm, and he believes
the social activism taking
place there is helping to
avoid similar unrest.
Ture served as a police
officer in the Atlanta
metropolitan area prior to
pursuing his doctorate
in anthropology.
“I worked in at-risk
spaces with the hopes
Samantha Saleh
“Social forces from
then on have pushed the
majority of low-income
African Americans to
the southeast quadrant,
where Barry Farm is
located,” says Ture.
These findings interested him both as an anthropologist and a social
activist, and they inspired
him to write his doctoral
dissertation on the Barry
Farm community.
of resolving community
homicides and violence
among African American
adolescent males,” he
says. “The experience
helped me realize that atrisk children are not born
that way, but created by
social policies, community and infrastructural
disinvestment, displacement, and the introduction of guns and drugs
[into their communities].”
After graduation, Ture
intends to stay committed to his own volunteerism while impressing
upon his students the
importance of maintaining a strong academic
presence in the public
service sphere.
“My training in anthropology,” he says, “has
[made] me realize that social transformations must
begin with students.” 
can’t say what she was
thinking. Forty years ago,
she wrote to Leonard
Woolf to ask for help
interpreting pages of
handwritten notes on
Russian writers by his
late wife, Virginia.
“I don’t know what I
thought he would do,” the
literature professor recalls.
“I guess I thought he might
say to send him a few pages, and he’d see whether
he could decipher some of
the unreadable words.”
Instead, the 87-year-old
Woolf invited the thenPhD student to his home
in Sussex, England, which
he and his wife had once
shared. Over the next
year, the two sat at the
Woolfs’ kitchen table and
pored over the author’s
notoriously illegible script.
In the process, they
became friends.
A Fulbright fellow at
the University of London,
Rubenstein was researching the influence of
nineteenth-century Russian writers on Virginia
Woolf’s fiction and literary criticism. In the early
1900s, short stories, novels, and plays by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
and Turgenev were being
translated into English,
most of them for the first
time. Woolf was among
the critics who reviewed
them enthusiastically. Her
reading notes and several
published essays, says
Rubenstein, reveal the
extent to which she was
affected by them.
“Each of the Russian
writers held a different
[place] in her imagination,” says Rubenstein.
“Their works entered her
experience at a vital moment in her own development when she was trying to break free of older
literary conventions.”
After finishing her
dissertation, Rubenstein
accepted a teaching
position at AU and began
looking for a publisher for
her work. No one was
interested. “When I told
people what my dissertation was about, they
would say, ‘Oh, it’s on
Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf, the Edward Albee
play?’” she recalls. “In the
early 1970s, that was the
main way in which Woolf’s
name was recognized in
the United States.”
It would be another
decade before the publication of Woolf’s letters
and diaries would make
her a popular subject of
academic study. By then,
Rubenstein had moved on
to other scholarly pursuits.
“I sort of forgot about the
dissertation,” she admits.
Until five years ago. A
paper on Woolf’s relationship to these writers,
she learned, had been
Courtesy of Roberta Rubenstein
Roberta Rubenstein
Photo by Samantha Saleh
research and volunteerism
intersect at Barry Farm
Public Dwellings, a public
housing complex just off
the Anacostia Freeway.
Since the anthropology
doctoral candidate began
conducting ethnographic
research in the Barry
Farm community in 2007,
he has also taken on roles
as a volunteer member of
its resident council.
Ture became involved
with Barry Farm while
writing a paper on the
site’s archaeological
significance. The land,
once part of a plantation,
was purchased shortly
after the Civil War by the
Freedman’s Bureau. The
federal agency parceled
out one-acre plots to exslaves and free blacks.
humanities
“Of the several books I’ve published,
this one has undoubtedly been the
most thrilling to see in print.”
presented at a conference
in Russia. It was the spark
she needed. “I started
looking at my dissertation again and I realized
how little still had been
done with this subject,”
she says. “And here were
all my transcriptions of
Woolf’s notes on Russian
writers that had never
seen the light of day.” She
decided it was time to
bring her work forward.
Revisiting her early
scholarship brought new
insights into her subject.
And a new CD of digital
files containing Woolf’s
complete works, including handwritten letters
and diaries, allowed
Rubenstein to view at her
computer what previously
had required trips to three
libraries on two continents.
This time, Rubenstein
had no trouble finding a
publisher. Virginia Woolf
and the Russian Point of
View (Palgrave Macmillan) was released in
September 2009 to high
praise, including a favorable review in the Times
Literary Supplement
last December.
“The dissertation written so many years ago
and the just-published
book seem like widely
separated bookends for
my scholarly career,” says
Rubenstein. “Of the several books I’ve published,
this one has undoubtedly
been the most thrilling to
see in print.” 
7
arts
Echoes
from Terezín
by
Jessica
Tabak
During World War II,
8
Samantha Saleh
the Nazis transformed
the Bohemian fortress of
Terezín into a camp-ghetto
for Czech Jews. Those
garrisoned inside its walls
were subject to the dehumanizing brutality prevalent in the Nazi forced
labor camps in Western
and Central Europe.
“Like other ghettos,
Terezín was essentially a
way station to the extermination camps,” says
Pamela Nadell, history
professor and director
of Jewish studies.
But the Jews interned
at Terezín, whose ranks
included eminent Czech
scholars and artists,
countered the horror
around them through an
unexpected means: art.
“All of these extraordinary minds and talents
were confined in this
town, and they started
to create,” says Gail
Humphries Mardirosian,
performing arts professor. “Choreographers
and artists taught
classes, musicians and
conductors held performances, scholars gave
lectures. And somehow
the arts helped them transcend their situation. The
arts became the means
by which they defied the
repressive degradation of
their circumstances.”
The College of Arts
and Sciences is commemorating this unique
legacy with Voices of
Terezín, its contribution
to the university-wide
Human Rights Initiative.
The project will focus on
art’s power to humanize
in the face of degradation
and despair.
“For many, the Holocaust is a stark example of
the kinds of human rights
violations that can take
place in the world,” says
Ellen Feder, philosophy
professor and project
coordinator. “Despite the
atrocities that occurred,
the art that was produced
at Terezín speaks to the
humanity and the possibilities not just of an individual
person but of a people.”
The project’s centerpiece is the Department of Performing Arts
production of Voices of
Terezín: An Artistic Tribute
in Two Parts. Cosponsored by the Embassy of
the Czech Republic, the
show will be held March
19–21 in the Katzen Arts
Center’s Abramson Family Recital Hall. Part one
will feature the American
University Chamber
Singers’ performance
of Songs of Children,
Robert Convery’s musical
adaptation of nine poems
written by the children of
Terezín. This choral piece
will be followed by the
Unknown Artist. Poster created at Terezín labor camp. Loaned by Murry Sidlin,
dean of the Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, Catholic University of America
“We hope this
will make
them more
alert to current
atrocities and
willing to stand
up to them.”
United States premiere of
Smoke of Home, a oneact play written by Zdenek
Eliáš and Jirí Stein while
interned at the camp.
Director Humphries
arts
Mardirosian first learned
of the play in spring 2008,
several months before
she went to Prague on
a Fulbright grant. Fellow
Fulbright Scholar Lisa
Peschel shared the script
with her; the following
spring, Humphries Mardirosian directed the play
in Prague and took its onsite premiere to Terezín.
Her decision to stage
Smoke at AU inspired
the cascade of related programs that have evolved
into the Voices of Terezín
project. Along with the
theatrical event, the project
includes movie screenings, crossdisciplinary
panels, an art exhibit at
Bender Library, and a
visiting professorship by
Stanislav Kolár of the
University of Ostrava,
Czech Republic.
The project also includes
curriculum initiatives on
and off campus. With
Nadell’s help, Humphries
Mardirosian has developed
a curriculum for an honors
colloquium on Terezín,
which the performing
arts professor is leading
this spring. In addition,
arts management student
Inga Sieminski is launching a curriculum outreach
program in conjunction
with Wilson High School.
The program will focus on
Terezín and culminate with
students attending the twopart performance.
“We want to engage
the students before they
come to the theatre so
that the performance
has a deeper impact on
them,” says Sieminski.
“We hope this will make
them more alert to current atrocities and willing
to stand up to them.” 
After the Flood
by
Jessica
Tabak
Don Kimes and his wife,
Lois, had been away just
over a week when they
got a call from a neigh
bor back in D.C. Water
was streaming under
their front door, down
their steps, and onto
the sidewalk.
His wife rushed back
to Washington and by the
following day, the AU art
professor’s worst fears
were confirmed. A water
pipe had burst, leaving
his entire art studio—
including his computer,
thousands of clippings
and slides, most of his
family photographs,
and 25 years’ worth of
sketchbooks and works
on paper—under four
feet of water. “When my
wife told me, my knees
just gave out,” he recalls.
“I was 50 years old and,
in essence, the record
of my life as an artist
had been erased.”
For months, Kimes
would return home from
teaching and spend his
evenings trying to salvage
portions of his photos,
drawings, and paintings.
“I would peel them apart,
trying to get some pieces
of the pictures back,” he
says. Over time, more
and more of the original
images would be lost,
leaving only shadowy
impressions.
But after several
months, Kimes saw something beyond destruction
in the traces of color and
line. “I don’t know why,
but suddenly I found a
strange beauty in them.”
“I don’t know why,
but suddenly I
found a strange
beauty in them.”
Memoria. 2008. Mixed meda on canvas
Flying with Galileo. 2009. Mixed media on paper
Kimes began to create
new abstract images
based on the remnants
of the old. In the seven
years since the flood, he
has amassed a collection
ranging from small works
on paper to his custom-
ary large canvasses. A
selection of these pieces
will be featured in Pentimenti: After the Flood,
from March 20 to May 1
at the American University Museum.
“I spent years and
Premise. 2008. Mixed media on canvas
years talking about loving
Pompeii or the ruins
of Agrigento or walking through an Etruscan
archway because of
the way nature takes
everything back, causing nature and culture
to intersect in beautiful
ways,” he says. “When
this happened to me, this
external idea suddenly
became very real and
very personal.”
“The flood,” he adds,
“turned out to be a gift.”
9
arts
humanities
Opera out
of the Box
“If you could have
of the school year writing
their own version of the
opera, which they perform in the WNO’s studio
for other D.C. public
school students.
“The kids may be in
third grade and learning
geometry or simple math
when they’re making a
set,” says Corey. “We
work with the teachers
to take what the students
are learning in class and
apply it to the things that
they’re learning through
the opera.”
The days can be long.
Sometimes Corey starts
with a school visit at
8 a.m. and goes until 11
p.m. if there’s a performance. “When you’re a
student at AU, you live
in the AU bubble and
you don’t get to see a
lot of the other parts of
the city,” says Corey.
“Because of my job now,
I’m in Southeast [D.C.],
I’m in Anacostia, I’m in
Northeast almost every
single day.”
Working for the WNO
certainly has its perks.
Corey gets to see any
performance for free. She
has access to some of
Being
Brandeis
the world’s most talented
opera singers. She has
been asked to stand in
and perform in education
department programs.
And the costume department even designed
her dress for the talent
competition in the Miss
America pageant.
“This is my dream job,”
says Corey. “I get to sit
in my office and listen
to renowned opera singers singing down the
hallway from me all day
long and [also] work
with kids all day long.
It is so much fun.” 
“We work with the
teachers to take
what the students
are learning in class
and apply it to the
things that they’re
learning through
the opera.”
“In his life and
his work, he was
always the idealistic
pragmatist.”
“I got into his papers
and was fascinated
by what I found.”
Jeff Watts
10
she single-handedly
wrote, edited, recorded,
and produced a WNO
commercial that aired at
Nationals Park. And three
or four times a week, she
and other department
members go into the
city to teach D.C. youth
about opera.
Through Student LookIn, one of the WNO’s
programs, local students
have an opportunity to
attend a kid-friendly
performance of a current
WNO opera. Drawing
on their experience, the
students spend the rest
Patrick G. Ryan www.snarkinfested.com
dinner with anyone, who
would it be?” The question was put to Jennifer
Corey, BA performing
arts ’09—and a contestant for the Miss National
Sweetheart Pageant—
during a mock interview
in December 2008.
For Corey, the answer
was easy: Plácido Domingo, the famous tenor
and director of the Washington National Opera
(WNO). Corey, a music
major with a concentration
in vocal performance, is
an opera aficionado. (As a
Miss America contestant
in January, she sang
“O Mio Babbino Caro.”)
As it happened, one of
the pageant interviewers
worked for the WNO.
He asked Corey to apply
for an internship. She
followed the lead and was
hired. That was nearly a
year ago. When her internship ended, the WNO
asked Corey to stay on as
an apprentice in their Education and Community
Programs Department.
Her main responsibility is to create DVDs
and other multimedia
products that educate
viewers about the WNO.
It isn’t your typical 9-to-5
desk job. In September,
by
Ariana
Stone
Adapted from The Life of Louis
Brandeis by Mike Unger, American
Today (December 8, 2009)
By any measure, Louis
Brandeis was a mountain
of a man. One of the
country’s preeminent
lawyers, a reformer during the Progressive era,
a leader of the Zionist
movement, and perhaps
the most influential Supreme Court justice in history, Brandeis lived a life
that profoundly impacts
the world even today.
Capturing the true
essence of a man as
complex as Brandeis
in a singular, definitive
biography is not easy.
Yet through diligent
research and a thirst to
understand the man and
his work, Melvin Urofsky,
a historian in residence
at American University,
deftly accomplishes that
in his new book, Louis D.
Brandeis: A Life. Famed
attorney Alan Dershowitz
declared the biography
“monumental, authoritative, and appreciative” in
the New York Times Book
Review on September 27,
2009, and the Economist
named it one of the best
books of 2009.
Satisfying praise, undoubtedly, to Urofsky, who
first delved into Brandeis’s
world as a graduate
student at Columbia
University nearly 50 years
ago. “I got into his papers
and was fascinated by
what I found,” he says.
In 1965, Urofsky
and a colleague won a
three-year grant from
the National Endowment
for the Humanities to
edit Brandeis’s letters.
With the blessing of the
jurist’s daughters and the
University of Louisville
Law School, where the
letters were housed, he
worked on what would
become seven volumes
of text. The publication of
the letters led to a handful
of Brandeis biographies
in the ensuing years, but
Urofsky’s is the first since
the 1980s.
“I had a different take
on him in terms of his
having four intermeshed
careers,” says Urofsky,
a professor of law and
public policy at Virginia
Commonwealth University. “Yet the careers all
intersect. One of his law
clerks once told me that
Brandeis had a ‘mind of
one piece.’”
In the book, Urofsky
explores Brandeis’s roots
as the son of CzechJewish immigrants, his
lucrative career as an attorney (in the late 1800s
he made $50,000 a
year—roughly equivalent
to $900,000 today—
when most lawyers
were making less than
$5,000), his championing
of the state of Israel, and
his celebrated career on
the bench. “In his life and
his work, he was always
the idealistic pragmatist,” writes Urofsky,
“one whose faith in time
remained great.”
The book contains insights into Brandeis’s private life as well. “He could
be, to people who didn’t
know him well, cold and
austere,” Urofsky said.
“He was an extremely
efficient man who did not
like to waste time. On the
other hand, to people who
knew him well, he was a
good friend. He couldn’t
tell a joke—but he liked
jokes. He started laughing
before he could tell the
punch line.” 
11
science
Feeling stressed out?
Common stress-related
conditions may be controlled simply by adding
a meditation practice to
your daily routine.
A recent study coauthored by AU psychology
professor David Haaga,
clinical psychology PhD
student Melissa Tanner,
and researchers from the
Maharishi University of
Management indicates
that practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM)
at least once a day for
20 minutes may reduce
depression, anxiety, and
high blood pressure in
college students.
The results of the
study, published originally
in the American Journal
of Hypertension (December 2009), have drawn
attention from news outlets across the country,
including the Washington
Post, the Los Angeles
Times online and U.S.
News and World Report.
The study provided TM
training and monitoring, in
three-month cycles over
two years, to 298 D.C.area college students, 159
of whom were at risk for
hypertension. Participants
practiced TM—which
involves focusing silently
on a mantra while seated
with eyes closed—for
20 minutes at least once
a day. Blood pressure,
psychological distress,
and coping ability were
12
measured at the beginning
and end of the threemonth interval.
Results showed that
TM had positive psychological effects on all of the
students in the sample. In
addition, both systolic and
diastolic blood pressure
decreased in the at-risk
subgroup, with post-TM
levels associated with a
52 per cent lower risk of
developing hypertension
later in life.
These findings are
especially important to
college students, who
face a perfect storm of
stress factors.
“Students often arrive
at school accustomed
to [parents] controlling
when they eat, when they
sleep, and when they go
to school,” says Haaga.
“Learning to manage all
those factors on their
own can be a challenge.”
The study’s findings
also have implications
for the general population, particularly those
individuals prone to high
blood pressure.
“Past research has
shown TM to be useful
for people who already
have hypertension,” says
Haaga. “I think our study
encourages further application of TM to include
the members of the
general population at risk
of hypertension.” 
No
Place
Like
Om
by
Jessica
Tabak
achievements
Appointments
& Honors
In October, Jack Child (language and
foreign studies/SIS) and Alan Kraut
(history/SIS) were named University Professors.
This is the university’s highest professorial rank
and recognizes outstanding scholarship, teaching,
and influence. (See article on p. 2.)
The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities
granted Kyle Dargan (literature) a 2009–
2010 Individual Artist Fellowship. Founded in
1968, the organization promotes local artists,
organizations, and activities through grants,
programs, and educational activities.
Bill Leap (anthropology) won the 2009 Ruth
Benedict Prize for Best Anthology for Out in
Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in
a Globalizing World, the third volume in his series
on LGBTQ anthropology. Leap shared the prize
with series coeditor Ellen Lewin of the University
of Iowa. The prize is awarded annually by the
American Anthropology Association’s Society of
Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. It is the third
time the pair has been presented with the award.
Grants
Mathematics and statistics professors Jeff
Adler, Jeff Hakim, and Josh Lansky
collaborated on a multi-institutional grant from the
National Science Foundation to facilitate major
research with academic institutions around the
world. The total grant awarded for the group of
institutions was $1.2 million. It will facilitate a
three-year project, Characters, Liftings and
Types: Investigation in p-adic Representation
Theory. (See article on p. 4.)
promote interdisciplinary research to solve
economic problems using real-world data. Golan
will receive $375,300 over the next four years.
the influence of Russian literature on Woolf’s
critical and personal approach to fiction writing.
(See article on p. 7.)
Publications
& Productions
Historian in residence Melvin Urofsky
(history) published Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
(Pantheon, 2009). The book was reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review (September 27,
2009). (See article on p. 11.)
In October, conductor Daniel Abraham
(performing arts) released the CD Passion and
Lament: Choral Masterworks of the 17th Century
(Dorian Recordings), performed by the Bach
Sinfonia and Sinfonia Voci. The recording includes
works by Heinrich Biber, Salamone Rossi, and
Giacomo Carissimi, and a solo by AU’s Barbara
Hollinshead (performing arts).
María Eugenia Verdaguer (PhD sociology
’02) published Class, Ethnicity, Gender and Latino
Entrepreneurship (Routledge, 2009). The book
examines the social and economic relations of
first-generation Latino entrepreneurs.
Matthew Clavin (PhD history ’05) has
published his first book, Toussaint Louverture and
the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of
a Second Haitian Revolution (U. of Pennsylvania,
2009). The book examines the United States
perception of the Second Haitian Revolution, from
1791 until 1865. Clavin is an assistant professor
of history at the University of West Florida.
This fall, film director Terence Davies optioned
the rights to Mother of Sorrows (Vintage, 2006)
by Richard McCann (literature). The
collection of interconnected short stories, narrated
in the first person, relates an Eisenhower-era
coming-of-age in suburban Washington, D.C.
Roberta Rubenstein (literature) published
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The book explores
Impressions
Anna Amirdjanova (mathematics and
statistics) received a two-year project grant from
the National Science Foundation for Stochastic
Evolution Equations Driven by Nonmartingale
Random Fields and Related Topics. Her projected
award is $81,330, to be distributed over two years.
Vikki Connaughton (biology) is contributing
to a research project that recently received a
$427,758 grant from the National Institutes of
Health. Connaughton, with several colleagues
from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,
is studying how sensitivity to methylmercury
in zebrafish is affected when they express
glutathione-related human genes.
Amos Golan (economics) has received a
grant from the U.S. Department of the Treasury
to establish the Info-Metrics Institute under the
Department of Economics. The institute will offer
courses, workshops, and conferences that
Don Kimes. Book. 2009. Mixed media on paper
13
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