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Superscrip
Volume 4, Issue 1
Fall 2013–Winter 2014
The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences | Columbia University
Bringing Pedagogy
into the
21st Century
Superscript 1
Link back to contents page
C O N T E N T S
From the Dean
Bringing Pedagogy into the
21st Century
GSAS Alumni Association Board of Directors
1
Louis A. Parks, President, M.A. ’95, Ancient Studies
Lester Wigler, Vice President, M.A. ’80, Music
Bridget M. Rowan, Secretary, M.A. ’80, English and Comparative Literature
2
Alumni Profile: Judith Shapiro, Ph.D.
’72, Anthropology
8
Tyler Anbinder, M.A. ’85, M.Phil. ’87, Ph.D. ’90, History
Jillisa Brittan, Chair of Development Committee, M.A. ’86, English and
Comparative Literature
Gerrard Bushell, M.A. ’91, M.Phil. ’94, Ph.D. ’04, Political Science
Report from the Field: Teaching at a
Community College
12
Applied Humanities: Ramona Bajema,
Ph.D. ’12 and the To-hoku Earthquake
Relief Effort
14
Neena Chakrabarti, Student Representative, M.A. ’11, Chemistry
Frank Chiodi, M.A. ’00, American Studies
Kenneth W. Ciriacks, Ph.D. ’62, Geological Sciences
Annette Clear, M.A. ’96, M.Phil. ’97, Ph.D. ’02, Political Science
Michael S. Cornfeld, Chair of Nominating Committee, M.A. ’73, Political
Science
Astrobiology: Modern Science Targets an
Ancient Question
22
Elizabeth Debreu, M.A. ’93, Art History and Archaeology
Alumni News
George Khouri, M.A. ’69, Classics
26
Robert Greenberg, Chair of Student Outreach Committee, M.A. ’88, Philosophy
Sukhan Kim, M.A. ’78, Political Science
Alumni Profile: Steven G. Mandis,
M.A. ’10, M.Phil. ’13
28
Lindsay Leard-Coolidge, M.Phil. ’87, Ph.D. ’92, Art History and Archaeology
On the Shelf: Faculty Publications
30
Les B. Levi, M.A. ’76, M.Phil. ’78, Ph.D. ’82, English and Comparative Literature
On the Shelf: Alumni Publications 32
Komal S. Sri-Kumar, Ph.D. ’77, Economics
John Waldes, Co-chair of Marketing and Research Committee, M.S. ’68,
Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. ’71, Plasma Physics
Dissertations
34
Announcements
46
Tracy Zwick, M.A. ’11, Modern Art
Helpful Links
49
Letters to the Editor
Harriet Zuckerman, Ph.D. ’65, Sociology
To share your thoughts about anything you
have read in this publication, please email
[email protected]. Unless you note
otherwise in your message, any correspondence
received by the editor will be considered for
future publication. Please be sure to include in
your message your name and affiliation to the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
SUPERSCRIPT is published twice annually by
the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the
GSAS Alumni Association.
Dean: Carlos J. Alonso
Editor: Robert Ast
Assistant Editor: Andrew Ng
Senior Director for Alumni Relations: Jill Galas-Hickey
Design, Editing, and Production: Columbia Creative
2 Superscript
From the Dean
O
ne of the principal raisons
d’être for the Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences
is enhancing the academic
and professional life of our students.
But graduate students—both Master’s
and doctoral—typically devote between
one and eight years in pursuit of the
degree that brought them to Columbia. This investment of time means
that students often spend a significant
number of their formative adult years
among us, years in which the realm of
Carlos J. Alonso
the personal usually takes a backseat
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and
to the requirements of the academic
Sciences; Morris A. and Alma
pursuits that brought them to campus.
Schapiro Professor in the Humanities
Graduate students have traditionally
postponed or set aside significant
personal decisions while in graduate school, owing to the
belief that life and its big choices resume upon receipt
of the degree and after reintegration in the larger world
outside the university.
The reality is, however, that there has never been such a
transparent split between life and the graduate experience: graduate school IS life for our students. In fact,
graduate school is in most cases the first time in which
students will not be under the tutelage of someone in
loco parentis—in other words, it is the first truly adult autonomous experience some of them will entertain. It is
also quite possible that graduate school be the first time
there is significant geographic distance from their family
environment, since most students tend to remain relatively close to home when choosing an undergraduate
institution. This is especially the case with international
students, who cast a much wider net when applying to
institutions in which to pursue their postbaccalaureate
education. Graduate school is not just what life is for our
students, it is also a most significant season of that life
from an existential point of view.
In my time as a faculty member, and now as dean, I have
noticed a gradual but quite significant change in student
attitude toward their graduate experience. Students
nowadays tend to see graduate school as coextensive with
Superscript 1
their personal lives and are continually searching for
ways in which to make graduate life fit into their lives, as
opposed to the other way around, which was the norm
traditionally. I do not have the space here to explore the
reasons for this development, which I would argue nonetheless should be regarded as both healthy and welcome,
since it demystifies graduate education and the graduate
experience, and forces both to conform to realistic and
humane parameters. This transformation requires, nevertheless, that graduate school administrations and support services evolve to accommodate our students’ novel
understanding of their relationship to their programs, to
the institution, and to their discipline at large.
This development accounts, for instance, for two changes
in policy that the Graduate School instituted since I became dean: first, the existing policy on the “Suspension of
Responsibilities for Childbirth” was broadened two years
ago to include male student parents, as well as instances
of adoption and foster parenthood; second, the Graduate
School announced last year that graduate student parents
would be entitled to receive for each child a $1,000
subsidy to defray the cost of child care expenses. The
realization that graduate school has to be better integrated
into our students’ lives was also one of the reasons behind
the creation of a new program of Internships in Academic
Administration, in which graduate students explore nonacademic careers in university administration that may
give them more flexibility at the moment they endeavor
to combine the personal and the professional. Our newly
created Office of Student Affairs in GSAS has been given
the consequent mandate to address the many facets of the
nonacademic dimension of our students lives, while recognizing the particular and specific needs of our Master’s
and doctoral constituencies.
Graduate school used to be regarded by students, faculty,
and administrators as a parenthesis or hiatus in the lives
of graduate students. The current move toward the closer
integration of life and the graduate experience is a salutary transformation that nonetheless presents us with
new challenges that we in the Graduate School are ready
and eager to assume. I would be extremely interested in
hearing from you, the alumni of the school, about how
we could best fulfill that responsibility.
2 Superscript
Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century:
The GSAS Teaching Center and the
Science of Teaching and Learning
By Alexander Gelfand
One sunny day this past June, a clutch of doctoral students from various
departments—Music, Sociology, Earth and Environmental Sciences—sat,
stood, and circulated in a large room on the fifth floor of Barnard College’s
Diana Center. The space was crammed with themed tables devoted to
various digital tools: one bore a piece of paper with the word “SIMS,” for
computer simulations, scrawled in black sharpie; another proclaimed
“Blogs!” Many of the tables were littered with lists and diagrams and flow
charts, and each one was equipped with an educational technologist from
the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL).
The students had all been appointed as teaching assistants or preceptors
for the coming year, and the technologists were there to show them how to
use the software to design and deliver assignments.
In other rooms, students
munched on box lunches
as presenters from
CCNMTL and the GSAS
Teaching Center—
including Mark Phillipson,
the Center’s interim
director—demonstrated
how to use the library’s
Superscript 3
online resources or set
up a website where
students could upload and
annotate text and images
for a class. All the while,
informal groups of TAs
lounged on comfy chairs
in a common area framed
by large windows, sipping
bottled water and talking
shop.
The setting was the second
day of the Teagle Summer
Institute, a three-day-long
series of workshops and
discussions devoted to
pedagogy and technology.
Now in its second year,
the institute is part of a
larger three-year program,
the Preparing Doctoral
Students for the 21st
Century Initiative. Offered
by the Teaching Center and
CCNMTL under a grant
from the Teagle Foundation,
a nonprofit dedicated to
improving the quality of
undergraduate learning in
the arts and sciences, the
initiative seeks to equip
graduate students to teach
in the new millennium and,
by extension, to bring the
quality of undergraduate
learning at Columbia to an
even higher level. And it
is emblematic of the way
in which the University
is trying to rethink the
role and function of the
Teaching Center at a
pivotal moment in higher
education.
***
Since they first began
to appear in the 1960s,
teaching centers have
become increasingly
common on American
college and university
campuses; more than
two hundred schools now
have some kind of center
devoted to helping faculty
and graduate students
improve the quality of
their teaching, including
many of Columbia’s peer
institutions. Yet Columbia
itself came to the party
relatively late.
Judith Shapiro
recalls that when
she was hired by
the anthropology
department at
the University of
Chicago in 1970,
even talking about
teaching with
your colleagues
“would have been
the professional
equivalent of a
burp.”
According to Carlos J.
Alonso, Dean of the
Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences and Vice President
for Graduate Education, the
University first explored the
possibility of creating a fullservice teaching center that
would cater to both faculty
and graduate students in
the 1990s. At the time,
however, the cost seemed
prohibitive, and so in 2006
the University established
a more limited center,
focused on the needs of
graduate students. Helmed
for two years on an interim
basis by Jan Allen, then the
associate dean for Ph.D.
programs, the Teaching
Center acquired its first
permanent director in
2008, when Steven Mintz
came on board.
Mintz wanted to move
the Center in several
directions at once. For
one thing, he wanted it to
address not only teaching
but also research into
learning—more formally
known as scholarship on
teaching and learning, or
SOTL. SOTL emerged as
an academic discipline
less than a quarter-century
ago with the publication of
Scholarship Reconsidered:
Priorities of the Professoriate
by Ernest Boyer. Boyer, who
was at the time president
of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of
Teaching, argued that
instruction merited the
same systematic study and
professional recognition
accorded to other areas
of scholarly investigation,
and his contention was
quickly taken up as a
rallying cry by others.
Allison Pingree, director of
professional pedagogy in
the Strengthening Learning
and Teaching Excellence
Initiative at Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School
of Government, says that
research in areas relating to
SOTL is already beginning
to count toward academic
promotion and tenure.
To Mintz, a professional
historian with a long list of
publications to his credit,
acquiring those scholarly
bona fides was crucial.
Otherwise, he suspected
that a teaching center would
never be taken seriously
at a top-tier research
institution like Columbia—
the kind of institution
where scholarship, not
teaching, has historically
been regarded as the
real work of faculty and
graduate students. Judith
Shapiro, former president of
Barnard College and current
president of the Teagle
Foundation, recalls that
when she was hired by the
anthropology department at
the University of Chicago
in 1970, even talking
about teaching with your
colleagues “would have
been the professional
equivalent of a burp.” A
generation later, when he
was a doctoral candidate
at the University of
California, Berkeley, Mark
Phillipson recalls a similar
silence surrounding the
art of teaching—and the
concomitant experience
of walking into his first
teaching section at ten
o’clock one morning,
writing his name and phone
number on the board, and
realizing that he had to
“turn around, face the class,
and do something.”
The Teaching Center’s
emphasis on SOTL is
a means of redressing
precisely that lack of
attention to how teachers do
what they do and how they
can do it more effectively.
Cognitive psychologists
like Columbia’s own
Janet Metcalfe and Lois
Putnam have for many
years conducted research
into learning and memory,
and their findings can be
directly translated into
helpful teaching strategies.
Metcalfe, for example,
points to three or four basic
techniques that virtually any
teacher can use to improve
learning outcomes, such as
spacing practice sessions
4 Superscript
out to help learners retain
new concepts and requiring
students to generate their
own answers (even if they
are wrong, the process is
ultimately more effective
than simply giving them
the correct answers to
begin with). “The empirical
findings are very solid,”
Metcalfe says. “And it works
beautifully.”
Some months ago,
Metcalfe addressed the
staff at CCNMTL, and
the results were apparent
at the Teagle Summer
Institute when Michael
Cennamo, an educational
technologist who is working
toward his doctorate in
education at Teachers
College, gave a brief
talk titled “Presentation
and Metacognition.”
Cennamo outlined the
specific psychological
reasons why so many
PowerPoint presentations
fail, including the fact that
people find it difficult to
process information when
it is delivered both orally
and textually. He and his
colleague Adrienne Garber,
also an Ed.D. candidate
at Teachers College, then
presented a series of digital
tools that can be used
to deliver more effective
presentations by exploiting
the ways in which our
minds process data.
Wendell Hassan Marsh, a
third-year Ph.D. candidate
in the Department of
Middle Eastern, South
Asian, and African
Studies, attended a similar
workshop at the Teaching
Center last year. Marsh
is hardly a novice when
it comes to either digital
technology or teaching—a
former journalist, he’s well
acquainted with new media,
and he taught English to
refugees while in Egypt on a
Fulbright—but he says that
the strategies he learned
“kind of changed the way
I present things in general
now.” They also kept him
coming back to the Center
for more training.
***
The digital side of
the workshop that
Marsh attended, of the
presentation that Cennamo
and Garber gave, and
of the entire Teagle
Summer Institute, points
to another development
at the Teaching Center:
its growing emphasis on
educational technology.
Phillipson is well suited to
manage that change: before
being appointed interim
director of the Center, he
spent six years as a senior
program specialist in the
faculty support unit at
CCNMTL; as an assistant
professor of English at
Bowdoin College and an
adjunct assistant professor
in the Department of
English at Columbia, he has
made extensive use of wikis,
the popular web apps that
allow people to collectively
create and annotate online
content. As a teacher,
Phillipson has found that
such tools bolster students’
sense of participation,
and can even influence
the direction of a course
through the generation
of new ideas and avenues
to explore—an effect that
can have a transformative
impact on overall student
engagement.
The word “transfor
mative”—along with its
close cousins “revolu
tionary,” “game-changing,”
and “disruptive”—has often
Mark Phillipson, interim director of the GSAS Teaching Center, leading a workshop
Superscript 5
“I had no notion
that there was
this vast network
of professionals who
were available
to help make things
more engaging
for students.”
—Holly Myers,
Teagle Summer
Institute participant
been used to describe the
role of technology in higher
education. Much of the
hubbub has in recent years
come in response to the
phenomenon of massive
open online courses, or
MOOCs: strictly digital
combinations of text,
images, and video delivered
to vast numbers of people
over the web. Because they
are free and available to
anyone with a computer
and an Internet connection,
MOOCs have been heralded
as a means of making
higher education accessible
to almost everyone. Some
proponents even believe
that they might represent a
cure for what economist and
former Princeton president
William Bowen calls the
“cost disease” of higher
education, which manifests
in ballooning tuition costs
and skyrocketing student
debt. And they’re spreading
like wildfire: Columbia
currently offers a number of
MOOCs in subjects ranging
from virology to economics
through Coursera, a Silicon
Valley startup that at last
count had more than
nine million enrollments
from students scattered
across nearly two hundred
countries.
The speed with which
MOOCs have proliferated—
many of Columbia’s peer
institutions have introduced
their own courses, while
Harvard and MIT have
partnered to create the
MOOC provider edX—has
also raised concerns about
the future of the technology.
Some fear that turning
toward a fully online model
might further imperil
academic jobs at a time
when tenured positions
are already dwindling,
while others believe that
it will inevitably dilute the
educational experience.
In a recent piece for the
online magazine The New
Inquiry, Aaron Bady, a
Ph.D. candidate in African
literature at the University
of California, Berkeley,
assailed MOOCs for being
a pedagogically shallow
means of content delivery
that will benefit only the
most self-directed students,
and he also contended that
the rush to adopt them has
more to do with serving
corporate interests than
educational ones. (In an
earlier post to the blog
Inside Higher Education,
Bady described MOOCs as
“only better than nothing.”)
Because of these conflicting
views, and perhaps because
of the fundamental
uncertainty that surrounds
a phenomenon that is still
in its infancy, the subject
of MOOCs tends, as Mark
Phillipson says, to get
people “very excited, and
very scared.”
realm as well—whether that
is in the context of a MOOC
or of a course that mixes
face-to-face and online
elements.
The changes underway at
the Teaching Center could
help assuage at least some
of those fears. For example,
more technologically
oriented offerings ought
to help teachers bring the
same quality of instruction
that Columbia students
have come to expect in the
classroom to the digital
“I had some vague notion
of an office somewhere in
Butler if I had questions
about CourseWorks,”
she said, referring to the
University’s online course
management system. “I
had no notion that there
was this vast network of
professionals who were
available to help make
Holly Myers, a Teagle
Summer Institute
participant and doctoral
candidate in the Department
of Slavic Languages who
was preparing to lead
a section in first-year
Russian, was visibly
thrilled to be sitting next
to Michael Cennamo as he
demonstrated an application
called VoiceThread on
his laptop. VoiceThread
allows students to create
online conversations
around material they
have uploaded to the web,
and Myers could already
see her undergraduate
students videotaping their
own Russian-language
skits, uploading the videos
to their class website,
and commenting on one
another’s work. She was
especially excited because,
prior to attending the
Institute, she hadn’t even
realized that such a thing
was possible—or that
someone like Cennamo
might be around to show
her how to do it.
6 Superscript
Michael Cennamo
and Adrienne Garber, educational technologists
at CCNMTL
things more engaging for
students.”
***
The idea of a “vast network
of professionals” hints
at yet another role that
a reimagined Teaching
Center could potentially
play, as a place for graduate
Superscript 7
students to get a sense of
the possibilities that lie
beyond academia and to
find the support they will
need to capitalize on them.
The fear that MOOCs and
other digital technologies
will render some tenuretrack positions obsolete is
accentuated by the very real
tightening of the academic
job market, which has sent
increasing numbers of
graduate students into
so-called alt-ac—short for
“alternative academic”—
careers that include
staff and administrative
positions at colleges
and universities, not to
mention careers that
have nothing to do with
academia whatsoever.
Not surprisingly, this
can be difficult terrain to
negotiate. Many graduate
students are uncomfortable
discussing alt-ac or
nonacademic options with
their faculty advisers, either
because they feel ashamed
of abandoning a traditional
academic career or because
they are afraid that
betraying even the slightest
lack of commitment could
have catastrophic results.
And many faculty advisers
don’t know enough about
the world beyond academia
to be of much help. This is
why Steven Mintz originally
envisioned the Teaching
Center as a “safe place” for
Teaching Fellows to explore
alternative career paths,
and why Mark Phillipson
says that the University
would be failing graduate
students if it did not help
them confront the realities
of the job market—whether
by assisting in the creation
of the kinds of robust
professional portfolios
they’ll need to land their
first faculty positions or
by preparing them for life
outside the ivory tower.
Phillipson is therefore
introducing sequences of
workshops that graduate
students can complete in
order to receive a formal
certification. Bill Rando,
director of the Yale Teaching
Center, which awards a
certificate of college teaching
preparation to graduate
students who complete a
comprehensive training
program, says that many
graduates of tier-one
research universities who
are lucky enough to land
academic positions will likely
find themselves working
at liberal arts colleges,
which have traditionally
emphasized teaching over
research, or at state schools,
which have come under
increasing pressure to
demonstrate their efficient
use of taxpayer dollars
with evidence of effective
teaching. Under those
circumstances, proof of
participation in teacher-
training activities can only
help.
In addition to what
Phillipson refers to as
the “quiet mentoring”
that already takes place
as graduate students
are exposed to alt-ac
professionals such as
Cennamo and Garber, the
Graduate School is also
launching an initiative
to explicitly address
alternative career options.
Beginning with the spring
2014 semester, advanced
doctoral students will have
the opportunity to intern in
some twenty administrative
offices across the
University, where they can
get a glimpse of the day-to-
Judith Shapiro, Ph.D. ’72, Anthropology
By Alexander Gelfand
When Judith Shapiro became head of
the Teagle Foundation this past July,
the former Barnard president took
the reins of an organization that for
nearly eighty years has given grants
to institutions of higher learning and
research with an eye toward improving
undergraduate learning in the arts and
sciences. Which seems only fitting,
since Shapiro herself has spent the
last forty-odd years trying to advance
the same goals.
Many of the Foundation’s efforts are
aimed at bolstering the quality of
teaching, a vocation that is in Shapiro’s blood. Her mother taught Latin
and supervised the high school libraries in the New York City public school
system, the same system Shapiro
herself attended (at PS 29 in Flushing
Meadows, Queens), along with classmates such as Jonathan Cole, future
sociologist and provost of Columbia,
and Stephen Jay Gould, future paleontologist and public intellectual. “I used
to play teacher when I was a kid,” she
says.
Nonetheless, it took her some time
to find her subject. Armed with a
degree in history and French from
Brandeis University, Shapiro entered
the graduate program in history at the
University of California, Berkeley in
1963. She quickly realized that the life
of a professional historian was not for
her, however, and dropped out after
only a month—a decision that cost
her a front-row seat at the landmark
student protests of the Free Speech
Movement just one year later. Back in
New York City, a friend hipped Shapiro
to the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she
applied to the graduate program in
anthropology at Columbia, where she
was admitted on scholarship despite
never having taken a single course in
the subject.
Despite the false start, it didn’t take
long for Shapiro to get up to speed.
By 1965 she was doing “salvage
ethnography”—fieldwork aimed at
preserving cultures on the brink of
extinction—among the Northern
8 Superscript
day operations of a modern
research university. As Dean
Alonso notes, that exposure
can serve as “useful
preparation for a career in
academia, either within the
professoriate or in academic
administration.”
***
Opportunities for
mentoring of all kinds ought
to increase as the result
of another shift, as well.
Until recently, the Teaching
Center focused almost
exclusively on providing
teaching and professional
development services to
graduate students. That is
now changing, however,
as faculty from across
the University are being
invited to take advantage of
its resources. In addition
to providing faculty
with the same support
already enjoyed by their
Teaching Fellows, this will
expand interaction and
communication among
all of those who make up
the Columbia teaching
community, tenured and
otherwise. And that ought to
be good for everyone.
Rando, who has over the
past five years steered
the Yale Teaching Center
through a similar transition
from a student-centered
organization to one that
also serves faculty, says
that opening the doors to
Paiute of the Great Basin, the massive watershed that lies between
the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra
Nevada range. A few years later
she undertook a series of studies of
indigenous groups in Brazil. Her research among the Yanomami yielded
some of the earliest anthropological
analysis of gender differences—not
because of any ideological motivation (“second-wave feminism hadn’t
yet happened,” Shapiro recalls), but
because the differences between
the lives of Yanomami men and
women were simply too obvious to
ignore.
Gender would prove to be a defining
issue in Shapiro’s professional life.
Superscript 9
all comers makes many
things possible. In addition
to providing TAs with
increased access to senior
faculty, mixing populations
also enables more two-way
exchanges between graduate
students—many of whom
have been roaming the
halls for years and have
considerable insight into the
culture of the University—
and junior faculty who
have only recently ceased
being graduate students
themselves. Such exchanges
can help freshly minted
assistant professors navigate
the environment where
they hope to build their
careers, while providing
grad students with a better
understanding of what their
In 1970 she became the first woman
appointed to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It
was, she says, an overwhelming, even
paralyzing experience to be a junior female faculty member adrift in a sea of
distinguished senior male colleagues.
Though she hadn’t yet finished her
dissertation, for example, Shapiro
suddenly found herself ensconced in
the office previously occupied by the
revered cultural anthropologist Clifford
Geertz. In what she now describes as
an extremely wise professional move,
Shapiro moved on to Bryn Mawr in
1975, discovering in the process “the
wonderful world of women’s colleges”—a world in which she would
spend the bulk of her working life.
own roles as teachers and
scholars will be once they,
too, move on to their first
professional posts.
Those higher up in the
institutional hierarchy
stand to benefit as well.
Harvard’s Allison Pingree
points out that digital
technology can provide
an avenue for renewal to
senior faculty who want to
refresh their teaching with a
shot of something new and
innovative.
And faculty at all levels of
seniority profit when they
have the chance to mingle
with colleagues from other
disciplines. Universities,
Rando says, tend to be
Though she claims never to have
considered a career in administration,
Shapiro was named dean of the college and then its first provost. The role
Faculty at all levels
of seniority profit
when they have the
chance to mingle
with colleagues from
other disciplines.
siloed along departmental
lines: physicists hang out
with physicists, English
profs with English profs,
and never the twain shall
meet. While this may be
natural, it is not particularly
healthy. If those physicists
never develop a genuine
appreciation for what
those English profs do
(and vice versa), they will
never develop a sense
of shared purpose—a
situation that can eventually
breed mistrust. Moreover,
drawing together faculty
from different departments
gives them the opportunity
to share their respective
insights into teaching and
to discuss the common
challenge of reaching
students. This, Rando says,
is one of the most powerful
aspects of a teaching center:
done right, it can become
a University-wide faculty
center.
The new and improved
Teaching Center will also
benefit from its new and
improved digs: a sleek,
digitally enhanced space
in Butler Library known as
Studio@Butler. Everything
in it—the tables, the
whiteboards, the digital
projectors—is on wheels
and can be easily configured
for a variety of uses:
graduate-student workshops
and faculty seminars, oneon-one consultations on
teaching strategies and
departmental discussions
of curricular planning,
maybe even improvised
study halls for students
taking MOOCs—a physical
complement, as it were, to
the online classroom—and
a laboratory where faculty
and staff can gauge student
reaction to the digital
environment.
Phillipson also sees
Studio@Butler as a
response to the desire
expressed by many
graduate students for a
“third space” on campus:
a refuge beyond the orbit
of one’s department and
immediate social circle,
where graduate students
from across the University
Judith Shapiro, continued
she played in helping to establish and
strengthen interdisciplinary programs
and cooperative arrangements with
other top-tier schools such as Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania helped attract the attention of
Barnard College, where she was appointed president in 1994. Coming to
Barnard, she says, was like choosing
a spouse: in addition to being a close
sister college of Bryn Mawr, Barnard
had the advantage of being located in
her native New York, and its relationship to Columbia felt more like a genuine partnership than the kind a small
women’s college might be expected to
have with a major research university
across the street.
Shapiro likens the role of a college
president to that of a small-town
mayor; her primary role, as she saw
it, was to hold the Barnard community together and to “hear the
song of the institution”—to see its
distinctiveness and to understand
its mission. When she stepped down
in 2008, Shapiro was credited with
tripling Barnard’s endowment and
doubling the number of applications
it received, refining its curriculum,
and ramping up its commitment to
educational technology. (One of
her first moves was to get all of the
members of her senior senior staff
on email, at a time when the new
communication platform was far
from ubiquitous.)
Yet Shapiro herself dismisses much
of the praise she has received as
“leadership fetishism,” lays most
of the credit for her alleged accomplishments at the feet of her
colleagues, and claims that being a
university or college president is “an
endless opportunity for screwing up.”
(Along with self-deprecating humor,
traces of Shapiro’s anthropological
training can also be discerned in her
take on the college presidency—for
example, when she describes the
“rituals of opposition” that inevitably
arise between faculty and administration.)
When she was first asked if she might
like to be a candidate for the Teagle
presidency—she was a member of the
search committee at the time—Shapiro said no. She was content to teach
part time at Barnard and to pursue her
other interests, from singing and knit-
10 Superscript
can come to find informal
support and a sense of
community. You could see
the outlines of such a space
emerging at the Teagle
Summer Institute, as
participants from different
disciplines temporarily
coalesced into small,
informal groups where
they commiserated over
the difficulty of balancing
teaching and research,
talked about their job
prospects, and bonded with
one another regardless
of their respective
departmental affiliations or
areas of expertise.
Not incidentally, the
Teaching Center shares
Studio@Butler with the
Digital Humanities Center,
which offers technological
and research support to
faculty and students who
work in the humanities
and history. Phillipson
hopes that this cohabitation
will blur the line between
teaching and research in
productive ways. The entire
Columbia community
would gain something, for
example, if more TAs and
professors were to discover
the scholarship of teaching
and learning, or if they
came to regard their own
teaching as something
that warranted the same
rigorous procedures of
inquiry they employ when
conducting their scholarly
investigations. “Why teach
ting to spending quality time with her
poodle, Nora. Ultimately, however, she
found the prospect of leading an institution devoted to improving the quality
of undergraduate learning—and, by
extension, the quality of undergraduate teaching—to be irresistible; and
when the board asked her again, she
acquiesced.
“This foundation is about my life’s
work,” says Shapiro. As president,
Shapiro would like to maintain Teagle’s recent emphasis on pedagogical
innovation and assessment of student
learning, but she would also like to
promote curriculum revision and greater sharing of information and material
between teachers at different institutions. As researchers, Shapiro says,
faculty members are used to thinking
Superscript 11
on hunches and guesses,”
Phillipson asks, “when
you don’t treat your own
scholarship that way?”
That question gets at the
heart of the Teaching
Center’s mission and
purpose. It may be
many things to many
people—support center,
digital training ground,
professional development
office, communal gathering
place—but all of those
roles and functions
are undergirded by a
fundamental commitment
to helping faculty and
students become as serious
about their teaching as they
are about their research.
of themselves as part of a community.
As teachers, however, they are not:
alone in their classrooms, they tend
to assume that they must build their
courses alone as well. But that need
not be the case.
As an example, Shapiro points to Reacting to the Past, a course developed
by Barnard history professor Mark C.
Carnes with Teagle support that has
students explore classic texts through
elaborate role-playing games. Though
born in an elite liberal arts college for
women, the course has over the years
been expanded and refined with the
help of a consortium of colleges and
universities around the country, and
now community colleges are beginning
to show interest in it as well. Borrowing
or adapting courses developed by oth-
“It’s often an uphill battle
to get people to commit
to teaching in the ways in
which they are committed
to scholarship,” Phillipson
says. “So it’s good to
trouble the line between
the two.”
ers isn’t a mark of failure, says Shapiro,
and it can help teachers use their time
more efficiently, freeing them up to
more effectively mentor their students.
Above all, Shapiro remains committed to continuing the Foundation’s
commitment to improving undergraduate student learning, which
she believes is inextricably linked to
the quality of teaching. That, in turn,
is why she feels it is important to
back the kinds of programs that the
Teaching Center is developing and
that Teagle is encouraging at other
colleges and universities across the
country.
“When you develop faculty as teachers,” Shapiro says, “you’re supporting
students.”
Report from the Field:
Teaching at a
Community College
B y S ar ah Mar kg r af, M.A. ’8 6 , M.Ph il. ’8 9, Ph.D. ’94,
E n g l ish and Co mpar ativ e Liter atu r e
T
enure-track positions at community colleges
offer valuable job opportunities for people with
graduate degrees in the humanities. In the early
1990s when I was looking for a job, it seemed
that taking a position at a community college wasn’t normal
for those with Ivy League Ph.D.s. It didn’t initially occur
to me, either. Having taught part-time for four years—and
after interviewing at four-year colleges to no avail—I had
largely given up the search for a tenure-track position in
English and was working as a legal secretary when I saw
an ad in The New York Times for an opening teaching
college composition at Bergen Community College (BCC)
in northern New Jersey. Once I joined the BCC faculty,
though, I found that a few of my colleagues also had
degrees from GSAS in English and Comparative Literature,
including Bonnie MacDougall, M.A. ’70, Ph.D. ’82 and the
late David Kievett, M.A. ’70, M.Phil. ’74, Ph.D. ’75.
GSAS graduates have applied for tenure-track or lecturer
positions—somewhat odd given the paltry job offerings
for those with Ph.D.s in the humanities in the past few
decades. The dearth of applicants for positions at BCC is
particularly surprising, since the school is located only eight
miles from Manhattan (in fact, many of my colleagues live
in Manhattan and Brooklyn).
However, since joining Bergen in 1994 I have served on
a number of search committees, and in that time very few
Previous to BCC, I taught Logic and Rhetoric (the
introductory writing course now known as University
Another professional consideration to note is that there is
no “publish or perish” culture at the typical community
college. Tenure, usually granted after five years of good
service to the college, does not depend on getting a book
out. This frees up those who wish to publish to work on
whatever they want, at their own pace. It also provides more
time to focus on the college’s core mission: teaching.
***
12 Superscript
Writing) at Columbia and First-Year English at Barnard.
Teaching at BCC has been a different, and in many ways
more satisfying, experience.
Most books about pedagogy seem to be written for people
at elite universities. For example, at BCC there is little need
to challenge a student’s sense of privilege—the college
has open admissions, and many of our students are part
of the working class, new immigrants, and members of
traditionally understood minority groups. We don’t have
to push the institution toward a more student-centered
classroom, since that is already the law of the land. We
also don’t have to convince students that professors are not
distant authoritarian figures, since few see us that way to
begin with. There is no academic “star system,” or anything
precious about the college environment. To illustrate the
latter: one rainy spring day, the BCC commencement was
held on the ground level of the parking garage.
My greatest hope as an instructor is to create an
opportunity for pleasure in discovery during each class. I
work in an academic environment that could seem generic
and rudimentary, a force that pushes against unquantifiable
or even improvisational aspects of teaching. But over the
years I have carved out my own special classroom space in
the area of Cinema Studies.
Most of my students come into class with the view that
school is a burden. I’ve found that teaching “critical
thinking skills” does little to help that situation. In fact, I’ve
had greater success deliberately ignoring those very skills
at times. (Any self-satisfied teaching of these “skills,” as
if in a list, defeats the purpose of this approach anyway.)
Quite wonderful bursts of ideas can emerge when students
experience moments of chaos and surprise, such as when
they watch Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G or Maya
Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
has the potential to move a student into a fun and exciting
place, a place where truly original thinking can take place.
These moments I’ve described are rare and unpredictable,
but when they arrive—what a great class it can be. (And I
feel happy on my end.)
***
Community colleges these days are gaining popularity with
the rising expense of private colleges and universities. But
community colleges are still outsiders to the Ivy League and
most four-year colleges. Maybe someday we won’t seem
so alien. Ironically, one of the strongest imperatives of my
graduate study at GSAS was to pay attention to suppressed
voices, repressed populations, and underrepresented
viewpoints. Community colleges are a repressed population
in the world of higher education. It’s surprising that more
GSAS graduates wouldn’t be interested in exploring this
world of the Other!
As I was writing this short piece, I received an email
announcement for the 2014 annual meeting of the
Eastern Sociological Society: “Invisible Work: Exploring
the Invisibility of Teaching, Learning and Researching
at the Community College.” The précis reads as follows:
“Community colleges—their students, faculty, and role
in higher education and American society—remain
largely invisible, despite growing national attention and
swelling numbers. In academia, we continue to talk about
‘traditional students’ and ‘college’ as if most students are
between the ages of 18 and 21 and attending residential
four-year institutions. They aren’t. . . . What are the
consequences of this invisibility for those at community
colleges and for higher education itself?”
Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about such
issues.
My students at BCC generally feel not only burdened but
also tired. I teach evening classes, and many of them have
worked a full eight-hour day—often involving physical
labor—before coming to class. Why should a college class
make a person even more burdened and tired? In the world
of open admissions (compared to Columbia and Barnard),
pleasure is generally thought to be unrelated to classroom
experience. One way I try to address this problem is to
encourage students to become interested in new and
unusual things, such as the discontinuity editing at the
beginning of City of God. Energy can be created from that
interest. Exposure to unanticipated—even bizarre—ideas
Superscript 13
Applied Humanities: Ramona Bajema, Ph.D.
14 Superscript
’12 and the Tohoku Earthquake Relief Effort
By Dylan Suher
The call first came
at four a.m. Ramona
Bajema, then a doctoral student in modern
Japanese history, was
on spring break, finishing up her dissertation
at her mother’s house in picturesque Ojai,
California. Her best friend, Ella Gudwin, vice
president of emergency response for the aid
organization AmeriCares, was trying desperately to reach her.
“The first couple of calls, I thought, She
probably just thinks I’m in New York, and
doesn’t know the time difference,” Bajema
recalls. “I picked up the phone and she said,
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ I said, ‘No, are
you okay?’ I was laughing, thinking, Ella, I’m
in California, it’s five in the morning. She said,
‘Okay, I need you to sit down for a second and
turn on your computer.’”
Superscript 15
bring relief to people
affected by the earthquake
and tsunami.
“The difference with
Ramona,” her adviser, Carol
Gluck, George Sansom
Professor of History and
Professor of East Asian
Language and Cultures,
notes with admiration, “was
that Ramona went—and she
stayed.”
***
In the aftermath of
the earthquake, many
in the Columbia
community helped.
But Bajema went
one step further.
Temporarily setting
aside her academic
career, she signed on
as a program director
for AmeriCares’s
relief efforts in Japan.
Ramona Bajema gardening in Tōhoku
What Bajema saw when
she opened her computer
were images of devastation
that shocked and horrified
the entire world. On
that morning, March 11,
2011, a 9.0-magnitude
earthquake struck just off
the coast of the To-hoku
region of Japan. It was the
fifth-largest earthquake
ever recorded, and it was
followed by a tsunami with
record-breaking, 133-foot
high waves. Entire villages
were swept into the sea.
The final death toll would
reach upwards of fifteen
thousand people. The
tsunami also precipitated
a partial meltdown of the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
reactor. Thousands were
evacuated from areas
near the plant, and two
years later authorities still
struggle to keep tons of
radioactive wastewater from
contaminating the local
water supply.
In the aftermath of the
earthquake, many in the
Columbia community
helped. But Bajema
went one step further.
Temporarily setting aside
her academic career, she
signed on as a program
director for AmeriCares’s
relief efforts in Japan. She
arrived in To-hoku in June
2011 and has stayed ever
since, helping AmeriCares
Ramona Bajema has
always been an outlier. She
grew up around artists,
intellectuals, and academics:
her mother is an artist and
art dealer, and her father is
an actor and writer. Raised
outside the mainstream of
American culture, Bajema
was drawn to Japan from
an early age. Her mother
introduced her as a young
child to Japanese art,
cinema, and cuisine, and
Bajema, who has no familial
ties to the country, was
intrigued by what appeared
to her to be a drastically
different world.
The early infatuation
eventually blossomed into
a lifelong interest, fueled
in part by her politics: as a
high school student in San
Francisco, she protested
against the Gulf War. The
young Bajema saw Japan
as a counterbalance to
American power. “This was
during the time of ‘The
Japan That Can Say No,’
this alternative capitalism,
state capitalism. It looked
like Japan could rival
16 Superscript
America,” Bajema recalls.
“I thought, Oh, great, I’m
going to become this inbetween force between
Japan and America.”
Having witnessed the
precarious life of the artists
around her, Bajema was
determined to be pragmatic.
“I thought, I will go and
make money and take
care of all these people,”
Bajema said. She did her
undergraduate thesis at the
University of California,
Berkeley, not on the arts or
culture of Japan, but on the
history of Japanese financial
markets.
After graduation, she
participated in the
Japanese Exchange and
Teaching (JET) program,
a Japanese government
initiative to place native
English speakers as
assistant language teachers
in Japanese schools.
Bajema taught English
for two years in the idyllic
prefecture of Fukui. She
then completed a master’s
degree at the Paul H.
Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies at
Johns Hopkins University.
After graduating from
SAIS, Bajema accepted
a position with Lehman
Brothers, where she had
interned the summer
before graduation; she
seemed to be on the way
to a lucrative career in
finance.
But Bajema soon found
that finance wasn’t for her.
She quit in a hurry, literally
Superscript 17
fleeing Lehman’s Tokyo
offices in the middle of the
night. “It was not me, it was
not my values, it was not a
good fit,” Bajema says. “I
came back to the United
States just going, ‘Oh my
God, my ten-year plan, what
am I going to do?’”
Unsure of what to do next,
Bajema came to history
out of frustration. A friend
who worked at the BBC
repeatedly picked her brain
about Japanese history for
news segments, and Bajema
obliged—but always without
receiving attribution in the
resulting programs. “I was
in the shower, getting so
frustrated that once again I
was getting called upon and
not getting any credit for it,
and then I realized, Oh, if I
had a Ph.D. then they’d have
to cite me,” Bajema says. “I
got out of the shower and
said, ‘Now’s the time to do it,
I have to go back.’”
Bajema’s background made
her an attractive candidate
for the Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences. “She
knew contemporary Japan
as well as the history and
culture of Japan, she had
very good language skills,
and she was dedicated and
committed,” Gluck says of
the decision to take Bajema
on as a student.
Bajema would find her
openness and independence
to be valuable assets, not
only in graduate school, but
in her future disaster relief
work—a vocation she never
anticipated.
“Ramona would always take
on very difficult things,”
Gluck says. “She wouldn’t
just work in her comfort
zone.”
***
When Bajema saw the
images coming out of
To-hoku, she was
immediately reminded of
her time in Fukui.
To-hoku and Fukui are both
largely rural places, made
up of fishing and farming
villages, and both are home
to many nuclear power
plants. “It just looked like
it had happened to Fukui,”
Bajema says, “and I saw
these flashes of the faces of
my kids and the teachers
that I worked with.”
Bajema found she could
process the shock by
helping. She connected
Gudwin with her contacts
from SAIS and colleagues
from Columbia who were
in To-hoku. She spent hours
researching and emailing
clinics and hospitals—
unaware that many of the
clinics she was trying to
contact had been swept
out into the sea. “I realized
within twenty-four hours
that, in this case, I could
actually help, and that was
an amazing feeling, to not
just hear about something
horrific passively,” Bajema
says.
But Bajema didn’t fly to
Japan immediately. When
spring break ended, she
returned to New York as she
had originally planned. She
had postdoctoral positions
to apply for, and most
pressingly, a dissertation to
finish. For her dissertation,
Bajema had returned to
art, writing about JapaneseAmerican artists between
the world wars. Bajema
had found a lost history of
Japanese artists—most of
whom immigrated from
Japan as educated laborers
and intended to return
to their homeland—who
became American. The
painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi,
for instance, originally
from Japan, was the first
American artist to be
honored by the Whitney
Museum of Art with a
retrospective while still
alive.
Though Bajema was
passionate about her topic,
the tragedy in To-hoku
preoccupied her. Reminders
were everywhere. That
semester, she served as
a teaching assistant with
Carol Gluck in a course on
the history and memory
of World War II. One day
during lecture, Gluck put up
a photo of Hiroshima next
to a photo of Rikuzentakata,
a village obliterated by
the tsunami. “She talked
about the visual impact
it must have on so many
elderly people who were
born into World War II
and are leaving with the
tsunami,” Bajema recalls,
“and I realized that this was
going to be a huge historical
moment for Japan, and that
I wanted to stay attached to
this.”
Bajema was not the only
Columbian who felt
compelled to assist in the
relief effort. Columbia has a
large population of Japanese
students, as well as many
students and faculty with a
direct connection to Japan.
There were fundraisers
and initiatives—bake
sales, armbands for sale,
photography auctions—at
almost every school at the
University raising money
for the Japan Society,
the Red Cross, and other
relief organizations. These
individual initiatives
coalesced into an
umbrella organization,
the Consortium for Japan
Relief, which organizes
symposia on topics related
to the disaster, such as
mental health issues and
the lingering effect of
radiation.
stay, and work full time for
the relief effort. And Bajema
does not compromise on
what she feels is right. “I
told myself after Lehman
that I was never going to
do what I thought I should
do ever again,” she says, “I
was only going to do what I
believed in.”
Formally hired in April
2011, Bajema began
commuting three or four
days a week to Stamford
to train at the AmeriCares
headquarters. Her fellow
students and professors
were very supportive. Chief
among Bajema’s supporters:
her adviser, Carol Gluck.
Aside from a sense of a
personal mission, sheer
coincidence helped to draw
Bajema into working for
the relief effort. Her friend
Ella Gudwin’s organization
AmeriCares was looking for
a director for their Japan
efforts. “Ella was saying,
‘Oh God, I don’t know what
I’m going to do, I need a
program manager on the
ground to spend the money
right,’” Bajema recalls. “So
I said, ‘Would you consider
me?’”
“Carol said, ‘Oh, perfect,
we’ll see this as a socialservice postdoc,’” Bajema
recalls.
“Many of us from Japan
living in New York City
were struggling because we
had mixed feelings. Relief
that we avoided the crisis,
but at the same time guilt
for not being able to do
anything and a desire to do
something for the mother
country,” recalls Daiyu
Suzuki, president of the
consortium and a student
at Teachers College. “The
fact that so many things
happened immediately
toward Japan relief was
a manifestation of those
feelings.”
Gudwin accepted the offer,
and Bajema passed through
the gauntlet, meeting with
decision makers in every
department and at every
level of the AmeriCares
organization. She emerged
the overwhelming favorite
to head up the Japan
program. “People identified
two key elements,” Gudwin
says of the decision to hire
Bajema, “One, she’s very
‘spongy’: she’s smart, and
she’s going to absorb new
information and come to
a point of decision on that
information very quickly.
Two, she’s a natural
communicator, she’s a
storyteller, and I think that’s
rooted in her appreciation
for history.”
Bajema felt that guilt and
obligation particularly
strongly. She began to feel
that she had to go herself,
***
When Bajema arrived in
To-hoku in June 2011, she
was primarily worried about
finding dentures.
AmeriCares specializes
in providing immediate
medical care in the wake
of disasters. Robert
Macauley, the founder of
the organization, started
his aid efforts by personally
chartering a commercial
jet to rescue 243 stranded
Vietnamese orphans. A
relatively small organization
in the field of disaster aid,
particularly when compared
with giants like the Red
Cross, AmeriCares seeks
to fill gaps left by the larger
organizations.
In To-hoku the gap was
dental care. The population
in rural To-hoku is
overwhelmingly elderly,
and the tsunami had
literally swept away their
dentures. Children trapped
in temporary shelters and
subsisting on crackers and
sugary snacks developed
cavities. At the same time,
the tsunami and earthquake
had destroyed many nearby
dental clinics. In response to
this crisis, AmeriCares set up
three prefabricated, mobile
dental clinics to allow local
dentists to attend to their
patients. “You don’t know
these things until you come
here,” Bajema says. “How
could you know about this
problem from New York?
Nobody writes about it!”
Bajema had a lot to learn
about the nonprofit world.
AmeriCares paired her
with an experienced
humanitarian aid worker,
and Gudwin grilled her
on stack after stack of
grant proposals in a
custom-made crash course
in NGO management.
The learning curve was
sometimes daunting, but
Bajema discovered that her
academic background was
helpful for the learning
process. “A lot of it was
being really honest about
what I didn’t know. What
my academic background
gave me most of all was
the ability to say ‘I don’t
know, you have to teach
me,’” she says.
But Bajema also found
she had a lot to offer
AmeriCares. For one, she
knew the history. To-hoku
is renowned in Japan for
its physical beauty. The
poet Bash wrote a famous
travelogue of his journey
to the region, and the
Matsushima islands, just
off the coast of To-hoku,
are considered one of the
18 Superscript
most beautiful scenic views
in all of Japan. But there
has also been a dark side
to that beauty. “To-hoku
has a hideous history of
famine and has always
been neglected by Tokyo,”
Bajema says. “None of the
issues raised during the
tsunami are new.” The
suicide rate for To-hoku even
before the disaster was the
highest of any region in
Japan.
Knowing the history of
the region, Bajema was
determined to stay in
To-hoku, in the city of
Sendai. That way, she could
prove that she was not just
another person to arrive,
Superscript 19
make promises, and depart
before those promises were
fulfilled. And she also knew,
based on her knowledge
of Japanese culture and
the specific history of the
region, that the next great
medical need would be
psychological care.
The challenge was
addressing those needs
in a way that would reach
the Japanese. Despite
having the highest suicide
rate in the developed
world, cultural norms and
government policy have
discouraged mental health
treatment approaches built
around talk therapy in
favor of approaches that
emphasize pharmaceutical
treatments and institu
tionalization. Japan has
only one psychiatrist for
every ten thousand people,
roughly half the ratio of
the United States, and
many Japanese clinics
don’t employ any clinical
counselors. “Japan has
more psychiatric beds per
capita than any country in
the world,” notes Gudwin,
“but it does not have a
tradition of counseling or
talk therapy or anything
like that.”
The Tōhoku gardening project
But Bajema was trained
to look beyond cultural
stereotypes and would
simply not tolerate any
Displaced tsunami
survivors who had
spent months cooped
up in cramped,
temporary shelters
emerged to work
the land. Elderly
survivors who had
been sullen and
withdrawn opened
up to explain the
finer points of
growing daikon
radishes.
mention of Japanese
stoicism. “Because of
working with people like
Carol Gluck and Harry
Harootunian and Marilyn
Ivy, cultural explanations
are anathema to me,”
Bajema says. “I approach
it as, All human beings
are going to have a similar
response to disasters of
this nature. People were
saying, ‘The Japanese are
not going to let you in.’
I said, ‘Oh yeah, they’re
human. It’s emotional.
They cry, too.’”
the elderly, this could be a
real answer.”
To devise an innovative
solution, Bajema did what
any good graduate student
would do—research. She
came across articles on how
horticultural therapy and
gardening programs have
aided in the rehabilitation
of violent criminals
and veterans suffering
from PTSD. Intrigued,
she searched for more
information on gardening
programs and came across
a study conducted after
an earthquake in Niigata,
Japan. Researchers had built
a garden in a temporary
community of elderly
evacuees. The residents
of the community with a
garden, when compared
with a control group, had
lower blood pressure,
lower rates of dementia,
and less severe arthritis.
“So I thought, This is
phenomenal,” Bajema says,
“because if it could help on
a psychological well-being
and emotional level, and
also on a physical level for
Bajema’s co-workers
at AmeriCares were
supportive, but skeptical.
They specialized in
disbursing funds to
distribute medicine and
build clinics. They had
never built gardens. They
applied close scrutiny
to the project, in an
attempt to make sure that
Bajema accounted for
every contingency and
the project succeeded.
“My boss and immediate
team never said no, but I
was getting a lot of pushback from them,” Bajema
recalls. “Then I had a
meeting in December of
2011 with the CEO, with
a menu of all the things
that I wanted to do. He
immediately looked at
the garden on the list and
went, ‘That makes sense.’”
Her solution was culturally
specific. The residents of
rural To-hoku had always
gardened, and Bajema and
her partners planned the
gardens in a way that would
help the residents of To-hoku
maintain their ties to the
land where they had lived
for generations. Many of the
gardens were even built on
the foundations of homes
that had been swept away by
the tsunami.
There was no road map for
building these gardens, nor
would her supervisors be
able to tell her what needed
to be done. It was not a
nine-to-five job. But as a
graduate student Bajema
had faced those conditions
before: it was not unlike the
beginning of dissertation
research.
Undaunted, Bajema got
to work. Partnering with
a local organization,
Peace Boat, Bajema
disbursed more than
one hundred thousand
dollars to build over a
hundred community
gardens. Displaced
tsunami survivors who
had spent months cooped
up in cramped, temporary
shelters emerged to work
the land. Elderly survivors
who had been sullen and
withdrawn opened up to
explain the finer points of
growing daikon radishes.
All of the participants who
were monitored showed a
marked decrease in blood
pressure. Altogether,
AmeriCares estimates that
this program has brought
over five thousand
survivors together and out
of their homes to talk and
to exercise.
But one data point in
particular demonstrates the
remarkable success of the
gardening program.
“Ramona,” Gudwin asserts,
“has been the recipient of
more hugs than anyone else
in the entire organization.”
***
This year marked the
second anniversary of the
20 Superscript
To-hoku earthquake, and
Bajema and AmeriCares
still have much to do.
Bajema is overseeing
the reconstruction of
group homes and not-forprofit workshops for the
disabled. She is managing
what AmeriCares calls
“community-directed
initiatives.” These are
tiny grants for grassroots
organizations, supporting
cultural activities vital to
community well-being,
such as traditional summer
festivals and storage sheds
for taiko drums.
And a final frontier for
To-hoku relief beckons:
the areas of Fukushima
prefecture affected by the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
crisis. Bajema had always
wanted to do a garden
project in Fukushima,
where obesity rates for
residents afraid to leave
their homes are on the
rise, but was stymied by
the radiation in the soil.
This year, she finally plans
to expand the program to
Fukushima, bringing in soil
from outside and placing
it in raised beds. “Usually,
people hear about these
programs through word of
mouth. But we’ve already
had eleven people sign
up just by doing a mailer,
which is really amazing,”
Bajema notes.
At the same time, Bajema
never lost sight of her
academic goals. Working
nights in Sendai, at the
height of the earthquake
recovery efforts, she
Superscript 21
finished her dissertation on
time, flying to New York to
defend it in December 2011.
“She didn’t put it off! God
bless her, she finished and
she defended, and then she
took the manuscript back
and completed the deposit
copy with all the footnotes
and deposited and received
her degree,” Gluck says.
“That’s Ramona!”
Bajema hopes eventually
to be able to write a history
of the earthquake, the
tsunami, and the recovery
efforts, but believes that she
will need time and distance.
“Once she leaves To-hoku, I
think she will have a story
to tell,” Gluck says. “The
story she will tell will not
be a story that begins on
3/11. As a historian, she’ll
have a longer background to
the story and a wider angle
of vision on the present
response.”
And, she asserts, it is a
detour that any Columbia
student is capable
of taking. “The NPO
[nonprofit organization]
field needs people who
have analytical skills to
be able to question how
successful X, Y, or Z
is. The work demands
tremendous physical and
emotional fortitude, and
I think that analytical
thinkers, people who are
doing the humanities have
that,” Bajema says. “You
can work for an NPO. We
have something to offer.”
For now, Bajema must
cultivate her gardens, which
means delaying her return
to academia. She wants
to insure the projects she
started will survive when
she leaves. She also wants
to write a report on her
gardening programs, to help
organizations replicate these
efforts in other disasteraffected areas.
But she does not regret
this academic detour at all.
“Based on the results I’ve
seen here, I’ve never been
as proud of anything I’ve
done in my life,” Bajema
says.
By Andrew Ng
Iconic image of Earth rising over
the moon, taken in 1968
22 Superscript
I
f you asked someone
ten years ago what
“astrobiology” is,
you may have gotten
a blank stare in return.
As a scientific pursuit,
astrobiology is relatively
new. But the underlying
disciplines—astronomy,
physics, chemistry, biology,
geology—have been around
for ages, and the underlying
question—“Are we
alone?”—is an ancient one.
Simply put, astrobiology
is the study of life in
the universe. This study
includes life on Earth, but
with our knowledge of
Earth’s processes as simply
one data set of hopefully
many to come.
“For a long time, astrobiology
was seen as science without
data,” says Caleb Scharf,
director of the Columbia
Astrobiology Center. “But
then the game changed,
and suddenly we were in a
position to study it.”
The turning point that
Scharf refers to was the
surge in the detection of
“exoplanets”—planets that
orbit other stars—over the
past decade or so. The first
confirmed discovery of a
planet around a sunlike
star happened in 1995, and
the rate of discovery has
Superscript 23
been almost exponential
ever since. Today nearly
a thousand confirmed
exoplanets and a few
thousand more candidates
have been detected, thanks
to both ground-based and
space-based telescopes.
Astronomers use several
techniques to infer the
presence of exoplanets, but
the most common involve
looking for tiny changes in
a star’s velocity due to the
gravitational influence of
planets and looking for the
dimming of a star’s light as a
planet crosses in front of it.
While these exoplanet
discoveries were surging,
a more gradual realization
had been building in the
field of microbiology.
Scientists were discovering
bacteria living in places
on Earth that were once
thought inhospitable—
from hot springs and
deep-sea vents to deep
within the crust and even
up in the clouds. If life on
Earth could thrive in these
extreme locales, then the
prospect of life on other
worlds was becoming more
and more enticing.
So in 2005 the time was
ripe for Scharf, who had
spent the previous five
years at Columbia as a
research scientist studying
galaxy clusters and testing
cosmological models, to
contact fellow scientists at
Columbia and two other
institutions on Manhattan’s
Upper West Side—the
NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies (GISS) and
the American Museum of
Natural History (AMNH)—
to gauge their feelings on
astrobiology.
“Our initial workshops
were like confessionals,”
Scharf says, “where people
from different disciplines
would raise their hands and
admit, ‘Yes, I’m interested
in astrobiology.’ We quickly
realized that many of us
were already doing research
that could be broadened into
addressing the question of
life in the universe.”
From these workshops and
meetings, the Columbia
Astrobiology Center was
born—not a physical
center per se, but a virtual
collective of scientists
with a common interest
in the topic. The center
includes scientists from the
Departments of Astronomy,
Physics, and Psychology,
Columbia’s Astrophysics
Laboratory, the LamontDoherty Earth Observatory,
the Earth Institute, and
Barnard College. Scientists
from GISS and AMNH are
also part of the collective.
As the list of departments
and organizations indicates,
astrobiology is not one
singular discipline but an
inherently interdisciplinary
pursuit with many lines of
inquiry.
Daniel Wolf Savin, senior
research scientist in the
Astrophysics Laboratory,
represents one of the
biggest successes of a
member of the center. Savin
has built an experimental
apparatus at Columbia’s
Nevis Laboratories in
Irvington, New York, to
investigate how carbon
combines with hydrogen
under the conditions
that one would find in
interstellar space. Organic
molecules like these seed
the universe with the
ingredients for life, and
thus are of great interest
to astrobiologists. While
similar experiments have
faced technical challenges
in the past, Savin’s team
is using their unique
instrument to better control
the temperatures and
energies of the chemical
reactions and circumvent
these past limits.
Another project on the
horizon involves “Model E,”
which is a state-of-the-art
climate model for the
Four exoplanets (circled) orbiting star HR 8799
with the starlight suppressed
To conduct their observations, the
team points the telescope at a given
star and employs a high-tech suite
of instrumentation and software to
block out its light, allowing them to
find planets normally overwhelmed
by the light of the star. Incredibly,
their technique has allowed them to
find planets that are up to one million
times fainter than the star itself.
Earth developed by GISS
scientists. Scharf and GISS
colleagues are hoping
to kick-start a five-year
project to make Model E
applicable to any planet
or moon. With millions
of lines of computer code
and parameters that are
currently fine-tuned for
Earth, generalizing the
model is not a trivial
endeavor. But armed
with such a model, which
would first be calibrated by
studying the environmental
history of familiar worlds
such as Mars, Venus, and
Titan, scientists would
be able to characterize
the climate systems of
exoplanets and determine
their suitability for life.
The allure of astrobiology
is pulling in the next
generation of scientists as
well. Aaron Veicht, M.A.
’10, M.Phil. ’11, Physics,
started his doctoral
program at Columbia with
a research focus on nuclear
physics and no astronomy
background whatsoever.
But he eventually switched
to exoplanetary research
after a series of events led
him to discover his true
scientific passion.
Around 2009 Veicht began
tinkering with graphics
processing units, or GPUs,
purely as a hobby. GPUs
were invented to handle
complex computer visuals,
like those found in video
games and other graphicsheavy programs. However,
with their ability to process
massive amounts of data in
parallel, GPUs have found
an alter ego as inexpensive
supercomputers, with
applications ranging from
quantum mechanics to
molecular modeling.
For his own enjoyment,
Veicht created a program
that modeled physical
systems forward in time,
given a set of initial
parameters. To test the
program, he decided to
input something he thought
had a known answer—how
the orbits of planets around
stars evolve over millions
of years. He contacted
Caleb Scharf, who promptly
informed him that the
problem was, in fact, still
at the core of modern
planetary science.
A year later, Veicht
continued stoking his
burgeoning interest in
astronomy by taking a
seminar on exoplanets at
Columbia. The seminar
revealed to him just how
fertile the field was for new
scientific discoveries.
“It blew my mind,” says
Veicht. “This was a field
in which I thought I could
make a large impact. So I
switched my research focus
to exoplanets. My advisers
at Columbia were very
supportive of my proposal
to change projects and
follow my passion, and
they ensured a smooth
transition.”
With Scharf’s
encouragement, Veicht
joined the lab of Ben
24 Superscript
Oppenheimer, an
astrophysicist at AMNH
and another member
of the Astrobiology
Center. Veicht currently
works on two projects in
Oppenheimer’s lab.
The first is direct imaging
of exoplanets—an extremely
difficult endeavor, given
how much brighter and
larger a star is compared to
its planets. Several times
a year, Oppenheimer’s
team travels to the Palomar
Observatory near San
Diego, California, where the
Hale Telescope resides. To
conduct their observations,
the team points the
telescope at a given star
and employs a high-tech
suite of instrumentation
and software to block out
its light, allowing them
to find planets normally
overwhelmed by the light
of the star. Incredibly, their
technique has allowed
them to find planets that
are up to one million times
fainter than the star itself.
Once they have isolated the
faint light coming off the
planets, they can deduce
the abundance or absence
of chemicals in the planets’
atmospheres by examining
their light spectra—
the unique and telltale
“fingerprints” created by
different chemicals. Earlier
this year Oppenheimer’s
team published a paper
in The Astrophysical
Journal detailing this
“reconnaissance” method
on HR 8799, a star about
128 light-years away with
Superscript 25
four gas giant planets
orbiting it. Although
these planets are probably
inhospitable (they average
1,340 degrees Fahrenheit
with ammonia or methane
atmospheres), the same
techniques can hopefully be
applied to more Earthlike
planets in the future.
In addition to this cuttingedge research, Veicht
continues working on the
project that brought him to
astronomy in the first place:
the modeling of planetary
orbits. Observations of
an exoplanetary system
do not give precise values
for attributes like mass,
location, and orbits of the
planets. Rather, the best
one can do is to infer a
range of possible values. A
computational model can
help winnow down these
possible values by running
simulations on them—those
that result in stable orbits
over the next 10 to 100
million years are considered
more “true,” whereas those
that result in chaos (i.e.,
planets falling into the star,
crashing into one another,
or getting flung out of the
system) are discarded.
Running these simulations
requires substantial
computing power. The
number of simulations
for each planetary system
could be anywhere from
100,000 to 1,000,000,
with more than a thousand
possible systems to model.
The use of GPUs helps
considerably, but Veicht
and his advisers are also
hoping to recruit the
public’s help by starting a
citizen science project that
will allow people to lend
their computers to run
these simulations over the
Internet.
“Today’s graduate students,
like Aaron Veicht, comprise
the generation that will
see the greatest leaps
in astrobiology,” says
Scharf. “If you want to be
a scientist, astrobiology is
an excellent option—there
are so many interesting
things happening in this
field, right now and in the
foreseeable future.”
In addition to promoting
astrobiology within
academic circles, Scharf is
spreading the word among
the general public. He has
written articles and op-eds
for The New Yorker, Wired,
and Nautilus magazines,
as well as The New York
Times. He maintains a blog
on Scientific American’s
website called Life,
Unbounded, which covers
a wide range of spacerelated topics and drew
an audience of more than
350,000 last year. And
in 2014 he will publish
an astrobiology-themed
popular science book
called The Copernicus
Complex.
“Copernicus’ heliocentric
model removed us—
humankind and the
Earth—from the center of
all things, and spurred the
notion that we are not that
special,” Scharf explains.
“But new discoveries in
astrobiology indicate that
the story is not that simple.
As we continue to learn the
details of other planetary
systems, it appears that
our solar system is not
typical. For example, most
exoplanets’ orbits are more
elliptical than those found
in our solar system. Also,
exoplanets ranging between
Earth-sized and Neptunesized are very common, but
our solar system does not
have any of those.”
These discoveries and
more continue to fuel the
interests of scientists in
the Columbia Astrobiology
Center. For Scharf,
astrobiology sits right
alongside evolution
and the Big Bang as
science topics with the
potential for huge impacts
on human culture. If
scientists find an exoplanet
tomorrow with strong and
clear indications of life, the
impact on society would be
as exciting to imagine as
the discovery itself.
“Before 1968, when the
iconic photo of Earth rising
over the moon was released,
many people still didn’t
have a genuine vision that
we lived on a sphere,” says
Scharf. “If just a picture of
our planet can dramatically
shift our thinking, how will
evidence that we are not
alone change our culture? It
would be revolutionary.”
Alumni News | Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
26 Superscript
28 Alumni Profile
30 On the Shelf
34 Dissertations
46 Announcements
49 Helpful Links
Superscript 27
Alumni Profile
Steven G. Mandis
M.A. ’10, Museum Anthropology, M.Phil. ’13, Sociology
Interview by Andrew Ng
You spent twelve years at
Goldman Sachs, left Goldman in 2004 to cofound
a multi-billion dollar asset
management firm, then
served as senior adviser to
McKinsey & Company and
worked at Citigroup. After
sixteen years on Wall Street,
what motivated you to enroll
in Columbia as a student in
2008?
What drew me back to academia was the desire to satisfy my intellectual curiosity,
to ask questions, and think
about how to answer them.
This emphasis on education
came from my parents, who
are Greek immigrants. They
would say, “People can take
a lot of things away from you
in life, but no one can take
away your education.”
I started looking into classes
at Columbia’s School of Continuing Education to figure
out what I was interested
in and to prove myself as a
student, after being away for
so many years. I ended up
taking classes in anthropology and sociology.
What motivated you to enter
a doctoral program at GSAS?
At first I wasn’t sure whether to apply to the Business
School or GSAS, but ultimately, I decided on GSAS
because I already had a
business background, and
I thought GSAS would give
me a broader perspective.
When I told my friends I
wanted to study sociology
and anthropology, they said,
“What?!” The teachers also
wondered how seriously I
would take classes. But in
the end I finished with a 4.0
GPA!
How did you settle upon
Goldman Sachs as the subject of your dissertation?
I took a class in economic sociology and wrote a
paper related to Wall Street.
Afterward, my professor,
David Stark, pointed out that
many sociologists don’t have
my level of expertise in the
banking industry, and that
I could make an original
contribution to the field in
that area. At the same time,
because of the financial
crisis, people were starting
to raise questions about Wall
Street and Goldman Sachs’
culture. When I saw other
Goldman alumni, we’d talk
about whether the culture
had changed. Everyone had
an opinion, but I realized no
one had a framework or had
researched it in an academic
way.
Your dissertation examines
the “organizational drift” of
Goldman Sachs—its movement away from its founding
principles over time. Can
you summarize your application of sociological theory to
explain this evolution?
I drew from the framework
of Diane Vaughan, a sociology professor at Columbia
who studied the Challenger
space shuttle disaster. The
official investigation into
Challenger concluded that
parts of the rocket called
“O-rings” were the problem—they were off by a
tiny fraction, and that’s
why the shuttle blew up.
However, Vaughan went
back and asked, “Why were
the O-rings off in the first
place?” She concluded that
a variety of pressures had
caused the scientists to take
incremental risks, and that
these risks had added up to
an organizational failure.
Similarly, in my dissertation, I look at the various
organizational, competitive,
and regulatory pressures at
Goldman Sachs over time to
explain its evolution, adding
an emphasis of technological
pressure to the framework
that Vaughan established.
And I use the idea of “organizational drift” to describe
the company’s incremental
departure from its founding principles. People don’t
notice organizational drift,
because it happens so
slowly that they can’t see it.
28 Superscript
Vaughan discussed a similar
idea in her work.
In October, you published a
book called What Happened
to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational
Drift and Its Unintentional
Consequences. How did your
dissertation turn into this
book?
At some point, I came in
contact with a literary agent,
Susan Rabiner, who specializes in academic topics that
Superscript 29
have the potential to cross
over to mass audiences. I
met with her about my dissertation, and she said, “This
is not a book about Goldman
Sachs. It’s a book about
organizations, and it would
appeal to leaders of organizations. The best publisher
to approach would be the
Harvard Business Review
Press.” By that time I had
600 pages worth of text and
notes, and hundreds of pages
of footnotes and appendices.
My editor at the Harvard
Business Review Press, Tim
Sullivan, totally understood
the message and approach.
He helped me focus and
turn it into a story that both
leaders of organizations and
academics could enjoy. It
was very hard to write a book
that satisfied both.
This interview has been condensed and edited; read the
full interview on the GSAS
website.
On the Shelf
Fa c u lt y P u b l i c at i o n s
Lessons in Secular Criticism
Stathis Gourgouris, Classics
E
ssays by Stathis Gourgouris present a new theory
of radical democracy and examine the success of
efforts to separate politics from religion.
Early China: A Social and Cultural History
Li Feng, East Asian Languages and Cultures
L
i Feng draws on recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries to provide an overview of early
Chinese civilization, from the beginning of human
history in China to 220 C.E.
Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created
Jobs, Challenge, and Change
Edmund Phelps, Economics
N
obel laureate Edmund Phelps argues that the
rise in prosperity in many nations between the
1820s and 1960s was fueled by widespread
innovation, which is now under threat.
Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II
Farah Griffin, English and Comparative Literature
F
arah Griffin gives a rich account of three black
female artists and the strides they made for social
justice during World War II, laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic
Novel, and Optical Media
Stefan Andriopoulos, Germanic Languages
D
rawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Stefan Andriopoulos traces connections
between Kant and phantasmagoria, the Gothic
novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the
invention of television.
30 Superscript
Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World,
1950–1992
Charles K. Armstrong, History
C
harles K. Armstrong explores the motivations,
processes, and effects of North Korea’s foreign
relations during the Cold War era.
The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon
to Richter
Deborah R. Coen, History
D
eborah R. Coen explores how the seismic
accounts of Darwin, Twain, Dickens, and other
citizen-observers comprise a natural experiment
at the nexus of the physical and human sciences.
Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children
David Rosner, History and Sociomedical Sciences
W
ith coauthor Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner
chronicles the contentious political and ethical
issues surrounding lead poisoning in the
twentieth century and the efforts to protect American
children.
Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt
Macalester Bell, Philosophy
M
acalester Bell offers a far-ranging account of
the nature of contempt and its use and abuse.
The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism
Carol Rovane, Philosophy
C
arol Rovane explicates a notion of relativism that
has a consistent logical, metaphysical, and practical significance, and how relativism influences the
moral choices we make.
Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence
Edward Tory Higgins, Psychology
W
ith coauthor Heidi Grant Halvorson, E. Tory
Higgins delves into two different types of motivation that drive human behavior: promotion-focused and prevention-focused.
Superscript 31
On the Shelf
ALU M NI P u b l i c a t i o n s
Goodbye, Brazil: Émigrés from the Land of Soccer
and Samba
Maxine L. Margolis, Ph.D. ’70, Anthropology
M
axine L. Margolis offers a global perspective on the relatively recent phenomenon of Brazilian emigration, asking
who the émigrés are, why they left home, how they
traveled, and how their native and host countries
responded.
The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat: Poems
Stephen Massimilla, ’96SOA, M.A. ’98, M.Phil.
’01, Ph.D. ’05, English and Comparative Literature
S
tephen Massimilla’s new poetry collection
treats “the loss, beauty, and suffering that
define our common humanity.”
El Documental Cinematográfico y Televisivo Contemporáneo
Isabel M. Estrada, M.Phil. ’97, Ph.D. ’99, Latin
American and Iberian Cultures
T
his first book by Isabel M. Estrada examines
how mass media, specifically film and television documentaries, played a role in the
“recovery of memory” process of the Spanish Civil
War and the ensuing Franco dictatorship.
Roll with It: Brass Bands on the Streets of New
Orleans
Matthew Sakakeeny, Ph.D. ’08, Music
M
atthew Sakakeeny’s book, based on his
dissertation, follows the lives of brass
band musicians in New Orleans before
and after Hurricane Katrina.
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled
History of America’s Universities
Craig Steven Wilder, M.A. ’89, M.Phil. ’93, Ph.D.
’94, History
C
raig Steven Wilder lays bare uncomfortable
truths about race, slavery, and the American
academy, revealing how the slave economy
and higher education grew up together.
32 Superscript
If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic
Michael Shenefelt, Ph.D. ’90, Philosophy
W
ith coauthor Heidi White, Michael
Shenefelt examines the initial formulation
of logical principles 2,300 years ago and
subsequent discoveries, all situated within their social
and historical contexts.
High-pT Physics in the Heavy Ion Era
Michael J. Tannenbaum, M.A. ’60, Ph.D. ’65, Physics
W
ith coauthor Jan Rak, Michael J. Tannenbaum gives an experiment-oriented
overview of large transverse momentum
particle physics.
Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide
Lara J. Nettelfield, M.A. ’99, M.Phil. ’01, Ph.D. ’06,
Political Science
D
rawing on more than a decade of fieldwork,
Lara J. Nettelfield and coauthor Sarah Wagner trace the impact of the fall of the United
Nations “safe area” of Srebrenica during the Bosnian
war.
Superscript 33
The Good Man: The Civil War’s “Christian General”
and His Fight for Racial Equality
Gordon L. Weil, Ph.D. ’61, Public Law and Government
G
ordon L. Weil examines the life of General
Oliver Otis Howard, a Union officer during
the Civil War, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and one of
the founders of Howard University (which bears his
name).
The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder,
and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards
Ava Chamberlain, M.A. ’80, M.Phil. ’85, Ph.D. ’90,
Religion
A
va Chamberlain unearths the tragic story of
Elizabeth Tuttle, the “crazy grandmother” of
the eighteenth-century American theologian
Jonathan Edwards.
Dissertations
Deposited
Recently
change in Guyana. Sponsor: David
Scott.
Darryl Alan Wilkinson. Politics,
infrastructure, and nonhuman
subjects: The Inka occupation of
the Amaybamba cloud forests.
Sponsor: Terence N. D’Altroy.
Anthropology
Heather Noelle Atherton. Community identity in the Spanish
colonial borderlands: San José de
las Huertas, New Mexico. Sponsor:
Nan A. Rothschild.
Anuj Bhuwania. Competing populisms: Public interest litigation
and political society in post-Emergency India. Sponsor: Brinkley M.
Messick.
Yogesh Chandrani. Legacies of colonial history: Region, religion, and
violence in postcolonial Gujarat.
Sponsor: Nicholas B. Dirks.
Krista M. Hegburg. Aftermath: Accounting for the Holocaust in the
Czech Republic. Sponsor: Rosalind
C. Morris.
Thushara Naresh S. Hewage.
Genealogies of the postcolonial
state: Insurgency, emergency, and
democracy in Sri Lanka. Sponsor:
David Scott.
Mythri Jegathesan. Bargaining
in a labor regime: Plantation life
and the politics of development in
Sri Lanka. Sponsor: E. Valentine
Daniel.
Etsko Kasai. Everyday fascism of
contemporary Japan. Sponsor:
Marilyn J. Ivy.
Munira Khayyat. A landscape of
war: On the nature of conflict in
south Lebanon. Sponsor: Brinkley
M. Messick.
Jun Mizukawa. The crisis of
language in contemporary Japan:
Reading, writing, and new technology. Sponsor: Marilyn J. Ivy.
Özge Serin. Writing of death:
Ethics and politics of the death fast
in Turkey. Sponsor: Rosalind C.
Morris.
Anand Vivek Taneja. Nature, history, and the sacred in the medieval
ruins of Delhi. Sponsor: Partha
Chatterjee.
Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn. Between
a promise and a trench: Citizenship, vulnerability, and climate
APAM: Applied Mathematics
David Goluskin. Zonal flow driven
by convection, and convection driven by internal heating. Sponsors:
David E. Keyes and Edward A.
Spiegel.
Clara Orbe. Tracer-independent
approaches to stratosphere-troposphere exchange and tropospheric
air-mass composition. Sponsor:
Lorenzo M. Polvani.
Neil Francis Tandon. What is
driving changes in the tropospheric circulation? New insights
from simplified models. Sponsor:
Lorenzo M. Polvani.
Ningyao Zhang. Homogenization
theory for partial differential equations with large, random potential.
Sponsor: Guillaume Bal.
Xiang Zheng. Large-scale simulation of spinodal decomposition.
Sponsor: David E. Keyes.
APAM: Applied Physics
Sriharsha Veerabhadraiah Aradhya. Interplay between mechanics,
electronics, and energetics in
atomic-scale junctions. Sponsor:
Latha Venkataraman.
Matthew Stiles Davis. Pressure
profiles of plasmas confined in the
field of a dipole magnet. Sponsor:
Michael E. Mauel.
Jonathan R. Widawsky. Probing
electronic and thermoelectric properties of single-molecule junctions.
Sponsor: Latha Venkataraman.
Matthew Wales Worstell. Symmetry breaking and the inverse energy
cascade in a plasma. Sponsor:
Michael E. Mauel.
APAM: Materials Science and
Engineering
Theodore Jervey Kramer. Functional nanocomposites formed
by two-step back-filling methods.
Sponsor: Irving P. Herman.
Architecture
Cesare Birignani. The police and
the city: Paris, 1660–1750. Sponsor: Mary McLeod.
Art History and Archaeology
Kim Benzel. Pu-abi’s adornment
for the afterlife: Materials and
technologies of jewelry at Ur in
Mesopotamia. Sponsor: Zainab
Bahrani.
Diana M. Bush. The dialectical
object: John Heartfield, 1915–1933.
Sponsor: Alexander Alberro.
Kathryn Josette Chiong. Words
matter: The work of Lawrence
Weiner. Sponsor: Rosalind Krauss.
Delhi, 1748–1857. Sponsor: Vidya
Dehejia.
Astronomy
Maureen Elizabeth Teyssier.
Extreme stellar populations in the
universe: Backsplash dwarf galaxies and wandering stars. Sponsor:
Kathryn V. Johnston.
Biochemistry and Molecular
Biophysics
Kate Ann Stafford. Thermal adaptation of conformational dynamics in ribonuclease H. Sponsor:
Arthur G. Palmer III.
Biological Sciences
Susanna Dora Lewis Cole. Space
into time: English canals and English landscape painting, 1760–
1835. Sponsor: Jonathan Crary.
Sarah Rose Alaei. C-terminal
lysines modulate Connexin32
turnover and its ability to suppress
growth of Neuro-2a cell cultures.
Sponsor: J. Chloë Bulinski.
Marie-Stéphanie Madeleine
Delamaire. An art of translation:
French prints and American art,
1848–1876. Sponsor: Elizabeth W.
Hutchinson.
Mauricio Alfredo Arias Hernandez. Designer exons inform a biophysical model for exon definition.
Sponsor: Lawrence Chasin.
Anna Ratner Hetherington.
Melancholy figures: From Bosch to
Titian. Sponsor: David Rosand.
Lilyn Daftuar. Rethinking the
role of ribosomal proteins in the
Mdm2-p53 axis. Sponsor: Carol
Prives.
Dipti Sudhir Khera. Picturing
India’s “Land of Kings” between
the Mughal and British empires:
Topographical imaginings of
Udaipur and its environs. Sponsor:
Vidya Dehejia.
Eric Patrick Henckels. Regulation
of matrix metallopeptidase 1 in
breast cancer metastasis. Sponsor:
Ron Prywes.
Emily Katherine Liebert. Roles recast: Eleanor Antin and the 1970s.
Sponsor: Alexander Alberro.
Martina Mims. August Endell’s
construction of feeling. Sponsor:
Barry Bergdoll.
Arianna Lysandra Packard. The
catafalque of Paul V: Architecture,
sculpture, and iconography. Sponsor: David Freedberg.
Nassim Ellie Rossi. Italian Renaissance depictions of the Ottoman
Sultan: Nuances in the function of
early modern Italian portraiture.
Sponsor: David Rosand.
Anna Lise Seastrand. Praise, politics, and language: South Indian
murals, 1500–1800. Sponsor:
Vidya Dehejia.
Yuthika Sharma. Art in between
empires: Visual culture and
artistic knowledge in late Mughal
Jing-Ping Hsin. The functions of
the RNA polymerase II CTD in
transcription and RNA processing.
Sponsor: James L. Manley.
Christine Shaoyu Huang. Structural and functional studies of
biotin-dependent carboxylases.
Sponsor: Liang Tong.
Justine Virginia Kupferman.
Targeting ion channels to distal
dendrites. Sponsor: Steven A.
Siegelbaum.
Thera Cathy Lewis. Serum regulation of inhibitor of DNA binding/
differentiation 1 expression by a
BMP pathway and BMP responsive
element. Sponsor: Ron Prywes.
Bharat Duttala Reddy. Elucidating
the biological function of PWWP-domain containing protein
complexes. Sponsor: Songtao Jia.
Ambar Asghar Salam. HDAC6
activity is required for efficient
34 Superscript
polarization and intracellular transport of organelles in directionally
migrating cells. Sponsor: J. Chloë
Bulinski.
Andrew J. Washkowitz. The role of
Mga in the survival of pluripotent
cells during peri-implantation
development. Sponsor: Virginia E.
Papaioannou.
Sarah Jane Weil. Novel regulatory mechanisms of cytoplasmic
dynein: A role for the complex
base. Sponsor: Richard Vallee.
Biomedical Engineering
Keenan Tali Bashour. Spatial dynamics and the mechanoresponse
in CD4+ T cell activation. Sponsor:
Lance C. Kam.
Ouri Cohen. In vivo three-dimensional proton Hadamard spectroscopic imaging in the human
brain. Sponsor: Andrew F. Laine.
Lauren E. Grosberg. Development
and applications of high-speed and
hyperspectral nonlinear microscopy. Sponsor: Elizabeth M. C.
Hillman.
Hamed Mojahed. Sequence development and expansion of zero
J-modulation echo-planar chemical
shift imaging in three dimensions
(3D ZJ-EPSI). Sponsor: Andrew F.
Laine.
Hesam Parsa. Leveraging microtechnology to study multicellular
microvascular systems and macromolecular interaction. Sponsor:
Samuel K. Sia.
Supansa Yodmuang. Preconditioning cells for cartilage tissue
engineering: Influences of silk
material properties and hypoxia on
chondrogenesis. Sponsor: Gordana
Vunjak-Novakovic.
Biomedical Informatics
Bo-Juen Chen. Personalized medicine: Studies of pharmacogenomics in yeast and cancer. Sponsor:
Dana Pe’er.
Biostatistics
Adam J. Ciarleglio. On wavelet-based procedures for scalar-on-function regression. Sponsor: R. Todd Ogden.
Superscript 35
Yi Wang. Sample size calculation
based on the semiparametric analysis of short-term and long-term
hazard ratios. Sponsor: Zhezhen
Jin.
Business
Stephen A. Atlas. Essays on decisions involving recurring financial events. Sponsors: Daniel M.
Bartels and Eric Johnson.
Santiago Román Balseiro. Competition and yield optimization in ad
exchanges. Sponsor: Omar Besbes.
Shinjinee Chattopadhyay. Essays
on the economics of entrepreneurship. Sponsor: Raymond J.
Fisman.
Yang Chen. Essays on institutional
investors. Sponsor: Wei Jiang.
Juanita Gonzalez Uribe. Venture
capital and innovation. Sponsor:
Morten Sorensen.
Jon Nathan Kerr. The real effects
of opacity: Evidence from tax avoidance. Sponsor: Trevor S. Harris.
Russell Paul Lemler. Rethinking
organizational leader identity
development: A social network and
ethnographic approach. Sponsor:
Jerry W. Kim.
pricing systems and network models. Sponsor: Robert L. Phillips.
Liad Weiss. Egocentric categorization: Self as a reference category in
product judgment and consumer
choice. Sponsor: Gita V. Johar.
Andy J. Yap. How power and powerlessness corrupt. Sponsors: E.
Tory Higgins and Dana Carney.
Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Joseph Minhow Chan. Network
and algebraic topology of influenza
evolution. Sponsor: Raul Rabadan.
Eileen M. Guilfoyle. Stressed astrocytes: Insights on the pathology of
Alexander disease. Sponsor: James
E. Goldman.
Benjamin David Hopkins. PTENlong, a translational variant of the
tumor suppressor PTEN. Sponsor:
Ramon E. Parsons.
Shahrnaz Kemal. Distinct roles for
dynein regulatory proteins NudE
and NudEL in brain development.
Sponsor: Richard Vallee.
Natalie Maria Kofler. Notch
deficiency causes arteriovenous
malformations and altered pericyte
function. Sponsor: Jan Kitajewski.
Meng Li. Changes in the profitability-growth relation and the implications for the accrual anomaly.
Sponsor: Doron Nissim.
Ya-Ting Lei. TRPM5 channels contribute to persistent neural activity
and working memory. Sponsor:
Steven A. Siegelbaum.
Andres Liberman. Essays in empirical corporate finance. Sponsor:
Wei Jiang.
Darrick Kong Li. Novel RNA targets of the spinal muscular atrophy
protein. Sponsor: Livio Pellizzoni.
Yina Lu. Data-driven system
design in service operations. Sponsor: Marcelo Olivares.
Colin James Palmer. The transcription factor Zfx is required for
tumorigenesis caused by Hedgehog pathway activation. Sponsor:
Boris Reizis.
Shira Mor. Cultural metacognitive
processes: Psychological mechanisms promoting intercultural
effectiveness. Sponsor: Michael W.
Morris.
Alicja K. Reuben. Essays on the
strategic discretion of prosecutors
in the legal system. Sponsor: Bruce
Kogut.
Assaf Aharon Shtauber. Essays in
financial economics. Sponsor: Gur
Huberman.
Ahmet Serdar Şimşek. Pricing
decentralization in customized
Germán Alonso Plata Caviedes.
Probabilistic reconstruction and
comparative systems biology of
microbial metabolism. Sponsor:
Dennis Vitkup.
Avraham Joshua Ziskind. Neurons
in cat primary visual cortex cluster
by degree of tuning but not by
absolute spatial phase or temporal
response phase. Sponsor: Kenneth
D. Miller.
Chemical Engineering
Damla Eroglu. Modeling and
characterization of rate phenomena in complex electrochemical
systems: Sodium-metal chloride
batteries and Ni/SiC co-deposition.
Sponsor: Alan C. West.
Luis Andrés Escobar-Ferrand.
Layer by layer, nanoparticle “only”
surface modification of filtration
membranes. Sponsor: Christopher
James Durning.
Min-Hsuan Kuo. Trace gas-induced brine and disordered
interfacial layers on ice. Sponsor:
V. Faye McNeill.
Yanir Maidenberg. Directed
self-assembly of polymer-decorated
nanoparticles. Sponsor: Jeffrey T.
Koberstein.
Chemical Physics
Dahlia Anne Goldfeld. Advances
in structure and small-molecule
docking predictions for crystallized
G-protein-coupled receptors. Sponsor: Richard A. Friesner.
Brenda Marilyn Rubenstein. Novel
quantum Monte Carlo approaches
for quantum liquids. Sponsor:
David Reichman.
Andela Saric. Self-assembly of
nanoparticles on fluid and elastic
membranes. Sponsor: Angelo
Cacciuto.
Carl Alexander Smith. Low-rank
graphical models and Bayesian inference in the statistical analysis of
noisy neural data. Sponsor: Liam
Paninski.
Chemistry
Alexander Buitrago Santanilla.
New approaches toward the asymmetric allylation of the formyl and
imino groups via strained silane
Lewis acids. Sponsor: Tristan H.
Lambert.
Daniel Robert Griffith. Synthetic
studies of the yunnaneic acids.
Sponsor: Scott A. Snyder.
Teresa Lynn Jacques. I: Catalytic
direct C-H arylation of pyrazoles.
II: Toward modulation of neuroplasticity with small molecules.
Sponsor: Dalibor Sames.
Chaoran Jing. Trimethoprim-based
chemical tags for high-resolution
live cell imaging. Sponsor: Virginia
Cornish.
Richard James Karpowicz Jr.
I. Advanced fluorescent false
neurotransmitters for the study of
monoamine transporter activity
and synaptic transmission. II. New
small-molecule inducers of glial
cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) from C6 glioma cells.
Sponsor: Dalibor Sames.
Matthew Douglas Merguerian.
Building a genetic system in yeast
to search for high-affinity proteins
in sequence space. Sponsor: Virginia Cornish.
Jason Gary Polisar. I: The reaction
of carboxylic/thiocarboxylic acids
with isonitriles. II: Ruthenium
hydride ring opening of an azetidinium cation. Sponsor: Jack R.
Norton.
Caitlin Marie Quinn. Solid state
NMR relaxation studies of triosephosphate isomerase. Sponsor:
Ann E. McDermott.
Christine Laura Schenck. Using
molecular design to influence intermolecular interactions. Sponsor:
Colin P. Nuckolls.
Danielle Felicia Sedbrook. In pursuit of conjugation in one dimension: Synthetic studies of oligomeric and polymeric organic materials.
Sponsor: Colin P. Nuckolls.
Trevor Charles Sherwood. Cascade
approaches to polycyclic natural products. Sponsor: Scott A.
Snyder.
Jing Zhang. Theoretical study of
electron transport and trapping
in solvated titanium dioxide
nanoparticles. Sponsor: Richard A.
Friesner.
Xinxin Zhu. Novel bio-imaging
techniques based on molecular
switching. Sponsor: Wei Min.
Civil Engineering and Engineering
Mechanics
Mahesh Raju Bailakanavar.
Space-time multiscale-multiphysics homogenization methods for
heterogeneous materials. Sponsor:
Jacob Fish.
Brett Alexander Benowitz. Model-
ing and simulation of random processes and fields in civil engineering and engineering mechanics.
Sponsors: George Deodatis and
Haim Waisman.
Daniel Peter Hochstein. Thermal
conductivity of fiber-reinforced
lightweight cement composites.
Sponsor: Christian Meyer.
YunJi Hwang. Stochastic analysis
of storm-surge-induced infrastructure losses in New York City.
Sponsor: George Deodatis.
Rishee Kumar Jain. Building
eco-informatics: Examining the
dynamics of eco-feedback design
and peer networks to achieve
sustainable reductions in energy
consumption. Sponsor: Patricia J.
Culligan.
Mengyu Lan. Developments in extended finite-element methods for
extraction of strain energy release
rates and computational nanomechanics for SWCNT aggregates.
Sponsor: Haim Waisman.
Po-Hua Lee. Fabrication, characterization, and modeling of functionally graded materials. Sponsor:
Huiming Yin.
Amy Tang. Leveraging policy for
renewable energy development
in industrialized countries and
emerging markets. Sponsor: Patricia J. Culligan.
Xiaoqi Xu. Leveraging human-environment systems in residential
buildings for aggregate energy efficiency and sustainability. Sponsor:
Patricia J. Culligan.
Classical Studies
Todd Alexander Davis. Archery in
Archaic Greece. Sponsor: Richard
A. Billows.
Classics
Evgenia Papathanasopoulou.
Space in Aristophanes: Portraying
the civic and domestic worlds in
Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps.
Sponsor: Helene Foley.
Communications
Katherine Ann Brown. Patterns in
the chaos: News and nationalism
in Afghanistan, America, and Pakistan during wartime, 2010–2012.
Sponsor: Todd Gitlin.
Julia Sonnevend. Global iconic
events: How news stories travel
through time, space, and media.
Sponsor: Michael Schudson.
Computer Science
Hao Dang. Stable and semantic
robotic grasping using tactile feedback. Sponsor: Peter K. Allen.
Michele Merler. Multimodal
indexing of presentation videos.
Sponsor: John R. Kender.
Richard W. Neill. Heterogeneous
cloud systems based on broadband
embedded computing. Sponsor:
Luca Carloni.
Iasonas Petras. Contributions to
information-based complexity and
to quantum computing. Sponsor:
Joseph F. Traub.
Snehit Prabhu. Computational
contributions toward scalable and
efficient genome-wide association
methodology. Sponsor: Itsik Pe’er.
Austin David Reiter. Assistive
visual tools for surgery. Sponsor:
Peter K. Allen.
Paul Etienne Vouga. Discrete
differential geometry of thin materials for computational mechanics.
Sponsor: Eitan Grinspun.
Lauren Gabrielle Wilcox-Patterson.
User interfaces for patient-centered communication of health
status and care progress. Sponsor:
Steven K. Feiner.
John Ruoyu Zhang. Correlating
visual speaker gestures with measures of audience engagement to
aid video browsing. Sponsor: John
R. Kender.
Earth and Environmental
Engineering
John Edward Feighery. A combined field and laboratory investigation into the transport of fecal
indicator microorganisms through
a shallow drinking-water aquifer
in Bangladesh. Sponsor: Kartik
Chandran.
reforming process to produce
hydrogen from sulfur-containing
fuels. Sponsor: Marco J. Castaldi.
Thomas Adrian Socci. A computational model of networked smallscale fuel synthesis demonstrating
greater production flexibility and
specificity. Sponsor: Klaus S.
Lackner.
Jun Wu. Greener surface active
reagents: Structure, property, and
performance relationships. Sponsor: Ponisseril Somasundaran.
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Christopher Tyler Hayes. Marine
thorium and protactinium distributions: Tools for past and present
chemical flux. Sponsor: Robert F.
Anderson.
Milena Marjanović. Signatures of
present and past melt distribution
at fast and intermediate spreading
centers. Sponsor: Suzanne M.
Carbotte.
Carlos Daniel Ruiz Carrascal.
Adaptation strategies to climate
change in the tropics: Analysis of
two multifactorial systems. Sponsor: Mark A. Cane.
East Asian Languages and
Cultures
David Carl Atherton. Valences of
vengeance: The moral imagination
of early modern Japanese vendetta
fiction. Sponsor: Haruo Shirane.
BuYun Chen. Dressing for the
times: Fashion in Tang dynasty
China, 618–907. Sponsor: Dorothy
Yin-Yee Ko.
Jennifer Lindsay Guest. Primers, commentaries, and kanbun
literacy in Japanese literary culture,
950–1250 CE. Sponsors: Haruo
Shirane and David Barnett Lurie.
Sarah Elizabeth Kile. Toward an
extraordinary everyday: Li Yu’s
(1611–1680) vision, writing, and
practice. Sponsor: Wei Shang.
Naomi Beth Klinghoffer. Utilization of char from biomass gasification in catalytic applications.
Sponsor: Marco J. Castaldi.
Michael Barrett McCarty. Divided
loyalties and shifting perceptions:
The Jo-kyu-ū disturbance and courtier-warrior relations in medieval
Japan. Sponsor: David Barnett
Lurie.
Amanda Elizabeth Simson. Developing an energy-efficient steam
Gregory Magai Patterson. Elegies
for empire: The poetics of memory
36 Superscript
in the late work of Du Fu (712–
770). Sponsor: Wendy Swartz.
economy of south Asia. Sponsor:
Suresh Naidu.
Gian-Piero Persiani. Waka after
the Kokinshu: Anatomy of a cultural phenomenon. Sponsor: Haruo
Shirane.
Alejo Eduardo Czerwonko Pupi.
Essays in alternative financial services. Sponsor: Katherine Ho.
Minna Wu. On the periphery of a
great “empire”: Secondary formation of states and their material
basis in the Shandong peninsula
during the late Bronze Age, ca.
1000–500 B.C.E. Sponsor: Feng
Li.
Sarena Faith Goodman. Essays on
human capital investment. Sponsor: Brendan O’Flaherty.
Yun Kyung Kim. Essays on corporate cash holdings and business groups. Sponsor: Brendan
O’Flaherty.
Christina Song Me Yi. Fissured
languages of empire: Gender,
ethnicity, and literature in Japan
and Korea, 1930s–1950s. Sponsors: Tomi Suzuki and Theodore
Hughes.
Hyuncheol Kim. Three essays on
health economics. Sponsor: Cristian Pop-Eleches.
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Tao Li. Essays in economics and
corporate finance. Sponsor: Patrick
Bolton.
Georgina Davie Cullman. Land
use, diverse values, and conservation practice in the periphery of
Makira Natural Park, northeastern
Madagascar. Sponsors: Eleanor J.
Sterling and Paige West.
Victor Hugo Gutierrez-Velez. Oil
palm expansion and land cover
changes in the Peruvian Amazon:
Implications for forest conservation and fire mitigation. Sponsor:
Ruth DeFries.
Mary A. Heskel. Environmental
controls of foliar respiration in
Arctic tundra plants. Sponsor:
Kevin L. Griffin.
Kari Lynn Schmidt. Spatial and
temporal patterns of genetic
variation in scarlet macaws (Ara
macao): Implications for population management in La Selva
Maya, Central America. Sponsor:
George Amato.
Economics
Ama Baafra Abeberese. Essays on
firm behavior in developing countries. Sponsor: Eric Verhoogen.
Adonis Antoniades. Three essays
in banking. Sponsor: Pierre-André
Chiappori.
Patrick Opoku Asuming. Three
essays on the economics of health
in developing countries. Sponsor:
Cristian Pop-Eleches.
David S. Blakeslee. Three essays
on development and the political
Superscript 37
Youngwoo Koh. Essays on market
design and auction theory. Sponsor: Yeon-Koo Che.
Neil Mehrotra. Essays on macroeconomics and labor markets.
Sponsor: Ricardo Reis.
WooRam Park. Essays on the
returns to higher education. Sponsor: Miguel S. Urquiola.
Petra Maria Charlotte Persson.
Relationships and communication.
Sponsor: Navin Kartik.
Maya Rossin-Slater. Social policy
and family well-being: Essays in
applied microeconomics. Sponsor:
Wojciech Kopczuk.
Dmitriy Sergeyev. Essays on
macroeconomics and international finance. Sponsor: Michael
Woodford.
Anukriti Sharma. Essays on fertility and sex ratios in India. Sponsor:
Cristian Pop-Eleches.
Minkee Song. Essays on large
panel data analysis. Sponsor:
Jushan Bai.
Sébastien Turban. Essays in political economy. Sponsor: Alessandra
Casella.
Zhanna Victorovna Zhanabekova.
Essays in health care and public
economics. Sponsor: Wojciech
Kopczuk.
Electrical Engineering
Courtenay Valentine Cotton. Characterizing audio events for video
soundtrack analysis. Sponsor:
Daniel P. W. Ellis.
Marshall Paige Cox. Processes and
materials for organic photovoltaics.
Sponsor: Ioannis Kymissis.
Zhi-De Deng. Electromagnetic
field modeling of transcranial
electric and magnetic stimulation:
Targeting, individualization, and
safety of convulsive and subconvulsive applications. Sponsor:
Kenneth L. Shepard.
Maria A. Gorlatova. Energy-harvesting networked modes: Measurements, algorithms, and prototyping. Sponsor: Gil Zussman.
Ning Gu. Experimental investigations of the role of proximity approximation in near-field
radiative transfer. Sponsor: Arvind
Narayanaswamy.
Kyung-Wook Hwang. Design of
scalable on-demand video stream-
ing systems leveraging video
viewing patterns. Sponsor: Daniel
Rubenstein.
Alexandros Iliadis. Haplotype
inference through sequential
Monte Carlo. Sponsor: Dimitris
Anastassiou.
Noam Ophir. Silicon photonics
for all-optical processing and
high-bandwidth-density interconnects. Sponsor: Keren Bergman.
John Christopher Sarik. Systems
for pervasive electronics and interfaces. Sponsor: Ioannis Kymissis.
Yevgeniy Slutskiy. Idenification
of dendritic processing in spiking
neural circuits. Sponsor: Aurel A.
Lazar.
Christos Vezyrtzis. Continuous-time and companding digital
signal processors using adaptivity
and asynchronous techniques.
lar complications. Sponsor: Nicole
Schupf.
Magdalena M. Paczkowski. Potentially traumatic event experiences
and health care service use in
Liberia. Sponsor: Sandro Galea.
Lynn Meredith Petukhova. The
genetic architecture of alopecia
areata. Sponsor: Ruth Ottman.
Christian Ricardo Salazar. Allostatic load in relation to periodontal
disease, tooth loss, and mortality:
Findings from the 1914 Glostrup
aging study. Sponsor: Pam R.
Factor-Litvak.
Sponsors: Yannis P. Tsividis and
Steven M. Nowick.
English and Comparative Literature
Jeffrey Michael Brown. To stage a
reading: The actor in British modernism. Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier. Archival
vagabonds: Twentieth-century
American fiction and the archive
in novelistic practice. Sponsor:
Brent Hayes Edwards.
Victoria J. Collis. Anxious records:
Race, imperial belonging, and
the black literary imagination,
1900–1946. Sponsor: Brent Hayes
Edwards.
Joan Virginia Melville. The theatre
of anon: Julia Margaret Cameron,
Virginia Woolf, and the performance of Alfred Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King. Sponsor: Martin
Meisel.
Cathy Kit-Ting Leung. George
Sand and rewriting: The poetics
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interpretation in the Heptaméron
and the Tiers Livre. Sponsor: Pierre
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Anne Claire Diebel. The outward
turn: Personality, blankness, and
allure in American modernism.
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hear: Sound recording and twentieth-century American literature.
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verse. Sponsor: Michael Golston.
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century. Sponsor: Ross Posnock.
Daniel Wright. Bad logic: Reasoning about desire in the Victorian
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Kairos Garcia Llobrera. The predicament of illegality: Undocumented
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French and Romance Philology
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users. Sponsor: David Vlahov.
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Genetics and Development
James Chi-ping Chen. Computational inferences of mutations driving mesenchymal differentiation
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T and Tbx6 during gastrulation
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Papaioannou.
Lisa Michelle Kennedy. Genetic
analysis of novel regulators of neuronal migration in Caenorhabditis
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Germanic Languages
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the animation of things. Sponsor:
Stefan Andriopoulos.
Tyler Robert Whitney. Spaces of
the ear: Literature, media, and
the science of sound, 1870–1930.
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History
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of war: United States soldiers,
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Nina Ansary. Roots of feminist
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Iran. Sponsor: Richard W. Bulliet.
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de Grazia.
Jun Hee Cho. Court in the market:
The “business” of a princely court
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1467–1503. Sponsor: Martha C.
Howell.
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law: Ottoman sovereignty and
the British occupation of Egypt,
1882–1923. Sponsor: Mark A.
Mazower.
Michael W. Heil. Clerics, courts,
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Laura Jeanne Hornbake. Community, place, and cultural battles:
Associational life in central Italy,
1945–1968. Sponsor: Victoria de
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Lawrence William Koblenz. From
sin to science: The cancer revolution of the nineteenth century.
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Jared Braidwood Manasek. Empire
displaced: Ottoman-Habsburg
forced migration and the Near
Eastern crisis, 1875–1878. Sponsor:
Samuel Moyn.
Susan Kay Mays. Rapid advance:
High technology in China in the
global electronic age. Sponsor:
Madeleine Zelin.
Michael James Neuss. Balancing
blood, balancing books: Medicine,
commerce, and the royal court
38 Superscript
in seventeenth-century England.
Sponsor: Matthew L. Jones.
Lucy Victoria Phillips. The strange
commodity of cultural exchange:
Martha Graham and the State
Department on tour, 1955–1987.
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Nathan Laughlin Pilkington. An
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Stephen Jude Sullivan. A social
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reconstruction of North Carolina
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Timothy Ming-Chih Yang. Market,
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Pharmaceuticals in the interwar
years. Sponsor: Carol Gluck.
Ana Cecilia Zenteno Langle. Models for managing surge capacity in
the face of an influenza epidemic.
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Italian
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of community in early modern
Italy. Sponsor: Jo Ann Cavallo.
Nicola Di Nino. Spiritual voices:
Antonia Pozzi, Cristina Campo,
and Margherita Guidacci. Sponsor:
Paolo Valesio.
Akash Kumar. Sì come dice lo
Filosofo: Translating philosophy
in the early Italian lyric. Sponsor:
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manhoods: Authorial masculinities
before the Commedia. Sponsor:
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culture in the Commedia. Sponsor:
IEOR: Industrial Engineering
Ileana Moreno-Viqueira. Invisible
mathematics in Italo Calvino’s
Le città invisibili. Sponsor: Paolo
Valesio.
Rodrigo Arnaldo Carrasco.
Resource-cost-aware scheduling
problems. Sponsors: Clifford S.
Stein and Garud N. Iyengar.
Valentina Nocentini. Il palcoscenico della guerra di Libia: Protagonisti, retorica, nazione, 1911–1912.
Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.
IEOR: Operations Research
Latin American and Iberian
Cultures
Krzysztof Marcin Choromański.
Tournaments with forbidden
substructures and the Erdös-Hajnal conjecture. Sponsor: Maria
Chudnovsky.
Arseniy Kukanov. Stochastic
models of limit order markets.
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Alexander Daniel Michalka.
Cutting planes for convex objective
nonconvex optimization. Sponsor:
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Zhiwei Qin. Optimization algorithms for structured machine
learning and image processing
problems. Sponsor: Donald Goldfarb.
Xingbo Xu. Financial portfolio
risk management: Model risk,
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Sponsor: Paul Glasserman.
Superscript 39
Mauricio Andres Castillo.
Avant-garde and socialist dreamworlds in Latin America: Global
and local designs, 1919–1939.
Sponsor: Carlos J. Alonso.
Mónica de la Torre. Nobody there:
Acousmatics and an alternative
economy of meaning in Latin
American poetry of the 1970s.
Sponsor: Carlos J. Alonso.
Mathematics
Andre Rubens Franca Carneiro. A
geometric construction of a Calabi
quasimorphism on projective
space. Sponsor: Dusa McDuff.
Daniel Disegni. p-adic heights
of Heegner points on Shimura
curves. Sponsor: Shou-Wu Zhang.
Alexander Palen Ellis. Odd sym-
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Andrew Lawrence Fanoe. Properties of Hamiltonian torus actions
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Luis E. Garcia. Singular theta lifts
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Kristen Elyse Hendricks. Localization and Heegaard Floer homology. Sponsor: Robert Lipshitz.
Zachary Alexander Maddock. Del
Pezzo surfaces with irregularity
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theory. Sponsor: Aise Johan de
Jong.
You Qi. Hopfological algebra.
Sponsor: Mikhail Khovanov.
Yu Wang. Local regularity of the
complex Monge-Ampère equation.
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Yanhong Yang. Purity of the stratification by Newton polygons and
Frobenius-periodic vector bundles.
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Fan Zhou. Sato-Tate problem for
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Mechanical Engineering
Edwin S. Ahn. Addressing stability
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and startup of multiple-period
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Shan-Ting Hsu. Effect of laser-induced crystallinity modification on
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Lindsie Adela Goss. Threonine
phosphorylation regulates
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Mowgli Clearwater Holmes. The
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Mazower.
Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi.
Revolutions and Rough Cuts:
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sexuality in contemporary Iran.
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Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Religions
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modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and
Walter Benjamin. Sponsor: Hamid
Dabashi.
Arthur Dale Dudney. A desire for
- A-rzu-’s philology
meaning: Khan-i
and the place of India in the eighteenth-century Persianate world.
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Elaine Marie Fisher. A new public
theology: Sanskrit and society in
seventeenth-century south India.
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Rebecca Gould. The political
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prison poem, 1100–1200. Sponsor:
Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi.
Emil Jose Sandoz-Rosado. The
tribological behavior of graphene
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Elizabeth Eva Johnston. Reading
science in the early writings of
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al-Tahtawi: On beginnings of the
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Nahda. Sponsor: Gil Anidjar.
Gen Satoh. Modification and
integration of shape memory alloys
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dissimilar metal joining. Sponsor:
Y. Lawrence Yao.
Omar Khalid Khalifah. Nasser in
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Noha Radwan.
Yasmine Khayyat. Memory in
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production. Sponsor: Muhsin
Jassim al-Musawi.
Dina A. Ramadan. The aesthetics
of the modern: Art, education, and
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Linda Sayed. Sectarian homes:
The making of Shi’i families and
citizens under the French mandate, 1918–1943. Sponsors: Hamid
Dabashi and Rashid Khalidi.
Kadir Ustun. The new order and
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Music
Beau Denny Bothwell. Song, state,
Sawa: Music and political radio between the United States and Syria.
Sponsor: Ellie M. Hisama.
Mahir Cetiz. Listening experience
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Lamento-Cambiata. Sponsor:
Alfred W. Lerdahl.
Scott Michael Gleason. Princeton
theory’s problematics. Sponsor:
Joseph Dubiel.
Sean Russell Hallowell. The déploration as musical idea. Sponsor:
Giuseppe Gerbino.
Nicholas Andreas Higgins. Confusion in the Karnatic capital: Fusion
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Music (D.M.A.)
Mario Diaz de Leon. Mansion:
Inner cosmologies, thresholds,
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Lewis.
Damon Russell Holzborn.
Building mobile instruments for
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Neurobiology and Behavior
Christine Marie Constantinople.
Subcortical inputs governing
cortical network activity. Sponsor:
Randy M. Bruno.
Elizabeth Erin Crouch. Adult neural stem cells and their perivascular niche. Sponsor: Fiona Doetsch.
Andrew Jacob Pixley Fink. Exploring a behavioral role for presynaptic inhibition at spinal sensory-motor synapses. Sponsor: Thomas M.
Jessell.
Saul Sen Kato. Temporal processing by Caenorhabditis elegans sensory neurons. Sponsor: Laurence F.
Abbott.
Maxim Valerievich Nikitchenko.
Inference of neural connectivity
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panics in New York City. Sponsor:
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Njoki Ng’ang’a. Manager and provider perspectives of the work environment experienced by associate
clinicians, nurses, and midwives
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care in Tanzania. Sponsor: Mary
Woods Byrne.
Annie Jill Rohan. Pain-associated
stressor exposure and cortisol
values at thirty-seven postmenstrual weeks for premature infants in
neonatal intensive care. Sponsor:
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Nutritional and Metabolic Biology
Pia-Kelsey Tiu O’Neill. Longrange synchrony between medial
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Katherine Jean Wert. Gene therapy
provides long-term visual function
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Tsang.
Christopher James Peck. Space
and value in the primate amygdala
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Daniel Salzman.
Pathobiology and Molecular
Medicine
Zev Benjamin Rosen. Dopaminergic control of hippocampal neural
circuitry. Sponsor: Steven A.
Siegelbaum.
Carl Edward Schoonover. Strength
and dendritic organization of
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Brikha Raj Shrestha. Role of
the immunoglobulin superfamily member basigin in sensory
neuron dendrite morphogenesis
in Drosophila. Sponsor: Wesley B.
Grueber.
Qing Wang. Neuronal diversification within the retina: Generation
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Mason.
Gregory Duncan Wayne. Self-modeling neural systems. Sponsor:
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Nursing
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nurses. Sponsor: Elaine L. Larson.
Young Ji Lee. Online health information-seeking behaviors of His-
Rosa Leonora Andrea de Vries. Be
eaten to stay healthy: Elucidating
the mechanisms of mitochondrial quality control by mitophagy.
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Yige Guo. Molecular mechanisms
of mitotic spindle assembly and
accurate chromosome segregation.
Sponsor: Yinghui Mao.
Angela Yuanyuan Jia. The role of
microRNAs in bladder urothelium
development and tumorigenesis.
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Kimberly Shauntae Point du Jour.
The role of phospholipase D1 in
trafficking and processing of amyloid precursor protein. Sponsor:
Gilbert Di Paolo.
Pharmacology and Molecular
Signaling
Matthew Lê-Khắc. Structure-based
design of small molecule inhibitors of HIV-1 entry. Sponsor:
Wayne A. Hendrickson.
Minji Kim Uh. Notch signaling
determines lymphatic cell fate and
regulates sprouting lymphangiogenesis. Sponsor: Jan Kitajewski.
Mi Wang. The role of GM-CSBF/
IL-3/IL-5 receptor common ß β
subunit (CBS) in HSPC expansion,
monocytosis, and atherosclerosis.
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Minerva Yue Wong. Dopamine
modulates corticostriatal inputs
during motor command signaling.
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Philosophy
Adrian Avery Terence Archer. The
rational significance of desire.
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Dehlia Hannah. Performative
experiments: Case studies in the
philosophy of art, science, and
technology. Sponsor: Lydia Goehr.
Harold Barnes Ingram Jr. The possibility of mutual benefit from exchange between the philosophy of
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Chloe Layman. Descartes’s slight
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Patricia Kitcher.
Ariadna Pop. Making sense of
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Physics
Alessandro Buzzatti. Jet quenching in quark gluon plasma: Flavor
tomography at RHIC and LHC by
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Gyulassy.
Yujiao Chen. Charged particle
multiplicity and open heavy flavor
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Gary Chia Li Cheng. Precision
search for muon antineutrino
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Michael H. Shaevitz.
Bin Choi. The light response of
the XENON100 time projection
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xenon scintillation light. Sponsor:
Elena Aprile.
Hung The Dang. The study of
transition metal oxides using
dynamical mean field theory.
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Solomon George Shamsuddin
Osman Endlich. The effective field
theory approach to fluid dynamics.
40 Superscript
Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.
mology. Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.
Mina Fazlollahi. Inferring transcriptional and post-transcriptional
network structure by exploiting
natural sequence variation. Sponsor: Szabolcs Márka.
Xiuyuan Yang. Cosmology with
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Lam Hui and Morgan May.
Ali Masoumi Khalil Abad. Topics
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Weinberg.
Gunes Demet Senturk. Observational properties of gigaelectronvolt-teraelectronvolt blazars and
the study of the teraelectronvolt
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Dustin Henry Urbaniec. A measurement of the jet multiplicity
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Eric Vazquez. Control study of
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Junpu Wang. The effective field
theory approach to fluid dynamics,
modified gravity theories, and cos-
Superscript 41
Hantao Yin. Precision lattice calculation of kaon decays with Möbius
domain wall fermions. Sponsor:
Robert D. Mawhinney.
Tae Hyun Yoon. An atom trap
trace analysis (ATTA) system for
measuring ultra-low contamination by krypton in xenon dark
matter detectors. Sponsor: Tanya
Zelevinsky.
Liuyan Zhao. Chemical vapor
deposition grown pristine and
chemically doped monolayer
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Political Science
Gordon N. Bardos. Ethnoconfessional nationalism in the Balkans:
Analysis, manifestations, and
management. Sponsor: Timothy
M. Frye.
Candace Hortensia Blake. Choosing an international legal regime:
How much justice would you trade
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Nathan.
Simon Collard-Wexler. Understanding resistance to foreign
occupation. Sponsor: Virginia Page
Fortna.
Gustavo de las Casas. Nationalism-as-technology and peace in
Europe, 1815–1914. Sponsor: Jack
L. Snyder.
Felix Hans Gerlsbeck. Experimental democracy: Collective intelligence for a diverse and complex
world. Sponsor: Melissa Schwartzberg.
Suzanne Katzenstein. Why surrender sovereignty? Empowering
nonstate actors to protect the status
quo. Sponsor: Jack L. Snyder.
Katherine Lyn Krimmel. Special
interest partisanship: The transformation of American political
parties. Sponsor: Ira Katznelson.
Virginia Oliveros. A working machine: Patronage jobs and political
services in Argentina. Sponsor:
Maria Victoria Murillo.
Sayres Steven Rudy. Citizen-subjectivity, experiential evaluation,
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Algerian violence and Polish peace
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Mark Kesselman.
Shiau-Chi Shen. Democracy and
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Kaori Shoji. When do party leaders
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John Joseph Sivolella. Do politics
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effects of ideology on civil enforcement at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Oscar M. Torres-Reyna. Origins
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Robert Y. Shapiro.
Andrej Tusicisny. Reciprocity
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Hindu-Muslim cooperation in the
slums of Mumbai. Sponsor: Jack
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Psychology
Eleni Kanellopoulou. Beyond
regret: Cognitive strategies for
healthier eating and weight loss.
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Karen Jeanne Kelly. Metacognition
of emotion recognition. Sponsor:
Janet Metcalfe.
Maria Konnikova. The limits of
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decision-making. Sponsor: Walter
Mischel.
Jennifer Ashley Silvers. Behavioral
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Religion
Susan Patricia Andrews. Representing Mount Wutai’s past: A
study of Chinese and Japanese
miracle tales about the Five Terrace Mountain. Sponsor: Chunfang Yu.
Todd Stephen Berzon. Classifying
Christians: Ethnography, discovery, and the limits of knowledge in
late antiquity. Sponsor: Elizabeth
Castelli.
Joshua Even Eisen. Stammaitic
activity versus Stammaitic chronology: Anonymity’s impact on the
legal narrative of the Babylonian
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Halivni.
Benjamin Yen Yi Fong. The death
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of psychoanalytic drive theory and
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Joseph Mark McClellan. Poisoned
ground: The roots of Eurocentrism: Teleology, hierarchy, and
anthropocentrism. Sponsor: Robert Thurman.
Heather Christine Ohaneson. Free
to play: An analysis in aesthetic,
ethical, and religious movements.
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Gregory Adam Scott. Conversion
by the book: Buddhist print culture
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it work? Sponsor: M. Katherine
Shear.
Frank Griffin Shepard. The
sickness unto life: Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the Christian condition.
Sponsor: Wayne Proudfoot.
Amy Sheila Kapadia. Race-ethnic
discrimination, major depression,
and alcohol use disorder among
U.S.-born and immigrant minorities: Using a nationally representative sample to test the moderating
relationships of cultural and social
factors. Sponsor: Ellen P. Lukens.
Michelle Janet Sorensen. Making the old new again and again:
Legitimation and innovation in the
Tibetan Buddhist Chöd tradition.
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Hamsa Michael Stainton. Poetry
and prayer: Stotras in the religious
and literary history of Kashmir.
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Gheorghita Zugravu. Kassia the
Melodist and the making of a Byzantine hymnographer. Sponsor:
John Anthony McGuckin.
Slavic Languages
Alison Beth Annunziata. Sentimentalism made strange:
Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau.
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Andrew Benjamin Hicks. Negotiating the scope of postwar Stalinist novels. Sponsor: Catharine
Thiemer Nepomnyashchy.
Katharine Mansfield Holt. The rise
of insider iconography: Visions
of Soviet Turkmenia in Russian-language literature and film,
1921–1935. Sponsor: Valentina
Izmirlieva.
Jack Faust Matlock Jr. Leskov into
English: On translating Church
Folks. Sponsor: Catharine Thiemer
Nepomnyashchy.
Steven Brett Shaklan. Doomed to
irony, condemned to laughter: The
structure and function of irony in
the prose fiction of Nikolai Gogol.
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Social Work
Astraea Augsberger. Youth
participation in child welfare decision-making: A focused ethnography. Sponsor: Vicki Lens.
Catherine Elizabeth Carlson. Three
essays analyzing the impact of
community and neighborhood
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Kim Lisa Glickman. Complicated grief treatment: What makes
Daniel Barnett Kaplan. Home
health care for persons with cognitive impairment: The influence of
home health-care agency characteristics on the relationship between
consumer cognitive impairment
status and service volume and cost.
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Leyla Karimli. Financial asset
accumulation by poor adolescents
participating in child savings
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Ssewamala.
Yamile M. Martí Haidar. What is
the experience of foster care mothers? Sponsor: Ellen P. Lukens.
Colleen McGinn. “Every day is difficult for my body and my heart.”
Forced evictions in Phnom Penh,
Cambodia: Women’s narratives
of risk and resilience. Sponsor:
Denise Burnette.
Ofira Schwartz-Soicher. The role
of the neighborhood fast-food
environment in weight status of
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O. Teitler.
Joyce YongHee Shim. Family leave
policy and child health: Evidence
from nineteen OECD countries
from 1969 to 2010. Sponsor: Jane
Waldfogel.
Alex Smolak. Multilevel factors associated with uptake of biomedical
HIV prevention strategies in the
Muslim world: A study of Central
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Nabila El-Bassel.
Gretchen Thomas Sofocleous. Sexual and nonsexual juvenile offenders: Developmental antecedents
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Sociology
Jennifer Mari Kondo. The spatial
and temporal diffusion of museums in New York City, 1910–2010.
Sponsor: Peter S. Bearman.
Joscha Phillipp H. Legewie. School
context, peers, and the educational
achievement of girls and boys.
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Anna Karoline Mitschele. Identity
and social structure in early modern politics: How opportunities
induced witch trials in Scotland,
1563–1736. Sponsor: Peter S.
Bearman.
Daniel Navon. Genomic designation: New kinds of people at the
intersection of genetics, medicine,
and social action. Sponsor: Gil
Eyal.
Emine Öncüler. Globalization
and the networks of expertise in
Turkey: The politics of autism.
Sponsor: Gil Eyal.
Anna Elisabet Zamora. A structural explanation for anti-immigrant
sentiment: Evidence from Belgium
and Spain. Sponsor: Saskia Sassen.
Sociomedical Sciences
Abigail Alice Edgecliffe-Johnson.
Caught pregnant: Wresting and
relinquishing control over motherhood in Manchester, UK. Sponsor:
Carole S. Vance.
Claire Ellen Edington. Beyond
the asylum: Colonial psychiatry
in French Indochina, 1880–1940.
Sponsor: Ronald Bayer.
Brian Burroughs Johnson. The
politics of affliction: Crisis, the
state, and the coloniality of maternal death in Bolivia. Sponsor: Kim
Hopper.
Nora J. Kenworthy. What only
heaven hears: Citizens and the
state in the wake of HIV scaleup in Lesotho. Sponsor: Richard
Parker.
Sahar Sadjadi. Diagnosing the self:
An ethnography of clinical management of gender in children.
Sponsor: Carole S. Vance.
Statistics
Ying Liu. Kernel-based association
measures. Sponsor: Tian Zheng.
Radka Picková. Generalized volatility-stabilized processes. Sponsor:
Ioannis Karatzas.
Bo Qian. Credit risk modeling and
analysis using copula method and
changepoint approach to survival
42 Superscript
data. Sponsor: Zhiliang Ying.
Subhankar Sadhukhan. On optimal arbitrage under constraints.
Sponsor: Ioannis Karatzas.
Gongjun Xu. Statistical inference
for diagnostic classification models. Sponsors: Jingchen Liu.
Junyi Zhang. Estimation and
testing methods for monotone
transformation models. Sponsor:
Zhiliang Ying.
Sustainable Development
Xiaojia Bao. Three papers on
environment-related decision-making and development in China.
Sponsor: Upmanu Lall.
Kyle Chuan Meng. Essays in the
economics and political economy
of climate change. Sponsor: Bernard Salanié.
Nicole Su-lin Ngo. Three essays
on the environment and health in
cities. Sponsor: Douglas Almond.
Teachers College: Anthropology
and Education
Rehenuma Asmi. Language in
the mirror: Language ideologies,
schooling, and Islam in Qatar.
Sponsor: Hervé H. Varenne.
Amina Tawasil. The howzevi
(seminarian) women in Iran: Constituting and reconstituting paths.
Teachers College: Applied Anthropology
Grace L. Chao. Elite status in the
People’s Republic of China: Its formation and maintenance. Sponsor:
Charles C. Harrington.
Carole Lynn Hutchinson. Growing
toward the sun: How the good-food
movement catapulted a small New
York City third-sector organization
into rapid growth, success, and
many challenges. Sponsor: Hervé
H. Varenne.
Katharine Anne Keenan. Imagining a new Belfast: Municipal
parades in urban regeneration.
Kelly M. Nims. The Goffal speaks:
Coloured ideology and the perpetuation of a category in post-colonial
Zimbabwe. Sponsor: George C.
Bond.
Superscript 43
Sayaka Uchikawa. “Less is not
enough”: The dilemma of alternative primary schooling opportunities in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Sponsor: Lambros Comitas.
Ariela Tanya Zycherman. The
changing value of food: Localizing
modernity among the Tsimané Indians of lowland Bolivia. Sponsor:
Lambros Comitas.
Teachers College: Applied Behavioral Analysis
Claire Cahill. Actions and names:
Observing responses and the role
of multiple stimulus control in
incidental language acquisition.
Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.
Lisa Danielle Gold. A functional analysis on the effects of an
observational intervention using
a peer-yoked contingency game
board on the induction of observational performance, observational
acquisition, and naming. Sponsor:
Jessica Singer-Dudek.
Jessica Adele Neu. The effects of
observation of learn units under
reinforcement and correction
conditions on the rate of learning
math algorithms by fifth-grade students. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.
Derek Jacob Shanman. The
relation between components of
naming and conditioned seeing.
Lisa Dawn Tullo. The functional
relation between the onset of
naming and the joining of listener
to untaught speaker responses.
Teachers College: Behavioral
Nutrition
Christie Lauren Custodio-Lumsden. The Diet and Early Childhood
Caries (DECC) study: Validation of
a novel ECC risk-assessment tool
and investigation of diet-related
ECC risk factors. Sponsor: Randi
L. Wolf.
Tomoko Jane Iwaki. Gateway to
green: The family experience of
community-supported agriculture.
Sponsor: Isobel R. Contento.
Elena J. Ladas. Dietary intake
among children with acute
lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
Sponsor: Randi L. Wolf.
Lorraine Nicole Mull. Associations
among measures of weight status,
energy-balance-related behaviors,
and psychosocial mediators in
urban upper-elementary-school
children. Sponsor: Isobel R.
Contento.
Kathleen Joyce Porter. Bringing
nutrition education programs from
outside sources into the classroom:
The experience of New York City
public elementary schools. Sponsor: Isobel R. Contento.
Marguerite Marie Zaharek. Beliefs
about diet and colorectal cancer
prevention in an urban population.
Sponsor: Randi L. Wolf.
Teachers College: Clinical Psychology
Monica A. Brooker. The role of
relatedness and expressive flexibility in the prediction of complicated grief. Sponsor: George A.
Bonanno.
Debaki Chakrabarti. The investigation of helping behavior in the
virtual world. Sponsor: Elizabeth
Midlarsky.
Monica Carmela Ghailian. Association between adversity and
prosociality in children exposed to
trauma in four sites in west Africa.
Sponsor: Lisa J. Miller.
Dmitri Aaron Young. Predictors
of obesity in adults: The roles of
demographic factors, body dissatisfaction, depression, and life stress.
Sponsor: Elizabeth Midlarsky.
Teachers College: Cognitive Studies in Education
James Grant Atkins. The effect of
explicit teaching of comprehension
strategies on reading comprehension in elementary school.
Sponsor: Joanna P. Williams.
Kara Kilmartin Carpenter. Strategy
instruction in early-childhood
math software: Detecting and
teaching single-digit addition
strategies. Sponsor: Herbert P.
Ginsburg.
Shih-Chieh Douglas Huang.
Grounded learning experience:
Helping students learn physics
through visuo-haptic priming
and instruction. Sponsor: John B.
Black.
Na Li. Designing better scaffolding
in teaching complex systems with
graphical simulations. Sponsor:
John B. Black.
Samuel Dov Mandelman. Exploring the Aurora Battery, a gifted
identification tool, in a small sample of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders. Sponsor: John B. Black.
Dana Lenore Pagar. The effects of
a grouping by tens manipulative
on children’s strategy use, base ten
understanding, and mathematical
knowledge. Sponsor: Herbert P.
Ginsburg.
Satyugjit Singh Virk. Learning
STEM through integrative visual
representations. Sponsor: John B.
Black.
Teachers College: Comparative
and International Education
Karen Bryner. Piety projects:
Islamic schools for Indonesia’s urban middle class. Sponsor: Lesley
Bartlett.
Tricia A. Callender. Thank you for
not coming? Polity, politics, and
policy: How education stakeholders interpret post-apartheid
education policies for immigrants
in South Africa—The case of Cape
Town. Sponsor: Hope Jensen
Leichter.
Yue Lin. A sociocultural approach
to the study of motivation and
attitudes toward the learning of
Mandarin Chinese in the United
States: Secondary school students’
perceptions. Sponsor: Maria E.
Torres-Guzman.
Teachers College: Counseling
Psychology
Lauren Marie Appio. Poor and
working-class clients’ social-class-related experiences in
therapy. Sponsor: Laura Smith.
Cristina Dorazio. The impact of
ethnic identity on attitudes toward
counseling for Italian-Americans.
Sponsor: Laura Smith.
Rachel Haeyoung Kim. Differential impact of racial microaggressions on Asian Americans:
Relationship to perpetrator and
power status. Sponsor: Derald
Wing Sue.
Kolone Ruth Leilani Scanlan. The
relationship of cultural affiliation
and cultural congruency to depression, anxiety, and psychological
Berglind Gísladóttir. Social capital
and adolescents’ mathematics
achievement: A comparative
analysis of eight European cities.
Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.
Heather Tiana Gould. Teachers’
conceptions of mathematical modeling. Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.
Andrea Hernandez-Duhon. Exploring algebra-based problem-solving
methods and strategies of Spanish-speaking high school students.
Sponsor: Erica N. Walker.
Björg Jóhannsdóttir. The mathematical content knowledge of
prospective teachers in Iceland.
Sponsor: Erica N. Walker.
Derege Haileselassie Mussa. Tetrahedra and their nets: Mathematical
and pedagogical implications.
Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.
Teachers College: Mathematics
Education
well-being among native Hawaiian
college students. Sponsor: George
V. Gushue.
Teachers College: Economics and
Education
Kristen Marie Bucceri. Are early
commitment programs the answer
to gaps in college enrollment and
outcomes by income? The case of
Oklahoma’s Promise. Sponsor:
Judith Scott-Clayton.
Peter Michael Crosta. Essays
on the economics of education:
Structured transfer programs,
enrollment patterns, and efficiency
at community colleges. Sponsor:
Thomas R. Bailey.
Mehmet Alper Dincer. Education
policy issues in Turkey. Sponsor:
Francisco Rivera-Batiz.
Maria Emma Garcia Garcia. What
we learn in school: Cognitive
and noncognitive skills in the
educational production function.
Sponsor: Henry M. Levin.
Dong Guo. The labor market
returns to school quality in China.
Sponsor: Francisco Rivera-Batiz.
Ji Yun Lee. Private tutoring and
its impact on students’ academic
achievement, formal schooling,
and educational inequality in Ko-
rea. Sponsor: Henry M. Levin.
Olga Rodríguez. Examining the
effects of academic English as
a second language pathways at
the community college: A mixed
methods study. Sponsor: Thomas
R. Bailey.
Steven Troy Simpson. Essays on
the economics of education. Sponsor: Judith Scott-Clayton.
Di Xu. Three essays on the impact
of cost-saving strategies on student
outcomes. Sponsor: Thomas R.
Bailey.
Teachers College: Educational
Leadership
Thomas Eric Haferd. Do I want
to work with you in the future?
Does status moderate the process
by outcome interaction in ongoing
workplace relationships? Sponsor:
Craig Richards.
Teachers College: English
Education
Alison Villanueva. Implementing a
district-wide professional development initiative: What it means to
educate for the twenty-first century. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.
Teachers College: History and
Education
James Edward Alford Jr. For alma
mater: Fighting for change at
historically black colleges and universities. Sponsor: Cally Lyn Waite.
Teachers College: Intellectual
Disabilities and Autism
Young Seh Bae. Word-problem
solving of students with autistic
spectrum disorders and students
with typical development. Sponsor:
Linda Hickson.
Fanglin Jasmine Lai. The relationships between parenting stress,
child characteristics, parenting
self-efficacy, and social support in
parents of children with autism in
Taiwan. Sponsor: Linda Hickson.
Teachers College: Kinesiology
Aimee Marie Layton. Ventilatory
mechanics in endurance athletes.
Sponsor: Carol Ewing Garber.
Teachers College: Mathematics
Education
Megan Elizabeth Gibson. Motivation and study habits of college
calculus students: Does studying
calculus in high school make a difference? Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.
Hasan Shafiq. Examining the
effects of gender, poverty, attendance, and ethnicity on algebra,
geometry, and trigonometry performance in a public high school.
Sponsor: Alexander P. Karp.
Teachers College: Measurement
and Evaluation
Chen-Miao Carol Chen. Examining
uncertainty and misspecification
of attributes in cognitive diagnostic models. Sponsor: Lawrence T.
DeCarlo.
Sunhee Kim. Dealing with sparse
rater scoring of constructed
responses within a framework of a
latent class signal detection model.
Sponsor: Lawrence T. DeCarlo.
Jessica Patricia Marini. An item
response theory approach to causal
inference in the presence of a
pre-intervention assessment. Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.
Kerry McCloskey Matlosz. Bayesian multidimensional scaling for
ordinal preference data. Sponsor:
Matthew S. Johnson.
Jon-Paul Noel Paolino. Penalized
joint maximum likelihood estimation applied to two parameter
logistic item response models.
Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.
44 Superscript
Brian Francis Patterson. Examining the impact of examinee-selected constructed response items in
the context of a hierarchical rater
signal detection model. Sponsor:
Lawrence T. DeCarlo.
nontraumatized controls. Sponsor:
Philip A. Saigh.
Teachers College: Teaching of
Social Studies
Erica Michelle Miller. Peer sexual
harassment in middle school:
Classroom and individual factors.
Sponsor: Marla R. Brassard.
Aviv Abraham Cohen. Conceptions
of citizenship and civic education:
Lessons from three Israeli civics
classrooms. Sponsor: William
Gaudelli.
Kyoko Judy Tanaka. A Bayesian
multidimensional scaling model
for partial rank preference data.
Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.
Teachers College: Science
Education
Rui Xiang. Nonlinear penalized
estimation of true Q-matrix in cognitive diagnostic models. Sponsor:
Matthew S. Johnson.
David Edward Randle. An analysis
of interactions and outcomes associated with an online professional
development course for science
teachers. Sponsor: O. Roger
Anderson.
Teachers College: Physical Disabilities
Jennifer Lynn Montgomery. A
case study of the Preventing Academic Failure Orton-Gillingham
approach with five students who
are deaf or hard of hearing: Using
the mediating tool of cued speech.
Sponsor: Robert E. Kretschmer.
Michelle A. Veyvoda. An investigation into the skill set of speech-language pathologists working with
profoundly deaf children: A study
in context. Sponsor: Robert E.
Kretschmer.
Teachers College: Politics and
Education
David Lee Wright. The 26th
Amendment as a teachable moment: Young adult voter turnout in
United States elections, 1972–
2006. Sponsor: Jeffrey Henig.
Teachers College: School
Psychology
Elizabeth Andrea Belanfante.
The cognitive and demographic
variables that underlie note-taking
and review in mathematics: Does
quality of notes predict test performance in mathematics? Sponsor:
Stephen T. Peverly.
Christina Stark Laitner. Beyond
cognition: Examination of Iowa
Gambling Task performance,
negative affective decision-making,
and high-risk behaviors among
incarcerated male youth. Sponsor:
Stephen T. Peverly.
Leah Anne McGuire. A comparative analysis of the revised
Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale
scores of traumatized youth with
and without PTSD relative to
Superscript 45
Phillip Michael Stewart Jr. Learning the rules of the game: The
nature of game and classroom supports when using a concept-integrated digital physics game in the
middle school science classroom.
Sponsor: Ann E. Rivet.
Teachers College: Social-Organizational Psychology
Mekayla Kolean Castro. From the
mouths of men: A model of men’s
perception of social identity threat
toward women in the workplace
and endorsement of identity safety
behaviors. Sponsor: Caryn J. Block.
Avina Gupta. Employee perceptions of managers who express anger: Could a high-quality relationship buffer women from backlash?
Sponsor: Caryn J. Block.
Timothy James Patterson. Stories
of self and other: Four in-service
social studies teachers reflect on
their international professional
development. Sponsor: William
Gaudelli.
Social Studies
Jay Matthew Shuttleworth. Teaching sustainability as a social issue:
Learning from three teachers.
Sponsor: Anand Reddy Marri.
Ashley Michelle Taylor. Pedagogy
for Latino/a newcomer students:
A study of four secondary social
studies teachers in New York City
urban newcomer schools. Sponsor:
Anand Reddy Marri.
Social Studies
Dennis Joseph Urban Jr. Toward a
framework of inclusive social studies: Obstacles and opportunities in
a preservice teacher education program. Sponsor: William Gaudelli.
Theatre
Yunzi Tan. Variant conflict management: Conceptualizing and
investigating team conflict management as a configural construct.
Sponsor: Peter T. Coleman.
Minou Clare Arjomand. Theatre
on trial: Staging postwar justice in
the United States and Germany.
Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.
Teachers College: Sociology and
Education
Darragh Gerard Martin. The master of the rebels: Teenage encounters with Shakespeare, 1944–2012.
Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.
Allison Kaye Roda. Where their
children belong: Parents’ perceptions of the boundaries separating
“gifted” and “nongifted” educational programs. Sponsor: Amy Stuart
Wells.
Shilarna Stokes. Playing the crowd:
Mass pageantry in Europe and the
United States, 1905–1935. Sponsor: Arnold Aronson.
Miya Tamiko Warner. Small
high schools and big inequalities:
Course-taking and curricular rigor
in New York City. Sponsor: Amy
Stuart Wells.
Urban Planning
John Clancy Powers Jr. “Un-traded
interdependencies” as a useful
theory of regional economic development: A comparative study of
innovation in Dublin and Beijing.
Sponsor: Susan Fainstein.
Announcements
Kevin Holt
Christine McHone
Nancy Stula
Len Miller
Kevin Holt, M.A. ’11,
African-American Studies,
and a doctoral candidate
in Music, was awarded a
predoctoral fellowship from
the Ford Foundation.
Len Miller, M.A. ’09,
American Studies, has
been appointed associate
headmaster of The Hill
School in Pottstown, Pa.
Christine McHone,
’11GS and an M.A. candidate in Anthropology,
received a Jack Kent Cooke
Foundation Graduate
Scholarship.
Nancy Stula, M.A. ’87,
M.Phil. ’89, Ph.D. ’97,
Art History and Archaeology, was appointed executive
director of the William
Benton Museum of Art at
the University of Connecticut.
Christine Denny,
M.A.’08, M.Phil. ’09,
Ph.D. ’12, Biological Sciences, received a National
Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence
Award.
Louis Brus, Ph.D. ’69,
Chemistry, received the
Welch Award in Chemistry
from the Welch Foundation.
Pam Eddinger, ’82BC,
M.A. ’85, M.Phil. ’87,
Ph.D. ’99, East Asian Languages and Cultures, was
named president of Bunker
Hill Community College in
Massachusetts.
David Strickler,
M.A. ’77, Economics, was
appointed by the Library
of Congress to serve as a
copyright royalty judge with
a specialty in economics.
Lucy Kaylin, M.A. ’85,
English and Comparative
Literature, was appointed
editor-in-chief of the U.S.
edition of O, The Oprah
Magazine.
46 Superscript
Mark Rotenberg,
’79LAW, M.A. ’80,
M.Phil. ’81, History,
joined Johns Hopkins
University as vice president
and general counsel.
Ezra Tessler, M.A. ’09,
M.Phil. ’12, and a doctoral
candidate in History, was
awarded an Eisenhower-Roberts Fellowship from
the Eisenhower Institute at
Gettysburg College.
Superscript 47
Veli Yashin, ’08CC,
M.A. ’10, M.Phil. ’11,
and a doctoral candidate
in Middle Eastern, South
Asian, and African Studies,
won the Horst Frenz Prize
for best presentation by a
graduate student at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association.
Orit Hilewicz, M.A.’13
and a doctoral candidate in
Music, received the Founders Prize for New Scholars
from the International Society for the Study of Time.
Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya, M.A. ’89,
Pharmacology, received
a Fulbright Scholar grant
to lecture and conduct
research at Banaras Hindu
University in Varanasi,
India.
Christine Denny
Pam Eddinger
Louis Brus
Mark Rotenberg
Carl Haber, ’80CC,
M.A. ’82, M.Phil. ’83,
Ph.D. ’85, Physics, received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on reconstructing audio recordings
of historical and cultural
significance.
Announcements
Alondra Nelson
Duong H. Phong
Carl Haber
Joseph Diescho, M.A.
’86, M.Phil. ’87, Ph.D.
’92, Political Science, was
appointed executive director of the Namibia Institute
for Public Administration
and Management.
Alondra Nelson, associate professor of sociology,
was the co-winner of the
2012 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book
Award from the American
Sociological Association for
Body and Soul: The Black
Panther Party and the Fight
Against Medical Discrimination.
Professors Hervé M.
Jacquet and Duong H.
Phong of the Department
of Mathematics, as well as
Professor Barbara
G. Tversky of Teachers
College, were inducted into
the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences.
computer science; and Wei
Zhang, assistant professor of mathematics.
Four Columbia faculty were
awarded Sloan Research
Fellowships by the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation:
Mark Churchland,
assistant professor of neuroscience; Wei Min, assistant professor of chemistry;
Simha Sethumadhavan, associate professor of
48 Superscript
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