Month: February 2022

We mourn the passing of Judy Broadwin, a beloved and exceedingly gifted teacher of math.

“Judy was a wonderful person,” said Professor Warren Gordon, Mathematics Department Chairman. “She loved to teach and felt she was blessed being in our department.  Little did she realize we reaped the benefits of her blessing.”

She was a “master teacher,” Gordon said, with the best success rate in the department for students passing calculus, and the fewest students withdrawing–usually none. “No one sat idly in her classroom,” he added. “She made special efforts to intervene early with those students in jeopardy.”

She was also known as the “matriarch of AP Calculus,” having taught hundreds of teachers in AP workshops both locally and throughout the world. She helped design the exam, and was extremely successful in preparing her high school students for it.

Broadwin came to Baruch after a 50-year career teaching at Jericho High School on Long Island and at Queens College. She was a lecturer at Baruch from 2003 to 2015, and was actively involved in training tutors both in SEEK and SACC. She reluctantly retired after suffering an accident that affected her mobility.

“Judy was a warm, energetic,compassionate woman with a tremendous enthusiasm for teaching,” Gordon added. “She had a special relationship with her students. They appreciated her devotion to their education.”

Broadwin died February 23, 2022. She was predeceased by her husband of nearly 60 years, Stanley, and is survived by her daughters, Dr. Beth Belkin and Sharon Lorman; five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Her family encourages those seeking to make a donation in her memory to give to Town and Village Synagogue or the SEEK Program at Baruch.

The Baruch College History Department is hosting a teach-in on “Ukraine in Crisis,” Thursday, March 3, 2022, 12:30-2 pm, at the college, in VC 3-150.

Professors Jed Abrahamian, Thomas Heinrich, and Andrew Sloin of the Baruch College History Department will consider the historical and contemporary origins of the conflict, the contemporary geopolitical situation, and global political, economic, and security ramifications. This will be followed by a general discussion of the conflict, open to all members of the Baruch Community.

The Spring Semester at Baruch College is in full swing, including lots of events for students, faculty, and the broader community around Baruch, CUNY, and beyond. Take a look.

FILM SCREENING OF ‘QUILOMBO’: Audience discussion led by Professors Erica Richardson (English) and Tshombe Miles and Rojo Robles (Black and Latino Studies) focusing on racial capitalism, radical Black feminism, and “telling impossible stories” from archives of slavery as explored in Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts.” March 1, 6 pm. Register here. Co-sponsored by Mishkin Gallery, which is hosting the event in person for the Baruch community.

PREJUDICE REDUCTION: PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES: The Psychology Colloquium Series presents Princeton Professor Elizabeth Levy Paluck speaking on this topic March 10, 12:30 pm. Register here.

LAMIN FOFANA: BLUES EXHIBITION: On view at the Mishkin Gallery, March 21-May 6.

CRIME FICTION: “Perspectives in Crime Fiction: Navigating the Past.” The renowned Belfast crime fiction writer Sharon Dempsey will be interviewed by Elizabeth Mannion, who teaches English at Baruch, in conjunction with the US release of Dempsey’s latest book, Who Took Eden Mulligan? Co-hosted by Baruch’s English Department and the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, March 25, 1-2:15 pm ET. Register here.

HARMAN WRITER: April 7, 6 pm, Harman Writer in Residence Ersi Sotiropoulos, in person, Room 750, Baruch Library Building. Open only to Baruch staff, students, faculty. Reception at 5 pm.

FACULTY WORKS IN PROGRESS: Hosted by the Black Studies Colloquium with Professor Rojo Robles (BLS). April 8, 11 am. Register here.

DANCE: BPAC’s Rose Nagelberg Theatre hosts Joshua Beamish/MOVETHECOMPANY 2022 New York Season World & New York premieres, April 20-23, 7:30 pm. Proof of vaccinations/mask required. Tickets go on sale March 5.

LIVE MUSIC BY STUDENTS: A concert featuring student performances is planned for the Clivner=Field Plaza for May 12 at 1 pm. Help spread the word: Let students know they can submit an audition video or MP3 to abby.anderton@baruch.cuny.edu by March 31. All musical styles, acts, and genres are welcome.

Baruch students who are taking a journalism class or who have taken one in the past are invited to compete for cash prizes by entering the “What Is Home?” essay contest.

“We have spent a lot of time at home these past two years and our relationship with our living spaces has changed,” write the contest judges, Professors Bridgett Davis and Gisele Regatao. “We now know there are many ways to transform or reimagine our homes. But home is not only a physical space; there are also many ways to think of home. We are inviting students to write personal essays related to how their concept of home has changed. Is your home a place where you feel trapped? Or liberated? Or crowded? Or protected? What is home for you?”

Students may submit one personal essay of creative nonfiction, 600-800 words, by midnight, April 5, to bridgett.davis@baruch.cuny.edu and gisele.regatao@baruch.cuny.edu. Do not include your name on the entry; attach a separate cover letter with your name, email address, and cell.

Contest prizes are $1,500 for first place, $1,000 for second place, $500 for third place, and $200 for honorable mention. The contest is funded by the Shulman Family Fund. This is the second year for the essay contest, which was the brainchild of Baruch alumnus David Shulman ’64. He was inspired to encourage students to write about their experiences after reading Davis’ memoir The World According to Fannie Davis. 

“When I was growing up, my home held a secret: my mother’s vocation as a number-runner,” Davis said in announcing the contest. “Our house was her workplace, which made my home a place of brisk activity as well as daily tension. Yet home was also a refuge from an outside world that might judge us, and so I also found solace and protection within its walls. Writing about my beloved home in The World According to Fannie Davis was revelatory and cathartic. That’s why I’m so pleased that my memoir inspired a Baruch alum to fund this competition for a second year.”

Winners will be invited to participate in a reading in May.

The Dean’s Office at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences is recognizing faculty achievement through a new program: WSAS Faculty Excellence Awards.

Five $1,000 awards will be given, one in each of these areas: excellence for part-time teaching; excellence for full-time teaching; scholarly or artistic achievement; institutional leadership or service; and mentorship of students and/or peers.

Nominations by colleagues and chairpersons, as well as self-nominations, must be submitted by email by March 31, 2022, to Katheryn.Lypides@baruch.cuny.edu in the Dean’s office. Nominations should include a statement addressing the candidate’s achievements in the area of the award and the candidate’s qualifications.

Nominees will be contacted by the Dean’s office and must submit two documents by April 7, 2022 (note the new deadline):

• a current curriculum vitae
• a short (500-word limit) personal statement relevant to the category of their award that describes the project, activity, or experience and its impact.

All applicants must have been employed continuously in any department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences for a minimum of four complete semesters in order to be eligible. Distinguished Lecturers and Lecturers, along with Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors, are eligible for all awards. Part-time faculty are eligible for the Award for Excellence for Part-Time Faculty. Laboratory Technicians are eligible for the Institutional Advancement or Service Award. Presidential and Distinguished Professors are not eligible.

THE AWARDS:

• The Award for Excellence in Teaching for Full-Time Faculty: This award recognizes and celebrates innovative teaching done by a Full-Time faculty member in any modality.
• The Award for Excellence in Teaching for Part-Time Faculty: This award recognizes and celebrates innovative teaching done by a Part-Time faculty member in any modality.
• The Award for Excellence in Scholarship or Creative Activity for Full-Time Faculty: This award recognizes and celebrates a major accomplishment(s) in scholarship or creative activity.
• The Award for Excellence in Institutional Leadership or Service for Full-Time Faculty (including College Laboratory Technicians): This award recognizes and celebrates leadership and contributions to the WSAS and Baruch community done by a Full-Time faculty member.
• The Award for Excellence in Student or Peer Mentorship for Full-Time Faculty: This award recognizes and celebrates all forms of mentorship done by a Full-Time faculty member in any modality.

These awards mark strength in particular areas that lie at the heart of WSAS’s identity and mission: teaching our students, intellectual and artistic achievement, institutional leadership and service, and the act of mentoring students and/or peers to support their academic and professional advancement.

SELECTION COMMITTEE:
The Weissman Executive Committee, an elected body, has been charged as the selection committee for the WSAS Faculty Excellence Awards. Committee members will review the nominations and recommend candidates in each category to the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

The award recipients will be announced at the last WSAS faculty meeting of the academic year.

Previous recipients will not be eligible to be nominated for the WSAS Faculty Excellence Awards for a period of five years after receiving the award.

Live music is coming back to Baruch!

A live performance is planned for May 12 at 1 pm, outside on the Clivner=Field Plaza. But we need students’ help! If you are a Baruch student and a musical performer, we want to hear from you. If you are faculty or staff, help spread the word.

Interested in performing? Please send a video or MP3 of your music to abby.anderton@baruch.cuny.edu by March 31. All musical styles, acts, and genres are welcome!

An interdisciplinary course at Baruch Weissman called “Who Speaks for the Oceans? Art, Science, and Inter-Species Discourse” draws on research for a Mishkin Gallery exhibition on the topic planned for Fall 2022.

The seminar, which is being offered this spring for the first time, is a collaboration between Mishkin Gallery Director/Curator Alaina Claire Feldman and David Gruber, Presidential Professor of Environmental Science & Professor of Biology. Feldman and Gruber are also co-curators for the upcoming exhibition.

The syllabus describes the course as an opportunity to “reimagine and rethink humanity’s desire to experience the non-terrestrial, specifically focusing on an epistemological, historical and scientific analysis of what we think we know about life in the ocean. Many of these ideas have been informed by colonial, racialized, gendered, and terra-centric conventions alongside the production of nature, which will be exposed and critiqued.”

Students are using art, materials and concepts from the exhibition for a research paper or environmental campaign.

Bodies of water figure prominently in both Feldman’s and Gruber’s individual research pursuits.

Gruber’s groundbreaking research on bioluminescent sea animals and his development of robotics to study jellyfish and other delicate creatures has been covered by The New York Times and other news outlets. 

His latest work, Project CETI, involves using AI (artificial intelligence) to decipher the communication of sperm whales, using advanced machine learning and gentle robotics. “Sperm whales are incredibly intelligent and highly socially aware creatures,” Gruber told Discover magazine. “We believe that by bringing humans closer to an animal species whose behavior is more similar to our culture and intellect than any other living being, we can help them care more for every form of life on earth.”

Feldman’s recent essay “Flooding the Exhibition: Oceanic Encounters in the Age of Aquarium,” published in the journal Parse, looked at natural history exhibitions from the past and how they contribute to “capitalist consumptions” of nature that continue today.

Feldman is also co-curating an exhibition called Sea and River Edges: Visual Representations and Submerged Perspectives on Water in the Américas. The show will consider the work of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church alongside work by contemporary feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic artists. Planned for late 2023 or early 2024, Sea and River Edges will offer a “counter-narrative to the legacy of the Hudson River School’s often sublime and colonial views of water systems and geographical divides throughout New York, Ecuador, Colombia and Jamaica,” Feldman and her co-curator Macarena Gómez-Barris said in their proposal.

The Andy Warhol Foundation is supporting Sea and River Edges with a $50,000 grant for research. The Who Speaks for the Oceans? show received a $10,000 grant from the Etant Donnés program of the FACE Foundation (French-American Cultural Exchange in Education and the Arts) in partnership with Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

You can read more about upcoming Mishkin exhibitions here.

Professor Alison Griffiths has won a Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Scholar Award to Norway, one of the Fulbright’s Distinguished Chair programs. She will be based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo with a secondary affiliation at the UiT The Arctic University in Tromsø.

“My project examines amateur films of Sámi peoples made between 1907-1960 within a broader historical context of visual representations of the Arctic, including cartographic materials in the world-famous Ginsberg Map Collection at the National Library,” she said. “I will also be reconnecting the films to the Sámi community and in consultation with stakeholders at the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT, exploring their significance and legacy.”

Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in Baruch Weissman’s Department of Communication Studies, where she teaches film and media studies. She also teaches in the theatre doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center. An internationally recognized scholar of film, media and visual studies, her research crosses the fields of film studies, 19th century visual culture, and medieval visual studies and examines cinema’s relationship to, and experience in, non-traditional spaces of media consumption.

In addition to the Fulbright, Griffiths is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Meyer Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a Project Development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.  Her research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Eugene Lang Foundation, The Waterhouse Family Institute, and PSC-CUNY.  Griffiths received a Felix Gross Award for outstanding research by a CUNY junior faculty member and has twice won Baruch College’s Presidential Distinguished Scholarship Award.

Griffiths is the author of three monographs and over 38 journal articles and book chapters. Her books include the multiple award-winning Wondrous Difference:  Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture; Shivers Down Your Spine:  Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View; and Carceral Fantasies:  Cinema and Prisons in Early Twentieth Century American. She has just finished her latest book, Nomadic Cinema:  A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, under contract with Columbia University Press and is at work on a new project about travel, Indigenous history, and memory.

Watch a video interview with her that was taped when she received the Guggenheim.

We’re a little late catching up with all the events happening in the next month or so, but here’s what we’ve got so far through March.

TRANSLATING SPANISH SONGS: “Lost in Translation: The Beauty and Message of Latinx Music, ” hosted by ISLA, February 17, 6-7 pm. Register here. Famous Spanish songs will be translated into English and analyzed with an eye to what’s lost in translation.

COMEDY DUO: The Sandra K. Wasserman Jewish Studies Center is hosting the comedy duo El Salomons, a married Jewish-Palestinian lesbian couple, featuring Jess Solomon and Eman El-Hussein, February 24, 7 pm. Register here.