The William Lowell Putnam mathematical competition, organized by the Mathematical Association of America, is one of the toughest and oldest mathematics competitions in the US and Canada, as well as the largest.
Baruch’s team did well, ranking 170th out of 427 institutions taking part in the 82nd Putnam competition in December 2021. Team members were Danyil Blyschak, Devon Lall, and Jean Pulla.
Danyil Blyschak, winner of first Victor Istratov Prize
Blyschak will be the first recipient of the Victor Istratov Prize to recognize his achievement as Baruch’s top Putnam scorer. This prize will be given annually. Read more about the competition here.
Baruch students interested in future Putnam competitions should email Professor Pablo Soberón at Pablo.soberon [email protected]. Participation is free.
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 [email protected] and [email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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.
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 [email protected] 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.”
Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean, video still, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Students are using art, materials and concepts from the exhibition for a research paper or environmental campaign.
Alaina Claire Feldman and David Gruber
Bodies of water figure prominently in both Feldman’s and Gruber’s individual research pursuits.
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.
“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.
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.
CARNAVAL/CARNIVAL: ISLA and Black and Latino Studies celebrate the Afro-Latinx tradition of carnival in the Americas, February 23, 6-8 pm. Register here.
DEI: The Robert C. Weaver Society presents “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Panel Discussion: How to Build a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy,” February 24, 6 pm. Strategy. Moderator: Professor and Interim Chair Shelly Eversley (Black and Latino Studies). Panelists include Baruch Chief Diversity Officer Elliott Dawes. Register here.
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.
ART WALKING TOUR: Walking tour of public art in the Gramercy neighborhood, hosted by the Mishkin Gallery, February 26, noon, free, RSVP: [email protected]. Masks required, capacity limited to 20 people; first-come basis.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Links to sign up or join these events here.
BLACK LIFE FUTURES: Baruch’s Black Studies Colloquium is presenting a special public-facing research and pedagogy series: “Black Life Futures: Black Ecologies and African Diaspora.” Details here; schedule and registration links below.
March 1, 6 pm: Film screening of Quilombo. Audience discussion led by Professors Erica Richardson (English) and Tshombe Miles and Rojo Robles (Black and Latino Studies) will focus 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.” Register here. Co-sponsored by Mishkin Gallery, which is hosting the event in person for the Baruch community.
March 16, 6 pm: Conversation with activist, scholar, and writer Pedro LeBrón Ortiz. Register here.
March 22, 12:30-2:30 pm: Black Futures in the Classroom Part I: Faculty and Student Teach-in. Register here.
The Black Studies Colloquium will also present:
February 16, 6 pm: “Racial Imaginaries, Classification Schemas and Place in Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans in the Continental USA,” Marxe Professor Hector Cordero-Guzman. Register here.
April 8, 11 am: Faculty works in progress with Professor Rojo Robles (BLS). Register here.
NYC LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY WORKSHOP: Back at Baruch for the spring semester, in person. Pre-registration required. Email [email protected].
March 4, 11 am-1 pm: Isabella Cosse (CONICET; Columbia), “Revolutionary Love and Political Struggles in Cold War Argentina.”
April 29, 11 am-1 pm: Daniela Traldi (Lehman), “’Real’ Feminisms: Gender, Race, and the Far Right in 20th Century Brazil (1920 to 1985).”
NONPROFIT NEWS: “The Role and Vision of Nonprofit News.” Speakers: Susan Chira, editor-in-chief, The Marshall Project; Akoto Ofori-Atta, co-founder and chief audience officer, Capital B, written by and for Black people; Mazin Sidahmed; co-founder and co-executive director of Documented, covering NYC’s immigrant community. Moderator: Professor Gisele Regatão (Journalism). March 31, 5:30-7 pm. Register here.
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Professor Philip Lambert of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts. As a music theorist, Professor Lambert was a pillar of our Music Program for almost 35 years, formally establishing the teaching of keyboard harmony and the Music Theory minor. He was a devoted educator. In addition to his classroom duties, he individually tutored hundreds of students in theory and composition during his academic career, also mentoring CUNY doctoral students and shepherding dissertations. He served FPA for two terms as chairman, and with his brilliant mind, dry wit, and quiet presence, he was always a steady and secure source of advice and guidance.
A tireless researcher and writer whose interests were as wide as they were deep, Professor Lambert authored scholarly books on Charles Ives, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, Broadway’s Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, composer Alec Wilder, as well as classroom textbooks for both music harmony and post-tonal theory, and many scholarly articles.
Professor Lambert spent his youth in Oklahoma, where he walked by the now-famous Ada water tower every day on his way to middle school. He played football and trombone and also performed in community theater productions (playing the Artful Dodger in Oliver! and Papageno in The Magic Flute, among other roles). He received his BA from the University of Oklahoma and his PhD from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
Professor Lambert succumbed to a long illness after a valiant struggle and is survived by his wife Diane and two daughters. He was 63. We all miss him very much.
An anonymous donor is giving $40,000 to the Department of Natural Sciences. The money will be used to fund undergraduate research projects.
“This wonderful gift will enable students to collaborate with faculty in labs and in the field, providing opportunities for invaluable hands-on learning,” said Dean Jessica Lang. “It is thrilling to think of the impact of this gift for our students both while they are undergraduates and in their postgraduate lives. I am so very grateful to the generosity of this donor for creating the possibility of research partnerships between faculty and students.”
Students on field trip looking for specimens
The donor recalled that “decades ago, the Natural Sciences faculty created courses that allowed students to prepare for admission to medical and dental schools. I remember the great teachers: Professors Gernert, Hoffman, Bleyman, Malerich, Szalda and Sidran. It is wonderful that the College now has research labs where students learn science by doing it with a faculty mentor; and some students are even co-authors on publications. I wholeheartedly support these collaborations in research.”
Stay tuned for details on how to apply for funding. Funds are expected to be available beginning in the fall.
The Black and Latino Studies major has been unanimously approved by the Baruch College faculty with no objections from other CUNY campuses. The proposal will now go to CUNY’s Board of Directors and the NY State Education Department for final approvals.
Black and Latinx Studies blog logo
BLS Department Chair Professor Shelly Eversley provided this description: “This major centers knowledge production by Black, Indigenous, Latin American, and US Latinx peoples. The BLS major will provide students tools to think critically as they practice real-world applications of academic learning to develop solutions to social issues rooted in longstanding and persistent racial inequalities.
“The BLS major will produce graduates fluent in change-oriented, outcome-driven analyses. With an emphasis on applied learning in the service of equity and change, it encourages innovation, creative thinking, active learning, and the development of practical skills that prepare students for careers that will contribute to more just and equitable futures.”
