Husband and Wife Team Up to Run Medieval Academy of America

Eileen Gardiner, TMC ’69, GSAS ’80, and Ronald Musto, FCRH ’69, met as pre-med students in a science lab on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s.

“I was pulling Ds,” Musto said. “She was pulling Cs. I asked to borrow her [burners] and flasks. Hers were always clean. Mine were not.”

Musto and Gardiner’s interest in medicine didn’t stick. She found her calling in English—medieval literature, in particular—and he rediscovered his love of history.

“I was always reading history as a kid,” said Musto, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in medieval history at Columbia University. “It constantly raises questions that fascinate me.”

Meanwhile, Gardiner went on to earn her doctorate at Fordham. She was “drawn to the amazing imagination that one could find in [medieval] literature, which combined religion and nature and a sort of way of life that was so different from our own,” she said. “There was just something that naturally attracted me to it.”

As Gardiner and Musto found their academic calling, they also fell in love.

“We tried to get married [at Fordham] one night by a Jesuit friend,” Gardiner said. “He told us to go home and sleep it off!”

They did, but eventually married in 1970, a year after graduation, and they’ve been together—personally and professionally—ever since.

Recently, Gardiner and Musto were named executive director and editor, respectively, of the Medieval Academy of America and its journal, Speculum, following a successful 10- year stint as co-directors of the American Council of Learned Societies’ humanities e-book division.

“We’ve always done things together. We were business partners from so early on,” said Gardiner.

“It makes for an interesting breakfast conversation,” Musto said. “It makes for obsessiveness,” Gardiner added.

In the first of their many projects together, Gardiner and Musto started the Co-Op Bookstore at Fordham with a $10,000 investment from the University’s United Student Government. They ran the store, located at 613 Fordham Road, during their junior and senior years.

Later, after earning their doctoral degrees, Gardiner and Musto worked in book publishing. Eventually, they decided to start a publishing house.

In 1985, they founded Italica Press, publishing six titles in their first year, mostly out-of-print books. Though they still publish roughly the same number of titles today, Gardiner and Musto have expanded their list to include original academic titles.

They also publish electronic books, something they did earlier than most houses.

In 1999, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) tapped them to publish an electronic collection of monographs in history.

Together, Gardiner and Musto created the ACLS Humanities E-Book Division, a fully searchable online collection of nearly 3,000 titles. With more than 640 institutional subscribers, in 33 different countries, it is widely considered one of the best online resources for research and scholarship.

At the Medieval Academy of America, Gardiner and Musto will help bring the academy into the digital realm, while maintaining the quality of the academy’s journal.

It is, in a sense, their dream job.

“The opportunity to work for the Medieval Academy really combines everything that we could imagine to be able to work on,” Gardiner said, “and to do it for the premier society in the world is an honor.”

“We’ve always been outsiders,” Musto said. “We’ve never held academic positions. I think it’s delightful and in a certain sense ironic that we’ve ended up in a position that is central to this world.”

—Miles Doyle, FCRH ’01

Lincoln Center Construction

These images of the construction at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus were taken on Thursday, Feb. 17, 2011, from one of the McMahon Hall terraces and the roof of Lowenstein Center.
Click on images to enlarge.

We're facing north in this image.
The rubble is likely part of a demolished wall.

We're facing northwest here. The white structures in
Damrosch Park (since taken down) are tents set up for Fashion Week.

Ryan is the editor of FORDHAM Magazine, the
University alumni magazine. We were scouting the
rooftops for future photography shoots of the
construction site. We're on one of the McMahon terraces,
facing east, with Lowenstein on the right side of the image.

We're facing east in this image, again taken
from a terrace at McMahon Hall.

London Premiere of Edward Fox: Trollope in Barsetshire

This week Edward Fox premieres in Trollope in Barsetshire, devised and directed by Richard Digby Day, artistic director of Fordham’s London Dramatic Academy.

Edward Fox, the eminent British actor, brings to life the author and the world of Anthony Trollope in a one-man performance drawn from extracts of the Barchester Chronicles and from An Autobiography.

Anthony Trollope stands out as a hugely popular novelist, one of the greatest of the Victorian era, an author invested with a wonderful gift for words. For six of his novels he invented Barsetshire, both a county and a town and he filled this world with an astonishing range of characters from Dr. Harding, the gentle Warden, to Mrs. Proudie, the domineering Bishop’s wife. Like all truly celebrated novelists, Trollope deals with conditions of life that touch men and women, against the background of country life and the complexities, plots and counter-plots of the cathedral close. Humane, witty and well-observed Edward Fox wields his magic to bring many of these much-loved characters to life. The extracts from the novels are joined together with parts of Trollope’s controversial autobiography published a year after his death in 1883. This book, unlike the novels, is as famous for what it leaves out as for its plain spoken directness.

This piece is the result of a collaboration between Richard Digby Day and Edward Fox, which began five years ago. The play opened in 2008 and was widely performed again in 2010, its success resulting in the current run for six weeks in the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. Throughout his long career, Digby Day has made many other one person performance pieces for a variety of famous British actors, including Honor Blackman and Geraldine McEwan. Digby Day is the Artistic Director of Fordham University’s London Dramatic Academy, a challenging, practical study abroad program focusing on British theatre.

POST-SHOW DISCUSSION
There will be a post-show discussion at the Riverside Studios with Edward Fox and Richard Digby Day on Fridays February 25 and Friday March 25.

TICKETS and INFORMATION
February 22 to April 2, 2011
Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9RL
Box Office: 020 8237 1111 www.riversidestudios.co.uk
£15 - £25

IPED Alumna Takes Post at Japanese Development Agency

Mayu Sakagauchi, GSAS ’11, has been appointed to the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Sakagauchi is an alumna of the graduate program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED). Sakagauchi graduates in May. Following the completion of four months of orientation in Japan, she will begin a two-year assignment to the African nation of Malawi. While in Malawi she will represent the Japanese government as a community development officer and will work closely with the Malawi Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.

While at Fordham’s IPED, Sakagauchi specialized in international and development economics with a focus on project management. Her initial interest in Africa came from her participation in IPED’s summer study tour of South Africa.

Law School Examines Legal Activism and AIDS in China

Who are the Chinese anti-discrimination activists fighting for their nation’s disenfranchised? What are the obstacles that persons with HIV/AIDS face in China? How do human health rights NGOs deal with China’s regulatory environment?

These and other topics will be the focus of a daylong Fordham Law School conference on Thursday, Feb. 24 at the Lincoln Center campus, “Civil Society and Legal Activism in China: The Public Health Challenge.” The event is free and sponsored by the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.

The conference gets underway at 9:30 a.m. in the 12th Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Center, and consists of four panels throughout the day: Civil Society in China, Regulation and Practice; Anti-Discrimination Efforts in China; Public Participation Toward a Responsive Health System and China; and China: The Response to HIV/AIDS.

Scholars and activists who will be speaking include Timothy Webster, senior fellow at the China Law Center, Yale University; Benjamin Liebman, professor of law and director of Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia University; Scott Burris, professor of law, Temple University and associate director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health; Wan Yanhai, director of Beijing’s Aizhixing Institute; and Sara L.M. Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst.

For more information or to register, contact Joy Chia jchia@law.fordham.edu.

—Janet Sassi

TLC Commissioner Visits GSS Class

At the same time that the recession-weakened nation experiences headlined slashes in public services, Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) students are being trained to identify and implement low-cost or no-cost ways to help the needy, and to become a force which shows that society can improve despite the Great Recession.

New York City Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky addressed this topic when he spoke to students in Professor Allan Luks’s Advocacy and Public Policy class on Feb. 1. "It's always hard to get social changes approved," said Yassky, "but I don't think it's any harder now to get change, as long as it doesn't cost a lot of money. And you, as social workers, through your daily experiences, can identify such solutions and fight to get them adopted."

Each one of the second-year students in Luks’s course must identify and advocate for a new, small public policy that can improve society at little cost. The students have had no problem finding these issues and their public policy solutions. Some examples include: stopping users of suboxone, a methadone-like drug, from selling their supply to get others high; requiring people who are HIV positive to inform those they are sexually active with; have public TV and radio regularly post social indexes on how well or poorly society is solving its social ills and invite public involvement where changes are most needed; offering affordable transportation for low-income cancer patients, who now may be late or even miss appointments; regular mental health seminars in high schools so students can identify warning signs in themselves and others and prevent the violent behaviors; a requirement that public housing conditions that cause asthma be fixed within a month rather than a year; and allowing pregnant women to avoid going through school metal detectors.

"Social workers are required by their profession to identify solutions to public problems and advocate for their implementation," said Luks, who also directs Fordham’s Center for Nonprofit Leaders. "For the needy, who are most affected by the Great Recession, these small ideas of social workers become a balance that says optimism for the future is still possible."

A former nonprofit executive with more than two decades of experience, Luks tells students of his successful efforts to champion laws that have since become national models. In the 1980s, he led the adoption of New York City's law requiring posters in bars and restaurants warning about drinking during pregnancy, which resulted in national legislation. He also advocated successfully for the city law preventing job discrimination against recovered alcoholics, which was then adopted by many states and cities. In 2007, he led the call for the state law requiring mentoring programs to inform parents about whether or not they did background checks on their mentors.

“Social workers starting out today have high tuition bills, a high cost of living and the worry of their charitable employers cutting back,” he said. “So, there is pressure on them to just do the work they are employed to do and not to go beyond and start trying to change public policies.

“The goal of the Fordham program is to show the second-year graduate students that social workers are one vital counterweight to the Great Recession.”

Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in Dance Performance Benefit

Fordham hosts a performance by the students of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance to benefit the Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship Fund. The 11th Annual Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. Scholarship Benefit will celebrate the life and work of Denise Jefferson.

Thursday, March 10, 2011 | 7 p.m. (5:45 p.m. pre–performance cocktail reception)
Pope Auditorium | Lowenstein Center | Lincoln Center Campus

In the last 12 years of her life, Denise dedicated much of her energy to the development of dancers in the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance. The University will remember and celebrate Jefferson in this performance. The proceeds will make it possible for Denise Jefferson’s’s dreams to continue in the training of exceptionally gifted dancers in the Ailey/Fordham program.

Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. Benefit Committee
William F. Baker, Ph.D.
Clifton Brown
Elizabeth Burns, FCLC ’83
Andrew H. Clark, Ph.D.
Patricia Dugan, FCLC ’79
Amanda Hearst, FCLC ’08

Tickets required. Register Online

For event information, please contact Jill Logan at (212) 636-6440.

To support the Ailey/Fordham BFA program, please contact Rodger Van Allen at (212) 636-6562 or vanallen@fordham.edu.

Fordham Research Asks: Are The Kids Alright?

On Wednesday, Feb. 9, three of Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences faculty—one psychologist, one theologian and one sociologist -- presented their original research around the issue of children and their mental and physical well being.

The event, “Are The Kids Alright?” was coordinated by the Office of Research to help showcase the growing research among Fordham faculty.

Laura Sosinsky, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, (center) presented an ongoing longitudinal study on how a cohort of first-time Bronx mothers are choosing childcare before and after the birth of their child. Sosinsky said her study was inspired by the fact that, while rates of new mothers returning to the workplace has risen, the child care choices for women have not kept pace.

Matthew Weinshenker, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology, (left) presented his research on “Evening Dads, Couch Potatoes and Others,” a look at fatherhood in the United States and how different categories of fathers engage with their children. He said he hopes the study promotes a better understanding of what behaviors promote father-child involvement.

Charles Camosy, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology with an emphasis in Christian ethics, (right) presented research on neonatal ICUs and the financial and moral cost of saving young lives. Camosy recently published a book, Too Expensive to Treat? Finitude, Tragedy and the Neonatal ICU (Eerdmans 2010), which explores the moral issues of health care rationing in the United States.

All three presenters were recipients of Fordham Faculty Research Grants.

—Janet Sassi

FORDHAMScience: Sudan Meteorites Offer Look at the Early Solar System

In a small laboratory in John Mulcahy Hall, Jon Friedrich and Julianne Troiano have opened a window that looks 4.5 billion years into the past. That window is Almahata Sitta: fragments of a rare, carbon-rich type of meteorite called an ureilite deposited in northern Sudan in 2008, when asteroid 2008 TC3 slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded 37 kilometers above the ground.

Friedrich is an assistant professor of chemistry at Fordham; Troiano is a senior at Rose Hill, majoring in chemistry. The window they’ve opened doesn’t look like much—a tiny speck of material that resembles a black breadcrumb—but the insights gleaned from it have already changed the way we think about the composition of matter in the early solar system.

Images: Right, Jon Friedrich; Left, Julianne Troiano at the Mass Spectrometer (click to enlarge).

“The great thing about is that it allows us to see what the early solar system was like without having to back-calculate the effect of terrestrial contamination,” Friedrich says. “There’s a chemical signature that occurs in most ureilites known to date… and that chemical signature was not present in Almahata Sitta. We were actually able to say that okay, Almahatta Sitta does not contain that signature, so other meteorites of this class maybe actually somewhat contaminated.”

Friedrich says the chemical composition of Almahata Sitta is intriguing because it’s so atypical (the technical word for “weird”). The most common type of asteroid in the asteroid belt (a vast collection of small objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter) is something called an s-type asteroid. If you held a part of one in your hand, it would be heaver than a ureilite of the same size because the s-type would probably about 10 to 15 percent metal—particularly nickel iron, or nickel metal, and it would be gray in color.

“We have the samples, and they’re pretty small—probably the size of a pinky nail,” Troiano says. We grind the samples so it’s easier to dissolve them, then we mix them with nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid and we put them in a microwave digestion system that heats them up and increases the pressure so the samples can dissolve in the acid. When they dry down and they sort of just look like goo.”

The goo is mixed into a 50 milliliter solution and put into a mass spectrometer, which tells the researchers which elements are present and in what amounts. The results are then fed into Excel spreadsheets for analysis.

“One of the things that came out of all of the work that’s been done by people all around the world is that we know the 2008 TC3 asteroid that produced the Almahata Sitta meteorite was a very un-homogenous chunk of rock,” Friedrich says. “Julianne and I focused on the pieces that were ureilitic in nature, which is the majority of Almahata Sitta and the TC3 asteroid. But what we did find was that if you’re a geologist and you had an asteroid and you grabbed pieces of rock, they’d look a little different.”

He says it seems that different pieces of the asteroid did have different internal chemistry to it to some extent. Whether the different parts were formed under different temperatures might be one reason why this is so.

Analysis of Almahata Sitta tells us that not everything in the asteroid belt is of the same composition, which has implications for how these objects should be dealt with should they be nudged into an Earth-crossing orbit. Should an object of sufficient size be on a collision course with Earth, the results could be catastrophic. One of the leading suspects, if not the leading suspect, in the extinction of the dinosaurs is the Chicxulub asteroid, a chunk of rock at least 10 kilometers across that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The impact, at a speed at least 20 times greater than that of a rifle bullet, left a crater 180 kilometers across. It would have caused an enormous shock wave, global tidal waves, a tremendous earthquake, hurricane winds, and trillions of tons of debris ejected into the atmosphere. The forests of the Americas would have been set ablaze. The resulting smoke and particulate debris would have created months of darkness and cooler temperatures globally, and concentrated nitric acid rains worldwide.

Though so-called “slate wiper” impacts are rare (perhaps once every hundred million years), they are a real threat. NASA thinks so, and has created the Near Earth Object Program to track possible impactors and devise defenses, most likely nudging those objects out of their Earth-crossing orbits long before they reach us. How the objects get nudged away depends on their composition.

“One of the things that we’re learning is that asteroids aren’t necessarily big, giant rocks in the sky that are one big piece,” Friedrich says. They can be made up of lots of little pieces sort of weakly held together…and the structure you know is something that’s typically strong, a big piece versus something that is weakly put together in sort of a boulder pile. The official term is rubble pile—that’s what people call it in the asteroidal community. Trying to destroy or alter the course of asteroids with these two different properties is going to take different tactics.”

Friedrich has published on the composition of Almahata Sitta before, including in the March 2009 issue of Nature. We wrote about his work at the time (see “Fordham Scientist Helps Tie Chemical Makeup of Meteorite to Parent Asteroid”). He and Troiano have also published several papers on the meteorite, in the peer-reviewed journals Meteoritics & Planetary Science and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta—a somewhat unusual honor for an undergraduate researcher.

Troiano, a Clare Booth Luce Scholar, has made the Dean’s List for the last two years. She is a cheerleader, a member of the Expressions Dance Alliance, and a member of both the American Chemical Society and American Geophysical Union. Troiano says she was already interested in chemistry in high school, and that two great teachers brought her further along that path.

“I came into Fordham as a chemistry major already,” she says. “From there, I guess, once you make it past sophomore year—kind of breaking point—if you make it past that, you can make it through the rest of the major.”

She’s applied to nine graduate schools, but hopes to attend either the University of North Carolina or the University of California, Berkeley, for their analytical and physical chemistry programs. “UNC is the top school for analytical chemistry—they have a lot of really awesome chemistry going on there.”

Friedrich’s research is supported in part by a Fordham Faculty Research Grant. Troiano’s summer research was supported by her Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship.

Fordham Law Dispute Resolution Society World Champions

Dear members and friends of the Fordham Dispute Resolution Society:

I am extremely honored to announce that the Fordham Dispute Resolution Society became World Champions this morning in Paris, surpassing 57 universities from around the globe to win the International Chamber of Commerce Mediation Competition.

Please join me in congratulating competitors Matt Bress, Christie Houlihan, Pat Jacobs, and Veni Manickam. Matt, in addition to competing, directed the efforts of the team as this year's ICC Editor.

Each competitor's display of talent and hard work over the past several months and through the grueling 8 rounds of competition was truly phenomenal and sets an incredible standard for the Society going forward this year and in years to come. Thank you to each competitor for the success and the honor you have brought to our Society and the Law School.

Congratulations and many thanks are also due to Steve Grable ('07), who has built an impressive record coaching our ICC Team each year since graduating, dedicating numerous weekends and countless evenings preparing the competitors and working alongside them as they move into the finals in Paris. Special thanks also to alumni Dan Hope ’08, Henry Ko ’08, Kenny Shaw ’09, Cindy Alvarado ’10, Justin Elliot ’10, and Mike Kanatake '10, and DRS Managing Editor Tres Bulger for their huge support in preparing the teams. It goes without saying that the Society is indebted to our alumni and senior members for their continued dedication to our competitors.

Additionally, and as always, we are forever grateful for the matchless professional and academic guidance of Professor Jacqueline Nolan-Haley, who has been instrumental in establishing Fordham as a permanent presence at the invitation-only global competition.

Thanks and congratulations again,

Iverson
(you can read more about Fordham's Dispute Resolution Society here)

Iverson Long, Chairman
Dispute Resolution Society
Fordham University School of Law

Fordham Law's Dispute Resolution Program is ranked 8th in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The Dispute Resolution Society competes in national and international negotiation, mediation, and arbitration competitions, hosts a leading annual symposium and international commercial arbitration practice tournament, and teaches a course on negotiation techniques to local high school students at MLK Jr. High School. For more information, please visit the Dispute Resolution Society website.