Syllabus: Zombies at Homewood

Fall 2018

The undead are living the high life. Which is another way of saying that zombies are a huge cultural phenomena, darlings of screens big and small—think AMC’s mega-hit The Walking Dead and the bestseller-turned-Brad-Pitt-film World War Z.

While the flesh-eating creatures themselves are generally mute, their long history and enduring popularity have a lot to say about society. And that’s why another place that reanimated corpses show up is on the English Department’s course listings at the Krieger School. There—between Expository Writing: The Narrative Essay, and The Nineteenth Century British Novel—is course AS.060.154. Zombies.

“The idea is to teach critical reading, critical thinking, and critical writing, and that’s facilitated by choosing a topic that students are bound to be interested in and very many will be immersed in,” says Associate Professor Jared Hickman, who teaches the class, which is geared toward non-English majors. “And then my other angle is to think of it as a way to smuggle in a whole bunch of critical race theory and thinking about some of the bigger questions that are there in the history of the figure.”

Perhaps the earliest mention of such creatures is found in a late-17th-century French travelogue that covers the slave-exporting ports of West Africa. “It’s a figure who is described as having his soul taken in some way and yet the body remains active—and this has been done expressly for the purpose of exploiting the labor of that body,” Hickman says. “So, this figure that comes to be called the zombie is one that is arising out of observing the Atlantic slave trade.”

The “Zombie” really takes form (and gets the name) later in Haiti (where some of those slave ships landed) when they are created by devious voodoo sorcerers. Hickman’s class reads Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) and William Seabrook’s tome, The Magic Island (1929). The latter served as the blueprint for Hollywood’s first zombie film, White Zombie, starring Béla Lugosi (1932). The fear-inducing component of the film, Hickman says, is the notion that the power of the sorcerer “could extend to the white interloper, even if they don’t believe in any of this stuff.”

The 1968 film Night of the Living Dead by the late filmmaker George Romero is considered progenitor of the modern zombie era. The lead is played by a black man who—spoiler alert for a 50-year-old film—gets accidentally shot by police at the movie’s end.

Beyond racial politics, armies of animated dead provide other allegorical and symbolic messaging. You can’t help but see Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, with its zombies stumbling around a Muzac-filled shopping mall, as commentary on mindless consumerism. Hickman, who first taught the course in 2011, admits that he is not thrilled that the zombie canon has expanded to include comedic and even romantic films, such as the 2013, zombie-meets-girl film Warm Bodies. But one new film he discussed for the first time this semester is last year’s Oscar-winning Get Out, about a black man’s first visit with his white girlfriend’s family. Let’s just say it doesn’t go well.

“Which brings us back to the questions of race, class, and domination through something like the zombie figure,” Hickman says. “I would cite it as evidence that the problems that created the zombie are still very much with us. And so we will keep having the zombies.”

True Blue

Fall 2018

Edward Gillespie ’04 (MLA) strolls through the hallways of 3500 Northern Parkway with the easy stride of a person who has found his calling. He passes glass-doored trophy cases and rows of lockers. He walks under banners touting “courage,” “honor,” and “integrity,” before heading up the stairs to his office. If not for the signs reading, “Secure all weapons prior to entering,” the West Baltimore building could still pass for the former Pimlico Middle School it was, rather than the Baltimore City Public Training Facility it has become.

Gillespie joined the Baltimore Police Department as a trainee in 2005. Today, he is a detective who teaches in-service courses to police officers. How does a former history teacher, poet, and aspiring novelist who earned a master’s degree in liberal arts end up as a police detective?

Gillespie grew up in suburban Philadelphia, attended George Washington University, and participated in Naval ROTC. His plans to become a marine, however, were derailed after a back injury at officer candidate school. Instead, the history major chose to become a teacher, eventually segueing into work in curriculum development. Then 9/11 intervened.

Gillespie remembers sitting in his office, cup of tea in hand, looking forward to his first class in JHU’s Master of Liberal Arts program, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. After the second plane collided with the building, he thought to himself, “Okay, I need to make a plan. I’m going to get my master’s degree. I’m going to get my black belt. And I’m going to go get bad guys.”

After finishing his MLA degree in 2004, Gillespie entered the police academy the following year. His beats included Sandtown-Winchester and Penn North, where in 2015, during the uprising, he “watched the CVS go from being a building to a crater.” The work was challenging, eye-opening, and unlike anything he had ever done. He met drug addicts who demanded to be known by their names—rather than the sobriquet “junkie”—and witnessed former students in handcuffs. “Working on foot really did a lot for me,” says Gillespie. “Piece by piece, I started to understand the link between socioeconomics, culture, and education.”

It’s this kind of knowledge of everyday policing, coupled with a fervent devotion to the liberal arts, that Gillespie brings to the classroom. His classes—on topics ranging from ethics and police bias to hate groups—reference Plato, Emmanuel Kant, James Baldwin, and the film, Serpico. “It’s extremely important to me that officers see themselves in the context of humanism and liberalism with a capital ‘L,’” Gillespie explains.

“We are heirs to the debates people have had about ethics throughout history. A modern policeman has to look back at Ancient Greece, to the Enlightenment and the founding fathers … and say, ‘where do I fit into this?’”

Policing inevitably influences Gillespie’s off-work hours. It seeps into his poetry, like in his recently self-published collection, On the Later Addition of Sancho Panza, where he references stopping an undocumented worker driving a car with a broken window. And in 2017, Gillespie taught a class, The Police Officer and the Social Contract, through Johns Hopkins’ Odyssey program.

Ultimately, teaching police officers is where Gillespie’s heart is. The work is important, he says, and his officers benefit from it.

“I’m glad I held out and came to policing when I did,” he reflects. “When people said, ‘You might not want to do that,’ my wife’s aunt told me, ‘Ed, something good will come of this.’ And it really has.”

By the Numbers: Spring 2018

Fall 2018

Photo of AAP graduate students at computer in health care site.

 

Advanced Academic Programs (AAP) offers part-time and full-time degree and certificate programs in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Montgomery County, and online.

Graduate Degree Programs: 25

Professional Certificates: 16

Online Programs: 21 degree/15 certificate

Current Students: 3,200+

Years AAP has been serving students: 26

Underrepresented population in student body in past year: 54%

Works in Progress (Spring 2018)

Fall 2018

A glimpse at ongoing faculty research

Casanova, the Kabbalah Convert?

Giacomo Casanova’s name may be a synonym for “womanizer,” but rarely has it been associated with Jewish mysticism.

Yet, as it turns out, once his lascivious adventures were mostly done, the 18th-century Venetian explorer turned to one aspect of Jewish spiritual thought—the Kabbalah—while exiled in Prague, according to research by Pawel Maciejko, an associate professor of history, and the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Chair in Classical Jewish Religion, Thought, and Culture at Johns Hopkins.

Maciejko stumbled over Casanova in 2009, while he was poring over texts for a monograph he is writing on Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz—a heretic and “arguably the greatest rabbinical scholar of the late 18th century.”

“My main research tool is serendipity,” says Maciejko, who came to Johns Hopkins last year. “I found out that Casanova had a network of contacts in Kabbalah, and he studied Hebrew. It takes a lot of effort to learn Kabbalah, and he did that. Was he doing it to advertise himself, or make some attractive connections? Was he truly fascinated with it?”

Kabbalah, a wide body of ancient knowledge that promises to add fulfillment and meaning to its practitioners’ lives, is still taught in most Orthodox yeshivas around the world. It has also been an object of fascination for many non-Jews through the ages—including those today, when pop singer Madonna embraced it several years ago.

But Casanova, a libertine in most ways, has never been confused with someone who is pious. If he was truly transfixed by Jewish mysticism, it would place the storied adventurer in a new light.

“This wasn’t a new religion for him,” Maciejko says. “He was a radical enlightenment person. He thought religion was a path to persecution.” And perhaps understandably so, given that he had been imprisoned and then excommunicated for what Catholic Church authorities in Venice called an “affront to religion and common decency.”

Nonetheless, as he aged, he sought out Kabbalah. “It was knowledge that explained the universe—knowledge that the Jews had—or so he believed,” Maciejko says.

The scholar has been reading through Casanova’s manuscripts to learn about his Kabbalah contacts. So far, Maciejko has uncovered that the daughter, Eve, of noted Jewish heretic Jacob Frank (1726-1791) was one of them.

“Casanova mentions Kabbalah a lot, but he’s very inconsistent,” Maciejko says. “It’s clear, though, that he took the teachings very seriously.”

A Deeper Look at School Choice

Unlimited school choice has been invoked as a cure for many urban ills, including delinquency, lower educational attainment, and crushing poverty. Its ostensible powers to change the lives of the poor for the better have turned the concept of educational choice into a political football, one that gets tossed around during discussions about the funding of underperforming public schools.

But does allowing students the chance to attend the school of their choice actually result in greater access for all students in a district? Research by Julia Burdick-Will, an assistant professor of sociology with a joint appointment in the School of Education, has found that the evidence is a bit muddled, and that much of what politicians claim for the idea doesn’t resemble the truth.

For one thing, even in school districts without formal choice programs, the data show that children from poor neighborhoods are more likely than wealthy students to travel miles to school—a finding that contradicts claims made by school choice advocates that needy children are deprived of options.

Alternatively, even if there are programs designed to increase access to other schools, would-be students may not be able to get there easily.

A study Burdick-Will is conducting with Marc Stein, an associate professor of sociology at the School of Education, looks at how the geographic distribution of schools in Baltimore City, where all public schools are virtually available to anyone, relates to access to quality education.

They created a database to estimate the time it takes each Baltimore student to walk or bus to school. They learned that it is easier for kids in East Baltimore to travel to higher-quality schools outside their neighborhoods than it is for those who live in West Baltimore, in part because of large geographic obstacles in the city’s west side that transportation systems must circumnavigate.

“This doesn’t mean that no one in West Baltimore gets out, just that doing so takes additional time, planning, and stress that likely impacts how they feel when they get to the classroom,” Burdick-Will says.

“We need to document the pattern and see how they’re figuring this out and find ways to support them.”

Conjuring New Ideas on Gravity

Among the phenomena of the universe that have most vexed theoretical physicists, quantum gravity remains a force all its own.

Scientists have largely relied on two frameworks—Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum field theory—to try and understand how the universe works. While these two methods help scientists explore some of the deepest laws of nature, in tandem they fail miserably in providing a full explanation of the role quantum gravity plays in them.

But what if there were enough commonalities within these two frameworks to allow scientists to develop new ideas on the mysteries of the ages, including ones in which gravity plays a starring role, such as the initial conditions of the universe, the nature of the Big Bang, and the interior of black holes?

Holography, a field developed within the past two decades, gives scientists the tools to figure out the commonalities between general relativity and a quantum theory of gravity.

“The holographic principle is one of the major, relatively recent discoveries in theoretical physics,” says Ibrahima Bah, an assistant professor of physics. “This discovery is as important to the understanding of gravity as curvature of space-time in general relativity.”

Quantum field theory allows us to understand the basic building blocks of matter, such as electrons and quarks, as well as fundamental forces, such as electromagnetism, Bah explains. Meanwhile, general relativity helps scientists work to understand gravity, the dynamics of planets, stars, galaxies, and the large-scale structures of the universe.

Those who work with holography build models of these two frameworks to see how long-known common points might direct them to new answers.

Bah’s research involves utilizing the all-purpose Swiss Army knife of theoretical physics—math—to note equivalency, something known as the Maldacena conjecture, which was first posited in 1997.

“The fact that these two frameworks can contain the same answers,” Bah says, “and this idea that holography may explain gravity, is revolutionary.”

Faculty Awards

Fall 2018

Charles Bennett, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Alumni Centennial Professor, Physics and Astronomy, was named recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his work that established the standard model of cosmology—a precise, physics-based description of the contents, dynamics, and shape of the universe. He was the leader of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe space mission and will share the $3 million prize with the mission science team.

Janice Chen, Assistant Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, has been named a Sloan Research Fellow for 2018. Sloan Research Fellows, who are nominated for the award by their fellow scientists, are selected for their potential to become leaders in their respective fields.

Aaron Hyman, Assistant Professor, History of Art, has been awarded the 2018 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association for his article, “Inventing Painting: Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, and New Spain’s Transatlantic Canon.”

Lawrence Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, English and History, was included in The Washington Post’s “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2017” list for his book, Chester B. Himes: A Biography. The book was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award and named as one of the Best Books of 2017 by Chicago Public Library.

Yumi Kim, Assistant Professor, History, is recipient of the David B. Larson Fellowship in Health and Spirituality at the Kluge Center in the Library of Congress for 2018. The fellowship encourages the pursuit of scholarly excellence in the scientific study of the relation of religiousness and spirituality to physical, mental, and social health.

Julian Krolik, Professor, Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded a Simons Fellowship, which provides support to extend an academic leave from one term to a full year, enabling him to focus on research for a longer period of time. He is an expert on the processes that occur under the extreme conditions near supermassive black holes.

Christopher Lakey, Assistant Professor, History of Art, received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant for his book, Sculptural Seeing: Relief, Optics, and the Rise of Perspective in Medieval Italy. The CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects.

Yi Li, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, has been named a Sloan Research Fellow for 2018. Sloan Research Fellows, who are nominated for the award by their fellow scientists, are selected for their potential to become leaders in their respective fields.

Dora Malech, Assistant Professor, Writing Seminars, received an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Fund, which aims to “benefit poetry and the literary arts” by converting the poet’s former house into a place for a poet-in-residence.

Alice McDermott, Richard A. Macksey Professor, Writing Seminars, was included in The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2017” list for her book, The Ninth Hour.

Emily Riehl, Assistant Professor, Mathematics, was featured as one of 27 notable contemporary women in math in the March 2018 edition of Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Erin Rowe, Assistant Professor, History, was selected as the Edwin C. and Elizabeth A. Whitehead Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for 2017-18. While at IAS, she will complete a book that examines the circulation of devotion to black saints from the 16th to the 18th century.

Glenn Schwartz, Whiting Professor of Archaeology and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, was named recipient of the 2017 ASOR G. Ernest Wright Award for Rural Archaeology in Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia: Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’I, a volume dealing with archaeological material, excavation reports, and material culture from the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean.

Joseph Silk, Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy, was named recipient of the 2018 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship by the American Astronomical Society. The award recognizes a “lifetime of eminence in astronomical research” and honors Silk for his “lifetime contributions to our understanding of the early universe and galaxy formation.”

Yannick Sire, Professor, Mathematics, has been awarded a Simons Fellowship, which provides support to extend an academic leave from one term to a full year, enabling him to focus on research for a longer period of time. He is an expert in partial differential equations, harmonic and geometric analysis, and dynamical systems.

Christopher Sogge, J.J. Sylvester Professor, Mathematics, has been awarded a Simons Fellowship, which provides support to extend an academic leave from one term to a full year, enabling him to focus on research for a longer period of time. He researches Fourier analysis and partial differential equations.

Sara Thoi, Assistant Professor, Chemistry, was selected as a Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement. The fellows meet yearly to discuss new strategies to enhance energy storage technology and build collaborations between young investigators in the field.

Seen and Heard: Spring 2018

Fall 2018

He dove into the chasm between quantum theory and general relativity and came back with a pearl.”
Adam Riess
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Krieger Eisenhower Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Popular Mechanics, March 2018, on the death of Stephen Hawking.

To represent the nation, [Mrs.] Obama had to sweep aside parody—and that’s precisely what her portrait does. Her exposed arms unmistakably signify grace, strength and an impeccable fashion sense. But they also offer more: an unmistakable sign of black women’s political power at the start of the 21st century—a power centuries in the making.”
Martha Jones
Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History
The Washington Post, February 2018, on the Smithsonian’s recently unveiled portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama.

I thought: Can we measure this correlation of clustering of vacant houses the same way we made measurements about astronomy?”
Tamás Budavári
Associate Research Professor, Physics and Astronomy
WIRED, January 2018, on drawing from his research on modeling the universe to develop an algorithmic tool for the Housing Authority of Baltimore City that can predict a city’s abandoned housing vacancies.

What happens in the Middle Ages is that alchemy is celebrated—and it might be one of the first disciplines that is celebrated this way—as the power it gives to human beings to control nature.”
Lawrence Principe
Drew Professor of the Humanities, History of Science and Technology
The Washington Post, January 2018, on the history of alchemical practice, which began about 1,500 years ago in Hellenistic Greece and flourished in Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries.

The Cosmic Cocktail of Exoplanet Atmospheres

Fall 2018

Scientists have conducted the first lab experiments on haze formation in simulated exoplanet atmospheres, an important step for understanding upcoming observations of planets outside the solar system with the James Webb Space Telescope.

The simulations are necessary to establish models of the atmospheres of far-distant worlds, models that can be used to look for signs of life outside the solar system. Results of the study appeared recently in Nature Astronomy.

“One of the reasons why we’re starting to do this work is to understand if having a haze layer on these planets would make them more or less habitable,” says the paper’s lead author, Sarah Hörst, assistant professor in the Krieger School’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

With telescopes available today, planetary scientists and astronomers can learn what gases make up the atmospheres of exoplanets.

Sarah Hörst and assistant research scientist Chao He examine samples of simulated atmospheres in a dry nitrogen glove box.

“Each gas has a fingerprint that’s unique to it,” says Hörst. “If you measure a large enough spectral range, you can look at how all the fingerprints are superimposed on top of each other.”

Current telescopes, however, do not work as well with every type of exoplanet. They fall short with exoplanets that have hazy atmospheres. Haze consists of solid particles suspended in gas, altering the way light interacts with the gas. This muting of spectral fingerprints makes measuring the gas composition more challenging.

Hörst believes this research can help the exoplanet science community determine which types of atmospheres are likely to be hazy. With haze clouding up a telescope’s ability to tell scientists which gases make up an exoplanet’s atmosphere—if not the amounts of them—our ability to detect life elsewhere is a murkier prospect.

Planets larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune, called super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, are the predominant types of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. As this class of planets is not found in our solar system, our limited knowledge makes them more difficult to study.

With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled for 2020 (see p. 34), scientists hope to be able to examine the atmospheres of these exoplanets in greater detail. JWST will be capable of looking back even further in time than the Hubble Space Telescope can, with a light-collecting area around 6.25 times greater than Hubble’s. Orbiting around the Sun a million miles from Earth, JWST will help researchers measure the composition of extrasolar planet atmospheres and even search for the building blocks of life.

“Part of what we’re trying to help people figure out is basically where you would want to look,” says Hörst of future uses of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Given that our solar system has no super-Earths or mini-Neptunes for comparison, scientists don’t have “ground truths” for the atmospheres of these exoplanets. Using computer models, Hörst’s team was able to put together a series of atmospheric compositions that model super-Earths or mini-Neptunes. They assembled nine different “planets” by varying levels of three dominant gases: carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and gaseous water; four other gases: helium, carbon monoxide, methane, and nitrogen; and three sets of temperatures.

The computer modeling proposed different percentages of gases, which the scientists mixed in a chamber and heated. Over three days, the heated mixture flowed through a plasma discharge, a setup that initiated chemical reactions within the chamber.

“The energy breaks up the gas molecules that we start with. They react with each other and make new things, and sometimes they’ll make a solid particle [creating haze] and sometimes they won’t,” Hörst says.

She added: “The fundamental question for this paper was: Which of these gas mixtures—which of these atmospheres—will we expect to be hazy?”

The researchers found that all nine variants made haze in varying amounts. The surprise lay in which combinations made more. The team found the most haze particles in two of the water-dominant atmospheres.

“We had this idea for a long time that methane chemistry was the one true path to make a haze, and we know that’s not true now,” says Hörst, referring to compounds abundant in both hydrogen and carbon.

Furthermore, the scientists found differences in the colors of the particles, which could affect how much heat is trapped by the haze.

“Having a haze layer can change the temperature structure of an atmosphere,” Hörst says. “It can prevent really energetic photons from reaching a surface.”

Like the ozone layer that now protects life on Earth from harmful radiation, scientists have speculated a primitive haze layer may have shielded life in the very beginning. This could be meaningful in the search for external life.

For Hörst’s group, the next steps involve analyzing the different hazes to see how the color and size of the particles affect how the particles interact with light. They also plan to try other compositions, temperatures, and energy sources to examine the composition of the haze produced.

“The production rates were the very, very first step of what’s going to be a long process in trying to figure out which atmospheres are hazy and what the impact of the haze particles is,” Hörst says.

Philosophy Matters

Fall 2018

Legendary investor William H. “Bill” Miller III has committed a record $75 million to the Krieger School’s Department of Philosophy to broaden and intensify faculty research, graduate student support, and undergraduate study of philosophical thought.

Miller, founder and chairman of Miller Value Partners and formerly the longtime, highly successful manager of the Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust, is himself a former Johns Hopkins philosophy graduate student.

“I attribute much of my business success to the analytical training and habits of mind that were developed when I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins,” says Miller, who is best known for beating the Standard & Poor’s 500 with his Legg Mason fund for a record 15 consecutive years, from 1991 to 2005.

“I am delighted to be able to show my gratitude by helping to move the department to its rightful place among the best in the country,” he says.

Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, says Miller’s aim—and the university’s—is to set a new standard for excellence in philosophy and promote powerful, change-making collaboration between philosophers and other scholars.

“Philosophy matters,” Daniels says. “Philosophy defines what it is to be human, to lead lives that are meaningful, and to create societies that are just and humane. The contemporary challenges of the genomics revolution, the rise of artificial intelligence, the growth in income inequality, social and political fragmentation, and our capacity for devastating war all invite philosophical perspective. Bill Miller’s unprecedented commitment to our Department of Philosophy underscores the continuing vitality and relevance of the humanities.”

The university is recognizing Miller’s generosity by renaming the department in his honor.

“Bill’s dual perspective as a business leader and an intellectually curious lifelong student of philosophy is so important,” says Beverly Wendland, dean of the Krieger School. “Our talented faculty and the students who will study in the William H. Miller Department of Philosophy for generations to come will always be grateful, as I am, for Bill’s confidence in Johns Hopkins.”

Miller’s gift will help grow the department within 10 years to 22 full-time faculty members from its current 13. It will create an endowed professorship for the chair of the department, eight other endowed professorships,and endowed support for junior faculty members.

The gift will add $10 million to endowed support for philosophy graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The university also aims to attract more undergraduates to the study of philosophy, in part through new introductory courses and additional interdisciplinary tracks.

“The study of philosophy has been central to Johns Hopkins from the university’s beginning in 1876,” says Richard Bett, professor and chair of the department. “Bill Miller knows that every student, no matter their major or intended career, can benefit from philosophical study.”

Snapshot: From the Office of Karen Fleming

Fall 2018

Svedberg invented the analytical ultracentrifuge, and that’s my background—ultracentrifugation. The design is a combination of science and art—it’s an accessible beauty. These are fundamental physics and chemistry concepts, but you don’t even have to know anything about science to look at it and think it’s cool.”
Karen Fleming, Professor, Department of Biophysics

Theodor Svedberg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1926 for inventing the analytical ultracentrifuge, a tool that measures the size of molecules. But he also had an artistic side. In 1955, when he couldn’t find suitable fabric for new drapes for the Gustav Werner Institute, he simply designed his own. At a 2009 conference in Sweden commemorating the 125th anniversary of Svedberg’s birth, Professor Karen Fleming and her colleagues were each given a single black linen square with renderings of subatomic concepts like a Bohr orbital, mass spectrometry, or a Schrödinger atom—remnants of Svedberg’s remarkable curtains. Fleming was so taken with the fabric that she found a company that still manufactured it, and ordered several yards. “Atomics” now lines the bookcase in her office.

Evidence Points to Cooling Property of Dark Matter

Fall 2018

A new measurement recently reported in Nature provides evidence for a new cooling property of dark matter previously posited by a collection of JHU professors, postdoctoral fellows, and students.

The paper, authored by a group of radio-astronomers at Arizona State University, describes the first measurement of the temperature of intergalactic hydrogen atoms from only 180 million years after the Big Bang.

Surprisingly, that temperature reading is colder than expected in the standard cosmological model. An interpretation paper by a researcher at Tel Aviv University explains that this result can be understood if these hydrogen atoms have some small heat exchange with the abundant dark matter in the universe. If this result is correct, it tells us something new about the physics of dark matter: Not only does dark matter have a gravitational pull that prevents galaxies from flying apart, it also has the ability to absorb heat energy.

The theoretical research that suggested hydrogen might be cooled by dark matter, and thus produce the signal reported in Nature, was conducted at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

The initial paper exploring the possibility of heat exchange between hydrogen and dark matter was authored in 2013 by Marc Kamionkowski, the William R. Kenan Professor and a theoretical physicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and two of his collaborators. Two subsequent papers elaborated further this heat exchange and proposed to seek evidence for it in precisely the type of measurements reported in Nature. One of these papers was authored by Joseph Silk, a research professor in the department, and his collaborators; the other paper was written by JHU postdocs Yacine Ali-Haïmoud and Ely Kovetz and a graduate student, Julián Munoz.

“This newly reported result, if confirmed by subsequent measurements, may well turn out to be a Rosetta stone for the nature of dark matter,” Kamionkowski said. “Joe and his collaborators, and Julian, Ely, and Yacine, deserve significant credit for suggesting these neutral-hydrogen measurements could be used in this way.”

The Center for Visual Arts

Fall 2018

Established in 1974 as The Homewood Art Workshops, the center was an informal opportunity for Hopkins students, regardless of experience, to learn the fundamentals of drawing and painting. Eugene Leake, renowned painter and former president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, was the program’s first director.

Fast-forward to today. The center* has grown exponentially in popularity, offering courses in drawing, painting, photography, cartooning, sculpture, and printmaking. A dedicated space in the Mattin Center has become a hub for the visual arts, and students can now declare a minor in visual art.

Here, Craig Hankin—who is retiring this year after more than 30 years directing the program—gives artistic advice to senior student Amy He.

By the Numbers:

  • # of years the art program has been in existence – 44
  • # of courses offered in a given semester – 14+
  • # of faculty teaching at the center – 10
  • # of students taking visual arts courses in a given semester – 165

*On its 40th anniversary, and for the first time offering a minor in visual art, the Homewood Art Workshops became the Center for Visual Arts, a name more accurately reflecting its role on the Hopkins campus.

Major Infatuation: Art History

Fall 2018

As an art historian, I believe brushstrokes on canvas reveal stories of history in a way that the written or spoken word cannot. When I study art history, I become Marty McFly. With so many years of art history all around me, I am able to travel to the past and then back to the future.”

Maya Kahane ’19

Art is incredibly intimate and spurs many different emotive responses. Artworks can illuminate both an artist’s soul and the psyche of the viewer.”

Tess DeBerry ’19

Art history is like poetry in many ways. Where one describes with words, the other with dabs of paint. Studying art history has made me much more detail-oriented. I now notice tiny details in everything. If I were to describe my major I would say: EVERYTHING is art.”

Sydney Baker ’18