Finding Elisabeth Gilman

Fall 2018

Having spent the better part of half a century serving under six Johns Hopkins University presidents, alumnus Ross Jones ’53 might have thought he had no surprises left when it came to the university, its people, and its history.

Then, about 10 years ago, he came across the papers of Elisabeth Gilman (1867-1950), deep in the university archives. “Miss Lizzie,” as she affectionately came to be known, was the youngest daughter of founding university President Daniel Coit Gilman.

Ross Jones '53 with photo of Elisabeth Gilman in the background.

Ross Jones ’53 with photo of Elisabeth Gilman in the background.

“I was hooked,” says Jones, former vice president and secretary to the Board of Trustees. “Here was this woman who was many decades ahead of her time.”

As a young woman in the late 1800s, Elisabeth accompanied Daniel Coit Gilman on trips up and down the Nile River, rode donkeys across the desert in Egypt, and visited the West End docks in London to talk with prominent advocates for the working poor. Educated mostly at home, she met and learned from a steady stream of leading intellectuals who regularly visited her father and the university.

“No government official, no leader of industry or financial enterprise, escaped her persistent message that it was their duty to raise the quality of life for working men and women, children, minorities, and the aged,” says Jones.

Jones has spent nearly a decade researching the life of the relatively unknown Socialist leader—studying her diaries, newspaper clippings, letters, and more—and has produced a book-length manuscript about her life and work that he hopes to publish soon.

In tackling the writing project, Jones called on the reporting skills he honed early in his career. After graduating from Johns Hopkins with a major in history, he served for three years in the Army and then headed to Columbia University for a master’s degree in journalism. He worked for the Associated Press, then in public affairs for Columbia University, before he got a call from Johns Hopkins President Milton S. Eisenhower in 1961.

Jones became Eisenhower’s assistant and secretary to the board of trustees. Then, upon Eisenhower’s retirement in 1967, he became vice president and secretary, handling a broad portfolio of administrative responsibilities until his own retirement in 1998.

Jones continued working part time at Johns Hopkins for several years after that, doing some fundraising and researching Hopkins history to write articles for the university’s Gazette. It was during that time that archivist James Stimpert rolled out a cart loaded with boxes of Elisabeth Gilman’s papers—and Jones was quickly smitten.

He says that the more he learned about Gilman and her advocacy, the more he became convinced that her work is especially relevant now. “It’s really remarkable how so many of the issues she advocated for so passionately in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s are issues we’re still grappling with in 2017,” he says. He adds ruefully, “She might be a little discouraged if she came back today.”

Among other projects, “Miss Lizzie” created a “night bureau” in the winter for Baltimore’s homeless, launched the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and led a national effort to raise funds for the destitute families of the 1922 West Virginia miners’ strike.

Indeed, Gilman’s home on Park Avenue “was the center of liberal and progressive activity in Baltimore,” Jones says. “Progressive leaders from around the country would come to meet with her and talk about their programs and projects.”

Many of those visitors came under the umbrella of the “Open Forum,” a weekly Sunday lecture series, which began just before World War I and lasted until the early days of World War II, and drew more than 1,000 people each week.

“Elisabeth was the driving force for the Open Forum, particularly in the latter years,” says Jones.

At a testimonial dinner held in honor of Elisabeth Gilman several years before her death in 1950, at age 82, Sidney Hollander, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins, summarized her far-reaching vision and impact, Jones writes in his book.

Hollander called Gilman “one of America’s grandest institutions,” and noted, “She has stirred Baltimore as Einstein stirred the universe.”

More Faculty Books

Fall 2018


Analytics, Policy, and Governance
Yale University Press, 2017
Co-edited by Jennifer Bachner, senior lecturer, Government Analytics
Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein Professor, Political Science
Kathryn Wagner Hill, senior lecturer, Governmental Studies
Explores the relationship of data analytics to governance while providing strategies for the retrieval and management of information.

 

Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming
Duke University Press Books, 2017
By William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Political Science
Expands on the politics of pluralization, capitalism, fragility, and secularism to address climate change and notions of the Anthropocene.

 

Baltimore: A Political History
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017
By Matthew Crenson, Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor, Political Science
A historical exploration of the particularity of place and how a city developed its distinctive personality.

 

Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media
Bloomsbury Academic, 2016
Co-authored by William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities
Uses theoretical analysis to under-stand the concept of reality in the information age.

 

No Harm Done
Dalkey Archive Press, 2017
By Jean McGarry, Elliot Coleman Professor, Writing Seminars
A collection of 15 stories that depict family life at its worst, best, and funniest.

 

Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’: A Critical Guide
Cambridge University Press, 2017
By Yitzhak Melamed, Professor, Philosophy
Established scholars engage with the complex system of philosophy proposed by Spinoza’s Ethics.

 

Coming in to Land: Selected Poems 1975-2015
Ecco, 2017
By Andrew Motion, Homewood Professor of the Arts
An anthology of poetry spanning the career of England’s former poet laureate.

 

Last Day on Earth
Scribner, 2017
By Eric Puchner, Assistant Professor, Writing Seminars
A collection of short stories that revolve around the complex and surreal system of family.

Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel
Princeton University Press, 2017
By Jesse Rosenthal, Assistant Professor, English
Uses the work of Victorian philosophers to show the importance of understanding both the moral and formal principles of the novel.

 

Syllabus: Global (In)Security

Fall 2018

Cyber attacks. Biological weapons. Nuclear war. It’s the stuff of big-budget summer blockbusters. It’s also the stuff of Global Security Politics, a course that explores the political implications of weapons of mass destruction and oppression. Taught by Daniel Deudney, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science, the course examines the tensions between knowledge and ignorance, threats and responses, and security and freedom through the study of weaponry in four major areas: nuclear, space, biological, and cybernetic.

In framing his treatment of these emerging technological threats, Deudney leads the class through the essential lessons of what he calls “republican geopolitics,” which examines the ways in which combinations of technologies and geographies indicate what kinds of restraints are necessary to provide security and liberty. The course draws in part from Deudney’s 2008 book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village, and he says its goal is “to understand the contours of weapons of mass destruction and their relationship to international systems and everybody’s security.

“Most important is to get students to think beyond the concept of nation state and national security being viable anymore.”

Take nuclear weapons, for example. Over a series of hour-long lectures, Deudney details the destruction potential in nuclear weapons, security in the nuclear age, and arguments surrounding proliferation and deterrence. A consummate storyteller, Deudney paces back and forth across the stage of the Arellano Theater in his trademark black suit and dark-framed glasses, making meticulous notes on the white boards, which, by the end of class, will resemble a five-panel mural graffitied with text, diagrams, and sketches. As he writes, he points out the degree of uncertainty about the nuclear question.

“When we come to the question of what is the probability of nuclear war,” he explains to the 100 or so students attending the lecture, “we have no basis to really answer that question. Or the question of what we should do and what is necessary to prevent this cataclysm from happening.

“The most important questions we can’t answer in any empirical way,” he says.

Each time he teaches Global Security Politics, Deudney says, the syllabus content evolves—particularly in the cyber module, where change is constant. But he hopes that students will come away from class with an understanding of their own responsibility for what happens in the world. “The biggest enemy is intellectual complacency,” he explains: “the idea that things are good and going to stay that way.”

Although the focus of the course is the present and future, Deudney’s approach stands on an often unfashionable view of the past. The security problem, he explains, is not simply from the prospect that the “cornucopia of double-edged swords” produced by modern science and technology will be employed for mass destruction, but also that the measures needed to regulate new technologies will lead to oppressive totalitarian government—a prospect the internet makes all too possible.

“We forget,” he says, “how historically rare and precarious political liberty and security were prior to the founding and success of the United States of America,” and we must prepare ourselves for a “future that will require the same combination of luck, sacrifice, and daring innovation” that made our republic possible.

At the end of his lecture, as Deudney gathers his notes, a student approaches and admits with a mixture of appreciation and awe, “This is the only class that makes me scared.”

“If you’re not scared,” replies his professor matter-of-factly, “you’re uninformed.”

Winter Break for a Cause

Fall 2018

Close to 40 Hopkins students participated in an immersive civic engagement program last January during the Intersession Alternative Breaks program. Throughout the course of a week, they completed nearly 300 hours of service at locations such as Moveable Feast (pictured here), where volunteers prepare and deliver meals and groceries to people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other life-threatening diseases.

photo of students working at Moveable Feast

Major Infatuation: Political Science

Fall 2018

In no more than three sentences, tell us why you love your major.

Political science is asking and answering the question ‘what is going on in the world?’ We search for politically persuasive ways to obtain a greater good.” Tommy Koh ’18

Political science is remarkable for its relevance in the quotidian experience of life in Baltimore, as well as in the halls of the United Nations.” Libby Norford ’17

In political science, I have the freedom to study why the world is a certain way and to propose how it should be.” Simon Bohn ’17

First it was a love for votes:
Shiny stickers worn with glee
In the ballot box with mom;
Bright confetti on TV.

Then it was the activists:
Doctors, Greenpeace, Occupy.
Their resistance changes lives
I thought, and someday so will I.

And now it’s the news. It frightens me.
But though I may be just one girl,
Pounding pavement, chanting loud
And studying, I’ll change the world. Natalie Wallington ’19

Spotlight on Women’s Health

Fall 2018

Do hot flashes last forever? Does hormone therapy cause weight gain? Do women need Pap tests every year? These are just a few of the many midlife issues Tara Allmen ’86, MD, demystifies in her new book, Menopause Confidential: A Doctor Reveals the Secrets to Thriving Through Midlife, published by HarperCollins.

The book, says Allmen, comes at a time when more women are seeking out specialists in the field of midlife women’s health. “Women are more empowered now to talk about their symptoms and learn about what the best evidence-based solutions are,” says Allmen. “In my mother’s generation, women just toughed it out and didn’t talk about menopause. That has absolutely changed in the last decade.”

Menopause Confidential addresses issues particular to women over 40, from symptoms and hormonal changes associated with perimenopause to health screenings to remedies both allopathic and natural. “It’s amazing how little information midlife women get before they start this complicated time of life. My goal was to write a scientifically accurate, easily readable book that teaches midlife women with humor and respect.” Allmen also offers a series of short videos addressing frequently asked questions on her website, drallmen.com.

Allmen joined the Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders, and Women’s Health in New York City in 1999 and has focused her practice exclusively on midlife women. She earned her medical degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the president of the North American Menopause Society Foundation as well as the Allmen Foundation, which is devoted to issues concerning women’s health and animal welfare.

A pre-med graduate of the Krieger School, Allmen credits her first-year chemistry professor for changing her approach to academics. After failing the midterm, Allmen met with her professor, Ruth Aranow, who gave her some life-changing advice. “I will never forget it because I had never failed a test before,” says Allmen. “Dr. Aranow told me that I could no longer rely upon my excellent memorization skills. I needed to learn how to apply what I had learned. That’s when I became a critical thinker.”

It is a lesson, she says, that has served her well through the rest of her undergraduate years (yes, she passed her chemistry final), medical school, and residency, and still resonates with her after 25 years in practice. “I think I have the best job in the world,” says Allmen. “I love that I’ve been able to help women of every age navigate through all of the stages of women’s health. Honestly, I can’t think of anything better than that.”

Faculty Awards

Fall 2018

Kit Bowen, E. Emmet Reid Professor of Chemistry, received the American Chemical Society Physical Chemistry Division Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry for his contributions to the field.

Xin Chen, Associate Professor, Biology, was named a finalist for the President’s Frontier Award, created by JHU President Ronald J. Daniels to support outstanding faculty who are at the forefront of their fields. She was awarded $50,000 for her work.

N.D.B. Connolly, Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History, had his research project, Mapping Inequality, named one of the Best Maps of 2016 by National Geographic. The interactive database allows anyone to search hundreds of maps and documents that contributed to housing discrimination beginning in the 1930s.

Sarah Hörst, Assistant Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences, received a three-year, $500,000 grant from NASA’s Astrophysics Research and Analysis Program to conduct laboratory simulation experiments of exoplanet atmospheres.

Nitu Kitchloo, Professor and Chair, Mathematics, was chosen for a 2017-18 fellowship from the Simons Foundation, established to assist scholars in prolonging their sabbaticals and enhancing their research. He will use the award to work at the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics in Germany.

Rebekka Klausen, Assistant Professor, Chemistry, was one of five scientists nationwide to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences. She also received a 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship, recognizing early-career scientists who show promise in making significant contributions to their fields.

Yuan Chuan Lee, Research Professor, Biology, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his “distinguished contributions to glycoscience, particularly for the seminal discovery of glycoside clustering effect in protein-carbohydrate interactions.”

Tobias Marriage, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to support research by graduate and undergraduate students who are analyzing data from the JHU-led Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor to understand how the universe began.

Chikako Mese, Professor, Mathematics, was chosen for a 2017-18 fellowship from the Simons Foundation, established to assist scholars in prolonging their sabbaticals and enhancing their research. Her research deals with mathematical analysis of geometric objects and analysis.

Cynthia Moss, Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, was chosen as the recipient of the 2017 William and Christine Hartmann Prize in Auditory Neuroscience. The prize recognizes research that links auditory physiology with auditory perception or behavior in humans or other animals.

Hollis Robbins, Director of the Center for Africana Studies, was named a 2017-18 Fellow of the National Humanities Center. She will use the fellowship to complete her book Forms of Contention: The African American Sonnet Tradition.

Rosemary Wyse, Professor, Physics and Astronomy, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her “distinguished contributions to our understanding of the origin and evolution of galaxies, particularly galaxies like our own and dwarf spheroidal galaxies.”

Field Notes

Fall 2018

Oil and Water

Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski '17

Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski ’17

Last summer Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski ’17 found herself in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest canoeing down the Aguarico River toward a small village inhabited by the indigenous Cofán people. There she would spend the next five weeks conducting qualitative research, interviewing the residents about their lives and their thoughts on the oil industry, long active in the area. “It was probably one of the most challenging experiences I’ve ever had,” she says of her time spent beyond the reach of roads (but not beyond the reach of clouds of mosquitoes).

Cueva-Dabkoski was born in Ecuador and raised in San Francisco, where she says her mother instilled within her a deep interest in social justice. “In middle school, I started to hear about oil contamination in the Amazon largely and disproportionally impacting indigenous people and I was horror-stricken,” Cueva-Dabkoski says. “It’s always been a dream to focus on this problem.”

She’s preparing for such work by double majoring in public health studies and sociology with a minor in Latin American studies, while also working as a research assistant in the Department of Sociology’s Poverty and Inequality Research Lab.

Ecuador is among the largest oil producers in South America, and oil accounts for a third of the nation’s export income. But extracting this resource has been problematic, contaminating forests and rivers and leading to increased cancer risks for many. The aim of her project was to gain a better understanding of the socioeconomic consequences the oil industry has had for subsistence farmers.

“By understanding opinions about oil, you get a better sense of how indigenous people are interacting with this industry, how it is impacting them, and how we can create policies that support those who are most vulnerable to these large corporations,” she says.

She ended up interviewing more than 40 people, and while the transcribing and analysis of more than 70 hours of recorded conversations is ongoing, one surprise emerged: While she expected there to be near-universal condemnation of the oil industry, many villagers saw economic benefits to the industry’s presence.

Suffice it to say, the issue is complicated. Cueva-Dabkoski turned her research into a senior thesis and also plans to return to the Cofán forests. “It was an incredible privilege to move to the Amazon for nearly a month and half,” she says. “I made connections with this community, and I’m working to help it have longevity and sustainability. This work is important to me as an aspiring sociologist but also as an Ecuadorian-American. My insider-outsider status pushes me to return to Ecuador.”

Photos courtesy of Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski ’17

Emotional Rescue

Charltien Long '17

Charltien Long ’17

Imagine losing a loved one who is sitting right in front of you.

Individuals who suffer a right-hemisphere stroke or develop the neurodegenerative disease frontotemporal dementia (FTD) can experience debilitating behavioral changes, diminished motor skills, and a marked reduction in social interaction skills. It can also negatively impact their quality of life—and that of their caregivers. Such patients, for example, may no longer understand the emotional cues within a conversation—a speaker’s tone of voice or facial expressions. Consequently, they often can’t tell when someone is happy or sad or angry.

“Maybe you were married to someone for 25 or 30 years, and one day they have a stroke, and they are just not the same person afterwards,” says neuroscience major Charltien Long ’17. “The emotional closeness between you is gone, and it’s very hard to connect or communicate in a meaningful way. It’s like they are lost to you.”

Working under Johns Hopkins neurologist Argye Hillis, MD, in the School of Medicine’s Stroke Cognitive Outcome and Recovery Lab, Long focused on finding ways to bridge this distressing divide. Long had learned from previous training at the lab of Sophia Vinogradov, MD, at the University of California, San Francisco, that schizophrenia patients experiencing a similar loss of empathetic abilities have had success with a computer-based training system that helps them learn the norms of social and emotional interaction. Could such a brain-training approach benefit his target population as well?

Long devised a clinical study wherein 10 patients with FTD or who had suffered a right-hemisphere stroke performed about 30 hours of such training over a span of a few weeks to a few months. The flash-card-like training uses either a laptop or an iPad to train patients with various social and emotional skills. One screen describes a series of human interactions and then, on the following screen, patients answer multiple-choice questions about the emotional state of the participants: who was sad, proud, angry, etc. Other exercises such as facial expression training work similarly: A face is shown and then on a subsequent screen the participants choose the emotion it was expressing.

Analysis of the results is still ongoing, but Long says one of the valuable lessons regarding computer-based training for stroke patients is the need to adapt and optimize the test for an audience that can have vision or motor skill impairments. (Some participants had difficulty operating a mouse effectively, for example.) He also relished how the project got him out of the classroom to confront real-world issues.

“When we talk about neuroscience at Hopkins, much of our education is focused on cells and molecules,” Long says. “On the other hand, I think what people find most meaningful in life is social connection and our ability to empathize with others and to care about the world.”

Aid in the Airwaves

Michelle Kihara '17

Michelle Kihara ’17

The Nyarugusu refugee camp in western Tanzania was built in the 1990s to house 60,000 people fleeing armed conflict in the region. By 2015, it housed well over 100,000 people, mostly Burundians and Congolese. “When you have that level of overcrowding in a refugee setting, various health issues come up, such as cholera and different infectious diseases,” says public health major Michelle Kihara ’17.

As a native of East Africa herself (she’s from neighboring Kenya), Kihara wanted to learn more about the public health challenges within the camp and how they were being addressed. And she discovered a fascinating way to do so from far-away Baltimore. She listened to some 40 hours of archived radio programming that had been broadcast into the camp, transcribing it and then translating it from Swahili to English for content analysis.

“One thing they did very well was to draw on different levels of communication,” Kihara says. “They might have health experts speaking for one portion and then they would have a play with characters addressing a topic like HIV in a very relatable way.”

She also learned how they addressed the emerging threat of Ebola and delicately handled the subject of traditional healing methods (not always helpful but believed by many to be). The work so absorbed her that for her senior thesis, she continued to research the mass media’s role in addressing health issues, particularly in populations with limited resources.

“When I did this project I was debating between studying public health or neuroscience,” she says. “This project really just focused my trajectory because it was somewhere very close to where I’m from in East Africa and it exposed me to a lot of health issues that I might not have known about. It really set the tone for what I’m doing now.”

And what she’ll be doing in the fall is heading over to the Bloomberg School of Public Health to pursue a master’s degree.

 

Photos courtesy of Michelle Kihara ’17

Korean Conflict

Sang June Oh '17

Sang June Oh ’17

The future of historical documents can sometimes be the subject of present-day conflict. History major Sang June Oh ’18 learned this curious lesson firsthand while co-authoring an article in the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives on History last fall on a 2015 legal battle over the fate of a rare cache of Korean-American documents.

The Korean native was interning at the association over the summer when he spied “Korean-American papers” on a list of topics for upcoming magazine articles. “I was pleasantly surprised to find that the association readily covered East Asian history,” he says. “People tend to place greater importance on Chinese and Japanese rather than Korean history.”

At issue was a trove of historic documents and photographs related to the Los Angeles-based Korean National Association of North America (KNA) during the early years of the 20th century. The long-neglected materials had been found in the group’s disused headquarters building, where some of it was decaying. The KNA Memorial Foundation, the group now looking after the building, wanted to send the materials to Korea for safekeeping—much to the dismay of some local Korean community groups and academics who went to court to block the relocation. They wanted the invaluable slice of Korean-American history to remain in the United States for easy access.

Oh interviewed people on both sides of the conflict for the article, some of whom requested speaking with a Korean. Ultimately, a settlement was reached wherein the materials will be digitized and then loaned to Korea until a suitable facility to house them in California is developed.

“If I learned anything, it’s that politics plays into practically everything,” Oh says. “But, really, what was more interesting was getting acquainted with Korean-American history.”

 

Reopening the Case

Fall 2018

Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson rank among the hardest-boiled cops in American detective fiction, deploying guile, brute force, and a barrage of acidic quips as they battle crime in mid-20th-century Harlem.

Chester Himes created Grave Digger and Coffin Ed in 1956, and he won global acclaim with a series of novels detailing their exploits. But Lawrence P. Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History, stakes a claim for Himes past his emergence as a master of detective fiction. In a new biography, Chester B. Himes, Jackson identifies Himes as a key figure in the generation of brilliant, mid-20th-century black writers that includes Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.

The new biography excavates Himes’ unsparing meditations on race, politics, and masculinity, many of which were published in the two decades before his renowned crime fiction appeared. Jackson’s close readings of these texts and access to new archival materials make a compelling case that Himes broke significant new ground in tackling issues that remain at the center of American writing.

Jackson eschews what he dubs “romantic mythicization” in favor of weaving Himes and his peers back into “the crisis of day-to-day life” faced by African-American authors writing in the mid-20th century. It was a crisis manifested in the most basic aspects of life, including, says Jackson, “the inability to get an apartment, to buy a house, to eat at a nearby restaurant, or use libraries and get access to information.”

“I am interested in making an intervention into the mainstream narrative, which excludes systematically, almost as a point of principle, black voices and black people,” says Jackson. “Especially as a biographer of African-American subjects, as an African-American self, I am always interested in providing a corrective.”

Himes felt the quotidian crisis Jackson describes even more acutely than many of his cohorts. As a young man, Himes was arrested for a bungled armed robbery in 1928 and served more than eight years in prison. Himes procured a typewriter while in the Ohio Penitentiary and began his journey as a writer there.

“Prison was a very jarring and deeply uncomfortable experience [for Himes],” says Jackson. “His ability to create a private emotional and intellectual space through writing was a key way for him to survive that experience without becoming insane.”

Himes was already selling his unsparing and candid tales of life behind bars to magazines, including Esquire, when he emerged from prison in 1936. Yet early successes offered no easy path into literary circles. Himes’ fortunes oscillated between stints at prestigious writing colonies such as Yaddo and manual labor jobs taken to make ends meet.

Himes’ growing ambitions as a writer also collided with the racism that deeply permeated America’s publishing and film industries. “As his work grew in some of its richness,” Jackson says, “it was difficult for him to get published.”

Yet Himes persisted. Two classic novels—If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947)—joined an impressive body of stories and reportage, including what Jackson describes as “radical, sharp-edged journalism calling for absolute resistance [to racism] during the Second World War, which was a very unpopular stand.”

Himes eventually moved to Paris in the early 1950s. “I don’t think how Himes personally chafed against the abject racism in the United States at that time can be exaggerated,” says Jackson, “but there was also the sense of [American] cultural philistinism that rankled him as well.”

Himes found Paris more congenial. If He Hollers Let Him Go received a glowing mention in French psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon’s classic work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952). And Himes’ noir detective novels, published first in Paris in French translation, finally won him the wider audience in the late 1950s that he had long sought with his earlier work.

Despite the enduring appeal of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, Jackson’s initial attraction to Himes’ story was the author’s unique stance in the era’s fraught politics. “I was drawn to Himes as a writer with political commitments,” Jackson says, “who figured out an independent path between the Communist left, and the black middle class represented by the NAACP and the Urban League.”

Chester B. Himes will certainly draw new readers to the author’s entire body of work — including early sprawling gems such as Lonely Crusade (1947), which grapples with race, labor, class, and war.

“I think that we can get a lot from Lonely Crusade in our exact political moment,” says Jackson.

New Associate Dean Named for AAP

Fall 2018

John Caron has been named associate dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs.

Caron comes to Johns Hopkins from Northeastern University in Boston, where for the past six years he served as senior associate dean of academic and faculty affairs for the College of Professional Studies. He earned his doctorate of education from the University of Pennsylvania.

“Mission and quality are important to me,” says Caron. “At the same time, working closely with faculty to develop innovative programs that leverage Johns Hopkins’ commitment to excellence excites me.”

During his time at Northeastern, Caron worked with faculty to expand the outreach of academic programs; develop and launch multiple new programs each year; expand the ranks of full-time faculty from 20 to 80; and develop a robust professional development program for full- and part-time faculty.

Advanced Academic Programs offers part-time and full-time degree and certificate programs for adults in disciplines such as applied economics, biotechnology, communication, environmental studies, film, and government. Classes are held on-site in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; and Montgomery County; and flexible classes and online programs are also offered.

In the LEED

Fall 2018

The Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories, a state-of-the-art lab space on the Homewood campus, has received the highest certification available—platinum—from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

The internationally recognized LEED program is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council and provides a numeric score for green building design, construction, operations, and maintenance. The UTL building received a score of 80 out of 108 possible points.

“The university has a LEED silver standard, so to achieve platinum for such a resource-intensive building truly speaks to the design and construction team’s commitment to integrate sustainability in innovative ways throughout the space,” says Ashley Pennington, program manager of the Johns Hopkins Office of Sustainability. “It’s an impressive feat.”

The UTL building contains 20 high-tech lab spaces and classrooms for undergrads and faculty in the departments of chemistry, biology, biophysics, psychological and brain sciences, and neuroscience. Opened in 2013, the four-story, 105,000-square-foot facility was designed by Ballinger of Philadelphia to use 40 percent less energy than similar code-compliant lab buildings. Its energy-efficient designs include highly efficient heating and cooling systems, occupancy sensors that control lights and HVAC, daylight sensors, low-flow water fixtures, and cutting-edge lab technologies designed to conserve energy and water.

For example, a typical lab creates vacuums for experiments using water, whereas the UTL building utilizes vacuum pumps with on/off switches, conserving the water that would otherwise be discarded after use. Also in the labs are high-performance fume hoods, which provide protection for scientists while conserving energy.

Senator Barbara Mikulski Joins Faculty

Fall 2018

Barbara Mikulski, Maryland’s longest-tenured United States senator, joined Johns Hopkins University in January as a professor of public policy and advisor to President Ronald J. Daniels.

Mikulski retired from the Senate in early January after completing her fifth six-year term. At Hopkins, she is based primarily in the Krieger School’s Department of Political Science, serving as a Homewood Professor, a title reserved for individuals of international distinction and major accomplishment in their fields. She will also consult with leaders of the university and Johns Hopkins Medicine on public policy and other relevant issues.

“I’m proud to join the Johns Hopkins faculty and to share my expertise and experience in public policy,” says Mikulski. “I am excited to teach and encourage the next generation and to assist the leadership of this internationally recognized university.”

This semester, Mikulski has already been a guest lecturer in a class on sociology and health care, and she has met with sociology and political science faculty members. She is also working with members of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, particularly with some of the school’s Baltimore-focused programs. In the fall, Mikulski will co-teach an undergraduate course—The Politics of Public Policy—with Robert Lieberman, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science.

“I love the energy and commitment at Hopkins,” says Mikulski. “Everyone has been so welcoming. I have just jumped in—in the classroom as a guest lecturer; meeting with deans, faculty, and students; and working with Hopkins and the greater community. Expect sightings of me all over!”

Mikulski, 80, was elected to the Senate in 1986, after five terms in the House of Representatives and service on the Baltimore City Council. The lifelong Baltimorean and former social worker, who first gained prominence in a successful fight to block a highway project from cleaving long-established Baltimore neighborhoods, rose to serve as chair and then as ranking member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

Mikulski, a Democrat, focused on issues including civil rights, national security, space exploration, education, jobs, research and innovation, women’s health, cybersecurity, senior citizens, and veterans. She was primary sponsor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, addressing salary discrimination against women; it was the first bill signed into law by President Obama, just days after his inauguration in 2009. Obama later awarded Mikulski the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mikulski has donated her papers to Johns Hopkins to eventually be available to researchers and historians.

“Our students and faculty are so excited to have the chance to meet and learn from Senator Mikulski,” says Dean Beverly Wendland. “She brings a wealth of expertise and experience to so many issues that we study here on campus—everything from civil rights to income equality to research and innovation. Her intellect and enthusiasm are inspiring, and her boundless energy is contagious.”