The Writing Life

Fall 2018

“It has always been important for Native people to prove who we are because the minute we allow someone else to define us, our land is taken … so the issue is always new.”

—Louise Erdrich, ’79

More than 30 years have passed since Louise Erdrich, MA ’79, received the acceptance letter she still keeps, inviting her to join the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. “Thrilling,” she says, remembering the welcome news, which included notice of a teaching assistantship and stipend. Erdrich soon left her job with North Dakota’s Poets in the Schools program, which involved traveling around North Dakota and “staying a week in grade schools, high schools, the penitentiary, wherever I was called upon to spread poetry.” She tied her foam-rubber mattress and her writing table to the top of her car and drove to Baltimore for the two-year program.

Since earning her MA, Erdrich has written 13 novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Love Medicine; The Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse, a National Book Award finalist; and The Plague of Doves, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written a memoir, children’s stories, and several volumes of short stories and poetry.

Erdrich’s latest novel, The Round House, published by Harper-Collins in October, takes place in 1988 on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota (the site of many of her novels), where 14-year-old Joe tries to solve the mystery of who brutally assaulted his mother and why. Early on, Joe explains that “being an Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape,” a familiar theme in Erdrich’s stories. It’s the untangling of identity, land rights, and relationships that leads to the mystery’s climax. “Because the federal government is bound by nation-to-nation treaties, Native people are not so much an ethnic group as a people defined first by our own culture and family, second by legality,” explains Erdrich, an enrolled Turtle Mountain Chippewa. “It has always been important for Native people to prove who we are because the minute we allow someone else to define us, our land is taken … so the issue is always new.”

Although Erdrich’s earlier fiction is marked by multiple narrators, The Round House stands out for what Erdrich calls “its one transparent voice,” which results in “a more headlong and direct form of storytelling.” She speculates that her earlier novels might be characterized as more poetic. “I began, of course, as a poet,” she says. “In fact, perhaps I miss that.”

It was in the Writing Seminars, Erdrich says, that she found her voice as a novelist. She jokes that she was drawn to “the dark side,” aka fiction, a shift inspired by Hopkins professor Edmund White, whose work deeply affected her. “I had never before written the truth of my own anger and joy into fiction, and he showed me that could be done,” she explains. “He gave me courage.”

Erdrich also remembers the support of other students and of mentors like John Barth who “set the tone for the seminars—intellectually acute, lighthearted, generous, bold,” and John Irwin, in whose class she “kept copious notes because half the words he used I had to look up, and the other half were outrageously interesting.”

In 2001, Erdrich opened Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, the city she calls home. In addition to books, the shop carries Native art and jewelry and sponsors readings by authors, including Erdrich. “I started the bookstore partly because I was coming off a book tour and tired of talking about my book [and] wanted to talk about other writers’ books,” she says. Bookstores, she believes, “are not so much businesses as community services.

“Amy Goodman calls them intellectual watering holes. We need them now more than ever in this corporatized, increasingly spectral world.”

While you might run into Erdrich on a visit to Birchbark Books, entrepreneurship has not cut into her writing time. Her writing process is fairly static and decidedly old school. “I take my notebooks with me everywhere and write my work out by hand before transferring it into my computer,” she says.

Her advice for aspiring writers?

“Always listen to criticism, try not to take it personally, and try to let your work exist outside yourself. That way your work can get better and your sensitivities will be protected. Beyond that, persist.”

Sea Tales Inspire Former Inmate

Fall 2018

Just about 15 years ago, Gregory White found himself locked in solitary confinement—again—this time for fighting in the yard of the Nottoway Correctional Center in Burkeville, Va. “I was a bad guy,” he says frankly, “but didn’t want to be one anymore.” The former Navy sailor-turned-bank robber was looking for a way out from the convict’s life, even though parole was still at least seven years away.

His chance came on that day in 1997, in the form of some scattered pages of a two-day-old newspaper—about as current and comprehensive as news gets in “the hole.” One article stood out from the rest: a review of a book, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, by Jeffrey Bolster, PhD ’92.

Jeffrey Bolster and Gregory White holding the book Black Jacks

Jeffrey Bolster ’92 (l) and Gregory White meet in Washington, DC, to address the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Bolster had recently finished the doctoral program in the Krieger School’s Department of History. His dissertation on African-American sailors during the 18th and 19th centuries had become the foundation for Black Jacks, his first book. “For much of this time, the age of sail in America was also the age of slavery,” he explains. “Thus the book is largely about people of color in motion during a time when they were meant to be in chains.” Bolster thought of his book as an important documentation of American history but didn’t expect Black Jacks to resonate with “black men in chains” of the modern era… inmates like Gregory White, for example, who was inspired by the review and contacted Bolster for a copy.

“I felt a connection with [the men in] this book,” White says, “even though this was 200 years ago. I could identify. There were chapters in the book where there were sailors in prison, like prisoners of war in the War of 1812. They were locked up, and I was, too. But they overcame. They rose above it…. The book gave me inspiration to get back on track and be what I always wanted to be.” White was also impressed with Bolster himself, who included with the book a note that encouraged White to pursue a career as a merchant marine upon his release. “I read that book over and over, until it literally fell apart in my hands,” White remembers.

White and Bolster kept in touch, and after White’s 2003 release from prison and another three years of parole, he landed his first job in more than 20 years as a working sailor. He worked aboard an educational vessel with Living Classrooms, an experiential education organization based in Baltimore. (Bolster had helped White land that first sailing job at Living Classrooms, where his brother, Peter Bolster, directs all shipboard operations.) After building up more professional sailing experience at Living Classrooms, White became a merchant marine…and has never looked back.

“The book took on a life that I never expected,” Bolster explained this summer to a meeting of the National Council on the Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which the council oversees, provided funding for Black Jacks in 1993–94 and, after learning about Bolster and White’s remarkable story, invited the pair to speak at its semiannual meeting in July. “I have a file folder in my office that continues to grow,” Bolster told the council, “just full of letters from regular folks that were touched by this book. I think it gave people a sense of ownership of this piece of the past that they never really knew belonged to them.”

And to an extent, the book gave Bolster ownership over his own past. A commercial sailor before his career in academia, Bolster spent much of his young adult life with seafarers. “After college, I bought a one-way ticket to the Caribbean and spent most of the next 10 years on ships and boats. Along the way I met West Indian men on the wharves, talked to them, watched them play dominos and drink bad rum…. I wasn’t thinking about writing a book about black guys on boats.” But years later while in graduate school, says Bolster, he noticed that the history of sailors of color was surprisingly undocumented. So he came to Hopkins with a loose plan to pay tribute to this largely untold period of history. “Hopkins was great for me,” Bolster remembers, “It was sink or swim, and the history department really allowed me to do my best work.”

Bolster, an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, has just published his most recent book, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Meanwhile, White continues to work his way up the ranks of the merchant marines and writes about his journeys on the side.

The Missing Perspective in the Middle East (and Elsewhere)

Fall 2018

“We are at a very precarious point in time. There are so many moving parts right now,” says Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein ’87, Jordan’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

An authority on international justice and peacekeeping (he was formerly Jordan’s ambassador to the U.S. and helped found the International Criminal Court), Prince Zeid is accustomed to times of crisis. Soft-spoken and articulate, he offers his unique perspective of the Arab Spring—a “season” of revolution that has been raging in the Middle East for nearly two years—with the kind of calm that comes from knowing that such a multicultural, dynamic revolution requires an immense amount of patience.

“The historic parallel one likes to draw is between what we see now in the Middle East and the 1848 revolutions that swept through Europe,” he says, noting similarities in both uprisings, despite the great distance between the two in time and place. Both were led mostly by young rebels demanding freedom, justice, and equality. Both spread quickly across the continent, infecting communities like a virus. And sudden spikes in food prices triggered waves of revolution in 19th-century Europe and the modern Middle East alike.

“But the fundamental difference between these two sets of revolutions,” Prince Zeid says, “is that there is no clearly articulated, authentically Arab liberal philosophy.” Unlike the Europeans, who were standing on the shoulders of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Locke, and Marx, “there are no liberal Arab philosophers that can carry these sentiments, these tumultuous expressions of yearning on the part of the youth for something better, and transform them from being mere expressions to concrete results.

“What we have now is our default position—Islamic ideologies,” he says. Thus, though Jordan and the rest of the Middle East are in the early stages of fundamental transition, it appears that those transitions will likely be Islamic in nature. “We will see how it develops and progresses,” he cautions, “but this may very likely lead to more extreme views and a progression to a sterner series of policies. If revolutionaries were to encounter failure at any point along this journey, what you may find is that people will not say it’s because of an absence of liberal thinking. They may well say that those in power have not been Islamic enough.”

The question then, not just for Arab nations but for the youth of the world, is how does one acquire critical, liberal thinking?

Prince Zeid, 48, found his direction while a “very junior” U.N. official deployed to the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and fresh from completing a doctoral degree at Cambridge. “I was in bed, living in someone else’s home in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t speak the language and the conditions were very tough. I looked at the ceiling and thought, ‘My God, what on earth am I doing?’

“I think it’s that kind of experience of engagement in whatever you are doing that provides a deeper reservoir of knowledge as to how the planet works and how your field of study works. Once you are exposed to a broad palate of experiences you start developing your own opinions.” Prince Zeid’s “palate” has seen a variety of colors, as his diplomacy work has taken him from border disputes in Niger, to the International Court of Justice during Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence, to war crime proceedings originating from Nuremberg, and to a wealth of negotiations between his native Jordan and the rest of the world.

“I don’t think there is sufficient critical thinking in higher levels of government in many countries. You have conventional wisdom going untested, and the more you test it the more you realize that it should not be conventional at all and there is very little wisdom in it,” he says.

“My urging to all students is to go out and gather experiences. Many aspire, but most settle for something safe.”

It’s Hot: High-Tech Sentinel System for “Cold Chain” Process

Fall 2018

Tom Smith ’11 is usually the only one in the lab at 7:30 in the morning, when the glass orb celebrating his team’s winning entry in the JHU 2011 Business Plan Competition casts rainbows across the waiting computers and whiteboards.

Located in Baltimore’s Emerging Technology Centers, this space—with its chocolate-covered espresso beans on the conference table and temporarily idled Frisbee hanging on the wall—is home to ESDA LLC, the high-tech startup that Smith, a cognitive science and cultural anthropology major, created with two friends and $130 apiece during their freshman year.

Their current main project, and the reason for the award, is Magpie Sensing—a calculator-sized circuit board that tracks the temperature and humidity of sensitive medical and pharmaceutical products through “cold chains” of manufacture, shipping, and storage, which can involve up to 14 hand-offs. Using a sensor and a cellular chip, the device sends a constant stream of data through the cellular network to the team’s server, which stores the information in a database.

“This way you have a full record of everything that happens through the chain,” says Smith, ESDA’s CEO.

Tom Smith works on circuit board

Tom Smith works on the small circuit board he created that will track sensitive pharmaceuticals, like vaccines, as they are shipped.

Smith and his colleagues, Robert Douglas ’12 and Brendan Ebers ’12, both computer science majors, and Jon Smalletz ’08, an applied mathematics and statistics major, were interested in what they could do with wireless sensing. The team heard that an outbreak of whooping cough in Texas had been connected to a bad shipment of vaccines, and learned that such products can be ruined if they freeze or experience temperature fluctuations of more than about four degrees. Between truck compressors breaking down and refrigerator doors being accidentally left open, 17–35 percent of shipments experience these temperature changes, Smith says, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

At under $200 for the long-lasting device, Magpie tracks the data 24/7, so it can offer manufacturers information about potential issues in time for products to be tested upon arrival. And what’s even more interesting to Smith and his team is that they can use the data to predict failures before they occur: ESDA created an algorithm that mines the incoming data for abnormalities and could indicate weak points, like a compressor beginning to break down.

“What we think is really great is not the device but what we can do with the data that comes in,” Smith says.

Consulting with potential customers, the team discovered that while shipping is indeed a dangerous time for medical and pharmaceutical products, such products face even greater risk when sitting in the lab fridge. This is a vulnerable period, Smith says, because most labs use a standard dorm-size model with imprecise settings, and because doors are sometimes left open through human error. So Magpie now has three components: the shippable version, a fixed-location version, and the analytics used to improve procedures. The team is currently working with the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to beta test the fixed-location version.

Running ESDA requires a knack for both technology and business, and Smith started young. The Lower Merion, Pa., native picked up his first screwdriver at 2, taught himself HTML in seventh grade, and began computer consulting at 13.

He spent two semesters planning to major in English, and wrote his honors anthropology thesis on the use of naturalistic vs. mechanistic metaphors in the official inquiry report on the recent financial crisis.

Smith’s adviser, Jane Guyer, the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology, says Smith is “a perfect example of how our students can foster their ideas within a unique double major trajectory. He found intellectual connections and also saw how to make a technical innovation applicable in the global world.”

And so while Smith was working on his thesis, he and his classmates were running ESDA’s first project, which continues to infuse both capital and concept into Magpie today; the Hopkins Buybacks program purchases textbooks from students and sells them to a fulfillment center using an algorithm the team created to predict prices. Typical programs usually offer students lower buy-back prices and less certainty of making a sale, Smith says.

Valuable connections also come from Gado, a robot Smith created in a project he did with the Krieger School’s Center for Africana Studies, for the Afro-American Newspaper, to digitize photos in small archives. The City of Cambridge, Mass., and the University of South Florida, among others, have expressed plans to use the robot.

With a full-time staff of seven now, ESDA takes full advantage of the opportunities to share gear and ideas with other entrepreneurs at the Emerging Technology Centers, a nonprofit business incubator at Johns Hopkins Eastern that offers office space, shared services and equipment, and mentoring and networking opportunities to startups for below-market rent.

When Smith tears himself away from the lab, he and his wife, Amy Smith ’11—a history of science, medicine, and technology major—like to cook French meals in their Woodberry home, walk their bichon frise in Druid Hill Park, and travel. And now they are colleagues, too; Amy joined ESDA as marketing director this fall.

Editor's Note, Fall 2012

Fall 2018

My favorite quote in this issue of Arts & Sciences magazine comes from Krieger School astrophysicist Stephan McCandliss. He asks, “How is it that out of a universe composed of particles, which at a fundamental level are indistinguishable from each other, does this rich complexity and life emerge?” That’s a big question. He’s talking about mining the data from ultraviolet images of binary stars and intergalactic gas and dust, for clues to how the early universe evolved. But the question could also be asked in a metaphysical way—a sort of “who are we and why are we here” type of probe.

McCandliss is just one of many award-winning physicists at the Krieger School whose remarkably complex work inspires us to think more broadly and deeply.

Our feature about McCandliss takes us into the laboratory (and mind) of a rocket scientist. For about eight years, McCandliss and his small team have been building—from scratch in the basement of the Bloomberg Center—an experimental ultraviolet telescope that will be launched into space in December. During its brief journey above the Earth’s atmosphere, the delicate instrument will rapidly gather images and data that could one day help physicists better understand how the early universe developed.

One of the impressive things about McCandliss and his team is the extraordinary amount of patience and persistence they must have in their work. If just one small screw rattles loose or is turned too tightly, it could jeopardize the entire mission. Everything must be checked and tested again and again.

Novelist Haruki Murakami says the most important qualities writers must possess are talent, focus, and endurance. But it’s not just writers (or physicists!) who need those characteristics.

In this issue you’ll see others with uncommon talent, focus, and endurance. Like the recent graduates featured in our cover story. They are determined to use the opportunities they had at Johns Hopkins to secure meaningful employment. You’ll also meet visiting professor Nikolay Koposov, who lost his job in Russia because he refused to accept his government’s skewered view of history. And then there’s Professor Betsy Bryan, from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, who took undergraduate and graduate students with her to Egypt last summer to engage in an archaeological dig. Talk about endurance. They spent hours meticulously digging and brushing through layers of earth—but the results were indeed worth it.

Talent. Focus. Endurance. At the Krieger School, those are the attributes our researchers, students, and alumni continuously tap to tackle life’s big questions. This issue of our magazine has just a few of those many stories; I hope you find them as inspiring as I do.

Kate Pipkin
Editor

The Road from Classroom to Career

Fall 2018

During World War II, Jewish families lost millions of dollars’ worth of fine art to the Nazis, and their descendants are making extraordinary efforts to reclaim those paintings and artifacts. But the process of proving their claims is complex and requires the expert assistance of art historians who specialize in such research.

Courtney Harris, a 2011 graduate of the Krieger School, pores over historical sources and data bases, tracks down experts in the work of particular artists, and tries to authenticate the claims of families who come to her employer, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. Based in London, the commission is a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property 1933–1945, which operates under the auspices of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Courtney’s journey to the job of her dreams began in Krieger classrooms, but it became a reality thanks to internships she landed through the university and the assistance she was given by faculty members. This issue of the magazine is devoted, in part, to how the School of Arts and Sciences puts shoulder to the wheel to assist students in developing the academic skills and real-world experience they need to compete for positions that will fulfill their ambitions.

Courtney arrived at Johns Hopkins in pursuit of a major in international studies, which enabled her to take a variety of classes. “My favorite classes were the ones I took in the history department with Richard Kagan,” she recalled. “Occidental Civilization in my freshman year, Spain: The Golden Age in my sophomore year, and Collecting in America’s Gilded Age during my senior year. He took a holistic approach to the study of history and used paintings and maps to explain how a certain historical moment was significant.”

Courtney’s interest in the historical questions in Kagan’s classroom led her to a double major in art history. She was given permission to enroll in Michael Fried’s graduate seminar on Classics of Art Criticism. She met Rebecca Brown, whose course on The Politics of Display in South Asia exposed her to how publicly displayed artifacts in India reflect tensions associated with identity and tradition.

But it was in Elizabeth Rodini’s course, Introduction to Museums, that Courtney realized she could aim for a career that would blend her interests in international studies, art history, and museums. “Someone from the National Archives spoke to Rodini’s class about the large amount of Nazi-era documentation held there, and it was the first time I became aware that it was possible to have a career in my field.”

What was missing from the equation was work experience, and Courtney began searching for internships. Her first success was on campus in the Homewood Museum, where she worked as a tour guide and later as a development assistant. That gave her the experience (and the courage) to approach the Walters Art Museum in her sophomore year to work with a curator who needed someone fluent in French. The study-abroad office helped her find academic programs in Europe with internships at museums, like the one she secured in Florence at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. When Courtney returned to Hopkins, she was accepted as a student curator at our own Evergreen Museum where, with the guidance of director Jim Abbott, she prepared an exhibition based on the work of John Garrett and his wife, who had turned the American Embassy in Rome into a place of cultural exchange between Italy and America in the 1920s and 1930s.

Courtney began to wonder what she would do after graduation. Enter Professor Kagan again. He gave Courtney a contact at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and she was accepted as a graduate research intern, working on the provenance and history of European decorative arts objects acquired between 1877 and 1893.

With this rich background in hand, Courtney was able to compete for the job she now holds with the Commission for Looted Art. Her undergraduate background, coupled with the MA she received subsequently from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, prepared her for the demanding position. Professor Kagan is not surprised by her success. “With her love of learning and passion for art history and history, Courtney was a pleasure to have had in class,” he said. “I’m thrilled to learn that her dream of pursuing a museum career has been realized.”

Hard work, a capacity to focus, the ability to move across fields and absorb the analytic skills and substantive background those fields offer, and the sheer gumption to break out of the university community and take those first steps into the working world—that is what we encourage our students to do in order to craft their futures. The work Courtney is doing makes all the difference to the heirs who seek to right one of the greatest wrongs ever perpetrated. Jewish families who lost everything in the Holocaust are looking to recover what belongs to them. People like Courtney are bringing their formidable knowledge to bear in that effort, and we are proud of their role.

Sincerely,

Katherine Newman
James B. Knapp Dean

Becoming Muslim

Fall 2018

“The reigning preoccupation with Pakistan is with its military and the failure of democracy in the country,” explains Naveeda Khan, assistant professor of anthropology. “I wanted to write a book that had the ambition to legitimize Pakistan as a center of intellectual thought and creative expression.” That ambition has been realized in her new volume, Muslim Becoming, Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan, about religious aspiration and violence in Pakistan. Khan, who is from Bangladesh, returned to her region of birth to gather information for the book.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the neighborhoods and mosques of Lahore and on readings of Urdu literature, legal history, and theological polemics, Muslim Becoming examines the influence of Muhammad Iqbal—the poet, politician, and spiritual founder of Pakistan—and his view of Islam as an open religion. Iqbal believed the goal of Islam should be for believers to collectively strive for an ideal society, even though it might not be attained. It’s the act of striving, Iqbal believed, that gives vitality to a community and that Khan believes lies within everyday life in Pakistan.

Naveeda Khan

“I wanted to write a book that had the passion to legitimize Pakistan as a center of intellectual thought and creative expression.”

—Naveeda Khan  

The book reveals the ways in which everyday life becomes fertile ground for profound insight on some of the major philosophical questions of our times: How do we live together? How do we give our consent to those who govern us? How do we acknowledge the claims of others upon us? And religion is the orienting philosophy of everyday life for many.

“When I chose to study Pakistan, it was partly because it was relatively understudied. I could actually say bold, original things,” says Khan, who joined the School of Arts and Sciences faculty in 2006. “Over the course of working on the book, Pakistan became hugely important to the world.”

Khan says she wanted her book to be useful for Pakistanis in understanding their history. Since it became a nation in 1947, Pakistan has matured to the point where serious reflection on some of the difficult chapters in the country’s history can be examined. Muslim Becoming dwells on some of these troubling episodes, such as when an entire group of Muslims—the Ahmadiyya—was labeled heretics by the state. “I tried to understand what the thinking was behind it, and how that tells us something about how the Pakistanis relate to Islam,” she says.

It’s ironic that Khan should write a book that attempts to portray Pakistan in a sympathetic light. She was born in 1969 in East Pakistan, which two years later became Bangladesh after a brutal war with Pakistan. Her own father was interned by the Pakistani army during the war. “Most people in Bangladesh still view Pakistan with great suspicion,” she says. “I wrote the book in part as an intellectual exercise, to show how it is possible to revisit Bangladesh’s historical past, to show how the idea of Pakistan did not belong to Pakistanis alone but was as much a part of Bangladesh’s Muslim makeup.”

The new book is a natural extension of Khan’s long-standing interests in the political formations, spiritual diversity, and material landscapes of the country. She began her career as a graduate student at Columbia University, with a dissertation on sectarian violence as it related to mosque construction in Lahore. Muslim Becoming explores the nature of religious observance in Pakistan and casts a positive light on the nation’s struggles with plurality.

Her next book will be about the subculture of itinerant Muslim farmers living on the silt islands in the Jamuna River, which bisects Bangladesh. In the Braid: Riparian Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh analyzes patterns of life that shift with the river itself. As the filaments of the Jamuna change, entire villages are flooded out, rendering settled farmers into itinerant ones. They return if and when the islands re-form.

“There is a form of life that has developed to which people become attached,” Khan says. It’s this devotion to place, despite the extremely challenging lifestyle it requires, that fascinates her. “It’s an incredibly risky life,” she says.

Immigration Nations

Fall 2018

Human migration predates the nation-state system by millennia. From the dawn of humankind, climate, topography, and search for new food sources and shelter have contributed to migration. When situated against the backdrop of the human tendency to move, settle, and often move again from one part of the world to another, the nation-state, we recognize, is a relatively recent way of organizing and naming a group of people who live in a particular place and time. In addition, war, genocide, coups d’état, religious persecution, imperialism, and the rise of industry and commerce (industrial revolutions) are added factors that have motivated population movement.

What does all of this have to do with contemporary migration to the United States? Plenty. Most national societies throughout the world are composed of groups differentiated by ethnicity, language, and prior national origin. At the moment of French unification, for example, the contiguous territory known as France was inhabited by people of divergent religious, linguistic, and other ethno-national characteristics: Catholics, Cathars, Occitan, Provençal, Breton among them. As France extended its overseas empire, its colonial departments were populated by various indigenous peoples in Africa, the Caribbean, and what was once known as Indochina. At the moment of German unification in 1871, fears of Eastern European migration led to the creation of citizenship laws that emphasized genealogical lineage, so-called blood ties, over rights and responsibilities as the principal criterion for German citizenship.

In these and other national societies and territories inhabited by diverse populations, dynamics of power, expressed principally in economic and political relationships, identify and distinguish insiders from outsiders. Recent rioting in South Africa in response to the sudden influx of Zimbabweans fleeing civil strife was based, in part, on anxieties over the presence of a new minority group that would, according to one argument, depress the wages of hardworking South Africans and upend the country’s stability. In Greece, the popularity of the new right-wing party named Golden Dawn is based on its leaders’ ability to project a message that blames immigrants, particularly non-European immigrants, for increasing crime, instability, and a heavier tax burden upon properly Greek (read white, European) citizens.

Thus, perceived differences (often religious, racial, or ethno-national classification) become politically salient when people perceive (rightly or wrongly) that certain segments of a population have advantages because of how they are identified in society. Faculty and students affiliated with the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship Program, which I co-direct with Erin Chung in the Department of Political Science, want to understand why certain immigrant groups enter countries with little fanfare and commentary, while others generate fear, anger, and suspicion. Minority groups, particularly those associated with “cheap”—or in the case of slavery, non-wage labor—are often considered as the least worthy and potentially most dangerous.

Push and pull factors have motivated people from all over the world to emigrate to the United States. In the current moment, the rise in Spanish-speaking populations from Central America, the Caribbean, and South America have generated acrimonious discussions and controversial federal and state legislation, such as the Dream Act and immigration reform laws in Alabama and Arizona. These debates invariably involve matters of national identity: What does it mean to be an American? Does it matter which language will predominate in the United States? What difference does it make if whites in the United States become a numerical minority in the national population? The responses of the U.S. citizenry and its government to these and related questions reveal collective national anxieties and fears, hopes, and dreams, about a society in the process of transformation. Responses to such questions also reveal attitudes and commitments to the economic, political, and social aspects of a democratic polity.

Times of economic crisis often exacerbate perceived and actual differences between peoples in diverse societies. Immigrants, particularly those from minority groups, often provide the easiest target for blame, ostracism, and violence, the source—it would seem—of a society’s socioeconomic problems. Yet in most cases around the world, immigrant laborers occupy the least-attractive, lowest-paying positions and sectors in national economies—jobs, ironically, that are essential to the growth and development of those economies.

MindSumo

Fall 2018

Co-founded by Keaton Swett ’11, MindSumo is a modern answer to two age-old dilemmas: Businesses want problems solved on the cheap, and soon-to-be college graduates want the attention of prospective employers. Swett’s startup allows companies to post their challenges—for example, boosting energy-efficiency at a popular resort—for a fee. Then, college students from around the U.S. have free rein to submit ingenious solutions. The winner, as decided by the company, gets a few hundred bucks and, more importantly, a meaningful connection with the organization. This way, students “can prove they can get the job done,” the website boasts. “Beats an interview, wouldn’t you say?”

Students can also compete in challenges just for fun—most challenges award $200 to the winner, along with public recognition on mindsumo.com. Companies like Facebook and Microsoft have already tapped into the MindSumo network, which has helped bring fast success for Swett and his five-person team. And students from universities such as MIT, Stanford, UPenn, Harvard, and, of course, Johns Hopkins, have submitted solutions.

How Free Is Free Will?

Fall 2018

“Philosophers have been talking about moral responsibility and free will forever, and now neuroscientists are coming in with all these new data.”

-Debra Mathews

The nature of free will and moral responsibility is a discussion philosophers have been having for centuries.

But for the most part, it’s a conversation that neuroscientists have been absent from—until recently.

With the advent of technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), neuroscientists have been able to examine the “decision-making” centers of the brain. Which brings up the question: If the mechanism by which we make decisions is simply a biological one, then what does that say about free will and moral responsibility?

It seemed like the time was right to bring neuroscientists and philosophers together.

For the last three years, six researchers—three bioethicists, two neuroscientists, and one with a background in both disciplines—have been sharing knowledge with one another in a project designed to examine free will, moral responsibility, and the implications of advances in neuroscience.

“Philosophers have been talking about moral responsibility and free will forever, and now neuroscientists are coming in with all these new data,” says Debra Mathews, assistant director for science programs at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “Is there something that philosophers can learn from neuroscientists and is there something neuroscientists can learn from philosophers?”

The collaborators—three of whom work at the Krieger School—met nearly every other month to share knowledge in what turned out to be some “pretty intense” discussions, says Veit Stuphorn, assistant professor in the departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and of Neuroscience. They spent the first several months reading the relevant literature and simply trying to figure out a common language.

The immediate difficulty for the neuroscientists was that free will is a concept, not a physical thing to study. So the discussions focused on a person’s capacity for self-governance, the mental ability of a person to make a reasoned choice among various alternatives and to act on that decision—“which is a much less sexy thing than free will,” notes Mathews. “But you can actually study that with neuroscience.” Or more precisely, researchers can study the physical processes that go on in the brain when someone is faced with a decision.

They also looked at instances when a person’s capacity for self-governance is compromised, either temporarily or permanently—through, say, a brain injury or disease or drugs. Or simply, what causes a person to make “bad” decisions?

“Philosophers mainly use examples of normal, fully functioning adults when talking about issues of moral responsibility, but we wanted to do the opposite,” says Hilary Bok, associate professor of philosophy and the Luce Professor in Bioethics and Moral and Political Theory. “What is it that goes wrong in human beings to prevent them from engaging in this kind of self-governance? We were hoping that this might illuminate some of the philosophical issues and also help neuroscientists think this thing through.”

The social implications of the failures of self-governance were also a hot topic, from legal issues—“lawyers would love to prove their clients don’t have free will and aren’t responsible for their actions,” says Mathews—to implications involving health, particularly for people who might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or obesity, for instance. These conditions are often considered “failures of the will,” says Mathews, but as the neuroscientists noted, patterns of behavior become established in the brain.

“If you do something over and over again it becomes rote for your brain and you just do it,” she says. “Then modifying that pattern is physically difficult.” So does a person who has a compulsive behavior—a physical condition—also have free will?

In the end, more questions than conclusions were raised, and at least Stuphorn thought the project may have been ahead of its time. “The neuroscience isn’t quite where it has to be to be helpful for philosophy,” he says. Still, he believes the project was invaluable in helping to lay the groundwork for future experimental studies. “It’s necessary to say, ‘This is what’s important,’ or, ‘These are the questions you need to answer,’ in order to get a clear understanding on how we actually make decisions.”

The team is turning these discussions into a book, with each chapter addressing different issues and co-written by a philosopher and neuroscientist. Future discussions will surely follow.

“The main result is that we need to be talking to each other more,” says Susan Courtney-Faruquee, professor of psychological and brain sciences. “There is a lot to be learned in both directions. We hope what we are doing will start a broader conversation between philosophers and neuroscientists.”

How the Race Will Be Won

Fall 2018

Not sure why this is irking me so much, but I read the opinion of Prof. Sheingate [Spring 2012]. I was particularly taken aback by his comment, “a better system would tie the outcome more directly to the popular vote.”

Is Prof. Sheingate saying that his system is better than the system set up by the Founders who put the Electoral College in place? If so, why? And, if it’s all popular vote, wouldn’t candidates spend even more of their time in only a few key places? Plus, the fear of smaller states would become even more pronounced as their relevance would almost evaporate, which kind of defeats the point of the Union in some respect.

I’m no expert, but if you’re going to attack and suggest the dismantling of one of the core tenets of Democracy, I think you need to put some more meat behind it.

Jeremy Epstein ’95

Response: In a recent piece for the New York Times, humorist Mo Rocca explored the effect of the Electoral College with a group of third-graders. The experiment was simple: Each student voted on whether they preferred markers or colored pencils; markers won the popular vote, 14-10. But when Mr. Rocca divided the kids into five groups (or states) and then counted the winner from each group in an “electoral college,” colored pencils won 3-2. Some of the kids were angry: “It’s about everyone’s vote,” one child exclaimed, “It has to be fair for everybody who voted for markers, not just for colored pencils. It’s 14 to 10, it should stay that way.”

Although there are many reasons to admire the Constitution the Founders bequeathed to us, the Electoral College violates a basic notion of fairness. Just ask a third-grader.
Here’s a link to the video: tinyurl.com/electoral-nyt.

Adam Sheingate, Associate Professor, Political Science

Con Men Characters of American Literature

Fall 2018

“I believe the name ‘Hop-Frog’ was not given to the dwarf by his sponsors at baptism,” Edgar Allan Poe begins.

The protagonist and title character of Poe’s 1850 short story was given his name by a cruel king and his court. Their jester Hop-Frog was the butt of every joke, teased relentlessly about his body, forced to drink wine and wear ridiculous costumes. But then, on what seemed like any other evening of royal excess, Hop-Frog fooled the king and his ministers with his clever wit and—long story short—burned them all alive. “This is my last jest,” he declares, seconds before “his fiery revenge” on the king.

Illustration of Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, and Fitzgerald

Illustration by John S. Dykes

Classic Poe, one might say… as improbable as it is macabre. But to the well-trained student of literature, one might add: classic 19th-century American.

“I’ve always been fascinated with confidence games and con men,” says Doug Tye, a graduate student in the Department of English and the instructor of the course Social Climbers and Charlatans in American Literature. Tye’s father, a motivational speaker from the Midwest, sparked his son’s curiosity at an early age. “I’m interested in the practice of selling ideas that ‘make you better’… selling a product that doesn’t really exist,” he says. “That’s all tied up in this rags to riches American ideal that leads people to think they can be self-made, from nothing to something.”

That’s also the impetus for Tye’s course: connecting great authors of 19th- to early 20th-century American literature through common themes of rapid social mobility and dubious self-representation. Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Barnum, Twain, and Fitzgerald were all too aware of “the tensions between individual achievement and democratic egalitarianism,” Tye explains. Authors of this period routinely cast their protagonists as self-made, often to a nearly impossible extreme—like the social mobility of Twain’s African-American characters or the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby.

“The biggest thing I want is for students to read a small collection of classic American works,” says Tye. “But they should also see these themes of self-making and self-fashioning, and think about the ways that the character’s cons can be seen as artifice and the ways they can be seen as genuine invention.”

Tye is one of 27 Dean’s Teaching Fellows for the fall semester. They were selected in a competitive grant process within the Krieger School, whereby doctoral students are chosen to teach a course of their design during their most advanced years of study at Johns Hopkins. These soon-to-be professors are given the opportunity to lead small seminars on the very subject that interests them the most, while undergraduates have the pleasure of working closely with a scholar. “This is the fellowship every advanced grad student wants to get,” says Tye, who taught four semesters of Expository Writing and submitted an extensive curriculum and lesson plan in order to garner this fellowship.

“Tye has a very interesting take on the subject matter he covers in class,” says Adam Dec ’15, who took one of Tye’s courses in his freshman year and is currently enrolled in Social Climbers and Charlatans in American Literature. “He takes apart every single detail, analyzes the material so well, and really tries to get everyone involved.”

Surely the irony is not lost on Tye: Like his 19th-century protagonists, he’s also in the business of selling intangible ideas and explanations to his students. “Not all confidence games are crimes,” he’s quick to add. “Sometimes it’s just two people who agree on something and they both get what they want.”

Tye’s class, which is one of eight Dean’s Teaching Fellowship courses that have been waitlisted this semester because of student demand, seems to be precisely what Hopkins undergraduates want.