Quint Steffey, water polo vs. George Washington, September 2023.
Jayden Nixon, men’s basketball vs. Hamilton, NCAA tournament, March 2023.
Kellen Roddy,
men’s swimming, NCAA championships, March 2023.
Haleigh Moore, women’s lacrosse vs. Syracuse, NCAA championships, May 2023.
Shawn Steuerer, baseball, Division III World Series, June 2023.
Women’s cross country, Baltimore Metro Invitational, September. 2023.
Daniel Ardila, men’s tennis vs. Washington College, Centennial Conference semifinals, April 2023.
Centennial Conference indoor track championships, February 2023.
Tessa Erickson, field hockey vs. Williams, November 2022.
Photos Courtesy of JHU Athletics
The 2022–23 academic year was a stellar one for Hopkins Athletics. Blue Jay teams collectively won the program’s first LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup, which is presented annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics to U.S. schools with the most success in collegiate athletics.
Twelve Johns Hopkins teams finished in the top 10 in the nation: women’s cross country, field hockey, men’s soccer, women’s soccer, volleyball, men’s basketball, men’s swimming, women’s indoor track, baseball, men’s lacrosse, women’s tennis, and women’s outdoor track. The Blue Jay water polo team also advanced to the USA Water Polo Semifinals.
Arusa Malik holding accordion-style artist book by Christine Tacq called “Hatbox: A Storm of Stars” featuring symbols, people, and scenes associated with the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
A collection of items representing both the women’s suffrage and women’s liberation movements.
Vintage “Votes for Women” buttons from 1915.
Postcards from the women’s suffrage movement.
A collection of items representing both the women’s suffrage and women’s liberation movements.
Arusa Malik loves fictional superheroine She-Ra and prefers comics to novels. As a First-Year Fellow with the Sheridan Libraries, she combed through comics, postcards, political cartoons, and even soap to understand feminism and women’s movements in the United States. Malik, majoring in political science and international studies, enjoyed identifying feminist symbols in her research. She found the same cats, big hats, flowers, and hyper-feminine items in 1920s suffragette postcards that she did in 1970s liberation comics about Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
“Now I understand why this is a research university,” she says. “You can research literally anything here.” Malik plans to continue researching pop culture and feminism as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.
The 1970s “It Ain’t Me Babe Comix” (taken from a Bob Dylan song) focused on stories of multiple female superheroes from a new angle. “It was fascinating and combined a lot of the superheroes I read about as a kid,” Malik says. “It also inspired my final project.”
Through a fellowship she earned while still in high school in Pasadena, California, Cleo Bluthenthal visited hospitals in northern India and Nepal to learn about health care settings abroad. While there, she became particularly interested in birthing practices. That trip, along with her broader passion for health care equity, led her to apply to Johns Hopkins, the top-ranked university in the United States for public health.
Classes that Bluthenthal—a senior majoring in public health studies and minoring in women, gender, and sexuality—took during her first year further opened her eyes to racial birthing disparities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women in the United States are three times as likely to die as white women when giving birth, and have the highest maternal mortality rates nationally. Given that 84% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the grim statistics suggest that changes in health care policy could save many new mothers.
“Black women risk their lives bringing life into this world more than any other demographic group,” says Bluthenthal. “Biology doesn’t explain that.”
Partnering with the Bloomberg School of Public Health
Encouraged by her professors, Bluthenthal applied for and won a Woodrow Wilson Undergraduate Research Fellowship to study pregnancy complications potentially related to disparate health outcomes in minority women in the U.S. For guidance, Bluthenthal reached out to Zoé Hendrickson, then an associate scientist in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Delving into the medical literature, Bluthenthal examined how high preterm birth rates are tied to high maternal mortality across all demographics, but especially in Black women. A predictive risk factor for preterm birth is several cardiovascular conditions, with high blood pressure being the most pronounced.
Fortunately, the conditions are also readily diagnosable and treatable. Increasing access to early screening, for instance through directed funding and outreach, Bluthenthal says, could lead to decreases in preterm birth and maternal deaths.
From research to policy
To highlight these research findings, Bluthenthal has presented at the 2023 Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium and the Society for Public Health Education’s (SOPHE) Annual Conference, as well as in other forums. Her long-term goal is a leadership role in developing integrated approaches to health and social policy that reduce inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities.
“I want to contribute to our body of knowledge so we can improve health care and refuse to allow mistreatment,” says Bluthenthal.
Iván Ruiz-Hernández is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Political Science. We spoke with him about his research into the food systems affecting small farms in southern Mexico.
What are some questions that drive your research?
I want to understand the politics behind food regulation and how food markets work in less closely regulated spaces. I’m interested in how informal food economies work because informal regulatory practices dominate the landscape in many parts of the world. A lot of food isn’t taxed, there’s no quality control, and there isn’t a clear idea of who is involved in the farm-to-table narrative. In certain regions, non-state actors like organized crime have a role in—and have integrated into—many food markets.
More specifically, I’m interested in how smallholder coffee producers get their products out of Chiapas, Mexico. What are the bureaucratic or informal practices that they have to go through to get their product exported?
What impact do you hope your research will have?
On the academic side, I hope to contribute to our understanding of informal economies, refining working definitions and highlighting sites that showcase the diversity of informal regulations. Through my work, I also aim to advance the centrality of food and agricultural development in studying various political processes. In a more applied sense, I hope to give farmers a better idea of what they’re up against. The farm-to-table story is challenging to conceptualize regardless of where you are on the food supply chain, and having records of systemic injustices within food supply chains is an essential step toward a more equitable food system.
How did you become interested in informal food economies?
There are farmers in my family, and as a kid, I looked up to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers movement, who fought for the livelihoods of the communities that hold our global food systems together. I was always interested in food justice and wanted to understand where injustices originated. While at the University of Georgia, I learned how barriers to accessing markets reinforced many of these injustices for smallholder producers. At Hopkins, my advisors [assistant professors John Yasudaand Sarah Parkinson] guided me toward the question of informal economies and informal regulation, which political science is only beginning to understand.
Robbie Kuang has long been fascinated by how the brain is affected by drugs in ways manifesting as altered physical behavior. Knowing right away upon coming to Johns Hopkins that she wanted to delve into the subject, Kuang declared as a neuroscience major and sought undergraduate research opportunities.
“With its emphasis on research, I knew Johns Hopkins would be a great place for me,” says Kuang, now in her junior year. “I’ve always been interested in how chemical compounds can interact with your brain cells and make you feel or act differently. Now I have the chance to study this concept.”
Connecting with researchers
Kuang’s curiosity led her to the Johns Hopkins Cannabis Science Laboratory, through which she connected with Catherine (Cassie) Moore, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the School of Medicine. Under Moore’s mentorship, Kuang submitted a successful project proposal for a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA).
The project broadly asks if cannabidiol (commonly known as CBD) could help people better cope with the harsh physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal after long-term opioid use. These symptoms include anxiety, tremors, gastrointestinal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and disturbed sleep. For a number of recovering users, the withdrawal symptoms prove too severe and result in relapses.
Kuang’s research is highly topical, seeing as CBD—a non-addictive, non-psychoactive compound derived from cannabis, or marijuana plants— has gained greater acceptance, while an opioid epidemic continues to rage across the country.
Effects of CBD on long-term symptoms
For the project, Kuang is working with animal models in Moore’s lab to explore two understudied elements in opioid use disorder research.
The first is protracted withdrawal, which continues even after the acute symptoms endured over the first few days ends.
“Acute is the most studied, but protracted symptoms can last for weeks or even months,” says Kuang. “We really wanted to take a deeper look at this and see if CBD can help with symptoms in the long run.”
The second element is that a lot of scientific research has historically been conducted with male subjects only, thus failing to account for potential sex-related differences. Accordingly, Kuang’s experiments involve both male and female animal models.
If the research bears out CBD’s effectiveness, the hope is that it could serve as an alternative or supplement to current medications for treating withdrawal and addiction. These mainline treatments are opioids themselves, such as methadone, or opioid antagonists, such as naltrexone, both of which can have unwanted side effects that reduce treatment compliance and thus overall patient outcomes.
When museum director Asma Naeem ’91 develops plans for a new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, her thoughts go back to her undergraduate years and to an eager elementary school student named Ashley.
More than 30 years ago, she helped Ashley improve her skills in reading and math as part of the Johns Hopkins Tutorial Project.
“I just remember feeling so lucky that I was getting to be a part of this little girl’s world. It wasn’t an opportunity that I had ever had before,” Naeem says. “It opened up so many worlds for me.
“Now, whenever I’m welcoming the press and the public for the opening of a new exhibition, I think about how would Ashley feel walking into this space? Would Ashley even want to be in this space? How can we make sure we’re reaching her friends, her family, her colleagues, and making them feel welcome?”
Naeem became director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, located adjacent to the Homewood campus, last February. The first South Asian and first person of color to lead the museum, she oversees its collection of more than 97,000 objects and an annual operating budget of $23 million.
An absolute fundamental tenet of this museum is to be able to reflect the stories of the lives of the people around us.”
—Asma Naeem
Political Science and Art
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Naeem moved with her family to Baltimore as a child and commuted to Johns Hopkins all four years. She began as an English major—in love with the classics and the written word—then switched to political science, intending to become a lawyer like her aunt.
On a whim, she took a course in Italian Renaissance art, which led to a new passion; a double major in art history; and such inspiring mentors as the late Charles Dempsey, an Italian Renaissance and Baroque scholar, and Yve-Alain Bois, a major figure in 20th-century modernism.
Meanwhile, her political science courses supplied wisdom that Naeem now uses to navigate the intersections between art, culture, and public service.
After college came law school at Temple University, then work as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Naeem describes her job as a prosecutor as emotionally draining. She sought relief by spending time in art museums and galleries, and began searching for another way to serve “those who may not necessarily have a voice.”
Returning to Maryland
Returning to Maryland in 2000, she worked as an attorney, taking graduate art history courses at night, while her husband, Johns Hopkins orthopedic surgeon Babar Shariq, attended medical school at Howard University. By the time Naeem received her doctorate from the University of Maryland in 2011, the couple was also raising three children.
Over the next decade, she served as associate curator of prints, drawing, and media arts at the National Portrait Gallery, and as chief curator and interim director at the BMA.
Naeem is attracting new audiences by illuminating contemporary issues and different perspectives. Last summer’s very popular show The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century captured hip hop’s influence through more than 90 works of art and fashion. In 2022, the exhibition Guarding the Art, curated entirely by members of the museum’s security team, attracted national attention.
“In what may be the first show of its kind, guards at the Baltimore Museum of Art are stepping into the light as guest curators—and individuals,” The New York Times reported. “It is part of a national reckoning by museums striving for diversity and inclusiveness—and looking for original ways to bring in a range of voices to interpret the art.”
“An absolute fundamental tenet of this museum is to be able to reflect the stories of the lives of the people around us,” Naeem says. “Relevance means being able to relate human-to-human. It’s a great skill that directors need to have, and I saw that [demonstrated] in my coursework at Hopkins.”
Jenifer Clark ’75 MA is a satellite oceanographer specializing in the patterns of the Gulf Stream. She worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 27 years and now runs Jenifer Clark’s Gulfstream, a marine advising service, with her meteorologist husband.
Who uses a marine advising service?
It’s a seasonal business. In October and November, we get requests for routing packages for people doing boat delivery for the snowbirds going from Massachusetts and New York to Florida. April through July are the most popular months for [sailboat] races. We work 60–80 hours a week at that time.
How do you help people navigate the ocean?
We help them pick the best window to sail. My husband gives them a weather forecast, and I give them an analysis of the ocean, the wind, and the currents. The water temperature in the Gulf Stream is much warmer than the water around it. There is a lot that goes into studying it because of the ways that the eddies rotate.
What are some of the most interesting routes you’ve worked on?
We worked with Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida. She tried five times. Finally, we picked a time of year when the temperature, waves, and meteorology were just right, and the jellyfish didn’t come up to disrupt her swim. Erden Eruc, who rowed around the world, came to our house for a home seminar. We routed him with ocean maps and weather for seven years. It’s fun to work with people with these unusual desires.
What’s one of your favorite things you’ve done as an oceanographer?
I was invited to Bermuda to brief the tall ships in 2000. About 25 boats were going from Bermuda to New England or Delaware. I had to plot a route for each one along their particular “rhumb line,” and a lot of them didn’t speak English.
What do you love the most about your work?
When I got to start working with the Gulf Stream, I knew it was my baby. I have never sailed, but I know the ocean like the back of my hand. I’ve done this for 45 years and I will never stop.
Collage images: De Visu, Adobe; Gulf Stream chart courtesy of Jenifer clark
Mobtown Brewing features recycled materials, such as panels from the tin roof of an old barn on the lower half of the bar, railroad track for the footrest, and wood planks from the floor of an old high school gym.
Inside there’s seating space offering a view of wall murals crafted by talented local artists.
Outside seating at the Mobtown Brewing Company.
A wide variety of beers flow at the brewery.
Complete a flight card and venture into trying beer styles you typically wouldn’t consider; you might just discover your new favorite.
Mobtown offers an ever-changing menu featuring a diverse array of beers.
A line of beer cans is queued up in the feeder, awaiting filling and labeling.
Today, the beer can labeler is set up for German Pils.
You can purchase beers on-site and find them available at numerous locations across the Mid-Atlantic region.
The resident beermaster, Ernie the cat, comfortably lounges on the bar.
PHOTOS: MIKE CIESIELSKI AND COURTESY OF MOBTOWN BREWING COMPANY
When you think of beer, you probably don’t think about upcycled materials, but Noah Chadwick ’13 MS does. He’s part owner of Mobtown Brewing Company, which opened in 2019 in a southeast Baltimore neighborhood long known for beer making.
“The short life cycle of materials we use in the United States has a real impact on the planet,” says Chadwick, who received a graduate degree in environmental science. “I spent some of my graduate work doing hazardous waste management, and I realized that if we stop creating all of this waste, it will simply make our planet better.”
From the floor up
So Chadwick and his co-owners, David Carpenter and Darren Stimpfle, began a quest to incorporate upcycled materials into their new business, searching around Baltimore and beyond for materials they could use. Today, some of the tables and wall coverings at Mobtown Brewing are made from wood planks previously used for the gym floor at the old Lake Clifton High School. Chadwick found tin roof tiles from an old barn in Pennsylvania that are now around the bottom of the bar. And the footrest at the bar? That comes from old railroad track recovered from a metal recycling yard.
The idea to start a brewery was born several years ago when Chadwick was hanging out with his buddies, enjoying the fruits of a friendly home-brew contest.
“I was working for an engineering firm then,” says Chadwick. Carpenter was a former coworker, who shared Chadwick’s taste for home-brewed beer and also lived nearby. After completing a certificate in brewing (yes, it’s a thing), Carpenter and mutual friend Stimpfle approached Chadwick about starting their own brewery.
“I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Chadwick.
Back to Brewer’s Hill
The trio looked at several possible locations, but as serendipity would have it, the ideal location ended up being in Brewers Hill. The neighborhood got its name from being associated with a number of prominent late-19th-century businesses, chief among them the brewing industry.
“We felt like everything had come together, and we’re energized about tapping into that brewing history,” he says.
Chadwick hasn’t completely turned his love for environmental science over to beer, however. He still has a day job working on Bay restoration projects aimed at reducing pollution in the United States.
Mahzi Malcolm Martin ’15 is the founder of Planticular, a Manhattan-based company that helps individuals and organizations design and maintain plant-filled indoor and outdoor spaces. Launched in February 2022, it has already signed on high-profile clients like the popular riverfront venues City Vineyard and City Winery.
Malcolm Martin, who grew up in Oklahoma, earned a degree in cognitive science at Johns Hopkins, and a master’s degree in design from Carnegie Mellon. When he moved to New York, he filled his apartment with houseplants, starting with a hardy Zanzibar Gem given to him by his mother.
“I had nearly 100 plants in my apartment, and I asked a friend to care for them while I traveled for about four months. Twenty-seven of those plants didn’t make it. I realized there was a need for plant care,” says Malcolm Martin.
How do you help people find the plants that are right for them?
It starts with assessing their objectives and their space. We take into account colors and the heights of objects. If it’s a restaurant that has to maximize table space, that’s important. We discuss the plants’ light, water, and temperature requirements, particularly if they’re going to be outdoors in summer and inside for colder weather.
People tell me that their apartment is dark, or they had a plant in a certain spot and it died, so they can’t have plants.
That’s not true. It’s about balancing the inputs. A plant is a living organism that has needs, and as you get to know it, you can meet those needs. Maybe you change the amount of water you give it, or you introduce more movement through something like a fan.
Interact with your plant on a regular basis, especially in the first two weeks. Jot down any changes that you notice. It’s easier to care for something when you understand it.
There are also many ways that plants are beneficial for mental health, starting with just being around something that is growing and changing and that you can care for.
Course title: “Children’s Literature and the Self: From Fairy Tales to Science Fiction”
Instructor:Katarzyna Jerzak, Lecturer, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature
Course description
This course isn’t what you expect. It is not easy. It is not even fun. We will tackle painful topics: orphanhood, loneliness, jealousy, death. We will also deal with parenthood, childhood, justice, and love. We will investigate the special connection between children and animals. Many iconic children’s literature characters are outsiders. All along we will consider how children’s literature reflects and shapes ideas of selfhood, from archetypal to post-humanistic ones.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens/ Peter and Wendy, J. M. Barrie
Classic Fairy Tales, Norton Critical Editions
Ghetto Diary, Janusz Korczak
Mortal Engines, Stanislaw Lem
Course Requirements
Each student gives an informal oral presentation on one of the texts, and writes a comparative final paper or a work of children’s fiction—a fairy tale, short story, series of poems, or musical composition.
Insights on the class
“The premise of the course is that children’s literature is the opposite of what many deem it to be; i.e., facile. Children are deep thinkers and demanding readers so the best kind of books for them are also excellent—and often challenging—reading for adults. The prerequisite is to have been a child.”
Katarzyna Jerzak Course instructor
“I love this class because fiction for children is often so much freer than fiction for adults. Authors like Janusz Korczak write fiction for children that in many ways is better than fiction for adults as it is fast paced and ponders questions adult fiction often takes for granted.”
Jeremy Mandelbaum Giles Class of 2024
“It’s a deeply emotional class since I get to reconnect with themes and ideas brought up from childhood that we get to remember in the present. I’m interested in the structure of children’s novels and fairy tales and literature that inspired how we think and write today. Every time I do a reading or come to class, I feel like I’m reconnecting with a part of myself. The class makes me think a lot about my personal identity and writing identity, and how I can take pieces of what I read and apply them to my own work and my own life.”
Natalie Wang Class of 2026
“It’s not simply children’s stories; you have to understand the stories in a deeper way. This class helps me to understand when things happen in real life.”
Around 1.3 billion years ago, two orbiting black holes smashed into one another and set loose ripples in the fabric of space-time. These gravitational waves raced through the universe at the speed of light. Eventually, those rippling waves would set off a tiny shift in the distance between two pairs of mirrors monitored with laser beams at the heart of the underground Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This triggered the 2015 announcement of the first observation of Albert Einstein’s predicted gravitational waves.
It was the moment Emanuele Berti, a professor in the William H. Miller III Department of Physics and Astronomy, had been waiting for. Berti had been researching gravitational waves and working to merge that research with modern-day astronomy since his time as a physics student at the Sapienza University of Rome in the late 1990s. He was in a field where scientists had been trying unsuccessfully to detect gravitational waves since the 1950s.
“It was life changing,” he says simply. “It’s the best feeling you could have— you know, my life was not in vain. And now let’s get as much science as we can out of this.”
This illustration shows the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward as the black holes spiral toward each other. In reality, the area near the black holes would appear highly warped, and the gravitational waves would be difficult to see directly. [Credit: R. Hurt, Caltech-IPAC]
Like the Plucking of a Guitar
Berti was recently awarded the 2023 American Physical Society’s Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science for his work on black holes and gravitational waves. In addition to pioneering connections between physicists and astronomers who were working on gravitational-wave studies, Berti was one of the first people to explore in depth how to test the theory of general relativity using gravitational waves. He published a foundational paper for using LIGO to analyze black holes via spectroscopy. He also explored how to use gravitational waves to study the history of how stars evolve, form binary systems, turn into compact objects (such as neutron stars or black holes), and eventually merge.
Gravitational waves occur when massive, accelerating bodies—such as black holes or neutron stars—orbit each other. Berti likens the waves they give off to the plucking of a guitar. But instead of hearing the oscillation of a string, you’re experiencing the oscillation of space time.
And just as a musician can tell the shape and material of a drum from the sound of it being played, a scientist can determine the properties of an object from its gravitational waves. All black holes should give off identical gravitational waves because they are simple objects characterized only by their mass and rotation. Because black holes devour light and can only be observed by the behavior of the material swirling around them, gravitational-wave observations allow scientists to discover, for instance, whether a suspected black hole truly is a black hole—or some other type of astronomical object.
“All black holes play the same music, and once we know the mass and the spin, all the tones each black hole plays have to be the same,” Berti says.
All black holes play the same music, and once we know the mass and the spin, all the tones each black hole plays have to be the same.”
—Emanuele Berti
A New Understanding
Knowledge about the role of gravitational waves in physics and astronomy will only increase as the future detectors and observatories come online. Berti is a member of the U.S. NASA study team contributing to the European Space Agency’s upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. It’s a trio of satellites that will detect gravitational waves from space, and he is working on the science case for the next generation of ground-based detectors.
So far, LIGO evidence points to the black holes observed as being black holes—as Einstein thought. But gravitational waves aren’t just important because they tell us Einstein was right. They’re important because someday they might tell us Einstein was wrong.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity has governed humanity’s understanding of gravity for decades. But mysteries like the presence of invisible dark matter and now dark energy—an unknown force speeding up the expansion of the universe—hint at possible flaws that could eventually pave the way to a new theory. If that happens, gravitational wave studies could be at the forefront.
“The dream would be to break general relativity and maybe find clues to a new theory that will explain all these things,” Berti says.
The portrait of a man in red chalk (c. 1510) in the Royal Library of Turin is widely, though not universally, accepted as a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
Art history professor Stephen J. Campbellhas been teaching about Leonardo da Vinci for 20 years at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Throughout his academic career, he’s seen interest in the Italian Renaissance artist and inventor explode with the growing value of Leonardo’s work at auction houses, the fervor created by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and the boom in biographies that followed.
At the same time, Campbell has observed with some trepidation how biographers have increasingly veered from verifiable fact into presumption. Sometimes, transforming the historic figure into an almost fictitious one.
“With these invented Leonardos that have come down since the 1500s to the present time, writers liberally fill in the gaps with conjecture, and conjectures that build on conjecture,” says Campbell. The lack of historical rigor has troubled the historian, and he’s found it difficult to locate texts on Leonardo’s life suitable for sharing with his students.
Pop Culture Problem
That’s why he decided to write Da Vinci Worlds: Towards an Anti-biography of Leonardo. The book explores the different ways Leonardo has been handled in 21st-century popular culture. It looks at how biographers make speculative psychological leaps to make him fit the mold of a 21st-century “genius”—an outsider figure, a bit obsessive, a social non-conformist.
It is a problematic endeavor, says Campbell. As with most artists of the Renaissance, not much is known about the private life of Leonardo da Vinci, despite his numerous notebooks. “In them, Leonardo doesn’t tell us anything about himself. He doesn’t write about his own life,” says Campbell. “There’s very little biographical information. It doesn’t resolve into the holistic celebrity some of us want him to be.”
With these invented Leonardos that have come down since the 1500s to the present time, writers liberally fill in the gaps with conjecture, and conjectures that build on conjecture.”
—Stephen J. Campbell
Leonardo’s writings were a critical component of Campbell’s research process. He finds himself constantly reminded of their power for the reader. “Every time you return to them, it’s extraordinary in the sense that you get multiple voices and multiple selves talking to each other,” says Campbell. “Leonardo is an intersection of maker, problem solver, engineer, painter, and someone who lays claim to the role of philosopher. Many of his academic contemporaries would not have agreed with that description.”
That’s made more powerful because the texts were often written in the second person, as if speaking to the reader. Campbell thinks therein lies part of the reason many feel compelled to flesh out the missing details of his life. “People think something has been whispered to them, some kind of mystery has been divulged,” he says.
Ethics of the Past
Campbell says we tend to view Leonardo through a modern lens and risk turning him into something he’s not. “Our models of biography right now didn’t exist in Leonardo’s time,” he says. We invent “da Vincis” to fit the mold of contemporary celebrity—to be the equivalent of a tech visionary like Steve Jobs, to be an isolated and persecuted gay man, to suffer from attention deficit disorder, or to precociously be a vegan.
By highlighting these tendencies in his book—which is expected to go into production this fall—Campbell hopes readers will realize how Leonardo has been repurposed to fit current interests.
“There’s a whole ethics of approaching the past that I want people to confront while reading this book,” says Campbell. He also hopes his book serves as a caution to future biographers. “Be aware of when you are projecting and know how to signal that in your writing. Be very self-conscious about when you are doing that and why you need to do it.”
