The Pillars of American Progress

Fall 2018

Compared to politicians and movie stars, they’ve gone largely unknown over the decades, this cadre of professionals: teachers, scientists, doctors, administrators, lawyers, business managers—but according to Louis Galambos, professor in the Department of History, these are the very people who have shaped modern America.

In his new book, The Creative Society—and the Price Americans Paid for It, Galambos says that since the turn of the 20th century, everyday “professionals” came to play a key role in solving many of the country’s crises. He calls them the “creative society” because they devised new ideas that helped advance the nation. To prove his point, he takes on four major American challenges: coping with urban life, keeping the economy innovative, shaping economic security, and relating to the rest of the world, and illustrates how people in particular professions worked together to address them. Galambos argues that solving one problem and enabling society to move on to the next problem is actually a creative process, but not always recognized as such.

“The problems the experts were dealing with were very complex and very large; they were the sort of problems that are never solved quickly or completely. That’s why they’re so interesting,” says Galambos. “The professionals constitute a broad and growing segment of American society. The lure of professional status and the power and income that it frequently offers have been attractive.”

Galambos has conducted research on a number of public, private, and nonprofit institutions, and “in every one you can chart the rise of professional experts.” His narrative takes the reader through the Great Depression of the 1930s to the growth of major urban areas (and the numerous public health and economic issues that came along with it) and right up to the present day. He shows how, for example, professionals in the medical and public health arenas made life in American cities less threatening by producing and distributing various vaccines. On the heels of public health reform came the urban planners and ultimately, reforms in education. “These reforms made teachers and the administrators professionals for the first time,” he says. “And education became the way to get ahead in America.”

Throughout the book, Galambos weaves stories of his own family members as they addressed economic challenges over the generations, gradually entering the field of professionals. There’s Lazlo, Galambos’ grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant who ended up in Toledo, Ohio, in the metalworking industry. And his aunt Geraldine, who was a teacher. Galambos’ father, Lou, started out as a welder and then became a self-proclaimed “mining engineer” and then started his own machine business.

“I wanted to weave my own family members into the book because I believe ours is a very common American story,” he says. “Four generations of my family were involved in the changes in America that I’m talking about. They were engaged in the evolution of a professional class. The truth is, we’ve been willing to pay an enormous amount to give people second chances. They can get an advanced degree, they can get professional certificates, they can reinvent themselves.”

Galambos reminds readers that such professional growth does not come cheap. “We have created a new society with a heavy emphasis on professional discourses and decision making,” he says. Despite numerous advances, the “price” Americans have paid for this creative society includes cases of corruption, lack of communication among disciplines, numerous wars expensive in dollars and lives, wide gaps among economic classes, troubling failures in urban education, and increases in the cost of higher education. “This is the other side of the coin in the creative society,” he adds.

Have these price tags, including the current financial crisis, squeezed the professional innovation out of America? “No, not at all,” says Galambos. “In the midst of great uncertainty, there are plenty of signs that this is still a creative society—one that learns from the past and continues to be flexible, a society with tremendous resources and a determination to use them to solve problems.”

Giving Voice to Those with HIV/AIDS

Fall 2018

The most effective HIV prevention programs are tailored carefully to their intended audience, concludes Rachel Burns.

The most effective HIV prevention programs are tailored carefully to their intended audience, concludes Rachel Burns.

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

In 2008, Rachel Burns ’12, then a freshman at Hopkins, read an article in the New York Times Magazine about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The article talked about how foundations were spending millions of dollars on AIDS programs, but there wasn’t any follow-up on which programs were most effective in actually combating the disease and helping those who suffered from it.

“It was a light bulb moment for me,” says Burns, who, at the time, was becoming interested in domestic public health issues through one of her early classes at Johns Hopkins. “There were all these overarching programs, but 25 years after the discovery of the disease, there weren’t people researching the effect of these programs on specific groups.”

So Burns, a public health and anthropology double major, decided to visit four U.S. cities to investigate the effectiveness of various HIV/AIDS awareness and treatment programs on different populations. She began last summer interning with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and working at a clinic in the predominantly gay Castro District. While there, she interviewed public officials and HIV-positive men and women of a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations, asking them their opinions on how HIV prevention was handled and how they envisioned it could be changed.

What she found through her empirical observations was a mixed bag on how effectively each population was being served. “I was definitely surprised at how good some treatment was for some groups and how ineffective it was for others,” she says.

For example, in her interviews with some black men, “the interviewees explained that programs targeted at African American males were only aimed at individuals who were much more open with their sexuality than others,” she says. “While they all may have contracted HIV through having sex with other men, that did not necessarily mean that they identified themselves as homosexual. And there was little programming in place for those who did not.”

She did find a success story at the Castro’s Magnet Clinic, which was founded in 2003 with direct input from the community it served. “It’s a clinic run by gay males for gay males in a predominantly gay area. It had a real homey type of feel and looked more like a coffee shop than a clinic, which made it a far more comfortable and approachable place for people to visit.” The clinic provided free testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections, support groups, town hall meetings, and confidentiality in all their client services.

She spent this past summer in New York City where the needs of the community can differ by neighborhood. “One could think that New York is homogenous and that a clinic model that worked in Harlem would work in [Greenwich] Village, but the communities are incredibly diverse and different, so understanding them first is key.”

This fall, she plans to expand her research to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., which has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS infections nationwide. Ultimately, Burns hopes to convince stakeholders that combating AIDS with blanket policies and programs is not as effective as listening to a community and responding to its specific needs.

“I feel like we’re still not listening to the most valuable voices we have—people already suffering from the disease,” she says. “They could make such a difference in determining health policy, and that’s what I want people to take away from my research.”

The Suite Life of Ben Swartz

Fall 2018

In Amsterdam, Ben Swartz studied with two master cellists who take very different approaches to Bach’s Cello Suites.

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites may be the most popular compositions for the instrument ever written, but their history is also the most enigmatic. “We play them at every audition,” says Ben Swartz ’12, “but there’s no authoritative transcription. It’s lost to the world.”

As Swartz explains it, although Bach likely composed the work around 1720, it wasn’t until 1925 that the suites, originally thought to be études, were recorded by cellist Pablo Casals, who found an edition in a Barcelona thrift store. It’s his romanticized interpretation that most cellists perform today. But is that what Bach intended?

Swartz, a double- degree student in history (Arts and Sciences) and cello (he’s a student of Peabody cellist Alison Wells), used his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to spend six months in Amsterdam studying with two masters of the instrument, Anner Bylsma and Pieter Wispelwey. Both have different approaches to the Cello Suites. Bylsma, Swartz explains, takes a traditional approach to the composition and plays in the baroque style, even insisting on playing the numerous irregularities and blatantly wrong notes that appear in the closest thing to a period manuscript—a hand-written copy by Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena. Wispelwey, on the other hand, allows his baroque training to inform his performances but interprets the composition in a more contemporary way. “As a student cellist you’re pulled in these two different directions,” Swartz says. “The question is: How do we reconcile them?”

Swartz would study with each cellist once a week for several hours, playing the suites on a modern cello with steel strings with Wispelwey and a baroque cello strung with gut strings with Bylsma. Each set of strings gives the instrument a different sound. Also, since baroque music had its origins in dance, “it’s a question of the cellist knowing how the dances were danced physically, and then learning how they translate into physical gestures on the cello as you play them,” he says.

Ultimately, Swartz wasn’t after whether which interpretation of the Bach Suites is “right,” but how modern players can synthesize both into a historically informed and intensely personal performance—something Swartz hopes to continue to pursue professionally after he graduates.

In the meantime, he’s still ecstatic that he was able to study with two of the masters of an instrument he’s played since he was 5 years old.

Mary Ryan

Fall 2018

“I believe in teaching-in-place, that is, exploring the actual sites where history has been made. Baltimore is a great place to do this. It was ‘erected into a city,’ as its charter phrased it, in 1796 and was built from the ground up after the American Revolution. Baltimore represents a city that was made along with the nation.”

—Mary Ryan, the John Martin Vincent Professor of History, is writing a book about the making of two major American cities: San Francisco and Baltimore. A 19th-century urban historian, Ryan recently published an article in the Journal of Urban History called “Democracy Rising: The Monuments of Baltimore, 1809- 1842.” She says Baltimore is home to many extraordinary monuments that document critical periods in American political development. Here, she stands in front of the Washington Monument.

The Darkroom Goes Dark

Fall 2018

At the Homewood Art Workshops in the Mattin Center, the dismantling of the darkroom is more than symbolic. The enlargers have been moved out, and the demolition is finished. Once the conversion is complete—by late autumn— a new open space will house a digital lab, with an overhead projector, some printers, and one computer per student.

“It was slow to come, as far as I’m concerned,” says Howard Ehrenfeld, about the demise of film as a medium. He teaches Introduction to Digital Photography and Photoshop/ Digital Darkroom. “Wet film photography is a bygone thing.”

It’s been about a decade since Ehrenfeld has shot film; he had a large darkroom and went further than most people, processing his own color transparencies for his work and his art—collages and large commercial installations. “It was clear to me that digital was happening,” he says, “and it was an improvement.”

Phyllis Berger, Homewood’s photography supervisor, agrees. “I will never lose my love for a beautiful silver print,” she says, “but the time has finally come when a digital image can be just as awe inspiring. With my own work, I can see the incredible tonal range and luminosity that are possible in the digital darkroom.” And there’s another benefit: With digital photography, you never run out of film.

Unlike Berger, Ehrenfeld isn’t nostalgic about film. “Plenty of people are, but I did quite a bit with film. I don’t need to breathe in and touch those chemicals and pollute [the environment]. I was buying film by the brick [20 rolls]!”

He says he can do better things now in far less time and with exactitude, things he could never accomplish with film. And to those who say you can’t get as good a print—especially with black and white, he says, “I don’t buy that in the slightest bit.” He’s an expert on printing; much of his commercial work is for new malls or stores, where his billboard images are used on barricades that make it look as though the new store is already there.

Berger feels pangs of loss from closing the darkroom— “because the process of making prints is such a spiritual one. Seeing images come up through the developing fluid feels like magic,” she says. On the other hand, she has felt the pain of the loss of hours spent just trying to “tweak the tonality” of a photo.

But the film versus digital debate is moot. The real issue now is that film, film cameras, and papers are in short supply. “We decided to close the darkroom when it became too difficult and expensive to get materials students needed,” Berger says. “It became apparent that it was time to make a choice.”

Students who want to study the fundamentals of film may take classes at nearby Maryland Institute College of Art. “We have reciprocity there,” she says. But students can learn just as much and make images that are as beautiful with digital single lens reflex cameras, she believes.

The lack of wet photography is better for the environment, Ehrenfeld notes, as well as for the health of students and faculty members. He remembers a time when students “couldn’t get color paper for their enlargers. It wasn’t clear whether the market would die or the shortage would come back.” In fact, he doesn’t think professional film is even available anymore. Even photographers’ favorite Baltimore camera spot, Service Photo Supply, doesn’t have it.

In a single moment, he punctuates the end of darkroom days: “They gave their film refrigerator to a motorcycle club to use for beer!”

Class of 2015

Fall 2018

Students lined up

This fall, Johns Hopkins University welcomed the Class of 2015 to the Homewood campus. The class comprises 1,280 students (64 percent are in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences), chosen from a record applicant pool of 19,391 high school seniors. The 2010-2011 admission season saw a 5 percent increase in the number of applications compared with last year, and a 112 percent increase in applications compared to 10 years ago.

The Class of 2015 is one of the most diverse classes ever, with 18 percent (230 students) identifying themselves as African American, Hispanic, or Native American. Along gender lines, the class is split pretty evenly, with 49 percent female and 51 percent male.

Total freshman enrollment: 1,280
Admit rate: 18%
Mean high school GPA combined score: 3.74
Mean SAT combined score: 1405
Admitted early decision: 506
Baltimore Scholars: 14
Countries represented: 38
47 states and U.S. territories represented
189 students from New York, the top represented state

Max Kade Center Launched

Fall 2018

As America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins owes much of its legacy to the German model of higher education. So it seems particularly fitting for the Krieger School to serve as home for the new Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought, which launched late in the spring 2011 semester thanks to a generous grant from the Max Kade Foundation.

“The German model is one of the defining elements of the Johns Hopkins University identity,” explains the Max Kade Center’s co-director Rochelle Tobias. “An examination of the modern German intellectual tradition is crucial for the continued success of the humanities and social sciences at Johns Hopkins.” Many of the issues that preoccupied modern German scholars continue to be studied in departments across the Homewood campus. Around the time of the Enlightenment, German intellectuals began examining diverse ideas ranging from the role of irony in literature, to the social effects of memory, to the challenges of hermeneutics and translation—key thoughts that remain present in today’s liberal arts curricula.

In one way or another, “modern German thought is at the core of most of the disciplines taught at any university,” Tobias says. The center will engage students and faculty from disciplines that either originated in Germany and Austria or were strongly influenced by German-speaking intellectuals, such as anthropology, classical and comparative philology, psychology, physiology, physics, mathematics, sociology, history, and art history.

Housed on the fourth floor of Gilman Hall, the Max Kade Center began its work in earnest this fall, offering four undergraduate courses (three in conjunction with the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures) while planning to host a lecture series, summer workshop, and graduate-level conference for 2012. At the heart of the 2011–2012 curriculum is a yearlong undergraduate course titled Panorama of German thought, in which the center’s other co-director, Elisabeth Strowick, guides students through the gamut of modern German philosophy, from Martin Luther to Niklas Luhmann.

Welcome New Faculty Members

Fall 2018

The School of Arts and Sciences welcomed another bumper crop of stellar new faculty members in 2011. Each one brings accomplishments to the Johns Hopkins community. Here is a sampling:
Soojin Park joins the Department of Cognitive Science as an assistant professor following her post-doctoral fellowship at MIT. Her research focuses on the constructive nature of visual perception and neural representation of scenes. Park earned her PhD in cognitive psychology from Yale University.

Akira Omaki is a new assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, who comes to Johns Hopkins following his postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on first/second language acquisition, adult/child language processing, and theoretical syntax. Omaki earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland.

Anand Gnanadesikan is a new associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who joins Johns Hopkins after serving as a lecturer at Princeton University. Primarily interested in the vertical circulation of the ocean and the connections between physical circulation, the biosphere, and large-scale ocean chemistry, Gnanadesikan was a member of the Oceans and Climate Group at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He earned his PhD from the MIT/ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program.

Nadia Altschul joins the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures as an assistant professor whose research bridges disciplinary historiography and intellectual history, and currently focuses on postcolonial studies, tempo-rality, and the “Middle Ages” in Latin America. Altschul earned her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Yale University.

Andrea Krauss is a new assistant professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, who comes to Johns Hopkins after teaching German literature at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Erfurt, and the University of Zurich. Krauss’ research and teaching focus on the intersection of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. In addition, she has been working extensively on literary theory and methodology. Krauss earned her PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 2001 and her venia legendi (habilitation) from the University of Zurich in 2010.

Michael Kwass joins the Department of History as an associate professor. He comes to Johns Hopkins from the University of Georgia. Since publishing Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalité, for which he received the David Pinkney Prize, Kwass has been working on consumer culture in the age of Enlightenment. Kwass earned his PhD in history from the University of Michigan.

Marc Kamionkowski is the newest professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He comes to Johns Hopkins from the California Institute of Technology, where he served as a professor of theoretical physics and astrophysics. With research focusing primarily on particle dark matter, inflation and the cosmic microwave background, and cosmic acceleration, Kamionkowski was a 2006 recipient of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. He earned his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago.

Nicolas Jabko, a new associate professor in the Department of Political Science, comes to Johns Hopkins following his service as the research director of Sciences Po, Paris. His work focuses on inter- national political economy with a focus on the European Union, democracy and accountability in advanced capitalist societies, and the euro and monetary stability. Jabko earned his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ho-fung Hung joins the Department of Sociology as an associate professor. He comes to Johns Hopkins from Indiana University at Bloomington, where he served as the associate director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business. His research focuses on global political economy, contentious politics, nationalism, and social theory. He earned his PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.

Hans Lindblad is a new professor in the Department of Mathematics, who comes to Johns Hopkins following his time as a visiting member at Mittag-Leffler Institute. His research concerns basic mathematical questions about nonlinear wave equations arising in physics. Lindblad is also interested in existence, stability, and behavior of solutions to hyperbolic differential equations. He received his PhD in mathematics from the Lund Institute of Technology.

Kate Okikiolu joins the Department of Mathematics as a professor following her years at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focus is harmonic analysis, spectral theory, and geometry. She studies elliptical determinants to geometry and investigates the properties of different dimensions in space. Okikiolu received her PhD from the Universityof California, Los Angeles.

Astrophysicist Adam Riess Wins Nobel

Fall 2018

Adam Riess

Nobel prize winner Adam Riess

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

In Baltimore, it was still dark in the early morning hours of October 4, 2011. In a modest home not far from the Homewood campus, Adam Riess, Hopkins’ Krieger‑Eisenhower Professor in Physics and Astronomy, and his wife Nancy, were being stirred from sleep by the babblings and cries of their 10‑month‑old son. Suddenly the phone rang. At first, Riess thought it was still the middle of the night. Then he glanced at the clock and saw it was 5:36 a.m. He knew that was about the time the call supposedly comes.

THE call.

Everybody knew it was the day the Nobel Prize in physics would be announced, but no one knew the details of that closely guarded secret. Until that pre‑dawn moment.

Riess answered the phone, and on the other end were several people saying they were from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and that this was a very important call. Riess was told that he was one of three physics researchers to win what many consider the most prestigious award in the world—the Nobel Prize. He would share the prize with fellow scientists Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Brian Schmidt, an American astronomer based at the Australian National University.

Riess, 41, along with Schmidt, was given the prize for leading a group of researchers known as the High‑z Team, to its 1998 unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that acceleration is caused by the unexplained “dark energy” that comprises the majority of the universe. Riess led the study of difficult and precise measurements—across 5 billion light‑years—that resulted in the remarkable findings, which some say have changed the field of astrophysics forever.

Riess’ High‑z Team initially set out to use exploding stars called supernovas to measure how much the universe had expanded in the past and how much it was expanding now. He expected to discover that gravity had slowed the expansion of the universe. Much to his disbelief (he figured he must have made a mistake along the way), the research showed that the expansion of the universe had not slowed down at all. Rather, it was accelerating, and fast. And it’s that mysterious dark energy that’s acting as the “gas pedal.”

Albert Einstein was actually the one who first proposed the idea of a kind of “anti‑gravity” energy that could act repulsively, accelerating the expansion of the universe. At the time, however, Einstein thought it was the biggest blunder he’d ever made. “Maybe he [Einstein] should be getting the Nobel Prize again,” joked Riess in an early‑morning phone interview.

That would be the first of many interviews Riess would give that day to news organizations throughout the world. The barrage of phone calls began even before he left the house for Hopkins, as the news began to spread. Even as he was leaving his house, Riess was approached by a photographer from Reuters news service. Driving onto campus, he was met by a small crowd of journalists and well‑wishers. At his office in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, department chair Daniel Reich was waiting with champagne.

Riess isn’t the only Nobel Prize recipient in the physics and astronomy department. In 2002, astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi received a Nobel for his groundbreaking work inventing the field of X‑ray astronomy.

Speaking at a midday press conference were President Ronald J. Daniels; School of Arts and Sciences Dean Katherine S. Newman; and Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, where Riess is also a member of the senior scientific staff. The audience included Carol Greider, professor and director of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the School of Medicine and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine. Riess is the 35th person associated with Johns Hopkins as a faculty member, fellow, or graduate to win a Nobel Prize.

Most of the Hopkins community already knew they were in the midst of a Nobel Prize winner, thanks to a broadcast email President Daniels had sent in the morning to all faculty, staff, and students. In that email, Daniels lauded Riess for his pursuit of discovery, saying, “Dr. Riess has a passion to know more. The energy with which he pursues that passion exemplifies the commitment made by all of us across Johns Hopkins to deploy knowledge to create a better and more humane world. We are honored by his association with our university.”

As Nobel Prize recipients, Riess, Perlmutter, and Schmidt will share a cash award of $1.49 million, and each will receive a medal and diploma in Stockholm in December.

“We at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences are enormously proud of this most significant accomplishment,” said Newman. “This type of internationally recognized achievement illustrates all that Johns Hopkins is about: the quest for knowledge, the drive for discovery, and the passion to make a difference in the world. Adam’s exceptional efforts in unlocking some of the mysteries of our vast universe are awe inspiring, and he is most deserving of this award.”

So what’s next for Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess? He wants to keep doing what he’s been doing. “This is a great place to do science,” he said of Hopkins.

“One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity,” said Riess. “Nature somehow must know how to bring these both together, and it is giving us some important clues. It’s up to us to figure out what they’re saying.”

Fresh Perspectives on Autism

Fall 2018

The social met the spatial in Alex Murray’s recent study, which could hold out promise for children with autism.

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Could children with autism improve their social skills by also improving their ability to discern spatial relationships? That’s what Alex Murray ’12, working with Amy Shelton, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, hopes to find out.

In fact, Murray’s initial research using Hopkins student volunteers did show a “significant” correlation between the two apparently unrelated skill sets.

“It was surprising and definitely not what we were expecting,” says Murray, who says she has been reading books about neuroscience disorders since the fifth grade. “But it was exciting because we know that [how people discern a point of view] is something you can train and get better at, so it could possibly have a reciprocal effect—a person could improve their social skills by improving their ability to perceive spatial relationships.”

Murray first tested her subjects to determine their level of social development through an autism quotient test, approximately 50 questions that help scientists measure the extent of autistic traits in adults by the range of their responses to various scenarios (i.e. “I find myself drawn more strongly to people than things.”) Then she constructed buildings out of plastic Lego blocks, stood them on a table, and placed either an artist’s modeling doll or a simple wooden block to mark different viewpoints of the buildings.

When she asked her subjects to identity photographs taken from the different viewpoints of the Lego buildings—either from the perspective of the doll or from the block—she found that those who scored better on the social skills test had an easier time identifying the perspective from the doll’s point of view than those who didn’t score as well on the test. Murray believes that’s because the doll, in its role as a “social agent,” made the less socially well-adjusted participants feel uncomfortable. Both groups scored similarly when trying to identify points of view from the block.

Murray, whose findings with principal investigator Shelton were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, hopes to start testing children next and then engage kids with autistic spectrum disorders to see if the correlation holds up. If it does, Murray says she’d like to set up a training study to see how teaching spatial relationships could improve social skills. “Since we found a correlation between the two, we think there could be some residual effects—if you train a person to improve on one [perspective taking], they could improve on the other [social skills].”

For now, the neuroscience major hopes to pursue a dual MD-PhD degree and continue the work she’s started as a Wilson Fellow. “The fact that I found a correlation in my preliminary data that had never been found before was an amazing thing,” she says. “We’ll see what happens from here.”

Reclaiming Hart Crane's 'Splendid Failure'

Fall 2018

Here is how John Irwin would like you to make acquaintance with the greatest poem you’ve never read: find a quiet room by yourself and have a seat in a comfortable chair. Now open a bound volume of the modernist epic The Bridge, and read aloud, starting at the first stanza. Read this:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

You have now dipped a toe into the poem that marked the culmination of American poet Hart Crane’s brief (1899–1932) and tumultuous life. Irwin—who is the Decker Professor in the Humanities in the Writing Seminars, and has a joint appointment in English—will tell you The Bridge is the best 20th-century long poem in English. It was the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Rice University in 1970. But Irwin’s fully evolved thoughts on the matter are only now reaching publication. In his new book, Hart Crane’s Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press), Irwin declares at the outset his intent to demonstrate that in form, beauty, daring, and sheer artistic achievement The Bridge outshines other contemporary long works in English (including even T.S. Eliot’s epoch-defining masterpiece The Wasteland) “not by a little, but by a lot.”

It’s a tall order, this, especially since at its publication in 1930 the poem was damningly pegged a “splendid failure” and has held that association ever since; Irwin candidly calls Crane “unarguably the most difficult modern poet in English” and tells how his first take at making the argument for the poem’s supremacy was in the hands of a publisher when he decided to recall the manuscript and work on it some more. That was 40 years ago.

Spend time with John Irwin and two things quickly become evident: He is passionate about words—their power, their beauty and their mystery; and the life of a scholar/poet/literary critic appears to suit him. He will cogitate why his students seem to easily take to Wallace Stevens, eventually offering, “You know, Stevens is jauntily cultured,” and follow it with the Irwin laugh—robust, full-throated, the natural product of a man who revels in observing the peccadilloes of students and all the rest of humanity. Even after four decades of teaching, Irwin still brims with new poetry, new ideas, fresh insights. You see it in his eyes, magnified in the oversized lenses of his glasses that—with his Sigmund Freud-ish manicured gray beard—define his face. It is this love of language and the passion for story that animate his conversation and have made him a popular teacher and role model for generations of students.

The life of language may have been born in his blood. Growing up one of two boys in Houston,  Irwin and his brother both took to book learning. His brother is a Catholic priest who taught ancient Hebrew and Ugaritic at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto for most of his career, then became dean of the School of Theology and eventually president of Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario. Maybe it’s the genetic predisposition to words that runs in the family—or perhaps years spent teaching in the classroom—that has convinced Irwin that poetry, and poetic ability, is in some profound way innate. “If you want to know if someone is likely to be interested in poetry you should ask them if, when they were very little, they loved to make nonsense sounds or make up words. That’s the best indicator if somebody cares about poetry,” he observes. Irwin publishes his own poetry under the name John Bricuth, preferring to keep his literary and scholarly criticism separate and distinct from his original compositions, which in recent years have tended to run to long verse dramas. In poetry he claims Alexander Pope as role model and inspiration but observes that “the problem with satires today is that everything satirizes itself.” The absurdity of the venture elicits a great Irwin laugh. “You invent wild things and then reality comes up and invents something wilder.”

When Irwin first arrived at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor in the Department of English in 1970, among his duties was teaching a course in introductory Anglo-Saxon. From that experience he adopted his poetic nom de plume, Bricuth, coming from the root word bric, a bridge. He has published three books of poetry with a fourth, Pure Products of America, Inc.—a verse drama charting an encounter between a country radio talk show host named Charlie Printwhistle and a televangelist known as Big Bubba—planned for next year. In addition to his poetry, Irwin has published widely in the field of literary criticism, including books on Faulkner, symbology in 19th-century American literature, and books on both the analytic and the hard-boiled detective story.

One class Irwin has taught nearly every year since moving to become chair of the Writing Seminars program in 1977 (a position he held until 1996) has been Readings in Poetry: Eliot, Crane, and Stevens, an examination of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens in the context of the modernist movement in the verbal and visual arts. His critical expertise in modern and American literature has hardly limited his pedagogy however, and over the years in addition to elementary Anglo-Saxon, he has taught such courses as 14th-century English Alliterative Poetry, Studies in Medieval Literature, and even the intriguingly titled Nietzsche, Heidegger, Crane, and Stevens. Yet all the while he has been teaching and talking and thinking about The Bridge—not only as a great though misunderstood poem but more importantly as the key to understanding Hart Crane’s poetry and his significance in 20th-century American letters. “I picked up the Hart Crane book four or five times over 40 years, but each time I would get started something would come up,” he recalls. When he was finishing his third book of poetry he took it up again, but this time with an added incentive: “My wife said to me, ‘You’ve worked on this so long, you simply have to get it done.’ And then we went to visit [family friends] Harold Bloom and his wife in New Haven and Harold said to me, ‘You’ve worked on this so long, you simply have to get it done.’” It may be partly in gratitude and equally in relief that Irwin chose to dedicate the book to the two of them.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a book about Crane’s poetry could take 40 years to write. Crane the poet is notoriously complex—some would say opaque—a writer who employed “logic of metaphor” to pack layer upon layer of meaning into his lines in much the same way that his contemporary T.S. Eliot does in poems like The Waste Land. But Crane goes even further, employing an essentially visual structure to shape and guide The Bridge. “He out-Eliots Eliot” is how Irwin describes it. An important insight he develops in his book is Crane’s close friendship with many of the leading visual artists of the day. It was a time, says Irwin, “when the arts were in competition to see what was most modern, the most avant-garde,” and the visual arts in particular were electrified by new styles and approaches and techniques. Crane’s friends and acquaintances included Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Siqueiros, and other prominent artists of the early 20th century, and in fact The Bridge had its genesis in a 1923 exhibition organized by Stieglitz that Crane attended in Manhattan, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It inspired Crane to write the final poem in the cycle, “Atlantis,” and to begin thinking of a longer and larger verse structure capable, he wrote to writer Waldo Frank, of “including all the strands: Columbus, conquest of water, land, Pocahontas, subway, offices. The Bridge, in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp as it does finally, seems to really have a career.” Over the next seven years Crane worked backward and forward on the verse cycle, most particularly during the summer of 1927, when he sequestered himself at his grandmother’s estate on the Isle of Pines, Cuba, and wrote a large part of the finished poem.

Crane never went to college, but he was deeply read if largely self-taught, precociously writing essays on Nietzsche and Joyce at the age of 19 and avidly reading Ulysses and The Waste Land when they appeared four years later. He came from a family background of wealth, but at the same time of neither urbanity nor sophistication. Irwin makes this point clear in the subtitle of his book, a line from one of Crane’s letters that simultaneously explains and defends his rejection of European poetic modes. “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio,” Crane wrote, misspelling the French poet and playwright’s name in either a careless or perhaps deliberate dismissal. On the cover of Irwin’s book Crane poses with a mogul’s cigar in hand, wearing a businessman’s sober suit and hat and standing next to his father, Clarence, a successful restaurateur and candy maker who invented and held the patent for Life Savers candies. His relationship with his parents was fraught: he fought with his father because he refused to make a career of the family business and later became permanently estranged from his mother who could not accept her son’s self-confessed homosexuality.

Crane’s first slim volume of poems, White Buildings (1926), was rapturously received on publication, coming at a time in America when poets and poetry held a higher distinction in popular culture than either does today. Writing in The New Republic, Waldo Frank declared, “Not since Whitman has so original, so profound and…so important a poetic promise come to the American scene.” But never shy of exalting his own talents, Crane thought he could do something bigger—something to match and excel Whitman. He wanted to write the great American poem. This was at least partly his intent in writing The Bridge, a poem in which a work of architecture—the Brooklyn Bridge—serves as a metaphor of the American experience, potential, and fate. Moving backward and forward in time between the present day and a fanciful pre-Columbian past, the poem embraces and encapsulates the American experience—or at least tries to. This time around, the reception for Crane’s poetry was decidedly less enthusiastic. The critics, including some Crane counted as friends, declared the work “a splendid failure.” Irwin suggests there may have been more than a little ressentiment on the part of others in the rather too abrupt dismissal of an admittedly challenging and complex work. Crane for his part did not help his cause through a personal combination of belligerence, drunkenness, insolvency, and self-absorption that made his friendship for many an outright ordeal. The critical and financial failure of the book no doubt contributed to Crane’s final act of desperation, when he threw himself from a passenger cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico just before noon on April 27, 1932. His body was never recovered.

Crane’s suicide helped cement the notion that he died a failed poet, but it is the enticing mystery of his verse that wins him the title as true American poet of the Jazz Age, as in this stanza from the poem “The River” in The Bridge:

You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
Is not more hushed by gravity … But slow,
As loth to take more tribute—sliding prone
Like one whose eyes were buried long ago
The River, spreading, flows—and spends your dream.

This is the poem from Crane’s great work that is most often anthologized and is, to some extent, most easily understood. Irwin suggests that reading the words aloud—reading the words of any poem aloud—helps convey the poet’s meaning. “I tell my students what T.S. Eliot said: Don’t worry about whether you understand a poem or not. Read it. And then read it again. And enjoy it. Once you know that you care about it then try to understand some basic things about it.” In 40 years of thinking and reading and writing about the subject John Irwin has come up with far more than just “some basic things” to say about The Bridge, and he takes more than 400 pages doing it. But 400 pages may be just the right length for the first major critical reappraisal of Crane’s work in more than a quarter century. Although The Bridge is Crane’s most dense and challenging work, Irwin convincingly demonstrates its value not only intrinsically as a work unto itself but also as an enlightening point of entry to understanding Crane’s complete poetic oeuvre—from White Buildings through to his last poem, “The Broken Tower.” In the end, Irwin’s book does something remarkable, outlining a path of understanding for even the casual reader of Crane’s poetry while pointing to a journey of exploration that could make a lifetime’s pursuit. “That’s the thing about the poems of Hart Crane,” says Irwin reflecting on his 40 years’ work, “no one reading exhausts it.”

Seeing the Eye's Not-So-Simple Subtleties

Fall 2018

Long referred to as the window to the soul, the eye also plays an important role in regulating the body’s internal clock, impacting everything from sleep to quality of life.

Now, new research from the lab of Samer Hattar, an associate professor of biology with a joint appointment in the Department of Neuroscience, gives scientists a clearer understanding of a little explored type of retinal cell—information that could eventually help redefine light‑related diagnoses for conditions like sleep problems and mood disorders. The paper appeared online in the July 17 issue of Nature.

Samer Hattar

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

The retinal cells, known as intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), were first discovered at Brown University in 2002. Since that time, researchers have assumed that all ipRGCs look and function alike, at once regulating both the light responses of pupil dilation and synchronization of the body’s internal clock to daylight hours, known as circadian rhythm.

It turns out that though the ipRGCs share fashion sense, they are not so susceptible to groupthink. The cells actually come in two physiologically alike—but functionally different—sub‑populations. This finding overturns previous data from other scientists that implied the ipRGC system was straightforward.

The genetic difference in ipRGC cell lines is small—and is differentiated by whether the cells are directed to regulate circadian rhythm or pupil dilation, Hattar found.

Given that each of these functions is completely different, says Hattar, when looking at the cells under many conditions, “to think they’d act the same was kind of naive.” Now he knows better. “I’ve learned not to take the system for granted.”

Previously, Hattar had shown that ipRGCs express small amounts of a light‑responsive pigment called melanopsin. ipRGCs are critical for both pupillary light response and circadian rhythm, which are in turn controlled by two different brain regions. In past experiments where all a mouse’s melanopsin cells were killed off, both functions were messed up.

Further work showed that melanopsin cells actually came in two flavors themselves, either with or without a certain protein called Brn3b. In his latest experiments, using mice, Hattar and colleagues wondered if they could disrupt the ipRGC functions individually another way: by genetically eliminating only the melanopsin cells that express Brn3b. (While it remains unknown whether Brn3b is found in humans, it is in mice, monkeys, and other mammals who often share brain physiology.)

This worked quite well, to the surprise of Hattar. “Somehow I didn’t expect [the cells] to be so cleanly separated,” he says. Without Brn3b positive melanopsin cells, one region of the brain got normal nerve action—circadian light response was intact, but pupillary light response was severely defective.

Usually, clinicians use melanopsin‑based responses in the pupil as a proxy for identifying patients with light‑related disorders affecting, for example, sleep or mood. “I think most of the time this is going to work,” says Hattar, “but our data gives a little cautionary tale.” A patient’s defective pupillary light response, as based on melanopsin, may not be the full story to her sleep disorder.

Light, and its myriad roles in our bodies, captivates Hattar. “You get used to it and forget it’s so important — even tree leaves measure day length.” He believes that more discoveries like these will tell us if, perhaps, it is better to take sleeping pills in a certain light environment, or how “light pollution” our exposure to various colors of light at all times of day, including a never‑quite‑dark nighttime associated with urban areas really affects our daily physiology.

“I think there’s a major influence of light in our behavior,” he says.