First and foremost, Alan was a writer. He published four novels, two collections of short stories, nine books of poetry and, "The Skin and All," a collaboration with artist Bill Davison. His work has appeared widely in journals, reviews, literary magazines and anthologies. In addition to his publications, Alan received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, an NEH Fellowship, and was elected a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He also traveled as a cultural representative in southeast Asia, Egypt, and Italy under the auspices of the State Department's USIA.

Survivors include his wife, Laurel Broughton; daughter, Shannon Leigh Broughton-Smith and her husband, Steven Smith, their children, Anne Camm, Alan Russell, Amiri Christine, and Angel Shannon Ellen Smith; sons, John Camm Broughton and wife, Stacy, and their daughter, Lila; and Travers Nathaniel Broughton. He is also survived by his sister, Margaret Tenney and her sons, Asa Robert, Charles, and William and his wife, Olga, and their son, Reid. His former wife, Lenore Follansbee Broughton, also survives him.

A celebration of Alan's life will be held at Trinity Church, Shelburne, Saturday, May 25, 2013, at 11 a.m. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Vermont Respite House; or Kids on the Ball, c/o the King Street Youth Center.

Hoffman is originally from Chelsea, Vt. He credits his college mentors, particularly Professors Martin Oyata, Cao Chunjing, and Brit Chase in the Fellowships Office for pushing him academically and intellectually while at UVM. After completing his Fulbright experience he plans to return to the U.S. and pursue a master’s degree in Chinese-English translation and interpretation. He ultimately plans to work as a language interpreter for the U.S. government or in the private sector.

Emma Kantrov ’12 has been awarded an English teaching assistantship to Brazil for the 2014 academic year. She will be teaching at a university and mentoring Brazilian students who will go on to become English language teachers throughout the country.

While at UVM, Kantrov majored in environmental sciences and minored in Spanish. She spent extensive time outside of the classroom working as a teacher and a tutor in after school programs run by the Burlington school district as well as the Sara Holbrook Community Center. Her experience tutoring refugees, immigrants and English language learners in the Burlington area inspired her to pursue science education as a career. The Fulbright will enable her to build on her teaching experiences while also perfecting her Spanish and Portuguese language skills.

Kantrov credits her college mentors, particularly Portuguese language professor Debora Teixeira, for their mentorship and support throughout the Fulbright application process. Originally from Lexington, Mass., she plans to return to the Boston area after her Fulbright experience and teach science in a high school that caters to newly arrived immigrants.

Brienne Toomey ’12 was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany for the 2013-2014 academic year. She will teach English as well as American government, history and civics, and she will also serve as an adviser to German teachers who teach English.

A North Andover, Mass. native, Toomey came to UVM to pursue environmental studies and to prepare to embark on a career that focused on environmental resource conservation. Her study of German language and culture (she was a double environmental studies and German major) played a prominent role in how she thought of promoting sustainable living in society. While studying abroad in Germany during her junior year, she saw how the country had made significant changes to its energy generation and transportation practices in order to live in a more sustainable and energy efficient manner. During her Fulbright year, Toomey plans to explore these practices and potentially bring these ideas back to organizations in the U.S.

Toomey graduated from UVM magna cum laude and as an Honors College scholar. While at the university she was an active participant in the DREAM Mentoring Program, and she regularly contributed her art work to The Water Tower. Since graduating she has been working for the National Gardening Association in Burlington. After returning from Germany in 2014, Toomey plans to continue her work in renewable technologies and sustainable initiatives.

A rigorous undergraduate intellectual experience is required to assemble a strong Fulbright proposal, and Toomey credits her mentors in the German and Russian language department for pushing her to perfect her language and enable her to study language through a cultural lens. She says Professors Wolfgang Mieder, Dennis Mahoney, Helga Schrekenberger, and Adrianna Borra were especially influential in her studies.

Doubleday, Hodulik, Hoffman, Kantrov, and Toomey are five of more than 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2013-2014 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 125 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country's most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Critical Language, SMART, Gilman and Boren Overseas scholarships.

Betsy Hoza received a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honors, from Princeton University, and PhD degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Maine. She was a Psychology Intern, Postdoctoral Fellow, and faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh early in her career. Subsequently she joined the faculty at Purdue University, where she rose from Assistant Professor to Professor, and was named a University Faculty Scholar. Hoza joined the faculty of the University of Vermont as Professor of Psychology in 2005. 

Professor Hoza’s research utilizes a broad array of methodologies and focuses on understanding and treating the functional deficits of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). She is best known for her work in three areas: treatment of ADHD; peer functioning of children with ADHD, and self-concept in children with ADHD. The results of her research have been reported in numerous publications in important journals, as well as book chapters, review articles, and conference presentations, and she has been cited as a top producer of scholarly publications in clinical psychology. Professor Hoza’s work has been continuously supported from a variety of agencies, primarily the National Institute of Mental Health, with total grant support to date exceeding eleven million dollars.  

In addition to her scholarship at UVM, Professor Hoza regularly teaches graduate courses. She has trained a number of graduate students, all of whom have published their research, as well as provided lab experiences for many undergraduates, and she has served as a mentor to junior faculty. A true scientist-practitioner, she is also the Faculty Coordinator of the ADHD Specialty Service, an assessment and treatment facility for youth with ADHD, operating within the Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center at UVM.  

Included in Professor Hoza’s external service are editorial and editorial board positions with several journals, reviewing for a broad range of journals, NIMH grant review, data safety and monitoring board service, and meeting convenor for professional societies.

Christopher Landry received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Richmond, and his PhD from Harvard, both in Chemistry. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Professor at UVM in 1996 he held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Landry was appointed full Professor in 2007. He has held a visiting faculty appointment in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow Award.

Professor Landry’s initial research was in the discovery and development of porous materials. For many years, he has been creating new methods for the catalytic decontamination of chemical weapons, pesticides, and other environmental contaminants using porous materials. More recently, he has extended these studies into biomedical research, working with colleagues at UVM to develop new nanomaterials for in vivo drug delivery. His research funding has included a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, as well as funding from the Department of Defense and Army Research Office, the National Institutes of Health, and companies. Landry’s work has resulted in numerous publications in leading professional journals and three US patents. He is frequently invited to speak at universities, laboratories, and professional meetings.

In terms of student teaching and training, Professor Landry teaches both small lecture and large lecture-laboratory courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. He has been nominated multiple times for the Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award. Strongly interested in interdisciplinary programs and research, he was central to the development of the cross-college undergraduate major in biochemistry, and also holds membership in the interdisciplinary graduate programs in Materials Science and Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences. Landry has been the research mentor to eight post-doctoral employees, thirteen doctoral students, and numerous undergraduates.

Landry’s many service contributions include, at UVM, co-chairing the University’s re-accreditation, President of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and Graduate College Executive Committee member; and externally, grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, NSF, and the Department of Defense, as well as manuscript review for a variety of journals.

The two other faculty outside the College of Arts and Sciences receiving University Scholar recognition are:

• Michael Giangreco, Professor, Department of Education, College of Education and Social Services
• Curtis Ventriss, Professor, Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources

“It was a brutal slaughtering of people,” Krikorian says. “You can still feel all of the emotion and pain." Yet, he explains, it requires a level of emotional removal to craft the details into the kind of poems that won him this year’s Benjamin B. Wainwright Prize for poetry. “Krikorian’s work has a certain level of gravitas,” Jackson says. “It is some of the best writing that I have encountered since I started teaching here at UVM.”  

April 24 commemorates the night in 1915 that ushered in the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government. The following work by Krikorian puts the images that live within the lives of families into words:

Hazel Remembers the Massacres

1.

Oh, it was awful I guess.

Throats cut, sons beheaded—

Boys were butchered like lambs

for kebab, the unborn held high on a sword,

pulled from the belly of the mother.

That's the easy part though, the rest looms

like a fever in the cold.

Women were lined like a slaver's bazaar

single-file, naked with nothing but coins

in their uterus. That should have been enough,

but the Turks needed more,

they danced them like dervishes

set wild aflame, or like Araxi to Zorab

she'd become their whore,

so long as she was alone in the world.

2.

There are a lot of underground places in Armenia

where the people could speak

in their native tongue. It was forbidden

so they hid beneath their homes

to share secrets

as though they were still alive.

Cousin Baidzar, sweet quidg, awoke

to mordant blindness like she was tied

in an ungovan blanket. Bodies tumbled

like a gourd pile all around her, the sun 

a broker of sight on her mother's last embrace.

She walked away like a whisper of the dead,

her earlobes cut wet for their gold.

3.

Past the Turkish border was a promise

like the Holy Land that curdled in the stomach

and browned. Forty years were never so cruel

as the caravan of lies left drying

like figs in the Syrian desert.

They were torn from their mountain like skin from bone,

ever marching to a place that was nothing

to end like dogs starving on their own wails.

After a hundred years, words

are all that's left.

The resolution, unanimously passed by the Vermont House and Senate, was read aloud in front of many of Bryan’s colleagues from the political science department, and was followed by a lengthy standing ovation by the entire chamber. Bryan, who was accompanied by his wife Lee, is retiring this year and is considered one of the most influential political scientists in Vermont state history.  

The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Philip Baruth, Bryan’s UVM colleague from the English Department, and Rep. Terry Macaig of Williston, was co-sponsored by dozens of other senators and representatives.

“Whereas, Professor Frank Bryan is truly a citizen scholar as his appreciation of Vermont politics is rooted in a strong, personal, cultural affinity for and love of his home state as well as a superb mastery of the erudite elements of political science,” reads the resolution. “Whereas, he has written extensively in the academic and general presses, and in books on state and local politics, including his 2004 seminal work Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works which is based on three decades of empirical research… Whereas, in the state at large, Professor Frank Bryan is a renowned Vermont civic educator and an unofficial spokesperson for the unique cultural and political life of Vermont that has historically been associated with our State…”

Gregory Gause, professor and chair of the Political Science Department who was on hand for the reading of the resolution, says Bryan has been the face of the political science department, and for many, the face of the university for decades.

“Professor Frank Bryan has been a pillar of our department for 36 years,” writes Gause in his nominating letter for Bryan’s professor emeritus status. “In all three areas of his professional life – teaching, research and service – Professor Bryan has had an exemplary career… Bryan is, for two generations of UVM students and Vermonters more generally, ‘Mr. Vermont Politics.’ He is beloved by his colleagues as a great teacher, serious scholar, model colleague and good friend.”

Bryan has authored or edited six scholarly books and authored more than 40 scholarly articles and book chapters.A reviewer in Political Science Quarterly called Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works “the best book I have ever read on local government.” In 1986 Bryan both received the Andrew E. Nuquist Town Government Award from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and was named a “New England Local Hero” by New England Magazine. His more recent honors and awards include the Medallion Award from the National Association of Secretaries of State (2010); an honorary degree from Marlboro College (2008); and the Curtiss/Loyzelle Green Mountain Boys’ State Director’s Award for more than 20 years of delivering the keynote address at Boys’ State (2006).

At UVM, Bryan has been the recipient of the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award (2004); Class of 2004 Award for Valuable Contributions to Students (2004); Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999); named Dean’s Lecturer in 1996 by the College of Arts and Sciences; and won the Senior Class Council Award for Contributions to the Students of the University of Vermont (1991).

Born out of concern for the children under her care and the picture books she was reading them, Franz decided to write her senior thesis on the subject with one primary question in mind: “How do children’s picture books potentially deter or reinforce materialistic values and consumer culture?” She revealed her findings – among the first to focus on the role of children’s literature in shaping material and consumer values – in her 196-page Honors College senior thesis, “Cultivating Little Consumers: How Picture Books Influence Materialism in Children.”

“I read three or four books a night as a babysitter and started noticing how much greed there was in children’s books and became deeply concerned,” says Franz, who is double-minoring in studio arts and green building and community design. “I realized how damaging consumerism is to the environment and tied that to my love of children. This study was an attempt to reconcile the two.”

Franz, who based her results on a content analysis of 30 picture books written between 1998 and 2012 from a list of Caldecott Medal Winners, New York Times bestsellers and librarian recommended books, found that picture books reflect, reinforce, and deter consumerism simultaneously with environmental messages serving as the most frequent way to counter consumerism. In the study, a number of picture books featured excessive amounts of toys, sending pro-consumer messages to children ages zero to six while others contained more outdoor-related themes that Franz says serve as a tool for countering consumerism.

Franz will be among more than 300 students presenting their research at the 2013 Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 23 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Davis Center.

“The results of this study reveal that picture books have a significant potential to act as both an avenue for becoming consumers and a tool for countering consumerism” says Franz, who has a professional certificate in sustainable business practices from UVM. “In order to help children to become positive, connected, responsible individuals, we must improve the quality and consciousness of the media and their ability to respond to it. Picture books, whose tradition is to inspire imagination and offer refuge, are a fantastic place to start. I know I’ll never read a book the same way again.”   

Coding consumerism

Franz, who cited a study showing a decrease in the number of interactions with the outdoors is resulting in “nature deficit disorder," created a comprehensive and unique coding system that identified 50 indicators across 10 categories representing different ways in which picture books can promote and discourage the consumer socialization of readers. Text and illustrations were coded to measure the occurrence of indicators of consumerism or counter-consumerism across five themes: individual material orientation, interpersonal material orientation, social norms, commercialization and environmental messages.

Some of the 37 pro-consumer indicators included “desire for more stuff,” “material goods as a vehicle for approval/gaining friends” and “focus on objects instead of peers in social setting.” Among the 13 counter-consumer indicators were “self-acceptance,” “sharing,” and “positive orientation to the outdoors/inspiration.” Overall, the average book contained 5.34 indicators of pro and counter-consumerism. The most frequent number of instances among counter-consumer indicators were “outdoor engagement” and “creative/imaginative engagement,” while “standard of living: above average” and “engagement with toys/games” topped the pro-consumer indicators.

The Pete the Cat books, for example, included pro-consumer indicators by showing Pete with a nice car, an expensive guitar, surfboards, and a significant number of toys located in an above-average home. Conversely, “nature immersion” ranked high due to the fact that “outdoor engagement” was found in 76.7 percent of the sample (23 of 30 books), with characters playing on playgrounds, skateboarding, biking or playing in the sand at the beach. Many characters go on walks, while others describe a “more emotional engagement in their natural surroundings” like feeling the wind, smelling the air or imagining riding a bird across the landscape in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

“Rachel took on an ambitious capstone research project that required great persistence in the design phase,” says Stephanie Kaza, Franz’s adviser and director of the Environmental Program. “Her thoughtful and meticulous analysis reveals important findings on the specific nature of consumer messages in children’s literature. Perhaps her greatest triumph was sticking it out through the many challenging phases of such a major piece of independent work.”

Putting research into practice

Franz is hoping scholars, parents, caregivers and educators use the information to offset other consumer drivers like television, video games and social media. She also hopes her research, which identifies leverage points for shaping consumerism through more careful selection of children’s picture books, is expanded to include classic books to examine how these values have changed over time.

“Most books, like our lives, have a combination of both messages,” says Franz, who has worked as an executive assistant at a design firm during college. “Parents are the number one source for countering consumerism. I’m hoping this study encourages people to develop critical thinking skills around consumerism and to select books more carefully.”

Maybe so, but for most of us, that means checking the WeatherBug app on our iPhone, which is nothing like the kind of data crunching that Dupigny-Giroux does as the official climatologist for the state of Vermont. She’s held that post concurrently with her professorship at UVM for the past 16 years, teaching students about weather and climate while using data collected from satellites and weather stations to research climate patterns.

Originally from Trinidad, Dupigny-Giroux received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 1996, but the data she tracks go back many years prior. “As a climatologist, a decade is just starting to become a significant time frame,” she says. “Looking at only two years is only seeing part of the story. It’s like a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle; if you only put together the first 100 pieces, you never complete the picture.”

Writer Lindsay J. Westley of Seven Days wanted the dirt on just how much trouble lies ahead from global warming, but that subject is just one of Dupigny-Giroux’s concerns. While she does track global trends, the majority of her data collection is specifically related to Vermont, and she works closely with colleagues at state agencies to better quantify the impacts of severe weather on local landscapes. Whether you’re a backyard gardener or a homeowner in a floodplain, you’ve likely benefited from Dupigny-Giroux’s work.  Read the entire inverview here.

Suddenly he recalled another deadline, a commissioned poem about a painting from a favorite artist, Romare Bearden. He’s chosen Calypso’s Magical Garden – Calypso the nymph in Greek mythology, the seductress who held Odysseus hostage on her island, the enchantress who lured Jackson back into his world of words. “It’s bad,” his new poem begins, “when a man doesn’t own even his dreams/a faint head full of the scent of a woman…”

That’s what tax extensions are for.

It wasn’t his accounting skills, of course, that won Jackson a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors granted to “midcareer” academics and artists who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation receives between 3,500 and 4,000 applications each year and awards approximately 200 fellowships.

Established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of their seventeen-year-old son who died in 1922, the foundation has sought to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding."

Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in periodicals including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker and Tin House. His work has been included in Best American Poetry (2004, 2011) and Best of the Best American Poetry. Poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson, among other honors, has been a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award.

“It is good to follow in the long tradition of poets I've admired who have also been awarded a Guggenheim,” he says. “It is fortifying and affirming.

Jackson’s grant proposal is to pursue the intriguing story of Edmonia Lewis, an African American woman who studied at Oberlin before the Civil War, stood trial for the alleged poisoning of her roommates, was acquitted and went on to become an internationally acclaimed sculptor, living most of her life in Rome. It’s a story with many twists and unknowns, of a woman who, in many ways, transcended her race given the time in which she lived, and in others, even in a progressive place like Oberlin, could not.

“She didn’t respect the boundaries between races,” Jackson says, and she was kidnapped, brutally beaten and left in a field after she was accused. Her lawyer, John Mercer Langston – great uncle of the poet Langston Hughes – provides the primary source for her story. Jackson’s ambition is to write a verse play about her trial, placed within history yet using modern techniques to appeal to a contemporary audience.

‘Writing in miniatures’

Jackson has longed used art metaphors to talk about poetry, particularly for his students. In class before workshopping their poems – he assigns one a week, which he admits is intense – Jackson compares the luxury of prose writers working on a large canvas to the constraints on poets, writing in miniatures where every stroke has weight.

Four years ago he started The Painted Word poetry series in which he brings established and emerging poets to read at the Fleming Museum once a month. While these are events open to everyone, Jackson is driven by the desire to give students the opportunity to come in close contact with working poets. This spring’s series will wrap up, however, with the first annual student reading on Wednesday, April 24 at 6 p.m. “The students really do astound me with their poems every semester,” he says. “I could have built the whole series around their work.”

Jackson is inspired both to nurture his students as poets and also to be part of the broad conversation about poetry in and outside of the academy: “I want to help shape the dialogue particularly around poetry and race and our collective American literary inheritance.” 

But with or without Calypso’s call, Jackson’s art is who he is, above publishing books and winning prizes. Writing, he says, is the only way he lives and grows in the world. Experiences filter through his imagination and demand interpretation. “That’s the pressure,” he says. “Not the pressure of a career or to produce but to know that my existence is so tied with how I process it through this thing called the poem… I walk it.”

The seminar is an opportunity to both explore and experience the meaning of liberal education. Sessions are based on intellectually rigorous discussion and reflection of classic literature from antiquity to the present, exploring ideas that touch on fundamental issues of society that deepen and broaden the vision participants bring back to their campuses and classrooms.

Past readings, organized into sessions on topics such as “What is a Good Society?”; “Leadership” and “Globalization and Responsibility,” have ranged from selections from John Winthrop, Aristotle, Confucius and Rousseau to Ralph Ellison, Tillie Olsen and the five pillars of faith in the Quran.

“The Wye Faculty Seminar is one of the nation’s most prestigious professional development opportunities for liberal arts faculty,” says Antonio Cepeda-Benito, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  “I am delighted for Alec and Luis; their selection reflects extremely well not only on their accomplishments but also on the very high quality of the UVM faculty.

Vivanco, whose research focuses on understanding the cultural and political dimensions of environmental change and sustainability, is passionate about both teaching and liberal education. “I’m always thinking about the broader global context in which the things that I teach about are taking place,” he says, “but I’m also looking for ways to enhance global citizenship for my students, get them involved in service learning projects and then tie that to the liberal arts.” For Vivanco then, the seminar’s combination of citizenship with a global outlook is a unique fit.

“In my teaching and research,” says Ewald, I’ve been interested in citizenship both as a formal category and as a more general question of civic belonging.” He has written about voting rights and taught classes on race, criminal justice and constitutional law. He, like Vivanco, is a strong believer in the liberal arts model of education, in “sitting in a room together talking and listening and writing and thinking about hard questions and solving problems.” But he knows there are genuine questions about the model that he hopes this seminar will help him address and articulate.

Ewald also sees a benefit in taking a role that’s closer to that of a student, a reminder of having someone else run the discussion, having someone else say, “good job” and realizing it feels good. “Or being ignored when you had your hand up,” he says. “Those experiences are often at least as valuable as some new thing I learned about John Locke.”

“Warhol was really interested – and I was too,” Grudin says, “in all those technologies that allow everyday people to make culture, but it’s not as though you become a star as soon as you make your little video… I find Warhol relevant to students and to people in general because he was unusual for his time in that he noticed the powers of cultural technology. He was a pioneer in recognizing these new possibilities but also the problems they pose.”

But you have to fast forward from middle school to graduate school before Grudin becomes a student of Warhol’s work, an unexpected twist given that his adviser at Berkeley was closer to the “worst artist” camp. “He thought Warhol was the beginning of the end of art history,” laughs Grudin, who saw a more complex and forward-thinking figure – clearly evidenced by the series Andy Warhol’s Athletes currently on exhibit at UVM's Fleming Museum. Warhol incited critics who thought he was lazy and facile by giving interviews claiming how little he cared about what he did, how easy it was, how he did it for the money.

Not true, Grudin insists. “I think he recognized that challenging some of the traditional expectations around art-making and effort was going to be a provocative and therefore powerful move for him to make as an artist,” he says. “He had a very sharp understanding of art history and of contemporary American culture, and he pretended not to have that understanding when he was interviewed.”

Warhol also, Grudin believes, had the most powerful and nuanced views of consumer culture than any other pop artist. He was a critic even as he deeply understood the appeal – and the danger. Warhol’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe, before and after her death, is a strong case in point.

Owning athletes 

Warhol famously adored celebrities and socialites. Sports, well, not. But in 1977 his friend Richard Weisman, a sports fan and major art collector, commissioned a series of portraits of the era’s top athletes (themselves moving into the world of celebrity idols), from basketball’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, golf great Jack Nicklaus to tennis star Chris Evert. This collection of ten works, a combination of paint and silkscreen on canvas created from Warhol’s original photographs, is a rarely displayed collection that offers an opportunity for close comparison within an intimately related group – and that dispels any question of “lazy.”

The pieces could, at first glance, Grudin notes, be dismissed as vanity projects on the part of the athletes, the artist or the patron. “But when you look at them closely, as my students did last week, they’re just fascinating. He’s got such an incredible aesthetic sensibility and there’s so much complexity – you’ll find something to stimulate discussion. That’s why it’s so much fun to bring students to a show like that.”

The art history class he took includes students not just from that major but also studio art and art education – all bringing, Grudin says, enthusiasm and focus from their different perspectives. Students broke into groups to examine a painting, followed by rich discussion, of the intention and drama created by light and shadow on Muhammad Ali’s face, the observation that only the women (figure skater Dorothy Hamill along with Evert) are looking away from the viewer, whereas the men look head-on, O.J. Simpson even confrontationally. Evert’s femininity is the subject, they say, “Evert is the brand rather than her skill.”

“Every single time we have a discussion like we did in the Fleming, somebody will say something that’s either a great point that I’d never even considered before,” Grudin says, “or, without having read some major scholar who wrote twenty or thirty years ago, they’ve come up in ten minutes with the same point. It’s really inspiring when they can do that.”

For their part, Grudin’s students are equally impressed. As sophomore Amy Goodman notes, they’re aware he’s a Warhol expert, but it’s not intimidating. “He’s very good at making people feel comfortable talking in class because anything they say he picks out what’s good about it,” she says. “He never makes you feel like you’re wrong.”

Grudin’s class also had the privilege of a visit from Weisman, who shared personal anecdotes about Warhol, describing him as thoughtful and articulate, further dispelling impressions from his media interviews. “To have direct contact with people who were friends with artists and also see the actual art work that we’re talking about in class,” Goodman says, “is amazing.”

“I can tell that being able to see something like this in person,” Grudin says, “is something my students won’t forget.” What he hopes is that they’ll carry the message further: take the time to look at art closely – or anything that’s complicated and worthwhile.

“Look closely, and it will reward your attention,” he says. “I really value giving them that so they can take it to other classes or to their life outside of UVM.”

Date:  Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Time:  5:00 p.m.
Location:  Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building
Information:  656-3166

For many of us today, the phrase "going back to the land" may bring to mind a vision of the 1960s:  yurts and domes, communes and co-ops.  But Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land for over a hundred years, and earlier back-to-the-landers were often motivated by dramatically different beliefs, hopes, and fears.  What sorts of people dreamed of "returning to the land" in 1900, and why?  Who left the city, and who helped other people to leave?  Professor Brown will discuss the cultural politics of the first back-to-the-land movement and consider the legacy it bequeathed to movements in the 1930s, 1970s, and beyond. 

Dona Brown has been on the faculty in the History Department at the University of Vermont since 1994.  Her first book, Inventing New England:  Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Press, 1995), explored the significance of the tourist trade in shaping New England's regional identity.  She has published widely on both tourism and American regionalism, and she was director of the Center for Research on Vermont from 2003 to 2006.  Her new book, Back to the Land:  The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), explores the long history of back-to-the-land movements in the United States.

A recording of the lecture will be made available soon at the online media blog http://blog.uvm.edu/compute-cas-media/ and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.

The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank. 

Watch a video of the conference (Sanders introduces UVM participants at 26:42).

As a child in Schenectady, N.Y., Nancy Dwyer elicited oohs and aahs for her artwork, which she recalls as being “effortless” for her to create. That talent eventually took her to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she studied studio art and joined a co-op gallery along with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. Those two went on to become global art stars, but, back in the 1970s, “we were all just a bunch of grubs,” Dwyer recalls.

Interviewed in her semi-orderly Pine Street studio, the tall, slender and platinum-haired artist cites many influences that inspired her to make word art her métier. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was a clerking job at Barnes & Noble in the early ’80s that turned out to be the most powerful catalyst.

Read the entire article by Seven Days contributor Kevin J. Kelley in the latest issue. 

After a previous transfusion, it turns out, Mrs. Vel had developed a potent antibody against some unknown molecule found on the red blood cells of most people in the world—but not found on her own red blood cells.

But what was this molecule? Nobody could find it. A blood mystery began, and, from her case, a new blood type, “Vel-negative,” was described in 1952.

Soon it was discovered that Mrs. Vel was not alone. Though rare, it is estimated now that over 200,000 people in Europe and a similar number in North America are Vel-negative, about 1 in 2,500.

For these people, successive blood transfusions could easily turn to kidney failure and death. So, for sixty years, doctors and researchers have hunted—unsuccessfully—for the underlying cause of this blood type.

But now a team of scientists from the University of Vermont and France has found the missing molecule—a tiny protein called SMIM1—and the mystery is solved.

Reporting in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, UVM’s Bryan Ballif, Lionel Arnaud of the French National Institute of Blood Transfusion, and their colleagues explain how they uncovered the biochemical and genetic basis of Vel-negative blood.

“Our findings promise to provide immediate assistance to health-care professionals should they encounter this rare but vexing blood type,” says Ballif.

The pre-publication results were presented online, March 18, 2013, and the finalized report will be published, as an open-access article, in the next edition of the journal.

(Last year, Ballif and Arnaud identified the proteins responsible for two other rare blood types, Junior and Langeris, moving the global count of understood blood types or systems from 30 to 32. Now, with Vel, the number rises to 33.)

New DNA tests

Before this new research, the only way to determine if someone was Vel-negative or positive was with tests using antibodies made by the few people previously identified as Vel-negative following their rejection of transfused blood. Not surprisingly, these antibodies are vanishingly rare and, therefore, many hospitals and blood banks don’t have the capacity to test for this blood type.

“Vel– blood is one of the most difficult blood types to supply in many countries,” the scientists write, "This is partly due to the rarity of the Vel− blood type, but also to the lack of systematic screening for the Vel−type in blood donors.”

In response, the UVM and Paris researchers developed two fast DNA-based tests for identifying Vel-negative blood and people. These tests can be easily integrated into existing blood testing procedures—and can be completed in a few hours or less.

“It’s usually a crisis when you need a transfusion” says Ballif. “For those rare Vel-negative individuals in need of a blood transfusion, this is a potentially life-saving time frame.”

Protein hunters

To make their discovery, Arnaud and coworkers in Paris used some of the rare Vel-negative antibody to biochemically purify the mystery protein from the surface of human red blood cells. Then they shipped them to Ballif in Vermont.

The little protein didn’t reveal its identity easily. “I had to fish through thousands of proteins,” Ballif says. And several experiments failed to find the culprit because of its unusual biochemistry—and pipsqueak size. But he eventually nabbed it using a high-resolution mass spectrometer funded by the Vermont Genetics Network. And what he found was new to science. “It was only a predicted protein based on the human genome,” says Ballif, but hadn’t yet been observed. It has since been named: Small Integral Membrane Protein 1, or SMIM1.

Next, Arnaud’s team in France tested seventy people known to be Vel-negative. In every case, they found a deletion—a tiny missing chunk of DNA—in the gene that instructs cells on how to manufacture SMIM1. This was the final proof the scientists needed to show that the Vel-negative blood type is caused by a lack of the SMIM1 protein on a patient’s red blood cells.

Your blood

Today, personalized medicine— where doctors treat us based on our unique biological makeup—is a hot trend. “The science of blood transfusion has been attempting personalized medicine since its inception,” Ballif notes, “given that its goal is to personalize a transfusion by making the best match possible between donor and recipient.”

"Identifying and making available rare blood types such as Vel-negative blood brings us closer to a goal of personalized medicine," he says. “Even if you are that rare one person out of 2,500 that is Vel-negative, we now know how to rapidly type your blood and find blood for you—should you need a transfusion.”

In his classic book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase "abstracted empiricism" to describe research in the social sciences that failed to address important theoretical issues.  Although it has been more than half a century since this book was published, far too much current research remains in this category.  Professor Krymkowski will critique modern examples of "abstracted empiricism." discuss how social scientific investigations should be conducted, and provide an illustration of such research from his current work on ethnic and racial differences in outdoor recreation. 

This lecture will be non-technical and accessible to all colleagues and students. 

Daniel H. Krymkowski, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology, is a mathematical sociologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Krymkowski's current research focuses on class, ethnic, gender, and racial inequality in the contemporary United States.  Recently published articles feature collaborative work with Professor Beth Mintz in the Department of Sociology and Professor Robert Manning in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.  These papers have appeared in Evaluation Review, International Journal of Sociology, Leisure Sciences, Race and Social Problems, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, and The Sociological Quarterly.

A recording of the lecture will be made available soon at the online media blog http://blog.uvm.edu/compute-cas-media/ and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.

The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.  The next lecture in this series will be presented by Dona Brown (Department of History).

The next day, Friday, the tournament began. The tournament is one of Europe’s best and most challenging, featuring 62 teams from 25 countries, from as far away as Hong Kong, Israel, Greece, Abu Dhabi, USA and all over the European continent. On Friday there were two rounds, and after both teams got a first in round one, they met stronger competition and both got a second in round two. As you may know, in the WUDC format there are four teams in each debate, two for the motion and two against, and the teams are ranked as 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th. The debate is judged by a panel of three who come to the decision after a consensus discussion before disclosing the result to the four teams. It was a good start to the first day, as Vermont expected this tournament to be more difficult than Budapest, even though that had also been a very challenging tournament.

On Saturday there were four debates. In round three Becca and Sarina scored a strong first place while Drew and Mariel got a third place. In round four Drew and Mariel got a second while Sarina and Becca took a fourth. After four rounds each team had 8 team points (3 for 1st, 2 for 2nd, 1 for 3rd and 0 for 4th). Knowing that it would take at least 12 points to reach the semifinals (the top eight teams) to debate on Sunday, both teams had their work cut out for them. And they delivered. Drew and Mariel got two firsts against the top of the draw while Sarina and Becca got a first and a third. Thus, Drew and Mariel finished on 14 points (2nd ranked team after prelims) while Sarina and Becca finished on 12 points (just squeaking through as the 8th ranked team).

The semifinals on Sunday were a complete new story. In separate semifinals, Becca and Sarina advanced (the top two teams in each debate advance) as a clear first, while Drew and Mariel did not advance after a 4-3 split amongst the seven judges. This put Becca and Sarina in the final against traditional European debate powerhouses RRIS (Israel), Babes Boyal (Romania) and Gottingen (Sweden). The final debate motion was that the new Pope should be elected by the members of the Catholic Church instead of by the College of Cardinals. Becca and Sarina were the first proposition team, with BBU in first opposition, Gottingen in second proposition and RRIS in second opposition. The debate was held in the ancient official formal hall of the University of Vienna, flanked by statues of Maria Teresa and King Rudolf. The media and hundreds were there to watch the debate.

See more pictures, videos, and read the full story here.

Date: Tuesday, March 12
Time: 5:00 pm
Location: Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building
Information: 656-0756

This lecture examines the retroactive formation of gay identity through the act of reading in a famous lesbian novel of the 1920s, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness.  Appealing to sexologial theory, Hall argues that homosexuals are naturally and immutably different--as we say now, "born this way"--yet the novel's scene of reading opposes that claim, showing something like the queer influence of which the text itself would be accused.  In doing so, it leads us to question theories of biological determinism, reframe paranoid notions of queer increase, and consider new forms of gay identity. 

Professor Rohy is the author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Cornell, 2000) and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (SUNY, 2009), and the co-editor (with Elizabeth Ammons) of American Local Color Writing, 1880-1920 (Penguin, 1998).  She has published essays on sexuality, race, and American literature in such journals as GLQ, Genders, and Modern Fiction Studies.  In 2006 she won UVM's Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award.  

A recording of the lecture will be made available at the online media blog http://blog.uvm.edu/compute-cas-media/ and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.

Rollins was hired prior to the 1967-68 academic year as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences with an appointment in the Department of History. In 1970, he became UVM’s vice president of Academic Affairs, a position equivalent to provost.        

Among other contributions, Rollins played a key role in launching the university’s Experimental Program, which provided the framework for the Living Learning Center, and helped lay the groundwork the university’s Environmental Program. 

After leaving UVM, Rollins became president of Old Dominion, a position he held from 1976 to 1985. He was credited with transforming the institution from a regional college to a major research university.            

Before coming to UVM  Rollins served as a history department chair in Harpur college at SUNY Binghamton and the State University of New York at New Paltz.   Rollins, the son of a minister, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Wesleyan University and his doctorate at Harvard.            

Rollins was an accomplished writer of scholarly books and articles, as well as fiction. His best known work as a historian was the book Roosevelt and Howe.

More information, see this obituary:  http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/burlingtonfreepress/obituary.aspx?n=alfred-brooks-rollins&pid=163391717#fbLoggedOut

By all accounts a brilliant student, Ebalu says she came to UVM unprepared for the transition to college. "My freshman year I didn't have many resources," she says. "But I met some great people who helped and guided me."

Ebalu was born in the U.S. of Nigerian parents who took her and her four siblings back to their homeland when she was two, before they became acculturated as Americans. “I’m really glad they did,” she says, “because I got to experience the beauty of Nigeria and the glory of being an African.”

At 12, after losing a sister from sudden illness who was just a month away from starting medical school in America, Ebalu’s father brought the remaining children back “to fulfill our dreams because life doesn’t go according to plan.” Despite difficult circumstances in New York City, her mother behind in Nigeria, Ebalu says it was in high school that she came to love psychology (her major) and German (her minor, which took her to Austria for a semester abroad).

Time for Africa                                                                                                                     

As she settled into UVM, becoming heavily involved with the ALANA and Women’s centers, Ebalu was walking through Dewey Hall when she passed Karen Fondacaro’s open door, caught a glance of a clock in the shape of Africa and stopped short. Fondacaro, clinical professor of psychology and director of the Behavior Therapy and Psychotherapy Center (BTPC), invited her in. “She started looking around,” Fondacaro recalls, “and she said, “’I feel like I’m home, what do you do?’ And we just had this immediate connection to each other. That was it.”

Fondecaro explained that the clock and other African influences were related to her work directing Connecting Cultures through BTPC, a program providing mental health services to refugees. Ebalu was in from that moment, pouring herself into projects in the New American community through academics and personal service, all the while solidifying a focus for her long-term career goals in clinical psychology.

From her first year Ebalu became aware of the McNair Scholar program, designed to help advance first-generation, limited-income and/or underrepresented undergraduates who are academically competitive and have the intention of earning a doctoral degree. She prepared herself early she says, knowing the opportunity would serve her well. Named a McNair research fellow in 2012, Ebalu, under Fondacaro’s guidance, chose to study the relationship between post-migration stressors such as unemployment, lack of social support, language and education barriers and their impact on mental health outcomes in refugee populations (she had noticed that the research tended to focus on prior trauma).

If statistical analysis tends to be the least engaging task for most scientists, it wasn’t for Ebalu, hungry to expand her knowledge. “I just think of her,” Fondacaro recalls, “smiling through her multiple linear regressions. She was so excited to learn the statistical procedure. It was wonderful."

Gratitude in action

Despite Ebalu's intellectual strength, it's not what makes people effusive. “Her mind is constantly going but really and truly,” says Candace Taylor, coordinator of programming and leadership development at the university’s Women’s Center, “what I connect most with Tracie is this guiding moral compass, this heart... She is constantly thinking about how she can give back, I think it really is the lens through which she walks this world.”

One of Ebalu’s big personal initiatives this year was spearheading a coat drive for the refugee community -- a project Burton (through a connection with Taylor’s husband) enthusiastically supported -- collecting some 500 coats and other winter wear. Ebalu is a fan of the phrase, “pay it forward.” Because she knows.

It was Taylor, Ebalu will tell you, who gave her a coat when she needed one. But ask Taylor about it, and she tells you that Ebalu turned around and gave it to her little sister. “That’s Tracie,” she laughs. “She will hear that somebody needs something, and she will literally take it off of her own back.”

“The reason she did the coat drive,” says Beverly Colston, director of the ALANA center, is because she knows what it’s like for a family to not have coats. How do you function when you’re cold? Tracie is committed to making sure that it will be better for people than it was for her.”

The success of this effort in a sense represents the culmination of Ebalu’s growth at UVM. According to Colston, Ebalu has always sought out leadership roles, even ones that may have been a bit beyond her at the time. “But the truth is,” Colston says, “she just soaked up those experiences and used them to get wise and go to the next level.”

Now Colston calls her a community connector, an activist who is passionate about issues that face women of color, a leader who uses her voice to speak up, educate others and bring them in.

Quirky, authentic, almost uncensored are among the descriptions of Ebalu that make her real. At times, they say, exuberant to a fault.

“She’s so compassionate and she cares so deeply,” Taylor says, “to the extent where you have to reel her in a little bit and say it’s okay for her to take care of herself too. But she’s got a big vision, big dreams and I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who has that energy that you know they’re going to accomplish it.”

Ebalu, too, has no doubt what she’ll do. For herself, for her mother, maybe for her older sister.

“I tell (my mom) I’m really certain I’m going to get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and one day my name is going to be Dr. Tracie Ebalu.”

Borchert’s Fulbright is for Thailand, where he will be doing research on a project called "Monastic Citizens: Examining the Relationship of Religious and Political Identity of Thai and Chinese Buddhist Monks."  Briefly, monks are almost always citizens of specific nation-states, and they are subject to the legal governance regimes of these nation-states.  In some cases, such as Thailand, monks do not have the same rights and responsibilities that other citizens have.  They cannot vote, their passports go through a different process from that for ordinary citizens (and they receive less time), and they are subject to a unique regime of governance that is only partially religious.  At the same time, they are required to register for the Thai military draft, though they are always given an exemption.   While scholars of Buddhism and Thailand have spent a significant amount of time studying the relationship of Buddhism and politics, they have not actually paid much attention to the attitudes that monks have about the matter. 

Borchert adds, “Over the course of six months, I plan to interview monks in Bangkok (particularly at the Buddhist universities) about how they understand who they are as citizens and as monks; whether and how these two different positions work together or are in conflict with one another.  In the second half of the academic year, I hope to do the same research in Shanghai and Kunming in China.“

Associate Professor Borchert specializes in the religions of East and Southeast Asia. His area of research includes Theravada Buddhist traditions of mainland Southeast Asia and the minorities of China. He received a Ph.D. (2006) in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago and a B.A. (1992) from Swarthmore College.

Luis Vivanco is a Cultural Anthropologist, Director of UVM’s Global and Regional Studies Program, and Founding Director of UVM’s Global Studies Program. He holds an A.B. in Religion from Dartmouth College (1991), and M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. He came to UVM in 1997 as a New England Board of Higher Education Dissertation Write-up Fellow, and began as Assistant Professor in 1999. In 2005, he was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

This is going to be Vivanco’s second Fulbright Award as a UVM faculty member. (His first was in 2004, in Costa Rica.)  He will be in Bogotá, Colombia on a "Teaching/Research" Fulbright Award giving a graduate course in Anthropology on "Culture and Mobility" at the Universidad Nacional, which is Colombia's premier public university. For the research component, he will be conducting ethnographic research on the meanings, social relations, and political organizing around bicycle transportation and sustainability politics.  “I plan to conduct interviews and participant-observation research among city officials involved in promoting bicycle transportation; bicycle advocacy groups; and among everyday cyclists getting around the city by bike,” says Vivanco.

Bogotá has been undergoing a major transformation during the past decade and a half in which bicycles have gained a high profile as a sustainable and accessible form of transportation for many people.   “My interest in Bogotá is one piece of a new research agenda I have been developing as an environmental anthropologist, which is to understand the specific socio-cultural and political-economic conditions under which cities can redevelop transportation systems around principles of equity and sustainability.”

Vivanco’s new book Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing just came out this past week, and examines similar issues. See it here: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415503891/. While in Bogotá he plans to conduct the bicycle research in collaboration with colleagues and graduate students involved in two research groups within the Universidad Nacional’s Department of Anthropology: the Program in Historical Ecology and Human Mobility and the Social Conflict and Violence group.

Diving in

For senior Peter Grunawalt, who conducted field research in India's Himalayan region through the Brattleboro, Vt.-based School for International Training (SIT), one uncomfortable moment came when setting out on a research excursion to a village with no pre-arranged shelter. Eventually, housing was secured with the help of his translator, and Grunawalt was able to spend time in the area, speaking with residents about the factors affecting youth migration. His presentation, "Why are Cities the Only Place for Dreams? Rural to Urban Migration in India," delved into the farming practices and educational structures, among other considerations, contributing to the growing influx of youth to urban areas in the northern Indian region.

Senior Sarah Gallalee, who also studied abroad through SIT, spoke on "Analyzing the Barriers that Prevent Access to Diagnosis and Treatment for Tuberculosis in Dehradun, India." Tuberculosis, a treatable and curable disease, is still among the deadliest agents in the country. Gallalee conducted interviews with patients, officials and health workers and pursued spatial analysis research using geographic information systems to look at reasons why tuberculosis persists as a public health problem even when India has taken measures to improve its policies regarding treatment and reporting. One barrier became apparent to Gallalee when speaking with young women who reported the stigma surrounding the illness -- one that "could destroy chances of a proper marriage." This factor and others, such as religious misconceptions and loss of working time, she said, are among the barriers that still exist to both diagnosis and treatment.

Sophomore Benjamin Ryan discussed two independent trips he's taken to Bangladesh, one during high school and one during a gap year prior to enrolling at UVM. Ryan discussed the fledgling research he conducted in slums that sparked his decision to found a non-governmental organization, the Foundation for Climate Change Refugees. Conducting surveys among residents of slums, Ryan learned that many of its inhabitants had been displaced due to the effects of global climate change. Bangladesh, with its sea-level elevation and geography that makes it prone to typhoons, is considered "ground zero" of global warming, and its people, Ryan said, all already feeling the effects. "Climate change is not something we have to be concerned about in the future," Ryan said. "It's something that impacts people every day. It's a contemporary issue."

Reflection

The four students had met last fall about their mutual interest in contemporary issues in South Asia. Rosenblum organized the research forum, with support from the Anthropology Department, as a way to share their work with a broader audience as well as with each other. After their presentations, they answered questions from Steinberg as well as attendees, and spoke with each other on issues ranging from their personal health and safety while traveling to areas of common findings among their work.

Rosenblum's research on street children focused on agricultural antecedents to childhood migration, so his work, although dealing with a different region of India, had strong overlap with Grunawalt's. He was also particularly interested in Ryan's findings regarding climate change as a cause for migration since their areas of focus share a river system, similar weather patterns, and increased occurrence of natural disasters, Rosenblum explained.

Rosenblum has plans to pull his notes and interviews together into a research paper and hopes to one day return to India. "I definitely think I'll go back," he says. "I have a lot of connections and ties there now."   

In the meantime, he'll continue his global research on this side of the hemisphere: he departs this week with SIT for a semester abroad in Buenos Ares, Argentina.