LEHIGH UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK REVIEW | 2024
2 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES contents MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN The Essential Role of Research in a Liberal Arts Setting | 3 HIGHLIGHTS Binding Photography and Textiles | 4 Reimagining the Round Table: Restoring Medievalisms of Contemporary Women Writers | 4 Theatre Design is a Creative Journey | 5 American Influence on Religion in South Korea and Haiti | 7 The Whole Person | 8 Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka | 8 The Wheel of Temporality: German Jewish Thinkers on Time | 10 Modeling Electronic Processes | 11 Artificial Intelligence, Elections and Democracy | 11 Moscow Conceptualism Revisited | 13 Mountains and Climate Impact | 14 Looking for Ways to Better Understand Childhood Resilience | 17 SPOTLIGHTS Bone Research Studies Romanian Social Structure, Health in Aging | 6 Five New Hydrothermal Vents Discovered in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean | 9 Practice, Perspective, Persistence: Understanding Polygamy in Bamako | 12 Women in American Operas | 15 Quark Gluon Soup | 16 COVER IMAGE: A dream-like landscape of Iceland, with flowing glacial rivers, taken from a helicopter. EXTREME-PHOTOGRAPHER / GettyImages
The Essential Role of Research in a Liberal Arts Setting WELCOME to Inquiry, a review of research in the College of Arts and Sciences for 2024. Research is often seen as the exclusive domain of large research institutions, but in the College of Arts and Sciences, it plays an equally pivotal role—perhaps even a unique one. Within our intimate, interdisciplinary setting, research empowers both faculty and students to engage deeply with complex ideas, foster critical thinking, and push the boundaries of knowledge across multiple fields. In this issue, we explore the profound importance of research within a liberal arts context and how it transforms the educational experience. For faculty, research is more than an academic endeavor; it’s a catalyst for teaching innovation. Engaged in research, professors bring fresh insights into the classroom, bridging theory and practice in ways that benefit their students. Research demands that faculty stay current and critical, ensuring that the knowledge they impart reflects the latest advancements and thinking in their disciplines. Moreover, within the College of Arts and Sciences, faculty research often stretches beyond conventional disciplinary silos, enabling groundbreaking interdisciplinary work. This cross-pollination of ideas not only broadens their academic contributions but also reinforces the liberal arts mission of fostering a holistic, interconnected worldview. For our students, research opportunities within the college are invaluable. They are not merely passive recipients of knowledge but active participants in its creation. Working with faculty mentors, students cultivate skills essential for today’s world: problem-solving, analytical thinking, and effective communication. They learn how to frame questions, sift through information critically, and synthesize their findings—all skills that will serve them far beyond graduation. In addition, research experience helps students deepen their knowledge in their chosen majors, often leading to more competitive positions in graduate programs and diverse professional paths. In this issue, we celebrate the dedication to research shared by our faculty and highlight examples of projects that exemplify the unique strengths of a liberal arts environment. It is my hope that you will be inspired by these stories and appreciate the vital role research plays in enriching our academic community and creating a global impact. MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN contributors EDITOR Robert Nichols ’17G CAS ADVISORY BOARD Robert A. Flowers II, dean Kelly Austin, R. Michael Burger, Dawn Keetley, Jessecae Marsh, associate deans DESIGNER Kayley LeFaiver CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jodi Duckett Hayley Frerichs Vicki Mayk Robert Nichols PHOTOGRAPHERS Christine Kreschollek Christa Neu Inquiry is published annually by the College of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University. COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Lehigh University 9 West Packer Avenue Bethlehem, PA 18015 cas.lehigh.edu INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 3 Robert A Flowers II Herbert J. and Ann L. Siegel Dean CAS.Lehigh lehigh_cas lehighu-cas @lehigh_cas @Lehigh_CAS Douglas Benedict
4 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES design Binding Photography and Textiles Material meets the natural world in Anna Chupa’s studio. Chupa, professor of design and associate chair of the department of art, architecture, and design, combines photography montages with textiles to create unique quilts. Botanical quilts are one of Chupa’s ongoing projects. Rich colors splash across the surface of her fabric, which is printed with a collection of various flowers that have been manipulated in Photoshop. When creating the artwork she says, “The Photoshop work is so meditative for me.” Chupa is also creating textile designs that combine scans from electron microscopy and juxtaposing it with photography and macro photography of the same species. “The scanning electron microscope is so much fun to work with,” Chupa says, “and so interesting to work with, to see what you reveal underneath.” Scans were rendered at the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices and Robert Booth, professor and chair of the department of earth and environmental sciences (ESS), provides herbarium specimens. But that’s not the only collaborative project on which Chupa is working. She and Deirdre Murphy, professor of design in the department of art, architecture, and design, have a show planned for the Nurture Nature Center in Easton in 2027. This exhibition will showcase both of their creative work where art meets the biological sciences. Another layer of Chupa’s work are her art quilts of the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage across northern Spain. Her quilts document the landscape and architecture of the Camino. She hiked the Camino twice, the first time in the summer of 2022 and then again in June 2024, carrying her cameras, photography lenses, and back-up drives along with her. Chupa was interested in learning why people do a pilgrimage and “how spirituality is revealed on the path along the way.” These quilts are like altars themselves and reminiscent of her photographs of altars created by New Orleans Voodoo Priestess Miriam Williams and her quilts inspired by Islamic architecture and tiles of southern Spain. Sandwiching backing fabric, batting, and a quilt top, Chupa creates intricate designs with a longarm quilting machine. “The advantage of working with a machine like this is that you drive it, and it’s using gross motor skills rather than pushing your fabric through a sewing machine,” Chupa explains. The result is densely quilted artwork with embroider-like patterns—layers that bind architecture and nature. english Reimagining the Round Table: Restoring Medievalisms of Contemporary Women Writers When imagining the Middle Ages, jousting arenas, turkey legs, and knights in shining armor often come to mind. However, this masculine, Westernized view of the medieval period excludes a wealth of diverse narratives and perspectives. Suzanne Edwards is changing that with a volume of essays on women’s medievalism that she’s co-editing with Matthew X. Vernon. “Medievalism includes representations of the Middle Ages in any moment after the Middle Ages from Spenser’s 16th century The Faerie Queene to the movie Camelot or even Games of Thrones,” Edwards, professor of English, explains, naming a few popular examples. Historically, scholarship on medievalism has often focused on the works of white male authors like Alfred Tennyson, T.H. White, and JRR Tolkien. “In attending to the history of medievalism, we’ve largely overlooked the contributions of women writers in particular,” Edwards says. “What we found in writing the book is often those contributions by women writers have not been recognized as medievalism or they have remained hidden in the archive.” In 10 essays and an introduction, Women’s Restorative Medievalisms: Forgotten Pasts and Unimagined Futures sheds light on these unrecognized medievalisms by women writers from the 20th and 21st centuries. “Women writers in their medievalisms call attention to histories of oppression as well as imagine alternative possibilities for the past that might lead us toward a different kind of future,” Edwards notes. For instance, Tracy Deonn’s young adult novel Legendborn is a popular contemporary example that Edwards Anna Chupa (above) and one of her quilts, Camino de Santiago (left). Christine Kreschollek HIGHLIGHTS
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 5 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 7) and Vernon, professor of English at the University of California-Davis, discuss in their introduction. Featuring an African American teenage girl as Arthur’s heir, “[Legendborn] lays bare the intimacies between Arthurian legend and racially gendered histories of enslavement in the United States, gesturing toward new possibilities for social coalition.” The first section of essays grapple with canonical European literary works through the lenses of race, language, and place. The second section broadens the scope beyond Europe, while the third section addresses what historically has been silenced, reproducing historical absences. The final section bridges the gap between academic and creative writing. When Edwards and Vernon reached out to scholars to contribute to the volume, the response was enthusiastic: “Almost everyone we reached out to agreed to contribute.” This enthusiasm underscores the need for the intersectional feminist framework the book provides. Edwards and Vernon first connected over their love of the work of Gloria Naylor and her creative engagements with medieval literature. “Working with Matthew has been a dream,” Edwards says. Together with Mary Foltz, associate professor of English at Lehigh, Edwards co-directs the Gloria Naylor Archive project, which makes the author’s collected papers more accessible to scholars, teachers, students, and fans. Edwards’ passion to highlight women’s medievalisms has only grown, and she is planning a monograph on the subject. The portrayal of the Middle Ages by women is one that centers “community and resistance across geopolitical boundaries,” Edwards explains. This shift allows us to imagine a different kind of Middle Ages—one where the story might not revolve around 12 white knights sitting at King Arthur’s round table. theatre Theatre Design is a Creative Journey When theatregoers see a set designed by associate professor of theatre Will Lowry, they see the result of a creative journey. “What I think is unique about my process as a designer is that I often like to do multiple sketches of vastly different approaches,” says Lowry. “I may bring six to 12 different designs to the table. In sketching different ideas, I don’t try to solve every problem.” Considering multiple scenic designs encourages collaboration among the play’s creative team, inviting input from the director and the lighting and costume designers. Such collaboration in creating the world of the play is integral in theatre. “I revel in having multiple ideas so that we can design as collaboratively with the full team as possible,” says Lowry. As a multidisciplinary designer he has created scenic, lighting, media, and costume designs professionally and at Lehigh. Lowry used his multi-faceted approach to design the set for a production of The Wanderers at Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company. The play, written by Anna Ziegler, opened the company’s 20242025 season in September. He explains that before he produces sketches, research helps to generate ideas. It may include what he calls denotative research that answers questions like “what did a writer’s office in 1940s England look like?” Other research might be connotative research exploring images and materials that evoke a mood, exploring textures, line, shape, and patterns. Inspiration for some of the designs used in The Wanderers came from considering the work of visual artists. Because the play’s characters are Jewish, Lowry researched the work of Jewish artists Anni Albers and Richard Serra. The graceful curves in one of Serra’s sculptures inspired the curved platforms used on stage for The Wanderers. The pattern in one of Albers’ works recalled the grid-like pattern of city streets. It eventually led Lowry to design a backdrop that is the grid of streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the play takes place. Robert DaPonte and Alanna J. Smith in The Wanderers. Catherine d’Amboise (1475-1550), a prose writer and poet of the French Renaissance. Leonard de Selva / Bridgeman Images, Will Lowry
6 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES IN SZÉKELYFÖLD, an ethnically Hungarian region of Romania that once fought for its existence during a period of dictatorship, people are still trying to learn more about the way their ancestors were buried, according to Armando Anzellini. Three different burial methods were used in the community’s Romanian graveyard, but there is no information as to why. Anzellini, a bioarchaeologist, forensic anthropologist and assistant professor of anthropology, has been invited by research colleagues to assist in analyzing remains from the burial site, using isotope ratio analysis, to determine if there is a social or temporal reason for the differences. Anzellini is also studying the biomechanics of bone— how bone reacts to activity by doing three-dimensional models of the bone. It’s possible the research, in conjunction with research others have done, can one day prevent or treat bone-related ailments. And he just completed a project using Raman spectroscopy, which uses a low-powered laser, and the wavelength of light scattered to determine molecular structure. With isotope ratio analysis and the Romanian remains, Anzellini uses various chemicals, depending on his end goal, on either bone or teeth that are broken into tiny pieces. To study collagen, the organic part of bones, Anzellini uses hydrochloric acid to eat away at the mineral of bone, leaving just collagen behind. To study the mineral, he uses a concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide or sodium hypochlorite bleach to rid the sample of the organic material. Anzellini’s lab preps the specimens, separating the components so they’re completely cleaned and ready to be analyzed by another lab, which vaporizes and ionizes the materials before accelerating them through a magnet on a curve. During this process, the heavier isotopes have more momentum and don’t curve as much as the lighter isotopes, which allows the lab to determine the number of heavier elements versus lighter elements. Once the isotope ratios for each element have been determined, Anzellini says they can determine what type of diet people had through carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. He can then compare it to other archaeological data to determine the social structure and possibly provide insight into the different burial methods. The other of Anzellini’s projects involves biomechanics. Bone reacts to the pressures and activities a person partakes in, and the bone can completely change shape based on the activity. Sometimes there are significant differences in the shape of the tibia of someone who regularly runs versus someone who regularly swims, he says. He uses CT scans from individuals starting in their 20s, through others in their 90s, to run simulations and see if the distribution of the stresses on the bones changes as they get older and the bone shape changes. While the goal, he says, is trying to better understand the patterns of bone health in aging, this research could one day have potential health benefits for people as they age, or allow doctors options for treatment for, or prevention of, bone related ailments, when applied with other completed research. ■ Bone Research Studies Romanian Social Structure, Health in Aging Bioarchaeologist Armando Anzellini uses Raman spectroscopy and isotope ratio analysis to study human remains. SPOT LIGHT Christa Neu
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 7 The Wanderers is Lowry’s second collaboration with Lantern Theatre. He was the scenic and lighting designer for the company’s production of The Royale in 2022. His work earned nominations from the Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre. The awards recognize work in Philadelphia theatre. The play itself won Barrymores for best direction and overall production. Embracing the creative journey is an approach that he tries to share with his students. “It’s all about the process,” Lowry emphasizes. “If you think just about the final result, it’s very daunting to create an original idea that answers this theatrical riddle.” religion, culture & society American Influence on Religion in South Korea and Haiti Minjung Noh has a surprising answer when you ask how she began studying Korean women missionaries. Noh, a native of South Korea, is a fan of the Korean popular music K-Pop. When a member of one of her favorite bands, The Wonder Girls, left the group a decade ago, Noh found a connection between the performer—a born-again evangelical Christian—and Haiti, a country Noh was studying in her academic research. “She was at the top of the Korean K-Pop industry, and she just left and got married to a Korean Canadian pastor. That was 10 years ago, and that was shocking,” says Noh, assistant professor of religion, culture and society. “And then she was doing missions in Haiti. I thought, ‘What is happening?’” Her current book project, Transnational Salvations: Korean Women Missionaries in Haiti, uses historical and anthropological data in three areas— race, religion, and gender—to examine the impacts on Haitian culture from both the United States and Korea. “I’m trying to show in my work and in my book, we have this history of different colonizations in South Korea and Haiti, and it has been propelled by religious missions and also by the colonial powers, the political powers.” Noh’s research reveals that the influence of the United States is reflected both in religion and in myriad policy changes introduced during the American occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 and of Korea from 1945-1948. “By connecting Haitian history and Korean religious history, they’re very well connected by U.S. colonialism,” Noh says. “When the U.S. occupied those countries, their constitution was changed. So, it was not just a military occupation, it was an ideological occupation.” The work of Korean missionaries— including Korean American evangelicals—is another example of American influence. “Up until the mid-20th Century, until the end of the Cold War, [American] evangelical leaders and churches claimed their religious identity as [being] opposed to communism,” Noh says. “South Korea became a symbol of this bulwark against communism.” Attitudes about race are a third focus of her research. Tracing historical attitudes toward Asians in different cultures has led her to examine how the issue of race might be reflected in the Korean missionary experience. Although Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries continue to evangelize in Haiti, missionaries have a new focus. Increasingly, Korean American churches recruit pastors from Korea. “Just as they were evangelized by the U.S.in the 20th Century, now it’s their turn to pay forward the gospel. They have to save the U.S.,” Noh says. “Such patterns of conservative evangelical missions from the global south to the Anglo-European world are significant contemporary religious phenomena that need more scholarly attention.” (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5) Over 12,000 Haitians gathered in the Desselins Square to protest the continued occupation by U.S. troops (below). South Korean Christians attend a service in a church in Seoul (right). Bettmann, Patrick Robert / Corbis
8 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES psychology The Whole Person The history of science is a story of how humans see the world and the continual reassessment of our assumptions about our place in it. There has been a metaphysical divide for centuries between the natural world and the domain of the mind. Theoretical psychologist Mark Bickhard argues that there are essential relationships between the two. His latest book presents a model to understand how minds emerge from, yet remain connected with, the world of facts. He proposes a new model of metaphysics that shifts this understanding from a framework of substance to one of process that enables an integrated account of the appearance of normative phenomena. Bickhard, who holds appointments in the departments of philosophy and psychology, explores the spaces of theory and philosophy concerning minds and persons. His book, The Whole Person: Toward a Naturalism of Minds and Persons, focuses on the evolutionary and developmental occurrence of normative phenomena out of prior forms of process. He proposes models of, among other phenomena, biological function, representation, and other cognitive issues. Bickhard presents a new paradigm, a process metaphysics. This process model of representation, called interactivism, requires changes in many related disciplines. His arguments pay particular attention to three domains in which changes are induced by the representational model: perception, learning, and language. This interactivist model of representation and cognition is an action and interaction-based approach, he says. It involves fundamentally different assumptions about representation than generally accepted models and presents a fundamentally different metaphysical framework from the substance, structure, and particle frameworks that are still dominant in most of philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. He focuses on the evolutionary and developmental emergence of normative phenomena out of prior forms of process. “If you want to think about substance, most people will think Aristotle. Aristotle has been the primary source for matter-and-form ways of thinking about things. What I’m arguing for is a process metaphysics. (My model) isn’t reinventing entirely, but it is saying, ‘Look, we really need to do this right. And in order to do it right, we’ve got to use a process model. And here’s a way of thinking about process metaphysics.’ I don’t, in a certain sense, propose full process metaphysics. It seems to me that that ends up being physics. And we already have process models in physics. They’re called quantum field theories.” There are good reasons to explore process frameworks, Bickhard argues. Substance and encoding presuppositions have permeated Western thought for millennia, and attaining a fresh process and interactive view is not easy, but accepted frameworks no longer work conceptually and empirically, and it is time for the process alternative to emerge. art Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka The German-speaking Jewish author Franz Kafka is considered by many to be one of the great 20th century writers. His prominence is so significant that we sometimes even use his name as an adjective. His work has influenced many 20th century writers and has been the focus of many literary scholars. Perhaps less well known is that Kafka was also a prolific artist, and on the 100th anniversary of his death this year, his sketches, drawings, and interest in modern art are the subject of a new book co-edited by art historian Nicholas Sawicki. Sawicki, associate professor of art history and chair of the department of art, architecture and design, co-edited the monograph with Marie Rakušanová, an art historian at Charles University in Prague. Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language follows Kafka’s interest in art and explores the variety of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague, as well as the drawings that Kafka produced in his lifetime. The book accompanies an exhibition that opened in June and was curated by Rakušanová. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he (CONTINUED ON PAGE 10) istockphoto.com
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 9 SPOT LIGHT THE PACE OF DISCOVERY in the oceans leaped forward thanks to teamwork between a deep-sea robot and a human occupied submarine leading to the recent discovery of five new hydrothermal vents in the eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean. Funded by the National Science Foundation, a team of ocean scientists, led by chief scientist and Lehigh faculty member Jill McDermott discovered new deep-sea hydrothermal vent sites on the seafloor at 2,550 meters (8366 feet, or 1.6 miles) depth. The venting fluids are all hotter than 300°C (570°F). The discovery was supported, and in many ways accelerated, by making use of the unique strengths offered by robotic and human exploration of the deep seafloor. The newly discovered vents are located on the East Pacific Rise (EPR), a part of the globe-spanning mid-ocean ridge volcanic mountain chain, where two tectonic plates are splitting apart at a rate of about 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) per year. Scientists on the expedition mapped the area at night using the undersea robot Sentry, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s (WHOI) National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF) and funded by NSF. After Sentry was recovered each morning, high-resolution maps from the vehicle’s sensors were then used to plan the day’s dive by the human-occupied vehicle Alvin also operated by WHOI-NDSF, which enables scientists to view firsthand the complex and constantly changing environment of a place like the East Pacific Rise. “The high-resolution maps from Sentry allow us to spot likely new hydrothermal fields soon after Sentry comes back on deck,” says McDermott, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences and director of Lehigh Oceans Research Center. McDermott served as chief scientist of the expedition and co-lead scientist specializing in hydrothermal vent geochemistry. “This gives us great targets for Alvin and the opportunity to make multiple discoveries in a single dive.” Scientists diving in Alvin first discovered hydrothermal vents in 1977 while exploring an oceanic spreading ridge north of the Galápagos Islands. Hydrothermal vents are rich in chemicals that supply energy to animal life, fueling rich and productive ecosystems. The discovery re-shaped scientists’ understanding of the conditions capable of supporting life on Earth and potentially elsewhere in the solar system. The research program at EPR is focused on learning more about volcanic and hydrothermal systems in the deep sea where new seafloor is formed and where unique communities of animals thrive in high-pressure and high-heat environments. Scientists plan to continue studying hydrothermal activity and volcanism along the East Pacific Rise in a follow-up expedition that will also use Sentry and Alvin to expand their understanding of the geophysical, chemical, and biological processes that shape our planet and support life in the deep, dark recesses of Earth’s Ocean. ■ Jill McDermott aboard the R/V Falkor (too) (above). Searching for undiscovered vents in the Galapagos Islands (left). Five new hydrothermal vents discovered in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean Chris Linder / Schmidt Ocean Institute
10 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8) thinkers—Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan—and analyzes how their ideas about time have shaped various fields, such as religion, politics, art, and culture. “German Jewish thinkers think about these things because they are a minority,” Lebovic argues. They’re a minority living in a German-speaking society, and their status, identity, and understanding of the world reflect their sense of discrimination but also hope for change. Lebovic traces how the notion of time evolves chronologically from Buber to Celan. Martin Buber, the father of modern-day religious studies, considers time as it relates to reforming Jewish life. For critical theorist Walter Benjamin, time is linked to critical thought and how it shapes life. Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, discusses time as the core of equality and the sanctity of life. Paul Celan’s thoughts on time are expressed in his poetry, reflecting the language of life, especially in the context of post-Holocaust existence. Unlike the other scholarly work on Jewish time, Lebovic emphasizes that “these Jewish thinkers think about time the way they do because they are Jewish,” but not to reaffirm their Jewishness. On the contrary, “they use it as a critical tool.” “It may be a sign of their openness that all four were highly skeptical about Zionist ideology and imagined either a bi-national state, as Buber did, a These are quickly rendered, but they carry a lot of the traditional techniques of drawing, such as shading and modeling and line. “Then we also have a whole range of drawings also focusing on people where he zooms out and takes in the whole of the body. In those drawings, we start to lose detail. In place of detail, we see Kafka really elaborating on the gesture and the movements and comportment of the body and sometimes exaggerating those movements in ways that amplify them. The movement of the body, the way people carried themselves was very interesting to him.” history The Wheel of Temporality: German Jewish Thinkers on Time Intellectual history explores the development of ideas and concepts over time. Historian Nitzan Lebovic is examining how the concept of time itself has evolved by studying the thoughts and writings of influential 20th-century German Jewish thinkers. Lebovic, professor of history, explains that there are layers to thinking about time. At its most fundamental, “we are creatures of time, and what we understand, especially as historians, is that everything we do is connected to time,” he says. Identity is always transforming and changing. “Identity is never static,” he says. “Identity is formed and re-formed during our lifetime.” Our engagement with the world—through society, language, and culture, for example—plays a role in shaping our sense of self, he further explains. At the core of his research, Lebovic is exploring Jewish time, and more specifically, German Jewish time. His latest monograph Homo Temporalis focuses on four key German Jewish received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka is the first book to comprehensively examine his connection with visual art and culture across a range of media, and to address his connections to the artistic scene in Prague in the early 20th century. There was a particular interest for Sawicki, whose major research area is early-20th-century central and eastern European modernism. His research focuses on overlooked histories of modernism, to expand and in some cases challenge conventional scholarly narratives in the subject area. “In the drawings that were rediscovered in Zurich we see a large majority focused on people,” he says. “Some of them are relatively naturalistic, where Kafka focuses in tightly on the face or some aspect of the body and really develops it in a fairly conventional way. Nitzan Lebovic Two seated figures, Franz Kafka Courtesy of Nicholas Sawicki, Christine Kreschollek
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 11 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 13) solutions to deal with the reclamation and repurposing of high-global warming potential (GWP) legacy refrigerants. These solutions are needed to prevent millions of metric tons of high-GWP refrigerants from leaking and illegally venting into the atmosphere. Working at the boundaries of various types of chemistry, the Fredin group seeks to uncover insights into the fundamental properties of a broad range of atomic to nanoscale materials and build computational models that are both descriptive and predictive. “We’re looking at a computer and asking the computer a scientific question, and you have to ask the question right, and you have to set it up correctly. All of those are the same as running an experiment. You have to set up the experiment, you have to control all the variables. We have the same thing, it’s just that in the end of the day, the final experiment is run by the computer.” journalism Artificial Intelligence, Elections and Democracy It’s a tale as old as Democracy, says associate professor of journalism Jeremy Littau—political candidates lying about the life, accomplishments or plans of opponents to discredit them or make themselves look like the better choice. It may seem surprising, but courts have long ruled that this type of false political speech is legal under the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech. Now, due to the easy accessibility of the technology artificial intelligence (AI), political candidates—or their supporters—can take lying much further than speaking or writing mistruths. They can try to sway public opinion by creating very believable fake images, video and systems. Her team uses supercomputing power and method development to increase the reliability of experimental comparison and theoretically predicted materials from atomic to nanoscale. From this, they develop models to investigate fundamental electronic processes. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), she and her team use theoretical quantum mechanics to understand the properties of chemical systems. Part of the group’s work seeks to understand the characteristics of new chemical structures, such as new molecular systems or nanoparticles. The other part is theoretical development using quantum mechanics. “Quantum mechanics is a theory in science that has been proven over and over to be exactly true,” says Fredin, who also holds a Sloan Fellowship. “My group calculates some of the largest structures that people can even run on supercomputers at this point in time. That means we have to make sure that we are both numerically accurate, but also chemically accurate.” Enter Fredin’s laboratory and you can forget the stereotypical chemistry environment. Fredin’s lab is a room of computers, connected to the high-performance computing center in Lehigh’s Fairchild-Martindale Library. “This is one of the best things about Lehigh, why I came here. It’s because the provost and the dean support the staff that run that facility,” she says. The group’s work allows Fredin the opportunity to partner with experimentalists working on both inorganic and organic materials, bridging physical chemistry, material science and nanotechnology. Her most recent work involves teaming with colleagues at Lehigh and other institutions as part of a $26 million NSF grant to develop confederate structure, as Arendt did, or simply a non-nationalist Jewish identity, as Benjamin and Celan did.” For each thinker, understanding life means understanding, or accepting equality, Lebovic says. His interest in studying temporality stems from his ethics: “I always believed in equality as a basic value.” “Time is the most important element of life and it’s what defines who we are as human beings.” In the end, time is the greatest equalizer. chemistry Modeling Electronic Processes With a changing climate, there is a need to develop more sustainable, environmentally friendly materials. Focusing on the development of models at the edge of theory and experiment, quantum chemist Lisa Fredin explores the chemical physics of catalytic materials to improve our fundamental understanding of emerging substances. Fredin, assistant professor of chemistry, uses quantum mechanics to study the photochemical, electronic and magnetic properties of materials and improve scientists’ understanding of the processes involved during catalysis, charge and energy transfer, and electron or hole transport in complex electronic Lisa Fredin Christa Neu
12 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES SPOT LIGHT EIGHTY YEARS AGO, scholars predicted that polygamy would rapidly decline in urban settings. They argued that the economic incentive would preclude the necessity of financial burden on the primary income earner. Yet, polygamy has endured, particularly in West Africa. Bruce Whitehouse explores why in his book Enduring Polygamy: Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis. A leading scholar on Mali, Whitehouse began researching marriage in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 2008. He was able to bring Lehigh student researchers with him in 2010 and 2011 and continued his field work with a Fulbright grant in 2011 and 2012. Whitehouse’s first encounter with polygamy in Mali occurred when he joined the Peace Corps prior to his anthropology career. “So much of what I learned, and so much of what is still vital to my understanding of Mali today,” he says, “was formed 25 years ago when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and living in a rural community,” says Whitehouse, associate professor of anthropology in the Sociology and Anthropology department. During his three years as a volunteer, he was connected with a host family whose patriarch had three wives. It was his observations and his everyday interactions with people in polygamous households that sparked his curiosity. Whitehouse worked with a small team of researchers to interview 100 men and women—half of whom were in polygamous marriages and half in monogamous marriages. Whitehouse and his team also conducted focus group discussions as part of their ethnographic research. More importantly, Whitehouse emphasized the value of observation. “You have to spend a long time embedded in a community to start to notice patterns and start to notice when the things that people say diverge from the things that they’re actually doing,” he notes. For women, it didn’t necessarily matter if they were in a monogamous marriage because they knew that their husband could take another wife at any time. However, the decision to take another wife wasn’t always the husband’s alone. In West Africa, one’s choice of spouse is not just about one’s individual preferences. Often, parents and extended family members arrange marriages to benefit the individuals and the communities to which they belong. Despite Whitehouse’s belief that everyone deserves the right to individual choice, an entire generation of elders in Mali doesn’t share this perspective. “I definitely have a lot more reservations about this question of whether any of us is best qualified, when we’re young and single, to know who’s the best partner going to be for life,” he admits. “I learned through the course of the research, and particularly the writing of it, to share that understanding of marriage, not as an outgrowth of individual level preferences, but as kind of a manifestation of community standards.” Whitehouse was able to return to Bamako, Mali in early 2020 to follow up on his findings and touch base with those he interviewed. “There seems to be a kind of consensus for people of all backgrounds and genders that the right to practice polygamy exists. The only question is, how should it be practiced?” ■ Practice, Perspective, Persistence: Understanding Polygamy in Bamako A man stands outside his home with wives and children in their village in Ségou Region, Mali, West Africa. Jake Lyell / Alamy Stock Photo
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 13 (CONTINUED ON PAGE 14) audio that purport to be someone or something they are not. And while lying with AI might seem to be even more egregious and unacceptable, it has strong First Amendment protection too, according to Littau and his research partner Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart, journalism professor at Texas Christian University. “The courts say there’s no difference,” says Littau. “You have a right to lie with AI.” In their paper “The Right to Lie with AI? First Amendment challenges for state efforts to curb false political speech using deepfakes and synthetic media,” Littau and Stewart provide a primer on AI and deepfake technology and explore the viability of laws created to limit or ban AI generated false political speech. Littau and Stewart describe two types of AI outputs driving the conversation about the technology’s use in mass media. Outputs that are “processes” occur when AI operates in the background to manage a task without specific human oversight. Search results are the primary form of AI process outputs. Outputs that are “products,” often referred to as generative AI, create something original such as images or text. Deepfakes, on the other hand, are more comparable to photoshopping. No original material is generated, but existing images are swapped Littau says he and Stewart hope their research will help inform public policy. “One of our hopes was that we would move the ball around public discourse regarding these tools,” he says. They suggest that “a better path to managing deepfakes and AI-generated false political speech—both in legal terms and in practicality—may be rooted in technology and the free market instead. It’s a fast-moving and volatile topic, and Littau says the paper creates a foundation for future AI research. There are lots of questions to explore, and he is working on them. “What does it mean to be human in a world of AI? he says. “What happens to the life we are living when we are increasingly relying on technology to manage our lives for us, when we are outsourcing our brains and our thinking.” modern languages & literatures Moscow Conceptualism Revisited If you wanted to create impactful art challenging the status quo in a repressive country, you’d think you would have to go “underground.” Indeed, that’s exactly where a new, alternative art form called Moscow Conceptualism arose in the late Soviet era—operating in secrecy, away from viewers, critics, and especially those in power. But Russian professor Mary Nicholas says that a subset of Moscow artists of the time—who she considers among the most influential—challenged the idea they should be hidden—and with great impact. For Nicholas, professor of modern languages and literatures, Exhibit A is a street procession in 1978, where a small group of conceptual artists called The Nest carried a red banner down a Moscow street. The event—called “Art to the Masses”—is pictured on the cover of Nicholas’ new book, Moscow Conceptualism, 1975-1985: Words, Deeds, Legacies. The book takes the study of Moscow Conceptualism to a place where no one has gone before. It is not just a primer on the topic, but an argument that previous analyses of the movement by art A deepfake video of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is produced during an election campaign. “Wrapped Star (Hi, Christo!)” by the Nest (Gnezdo), 1979. (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11) Himanshu Sharma / Alamy Live News, Courtesy of Mary Nicholas
14 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13) Charting the Altai’s birth, uplift and the rate at which the mountains grow will ultimately lead researchers to the climate impact question, he says. Funded by the National Science Foundation, a 10-member team with participants from Lehigh, Colorado State University, the University of California Irvine and Mongolia dug into this question in the arid Mongolian desert. The Altai, an ancient mountain range, is at the convergence point Joining Pazzaglia were doctoral student Nora Vaughan of Pittsburgh and Aurora Bertoldo, an undergraduate senior from Belvidere, New Jersey. They lived and worked in bone-dry arid desert conditions where summertime temperatures easily logged 90°F and nights dipped into the 60° mark. It may seem odd to consider mountains as living features—but mountains have a definitive lifespan. watchmen or janitors to have more time for their art and more ability to create art without ideological pressure. “When you are caught in a regime that is trying to repress your ability to think and behave and live, you can sometimes make more progress by freeing yourself creatively. It’s not hard for an autocratic state to stalk the individual; it’s hard to stop individuals who imagine themselves free of those constraints.” earth & environmental sciences Mountains and Climate Impact A Lehigh geology professor and two students spent a month this summer studying the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia and returned to Bethlehem profoundly changed. How high—and massive—do mountains need to grow and how long does it take before their elevation impacts global climate patterns? “The Altai impacts how the rest of the climate system circulates” well beyond central and east Asia, says Frank Pazzaglia, professor of geology in the department of Earth and environmental sciences and leader of the Lehigh research team. historians are incomplete because they neglect the important contributions of a younger generation of conceptual artists in Moscow. Moscow Conceptualism—created by “unofficial” artists who didn’t always have access to materials or studios or exhibit spaces—was a challenge to that scripted narrative. Many of the earliest generation of Moscow Conceptualists worked as artists for the state by day—painting slogans or doing commissions. At night in their underground world, and with a very small group of trusted friends, they created and discussed a different kind of art. Those artists, Nicholas says, “set themselves up as Don Quixote figures in the face of the all-powerful state.” The group of artists Nicholas documents refused to accept the futility of that common approach to unofficial art. The younger group of conceptualists was more knowledgeable about Western art and felt that art needed to be in the open for all to engage with. Artists didn’t need to be part of an exclusive club to talk about art or understand it. In a bold way, the group worked within the system while at the same time rebelling against it. Many of the younger artists made their living in jobs such as night Art to the Masses, The Nest, 1978. The research team makes camp in Mongolia (above). Part of the Altai mountain range (top). (CONTINUED ON PAGE 17) Courtesy of Mary Nicholas / Courtesy of Frank Pazzaglia / Adobe Stock
INQUIRY | SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH, AND CREATIVE WORK | REVIEW 2024 15 OPERA AS AN ART FORM has been around for more than 400 years. American opera, works written in English by composers in the United States, has historically found difficulty gaining acceptance with opera companies, yet these works experienced incomparable popularity after World War II. Musicologist Monica Hershberger has studied the important role of sopranos in boosting this popularity, and her book presents the first feminist perspective investigating the stories of women in American opera. Hershberger, assistant professor of music, is author of Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes. During the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were attempting to create productions that were responsive to American culture and interests. Yet, they did not break from the longstanding archetype that is a standard in European opera, she says. Women were portrayed as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, and it was an absolute. As a result, women risked continuing a tradition of playing predictable victims in American opera. “When I talk about women in American opera, I’m talking both about these fictional characters that have been made up by male composers and male librettists, and then the way that actual American women have sung and performed them on stage,” Hershberger says. “One thing that I think is interesting is they may be written one way on the page, but the way that performers bring them to life, what they emphasize, what they de-emphasize is often different.” Hershberger notes that the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Or they used their lived experiences to bring greater genuineness to their roles. The book analyzes some of the most performed, yet understudied, works in the Americanopera canon, focusing on Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Jack Beeson’s Lizzie Borden, and Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe. Hershberger writes about how singers Phyllis Curtin and Beverly Sills often resisted the stereotypes in these productions that are so commonly found in opera. One example is The Ballad of Baby Doe which premiered in 1956 and is based on the lives of 19th century figures Horace Tabor, a wealthy Colorado mine owner; his first wife Augusta Tabor, and Elizabeth “Baby” Doe Tabor. Hershberger argues that women in these operas often exemplified the complex quest for national identity as the United States entered the Cold War and began to address issues surrounding civil rights. By focusing on the way national and feminist identities sometimes conspire and at other times collide in these operas and on their heroines, she finds that operatic authorship, and American opera as a genre, demonstrates the beginning of modern feminism in Cold War America. She adds that sopranos of the period helped destroy prevailing gendered stereotypes that had traditionally been accepted without question in opera houses. ■ SPOT LIGHT Women in American Operas American soprano Beverly Sills performs in a 1975 production at Filene Center at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Robert Rathe / Bridgeman Images
16 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES SPOT LIGHT FOR A MOMENT after the Big Bang, just a few millionths of a second, the universe was filled with an incredibly hot, dense liquid composed of particles moving at near-light speed. This mixture was dominated by quarks—fundamental bits of matter—and by gluons, carriers of the force that normally “glues” quarks together into familiar protons and neutrons and other particles. A quark-gluon plasma (QGP) occurs when the temperature is so high—an average of 4 trillion degrees Celsius—that individual protons and neutrons comprising atoms melt, and this event is the focus of research by high energy physicist Rosi Reed. Funded by the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation program, Reed’s research explores hardware development and data analysis. Working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which is located at Brookhaven National Labs (BNL) on Long Island, New York, she has been involved in the development of two different detectors— the Event Plane Detector (EPD) for STAR and the sPHENIX Event Plane Detector (sEPD). She uses particle jets as probes to analyze QGP to answer fundamental questions about the nature of quark-gluon interactions. Particle jets are formed when a high momentum quark or gluon splits into a column of particles, which create subatomic particles called hadrons and are measured by the detectors. When this particle travels through the QGP, it will lose energy to the medium in a process called jet quenching. The modification of the jets due to the medium depends on the details of the medium such as its temperature, the size of the fluctuations within it, and the geometry of the QGP droplet. Comparing models and data from proton-proton collisions, the properties of the quark-gluon interaction can be understood. Previously, Reed installed a detector in the STAR experiment to measure charge particle distributions. This past spring, a detector was installed at sPHENIX, which is a massive cylindrical detector wrapped around a beam. Reed’s detector was attached along either end, and it is segmented so that scientists can examine the charged particle distributions. When a collision happens in the detector, Reed and her colleagues want to know the details of how the ions collided. When scientists smash together these ions, a tiny drop of matter forms so hot that the protons and neutrons melt. It’s like quark gluon soup, Reed says. And one of the questions is how do quarks and gluons interact with that soup? One of the main questions of sPHENIX is how a quark or gluon interacts with this quark gluon soup. Reed’s detector allows scientists to understand precisely how hard these ions have struck each other, whether they hit each other head-on or peripherally and what the angle is. ■ Quark Gluon Soup When scientists smash together these ions, a tiny drop of matter forms so hot that the protons and neutrons melt. It’s like quark gluon soup. Part of the sPHENIX detector, the Time Projection Chamber allows nuclear physicists to measure the momentum of charged particles streaming from collisions produced in Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory
flippingbook.comRkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==