Dear Colleagues,

As I write for the first time in this capacity, I foremost want to express how honored and humbled I am to step into the role of Interim Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences this Fall 2025 semester. After a decade as Chair of the Psychology Department and years of service at the school, college, and university levels, I am thrilled to begin working with you to shape Weissman’s next chapter. 

As a data-informed scientist, I’m compelled to share a few numbers that help capture Weissman’s impact. This Fall, Baruch enrolled around 12,000 total students, including about 3,500 Weissman majors. But in a sense, everyone begins as a Weissman student—taking our core liberal arts and science courses that form the foundation of a Baruch education. This Fall, we also celebrate 6 faculty colleagues who received tenure and/or promotion, and welcome 5 new hires across the disciplines: 2 in Mathematics, and 1 each in Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.

This semester also brings exciting new endeavors. Our MA in Corporate Communication is getting a refresh as our new MA in Strategic Communication. This change reflects the evolving communications landscape, ensuring that our programs continue preparing graduate students to lead with clarity and impact. We also continue to advance our Weissman Strategic Plan, with implementation groups on Faculty Success and Identity and on Student Success and Community Engagement now joining forces to carry forward the work of strengthening interdisciplinary initiatives, refining our identity, and enriching teaching and learning. I encourage you to read their latest updates, proposals, and actionable steps gleaned from hours of conversation over the past academic year.

As always, our fall programming reflects Weissman’s spirit of experimentation and engagement. The Mishkin Gallery will present Christian Hincapié: Decisions at a Desk opening on September 25, and on September 30 the Baruch Performing Arts Center will host journalist and filmmaker Shiori Ito for a screening and discussion of her Oscar-nominated documentary Black Box Diaries. These are just a few of the extraordinary opportunities to engage with urgent global conversations on campus. Keep an eye out for many more announcements to come!

We also celebrate new leadership and initiatives. Sarah Valente joins us as the Interim Director of the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center and Antisemitism Studies Lab (AS Lab). The AS Lab, supported by a generous gift from the Laterman Family Foundation, aims to educate, create understanding, support research, and address the challenges of antisemitism locally, nationally, and globally. Looking further ahead to 2026, Weissman’s History Department will take the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence to explore “An Independent History”of how the meaning of independence has evolved—here in New York, across the country, and around the world—and how those histories help us think more deeply about freedom and responsibility today.

As Interim Dean, I see my greatest responsibility as fostering an environment of curiosity, collaboration, and creativity—for faculty, students, and staff alike. I invite you to share your ideas, questions, or concerns with me and the Dean’s Office at baruchwsas@baruch.cuny.edu or directly at Jennifer.Mangels@baruch.cuny.edu.

Thank you for the extraordinary work you do to advance Weissman’s mission every day. I look forward to exploring new possibilities together.

With gratitude,

Jennifer Mangels

Interim Dean

Weissman School of Arts and Sciences

Paper Brigade: Prof. Debra Caplan’s New Musical Brings Cultural Resistance—and Its Aftermath—to the Stage

By any account, Debra Caplan leads a multifaceted life. An Associate Professor of Theater at Baruch College’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and the CUNY Graduate Center, Caplan is a scholar whose research centers on Yiddish theater and drama, the emergence of artistic networks, and immigrant performance. She’s also a composer-lyricist, translator, director, and dramaturg. Her latest project, Paper Brigade: A New Musical—created with librettist Cecelia Raker—brings Caplan’s seemingly disparate worlds together in a story about manuscripts, memory, and the stakes of a culture under siege.

Set in WWII-era Vilna and its long-shadowed aftermath, Paper Brigade draws on the true history of a clandestine group of writers and scholars who, while forced by the Nazis to sort Jewish cultural materials, risked their lives to smuggle and hide them—“millions of pages,” Caplan notes, “often hidden somewhere on their bodies.” The musical follows a Jewish historian and her Polish housekeeper who work to protect both a child and an endangered archive. The result is not only a story of wartime survival, but a meditation on what it means to rebuild a life when a war ends—but the trauma does not.

“Each word of every song has to advance plot, character, and story all at the same time,” Caplan says, reflecting on the leap from cultural criticism to musical theater. “The archive that I’ve worked on in my scholarship becomes almost a character—what we’re really watching is a world being destroyed and then fought for, page by page.” She is clear about the show’s ambition: to help audiences feel the richness of Yiddish culture beyond a handful of familiar references. “Most people know a few words or Fiddler on the Roof; we want them to experience the richness of this cosmopolitan, intellectual culture that made people risk everything to save it.”

While the musical includes original songs, Caplan and Raker also weave in resonances of historic Yiddish poetry and song, including material associated with a real poet whose texts were widely known in their time. That interplay—between old words and new music—helps the show dramatize why these books might still matter. “Texts only mean something if you have a sense of what’s inside them,” Caplan explains. “If they’re just objects, nothing makes sense.”

Crucially, Paper Brigade pushes beyond the 1940s. “People expect the darkest moments in the 1940s,” Caplan says. “For our protagonist, the 1950s and 60s are where the trauma catches up.” After the war, survivors confront Soviet hostility to Jewish culture, the decay of hidden materials, and the world’s shifting indifference—decades pass before parts of the archive resurface. 

The creative process remains intentionally iterative. Caplan points to the long tradition of musicals reinventing themselves right up to opening night—whole songs swapped out at the eleventh hour if they don’t serve the story that suddenly finds itself being told. Still, she and Raker have moved steadily from table reads to a May 2025 staged reading, and now studio recordings of three tracks have been mastered as a calling card for producers and presenters. “Theater is expensive and people-intensive,” Caplan says. “There’s no single pathway—but getting the music into people’s ears is the best way to show what this story, and this cultural tradition, can do."

Prof. Sarah Saddler Honored by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for latest manuscript, Performing Corporate Bodies.

Sarah Saddler, Assistant Professor of Theater in Baruch College’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts, has received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 "Outstanding Book Award for Scholarly Achievement" from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). This accolade celebrates the publication of her first book, Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India, published earlier this year by Routledge.

Sadler’s book is the first study to systematically define and examine what she calls “corporate theatre”—the use of theatrical performance techniques as training tools within multinational corporations. Based on nearly a decade of ethnographic research in India, South Africa, and Dubai, Saddler reveals how theater is mobilized in such corporate settings to shape leadership, creativity, and workplace practices.

“I’m thrilled to have Performing Corporate Bodies recognized by ATHE,” Saddler said. “The award is an exciting opportunity to share my work more widely and spark conversations about the unexpected and often unconsidered ways theater and performance are entangled with global capitalism.”

The book explores how performance is regularly used as a management tool—from IT firms in India deploying improvisation for soft-skills training, to South African companies using theatre for diversity initiatives, or Dubai luxury fashion houses incorporating performance into branding. While such practices often serve corporate interests, Saddler highlights their unintended consequences— including startling moments of resistance, humor, and creativity.

“On one hand, corporate theatre is supposed to discipline workers into becoming ‘ideal employees,’” Saddler explains. “But because performance is by nature improvisational, it also creates small but meaningful spaces where workers voice frustration, facilitators push back, or humor destabilizes authority. My work aims to show just how much these micro-moments matter.”

At the College, Saddler brings these insights into her teaching. In courses such as “Leadership Through Improvisation,” she adapts applied theatre techniques—including those gleaned from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed—to help students build confidence, creativity, and self-awareness. “Our students often want to be creative but haven’t had the chance,” she noted. “These practices give them real opportunities to unleash their capacities, not just for management roles, but as human beings.”

Performing Corporate Bodies is available now through Routledge. 

Read more here.