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Mishkin Gets $50K Warhol Foundation Grant
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is giving a $50,000 grant to the Mishkin Gallery to support research for an exhibition called Sea and River Edges: Visual Representations and Submerged Perspectives on Water in the Américas.

The show will consider the work of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church alongside work by contemporary feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic artists. The new perspectives will revise "colonial depictions of pristine landscapes" while reflecting on climate change, loss of biodiversity, industrialization, and the erasure of Indigenous peoples.
The exhibition's curators are Alaina Claire Feldman (left), director of the Mishkin Gallery, and Macarena Gómez-Barris (right), professor at Pratt Institute and founding director of the Global South Center.

Planned for late 2023 or early 2024, Sea and River Edges will offer a "counter-narrative to the legacy of the Hudson River School’s often sublime and colonial views of water systems and geographical divides throughout New York, Ecuador, Colombia and Jamaica," the curators said in their proposal.
Church is renowned for his landscape paintings of the Hudson Valley, but he also created images--including detailed nature studies--from his travels to the Caribbean and South America. His painting shown here, "El Rio de Luz (The River of Light)," was inspired by those trips.

The grant will support research and travel by the curators, work by contributing artists, and field trips by Baruch students to Church's Hudson Valley estate Olana. Feldman envisions the project as an interdisciplinary effort bringing together a variety of Weissman programs, including art, history, Latin American and Caribbean studies, environmental science, and climate change research.
Meet the New Harman Writer: Ersi Sotiropoulos
The Spring 2022 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence is Ersi Sotiropoulos, the first Harman writer to work in modern Greek. She has published more than a dozen works of fiction and poetry and has won numerous awards, including Greece’s National Book Award (twice), the Greek Book Critics’ Award, and the Athens Academy Prize.

Her novel What’s Left of the Night won the 2017 Prix Méditerranée Étranger in France and its English translation won the 2019 National Translation Award. The book follows Constantine Cafavy, one of Greek’s most esteemed poets, as he comes to terms with his sexuality and defines his voice as an artist in an era of political upheaval and social unrest. Cafavy’s creative evolution will serve as the foundation for Sotiropoulos’s class at Baruch.
Student and Alumni News
COLLEGE AT AGE 40 AND NOW HE WORKS FOR THE MAYOR: Jose Bayona arrived in New York from Colombia 25 years ago and enrolled at Baruch at age 40. He's now executive director of the Office of Ethnic and Community Media under Mayor Eric Adams. The office serves as a liaison to City Hall for more than 300 media outlets providing news in three dozen languages in every corner of the city. 

“My life changed when I enrolled at Baruch College for a BA in journalism and political science when I was 40 years old,” he said, adding special thanks to Professors Andrea Gabor, Josh Mills, Vera Haller, Geanne Belton, Chris Hallowell, Roslyn Bernstein, and Thomas Halper, along with Jennifer Salas in admissions. Read more here.
INSPIRED BY THE INCAS: Bruno Santos Rodrigues '23 won $10,000 in a national competition sponsored by Blackstone Launchpad for his proposal for Chasqui Outdoor Clothing, named for the official messengers of the Incan Empire. He was one of just four student winners out of nearly 1,150 applicants.

Bruno is an economics major, a Baruch Climate Scholar, and a Jeannette K. Watson Fellow. He was born in Brazil, went to school in Peru, and came to the US when he was 18. He’s fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Read more here.

PRESTIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP: Kelly M. Nguyen, a first-year PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, won a three-year fellowship from the Asian American Transnational Research Initiative to mentor undergraduates and advance her quantitative skills. Read her essay "Asian American Millennials are Dispelling Model Minority Myths."
NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW: Daphne Palasi Andreades '15 scored a glowing review from The New York Times for her debut novel Brown Girls. The reviewer called it a "fearless novel" written with "economy and freshness" that put the writer "immediately on the radar screen." The book also showed up in numerous must-read lists for the new year. Details here.
Faculty Publications, Media Mentions, and More
WAS FRIDA KAHLO JEWISH? Curators and biographers have often echoed Frida Kahlo's claim that her German-born father was Jewish. But research by Distinguished Professor Gail Levin (Fine and Performing Arts) suggests that Kahlo's "self-professed Jewish ancestry" had more to do with politics, her supporters and friends in the art world, and her carefully created self-image.

Kahlo "crafted her performance of Jewish identity and broadcast her hyper-identification with what appealed to her patrons: she was someone at once exotic, Mexican, and politically correct," Levin writes in "Frida Kahlo’s Circulating Crafts: Her Painting and Her Identities," a chapter she contributed to a new book, Rhapsodic Objects: Art, Agency, and Materiality (1700–2000).
AFRICAN LITERATURE: In 2021, some of the world's biggest literary awards--including the Nobel and the Booker--went to writers from sub-Saharan Africa, and they may get even more attention from the literary world this year. A new book by Professor Eric Tsimi (Modern Languages and Comparative Literature) proposes a systematic study of the contemporary sub-Saharan novel and of methods for literary analysis. The book, written in French, is titled De quoi la littérature africaine est-elle la littérature? Pour une critique décoloniale [What is African literature the literature of? Toward a decolonial criticism]. Tsimi is the founder of the interdisciplinary journal Cameroonian Studies.

RESETTLING REFUGEES: Professor Els de Graauw (Political Science) co-authored an article in the journal Social Problems, "Explaining Refugee Employment Declines: Structural Shortcomings in Federal Resettlement Support,” examining weaknesses in programs supporting the long-term economic integration of individuals who enter the US as refugees.

TEACHER SHORTAGES: Journalism Professor Andrea Gabor’s latest column for Bloomberg is titled “Teacher Shortages Will Linger When the Pandemic Wanes.”

DEAN LANG'S APPOINTMENT: The permanent appointment of Jessica Lang as Dean of Weissman following 16 months as interim dean was reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

NO, SHE'S NOT A COMMUNIST: Florida Republicans erected a billboard calling U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Tampa Democrat, a Communist. PolitiFact called on Professor Ted Henken (Sociology and Anthropology) to explain why "nothing in Castor's record even remotely hints" that the ideology label is accurate.

MACHU PICCHU: Professor Mark Rice (History) gave an interview to the Peruvian literary website Libros a mí about the recently published Spanish-language edition of his book on tourism and Machu Picchu. Watch it here.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ART: A new book by Baruch Provost Linda Essig, Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action, looks at the challenges artists face in making their art while making a living in a changing economy. Artists who find ways to support themselves through their art are sometimes accused of selling out, but Essig contends that success on the business side means they're thriving and not just surviving. She uses diverse case studies to examine the relationship between art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and money. Provost Essig holds a concurrent appointment in the Weissman Department of Fine and Performing Arts.

'TRUE STORY': The most popular story last week on Truly Adventurous, a digital magazine for "astonishing true stories," was "The Champions," by Professor Corey Mead (English). It's about three women competing in a 1981 arcade-game championship while the game's creator --gaming’s first female designer--fights to keep the game from being stolen.
RESEARCH FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND SUPPORT

NSF CAREER BOOTCAMP (January 20 deadline): This program teaches tenure-track faculty how to create competitive research proposals for NSF's Early Career Development Program in science, engineering, or education. Details here.

JUNIOR FACULTY RESEARCH AWARD (January 21 deadline): Tenure-track junior faculty doing innovative research in the life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, mathematics, or engineering are eligible for this one-year $50,000 award. Details here.

WASHINGTON CENTER FOR EQUITABLE GROWTH (January 26 deadline): This funding supports academic research investigating how inequality, in all its forms, affects economic growth and stability. The request for proposals is organized around four topics: macroeconomics and inequality; human capital and well-being; market structure; the labor market. Details here.

FACULTY FUNDING WEBINARS: The CUNY Research Foundation hosts monthly webinars to strengthen faculty research funding efforts. Register for the January 28 (noon) program on Fulbright Scholars here; full calendar here.

EUGENE M. LANG JUNIOR FACULTY FELLOWSHIP (February 18 deadline): Tenure-track faculty members below the rank of Associate Professor with two or more consecutive years of full-time teaching as of June 1, 2022 are eligible. The fellowship supports research and other projects that contribute to the applicant's discipline. Details here.
THE MOST POPULAR MAJORS AT WEISSMAN
We asked Stephanie Govan, director of scheduling, registration, and enrollment data management, for a list of the most popular majors at Weissman. Here they are:
  • Psychology
  • Business Communication with specialization in Corporate Communication
  • Biological Sciences
  • Political Science
  • Economics (BA)
  • Actuarial Science
  • Communication Studies
Past newsletters here. Next newsletter: January 31. Weissman blog here.
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