For one thing, make sure that school is a place where they want to be.

That’s one takeaway from a new Fordham study of Bronx public school leaders trying to advance equity in their schools and ensure they’re welcoming and supportive for every student.

For these schools, that meant overcoming the effects of poverty, exclusion, and bias, or whatever else might be keeping students away. Schools in the study “thought about this really holistically” and reduced absenteeism as a result, said the study’s author, Elizabeth Stosich, Ed.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and associate chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy.

Poverty and COVID Hurt Attendance

Her study was published in November in Frontiers in Education. From 2021 to 2022, she examined the efforts of four district leaders and eight school leaders in one of the 12 community school districts in the Bronx. It’s a district where absenteeism is an especially tough problem because of high rates of poverty and the death rate—one of the city’s highest—during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

The schools she studied were trying to advance equity through continuous improvement, a management approach from the corporate and health care spheres that more and more schools are adopting. Among other things, it emphasizes a bottom-up approach to understanding an organization’s problems and making changes.

Getting Creative: Laundry, Fun Fridays, and Campfires

What did that look like in the schools? One of them set up a laundry because some families lacked access to one, hindering their kids’ attendance. Teachers identified the student groups in each school who felt the most ignored—in one case, English learners—and found ways to engage them. One school launched “Fun Fridays” full of meetings by clubs that reflected students’ interests—strategically scheduled on a day when students tend to be absent.

Teachers cooked with students or began art projects; one of them set up a faux campfire around which students could tell stories. “They really got creative, and it spurred new ideas,” she said.

Asking Students What They Truly Need = Success

Crucially, all of these initiatives came from talking to students themselves, Stosich said.

“By going to students and asking what they truly need, and then redesigning school in that image, that is how they engage in more really transformative work to support student success,” she said.

Also important was creating inclusive, supportive school environments for students from historically marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds, she said: “They thought about, yes, getting students into school, but then creating the experiences that would pull them in and keep them through both a more engaging and culturally responsive curriculum and instruction.”

While absenteeism remained a stubborn challenge, the districts’ schools showed a lot of improvement compared with similar districts in the area, she said.

‘Start Small to Learn Fast’

Stosich noted the importance of a long-term focus on equity, in addition to short-term efforts. Continuous improvement has a “start small to learn fast” approach, involving a series of short-term inquiry cycles combined with empathy interviews and data gathering to get at the roots of an issue and find the best solutions, she said.

“Oftentimes in education and other fields, we start with a solution,” she said. “We’ll adopt some practice across the whole district or across the whole school before we even know if this would lead to improvements. It can lead to a lot of burnout and ‘initiative fatigue’ among educators who are not convinced that the next new thing is going to be any better than the last new thing.”

The reasons for absenteeism evolve and change, and vary from one school to another, she said, “so spending time to really understand the problem is essential.”

Kramer has written widely about the importance of sound for appreciating history, art, literature, and current events. Why this approach? Because thinkers dating from Aristotle have treated sight as the most important of the five senses, leading sound to be a little, well, overlooked.

“When you begin to concentrate on sound, all kinds of things come up that traditionally would never have come up,” he said.

In his most recent book, Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being, he continues his focus on the humanistic side of sound studies, a field that emerged in recent decades because of advances in sound technology. The overall message is that sound is “the medium by which we measure the sense of being alive,” he said.

The book comprises 66 short essays about “all of the remarkable ways in which sound has affected human lives … and also affected the way in which people feel about being alive,” he said. His hope, he said, is “for people to start listening to the world as hard as they look at it.”

Some encapsulated essays from Experiencing Sound:

The Wind on Mars

In 2018, a NASA Mars lander detected something no earthling had ever heard: the Martian wind. It conveyed that Mars was a world in a way the quiet, windless moon is not. “The sense of a world cannot be established only by what we can see, as we can see the lunar landscape,” Kramer writes. “A planet can be seen, pure and simple. But a world can be seen only if it can be heard.”

The Talking Dead

A voice recording conveys life and presence in a way that the visual (i.e., someone’s portrait) does not, as exemplified in 1890, when the voice of the deceased poet Robert Browning was played at an event commemorating him, creating the air of an “extraordinary séance,” one journalist noted. His grieving sister viewed it as a kind of sacrilege, Kramer writes—for her, “it was too alive for comfort.”

Annals of Slavery

In her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes hiding in an attic’s crawlspace for seven years to avoid being sexually abused by her enslaver. For Jacobs, the street sounds she could hear from the crawlspace were a thread that linked her to life, Kramer writes—until she was able to escape to the North, “what freedom she had was carried on the sound of voices in the street.”

The Contralto Mystique

The author William Styron, in his 1990 memoir Darkness Visible, is dissuaded from attempting suicide when he hears a soaring contralto singer in a movie. It stirred family memories and had a power that was “literally maternal,” Kramer writes, because it reminded Styron of the voice of his late mother singing the same music.

Prisons of Silence

The human need for sound was apparent to Charles Dickens, who wrote “the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful” after visiting America’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where all prisoners were held in solitary confinement in enforced silence. And in a 20th-century Russian gulag, the enforced silence was described as physically stifling by prisoner Eugenia Ginzburg: “I would have given anything to have heard just one sound.”

Minding the Senses

“[K]nowledge comes as much through the ear as through the eye,” Kramer writes. Henry David Thoreau knew this, apparently, with his descriptions of murmuring wind, creaking footsteps in the snow, vibrations in the ear, and the jingling of ice on trees. Even so, today someone returning from a walk will be asked “What did you see?” rather than “What did you hear?” “This,” writes Kramer, “needs to change.”

Jasmine just had her 18th birthday behind bars and now she’s facing an uncertain future. “I’m kind of on my own, and I don’t really know what to do,” she said on the first episode of “Roadmap for Change: Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice.” 

The new podcast from the Center for Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice is co-produced by Keith Cruise, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Fordham and co-director of the center, which is a partnership among Fordham, the University of Connecticut Health Center, and other institutions. 

Through the podcast and the center’s other work, Cruise is on a mission to elevate the voices of young people like Jasmine, and to infuse trauma-informed care into the juvenile justice system. 

Creating a Trauma-Informed Juvenile Justice System

Stories like Jasmine’s are not uncommon in juvenile detention. On average, kids who come into contact with the justice system have experienced four traumatic life events, and according to a 2021 study, 23% of detained girls and 9% of detained boys meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. (The respective rates in the general population are just 8% and 2%.) 

The center  is affiliated with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and is funded through the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. It trains juvenile justice professionals across the country—like judges, lawyers, probation officers, and social workers—to understand and respond to the trauma they see every day while working with young people and their families. 

As a co-director, Cruise helps to manage the center’s work plan and develop training, information, and resources. He hopes to shift the conversation away from short-term punitive measures and toward deeper healing of youth and families while also promoting community safety. 

“When youth get arrested and charged in juvenile court, the focus tends to be on the behaviors they’ve engaged in and their level of aggression and acting out,” said Cruise. “We hope to raise awareness that behaviors are shaped by what a youth has experienced in the past … and if trauma can help to explain delinquent behaviors, that opens up new avenues for intervening.” 

To that end, Cruise said, the center supports universal screening for trauma for kids in the juvenile justice system, along with increased access to treatment, including grief therapy, which the center trains professionals to provide. 

“One of the most common traumatic events that youth experience in their lives is traumatic loss. They’ve lost a family member, a loved one, or a close friend, usually due to community violence, gang violence, or a violent crime that resulted in death,” Cruise said. 

Elevating the Voices of Adolescents and Their Families

Cruise hopes the podcast will amplify the experiences of adolescents like Jasmine so that everyone involved in the juvenile justice system can approach their work with greater understanding. 

“The stories from youth and families themselves are really important,” said Cruise. “Good trauma-informed care treats youth and families as the experts in their own life stories and co-collaborators in what they need to recover and heal. We need to learn from their voices and their experiences.”

Listen to “Roadmap for Change: Trauma Recovery and Juvenile Justice.”

“There was nothing risky, and I was disappointed,” said Timothy Malefyt, clinical professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business.

“The Super Bowl is the place to talk about issues and really make a statement, and you just didn’t see that,” he said. “It used to be a launching place. Advertising can be such a powerful medium for social change.”

Instead, this year the ads mostly avoided controversy, sticking to humor and nostalgia. And the viewers seemed to like that.

The fan favorite was Budweiser’s nostalgic ad featuring a young horse that saves the day, which topped the USA Today Ad Meter. Malefyt described it as “a hero’s journey, Little Engine that Could-type story” that gets back to basics and avoids any pressing issues.

The ads were a far cry from a 2014 Coke commercial promoting diversity or even Apple’s 1984 ad that introduced the Macintosh personal computer, he said. Budweiser perhaps played it safe with its ads, two years after facing backlash from a Bud Light campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

This year, the commercial coming closest to making a real statement, he said, was the Nike ad emphasizing female success in a male-dominated world. The spot features WNBA stars Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, and Sabrina Ionescu, along with other elite female athletes, with a voiceover by rapper Doechii, who delivers the final line: “Whatever you do, you can’t win. So Win.”

It made Malefyt think of Kamala Harris, without being outright political.

Nike has been absent from the Super Bowl for almost three decades. “Nike is losing market share, so they need a big win themselves,” said Malefyt.

He found the most powerful ads to be from pharmaceutical companies: Novartis with a bold ad about breast cancer screening and Pfizer with a little boy beating cancer. “The drug ads were provocative … powerful. But maybe people are inured now to ads that say something.”

Humorous spots came from Doritos, featuring aliens; Pringles and Little Caesars with flying hair, mustaches, and eyebrows; and Mountain Dew with singing seals, including Seal, the singer. In its “Built Different” campaign, Duracell featured a battery reboot for Tom Brady, showing him suffering an on-air power failure and needing the help of a Duracell scientist.

Celebrities were in abundance, which Malefyt called a “safe bet.”

But why play it so safe?

Malefyt pointed out that most of the commercials were in production last fall, in the heart of a contentious presidential election season. “So of course they were very careful to stay away from anything political at all.”

While pursuing her doctoral studies, Fordham history professor Stephanie Huezo, Ph.D., was intrigued to learn about those who were “teaching people to read and write during a war, when they were fleeing military operations,” she said. Thus began her research that led to her current book project on how popular education has helped people organize and effect change—in both El Salvador and the United States.

Revolutionary Learners

Huezo is on leave this semester writing the book, tentatively titled Revolutionary Learners: Grassroots Organizing and Political Consciousness in Salvadoran Communities (1980-2020). Her work is supported by a prestigious Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, which focuses on strengthening democracy and civil discourse.

The Salvadoran Civil War killed more than 75,000 people over a 12-year period. The war ended in 1992 with UN-mediated peace accords between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Salvadoran government, which gave neither side a conclusive victory.

It was soon after the outbreak of the civil war—when the government had shut down hundreds of schools—that communities in FMLN-controlled areas turned to popular education, a grassroots approach to spreading literacy and political awareness, Huezo said. Professional teachers, professors, union organizers, and others trained the popular educators, hundreds of whom taught the poor and oppressed in rural communities and FMLN guerilla camps.

Many of those who were teaching the popular teachers had no more than a sixth-grade education. They often worked in abandoned buildings or under mango trees, sometimes forced to share paper and pencils—if any were even available, as Huezo described in an article last year.

‘Trying to Build a New Society’

Salvadoran communities and the FMLN were looking beyond mere survival. During her interviews in El Salvador, Huezo spoke with a woman who became an educator after being inspired by the FMLN saying they were “trying to build a new society” through education, in preparation for eventually taking power.

Teachers used the generative method of a Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire, leveraging students’ existing knowledge to build literacy while also helping them understand their country’s history and develop critical thinking.

“That’s really what popular education does—it not only teaches people how to read and write by using simple words that fit into one’s daily life, but also understand the root of a situation in order to then work to change it,” Huezo said.

Long-Term Impacts of Popular Education

Popular education strengthened young people’s commitment to resisting the repressive Salvadoran government and gave people the education they needed for organizing food distribution and other local efforts, according to Huezo. The education had longer-term impacts as well, as communities that organized during the war also supported the country’s first-in-the-world ban on metals mining, passed in 2017 (but recently repealed).

“There’s more awareness of the power of organizing because of what happened” during the civil war, Huezo said.

Popular educators from Central America have helped seed organizing efforts in U.S. immigrant communities as well. In her book, Huezo will describe how these communities’ activism helped bring about Temporary Protected Status, a federal government designation that spares immigrants from deportation for humanitarian reasons. (The Biden administration gave the program an 18-month extension in early January.)

Huezo described popular education as empowering not only for students but for their teachers—and for anyone trying to effect change. By sharing their knowledge, teachers lose the attitude of “I’m no one” and come to appreciate what they have to offer, even if they didn’t get far in school.

The larger lesson, she said, is that “even though we might feel like we don’t have a lot to give, we do.”

That’s the topic of a recent book by Richard Teverson, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history, who puts a spotlight on something that tends to be overlooked in histories of conquering powers: the hopes and dreams of the conquered.

Studying such “past futures” is growing more popular in the humanities and social sciences, said Teverson, author of Visions of the Future in Roman Frontier Kingdoms 100 BCE–100 CE, published in September by Routledge. “You can’t get a full picture of a decision that someone makes in the past,” he said, “unless you have a sense of what they thought could happen.”

Teverson gained this sense by examining public art created during the empire’s expansion. He got the idea for the book from his students—when they wrote in a midterm exam about the imagined futures reflected in the Arch of Constantine in Rome, he decided to apply this idea at the former empire’s edge and beyond it, to structures created by people who later came under Roman rule.

Nations or groups being taken over deserve to have their aspirations understood rather than being told to simply “get on board” with their new ruler’s vision, he said. 

“Even people who you might think are on the losing side of history have a future that they’re envisaging and, especially if it’s no longer feasible in some way, are engaged in a really complicated idea about how to fit their aspirations to reality,” he said.

Protecting Rights Through Art

In 14 BCE, as Alpine tribes were falling to Roman conquest, the local ruler Cottius made a deal with the Romans to absorb his kingdom into the empire and remain as magistrate.

To proclaim the new order, he commissioned an archway that, Teverson argues, was designed with the future in mind: As opposed to the Romans’ usual depictions of peacemaking, which might show a vanquished barbarian kissing the hand of a Roman general, the arch contains a relief of Cottius shaking hands with the Roman emperor Augustus.

It also shows tribes receiving citizenship tablets—a way of codifying certain rights and privileges in case they were later challenged, Teverson argues. “This seems, to me, pretty direct in its aspirations and its concern for documenting a ritual of political transfer,” he said.

‘A Divinely Ordained Future’

Another example comes from Kommagene, in modern-day Turkey, a kingdom conquered by Rome in 17 CE. Before that, as wars involving Rome and other powers clouded the kingdom’s future, its ruler, Antiochos I, built a hilltop complex containing icons and images meant to convey a glorious destiny for the kingdom.

That was also his goal, Teverson argues, when the king took the unusual step of including an engraving of his own horoscope so that worshippers would compare it with the night sky and be reminded, “‘Oh, we are working in a kingdom that has a divinely ordained future,’” he said.

Crafting ‘the Futures They Need to Survive’

Through this and other stories of artistic expression, Teverson illustrates how people “craft the futures they need to survive” in the face of uncertainty about what’s coming. It’s an idea that resonates from ancient Rome to today’s marginalized communities who may have a picture of their own future in mind—but face strong headwinds in making it a reality, he said. 

An example might be city planners envisioning a future for a neighborhood—like Harlem, where Teverson lives—without consulting with the residents, he said. “If you want to understand the problems of Harlem, you need to, in some ways, ask yourself, well, what does Harlem think its future is going to be?” 

While writing the book, he was thinking of the looming problem of climate change and the questions that future generations might ask about the future we’re trying to shape today.

“Maybe even in my daughter’s lifetime,” he said, “they’re going to look back and [say], what were you planning in 2024?”

“I’m grateful that they gave me a shot to come here,” said Bernard Anderson, a mixer at Greyston. “[When I] came here,” Anderson said, “I stopped going to jail.”

He and other employees who have flourished at Greyston tell its story in a documentary recently co-produced by Gabelli School of Business professor Michael Pirson, Ph.D. It’s the latest outgrowth of research by him and his colleagues about how businesses can succeed by tuning in to their employees’ humanity.

Addressing the Great Resignation

Key to this approach is promoting employees’ dignity, according to an Oct. 30 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Pirson, Gabelli School professor Ayse Yemiscigil, Ph.D., and Donna Hicks, Ph.D., an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The article describes how to lead an organization with dignity—by defining it clearly, recognizing people’s inherent value, and acknowledging dignity violations, among other things. The goal is creating workspaces “where people feel seen and heard, and where they can collaborate at the next level” because of it, said Pirson, the James A. F. Stoner Endowed Chair in Global Sustainability at the Gabelli School.

Yemiscigil said it’s an urgent topic because of the so-called Great Resignation and “the epidemic of low employee engagement.”

“There are all sorts of indicators showing that the way that we manage and lead organizations is not working for the majority of people,” she said.

Creating a dignity culture, Pirson and Yemiscigil said, involves such things as listening to understand people, acknowledging employees as whole human beings, and giving employees a greater voice in the organization. “It doesn’t take long” for this culture to take hold if there’s enough intention and commitment, Pirson said.

Inspired by Sesame Street

Helping companies make this shift is the idea behind the documentaries Pirson started co-producing about four years ago after he happened to meet some of the (human) cast members of Sesame Street through a Gabelli School connection. Inspired by the show’s emphasis on human potential, he set out to feature companies that exemplify humanistic management, working with co-producer Alison Bartlett, a writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress who was a Sesame Street cast member.

His second short film, Zen Brownie, focuses on Greyston Bakery, a supplier of Ben & Jerry’s founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, a physicist and Buddhist monk. (One of Glassman’s friends, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, narrates.) The bakery’s dignity-based open hiring policy creates “a virtuous cycle of trustworthiness,” Pirson says in the film. “Trust that you place in other people typically gets trust back” and often inspires the recipient to want to live up to that, he says.

Studying Student Behavior

His team has shown the documentaries at film festivals; they’re looking for a distributor and planning a few more films. He and Yemiscigil are also working on studies, soon to be submitted to the Journal of Business Ethics, that show how dignity can boost employees’ motivation and engagement as well as teams’ performance. Some of their findings come from a study of 800 Gabelli School students preparing for a consulting competition, working in teams.

Dignity is important not only for companies but for society because it frees us to think more about large-scale problems, Pirson said, giving climate change as an example.

Without “dignity wounds” occupying our minds, he said, “we move from a defensiveness into a space of abundance where we can create, and that is what’s necessary for our species to actually survive.”

Last month Fordham celebrated Yan’s appointment to the Robert Bendheim Chair in Economics and Financial Policy, which was established in 1996 with a gift from the Leon Lowenstein Foundation. He found time to talk about his work before leaving for a trip to China and Taiwan to meet with Gabelli School graduates and potential donors interested in supporting the school’s research.

Your current area of research is ESG—the environmental, social, and governance issues that corporations consider when making business decisions. Why are you drawn to this field and how does the Gabelli School emphasize this in its course offerings? 

That’s part of the strategic research area of the Gabelli School. And also, of course, it’s something I’m passionate about. I spend a lot of time doing this research, trying to see what’s going on, what is wrong, and how we should be trying to educate the students, the market, and the investors. 

Financial Markets and Responsibility is a core course for our Master’s in Finance program and one of the classes I teach. It serves as the starting point for our students to approach [ESG] in more holistic ways and in more scientific ways. And then after this core course, we have electives which are taught by adjuncts working in the field because the ESG landscape has been changing all the time. So those professionals…help our students to really get a hold of the most contemporary issues and challenges. 

The Gabelli School [also]has a student-managed investment fund course that includes an ESG fund. This gives students first-hand experience in managing the portfolio in a sustainable way.

You delivered a lecture on ESG at your installation ceremony. What were the key takeaways?

The takeaway is that ESG is always part of strategic management. It used to be more opportunistic to game the system a little bit and to focus on one [pillar]while sacrificing another one. The recent development seems like the firms, they don’t do this trade-off anymore. My conjecture is, the financial market has become more sophisticated so they can recognize such opportunistic behavior [and they don’t reward it].

There seems to be a backlash against ESG right now. In 2022 Ron DeSantis associated the term with “woke capital.” At the start of this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a story with the headline, “The Latest Dirty Word in Corporate America: ESG.” What’s happening here?

I think it’s just unfortunate, right? It’s a lot of political pressure…but many firms—Unilever, Microsoft—are still [practicing ESG]. They have chief sustainability officers, CSOs. So it tells you they still want to do it. And many people talk about climate risk and how to help the climate. So that’s still there. ESG as a term could be in trouble. But as a practice, I still think many firms are still practicing it, although they may use a different phrase. 

You teach at a Jesuit institution and you received your Ph.D. from one. What is it about this tradition that speaks to you?

Cura personalis [care for the whole person], that’s the key part. Of course there are different ways to talk about a whole human being, but I think one way [is]: just do the right thing. In the current world, you have so much information, different extremes, social media. Sometimes you get lost. I think we’re just trying to [teach]students—think about what’s the right thing to do…follow your value system.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

That tech, called generative AI, holds the key to a new system “that not only anticipates potential attacks but also prepares systems to counteract previously unseen cyberthreats,” said Mohamed Rahouti, Ph.D., assistant professor in the computer and information science department and one of Fordham’s IBM research fellows.

He and a crew of graduate students are working on new systems that, he said, are needed to get ahead of sophisticated attacks that are constantly evolving. Their focus is a type of easy-to-launch attack that has proved crippling to companies and government agencies ever since the internet began.

Denial of Service Attacks

Cybercriminals sometimes overwhelm and freeze a company’s or government agency’s computer systems by bombarding them with way more internet traffic than they can handle, using multiple computers or multiple online accounts. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS.

A typical attack could cost a company $22,000 a minute, he said. Nearly 30,000 of them take place every day around the world. Many of them are foiled by programs that use machine learning and artificial intelligence.

But those programs don’t always know what to look for, since they typically rely on snapshots of past traffic, Rahouti said. Another challenge is the growing number of internet-connected devices, from smart watches to autonomous vehicles, that could provide cybercriminals with new avenues for attack.

Generative AI

Hence the research into using generative AI, which could produce a far wider range of possible attack scenarios by working upon computer traffic data to make new connections and predictions, he said. When it’s trained using the scenarios produced by generative AI, “then my machine learning/AI model will be much more capable of detecting the different types of DDOS attacks,” Rahouti said.

To realize this vision, Rahouti and his team of graduate students are working on several projects. They recently used generative AI and other techniques to expand upon a snapshot of network traffic data and create a clearer picture of what is and isn’t normal. This helps machine learning programs see what shouldn’t be there. “We were amazed at the quality of this enhanced picture,” Rahouti said.

This bigger dataset enabled their machine learning model to spot low-profile attacks it had previously missed, he said.

Large Language Models

For their next project, they’re studying a large language model—the kind that powers ChatGPT—for ideas about how generative AI can be applied to cybersecurity. They’re using InstructLab, an open-source tool launched by IBM and Red Hat in May.

With all the companies and university researchers invested in new uses for generative AI, Rahouti is optimistic about its future applications in cybersecurity. The goal is to develop a system that runs on its own in the background, detecting both existing and emerging threats without being explicitly told what to look for.

“At present, we don’t have a fully autonomous system with these capabilities,” Rahouti said, “but advancements in AI and machine learning are moving us closer to achieving this level of real-time, adaptive cybersecurity.”

Jenn Lilly, Ph.D., and Rose M. Perez, Ph.D., both of the Graduate School of Social Service, have dedicated large parts of their careers to studying the emotional and psychological complexity of Latin American communities. Their findings inspired their respective film projects: one highlighting the unique grief of Cuban Americans who’ve left behind their homeland, and the other exploring the mental health challenges faced by many young Latinas. 

Longing for a Lost Homeland

Perez’s film, Cuba es Mí Patria: The Homeland I Keep Inside, explores the experiences of the Cuban diaspora through the framework of “ambiguous loss,” a theory she’s researched extensively. Unlike other forms of grief, ambiguous loss can lack closure and keep the “lost object” psychologically present indefinitely. 

According to Perez, the experiences of the film’s interviewees who left Cuba after the 1959 revolution exemplify this phenomenon. Like a ghosted lover or the parents of a missing child, many Cuban Americans live with unanswered questions that can make letting go impossible, like: Will I ever see my relatives again? Will Cuba’s political and economic situation ever improve? And, will I ever be able to return? 

The conversations were often emotional, especially the interview Perez’s colleague conducted with her father. Perez and her family left Cuba in 1971. “He was so teary throughout the interview that it was really hard to edit his piece,” she said. 

The film appeared in several national and international festivals and won the Best Original Story award at the Touchstone Independent Film Festival in July. Locally, the next screening will be at the AMT Film Festival in Hell’s Kitchen Nov. 8-10. 

Perez says Cuba es Mí Patria is an excellent tool for educators, and will be relatable to anyone from an immigrant background. She hopes viewers will walk away with a “greater appreciation for the hidden trauma people don’t know we carry.”

Speaking Up about Latina Mental Health

In the short film Nuestro Apoyo (Our Support), which Lilly wrote with a group of young Latina collaborators, the drama on screen reflects a culture of silence around mental health issues in many Latin American families. With insights taken from Lilly’s academic research on Latina mental health, the short film depicts a young, first-generation woman’s struggle to bridge a generational and cultural divide with her parents and discuss her thoughts and feelings. 

To create the script, Lilly brought together a group of five young Latina writing partners — all Fordham students or alumni — and drew inspiration from their personal experiences. 

“One of my biggest takeaways was that this new generation is very aware of mental health and interested in preventive behaviors, but they’re encountering some difficulty in reconciling that with their families or their cultural views, which are often about keeping things within the family and not discussing things that could bring stigma,” said Lilly. 

Post-production work on the film wrapped in late September. Lilly plans to submit Nuestro Apoyo to some film festivals and then seek a distributor. Whatever happens next, she already experienced a moment of victory watching the film over Zoom with the five young writers. 

“It was really fun to see their reactions, especially when their names appear in the credits,” she said. “We all felt very emotional by the end. It was maybe the highlight of my career.”

According to professor Jordan Alexander Stein, Ph.D., there are deeper truths left to explore through the lens of fantasy: Simone’s fantasies about herself, as well as those residing in our cultural imagination. 

“Fantasies always express something that is at some psychic level genuine to the person expressing them,” writes Stein in his new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press, September 2024). The book is an exploration of Simone’s life and work, and the ways she constructed her artistic persona to claim race and gender privilege that weren’t available to her otherwise. It’s also an exploration of the public’s relationship with Simone, and how we’ve lost some of her complexity in making her an icon. 

A professor of comparative literature in Fordham’s English department, Stein draws his conception of fantasy from psychoanalysis, which holds that, like free association and “Freudian slips,” our idle daydreams offer insight into the unconscious mind. 

“Yes, fantasies can contain lies, falsehoods … and any number of other conscious or unconscious delusions,” Stein writes. “Yet the appearance of these dishonesties … tends very much to reflect things we honestly wish or desire.”

Breaking Barriers

According to Stein, who drew upon a vast archive of her performances, images, and writings for the book, we can find clues to Simone’s desires in her subtle artistic choices. The way she injected a word with unexpected melancholy, or the songs she chose to cover and the way she chose to cover them, often point to a wish to rise above the confines of her marginalized identity as a Black woman.

For example, Stein notes, when Simone covered Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, she rarely switched the pronouns from “she” to “he” when singing about a love interest, as many singers do. Her choice to cover these white male artists at all is notable. Through her music, “she’s claiming certain kinds of race and gender privilege that weren’t afforded to her in other ways,” Stein said. 

A One-of-a-Kind Icon

So, why choose Nina Simone’s music for this exploration? Because, Stein said, “There’s nothing like it.” 

He related a story about ’90s musician Jeff Buckley covering “Lilac Wine” and calling it a “Nina Simone song” without seeming to realize he was covering a cover. “[Her music] is so unique and beautiful that people don’t even understand this is secondhand material. She’s so thoroughly made it hers. It’s a power that some artists have, but not many,” said Stein. 

And what about our collective fantasies of Nina Simone? Psychoanalysts might say she’s reached archetypal status, a shorthand for Black female genius, empowerment, and transcendence. Stein notes that it’s easy to forget she never got to view herself from our future vantage point, a distance that blurs much of the messy nuance of an extraordinary life. 

He hopes to restore some of it. 

“The reputations people have after they die are not always the complexity they lived in,” he said. “To honor both things and not collapse them into each other is part of the project of the book.”