It took a village, or rather a city, to set up this year’s Translation, Theory, and Practice service learning project, which is designed to support French immersion programs in Louisiana by addressing one of their most critical issues: the lack of pedagogical materials in French.

The city of New Orleans has more than 1,700 students enrolled in its various French-language schools, and is the perfect location for a community-based collaboration project in French. Together with three of the city’s French public schools—Audubon Charter, Lycée Français de la Nouvelle-Orléans, and the International School of Louisiana—a group of dedicated, culturally competent, and community-engaged French students at Tulane University carried out the first phase of a new project last fall by translating half (200 pages) of a large body of pedagogical documents in collaboration with teachers from all three schools. With a focus on the history of Louisiana, these ‘scope and sequence’ documents are not only much needed tools for French immersion teachers, but also invaluable resources for parents and students alike.

I began spearheading this service learning project in January 2019, and in May of last year received a French Dual Language Fund (FDLF) grant from the FACE Foundation for $7,000 to support the participation of our public partners in the project. Targeting an extensive body of materials produced by the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE), the project covers all the documents in the curriculum area of social studies that are specifically related to the teaching of Louisiana history. Together we translate these documents and publish their French versions for free online.

Throughout the spring of 2020, I will carry out the second and ongoing phase of the project with educators from our partner schools. Over a series of regular translation workshops, we will continue translating the second half of the materials, editing, formating, and submitting all translated pages for publication on the LDOE’s official website.

The growing success of French immersion in the U.S.—highlighted by the special case of Louisiana in a recent New York Times article—provides a wonderful foundation for stimulating community-based projects, which enables Tulane students to contribute to French education in the U.S. while enhancing their translation skills.

School of Liberal Arts Course Spotlight

How do population changes, politics, income levels, and the environment affect what and how we eat? These are the correlations that LaPorchia Collins, a professor in the Department of Economics, examines with students in her course “Global Food Economy.” Each semester, Collins begins the course with a general overview of food security and then centers in on the U.S. before ‘traveling’ the international realm with her students to talk about the supply and demand of food.

“I believe learning about what is happening around the world makes you a better citizen and a more well-rounded person overall,” explains Collins. To help students gain a greater idea of the many factors that contribute to food insecurity, Collins and her students watch and discuss the documentary A Place at the Table (2012), a film that follows families in three different areas of the U.S. on their quest for sufficient nutrition. After using the documentary as a foundation to consider both data and personal experiences, Collins introduces her students to the website Dollar Street, a tool created by the Gapminder Foundation, which includes pictures of individuals with everyday items in their homes and states their monthly income. Dollar Street helps visitors understand how people live and what food insecurity looks like around the globe from Bolivia to Tanzania, Spain, and Vietnam.

“I think I have been most surprised by the extent of food insecurity within the U.S.,” explained Sarah Ruffin (SLA ’20), a senior studying economics and political science. “Hunger is often presented as a problem unique to the developing world, but the U.S. itself has a massive amount of people—40 million—classified as food insecure.”

After spending time studying hunger and food in the U.S. and then around the globe, students choose a country for which they complete a comprehensive case study on food security. “Once we get to the international realm, we start talking about food demand, which includes population,” explains Collins. “We look at how population has changed over time globally and study how income affects diet and nutrition. Then, we talk about food supply, which is where issues related to agricultural production and the environment come into play.” As an economics course, Collins centers discussions on theories of supply and demand, which the students then use to create a policy proposal that is both grounded in economic theory and supported with macroeconomic data.

In addition to screening documentaries, using the Dollar Street website, and highlighting recent research findings in class, Collins and her students also discuss Food Politics by Robert Paarlberg. All of these tools help expose the students to different sides of the story of food, whether it’s related to population or environmental policies. Sophomore Adam Mathura (BSPH ’22) is studying public health and economics and finds the multiple ways in which Collins engages in the complexities of food supply and demand helpful in considering his future profession. “This course has changed how I view my future career in public health. It has made me more socially aware of the burden of food insecurity on the individuals around me, and I believe it will potentially lead me to pursue a career in policy to correct the preexisting issues in this country surrounding food insecurity.”

“Global Food Economy” fulfills a Global Perspectives requirement for undergraduate studies at Tulane and also an elective requirement for the Environmental Studies program in the School of Liberal Arts. “We live in a truly global society,” remarked Collins. “This course helps students understand how our different societies fit together and the backstories behind the data on food and livelihoods around the world.”

As will surprise no one reading this special issue of our digital newsletter, the past month has been an extraordinary one here at Tulane. The pace of change is one of the most notable—and disconcerting—aspects of the crisis.

Less than a month ago, we were holding classes and the campus was filled with students enjoying another gorgeous New Orleans spring. Meetings began and ended with people shaking hands. In retrospect, it all seems chillingly normal.

Those paying attention, of course, were deeply concerned about coronavirus gaining ground in the United States. Tulane’s crisis readiness operation, which we typically activate when summer hurricanes are brewing, resumed meetings, with senior leadership gathering over early morning conference calls.

On the first Wednesday of March, at the monthly meeting of School of Liberal Arts department chairs and program directors, I announced a remote-teaching “fire-drill,” asking faculty to teach at least one class session remotely before spring break. At the time, this struck some as a bit abrupt, even unnecessary. But only seven days later, so much having changed in the interim, President Fitts announced that the rest of academic year would be taught online. The campus quickly followed to remote work, even before the city and then state followed with stay-at-home mandates.

Three weeks later, it seems that our world is turned upside down. Comments about the new “normal” cede to speculation about what the world will be like when all of this is over. Without being able to name it, we have a strong sense that we are living through a period of major historical significance.

These are challenging times for all of us. From those forced into claustrophobic surroundings with too many people and too little space to those with a compounded sense of isolation, we all suffer from restricted circulation.

But there is also sustenance and extraordinary fortitude in this community. This is a campus and a community that knows crisis and has shown great strength in the past.

Students of the liberal arts excel in making comparisons, in finding analogues and resonances, in exploring our affective responses to crisis, in charting the ways in which to understand that which is happening, and in offering recommendations for better futures.

This issue of our newsletter is dedicated to telling the story of the massive transition that has occurred in the past three weeks. I am truly amazed at how many people worked tirelessly and selflessly to move our entire operation online, even while safeguarding our community’s health and security. As a community of scholars dedicated to the disciplines of the liberal arts, we are at the same time thinking and reflecting on the tremendous movement of which we are a part. For now, we share these notes from the field.

Wherever this finds you, be well, take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and do take advantage of the best aspects of digital technologies to help keep in touch during a time when we must remain physically distant.

Brian Edwards
Dean and Professor

As is the case at so many other institutions worldwide, Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts is confronting unprecedented challenges in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, by listening to and learning from those around us, we are learning important lessons about teaching and community within the changing landscape.

On March 11, Tulane President Mike Fitts announced to students, faculty, and staff that courses would move to online instruction, travel would be limited for research, events and gatherings would be cancelled, and the university would begin staunchly practicing social distancing. In just two weeks, our usual methods of interaction, teaching, and research took a dramatic turn. But during these past few weeks, our faculty, staff, and students have acted quickly to transition into new ways of working, teaching, and learning, continuing to provide and engage in the important presence of higher education.

Together, we have ushered in remote teaching to reach our students through various methods of engagement, created hotspots for faculty and staff working from home, worked with academic leaders for grading adjustments, and used online surveying tools to stay connected with our students. Our school’s programs and departments have also continued to create opportunities to interact with audiences during events that are now occurring virtually. Whether using Zoom, YouTube, Canvas, or PhotoBooth, the liberal arts faculty have found ways to foster learning and leverage their research from a distance.

Aaron Collier, the Ellsworth Woodward Junior Professor of Art, Painting & Drawing, sees the resolute nature of our community through the strength of our students. “Within the first five minutes on day one of my virtual class,” he says, “I knew that the perfect attendance (including a student who had returned home to China) and the ability to see everyone together on screen signaled a gift to be revered. The compositional exercises we remotely preformed together in this Beginning Drawing class were simultaneously the most absurd and important activity to which we could give our Monday afternoons.”

While the road has not always been perfectly smooth during this transition, we remain confident that as we move forward in uncertain times, we will continue to strengthen as a community. “In the Dean’s Office, we knew we had to provide steadfast leadership including sharing clear and accurate communication and direction, marshal needed technology, and support all efforts to get faculty ‘back in the classroom’ by March 23,” explained Germaine Gross, Chief Business Officer for the School of Liberal Arts. “We moved quickly to Zoom staff meetings to maintain social distance, scoured stores for laptops and other technology for staff and faculty remote working needs, made sure that everyone had access to their buildings once the campus shut down, quickly developed Canvas for ongoing communication, and still met the budget deadline while keeping our inter-office dialogue running smoothly. It has been an honor to work with the dedicated team in the Dean’s Office during this time as we develop a new set of ‘normals.’”

Sometimes, this new normal looks like grids of faces on screens, headphones being adjusted, Wi-Fi connectivity coming and going, and tuning out leaf blowers while in a virtual meeting. But it also looks like the Newcomb Department of Theatre donating all of their scene shop’s N95 masks and gloves to local hospitals, a voice professor spreading joy through operatic singing while teaching proper hand washing, or colleagues across universities sharing online teaching techniques for the greater good.  Indeed, the new direction of all our paths reminds us of the importance of the humanities—in difficult times like these, we must think creatively, ask questions about our world, and work toward bringing about clarity for the future. Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts will continue to inform, educate, and stay dedicated to these values, and we are thankful for everyone on this journey with us.

"Death and a Lady, 1538" a woodcut by the German artist Hans Holbein (1497–1543).

It may seem odd to look to a 14th-c. poet such as Chaucer for help with the COVID-19 crisis.  But his poems do provide some support—beyond the balm for the soul that reading good poetry always offers.

On February 29, 2020, the New York Times ran an opinion piece, “How to be a Smart Coronavirus Prepper,” by Annalee Newitz.  While I admired the article’s optimism, I question its analysis of Chaucer’s response to the Black Death or bubonic plague, which carried away nearly half of the population of Europe when the poet was only six years old.  Newitz writes that Chaucer “grew up in a world forever changed by a pandemic, and yet he mentions the plague only once in his enormous body of work.”

In fact, however, Chaucer’s poetry is haunted by the plague.  His first major work, The Book of the Duchess, is a moving elegy for John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche, who died in the pandemic.  Chaucer understood that pandemics do not respect our facile social categories.  The poem is a lesson in the kind of empathy we need today, if we’re to survive the COVID-19 crisis.  And then there are Chaucer’s more direct warnings about pandemics, that we would likewise do well to heed.  Although he’s a devout pilgrim, Chaucer’s Physician in the Canterbury Tales is also a plague profiteer:  “He kepte that he wan [earned] in pestilence.”  The Physician cashes in by implying—like Jude Law in the movie Contagion (2011)—that he has a cure.  (In the Middle Ages, there was no cure for the Black Death, as there isn’t, yet, for COVID-19.)  Consider, too, the three young drunks in Chaucer’s most famous story, the Pardoner’s Tale, who are so loaded that they fail to notice that one of their friends has succumbed to the plague.  In their cups, they resolve to kill Death—only to fall victim to him, because of their pride.

I’m teaching a Medieval Drama seminar this term.  Just before my students were sent home because of the pandemic, we were talking about the figure of Death in the morality plays:  he’s often represented as a skeleton lurking behind people, because no one wants to believe he’s there.  Well, he’s with us now.  There’s hope, nevertheless, in the form of ongoing scientific research—and in the lessons of Chaucer’s poetry.  Empathy, honesty, vigilance, and humility:  in the midst of a pandemic, these never lose their healing power.
 

This article was also published in The Advocate: Letters: Chaucer offers age-old lessons in face of a pandemic
Michael Kuczynski – professor of English, Tulane University, New Orleans on March 25th, 2020.

Christopher Dunn, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is continuing his research on Brazilian music and culture with a new book on musician Antônio José Santana Martins, known as Tom Zé. This January, Dunn received a competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which will support the completion of a book titled Stray Dog in the Milky Way: Tom Zé and Brazilian Popular Music, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.

“I’ve always wanted to create a book like this,” explained Dunn. “While it will center on the life and work of Tom Zé, it will also tell a larger story about modern Brazil—from the 1930s, when he was born in a poor rural town, to the present moment of political crisis under the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro.” Dunn’s research focuses on modern and contemporary Brazilian culture, and this will be his third book written over a 20-year period that explores the region’s dynamic history.

Tom Zé, a pioneering musician known throughout Brazil and around the world, launched his career as a participant in the musical and cultural movement tropicália. While the movement was composed of films, literary works, and visual art, it was most known for its popular music and embracing the international counterculture of the late 1960s during a period of authoritarian military rule in Brazil. However, Tom Zé charted a different path than fellow tropicália musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, focusing instead on a more avant-garde and experimental approach to his music, and operating in the margins of the mainstream.

After believing his career had come to an end in the 1980s, Tom Zé’s music was rediscovered by Talking Heads’ musician David Byrne around 1985, soon after Byrne had begun re-issuing music from around the world on his own record label, Luaka Bop. Byrne made a compilation of Tom Zé’s work in 1990, which caught the ear of music critics and eventually led to the revitalization of his career around the age of 55. Today, Tom Zé is 83, performing around the world, and creating new music.

Dunn’s new work builds on his first book that focused on tropicália itself, as well as his second book that examined the counterculture of Brazil in the 1960s. “I’ve been talking with Tom Zé, collecting interviews, and working with him and has wife for the past thirty years,” said Dunn. “I’m honored to receive the award from the NEH to create a book that really exemplifies how music intersects with many realms of cultural production, and am hoping this book will speak to people across many fields, from Brazilian cultural studies to musicology.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided $30.9 million to support 188 humanities projects nationwide this year. From digital projects for the public to infrastructure and capacity building in humanities organizations, grants have been awarded to community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities to help ensure that communities throughout the country have access to quality humanities education and experiences.

Tom Zé, in concert in São Paulo, 2009.

Tom Zé with students of the Tulane Summer in São Paulo, 2012.

Until 2019 only three U.S. presidents had faced impeachment—Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998, both impeached by the House of Representatives, and Richard Nixon who resigned before he could be impeached in 1974. Johnson was impeached for abuses of power stemming from political appointments, Clinton was impeached for lying while under judicial oath in a deposition, and Nixon faced impeachment for attempting to conceal a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate in a plot designed to help Nixon remain in office.   

On December 18, 2019, the House voted to impeach Donald Trump for two crimes: Abuse of Power (when Trump and his team withheld congressionally appropriated funds from Ukraine to elicit an investigation into one of Trump’s political rivals, Joe Biden); and Contempt of Congress (for stonewalling congressional oversight requests for evidence and testimony from his executive team in the Ukraine matter).     

With Chief Justice John Roberts robed and presiding, a short “trial” took place in the Senate with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) taking a leading role among the House Impeachment Managers. After fierce opening statements, the Senate voted to forego a review of the evidence, declined to hear testimony from witnesses, and move directly to closing statements.
 
Just last week, on February 5, 2020, Trump was acquitted in the Senate with a 48–52 vote on Abuse of Power, and 47–53 on Contempt of Congress, in a vote nearly along party lines. Sen. Mitt Romney was the only senator—and the first senator in U.S. history—to cross party lines by voting to convict the president on the abuse charge.

The impeachment saga provides a unique teaching opportunity in all our political science classes at Tulane: readings and discussions about checks and balances, study and debate about the nuances of criminal law in American courts, gaming out the electoral implications for 2020, and reflecting on the role of political parties, the traditional news media and newer online spaces, and most especially, about legislative-versus-executive power. Organizations like Tulane College Democrats and Phi Alpha Delta (Tulane’s pre-law fraternity) have their members discussing Trump, election interference, the legalities of impeachment, and the role of students-as-voters in righting political wrongdoing.

For better or worse, we have never had a president like Donald Trump. Putting him into context for our bright students at Tulane is an ongoing project that has many faculty members like me reaching for the political rule book…if only to throw it away. The School of Liberal Arts Department of Political Science is also placing Trump’s presidency in a broader context. The scholarly literature on ethics, morality, and political power we discuss in our comparative politics, international relations, development, theory, and political economy courses crosses national borders, and centuries of time.

Scholars and students are weighing if the stain of House impeachment will make Trump a one-term president, or if Senate acquittal gives Trump an easier path to victory and a second term. Are Trumpian politics here to stay? Will a second-term Trump be impeached again—perhaps because of bolder executive malfeasance? 

We will learn soon. Voters go to the polls on November 3, 2020.