Author: Eva Dean Folkert

Converting one language into another isn’t just a utilitarian task; a good translator conveys the voice and linguistic nuances of the person whose words are being translated. But what if you are a 21st-century man translating the writings of a 17th-century woman? What challenges does a modern man encounter when decoding the thoughts and words… Continue Reading →

When Dr. Andrew Dell’Olio was a senior at Rutgers University, a professor there taught t’ai chi ch’uan in the campus square. Though Dell’Olio didn’t join in, he recalls observing the meditative martial art; he found it quite beautiful. Within a year, the budding philosophy professor, by then a graduate student at Columbia, had enrolled in… Continue Reading →

Almost any instrument has the capacity to express a variety of musical genres: classical, jazz, folk, blues, Latin, pop. It’s a musician’s choices of style and repertoire that let the variation out. For instance, take the violin — or should we say fiddle? To differentiate them, don’t look; just give a good listen. At the… Continue Reading →

On a table in his office in VanderWerf Hall, a popular recent memoir about hiking the Appalachian Trail sits alongside Dr. Brian Yurk’s mathematics papers and journals. The presence of each offers empirical evidence of how the applied mathematician’s love of nature is combined with his love for his work. He’s a backpacker, climber, skier,… Continue Reading →

In 2016, when Boston magazine ranked the “100 Best Bostonians of All Time,” Isabella Stewart Gardner came in fourth — just behind John F. Kennedy and right before Malcolm X. The wealthy, influential Gardner (1840–1924), whose eponymous art museum is a Boston must-see, transformed the city’s cultural landscape more than a century ago by being,… Continue Reading →

As a Marine veteran and military historian, Dr. Fred L. Johnson III is regrettably too familiar with the atrocities of war. As a college professor, he has not tucked away that horrific knowledge, but instead is adding a new perspective to it. Johnson recently gravitated toward extraordinary stories of friendship and forgiveness during times of… Continue Reading →

Dr. Sarah Kornfield likens the cultural effects of television to a distorted reflection from a funhouse mirror, and she doesn’t mean it in an amusing way. When she thinks about TV’s reflective light, she does so as a rhetorician who studies the portrayals of gender in mass media. Using that lens to look closely at… Continue Reading →

Dr. Aaron Franzen has been curious for years about the “hidden curriculum” of medical schools — the undercurrent of norms and expectations for behavior that medical students learn outside their official curriculum. “It’s the social water in which all of them swim, so it matters — whether they recognize it or not,” he says. Until… Continue Reading →