Barnard Magazine Fall 2023

FALL 2023

INTRODUCING PRESIDENT LAURA ROSENBURY THE SKATEABLE DESIGNS OF OLYMPIAN ALEXIS SABLONE ’08

AMPLIFYING LOCAL WOMEN IN NYC’S PUBLIC SPACES

A PROFESSOR’S 20-YEAR RESEARCH QUEST

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Skating by Design

by Nicole Anderson ’12JRN Architect and pro skateboarder Alexis Sablone ’08 brings both skills to her international projects RENDERING COURTESY OF ALEXIS SABLONE

Features

Departments 2 Contributors

3 From President Rosenbury

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President Rosenbury Is Ready for Her Barnard Journey Our ninth president sits down with Barnard trustee Marcia Sells ’81, P’23, for a wideranging conversation PHOTO BY DOROTHY HONG

4 From the Editor 5D ispatches

Headlines | Introducing the Class of 2027; Olivia Watkins ’16; Barbie Comes to Campus; @4NYCWomenPresidents; Meet Kelli A. Murray; Provost Linda A. Bell to Step Down 11 D iscourses Read, Watch, Listen | Books by Barnard authors; a new album by Dorothy Moskowitz ’62; collages

by Sonya Michel ’64; a debut YA novel by Jenny Laden ’92; Emmy noms for Donna Zakowska ’75 and Sarah Botstein ’94 Faculty Focus | Tamara J. Walker

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A Monumental Idea

by Laura Raskin ’10JRN Architect Jane Lea ’01 puts forward a project to address the dearth of statues honoring women in NYC PHOTO BY TOM STOELKER

Strides in STEM | Rachel Narehood Austin's 20-Year Research Quest 39 N oteworthy Perspective | Harriet Newman Cohen ’52 Q&Author | Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04 AABC Pages | From the AABC President; Volunteering at Barnard Class Notes Alumna Profile | Assia Grazioli-Venier ’03 AABC | Young Alums Leading the Way Obituary | Susan Valerie Lee ’84 Tribute | Saskia Hamilton In Memoriam Last Word | Rabbi Beth Lieberman ’84 Crossword On the Cover

President Laura Rosenbury PHOTO BY DOROTHY HONG

On the Back Cover

This year’s 12th annual Morningside Lights festival, held this September, celebrated “The Open Book,” an homage to keeping libraries free and minds open.

PHOTO BY MARY ROCCO, DIRECTOR OF ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP, CEI

Contributors KIRA GOLDENBERG ’07 is a writer, editor, and communications professional, as well as a therapist for adolescents and young adults. She has written or edited for The Guardian, The Connecticut Mirror, CT Public Media, Wired, and Columbia Journalism Review. Her communications serve the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, NDN Collective, and Hip Hop Caucus. She also writes for other university publications, though Barnard Magazine is forever “her unvanquished favorite.” At Barnard, Kira majored in anthropology and English and got her reporting chops at the Columbia Daily Spectator and then earned her MSW from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. She lives with her wife and puppy in San Francisco.

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is a freelance journalist and columnist based in Los Angeles. She writes about race, culture, politics, personal history, and the intersection of all. She is the author of the reportage/essay collection Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista (Northeastern University Press, 2011) and I Heart Obama (ForeEdge, 2016) and contributed to a book of essays, Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood (Broadway Books, 2005). In 2001, she received the PEN America Literary Award for Journalism. In addition to the opinion pages of Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, she frequently contributes to Politico and HuffPost. She lives in the L.A. area with her five dogs.

LAURA RASKIN ’10JRN is an architecture and design writer and editor. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Metropolis, Architectural Digest, and more. She was previously an editor at Architectural Record. She recently collaborated with architectural photographer Lara Swimmer on the soon-to-bereleased book Reading Room: New and Reimagined Libraries of the American West (December 2023, Artifice Press). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

DID YOU MISS? From the summer’s online-only issue, our editors suggest…

FEATURE: “Every Inch a King” Professor Ellen McLaughlin plays the complicated protagonist in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear. barnardbold.net/every-inch-a-king VIDEO: “Through the Years” Six Barnard alumnae from across generations recall their time at the College and connections that span decades. barnardbold.net/through-the-years LAST WORD: “Learning from Nature” California naturalist and scholar Helen J. Doyle ’84 shares hope gleaned from the state flower. barnardbold.net/learning-from-nature 2

EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Nicole Anderson ’12JRN CREATIVE DIRECTOR David Hopson

MANAGING EDITOR Tom Stoelker ’10JRN

COPY EDITOR Molly Frances

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Lisa Buonaiuto

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS N. Jamiyla Chisholm,

Kira Goldenberg ’07 WRITERS Marie DeNoia Aronsohn, Mary Cunningham, Isabella Pechaty ’23, Preetica Pooni

ALUMNAE ASSOCIATION OF BARNARD COLLEGE

PRESIDENT & ALUMNAE TRUSTEE Sooji Park ’90

ALUMNAE RELATIONS

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Karen A. Sendler

ENROLLMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS VICE PRESIDENT FOR ENROLLMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS

Jennifer G. Fondiller ’88, P’19

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Quenta P. Vettel, APR

DEVELOPMENT

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNAE RELATIONS Lisa Yeh P’19

PRESIDENT, BARNARD COLLEGE Laura Rosenbury

Fall 2023, Vol. CXII, No. 4 Barnard Magazine (ISSN 1071-6513) is published quarterly by the Communications Department of Barnard College.

Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices.

Postmaster: Send change of address form to: Alumnae Records, Barnard College, Box AS, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598

EDITORIAL OFFICE

Barnard Magazine, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598 | Phone: 212-854-0085 Email: magazine@barnard.edu Opinions expressed are those of contributors or the editor and do not represent official positions of Barnard College or the Alumnae Association of Barnard College. Letters to the editor (200 words maximum) and unsolicited articles and/or photographs will be published at the discretion of the editor and will be edited for length and clarity.

The contact information listed in Class Notes is for the exclusive purpose of providing information for the Magazine and may not be used for any other purpose.

For alumnae-related inquiries, call Alumnae Relations at 212-854-2005 or email alumnaerelations@barnard.edu.

To change your address, write to: Alumnae Records, Barnard College, Box AS, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598 Phone: 646-745-8344 | Email: alumrecords@barnard.edu

From President Rosenbury

PHOTO BY DOROTHY HONG

A Warm Welcome From the moment I stepped onto campus in late June, I've seen and felt a warmth, an energy — and yes, a boldness — that is unique to Barnard. Over the past few months, I have been fortunate to meet and learn more about our incredible students, faculty, staff, and alumnae.

It is an honor to be part of such a brave and kind community.

There couldn’t have been a better introduction to Barnard than Move-in Day in late August. The enthusiasm and joy were palpable.

I met so many wonderful students and parents and watched as our community members cheered first-years on, lent a helping hand, and made sure that this major transition was less daunting. It was an impressive welcome — much like the welcome I have received.

But more than that, it was a telling and meaningful prelude to the journey they are about to embark on at Barnard — one that will be filled with new learning experiences, supportive peers and mentors, and plenty of fun. And it will all happen on this beautiful campus in this dynamic city.

Though I am a recent transplant from Gainesville, Florida, my own post-grad journey started right here in New York City. It is where I worked for my first law firm, it is where I first clerked for federal judges, and it is where I had the chance to teach my first class ever as an adjunct professor of feminist legal theory at Fordham University School of Law, launching my career as an educator and then as an administrator. Now I am seeing New York City with new eyes.

Barnard is a reflection of the very best of this city — its diversity, culture, and energy. And like New York City, Barnard is a place that fosters discovery and self-discovery. We are here to help students harness the opportunities available to them inside and outside the classroom and to encourage them to take important risks that will pave the way for future successes.

At the start of the semester, I experienced one of Barnard’s most moving traditions: Convocation. Inside Riverside Church, I was elated to ring in a new academic year with so many members of the Barnard community. There were inspiring words from our esteemed faculty, staff, students, Trustee Chair Cheryl Glicker Milstein ’82, P’14, and our keynote speaker, Herminia Palacio ’83, M.D., MPH, the president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute.

Herminia, who is a leading public health expert, spoke eloquently about her own trajectory from her childhood in the Bronx to the supportive community she found at Barnard to her life’s work advancing health equity in cities across this country during some of the most tumultuous times, including the HIV/AIDS crisis and Hurricane Katrina. Speaking to the students, she said, “I invite you to reflect on your own ‘origin’ story as you soak up this entire convocation ceremony. Who are you? How will you grow? Who will comprise your communities?”

I was struck by her words, as they epitomized our mission as educators to support and empower students to seek out answers to these vital questions. It might take time, but the College is here to provide students with the tools they need to cultivate that sense of self and sense of belonging. As Dr. Palacio said, “Barnard is a place where you can and will be boldly you, and Barnard is a place where you can and will find a nourishing and nurturing community.”

I can’t tell you how excited I am to continue to get to know all the members of Barnard’s vibrant community. I want to hear your origin stories, learn about your interests, and assist you on your path to achieving your dreams. Our individual stories are uplifted by what we have in common. Barnard is a pivotal chapter in each of our narratives, and I am so happy to be starting mine with you all. B FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 3

From the Editor-in-Chief

Intersections I am coming up on my fourth year at the Magazine, and funnily enough, I often feel as if I am still new to Barnard. I suspect this feeling stems from the fact that there is always so much to uncover about the College’s vast ecosystem: new courses and programs, innovative partnerships and initiatives, and most of all, a community of people with fascinating careers, interests, and life stories.

This semester, though, does indeed represent a new moment for the College, as we welcome President Laura Rosenbury to Barnard. In this issue, you’ll find a thoughtful conversation between President Rosenbury and Trustee Marcia Sells ’81, P’23, who is the Metropolitan Opera’s chief diversity officer. The two women — both of whom have served as deans of major law schools — had quite a bit to talk about, from President Rosenbury’s mission to get to know the College’s many constituents to why empathy is so critical when engaging with different perspectives, particularly in an academic setting. It is an illuminating discussion and will make you as excited as I am for what’s to come under President Rosenbury’s leadership.

Before I started working here at Barnard, I spent nearly a decade editing and writing for architectural trade publications and shelter magazines. Changing gears from design to higher education seemed, on the surface, to be a significant change.

While there are certainly differences, I have found that the two worlds overlap more than I anticipated. They intersect at telling good stories and, occasionally, even in subject matter. The Fall issue sits right at this intersection. We have two design stories that feature alums — architect and Olympic skateboarder Alexis Sablone ’08 and architect Jane Lea ’01 — working to transform the way we engage with public space and, through their own respective projects, make it more inclusive, equitable, and accessible to different communities.

We are also introducing a new column, “Perspective,” that highlights women whose diverse life experiences have given them a unique point of view. To kick it off, we profiled the incredible Harriet Newman Cohen ’52 (above, right), whom I had the pleasure of meeting during our photo shoot at her Upper West Side apartment. As one of the top women lawyers in the city, she has worked with many high-profile clients. With five decades of practicing family law under her belt, she has the expertise, ambition, and outlook that is not just admirable but inspiring. I was struck by the compassion and empathy with which she spoke about her work.

As we photographed Cohen standing before the Manhattan skyline — the place where she built her thriving practice — it made me think about the impact women, and particularly Barnard women, have had on this city. It is why Lea’s All Along Project, whose goal is to address the paucity of women’s monuments, is so necessary. But at Barnard, the power of women and their contributions are everywhere in plain sight. You need look no further than our cover.

Nicole Anderson ’12JRN, Editor-in-Chief 4

Dispatches

PHOTO BY SHELLEY FARMER AND ANA GARZA

News. Musings. Insights.

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 5

Introducing the Class of 2027!

Barnard College welcomes the newest student body’s talented and pioneering first-years to campus 6

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIOT WYATT

Headlines

The start of the fall semester at Barnard is always a time for celebration, as the College excitedly welcomes new, transferring, visiting, and returning students to campus. It was another record-breaking year for the College’s admissions.

For the Class of 2027, Barnard received 11,804 applications and admitted 8% of those applicants, beating out 2022’s record-breaking admissions rate. Of the 944 students admitted this year, 76% chose to enroll.

Our newest first-years embody a diversity of backgrounds and interests, representing: • 35 countries, such as Argentina, Cambodia, Iran, Nepal, Sweden, and Ukraine • 43 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico • 15% who identify as first-generation college students, and 24 from Barnard’s partnership with Questbridge, which connects the College with high-achieving, low-income students from the U.S. • 540 who are interested in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), including 10 for the Pathways Bridgewater Scholars Program and 18 for the Science Pathways Scholars Program (SP)2 and Environmental Science Pathways Scholars Program E(SP)2 • 344 who came through Barnard’s PreCollege Programs • 39 athletes who will compete in a range of sports, including archery, gymnastics, and volleyball “Barnard has a long legacy of welcoming students who are as driven and determined as they are compassionate and inquisitive. The Class of 2027 is no different,” says Leslie Grinage, Dean of the College. “They are artists, activists, budding scientists, and leaders who will no doubt help to make the world better. The College is thrilled to meet and to support our newest members as they grow from first-years to seniors — and beyond.”

“The members of the Class of 2027 have worked so hard to get to this moment. Their passion for learning and engaging intellectually with others came through in their applications, and we admire their commitment to action, social justice, research, and so much more,” says Jennifer G. Fondiller ’88, Vice President for Enrollment and Communications. “We look forward to watching and supporting them during their journey at Barnard and championing all that we know they will accomplish.”

SCHOLARS IN STEM More than 200 first-years were in STEM clubs or organizations; some spent time identifying palynomorphs, converting home food waste into fertilizer, and planning the world’s first wasteto-biobutane project with the government of Cameroon.

CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE Passionate about the planet and human rights, students have restored coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, published a children’s book on identity, curated an LGBTQ+ sex education and awareness program for students, and promoted circularity of used clothes.

PASSION PURSUERS The Class of 2027 are also artistic movers and shakers, including a national competitive figure skater, a production runner on a TV show, a kaleidoscopic artist with a museum exhibition, and a classical pianist who has performed at Carnegie Hall and the White House.

LEADING THE WAY Hundreds of incoming students have already flexed their leadership skills; some have done it by rehabilitating a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, creating a student-led club focusing on the healthcare field, establishing an investment company centered on the gender gap and financial literacy, and collecting and donating 62,000 sanitary pads to girls in rural areas.

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 7

Headlines

Barbie Comes to Campus In anticipation of the opening of Greta Gerwig ’06’s Barbie, a special visitor arrived on campus — thanks to our social media team. Sporting Barnard swag, Barbie hit all the favorite local spots, from the library in Milstein to Futter Field. Gerwig (below, center), who co-wrote and directed the movie, brought the iconic doll to the big screen this summer, sparking Barbie mania around the world. There’s another familiar face in the film — alum Ana Cruz Kayne plays Supreme Court Justice Barbie. The film is now the biggest blockbuster of the year, making Gerwig the highest-grossing female director in history.

Olivia Watkins ’16 Wins a Prestigious James Beard Award This June, Olivia Watkins ’16 (above, right) took home the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year award alongside Karen Washington (left), a farmer and activist from the Bronx.

The two women are co-founders and co-executive directors of the Black Farmer Fund, which invests in Black farmers and food businesses in the northeastern U.S. to create sustainable and more equitable food systems. The illustrious accolade recognizes an individual or organization “in the food realm who has given selflessly and worked tirelessly to better the lives of others and society at large.”

“Being recognized as a humanitarian,” says Watkins, “which objectively is someone who dedicates their time to causes that they care about, was internal validation for me to keep going on this path because I am making an impact on things that I care about but also people outside of myself.”

Winning the James Beard award is not the only accolade Watkins has received — in 2021, she was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list for North America and The Grist 50.

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@FourNYCWomenPresidents Three major New York City universities recently named women as presidents for the first time in their storied histories. President Laura Rosenbury joined the three for dinner, where the conversation inevitably turned to “being a first,” says Rosenbury, who drew from her experience as the first woman dean at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. (Female leadership is, of course, nothing new at Barnard.) President Tania Tetlow of Fordham took the historymaking selfie shown here. From left to right: President Linda Mills of NYU, President Minouche Shafik of Columbia, Tetlow, and our very own President Rosenbury. Incidentally, Tetlow comes from solid Barnard stock. Her mother, Elisabeth Tetlow, graduated from Barnard in 1964 before going on to Columbia for a master’s in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages.

Meet Kelli A. Murray Not long after her first official day at work, President Laura Rosenbury greeted Kelli A. Murray on the steps of Barnard Hall. The two chatted like longtime colleagues, which they indeed are. Murray was in town to get acclimated to the campus and meet colleagues in her new role as executive vice president for strategy and chief administrative officer. Murray, a highly skilled strategist, served on the senior leadership team at the University of Florida Levin College of Law when Rosenbury was dean of the school.

Murray, who is a Florida native, began her professional career as an attorney and eventually shifted from direct legal practice to higher education.

She has worked in both private and public sectors, as well as with undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs. She got her foothold in career placement, then moved on to overseeing a variety of areas, including academic programs, admissions, development, diversity and inclusion, external and government relations, and Title IX — to name but a few areas of her higher-ed experience.

More recently, Murray was the inaugural chief operating officer of Camelback Ventures, a New Orleans-based nonprofit that addresses inequities in education and social innovation through the support of undervalued BIPOC, women, and nonbinary entrepreneurs.

At Barnard, she will be spearheading the formation, communication, and advancement of President Rosenbury’s priorities. She will also oversee the president’s office and manage strategic initiatives there, as well as collaborating with the Barnard community and external partners.

As the summer wound to a close, Murray had settled into her office at Milbank

Hall, and staff from around the College dropped by to welcome her at a small meet-and-greet. She seemed quite at home. “I’ve only been here for a week, but it’s been wonderful,” she says. “There are so many kind, warm, and welcoming people working toward the same goal of creating pathways for bold women.”

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 9

After more than a decade of extraordinary service as Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Linda A. Bell will step down from her role at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year to return to her award-winning research as an economist and as a member of the Barnard faculty. Provost Bell leaves behind a long list of accomplishments, as she championed faculty and enhanced the integrity of the College’s academic programs in partnership with three presidents — President Debora Spar, who recruited Bell in 2012 from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where she served as provost and the John B. Hurford Professor of Economics; President Sian Leah Beilock; and President Laura Rosenbury.

Among Provost Bell’s many achievements, she led the charge in 2014 to establish Barnard’s Summer Research Institute (SRI), which provides funding, subsidized housing, and supportive programming for 1,400 students conducting STEM research under the guidance of a faculty mentor; she launched the Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) to strengthen Barnard’s deep academic engagement and support for student and community well-being; and she was instrumental in the launch of the Accelerated 4+1 Pathways for graduate study in cooperation with Columbia University, featuring new alliances with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and with the Mailman School of Public Health.

In addition, she was a key player in the design and programming of the College’s academic hub, the Cheryl and Philip Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning, and led the College through its successful reaccreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in 2022.

“Linda has been a wonderful partner these past three months, and I look forward to continuing to work closely with her this year,” says President Rosenbury. “We will celebrate Linda’s many accomplishments later this year. It is so impressive to realize that when she steps down, her 12 years of service will be three times the median term for provosts nationwide. She has contributed so much to the Barnard community.”

“It has been a privilege and an honor to lead this extraordinary faculty and to work closely with so many committed colleagues on senior staff, in the Provost’s Office, and throughout the College to advance the mission of the College on behalf of our incredible students,” says Provost Bell. “While I look forward to returning to research and teaching, I will surely miss the collaborations and friendships that have been cultivated and nourished across this amazing community.”

The College will soon begin a nationwide search for its next Provost and Dean of the Faculty, and Provost Bell will stay in her administrative role through the 2023-2024 academic year. She will remain at Barnard to resume her awardwinning research as an economist and, after a well-earned sabbatical, will also teach as a member of the Barnard faculty. B 10

PHOTO COURTESY OF BARNARD COMMUNICATIONS

Linda A. Bell, Dedicated Provost and Dean of the Faculty, to Step Down

Discourses PHOTO BY CARRIE GLASSER

Ideas. Perspectives. A closer look.

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 11

Read, Watch, Listen POETRY

Bookshelf

Books by Barnard authors

by Isabella Pechaty ’23 NONFICTION The Color of Modernism: Paints, Pigments, and the Transformation of Modern Architecture in 1920s Germany

by Deborah Ascher Barnstone ’79 Most people imagine modernist architecture to be mainly pure white buildings; as a historian and practicing architect, Barnstone knows better. Shifting the paradigm of discussion, Barnstone discusses how Germany’s modernist period had international significance because of its uniquely colorful philosophies. Her elevated approach to this history reveals how crucial color theory was and how its legacy in modernist architecture can be traced along a fascinating path intersecting with the psychological, supernatural, and sensational. (Bloomsbury Academic) 365 Ways to Save the Planet: A Day-by-Day Guide to Living Sustainably

by Nergiz De Baere ’18 De Baere aims to demystify the ever-looming issue of climate change with a year's worth of easy, direct actions that offer a more holistic, science-based, and justice-focused educational approach to saving the planet. “I wanted to write a book that didn’t give conventional advice about how to recycle,” she writes, “but instead offered how to change ourselves and our systems to live more in tune with nature so that we can heal our relationship with it.” The book dispels misinformation and provides challenges that will empower both veteran activists and newcomers alike. (John Murray Press) Jusuur 1: Beginning Communicative Arabic and Jusuur 1 Arabic Alphabet Workbook

by Sarah Standish ’08, with Richard Cozzens and Rana Abdul-Aziz Co-author Standish’s textbook is carefully designed for Arabic language students who are interested in learning at their own pace. The workbook teaches students how to converse about topics relevant to their everyday lives and comes equipped with helpful teaching resources. Using a new classroomtested method, Standish introduces Arabic letters in order of how they most frequently appear rather than in their traditional order. Readers will walk away with a solid foundation of the language as well as all the tools needed to keep learning. (Georgetown University Press) 12

How She Came Here

by Barbara Elovic ’75 With quiet nuance, Elovic’s collection of poems traces the precariousness of our lives, memories, and ties to one another. The poems consider the strains placed on our relationship to the past, delivered through poetic stories of loss, historical figures, and familial relationships. Elovic uses the past and its ghosts to measure ourselves in the present with an unlikely sense of hope. (Kelsay Books) How News Travels

by Judy Katz ’82 Katz meditates on the passage of time and its impact on family dynamics with an unassuming spirituality.

In her writing, time passes and the inevitable comes: A mother dies, children grow up, and relationships deepen. Katz’s poetry reimagines and elevates these events as testaments to the human experience and how we think about ourselves throughout time.

(Silverfish Review Press) Under Granna’s Poetry Tree: Birthday Poems for Her Grands

by Lenore S. Richman Roland ’60 As her grandchildren grew from infancy into their teenage years, Roland penned poems to celebrate each new stage of their lives. She captures their personalities and interests at each new phase, reflecting on their growth from a grandmother’s perspective. Roland hopes to inspire others with a new way to express love between generations and to create a family tradition through words. (Raven House Publications)

A Lifelong Song

Dorothy Moskowitz ’62’s crossculture collaboration spawns new album The American singer-songwriter Dorothy Moskowitz ’62 had been making music long before she attended Barnard, and just as she lives and breathes, she continues to make her art.

Her latest, Under an Endless Sky (Tompkins Square, 2023), is a collaboration with Italian composer Francesco Paladino and poet Luca Ferrari. The album’s 23-minute title track is meditative bliss made complete by Moskowitz’s tranquilizing vocals.

“How strange a thing is man,” she sings. “A blinded lab rat in a cage/ Stuck in his house, elevator, or car/ His eyes engulfed by screens.”

Moskowitz, 83, explains that Paladino and Ferrari sought her out because of the avant-garde fame she garnered when she sang lead for the pioneering experimental rock band the United States of America in the 1960s. “My actual association with avant-garde artists was intense but short-lived,” she says.

Paladino and Ferrari even chose to bill themselves as the United States of Alchemy as a nod to the legacy band of Moskowitz’s early years, she says. “I consider myself experimental as of this writing, but I have no pretensions to being avant-garde either now or back in the day.”

Despite “cataclysmic” changes in the music business, Moskowitz says she rather enjoys the modernity of the music world. After all, thanks to digital production, “obscure musicians like me can now produce on their own in small home studios with astonishing results.”

Using Google Translate to communicate with her Italian collaborators, she composed melodies to “float” over Paladino’s compositions and translate Ferrari’s poetry into a more laconic style that would make sense in English. “We all became very close in the process, despite the miles,” she says.

Moskowitz was already writing songs before she got to Barnard, but the College lent her “intellectual courage,” she says. “This, in turn, has opened the door to collaborations with people from all over the world. It’s a remarkably fruitful phase to enjoy in my 80s — a Barnard bonus, you might say.” —Gina Vergel

Community Collage

Sonya Michel ’64 assembles a successful second act It’s the kind of commission any artist would savor.

For Sonya Michel ’64, a retired professor emerita from the University of Maryland, being asked to create a special collage for her congressional representative, Jamie Raskin, was an especially sweet affirmation of her second career as an artist.

Eight years ago, a serendipitous encounter with Raskin at a street fair in Maryland led to the purchase of one of her paintings. The two stayed in touch. After Raskin’s cancer diagnosis last year, Michel learned from a Washington Post article that he had been wearing bandanas gifted to him by Steven Van Zandt, the actor and guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, who is known for his own collection of head coverings. Since she had already used a section of a bandana in a collage, she sent Raskin a photo of the work, which led to yet another sale.

This past spring, Raskin told Michel he was trying to figure out what to do with all the bandanas his constituents had been sending to him during his recent cancer treatment. Michel stepped up to incorporate some of those bandanas into a distinctive collage, which Raskin gave to his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, as a birthday gift.

The transformation from retired academic to practicing artist wasn’t too much of a stretch, says Michel. As a professor of history and women’s and gender studies, she took an interest in “the materials of everyday life." Her work has been shown at galleries in Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

Reflecting on the project, she told the Washington Post that when she began assembling the bandanas, she realized that “they don’t always go together; they’re not always that harmonious. In fact, sometimes they contrast and even conflict, which is exactly the way our society works.” —Merri Rosenberg ’78 FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 13

‘This Terrible True Thing’

The debut YA novel by Jenny Laden ’92 draws on the experience of losing her father to AIDS

When a college friend first suggested to Jenny Laden ’92 that she write a young adult novel, she was skeptical. After all, Laden was a painter and illustrator, not an author. But the friend, Kevin O’Connor CC ’92, persisted.

“He kind of planted the seed,” she says. “He just kept sending me books about writing. I’d always written for myself, as part of my art practice; I’d always been obsessed with words as part of my painting.”

Six years later, those seeds have borne fruit with This Terrible True Thing.

Released in early September by Blackstone Publishing, the YA visual novel — which contains words, diary entries, poems, and drawings, all by Laden — tells the story of a 17-year-old high school senior, Danielle Silver, who learns that her father is HIV+ as she grapples with the uncertainty of impending adulthood. It’s

a work that, through Danielle’s first-person voice, fully captures the idealistic ferocity that characterizes teen responses to injustice — in this case, the U.S. government’s systematic neglect of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s as the virus decimated the gay community.

Danielle’s reactions and emotions come through with such heartbreaking authenticity because Laden lived them. The book, though an accomplished debut work of fiction, is a sort of emotional memoir. Laden’s own father, Richard B. Laden, learned he was HIV+ in 1990, when she was a Barnard sophomore.

Laden gave Danielle her own youthful artistic aspirations, as well as parents, like hers, who divorced after her father came out as gay.

“The feelings are very 14

real,” Laden says. “Writing the book was revisiting a lot of very specific moments of my own life that are hard places to go but also kind of beautiful.”

The events depicted in the novel are also based on Laden’s life, but she condensed the timeline to build narrative tension and used a younger protagonist to appeal to YA audiences. Laden did not attend a boarding school in her high school years, but Danielle does echo Laden’s experience of learning about her father’s illness while living apart from him.

To bolster the authenticity of the school-based scenes, Laden, a lifelong journaler, reread her collegeera entries.

“I went back and read my journal during the period after I knew he had told me,” she says. “It was about guys I had crushes on and art I wanted to make.” She laughs, thinking back on the fact that there was no mention there of her father’s bombshell divulgence.

“That was a very interesting, telling moment for me, and I think it helped me inform some of how I fleshed out the character.”

Though she narrates with some degree of typical adolescent self-absorption, Danielle’s journey through This Terrible True Thing leaves readers feeling, like the character, impacted by the mass tragedy of the AIDS epidemic — a potent reminder, as this era’s pandemic tapers, of how larger disasters map onto our individual experiences.

The sense of personal connection was far from accidental.

“I really wanted to write a story about the AIDS epidemic to widen the narrative about who that epidemic really impacted,” Laden says. “It’s an important piece of history for a young generation to know, and it’s important to memorialize, in a way, the people that were parents — all the different types of people that were impacted by this epidemic.” B

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JENNY LADEN

by Kira Goldenberg ’07

Sorcery and Truth

Two Barnard alums receive Emmy nominations for this year’s landmark celebration of television

by Marie DeNoia Arohnson

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE ALUMNAE

When the red carpet rolls out for the 75th anniversary Emmy Awards broadcast this winter, two Barnard graduates will be among the invited glitterati. (The awards show, which is traditionally in September, has been postponed until January 2024 as a result of the labor dispute involving writers and actors playing out this past summer.)

Donna Zakowska ’75 (below, left) — two-time Emmy-winning costume designer — is nominated for a fifth time for “Outstanding Period Costumes for Series” for Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Sarah Botstein ’94 (below, right) is nominated for her work directing two of the three episodes of the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust, in collaboration with Lynn Novick and the legendary documentary director Ken Burns.

“Midge,” the character Zakowska has been dressing for five seasons, “is a perfect Barnard student on every level,” she told Barnard Magazine in 2019.

“Because the thing about Barnard is, it’s about being independent. It’s about having your own mind, making your own judgment.” And the designer has helped to bring these very qualities to life for Midge through her dazzling costumes.

A recent New York Times article profiling Zakowska described her as “the sorcerer of costumes” who understands “perfectly the magnetic and transcendent allure that fashion can offer.”

Botstein, who has worked with Burns for more than 25 years, described the three-part series as a complicated story that takes an unflinching look at truths about what Americans understood about the Holocaust and when, what citizens and government leaders did and said about it, and how attitudes about immigration shaped the country’s

response. The six-and-a-half-hour series won critical acclaim. The Atlantic called it an “excellent project, which should be required viewing for all Americans.”

The Hollywood Reporter said it was “one of the most vital projects in Burns’ five-decade relationship with PBS.” For Botstein, the project carried a deeply relevant personal meaning. “On my father’s side, I’m a firstgeneration American. I’m the oldest grandchild, and my father was a refugee here himself. He came in 1949. I knew my grandparents and great-grandparents and their friends,” Botstein told Barnard Magazine last year. “So the Holocaust was very real to me. I think the most rewarding experience of working on this film is how much I’ve learned about their history and trying to, in some interesting way, honor their memory and their experience by sharing the stories of people who had different and similar struggles.”

Barnard women have a proud tradition of walking off with TV’s top prize, from Emmy-winning journalist Paolo Ramos ’09 and Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon ’88 to television producer and documentary filmmaker Sheila Nevins ’60, who has won more Primetime Emmy Awards than any other person — 32!

— as well as 35 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. B

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 15

Expanding the Borders of Scholarship

Professor Tamara J. Walker on why travel is key to understanding history

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm For some, travel represents an opportunity to check off bucket lists, but for Tamara J. Walker, associate professor of Africana studies, it is where history and personal identity collide, particularly in Latin America. “It can sound trite [to say] that travel can change your life,” says Walker, “but I think it does in really profound ways, in terms of how we think about ourselves and what we’re capable of.”

Walker’s love for the Spanish language and Latin American cultures was awoken 16

in the seventh grade. In high school, she spent two weeks in Mexico, which proved transformative.

“Spanish was the vehicle through which I became interested in Latin America,” says Walker, who was born to African American parents and grew up in Denver. “Then traveling to Latin America was the path that led me to be interested in history.”

Her interest in language and culture continued through her undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent a semester studying in Argentina; there, she faced difficulties being Black in a country that felt explicitly racist to her.

“During that semester,” she says, “I started spending a lot of time thinking about why Argentina was so complicated racially.”

When she returned to campus, she began to research race in Argentina, which spiked her

ILLUSTRATION BY HEATHER LANDIS / PHOTO BY TOM STOELKER

Faculty Focus

interest in the discipline of history, and she eventually earned bachelor’s degrees in both Spanish and history. By the time Walker began her University of Michigan dissertation research in Peru, she relied on the history of slavery to help answer questions about race there, in modern Argentina, and in Latin America more generally. She then taught in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years and at the University of Toronto for six. Her first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Now, in Barnard’s Africana Studies Department, Walker teaches on diverse topics, such as slavery and gender in Latin America, Afro-Latin American art, and Afro-Latin American history and culture. (She’s the only faculty member in the department with a 100% appointment.)

In June, Penguin Random House published Walker’s newest book, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, which explores the complex reasons why some African Americans became expatriates throughout the 20th century to present day and how they were treated abroad. Part historical nonfiction and part travel memoir, the book weaves in firsthand experiences to create what The New York Times called “a well-researched account of how global social, cultural and political affairs shaped the conditions for African Americans to travel.”

Deeply personal yet expansive, Beyond the Shores dives into the unknown experiences of well-known and not-so-well-known African Americans who chose to live overseas, creating narratives for the people and characters for the countries.

There’s stage performer Florence Mills and France. Agronomist Oliver Golden and the Soviet Union. Author Richard Wright and Argentina. Concert pianist Philippa Schuyler and Vietnam. And many more throughout the book’s eight chapters.

Walker relied heavily on the Black press for research, which she calls “a kind of main character throughout the book for always following the story of Black people leaving the U.S. and sharing their experiences and using those experiences to encourage Black people to go to these other parts of the world.”

But even with the Black newspapers and magazines to draw from, Walker’s research required creative resourcefulness. Some of her subjects had plenty of historical context from which she could pull. Schuyler, for example, whom Walker focuses on during the 1960s, has papers at Syracuse University that contain clippings and journals of her travels to Africa, Asia, and beyond and had also published the 1960 memoir-travelogue Adventures in Black and White.

But for Wright — who barely wrote about his time in Argentina while shooting the film of his book Native Son in that country for nearly a year — Walker imagined themes parallel to her own travel experiences. “He’s someone who wrote a lot about living in Paris and about traveling to other parts of the world, [but] in that chapter, I drew upon my own understanding as an historian of Latin America and what that would have been like for him and for other Black Americans to be there in the late 1940s and to compare that to the United States during the same era,” Walker explains.

It is in this give-and-take of historical research and storytelling that Walker will ground Barnard students. Her goal is for students to imagine history’s

long and interweaving arc and to understand how it can benefit from other methodological approaches as well as contribute to other disciplines. “What’s really wonderful about being in Africana studies is being able to sit under that umbrella and have all my work fit under it because it’s all part of my scholarship,” she says. The way Walker sees it, history and travel go hand in hand.

That’s also why in 2009 Walker co-founded The Wandering Scholar, a nonprofit that makes traveling abroad accessible to high school students from underrepresented backgrounds. She hopes to create a similar program that gives Barnard students the opportunity to make their own history-travel connections. The curriculum would allow them to convene with one another before studying abroad and to be in community while they’re overseas. She also envisions them doing research that they can then bring back with them to produce podcasts, documentary projects, videos, and cooking shows.

“More than just traveling, it’s about preparing for global citizenship, for meaningful engagement in issues that are shaping our present and our future,” she says. “And doing it in ways that also allow them to build skills that are going to be [impactful] in their jobs and whatever comes after graduation for them.”

And again, she adds, “I wouldn’t have become an historian of Latin America were it not for my experiences of traveling at an early age to Latin America.” B

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 17

A 20-Year Research Quest

Professor Rachel Narehood Austin publishes on critical carbon-consuming enzyme

by Tom Stoelker In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled 11 millions gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound; oil lingered at the site for decades. Though the disaster continues to affect wildlife generations later, remediation occurred naturally. As of 2015, only 0.6% of the spill remained, with much of the cleanup credit going to natural processes.

For the past 20 years, chemistry professor Rachel Narehood Austin has worked with students in her lab to examine how nature managed to clean up our mess.

One of her primary research goals at Barnard has been to reveal an oil-degrading enzyme, alkane monooxygenase (AlkB), in its 3-D active state. The resulting paper, “Structure and mechanism of the alkane-oxidizing enzyme AlkB,” was published this past April in Nature Communications.

Austin says the primary reason for solving the structure of the enzyme was to understand its structure and function. It’s particularly important because the enzyme functions in the global carbon cycle, which is critical to the planet’s 18

habitability. The enzyme carries out the first step in metabolizing one form of organic carbon into carbon dioxide. The goal of the work is not to inhibit the enzyme to prevent carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere, rather it’s to gain a better understanding of the carbon cycle itself. How AlkB influences the cycle’s functions is subtle and not fully understood.

She says the active 3-D version is an important element in the scientists’ toolkit for fully deciphering the carbon cycle.

“There’s this whole question mark of what’s actually happening in our environment. And if we don’t understand the process of what’s happening, then it’s really hard for us to predict how human activities can change it,” she says.

Several students worked with Austin on the project, but she credits three former Barnard students who worked alongside her in the lab with helping her bring this structure to fruition and serving as co-authors of the recent paper. All three are pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry. Juliet Lee ’21 and Shoshana C. Williams ’20, both of whom were Beckman Scholars, are continuing

ILLUSTRATION BY CORNELIA LI

Strides in STEM

their studies at Caltech and Stanford, respectively, and Allison Forsberg ’20 went off to USC. The students’ professional achievements underscore Austin’s parallel priority, teaching students how to become scientists, which includes how to handle the successes alongside rolling with failed experiments, resisting outside pressures, and maintaining the long view.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER “For years, people have known that [AlkB] is a critical enzyme in the carbon cycle.

If you go to a conference of environmental microbiologists, and you talk to people after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the Exxon Valdez oil spill, they’re all talking about this enzyme,” says Austin. “They’ve known it’s a key ingredient in the bioremediation of oil [for 80 years], but nobody has known about the threedimensional structure. So, 20 years seems like nothing to figure that out.”

Austin has always been intrigued by the interface between the environment and chemistry. While scores of scientists work on the environment in countless capacities, Austin’s niche in this area is that of an inorganic chemist interested in the role of metals in biological systems.

PACING THE SCIENCE Shortly after Austin moved to Barnard, a mutual colleague introduced her to Liang Feng, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford. A postdoctoral fellow in Feng’s lab, Xue Guo, had solved the three-dimensional structure of a protein she thought might be AlkB. This protein was out of Feng’s area of expertise, and the mutual colleague thought Austin could help, and she did.

The protein that Guo had purified was crystallized in an inactive form.

Eventually, Austin was able to show that the protein Guo had purified was active, it just wasn’t crystallizing in its active form — and it was indeed AlkB. Feng, now fully invested in the research, joined Austin’s long-held quest to determine the structure of active AlkB. “We were holding out to get the active form, because that’s the most important thing [for the environment],” Austin says.

For seven years, the two worked together with several students in Austin’s lab.

Juliet Lee spent two summers at Stanford working side by side with Guo to find a form of AlkB that was easier to characterize in its active form. Finally, more than 20 years into Austin’s research, Feng concluded that the structural data was ready to publish. Austin began writing, and there was much to say. It was, she believed, top journal material.

To get the word out, the team told a simple story, one that could be easily followed, without any superfluous complications, unnecessary caveats, or clarifications.

“We just cut out anything that wasn’t essential. And I think that’s partly why it ended up being so easy to review, because it was a simple story,” she says.

NEXT STEPS During the seven years Austin was examining the inactive structure of AlkB, she had a sense of when she might find the active form. Nevertheless, the discovery has opened up a host of questions. She compared the experience to rock climbing, when a piece of protection is placed in a crevice to secure a climber while she moves up to the next level.

“Without having [the paper] out, I was always torn in multiple directions about how to spend my energy,” she says. “And now it’s really clear what we should do next. So it’s kind of exciting. I feel like I’m ready for the next 20 years for sure.”

Austin says the active site of the enzyme, the place where two iron ions are, is “mind blowing.”

If I can help my students see that we can do really good and fun science, but we can do it carefully and ethically, that’s probably more important than anything else I’m going to do in my life.”

“Normally if you have two metal ions in an active site, it is really obvious to see how they work together,” she says. “In AlkB, the two iron ions are too far apart to directly work together. So the next thing is to better understand how the active site works.”

LESSONS LEARNED Austin acknowledged the setbacks over the years.

Though she doesn’t revel in them, she doesn’t hide them from her students either. “Science is hard, and young students make a ton of mistakes, and there’s certainly a temptation for students to say, ‘I want to prove something,’” she says. “I sit them down [and say], ‘You know, that’s really not the point.’”

She says if they do four experiments and they get four different results, that is the reality. Rushing is not an option, she says. In light of recent cheating scandals in the scientific community, she believes that upholding standards like peer reviews and respecting colleagues is just as critical in teaching science as finding the 3-D active state of alkane monooxygenase.

“The end never justifies the means — it’s how you live your life that is always, in my experience, more important than any endpoint,” she says. “I think if I can help my students see that we can do really good and fun science and that we can do it carefully and ethically, that’s probably more important than anything else I’m going to do in my life.” B On September 7, 2023, Rachel Narehood Austin won the ACS Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution from the American Chemical Society.

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PRESIDENT ROSENBURY IS READY FOR HER BARNARD JOURNEY

PHOTO BY DOROTHY HONG

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n June, Laura Rosenbury began her tenure as Barnard College’s ninth president. A leading feminist legal theorist, Rosenbury started her career as a litigation associate at the global law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City and went on to clerk for federal judges. From 2015 to 2023, Rosenbury served as the Dean and the Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. She was the first woman to hold this role.

At the start of the fall semester, President Rosenbury sat down with Barnard trustee Marcia Sells ’81, P’23, who is the Metropolitan Opera’s chief diversity officer and the former dean of students at Harvard Law School, to talk about the value of engaging with different viewpoints, the lessons gained from law school, and being among a new cohort of women leading New York City’s higher-ed institutions.

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Marcia Sells: So how was your first Move-in Day with students as the president of Barnard?

Laura Rosenbury: The energy was contagious. You walked through the gates, and there was the DJ and cheering. It was such a really warm welcome.

And how are you feeling as you move into this role from dean of a law school to president of the College?

I still have so much to learn about Barnard — it is such a dynamic place. It’s been wonderful getting to meet people, learn more about the history of the College, and listen to the community’s hopes and dreams for what’s next. It’s all about building upon strengths — making sure we preserve the special culture of Barnard while pushing ourselves to do even more.

There’s so much to learn! It will take time, but what steps are you taking to get to know the Barnard community?

When I arrived on campus, I knew the best way to really build an understanding of the needs, interests, and goals of our community is to go on a listening tour and to speak to different members and stakeholders at the College. Since the summer, I’ve been trying to meet with every faculty member one on one. It’s a slow process, but hopefully by the end of the semester, I will have talked with most of our wonderful faculty. Starting in the fall, I will be holding community conversation sessions with students, parents, and alumnae.

That’s wonderful. It will be a busy semester for you.

It will, yes, but I am so looking forward to these conversations, because they will be key to informing our priorities for the College and creating a road map for the future.

As you look at this moment in time for Barnard, and education in general, what are some of the things that you’re thinking about and hoping for?

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Also, the nature of the academic enterprise that you and I participated in while at law school — you at Harvard and I at Columbia — requires that [dialogue] even when it’s hard. It’s not just advocating for a particular point of view but really understanding and deepening that knowledge base, even when it’s challenging. That was always the difficult part — the humanity — recognizing there was a person on the other side of an issue and being empathetic.

Empathy is so important. And this is where our mutual friend, our eminent former colleague and mentor Martha Minow, comes in. She was my civil procedure professor. On the first day of my first semester, she told us that this class is about one question: “Can words constrain power?”

It was a different way of thinking about law but one that really appealed to me. If we’re going to really grapple with this question, we have to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. And that is the human side — having that empathy is so critical to representing one side or another, while following consistent procedures.

Right now, throughout our society, there’s a tendency to vilify people who have different points of view instead of being curious about them — instead of saying, ‘How did they come to have that point of view?’ or ‘What was their journey?’ Because we have students coming from all over the world, there is a real opportunity to engage with different ideas but also meet people who are radically different from you.

Can you tell me how engaging with different

PHOTO BY TOM STOELKER

I mean, not all in the first year, of course!

I think something that is facing the entire nation, but certainly at colleges and universities, is a fear of engaging with multiple sides of an issue. I think Barnard could lead as an example of how we could better connect across difference and have dialogue across difference.

When I talked to the parents on Move-in Day, I said one of my goals is to challenge the students, which means that we don’t want Barnard to be an echo chamber — to just promote one point of view. It’s important that we are very upfront from the beginning that students are going to encounter people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and ideologies. There shouldn’t be pressure to assimilate to one dominant viewpoint but instead to learn from one another. I believe deeply in that, and many of our professors do as well.

perspectives might have informed your own?

Well, at my welcome to new students, I talked to them about Nalini P. Kotamraju, my first-year roommate, from Chicago. She was born in Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean, to a mother whose ancestors were brought over as slaves. Her father was originally from Hyderabad, India. Her first language was Papiamentu, which is the indigenous language there. [When she was] age 5, her dad got a job in Chicago and the family moved there.

Unlike me, she went to the same school from kindergarten to high school, whereas I attended six different schools. She was from a city, whereas I grew up on my grandparents’ corn and soybean farm in Indiana. We were different in so many ways, and yet she’s my closest friend. She is my family — my chosen family.

I love that idea of a “chosen family.” Did you find that during your own college experience?

Yes, very much so. When I graduated from law school, several of my closest friends showed up. Nalini flew in from San Francisco, a college friend in Boston joined, and one came from New York. And then Martha took us all out!

That’s so Martha. If you find those people during your journey at college, they will be your chosen family. One of the things the pandemic made us realize is that a big part of the educational process is getting to know both yourself and other people, not only in the classroom but also in the greater context of school. It’s a very different experience to be virtual all the time, as opposed to being able to read someone’s emotions when you’re face to face.

Yes, it is. Because we were in Florida, we were teaching in person, even in the fall of 2020. But then it was pre-vaccine, so we also had mask mandates. This meant that in the classrooms, our facial expressions were hidden, and so I quickly learned how to read eyes, because so much of my approach to teaching is drawing students out, to try to look for the people who are silent yet engaged and encourage them to participate.

The reintegration into in-person has been part of the challenge, and [this distance] also sadly exacerbated what you were talking about in terms of the challenges we have of recognizing other people’s humanities. Now we have this opportunity to really engage and, at the same time, challenge ideas — and become comfortable doing so, because now we can see each other.

There’s no mask hiding us.

And to be intentional about it. Yesterday I was talking to Carl Wennerlind, the chair of the History Department, who is also a scholar of capitalism, and I asked him how comfortable he feels drawing out students to explore multiple positions.

It’s interesting because he does what I think many law school professors do — he has structural techniques. At one point during his class, he adopts a pro-capitalism perspective and asks all the students to focus on the strength of the pro-capitalist arguments. Then the next day, they have to do the exact opposite, and they take a skeptical or critical perspective on capitalism. And he said that, over time, it becomes less binary — you’ll see some of the overlap but also have a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. He explained that if you’re going to be committed to tackling capitalism throughout your career, you need to know its strengths in order to better frame your arguments. So by forcing students to engage with both sides, hopefully it better prepares them.

You have to engage with the work and the readings. And then you start to ask those big questions, but you can’t do it if you ignore them.

Right? And to not immediately go to critique but instead say, “What is the author trying to do here?

What are the strengths of this article?”

When I talked to the parents about not wanting Barnard to be an echo chamber, many of them came up afterwards and asked how we plan to do this with the country so divided. And I said we have to try. It might be an audacious statement, but we are going to try [to have dialogue across difference]. We can’t give up just because it’s hard. Maybe we’ll even be able — given our smaller community and the passions of our students — to eventually lead in this area. It will be another way that Barnard can be distinctive.

Well, “audacious” fits Barnard. I do want to ask you — what are the things that you’re looking forward to doing in New York City for fun?

I asked members of the senior leadership team to share their favorite nontouristy things to do, and almost every suggestion was something I had never done, from taking a water taxi to visiting the Cloisters. I would also like to come to the opera.

One of the things I say a lot about art is that it can raise big questions, and like we were talking about, it can engage people, so please, we’ll have to make sure that you can attend the opera.

Where Barnard is located offers the opportunity to see a lot of great things, such as the Apollo [Theater] and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

It’s wonderful. Barnard is very much part of the city. One of my goals is to think about how we can better connect to our local communities in Harlem and Morningside Heights but also how we can be a better partner with the mayor’s office and with other higher-ed institutions.

Speaking of higher ed, you’re in good company.

A number of institutions in the city are now being led by women.

I actually had dinner with three firsts last night: Tania Tetlow, the [first woman] president of Fordham; Minouche Shafik, the first woman president of Columbia; and Linda G. Mills, the first female president of NYU. It was very powerful.

A lot of the discussion was about being the first, and having been the first female dean at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, I know what a big deal it is. But I have to say I was also really thankful that there’s such a long tradition of female leadership at Barnard. And it’s not female leadership — it’s just leadership, period. B FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 23

A MONUMENTAL IDEA ARCHITECT JANE LEA ’01 PUTS FORWARD A PROJECT TO ADDRESS THE DEARTH OF STATUES HONORING WOMEN IN NYC

by Laura Raskin ’10JRN 24

PHOTO OF JANE LEA BY TOM STOELKER / OTHER PHOTOS COURTESY OF JANE LEA

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n 2021, lifelong community activist Jane Pool approached her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, neighbor and friend Jane Lea ’01 with an enticing prompt: In New York City, where there are so few public spaces and monuments dedicated to women, is there something we can do to address this?

Lea, an architect, was intrigued. She began digging into the research with her team at Lea Architecture, the practice she founded in 2017. “The numbers are fairly shocking,” says Lea, “which you always knew was sort of the case.” She found that only five of the city’s 150 public statues are dedicated to women.

Including those five statues, 1.9% of New York City’s monuments and parks are named after women — fewer than one in 55.

It struck Lea and Pool that men’s names are woven into New York’s urban environment, making it nearly impossible not to drop them into even the most casual and quotidian of conversations — “I’m getting on the George Washington Bridge.” “There’s no traffic on the FDR today.” “I’ll meet you at Bryant Park.”

But to Lea, conceiving another single monument or park dedicated to one woman or even a group of women seemed like an empty gesture. Couldn’t we come up with a system that’s much more local and, at the same time, pervasive and grand, she thought? Lea wanted to honor the women whose invisible labor had helped shape the city’s micro-communities and neighborhoods, driven social change, and led movements.

She and Pool wanted to leave a narrative trace — in a city where transience is the only constant — of what came before. “There were people who were involved in the transformations of our neighborhoods, like Greenpoint, or defending those transformations, and most of them were women,” says Lea. So, rather than a single monument, Lea devised an initiative — the All Along Project — that is both easily deployable and replicable. She and her colleagues designed a system of sleek, streamlined markers, including sidewalk pavers, railing plaques, and free-standing signs, that are embedded with a QR code.

Accessing the code leads passersby to a website where they can read a biography of the woman being honored in that spot, as well as connect to a map and interactive timeline that includes other honorees. In New York City, the markers can be embedded in the city’s Greenstreets — paved, vacant traffic islands and medians transformed by the City into green spaces filled with trees, shrubs, and groundcover — and Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) without interfering with access to nature and moments of respite. “[These areas] seem ripe for having another layer of significance,” says Lea. Lea and Pool have already been in talks with the New York City Department

LEA WANTED TO HONOR THE WOMEN WHOSE INVISIBLE LABOR HAD HELPED SHAPE THE CITY’S MICROCOMMUNITIES AND NEIGHBORHOODS, DRIVEN SOCIAL CHANGE, AND LED MOVEMENTS. FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 25

BUT LEA DOESN’T WANT TO DECIDE WHO, SPECIFICALLY, IS HONORED. “WE CAN PROVIDE THE TOOLKIT. I DON’T NEED TO BE THE AUTHOR EVERYWHERE,” SHE SAYS. “IT COULD BE A MODEL FOR ANY COMMUNITY THAT FEELS THEY NEED MORE REPRESENTATION.”

Lea’s system of pavers, plaques, and signs can be inserted into the City’s existing green infrastructure, such as the hundreds of Greenstreets in every borough that New Yorkers interact with every day. Many of these spaces — unnamed, underappreciated — can be transformed to tell the stories of women who have shaped their neighborhoods, elevating both in the process.

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of Transportation and the Parks Department, developers such as Two Trees and Lendlease, and major foundations about rolling out the project.

With the support of the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, they hope to soon install a yearlong pilot of All Along adjacent to McCarren Park, on the border of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods. They are also forming an advisory committee and a nominating committee to help research and choose the women who will be honored.

One of those women might be Sister Frances Kress, who, in the early 1980s, made it her mission to clean the polluted Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile tributary of the East River that forms a border between Brooklyn and Queens. In the 1800s, the waterway supported ships for commerce as well as clean water for swimming and wildlife. By the mid-20th century, surrounding refineries, factories, and wastewater plants had made it a toxic dumping ground.

As the Washington Post reported in September 1982, Kress, then a 67-year-old teacher, testified in Washington before the House Subcommittee on Water Resources, pleading with its members to save and strengthen the 1972 Clean Water Act. It could be Kress’s story that visitors come upon when they visit MASE Park, near the mouth of the creek. On the shortlist of potential women to include in the project are two influential Barnard alums: the leading suffragist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (Class of 1916), who 28

became the first Chinese woman to get a Ph.D. in economics, and Betsy Wade ’51, the first woman to edit the news at The New York Times.

But Lea doesn’t want to decide who, specifically, is honored. “We can provide the toolkit. I don’t need to be the author everywhere,” she says. “It could be a model for any community that feels they need more representation.”

The All Along Project isn’t a diversion from the ethos of Lea’s practice, which, she notes, takes on more pro bono work than her bookkeeper or husband would like. She is also a founding member and the treasurer of Design Advocates, a nonprofit network of design and architecture experts, launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, who pool their expertise and offer pro bono services to organizations and communities in need. “I’m interested in making the city a better place and being invested in the outcome of the world around me,” says Lea. “I think that architecture can really transform spaces; on a civic and institutional level, it can be transformative.”

Although Lea grew up in rural Pennsylvania with a homebuilder father and an interior decorator mother, she never considered a career in a design field. Lea was studying sociology and environmental science at Sarah Lawrence College when her twin sister encouraged her to try a summer career discovery program in architecture. Lea recalls realizing she had found her calling: “Oh, I love this; I could do

The All Along Project team will provide a toolkit for any community to deploy, including detailed instructions on how to install the markers, such as the sidewalk pavers shown here.

this forever,” she thought. “I like to draw, I like to make models, design things, but overall, I really love working with people a lot. I don’t want to be in a lab by myself. I’m a pretty social creature and also really enjoy collaboration.”

Lea was then diagnosed with cancer, forcing her to take a semester off her sophomore year. When she was well enough to return, she wondered what, exactly, she was returning to. An adviser encouraged her to transfer to Barnard, whose architecture program houses all the undergraduate architecture studies for Columbia University and its partner institutions. “The thing that I find most important about dealing with disappointment and disruption is how you’re moving on. It made me make a decision I might not have been brave enough to make otherwise,” she says. Following graduation, Lea worked for the architect Celia Imrey and then a residential architecture firm in Queens before returning to 116th Street to earn her Master of Architecture at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

After working for various New York-based architecture firms for a decade, Lea decided to open her own studio. Her two children were young, and she was able to be at home while slowly building her practice (and teaching at the Pratt Institute and Cooper Union). Now, she and her four colleagues (the studio will soon add another couple of designers)

manage a range of projects, including a new railroad station in Pennsylvania, a computer center and other improvements to St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and a nonprofit campus, also in Pennsylvania, for people struggling with addiction and behavioral challenges.

“We like to solve the problem. A new project has to hit two of three marks: make money, a client we really want to work with, or a typology we really want to explore,” says Lea. In a field that is known for its long, grueling hours, Lea prioritizes a work-life balance. She lives a block away from her studio and makes time to take her kids to activities like soccer and hockey practice. Lea also gives her team flexibility and the breathing room to live their lives — a privilege she wasn’t always granted at other firms but one she says is as deeply important as the work they do.

She says her staff jokes with her that she’s recognized everywhere they go in Greenpoint, which is even more true for All Along co-founder Jane Pool, she notes. Maybe one day a sign will mark their contributions to the neighborhood.

But for Lea, the collaborative process is what undergirds the project. “The power is not the project itself,” says Lea, “but the community deployment of the project. I think it’s nice for people to be able to self-recognize. And I think that that is a map and marker of a history. It’s a nice record, it leaves a good trace.” B

A subtle railing plaque with a QR code will lead passersby to a website that describes the All Along Project’s mission, provides a biography of the woman being honored in that spot, and connects to a map of other monuments.

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S K A T I N G

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B Y

D E S I G N

PHOTOS (LEFT) BY JOHN MEHRING

Architect and pro skateboarder Alexis Sablone ’08 brings both skills to her international projects

One evening in late April, a figure dressed in black careened down the glowing white ramp of the Guggenheim’s six-story structure. Devoid of the usual suspects — the famous artworks, the throngs of visitors — the museum gave pro skateboarder Alexis Sablone ’08 the green light to do what would

by Nicole Anderson ’12JRN usually be verboten.

Just a few days before Converse’s launch party for Sablone’s new AS-1 Pro sneaker took place in the museum’s rotunda, the Olympian and seven-time X Games medalist skated down Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling, quarter-mile-long ramp. Even for an athlete who has competed professionally for over two decades on some of the most challenging street courses, it was nonetheless, she says, “a wild experience” like no other.

Sablone, who holds degrees in architecture from Barnard and MIT’s graduate studies program, has long explored the relationship between skateboarding and the built environment. She’s done so not only through competitive skateboarding but through a busy architectural practice that keeps getting busier. Several recent commissions have called on Sablone to reimagine the way public space can be utilized by both skateboarders and the local community — a task that is well within her wheelhouse.

The first of these commissions happened in 2018 when Sablone designed Lady in the Square, a surrealist-looking sculpture at the center of Värnhemstorget, a public plaza in Malmö, Sweden. Inspired by the unique geometries of the face, Sablone translated those forms into a skateable work of art that removed the barriers between different user groups within the public realm: “So much of skateboarding is about exploring the city and finding things to skate that aren’t necessarily meant for skateboarding. That’s a big part of skateboarding culture.”

The project, says Sablone, puts forth a model that doesn’t really exist in the United States. “It’s in a public plaza, but it’s not a skate park; it’s sculptural but clearly skateable,” she says. “The Malmö project started to open up these other opportunities because people saw that it was possible and a different approach to making skateable spaces.”

A few years later, right before the pandemic, Sablone got a call from Paul King, one of the founding board members of Skate Essex, a nonprofit working to promote skateboarding in northern New Jersey. The organization was looking to update a favorite local DIY skating spot in Montclair, N.J. He asked Sablone if she would be interested in designing permanent metal and concrete sculptures to replace the existing wooden ramps. Sablone, who grew up in the 1990s with few designated places for skating, knows all too well why these DIY spaces are meaningful. She said yes to King and got to work.

“For me, the challenge was to make objects that were versatile and fun

for a range of ages and skill sets but that didn’t immediately read as just a state park,” she says. “I wanted to make each object kind of unique and open to interpretation.”

This past spring, Candy Courts, a series of brightly colored, skateable sculptures located on a former tennis court, opened to the public. The project, Sablone explains, was a real community effort and one that wouldn’t have happened if not for the young people involved. “It’s a great group of kids who are really outspoken and motivated to stand up for their spaces, and they really went above and beyond to speak to people in the city to fight for [their DIY space].”

Much of Sablone’s work centers around supporting the local skateboarding community. In 2022, she opened up a skate shop, Plush, with friend and fellow pro skateboarder Trevor Thompson, near her hometown in New Haven, Connecticut, in which she designed — and built much herself — the bright, airy interior. Inside, the white walls are lined with skateboards, clothing, and footwear, including the sneakers Sablone designed for Converse. The retail space, which hosts events out on the street, has also become a hub for local skateboarders.

The architect has several other projects coming down the pike, including a sculptural piece in marble made for an esplanade in Lisbon and a largescale installation, Sun Seed, for a new skate park in Richmond, Virginia. And through a joint fellowship at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Sablone has been teaching a class called Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space.

Even with so many design projects underway, she always makes time for skateboarding and recently got back from skate trips in Shanghai and Montreal.

Last year, she was named the new head coach for the U.S. women’s skateboarding team in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

For Sablone, good design has a similar attitude, and outcome, to skateboarding. “Something like the Guggenheim breaks all these rules,” she observes in the short film AS-1, created in partnership with the Guggenheim and Converse. “[It] kind of epitomizes what an architect sets out to do, like actually transform the way people move through and experience space. That’s exactly what skateboarding does. It changes the way you see everything around you. And suddenly there’s this new imaginative potential that wasn’t there before.”

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G U G G E N H E I M

C O N V E R S E

Sablone’s AS-1 Pro is one of four female/non-cis male signature skateboarding shoes available today and the only one of its kind from Converse. Sablone took inspiration from Converse basketball and court silhouettes of the ’80s and skateboard silhouettes of the ’90s, combining them to make the brand’s only signature skateboarding cupsole shoe, which offers more support and protection for skateboarding.

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ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF ALEXIS SABLONE EXCEPT WHERE NOTED; PHOTO COURTESY OF CONVERSE

This past May, Alexis Sablone’s signature AS-1 Pro shoe for Converse had its global debut. “Converse allowed me to design the entire shoe from the ground up,” says Sablone. For the launch party at the Guggenheim in New York City, Sablone created an art installation in the museum’s rotunda that housed a product display and a selection of her drawings that showed her creative process.

L I S B O N

Sablone is working on a skateable, sculptural element for a public plaza in Lisbon, Portugal. The piece will be carved from Lioz Abancado stone, a lilac-toned veined marble that the city is particularly well known for and was used to construct the city’s Monastery of Jerónimos and Tower of Belém.

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 33

M A L M O

Sablone designed a sculpture, titled Lady in the Square, for a public plaza in Malmö, Sweden. “For the size of the city, there’s a ton of skaters, and there’s a long-standing relationship between the skaters and the city and the planners,” she says. “I see [the project] as a bit of a hybrid, where it was designed with skateboarding in mind but is also very much a part of the city and can be shared by other user groups.”

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C A N D Y

C O U R T S

PHOTO BY JORDAN GALIANO

The Candy Courts project, completed this past spring, is located on a former tennis court in Montclair, New Jersey. The organization Skate Essex received funding for a more permanent skateboarding space and tapped Sablone to design seven skateable sculptures. “I wanted to keep the lines of the courts and the idea of a recreational space,” Sablone says. “I’ve always been inspired by the design of playgrounds and thinking about skateable objects as basically objects for play.”

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 35

P L U S H

Over a year ago, Sablone opened a skate shop with friend and fellow pro skateboarder Trevor Thompson. “We grew up skateboarding together in New Haven, Connecticut, and wanted the skate community there to have a hub, since our own friendship, and a lot of our youth, was spent hanging around skate shops in the ’90s that are no longer there.” Sablone designed and built the shop much herself over a two-month period, transforming a previous dark space into a light-filled interior, complete with white-tiled columns, green marble floors, and arched recesses with glass bricks.

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Sablone won a competition to design a large-scale installation adjacent to a skate park at a community center in Richmond, Virginia. “There were various functional requirements, like it should provide shade and/ or seating and could also be skateable,” she says, adding that there is “a wavy track that physically links it to the skate park.” The project is set to begin construction this year.

S U N

S E E D FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 37

Your support on Giving Day, and every day, makes a difference.

On Wednesday, October 25, the entire Barnard community came together from near and far, during Columbia Giving Day 2023, to donate critical funds for the College’s extraordinary students.

The accomplishments of this amazing community demonstrate the power of your collective generosity.

All donations to Barnard for Giving Day go to the Barnard Annual Fund, which helps create opportunities for Barnard students by directly funding immediate priorities across campus, such as financial aid, Access Barnard, campus improvements, classroom materials, and support for every student activity, academic department, performance, lecture, and exhibition.

Thank you for participating in this amazing day.

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Noteworthy Connecting alumnae. Celebrating community.

Production of Richard III, 1963.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BARNARD COLLEGE ARCHIVES

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 39

Perspective

‘Girl in a Hurry’ Harriet Newman Cohen ’52 has lived many lives, and in her 10th decade, she’s launched a new chapter

What are the odds that a well-reputed celebrity divorce lawyer in New York would be smart, tough, cool, somewhat ruthless? Before I meet Harriet Newman Cohen ’52, I’m betting this is what she’s like. I am almost entirely wrong.

Cohen is indeed smart. But she is also warm, lively, an attentive listener with a knack for storytelling and a robust sense of humor that’s miles away from ruthless. When we meet on Zoom, she is chicly dressed, even though, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, she’s the only one in the office. One of Cohen’s talents is being prepared, adapting to moments as needed. When the pandemic arrived three years ago, she set about mastering Zoom and in 2021 opened a new law firm, Cohen Stine Kapoor LLC. She was 88.

Cohen says people marvel at her age unnecessarily. “They’re just impressed that I’ve been here,” she says with a chuckle.

The doyenne of family lawyers, Cohen sports an impressive résumé that includes being an author of New York’s equitable distribution law in the 1970s, president of the New York Women’s Bar Association, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Family Law Section of the New York State Bar Association. Cohen has consistently been ranked among the top women lawyers in the city and this year was named one of the “Notable Women in Law” by Crain’s New York Business.

Cohen embraces the accolades but says she was fortunate in that the trajectory of her career rode the currents of history. A graduate of Barnard’s Class of 1952, she credits the College with instilling endurance and self-confidence — to a point.

“At that time, Barnard expected us to be highly, profoundly educated so that we could raise important men, important children,” she says. Marriage was a given, and Cohen, who entered college at 16, tied the knot right after she graduated.

“Many of my girlfriends couldn’t come to my wedding because they all got married the same day!” she says with a laugh.

At Barnard, Cohen majored in Latin and Greek and minored in music and went on to earn a graduate degree in Latin from Bryn Mawr. Her plan was to become a professor of classics. “Our dean at Barnard was so special — she said, ‘Girls, you can do it all!’” says Cohen. “She was our inspiration.” An even bigger, lasting inspiration was Cohen’s mother. When Harriet was growing up in Rhode Island, a hurricane kept many children home from kindergarten one day. “My mother gave me the choice to go to school,” says Cohen. “I went.” She was the only child 40

PHOTO BY TOM STOELKER

by Erin Aubry Kaplan

who did; Cohen recalls fondly how she and a teacher sat together at a child’s desk, learning cursive. “I was a girl in a hurry,” she recalls.

After getting married, Cohen had four daughters in quick succession. It was a good enough life, but she yearned for something bigger. “At dinner parties, men talked about very important topics. I wanted to talk about important topics,” she says. “Going to law school seemed the best way for me to get that voice and merge it with pro-woman sensibilities.”

Cohen went to Brooklyn Law School at 38 and graduated at 41. The day before she took her exams, her husband, a business owner, said goodbye. The divorce, which Cohen handled herself, was “very painful. I was ashamed, embarrassed when he left. He felt trapped, like life was passing him by.” But the divorce was amicable and, not surprisingly, beneficial for Cohen. Her ex put the title of the house in her name, and he got the business. “The business failed, but I still have the home,” she says. “I got the better deal.”

Cohen graduated from law school in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade. It was a pivotal time. “The country was changing,” she says. “Women were going out of the house; matrimonial law was changing. I found myself working, just out of law school, on the cutting edge of a brand-new equitable distribution law in New York.

It was fantastic.” It was the right time to be in family law, and being a woman with a Barnard degree was the right brand. “It opened all doors,” Cohen says of her alma mater.

Divorce is often assumed to be a crisis, but from the beginning Cohen saw it as improving the quality of lives — nobody, she says, should be made to stay in a situation that makes them unhappy or unfulfilled. The worst thing about divorces among the wealthy is not money — that tends to be prearranged — it’s betrayal, which Cohen admits is “very hard on people.” Forging personal relationships makes the process easier. Actor Laurence Fishburne, one of many celebrity clients, “picked me because of my name,” she says. “His mom’s name was Harriet!”

1974 was also the year Cohen met the man who became her second husband and true partner, a doctor named Arthur Feinberg. “Our courtship went on for nine years before I got married again,” she says. “Unlike in the ’50s, you could have relations outside of marriage with no stigma.” Over the years, Cohen has been at the forefront of breaking many stigmas and incorporating the resulting new marriage-and-family norms into her practice: gay marriage, surrogacy, sperm donors, two fathers or two mothers. “I’ve really been following the arc of history,” she says with more than a little wonder.

Cohen calls the new firm “my third life” — marriage and kids being the first, law school, a big career, and companionship the second. Though she’d headed her own law firm in various iterations since 1994, this one is different, a culmination of sorts. “I wanted to have a smaller, boutique firm,” she says. “It was time for mother/daughter partnering after so many men partnerships.” Two of her four daughters work with her: Martha Stine is a partner; Amy Cohen ’76 is the firm’s office manager (as well as a professional flutist). All of her kids, she notes proudly, are “big-time professionals.”

Two years into her latest endeavor, retirement is not on Cohen’s mind. Not that it ever was. “It’s the last thing I would ever do!” she exclaims. “There’s a whole new world every day, new adventures, new issues all the time. It’s so exciting.” As passionate as she still is about her career, she remains equally passionate about the second act, especially her “beautiful” second husband, Arthur, with whom she spent 32 years. He died in 2005 at the age of 82. From Cohen’s perspective, that’s young. And it’s getting younger. “90, 92, 93 is no longer longevity,” she muses.

“I’m looking at three figures.” She doesn’t have rote advice for success, but she does have a mantra: “Just keep working.” It certainly works for her. B FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 41

Q&Author

Sacred Wonder

Writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04 dives into the gifts of Audre Lorde, lessons from sea mammals, and the Barnard writing community Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04 has called herself a queer Black troublemaker, a Black feminist love evangelist, and a time traveler and space cadet. Critics have called the award-winning writer of narrative poetry and creative nonfiction “compassionate, inventive, and politically astute.”

Most recently, Gumbs was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry. In 2020, Gumbs published Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. The book, which won a prestigious 2022 Whiting Award, was a response, she says, to the profound grief she suffered upon her father’s death. All her saltwater tears led her to investigate what marine mammals can teach us.

“Undrowned,” says Gumbs, “is a ceremony for me to say, ‘Okay, everyone. I am a marine mammal apprentice. I am surrendering to learn whatever it is these mammals have to teach me. And I actually think maybe all of us have a lot to learn from them too.”

Gumbs is now at work on a biography of iconic writer, feminist, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde. She invites her readers on a journey of discovery into the very heart and power of this self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.”

Why is Audre Lorde someone you’ve taken such profound interest in?

I first learned about Audre Lorde when I was in high school, attending a weekly writing workshop for young women at Charis Books and More, the oldest feminist bookstore in the 42

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

by Marie DeNoia Aronsohn

Southeast. As soon as I read Audre Lorde’s poetry I knew I needed her. I could feel her open a door for me and more importantly opening a door in me, toward being my freest self.

Writing this biography is a practice of gratitude. It is also a process of self-love because every part of who I am has been supported, nurtured, and made possible by Audre Lorde’s work in the world and the work her writing has done for my own life as a queer Black feminist.

What do you want readers to grasp from your writing on her?

My deepest wish is that the people who read this biography will feel like they got to sit with Audre. I hope people feel like they got to be with her in vulnerable ways and to connect to who she was as a person, not just an icon or a historical figure but as a vulnerable disabled child, a teenager in the throes of so many crushes, a daughter who doesn’t know how to grieve her father, a mother wondering how to raise children in a feminist way, a terrified and determined cancer survivor, and more.

So actually, it’s less that I want people to grasp something about Audre Lorde than that I want people to open their hearts and find the place where their wondering and tender life experiences meet hers. And at the same time I want the wondering this book opens up to be huge. Because Audre Lorde wondered deeply and broadly and researched everything from the structure of the planet to the cosmos. I think the scale of the life of this poet is the scale of the planet. But I want you to feel so close to Audre, so related to her life experiences that you realize that — spoiler alert — the scale of your life is also the scale of this planet. And what if you loved yourself like that? Audre did.

Are you still learning from marine mammals?

Oh yes. I don’t think that will ever stop. And even if I could ignore the fact that my ancestors cultivated lifelong relationships with marine animals, no one will ever stop sending me links and photos and facts about marine mammals on social media. Every day my inbox is full of marine mammal information that makes me wonder even more. That’s one of the great gifts of sharing a heartfelt writing process — people really know what you care about, and they send it your way!

When you were an undergraduate, how did you envision your writing life?

I didn’t take any creative writing classes as an undergrad, but I was joyfully immersed in a community of brilliant and brave poets of color at Barnard and Columbia. I had this feeling that if I followed what interested and inspired me and continued to collaborate with curious people, there would always be something to write about, and there would also be some way to share it with the communities who needed it. And I let myself believe that without knowing what form it would take. And I was right.

What message would you share with aspiring writers at Barnard?

Oh you lucky Barnard writers! You are surrounded by the energy and legacy of so many phenomenal and brave writers. I can’t even list them all here. But the fact that Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Edwidge Danticat, and so many others went to Barnard was a big part of my desire to put myself between those Barnard gates. I would say listen to yourself. And trust yourself. And the big question for you is, What are the practices that allow you to listen to yourself most deeply? What are the practices that support you to trust yourself more than you trusted yourself yesterday?

Back to Audre. What have you found surprising about her?

I will be curious about Audre Lorde forever. I could answer this question with a million small wonders. But here is one: Did you know Audre Lorde hated tomato sauce? Despised it.

To her it looked like congealed blood. That’s one of those things that I will always wonder about. What was that about for her? And I myself have never been able to tolerate ketchup. B FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 43

From the AABC President

My First Few Months Dear Wonderful, Bold, Beautiful Barnard Alumnae Family: How are you doing? With just a few months left in 2023, are you excited to end the year strong? Or waiting for a new start in 2024?

My wish for you is to make the most of today, this time, this moment. I would love to visit with you over coffee or tea and reminisce and recognize all our victories and accomplishments, as well as the challenges. Reflection and gratitude are ways that I have found to keep expectations, comparisons, and fears on the back burner. So, take a minute for yourself — close your eyes and recollect your brilliant achievements, your magical milestones, and your abundant relationships that comprise this journey called life, and please also remember that we are

#Barnard!

In the first few months of my term, I’ve had the great pleasure of welcoming Barnard’s ninth president, Laura Rosenbury, the new Barnard College Class of 2027, and Columbia University’s 20th president, Minouche Shafik.

It’s a wonderful time to be part of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College — we want to learn about what you are doing, we want to celebrate with you, and we want to connect you with fellow alums, current students, and the worldwide Barnard community.

Check out all the ways you can get involved at our.barnard.edu.

Great organizations need resources to keep them great, and Barnard is at the pinnacle of greatness! We had an overwhelmingly positive response on Giving Day — thank you for doing your part to keep Barnard great. Participation matters immensely, so if you haven’t done so already, I sincerely hope that you will join me in making a gift to Barnard. Please know that I would never ask you to do something that I and the members of the AABC Board of Directors haven’t done ourselves.

Make your gift today at barnard.edu/gift.

Looking forward to seeing you all in person or online. Thank you for being part of this amazing Barnard community — we are #BetterTogether! I wish you a spectacular rest of the year, one that is filled with joy, health, and fun!

With gratitude and hugs,

Sooji Park ’90 AABC President, Alumnae Trustee

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A Summer of Student Send-offs!

The Barnard community meets and welcomes its newest members.

This summer, Barnard alumnae, parents, students, and friends gathered in 14 cities around the world to give a warm (pun intended!) “hello” and “bon voyage” to members of the Class of 2027 and incoming transfer students as they got ready to head to Morningside Heights for their first semester at Barnard.

From Boston to California to Hong Kong, Barnard families from across generations shared stories, advice, and laughs.

“It was truly special to see everyone,” says Edna Wong ’88, president of the Barnard Club of Hong Kong, “ranging from new students, current students, parents, and alumnae, so eager and enthusiastic about being part of the Barnard community. We all had a wonderful time sharing our experiences, learning from others, and helping each other.”

The summer send-off events are a cherished annual tradition that help to connect those away from campus while also showing new students that they are now part of a tightknit Barnard community wherever they call home. Thank you to the hosts of these wonderful get-togethers and to those who showed up to see off our newest community members in true Barnard spirit.

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Grab the Torch, Volunteer at Barnard

Wherever life takes you, opportunities abound to get involved with the Barnard community.

Each year, more than a thousand Barnard alumnae volunteer for Barnard. Whether it’s planning an event, serving as admissions representatives, helping advance a student’s career, connecting with classmates around fundraising, or anything in between, our global community of graduates helps the College adapt and thrive thanks to their dedication and enthusiasm.

Supporting and staying active with Barnard is a one-off endeavor for some and a year-round activity for others. At any level of involvement, input and engagement from alumnae on campus and beyond the gates is vital. There are so many opportunities to volunteer around the College and to make new friends and connections while you’re at it.

SHAPE THE FUTURE -> VOLUNTEER WITH ADMISSIONS Barnard is unique in higher education, and your perspective as a graduate is unique to the admissions process. Barnard Alumnae Admissions Representatives (BAARs) play a crucial role in increasing Barnard’s visibility and spreading the word about the College to exceptional students worldwide. Opportunities include: • representing Barnard at college fairs • attending prospective and admitted student gatherings • participating in Barnard Buddies, which pairs admitted students with an alum Learn more: BAAR@barnard.edu “I loved my experience at Barnard, and I stay involved because I hope to make the experience fruitful for others in the community.” —Gabrielle Paciencia ’19

Barnard’s Office of Community Engagement and Inclusion (CEI) is charged with fostering an ecosystem of civic and community engagement for the College, community leaders, and stakeholders across Harlem and New York City by networking around topics including: • environmental justice • arts and culture • housing and food insecurity • immigration • senior adults • public health Learn more: cei@barnard.edu 46

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LIAM EISENBERG

CONNECT TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD -> VOLUNTEER WITH CEI

TAKE THE LEAD -> VOLUNTEER WITH ATHENA The Athena Center for Leadership is a hub for changemakers at Barnard. Their mission is to prepare students to lead change today and throughout their lives. The Center is led by alumna Umbreen Bhatti ’00, and alums are critical to its success.

Opportunities include: • hosting a salon, reception, or conversation at your workplace • joining the Athena Alum Network to connect with current Athena students • volunteering to help at the Athena Film Festival Learn more: athenacenter@barnard.edu

CHANGE A CAREER > VOLUNTEER WITH BEYOND BARNARD One of the best aspects of the Barnard student experience is learning firsthand from the vast network of alum professionals across industries and around the globe. Opportunities include: • joining Barnard Connect, an online mentoring platform • becoming a Mentor-in-Residence • being a guest speaker for a Career Insights event • working with Beyond Barnard to recruit and employ Barnard students Learn more: beyondbarnard@barnard.edu

BUILD THE COMMUNITY -> VOLUNTEER WITH DEVELOPMENT/ ALUMNAE RELATIONS The Development and Alumnae Relations team fosters a community of Barnard graduates, encouraging them to come together, give back to Barnard, and pay it forward to current students by providing their time, collective brainpower, and donations to the College. Opportunities include: • joining a committee of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College • connecting with classmates about the Barnard Annual Fund as a Class Agent • helping out with a Regional Club in your area • planning your class Reunion Learn more: alumnaerelations@barnard.edu “I volunteer because I love meeting Barnard women of all classes — I so value the intergenerational friendships they offer with that unique spark of Barnard brilliance.”

—Elisabeth Garret ’05

“I engage with and support Barnard to give back to an institution that has afforded me incredible opportunities to learn, gain lifelong friends, and develop skills that have positively shaped my life.” —Michelle Jung ’91

Learn about all of these opportunities — and more — at our. barnard.edu/volunteeropportunities.

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 47

Sources

The Future Is

Bright Barnard’s Young Alums Are Leading the Way

Young alums are an integral part of the Barnard alum community. They have that same fierce Barnard spirit we all share but are closely connected to current students and bring a vital perspective to giving back that speaks directly to today’s student experience. They make gifts to Barnard, volunteer to mentor students, plan and attend Barnard events, and touch every corner of the Barnard community — they are dedicated to the College and help to identify and address the most pressing needs of current students.

As our community continues to grow, adapt, and thrive, our amazing group of young alums sets an inspiring example for the generations of Barnard alums that follow them. Together, we are fostering a culture of mutual support that will serve students for years to come.

“Knowing that the next generation of brilliant leaders will come through Barnard motivates me to donate.”

Phanésia Pharel ’21

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“Barnard is the gift that keeps on giving. I am grateful for my time at Barnard and all of the experiences I’ve been fortunate enough to have as a student and now as an alum. Giving to Barnard means supporting future generations of Barnard women, ensuring that they are able to have access to an incredible and rewarding education at an all-women’s institution, just as I had. Additionally, I’m acutely aware of the disparities in endowments between women’s colleges and their counterparts and know that giving to Barnard is crucial to ensuring the continued growth and success of the community we treasure.”

Lili Cohen ’19

“I’m motivated to ensure Barnard students have the resources and networks they need to have successful careers after college.”

Jessica Carroccio ’13

“I want to empower young women and give them access to a Barnard education, and alum donations play a huge part in that. Even though I graduated only recently, I try to help however I can. Every dollar counts!”

Rafaella Fontana Ferreira ’22

“I give to Barnard so I can help others have the same transformative experience that I had.”

Natasha Lerner ’21

“Barnard was the best possible college experience I could have asked for. It allowed me to discover parts of my identity I never realized were so important to me, hone skills that are instrumental to me now in my field, and develop friendships that mean the world to me. I give back to Barnard not just out of gratitude for everything Barnard has done for me but because I recognize how important alum involvement is in making Barnard the inclusive and supportive community I have grown to love, and to preserve that community for future generations of Barnard students and alums.”

Julia Betancourt ’21

“I am motivated to give to Barnard because, as a student, I received significant financial aid from the College. Additionally, Barnard punches above its weight with the funds we do have. Every dollar is used strategically to help individuals and the institution thrive.”

Alexa Easter ’23

“Making sure low-income students have the resources to level the playing field motivates me to give back to Barnard. As a first-generation, low-income student at Barnard, I had a fair shot at education through financial aid and resources designed for people like me. It only makes sense to give back to a community that has given me so much.”

Kashaf Doha ’19

“Going to Barnard was an absolutely transformative experience for me, both academically and personally. Barnard empowered me to explore big questions confidently and cultivate lifelong friendships. I give back what I can to Barnard out of deep gratitude and in support of current and future students.”

Alexandra Gluckman ’20

“I give because there is only one Barnard. I know that my contribution, regardless of the size, will play a vital role in turning the extraordinary, once-in-alifetime experience I had into a reality for countless remarkable women who will also choose to make Barnard their home.”

Leila Baadarani ’22

“As someone who wouldn't have been able to afford Barnard without financial aid, I want to give other students the opportunity to obtain a world-class education.”

Rina Factor ’21

“I am motivated to give to Barnard to ensure that the College can continue to provide the best possible education to students from all backgrounds and all financial circumstances.

Barnard is the beacon of excellence it is because of its ability to accept students through its need-blind policy.”

Toby Milstein Schulman ’14

Join

these incredible young alums in supporting Barnard.

Make a gift: barnard.edu/gift Get involved: our.barnard.edu/volunteer

FALL 2022 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 55

Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023)

The ‘beloved and brilliant’ professor and poet made an indelible mark on students and the literary community

by Catherine Barnett I’m writing this brief tribute to Saskia Hamilton a month before I will empty out her office, 401C Barnard Hall, which is itself a vivid portrait: thousands of books, Dutch tea, a reproduction of the Madonna del Parto, file cabinets stuffed with correspondence from literary luminaries, photos of her son. Saskia’s scholarship, which has made an inestimable contribution to the life of American letters, is shelved there, too, not far from her three collections of poetry. Her fourth, All Souls, was released in early September of this year.

Saskia’s generosity to other artists, students, scholars, and colleagues was matched by a work ethic seeded in kindness. She did not say no. I, perhaps like many of you reading this now, was often a recipient of this generosity, as are her readers, who encounter a body of work that acts as a “gateway to the place that is unreachable,” as she writes in “Slow Train.”

Saskia’s poems, which have earned her fellowships, accolades, and awards, are filled with images of landscapes both known and unknowable, with allusions drawn from her reading and from the erudite conversations she both listened to and engaged in with quiet wit and acumen. Her syntax unfolds with such music it approaches music even as it tracks the mind’s leaps and sudden fleeting 80

apprehensions.

Because I shared Saskia’s office, I know firsthand how beloved she was by her colleagues. If I left the door open, a good proportion of the English Department would come knocking to say hello.

In her 21 years at Barnard, Saskia taught poetry workshops and lectured on the history of lyric poetry and the art of the letter. In her last five years, she served as a vice provost, helping to guide the College through the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. She directed the Women Poets at Barnard reading series, which introduced hundreds of Barnard students to important contemporary poets. It was Saskia’s idea to have students introduce the guest readers; she helped students shape their introductions into homages that encouraged them to find their own voices.

To avoid burdening Saskia as she grew sicker, sometimes her students would send me letters they hoped would make it to Saskia at moments of relative ease. In one, Kap Taylor CC’18, a former student of Saskia’s, wrote, “I am not 18 anymore, and you are no longer my beloved brilliant professor. You are still beloved and brilliant, just no longer my prof. You’re really everyone’s now. …”

In 2020, just a few months before Saskia was diagnosed with cancer, I interviewed her for this magazine. We spoke about her newly published book, The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle. The interview conveys Saskia’s integrity and sensitive ethics; it also outlines how she got from being a Kenyon English major to becoming one of the country’s most respected poets and editors.

Though examples of Saskia’s particular brilliance are not hard to find — you can come across them in her scholarship, poems, and the folders of notes I’ll soon be trying to organize for the archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library — the interview makes them abundantly clear. “What moves you most in these letters?” I asked. Her answer: “Where is it that Yeats says that ‘words alone are certain good’?

What moves me most in these letters [is the] clarity of expression set alongside the contradictions of feelings.”

It has been a great fortune for those of us here at Barnard who knew Saskia and for those of us from elsewhere — from her punk rock bandmates in D.C. to her Lannan Foundation co-workers — to be illuminated by her inimitable presence and song, which endure. “We wake from sleep to sleep,” she writes in All Souls, “[while] those emperors of speed, the swifts, stir in the south and make their way, sleeping above us, in the air.” B

PHOTO BY JACQUELINE MIA FOSTER

Tribute

In Memoriam 1933 Hortense Feldman Mound 12/27/20 1942 Elizabeth Zimmerschied Sweeney 5/28/11 1945 Eleanor Webber Gibson 1/2/19

Ingrid Otten McCauley 8/9/23

Evelyn Goldstein Gelman 6/27/23

1954 Selma Gruenstein Miller 10/5/21

Stephanie Klein Kaufman 9/9/23

1955 Annette Wilbois Coleman 7/10/23

1960 Joan Elizabeth Larkin 3/23/23

Rita Cademartori Lagomarsino 5/6/21

1962 Penelope A. White Kilburn 8/20/23

Elizabeth Kaufman Mansky 10/4/22

Susan Migden Socolow 7/21/23

Sylvia J. Simmons Prozan 8/15/23

H. Barbara Kallman Weinberg 8/25/23

1948 Elinor C. Cahill Georgopulo 8/13/23

1956 Harriet Harwood 6/10/20

1963 Harriet M. Hoctor Groeschel 9/11/23

1950 Margarida Pyles West 5/25/23

Judith Vohr Niles 4/21/23

1966 Frances Allou Gershwin 5/26/23

1946 Gemma Fastiggi 9/26/23 1947 Barbara Bates Guinee 7/19/23

1953 Julia Elizabeth Lovett Ashbey 7/24/23 J. Nancy Goldan Clark 6/13/14 Sonya Irene Livshin Gordon 8/23/23 Mary Ann McNeil Henderson 8/12/23

Lucille Helen Rosin Silverstein 3/27/23 1958 Phyllis Cowan Lundberg 7/6/23 Rochelle Wall McNamara Date unverified 1959 Suzanne B. Waller Dudley 7/1/23

1968 Georgia Schwimmer 12/23/22 1978 Miriam Susan Kaye Fleisher 8/9/23 1992 Lisa Demairo DeLange 7/22/23

FALL 2023 | BARNARD MAGAZINE 81

Last Word

by Rabbi Beth Lieberman ’84 I took the course The Bible and the Literary Imagination in the fall semester of my senior year at Barnard. For an English major drawn to the mysteries of how God moves in the world — and perhaps, too, to the stories of kings, queens, and prophets — the prospect of exploring this vast collection of texts that had been composed over the span of thousands of years, in multiple genres, geographical regions, and societies, felt exciting.

The Bible’s scope and influence was astounding to me. There was way more material than we could ever hope to cover in one semester. As novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote in a 2011 New York Times article, “The Bible is the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know.”

Along with the uplifting teachings (that we are all created in God’s image, required to treat others with dignity, and expected to be responsible stewards of the Earth), there are other puzzling and profoundly disturbing messages. No wonder these ancient writings have been used over the centuries to elevate us morally as well as to justify the worst of human behavior. Challenges abound for those brave readers who choose to grapple with this text. I was hooked.

Fast-forward 20 years. I built a career as a book editor, then paired it with study for the rabbinate. As a rabbi, I interpret the verse from Proverbs 3:18, “[Wisdom] is a Tree of Life to those who hold on to it,” to mean that studying the Bible is a path by which we can both embrace and wrestle with tradition. I teach that doing so is central to every generation.

One of my most enduring challenges is the exclusively male designations for the God of Israel used by almost every major English-language translation of the Hebrew Bible: the Lord God of history, He who took us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, He whose presence fills the Earth, and so forth.

According to classical as well as modern Jewish religious thought and scholarship, God’s gender has never been male. But this knowledge has been obscured by the conventions of English language usage and patriarchal frameworks of seeing the world.

Fortunately, as society changes, so does language. At this moment, lexicographers, linguists, and literary scholars by and large agree that the male is a false generic. “He” is no longer acceptable in formal writing as a generic pronoun, and “mankind” is no longer acceptable as a universal noun. In English, which contains gender-neutral pronouns, there is no way to justify this method of translating our texts anymore.

I recently served as literary editor and a revising translator of an adapted English-language translation of the Hebrew Bible, a translation whose stated mission was to modernize the text for the next generation. One of the most delightful aspects of this project (for me) was rendering the God language gender neutral.

While this renewing of the text doesn’t eliminate some of its difficulties, at least readers of this edition will no longer have to 82

filter Divine wisdom through an exclusively male lens. Now, if we choose to listen, we can hear “a voice of slender silence” as poet and liturgist Marcia Falk renders I Kings 19:12 — allowing for a more nuanced awareness of Divine presence.

Will it change centuries of problematic texts and human behavior? No, but embracing the Bible with a fresh perspective offers us the hope of building a more equitable future. B Rabbi Beth Lieberman ’84 is the founder of Textish. She served as literary editor and a revising translator of the JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition (JPS/Sefaria, 2023).

ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL WEARING

A Genderless God

BARNARD REUNION MAY 30-JUNE 1, 2024 REUNION.BARNARD.EDU

SAVE THE DATE! This spring, generations of Barnard graduates from around the world will gather on campus for a weekend of events filled with learning, conversation, and tons of fun.

Mark your calendar now and get ready to make some memories at this magical celebration!

WANT TO HELP YOUR CLASS PLAN REUNION? If you are celebrating a milestone anniversary in 2024 (class years ending in 4 and 9, along with the Class of 2023) and you are interested in getting more involved in the Reunion planning process, please call 646.745.8314 or email reunion@barnard.edu.