Barnard Magazine Summer 2023

BARNARD.EDU/GIVING-DAY

save the date Giving Day 2023 is October 25

Are you ready for Giving Day 2023? We definitely are! On Wednesday, October 25, Barnard will compete against Columbia University’s other schools and programs for 24 hours to earn challenge funds and achieve our primary goal — to support the Barnard community by having our most successful Giving Day yet!

Giving Day last year was one for the books. If the entire community joins together again this year — and brings the Giving Day spirit Barnard is known for — we can reach even higher.

Your participation, by donating any amount, encouraging your friends and classmates to give, and sharing your inspiring Barnard stories on social media, will help the College earn additional challenge funds to support financial aid, direct-to-student relief funds, campus improvements, classroom materials, and so much more.

Mark your calendars, set your alarms, and get ready for Giving Day!

To learn more about Giving Day 2023, and how you can help, contact annualgiving@barnard.edu

Features

16 Nostalgia and Optimism at Reunion Barnard alumnae gather to reconnect and reminisce

by Mary Cunningham

20 An Alumnae Awardee Check-In Young Alumna Award winners fulfill their early promise

by Merri Rosenberg ’78

22 A Milestone Year for the Writing Fellows Program

Erica Mann Jong ’63, Anna Quindlen ’74, and alumnae from many generations came together to celebrate Barnard’s successful peer-to-peer writing program

by Preetica Pooni

28 The SGA, Then and Today Archival history shows the power and potential of the SGA at Barnard by Stephanie Rodriguez

Departments

5 Dispatches

Commencement 2023 Headlines | Barnard-Columbia Chorus in Poland; Two Barnardians Win Rome Prize

9 Discourses Faculty Focus: Ellen McLaughlin Read Watch Listen | Books by Barnard Authors; Audiobook Alumnae; On the Road With Edie Carey; “Justice: A New Musical”

31 Noteworthy

AABC Pages: From the AABC President | Alumnae Awardees

Alumnae Adventures: Rachel Rinaldo ’94 Class Notes

Alumna Profile: Kathleen Noonan ’89

Sources | Class Agents at the Grassroots Obituary | Rebecca Acres ’83 In Memoriam

Last Word: Helen J. Doyle ’84

On the Cover

Ellen McLaughlin — playwright, actor, and adjunct associate professor in Barnard’s English Department — will portray King Lear in the classic tragedy this summer in Boulder, Colorado (page 10).

Photo by Jennifer Koskinen/Colorado Shakespeare Festival.

Back Cover

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, 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

Summer 2023, Vol. CXII, No. 3 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

24 A Two-Way Street Alumnae-student duos thrive through Beyond Mentoring by Jill Grant ’05

Photo by Carrie Glasser

Barnard Magazine will be back in print this fall.

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

Honoring the Class of 2023

The Barnard community gathered at Radio City Music Hall to cheer on the graduating seniors

On Wednesday, May 17, the College celebrated more than 760 graduates at the 131st Commencement ceremony.

Emmy Award-winning writer, creator, producer, and actor Lena Waithe delivered a rousing Commencement speech about balancing successes with failures.

“Here’s what I know to be true: In your life, you will know success and you will know failure,” said Waithe. “They are both equally important to your growth as a human being. It’s called balance — do not chase one while trying to run away from the other. You must embrace both, with open arms.”

The College awarded its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, to Waithe and three other luminaries: Lynsey Addario, a career photojournalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has covered conflict, humanitarian crises, and women’s issues around the Middle East and Africa; María Magdalena CamposPons, whose work in photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video can be viewed in over 30 permanent museum collections worldwide; and Loretta J. Ross, professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

President Sian Leah Beilock told the graduates, “You are entering the world at a fascinating moment. And it’s at the exact moment so many critical fights are being waged: on climate change, freedom of expression, on the future of work, on diversity. There is an enormous leadership gap to step into. If you feel overwhelmed — or have that dreaded feeling you may not belong — remind yourself that [this] feeling is normal. We all go through it.”

President Beilock presented Myesha Choudhury ’23 with the Frank Gilbert Bryson Prize, an award voted on by classmates to the senior who contributed to Barnard the most over four years. And Sharmie Azurel ’23 and Ainsley Walker ’23 shared the Alicia L. Lawrence Memorial Award, which “honors a student who has made significant contributions to the College and who exemplifies Alicia’s values and honors her memory by leading with light and strength.”

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Linda A. Bell applauded the Class of 2023 on behalf of Barnard’s faculty. Senior Class President Myesha Choudhury ’23 gave the “Charge to the Class of 2023” speech. Frances “Fritzie” Schwentker ’23 presented academic reflections, and Victoria Cadostin ’23 shared the senior experience.

Cheryl Glicker Milstein ’82, P’14, Chair of the Barnard Board of Trustees, welcomed the graduates into a supportive alumnae community that is nearly 40,000 strong. “That incredible Barnard legacy — the same one that convinced you to apply — now belongs to you, too. You are our ambassadors,” said Glicker Milstein. “You are ‘Barnard Ready’ to take on the world.” B

Barnard-Columbia Chorus Performs

Polish Exchange Concert

Ana Victoria Serna ’25 shares her experience

Ana Victoria Serna spent much of her youth in music competitions for piano and honing her alto voice for the opera. Today, she’s majoring in history and in women, gender, and sexuality studies. But she did find a musical home on campus through the Barnard-Columbia Chorus, which is open to alums, staff, faculty, and students. “I really like the diversity; it’s all different kinds of people,” she says.

The group recently completed an exchange with the choir of Gdynia Maritime University in Gdynia, Poland. The Polish choir visited Barnard the week of April 17 for a joint concert, and at the start of the summer, 40 members of the American group traveled to Poland. There, they performed a concert with a repertoire that included “Te Deum laudamus” by Antonín Dvořák and the “Missa Brevis” by Zoltán Kodály.

For Serna, who was already familiar with the works of Dvořák and Kodály, the trip was a revelation. She said that performing in the spaces the music was intended for opened a dimension she had not experienced before. Instead of a concert hall, the performances were performed at a medieval church as part of a Mass and before a solemn audience.

“I’m not a religious person myself, but it gives a lot of depth and understanding to the composer’s intention,” she says.

In choir practice during the weeks leading up to the concert, the group’s director, Professor Gail Archer (at left in photo above), explained the symbolism behind the music, from the organ music rising to symbolize Christ’s ascension to a crashing cluster of chords for the crucifixion.

“When you’re performing that with these huge Gothic churches,” says Serna, “it closes the bridge between reading music and making music.” —Tom Stoelker

Two From Barnard Win Rome Prize

This past spring, two members of the Barnard community were among the 36 American artists and scholars awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize bestowed by the American Academy in Rome.

Elif Batuman (below, left), adjunct associate professor of English, was recognized with the John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize in literature for her entry, “CAMINO REAL/THE SELIN NOVELS.”

“Selin” refers to Selin Karadağ — the protagonist of Batuman’s The Idiot, a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2018, and its sequel, Either/Or, published last year. The books follow fragments of Selin’s life from dips in Walden Pond to S&M parties in what The Atlantic calls “Batuman’s curious experiment in fiction.”

Mary Danisi ’17 (below, right), a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, received the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize in ancient studies for her entry “Rovings: Wool and the Ancient Ecology of a Cosmic Medium.” Her primary area of research addresses the materiality and aesthetics of ancient ritual practices. Her dissertation, “Weaving the Cosmos: Fillets and the Fabrication of the Sacred in Ancient Greece,” presents the first comprehensive analysis of the craft and function of handwoven bands in Greek cult, from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods.

Awardees of the Rome Prize receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s 11-acre campus in Rome. The Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony was held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York on April 24. The CEO of the American Academy in Rome, Mark Robbins, praised Batuman and the other recipients, saying, “This class of Rome Prize winners once again includes some of America’s most gifted scholars and artists.” —Tom Stoelker

PHOTO BY CARRIE GLASSER

King Ellen

How Barnard professor Ellen McLaughlin is spending her summer “vacation”

by Marie DeNoia Aronsohn

In theatrical circles, there’s a belief that by the time you’re old enough to understand King Lear in Shakespeare’s epic drama, you’re too old to play him. Lear is an old man, raging against time and the indignities and weaknesses of age. Ellen McLaughlin — award-winning playwright, stage actor, and adjunct associate professor in Barnard’s English Department — is neither old nor a man but has a unique understanding of the enigmatic character informed by her childhood and, especially, her mom.

McLaughlin’s mother went to graduate school when she was in her late 40s and got a Ph.D. at age 50. One of her mother’s academic papers focused on King Lear and made a lasting impression on McLaughlin: “My mother had dealt with mental illness all her adult life; it was an absolutely terrible problem for her and for all of us. Her thesis, which I think is fascinating, was that Lear is actually bipolar, which was something she knew too much about.”

This summer, McLaughlin is playing the complicated protagonist in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear. The role, notorious for being among Shakespeare’s most challenging for performers, requires memorizing long passages of complex dialogue and bringing to life a vastly conflicted character.

“Men [often first] play Lear when they’re too young to play it, because that’s the tradition in England,” explains McLaughlin. “You play it when you’re young so that when you get old enough to play the role, you can hang on to the words. It is

a lot to memorize.”

King Lear has haunted her since childhood, when her parents took her to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the classic tragedy. Specifically, the play features the violent blinding of one of the characters, which deeply upset McLaughlin as a child and disturbs her to this day.

“I must have been nine or 10, and the blinding of Gloucester was probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. It was totally traumatic. It is the worst thing that Shakespeare ever does to an audience,” she says.

In the play, King Lear demands that each of his daughters profess their love so he can gauge how to divide his kingdom; he plans to reign until his death while they and their husbands do the work of running the country. But Cordelia, his youngest and favorite child, will not participate. She loves him deeply but won’t make a game of it. The king, enraged and wounded, banishes her — one of several tragic mistakes that lead to catastrophe; the king is cast from his kingdom and ultimately loses his mind.

FROM CORDELIA TO LEAR

“Cordelia’s refusal is still one of the great moments of speaking truth to power in literature,” says McLaughlin. “I can’t think of anything that is quite on that level of somebody who says, ‘No, I’m not going to play this game. Even if it costs me my life.’

There’s no heroism like that that I can think of in literature. Everything else looks sort of shallow by comparison.”

Young Ellen was shocked — but also spellbound — by that very first production at the Arena theatre. “I remember sitting in the audience,” says McLaughlin, “and when the curtain calls happened, as the [actor who played] Cordelia was taking her bow, I saw the light hit her back, and I thought, ‘I’m going to play that part.’”

In her 20s, McLaughlin did appear in a production of King Lear as Cordelia; the experience was profound. She recalls the time when her father, a man who used crutches and a wheelchair due to physical challenges triggered by polio, made a solo trip across England to be in the audience.

Toward the end of the play, during a scene that always “undid” her, in which her “stage father” King Lear, now crippled, kneels to her as Cordelia, McLaughlin suddenly noticed that her father was there, in the front-row disabled seating. She was overwhelmed with emotion. “I was just awash with that recognition scene,” she says.

McLaughlin believes her time as Cordelia years ago will serve to deepen her portrayal of the king this summer. McLaughlin will play Lear as king, not queen, and without going to great lengths to conceal her gender.

“I’m hoping that at some point the audience will stop thinking about the fact that it’s a woman playing the part, and they’ll just watch an actor interpreting because that’s, of course, what people were doing during Shakespeare’s day [when women were not allowed to perform on stage],” says McLaughlin. “If I’m doing it properly, what I bring as an actor to the party is worth letting me have a whack at it. I’m terrified, but I am so excited by the challenge.”

TAKING THE STAGE TO THE PAGE

McLaughlin, an accomplished theater professional, is, by all accounts, more than up to the challenge. Her commitment to the role is a signature trait of her approach to her craft — on stage and in Barnard classrooms. She began teaching at the

College in 1995. As a playwright, McLaughlin brings her signature courage to the blank page.

“Writing is much harder than acting,” says McLaughlin. “Because you sit down, and you know that nine times out of 10, you’re going to fail. But in those rare moments when you really feel like you’re in touch with something bigger than yourself, and you’re actually able to articulate it, it’s exhilarating on a level that nothing else is. Those are rare, but they do come, and that’s what keeps you doing it.”

She is bound to tap that same drive and determination as she faces down the daunting work of crafting her own version of King Lear to present to audiences at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. The Bard’s enduring drama continues to capture the current imagination. A recent article in The Atlantic, “The 400-Year-Old Tragedy That Captures Our Chaos,” compared the HBO series Succession to King Lear. McLaughlin, however, sees the play as a singular work of art — one that has few, if any, true comparisons.

“

King Lear is about what happens when you lose everything, including not just your political power and your financial power. You lose your mind. You lose your eyesight. You lose your clothes. I mean, you lose everything. You’re reduced to an animal. And that’s where Shakespeare takes it. It’s not where anybody else has ever taken it,” she says. “It is one hell of a part.” B

Books by Barnard

Authors

by Isabella Pechaty ’23

NONFICTION

American Born: An Immigrant’s Story, A Daughter’s Memoir

by Rachel Mayer Brownstein ’58

(University of Chicago Press)

Brownstein delivers a lovingly layered memoir of her mother, Reisel Thaler, a Jewish woman born on New York’s Lower East Side and raised in Poland. (At 18 years old, Thaler returned, alone, to the U.S. for good.) Inspired to write by Trump-era rhetoric, Brownstein considers identity and immigration through her mother’s character — how she embodied what it means to be Jewish, to be American, and to be a woman. Weaving personal memories with family history, Brownstein creates a lively tapestry of mother and daughter through the decades.

Office Shock: Creating Better Futures for Working and Living

by Christine Bullen ’67 with Bob Johansen and Joseph Press (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

The office takes up a large piece of our daily lives, and in the wake of the pandemic, Bullen advocates that we look at this workplace environment with a renewed intention. Interlocking systems of people, information, and communication — the “officeverse” — can usher in increasingly productive exchanges for all involved. Bullen proposes how an office, rather than being a static and stifling environment, can be a verb: officing. It’s workplace as process as we navigate our postpandemic work lives.

Breaking Point: The Ironic Evolution of Psychiatry in World War II

by Rebecca Schwartz Greene ’68 (Fordham University Press)

Schwartz Greene uses vivid primary sources and interviews to bring to life an overlooked chapter in modern American history. The U.S.’s institution of psychiatric examinations for WWII recruits had many unforeseen consequences that would forever change how the country handles issues surrounding mental health. Psychiatry’s expansion as a practice can be traced back to

wartime hopes of preventing mental breakdowns in soldiers and the discipline’s underestimation of the true cost of combat.

Streaming Now: Postcards From the Thing That Is Happening by Laurie Stone ’68 (Dottir Press)

Stone pens an associative, unrestrained collection of essays, candidly ruminating on time as well as our hopes and desires within this continuum. Through memoir and criticism, the essayist considers the direction of contemporary cultural narratives, her topics ranging from satirical comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and disgraced CNN analysts to the emotions stirred by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Stone strikes an intimate author-reader relationship, balancing an embrace of fragmentation and things lost to time with a keen desire for clarity.

Dinah’s Kitchen: My Journey in Korean Food, Cooking Contests and Comfort Food by Dinah Surh ’79 (www.dinahsurh. com)

Surh shares recipes with a Korean flair inspired by her mother’s cooking and shaped by the many distinct flavors of cuisines on offer in her native New York City. Alongside her recipes, Surh divulges hard-won cooking secrets through recollections of her experiences in local and national cooking competitions. This self-described “culinary diva” and Food Network Chopped champion shows the reader how to give soulful, home-cooked food a competitive edge.

Kept for a Purpose: A True Story of Peril, Forgiveness, and Unexpected Favor

by Karen Panton

WalkingEagle ’84 (Havendale Press)

WalkingEagle

co-wrote Kept for a Purpose with Jean Bosco, who was 14 years old when he fled the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In the chaos that ensued, Bosco was separated from his family and forced to trek through the forest to a neighboring country. Like WalkingEagle’s last book, Bless, the narrative examines how Bosco’s Christian faith saw him through an escape from a refugee camp in Uganda and imprisonment in Kenya. A harrowing story of one boy’s survival, though, ultimately, one of hope.

POETRY

A Long Essay on the Long Poem

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis ’63 (University of

Alabama Press)

In assorted literary criticisms and essays, DuPlessis considers — without categorizing — the elusive legacy of the elusive long poem. She is informed by creative work as well as criticism, having recently published Selected Poems 19802020, and in Life in Handkerchiefs, a collection of collage poems fashioned on handkerchiefs. For DuPlessis, the long poem is not rigid but a dynamic genre whose lively heritage can be tracked across several renowned authors and traditions.

Authors, Actors, and Audiobook Alumnae

Actress Gilli Messer ’10 encounters many Barnard alums at work

Gilli Messer is an actress in Los Angeles working in television and film. Recently, she’s begun narrating audiobooks, during which, she says, she keeps running into Barnard alums.

“With so many prolific authors coming out of Barnard, it’s no surprise that there’s such a strong Barnard presence in the audiobook world,” she says.

She recently collaborated on an audiobook with producer Molly Lo Re ’17. And on completing the narration of Happily (Penguin, 2023), a “memoir in essays” by Sabrina Orah Mark ’97, Messer discovered that Mark, too, went to Barnard.

“None of us knew the other went to Barnard beforehand; we discovered it after the projects were completed,” she says. “It seems that everywhere you go that’s interesting and creative you bump into Barnard women.”

Messer says that her liberal arts background at Barnard prepared her for an acting career well beyond the acting, speech, and movement training she received in partnership with Juilliard. She majored in anthropology and minored in French, spent a semester abroad in Russia, and holds dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, so she speaks Hebrew as well. It’s the sort of background that has made her adept at duplicating a variety of accents.

That’s not to say she doesn’t have to do her research with the seemingly familiar. At press time, she was preparing to go back into the studio to record a book featuring a protagonist from the modern Orthodox Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And while she certainly knows the culture and the language, she turned to yet another Barnard alumna to get the nuances right. She made a list of words she wasn’t sure about and contacted Aryanna Garber ’10, who hails from the old neighborhood: “I couldn’t say it authentically as she would, with the same inflections and pronunciation.”

Her time at Barnard, she says, provided the diverse learning experience that has helped expand her acting career well beyond a single medium: “It was my ticket to the party with these books.”

—Tom Stoelker

On the Road

Singer-songwriter Edie Carey ’96 relishes performing live

Music is an intensely personal process for Edie Carey, one that she’s been honing for years. Carey’s a folk musician based in Colorado whose songwriting career has taken her from performing at local Upper West Side venues to national tours. In June 2022, she released The Veil, an album that contemplates the thin but precious covering around time, family, and oneself.

Carey was raised in a household passionate about language, a passion that found its way into her insightful and accessible lyrics. She expanded her musical knowledge at Barnard within New York’s singer-songwriter milieu and developed her performance chops busking on the streets of Italy.

Now a wife and mother, Carey was moved to write The Veil’s title track in the midst of familial and global dangers. In early 2020, after Carey and her children were in a serious car accident and with the world on the brink of a pandemic shutdown, themes on seeking stability resonated.

“In one verse of that song, the veil refers to the thin shroud of security we all want to believe we have between us and danger and how disturbing it is when that shroud is suddenly torn away,” Carey says.

Across the album’s 12 tracks, Carey parses this fraught but vital barrier and its symbolic reverberations throughout past and present, in family and marriage, and our perceptions of one another.

Carey is currently on tour through the fall to promote The Veil and finds it a rewarding experience to reconnect with audiences after COVID-19 isolation.

“After doing this work for 23 years,” she says, “I have never appreciated more the magical, emotional exchange between a performer and an audience.” —Isabella Pechaty ’23

Doing Justice

Lyricist Kait Kerrigan ’03 imagines the inner lives of three Supreme Court jurists

Kait Kerrigan is a playwright and lyricist with an ever-expanding portfolio. She recently penned lyrics for Justice: A New Musical, about seminal female figures of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning with the tense confirmation process of Sonia Sotomayor, the play reenvisions three familiar American icons — Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sotomayor — through grand musical numbers.

With a book by playwright Lauren Gunderson, Justice is a product of Kerrigan’s longtime collaboration with composer Bree Lowdermilk. The lyricist-composer duo have several successful albums and off-Broadway productions to their names; they often focus on intimate stories with broader emotional impact.

As the creative team began to unpack the stories of these quintessential American figures, the writing process soon revealed how each justice held an intersection of identities, with personal desires and demands woven into an epic historical legacy. Kerrigan said she was originally most familiar with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor but found a new favorite along the way.

“They were both heroes of mine,” she says. “But the great surprise of writing this piece for me was diving into the story of Sandra Day O’Connor and learning that there used to be a different kind of Republican on the court.”

Kerrigan hopes that seeing these political legends onstage will bridge the gap between past and present and perhaps inspire bipartisan efforts at communication. “I hope that people who see Justice call their relatives on the other side of the aisle and see a way to start a conversation with them.” —

Isabella Pechaty ’23

Nostalgia and Optimism at Reunion

Barnard alumnae gather to reconnect and reminisce

by Mary Cunningham

More than 1,000 alumnae arrived on campus on June 1 for Barnard’s Reunion. There were familiar and new faces and lots of catching up to do.

Flo Low ’03, one of five speakers for the beloved Moth storytelling event, was happy to be back in the place that reminds her of promise and possibility. One of her first pit stops was at the dance studio where she used to take classes. She also had a joyous and tearful reunion with Claudia Cherry from Dining Services, who has worked at Barnard for 39 years. “I moved here from Missouri, and every morning when I went to get my breakfast she smiled at me and asked how I was doing,” said Low. “That kind of care lasts.”

Others had the opportunity to forge new connections. Ronnie Braunstein Budge ’63 and Pat Mallon ’63 never crossed paths while at Barnard and were meeting for the first time 60 years after graduating. They bonded over their mutual connection to Seattle, where Budge now lives and Mallon plans to move to be closer to her son. “We may become long-term friends,” said Mallon.

After years away, many were surprised by the physical changes in and around campus. Friends Stephanie O’Brien Kodweis ’87 and Anna Lundgren ’87 reminisced on time spent in Lehman Hall (now the Milstein Center) — where they would bring stockpiles of Starburst candy to help fuel them while studying — trips to McIntosh (now the Diana Center), and nights out grabbing pizza at Koronet.

But while certain parts of campus looked different, others remained familiar.

Ilana Breitman ’13 felt like campus was exactly how she had left it. “The key to the costume shop was still where it was hidden 10 years ago,” she joked.

The weekend officially kicked off with alumnae gathering at more than a dozen cocktail parties held around the City and a variety of other intimate events. From a “noshwalk” in Washington Heights to a tour of MoMA, the Class of ’73 kicked off their 50th anniversary, while the Class of ’98 indulged at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. The following morning, alumnae awoke to a menu of lectures, open houses, tours, and, of course, more conversations.

By 11 a.m., most of the alumnae had arrived at the Diana Center for a unique event: President Sian Leah Beilock in conversation with President-elect Laura Rosenbury. President Beilock shared a brief yet sweeping review of her six-year tenure and then introduced Barnard’s incoming president, who spoke on her background in law and life. When asked what she was most looking forward to about Barnard, President-elect Rosenbury smiled and said without hesitation that

it was getting to know the students and seeing their zest for change.

“Meeting with the students just reminded me of the passion, vision, and hopes of undergraduate students. I’ve missed that at law school — sometimes the students are a bit jaded,” she said to laughter. “Whereas the students I met at Barnard are so committed to making the world a better place, and that’s what I’m so excited to learn about.” She then nodded to the audience of alumnae and said she also looked forward to learning how they took their Barnard degrees and changed the world over the past few decades.

In true Barnard fashion, there were plenty of opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations throughout the weekend. The Class of 1983, led by Shoshana Botnick ’83, organized a special panel for Saturday morning featuring journalists Susan Leibowitz ’83, West Coast senior producer for Dateline; Donatella Lorch ’83, an international reporter; Judy Maltz ’83, senior writer for Haaretz; and Elizabeth

PHOTOS BY ALICE PROUJANSKY, BROOKE SLEZAK, AND SAMUEL STUART

Rich ’83, opinion editor for Education Week

The seasoned journalists shared insights into their work in the field, responded to questions about objectivity and bias in reporting, and considered the shifting tides in the industry ushered in by social media and remote work. “I think it’s people of our generation that need to be considering what do we have to do and how can we change the landscape to support people,” said Rich.

Alumnae who love to binge and talk shop about media, theatre, and film were happy to find this year’s alumnae panel had an artistic bent. “Stealing the Show: How Barnard Was the Ticket to a Successful Career in Entertainment,” hosted by Gina Borden ’14, featured all-star cast of alumnae who have built successful careers in the business. They included Jamie Babbit ’93, P’26, a director and executive producer known for her work on popular shows like Only Murders in the Building; Jessica Alpert ’03, a producer and founder of the audio content creation company Rococo Punch; and Camille Bernier-Green ’13, a director of documentaries at the Walt Disney Company’s Onyx Collective who is passionate about all things social justice.

Panelists discussed how opportunities at Barnard primed them to navigate male-dominated spaces, what the writers’ strike and streaming mean for the future of TV and film, and the importance of translating the female experience onto the screen. “It is important that we fight on every level as women to get our stories told,” said Babbit.

“The Moth,” a long-standing traditional event at Barnard, returned for its 19th year. This year’s edition, dubbed “The ABCs of NYC: A Special Event with The Moth,” brought five audacious speakers to the stage to share tales of friendship, family, and self-discovery, all set against the backdrop of New York City. There were tributes to Fairway Market, dazzling adventures behind the scenes of the Metropolitan Opera, and more. Storytellers included Camilla Trinchieri ’63, Irene Sawchyn ’73, Heidi Levitt ’83, Flo Low ’03, and Lisa Campbell ’13.

After the day’s many events, lectures, and cups of coffee, crowds of different affinity groups fanned out across the Barnard and Columbia campuses to rev up before the All-Class Cocktail Reception and Reunion Closing Dinner and Awards Ceremony. At the LGBTQ+ reception, streams of alums from Barnard and Columbia filtered through the doors of the atrium of Altschul Hall and were greeted by Dylan Kapit ’16, LGBTQ+ Outreach Coordinator for the College. Dylan said they have stayed involved with Barnard since they graduated seven years ago and acknowledged the changes they have witnessed over the past decade as attitudes toward gender and queer identities have changed on campus.

“I think we are making steps in the right direction, but institutional progress is really slow,” they said. “I’m trying to foster communication with students [so] that we are moving in the right direction. We’re in a 134-year-old institution, and they’re only here for four years.”

Dylan’s advice? Stay involved.

“We’ve changed in so many ways since I got here,” said Dylan. “You’ve just got to stick around and be part of the community and see the way that it changes.”

While the LGBTQ+ community mingled, high above campus in the Faculty Salon of the Milstein Center, alumnae with disabilities enjoyed spectacular views of the Columbia and Barnard campuses at a reception hosted by the Center for Accessibility Resources & Disability Services (CARDS)

Class president Julia Betancourt ’21 said that when she arrived on campus as an amputee the summer of her first year, she did not expect the warm welcome she received or that she’d become so involved with CARDS, which sprang from the Office of Disability Services in 2019. At CARDS, she found mentors, and later

mentees, who were encouraged to advocate for themselves. She said it was there that she began to develop an identity as a disabled person.

“Before Barnard, I was always encouraged to ignore my disability. I was told, ‘You’re not really disabled,’ even though my disability is very visible. I mean, I don’t have a left hand — it’s something people notice pretty easily,” Betancourt said. “Interacting with students at CARDS was a wonderful opportunity to be able to acknowledge my disability identity in a way that fit with the life I was expecting to have and be able to say, ‘I’m going to college, and I’m a woman with a disability, and I don’t need to ignore my identity.”

Betancourt said that she plans on continuing to stay involved with Barnard and was delighted to see that her efforts to organize the College’s first disabilities affinity reception paid off.

While being recorded for a social media post, she was asked her reaction on seeing the room, with its majestic view of both campuses.

“It’s surreal,” she said, smiling.

Many of the events online and hybrid events, such as “The Zora Neale Hurston Centennial Reading and Conversation,” were recorded and can be viewed at https:// barnardbold.net/reunionevents

VIDEO: Barnard Bold Through the Years

Barnard Magazine asked six Barnard alumnae from across generations to sit down with writer Marie DeNoia Aronsohn to recall their time at the College and connections that span generations. The intertwined interviews present memories in a collagelike video that picks up on themes of insecurities overcome, plans realized, and hopes continued. See it at barnardbold.net/ThroughTheYears

An Alumnae Awardee Check-In Young Alumna Award winners fulfill their early promise

by Merri Rosenberg ’78

What do actor and activist Cynthia Nixon ’88, author and scholar Jhumpa Lahiri ’89, and Olympic fencing medalist Erinn Smart ’01 all have in common, besides being Barnard graduates? All were Young Alumna Award winners, recognized early on for their extraordinary achievements.

For more than two decades, the Alumnae Association of Barnard College (AABC) has bestowed this award on alums who’ve graduated within the past 15 years. And their track record ain’t bad. The roster of high-achieving alums also includes Jamie Babbit ’93, P’26, who received the Young Alumna Award in 2008 and is this year’s winner of the Woman of Achievement Award, confirming her staying power as a TV and film director and producer. The 2023 Young Alumna Award winner, Aditi Somani ’18, is the special assistant to the first-ever counselor for racial equity at the United States Department of the Treasury.

The list also includes three impressive alums from the early aughts who would go on to succeed and evolve well beyond what they were initially recognized for. Barnard Magazine caught up with those past winners to see how prescient the College’s crystal ball turned out to be.

JIEH GREENEY ’03

Jieh Greeney was already a rising star in the financial world when she won the AABC’s Young Alumna Award in 2013. Her citation noted her entrepreneurial spirit even as an undergrad — Greeney had started an event planning company, Gotham Events, as a junior — as well as her corporate success at IBM and McKinsey & Company.

“I was surprised to get it,” Greeney admits. “I was just launching who I’m going to be in my life. It was definitely a vote of confidence. It was a little scary — ‘We think great things will come.’ I better make Barnard proud.”

Greeney, who majored in art history and studio art as an undergrad, went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked for Lululemon Athletica before rejoining McKinsey.

Currently, Greeney is leading the U.S. launch later this year for a European farm-to-table food tech startup and has provided her strategic expertise in sales, marketing, innovation, and customer experience to companies like Tiffany and Food52.

As a scholarship recipient at Barnard, Greeney feels strongly that she wanted to encourage students to consider finance, technology, and consulting opportunities: “How can I enhance the resources beginning at Barnard?”

A dedicated fundraiser for the College, Greeney says, “The award strengthened my loyalty and affiliation. I’ve always been really ambitious. [The award] was a motivation to continue being a role model for Barnard students.”

If anything, Barnard’s recognition of her accomplishments provided even more incentive for Greeney to stretch and succeed. “I always keep moving forward,” she says.

JOYA BANERJEE ’04

Receiving the Young Alumna Award five years after graduating helped Joya Banerjee assuage her family’s doubts about her professional path. The accolade in 2009 “was so unexpected and a huge honor,” says Banerjee. At the time, she was in grad school after having just stepped down from helping run a youth global health NGO. “This [award] was giving legitimacy to this type of work. My family was questioning what I was doing.”

The citation recognized Banerjee’s early interest and advocacy for “health care as a human right” as well as her work as a co-founder of the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS — a network of over 8,000 young leaders in 164 countries that sought to empower young people to battle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

As a major in human rights and political science, she says, her seminal experiences at Barnard included starting Columbia Global Justice, a chapter of the national Student Global AIDS Campaign, participating in Take Back the Night, and helping to shape the new major in human rights.

Banerjee was earning a Master of Science in global health and population from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health when she received the Young Alumna Award.

Pursuing public health has remained Banerjee’s mission. In her current role at CARE — an international humanitarian and

development nonprofit that focuses on ending poverty and achieving social justice, centering women and girls — Banerjee is the global director for gender-based violence. Her professional pursuits continue her focus on transforming health for women around the world.

Barnard’s recognition has “drawn me closer” to the College, says Banerjee, who is also grateful that Barnard provided funding for her to attend an Oxfam conference shortly after she graduated. The only stipulation was that she make a “commitment to come back,” which she has done.

“I’ve given a talk and mentored students, in person or remotely, for nine of the past 14 years,” she says. “I talk to Barnard students every year, and I’ve connected them to other opportunities. Barnard is so near and dear to my heart.”

MERCEDES MONTAGNES ’05

When Mercedes Montagnes received the Young Alumna Award in 2015, it validated her gutsy career choice. “I had taken a big risk when I moved to New Orleans,” she says. “At the time, [the award] felt like a real professional vote of confidence from this Barnard community that had done so much for me.”

She was especially touched that all her best friends came to their class’s 10th Reunion to celebrate her award.

The citation recognized her pursuit of criminal justice reform, most notably with the organization she co-founded, the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), a New Orleans-based nonprofit that works

toward the abolition of the death penalty in Louisiana as well as improved conditions for those imprisoned.

The urban studies major, who was born and raised in Toronto before moving to New York to attend Barnard in September 2001, credits the College with fostering and encouraging her ambitions.

At Harvard Law School, Montagnes was president of the Harvard Law and Policy Review and worked with the Massachusetts Prisoners’ Legal Services and the Criminal Justice Initiative, as well as the Hurricane Katrina Legislative Tracking Project.

After her law school graduation, Montagnes held two clerkships, one in New Orleans’ district court and the other in the federal court of appeals in Richmond, Virginia. She served for 11 years, until this past April, as the PJI’s leader, and she currently heads her own firm as a legal consultant and strategist.

The Barnard award, Montagnes says, reinforced her willingness to stand “up in leadership,” even if it was “pretty scary.” As the executive director of the PJI, Montagnes was especially mindful to “really examine my own mentorship of people who were younger and people who came to work in New Orleans. Their growth was something important to me.”

Through projects and personal and professional relationships, Montagnes remains closely connected to the Barnard community.

“It’s always those connection points,” says Montagnes. “I reminded my core cohort how much we were all made in that place. Barnard made me.” B

From left: Jieh Greeney, Joya Banerjee, Mercedes Montagnes

A Milestone Year for the Writing Fellows Program

Erica Mann Jong ’63, Anna

’74,

from many generations came together to celebrate Barnard’s successful peerto-peer writing program

by Preetica Pooni

As a liberal arts college, Barnard has a long-standing commitment to graduating students who can write as critically as they have learned to think and read. At this year’s Reunion — three decades after the College’s Writing Project (launched in 1990) became the Writing Fellows Program in 1992 — award-winning authors, inaugural fellows, alumnae, and other members of the community came together to celebrate the program’s success.

From the start, the Writing Fellows sought to help students across curricula as they developed and strengthened their creative visions and voices as writers. Nancy Kline Piore ’64, then a senior lecturer in Barnard’s English Department and the program’s inaugural director, decided to make sure this was happening on campus.

“At the beginning of the 1990s, the program was a startup, an experiment, an exhilaration!” reflected Piore, the inaugural director, during the 30th anniversary celebration.

Very quickly, the program focused on writing as a process distinct from product. In individual peer-to-peer consultations, Writing Fellows help to alleviate some of the stress that students experience when drafting a paper. Fellows take a discursive approach to each session as they encourage students to call on prior knowledge

while revising their writing.

“Writing Fellows listen and question and believe that every student has something to express that is deserving of an audience and can be realized through peer collaboration,” said Pamela Cobrin, the Center’s current director of the writing and speaking programs. “Within the hierarchical structure of academia, this is still a radical idea and one that has been embraced by Barnard.”

As Kate Gester ’12 wrote in the Columbia Spectator in her senior year, “We become intermediaries for our peers. We are educators who can critique work, but we are also peers who will listen and empathize as a friend would. In this way, it is a safe space, one where students’ ideas and frustrations can be vented and considered.”

“In my 21 years working with the Writing Fellows Program — 15 years as the director — [it] has always been about responding and advocating,” said Cobrin, who is also co-director of the First-Year Seminar Program. “Responding to the needs of students and advocating for student voices in both their writing and, by extension, the larger Barnard community.”

IN CELEBRATION

On June 2, the College celebrated 30 years of successful mentorship with alumnae, Writing Fellows, and current — and former — directors of the program. The event, which felt like a family affair, honored Erica Mann Jong ’63, for whom the Erica Mann Jong ’63 Writing Center is named. Jong created a $100,000 Writing Fellows Fund in 1997 in order to help renovate the writing room in Reid Hall and pay the stipends of several Writing Fellows every year.

Novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anna Quindlen ’74 has also supported the Fellows program, with two large gifts over the years — most recently, $100,000 to help fund the Creative Writing Fellows and Speaking Fellows programming. At the event, she spoke on what made the program special for her.

“Building confidence is the linchpin of the Writing Fellows program,” said Quindlen. “[It] has helped thousands of students here at Barnard feel in charge, to sharpen their paragraphs and their point of view in a way they will carry forward. It’s why I will continue to support it in the years to come — confidence and community have not only made me a writer, they’ve made me a person.”

As the program’s coordinator for the past five years, DaMonique Ballou ’17 has witnessed Fellows explore and develop their own written process, even when it meant reimagining their understanding of

Quindlen

and alumnae

writing. During The Writer’s Process — a two-section training course taught by Cobrin and Alexandra Watson, associate director of the Writing Program — Fellows contemplate the process of writing, knowledge making, and the purpose of asking questions. “Through asking questions, Fellows practice how to be curious — and it is a practice,” said Ballou. “Every moment I’ve spent as the coordinator has been a consistent reminder to be curious. In 30- to 60-minute conferences, Writing Fellows make space for students to discover elements of their voice and ideas [when] there seems to be no time for [them], especially at a place as demanding of [one’s] time as Barnard.”

Also attending the Reunion was Cecelia Lie-Spahn ’11, lecturer of English and associate director of the First-Year Writing Program, who went from being a Writing Fellow in 2009 to being the coordinator of the Writing and Speaking Programs from 2011 to 2014. “Fellowing means so much more than reading and commenting on papers. It is really a listening and naming skill — one that first helped me uncover ideas I didn’t know I had and make connections that transformed the way I think,” said Lie-Spahn. “In this way, the program acts as a kind of engine for self-discovery at Barnard: I fellow another student, who experiences a shift, who then brings that experience to their writing and their classes. It is a deeply collaborative, collective movement.”

THE EVOLUTION OF THE WRITING FELLOWS PROGRAM

Part of what has made the Writing Fellows Program so successful over three decades is that the Fellows work closely with their peers across the curriculum from day one. Piore understood that the Fellows would sharpen their communication and writing skills — whether they were studying biology and writing about labs or the changing faces of art history — just as much as the peers with whom they worked. Looking back on her time as a Fellow, from 2008 to 2011, Callie Wilson ’11 —

who was an anthropology major and is now deputy attorney general within the California Attorney General’s Office — remembered how much she learned then that she still carries with her today.

“Being a Writing Fellow gave me the excellent communication skills and confidence that helped me chart my career trajectory from Barnard to today. It helped me get my first job working with a New York State Assembly member, which set me on the path to law school and public service,” said Wilson. “I still think about the lessons I learned from Pam Cobrin and my brilliant peers: to ask questions, to pursue clarity, and to honor first every writer’s and situation’s strengths instead of focusing on their weaknesses.”

Transfer student and English major Hannah Ehrenberg ’13, who went on to graduate school at Teachers College, described her time as a Writing Fellow as having a practical impact on her writing process in terms of planning, structuring, and revising.

“I am a better reader, collaborator, problem-solver, and listener,” said Ehrenberg, who works for an organization that does research and training for progressive organizations and campaigns. “I also learned a great deal from working with my peers — I really valued the opportunity to learn more about the unique ways that each person thinks and writes.” B

Two-Way Street

Alumnae-student duos thrive through Beyond Mentoring

Aby Jill Grant ’05

At the height of the pandemic, students — some who were heading into summer break, others about to graduate — faced a predicament like never before: Many in-person internships were suddenly postponed or canceled, and job opportunities grew scarce. Concerned alumnae asked how they could help. That’s when Beyond Barnard — the College’s one-stop shop for career services, graduate school preparation, internships, and more — made a quick pivot and launched Beyond Mentoring in June 2020.

Beyond Barnard’s executive director, Christine Valenza Shin ’84, worked with assistant vice president of lifelong success A-J Aronstein, senior associate director for partnerships Alexa Hammel ’13, and the Beyond Barnard team to match alumnae with students for Beyond Mentoring, made possible through an anonymous donation from a member of the Beyond Barnard Advisory Council.

“Whether it’s a shocking thing like COVID, a recession, or the emergence of a hot market, Beyond Barnard adjusts to helping students find connections, knowing they are fortunate to have many alums who respond in a crisis but also on a regular basis,” says Shin.

Since the inception of Beyond Mentoring, there have been 164 projects and 124 student participants, and the program continues to expand. (This includes a project between myself, the writer, and Emily Chen ’25, a talented computer science major, who helped me build a website to expand my client base. Though Emily served as my mentee, I can attest the learning went both ways.)

“There’s been huge interest in the program from Barnard students,” says Laura Maltz, associate director of advising and programs. “We couldn’t create something nearly as meaningful without our alum and parent communities who model future possibilities. They create access to opportunity all while building their own talent pools.”

Here, three pairs of mentors and mentees describe their Beyond Mentoring projects and the formation of their successful partnerships.

JILL ROBBINS ’76 & ASHLEY CANALES ’23: Speaking the Same Language

While serving as a mentee for Jill Robbins ’76, vice president of the National Museum of Language, Ashley Canales ’23, along with Gabrielle Viner ’24, developed a “virtual field trip,” a self-guided tour of the museum’s trip to Puerto Rico. Canales created activities for teachers to implement in their classrooms, placing English and Spanish translations onto a presentation with vocabulary words, discussion questions, and Puerto Rican trivia.

“The goal was to expose younger students to foreign language and culture and stimulate curiosity about language,” explains Robbins. “The virtual field trips allowed students to see how the language they study exists in the world outside of their textbook and classroom.”

Canales was very invested in the project from the beginning. “It sat in the intersection between many of my interests, like education, children’s media, and language learning,” she says.

Discovering ways to create engaging conversations for students through visual learning, Canales felt that the project aligned perfectly with her degree in sociology and Spanish & Latin American cultures. Robbins, an English as a second language teacher with a Ph.D. in applied linguistics, was impressed by Canales’ performance.

“Working with Ashley shows that there is much that we [mentors] can gain from these virtual mentorships,” Robbins says. “I would jump at the opportunity to mentor again.”

BARBARA OSBORN ’80 & FIONA CAMPBELL ’23: Breaking Barriers in Public Policy

Before Barbara Osborn ’80 decided to mentor a Barnard student, she had reservations about the process. But after speaking with Fiona Campbell ’23, an urban studies major interested in housing, her concerns were put to rest.

“I knew within five minutes of talking to Fiona that I was lucky,” Osborn says. “It was kind of a serendipitous fit.”

With 25 years of experience in the communications field, Osborn is in the early stages of creating a network to educate the public about affordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles County, which has the worst unsheltered population crisis in the U.S. With Campbell’s help, she sought to strengthen public understanding of long-term solutions to homelessness.

“Fiona felt like a kindred spirit because she was trying to take applied and theoretical learning and apply it to the real world, which was really important to me,” she says.

As a mentee, Campbell assessed the social media strength of over 90 nonprofits to determine their existing capacity for digital communications. The research and analysis was used to select participants for a nonprofit collaborative. Campbell found the process of working with mentor Osborn very rewarding because there was a mutual connection toward a common goal.

“I learned more about the political side of planning and how community-based planning operates on the administrative side,” says Campbell, who was able to apply her hands-on experience to her studies.

Today, Osborn feels indebted to Campbell, whose “findings laid the foundation for assessing prospective partner organizations,” Osborn says. “No other similar coalition has done this type of pre-assessment.”

Osborn says that she will encourage her daughter, who is currently a rising sophomore at Barnard, to participate in Beyond Mentoring.

Campbell, who has just graduated, hopes to revisit Beyond Mentoring from the opposite side later in her career.

“I would be interested in mentoring Barnard students,” she says. “I think the only way to learn what you want to do and what works for you is through handson experience.”

“I would be interested in mentoring Barnard students.... I think the only way to learn what you want to do and what works for you is through hands-on experience.”

DEVAKI CHANDRA ’86 & TANVI SINGLA ’25: Setting Standards in STEM

When Devaki Chandra ’86 began planning her move from Berkeley to Nashville in 2022, she studied the differences in life between California and Tennessee, examining such areas as transportation. Soon, she created her newest Beyond Mentoring research project with that as a guide. As an instructor with a Ph.D. in economics and a personal investment in climate change and energy, Chandra focused the research project on electric vehicle adoption, hoping to provide a student with a politically and publicly relevant topic. This was her fourth time serving as a mentor, which she finds very fulfilling.

“It’s rewarding to see what has changed at Barnard, like increased specialization,” she observes. “What hasn’t changed is the priority to help each other.”

Having worked over the past decade as an instructor at the Summer Institute for the Gifted at the UC Berkeley campus, Chandra says that the “student is the audience,” maintaining that her role as a mentor was to guide students toward achieving their personal goals. But mentoring has been educational for her as well: “Being a mentor gives me experience in hiring and a more current insight into issues like community engagement and climate change.”

Tanvi Singla ’25, a double major in economics and environmental science, served as Chandra’s mentee on two of her Beyond Mentoring research projects. In 2022, Singla researched COVID-19 vaccinations and climate change and related them through an economic perspective; the following year, Singla compared electric vehicle sales in California and Tennessee to identify obstacles and assess the potential for increased electric vehicle adoption to fulfill President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order (EO) on Strengthening American Leadership in Clean Cars and Trucks. (The goal of the EO is for 50% of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030.)

Singla says that opportunities from her projects, which address interests from both of her majors, encourage her “to pursue a career in a field where finance and environmental science intersect.” This summer, she will be doing a research project for Barnard’s Environmental Science Pathways Scholars Program through the Summer Research Institute, which supports students conducting STEM research. Her project will develop methods of water treatment in rural communities. She will also do a comparative cost analysis of water treatment methods.

“I definitely think the [Beyond Mentoring] projects were successful,” Singla says. “With the first project, I saw, on my own, how environmental science and economics can connect. For the second project, I was able to take it a step further, and this intersection keeps carrying over into my life with the research I’m doing this summer.” B

“It’s rewarding to see what has changed at Barnard, like increased specialization....

What hasn’t changed is the priority to help each other.”

THE SGA, THEN AND TODAY

Archival history shows the power and potential of the Student Government Association at Barnard

by Stephanie Rodriguez

Since 1892, Barnard’s Student Government Association (SGA) has been an influential student body advocating for change on issues big and small, from supporting a requirement to wear hats on campus in the early 1900s to professing anti-war sentiments in the 1960s.

This past school year, SGA representatives Hilda Gitchell ’23 and Vivian Todd ’23 made it their mission to capture SGA’s work over the years by rummaging through old bulletins, meeting notes, and photographs that date back to the SGA’s founding.

“When we went to the archives, we were thinking, ‘What kind of documentation can we find that really represents the work at the core of SGA’s mission?’” says Gitchell.

Their research captures decades of institutional memory and culminates online as a historical timeline, a digital ode to the guts and glory of years past, and a road map of possibility for SGA officers to come. They hope future members will pick up the baton and continue developing the chronology.

While every Barnard student is technically a member of SGA through the mandatory student activities fee, its leaders work to win votes for the group’s

elected offices. The very first volume of the Barnard Annual lists the names of the 15 students who stepped up in what was then called the Undergraduate Association. Today, 24 elected members work across seven committees — Policy, Equity and Inclusion, Campus Life, Finance, Public Relations, Student Services, and Academic Affairs. Representatives have addressed campus-related issues like food, dining, and housing as well as issues playing out on the national stage, such as racism and the COVID-19 pandemic.

FACING ISSUES AT HOME

Gitchell and Todd admit that it can be tedious sifting through 100-year-old housing disputes but say that the material offers a fascinating peek into Barnard’s enduring issues. Ruth Schwartz Cowan ’61 remembers her years as a student as a time that began with duck-and-cover drills in the event of nuclear attack and ended with standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Barnard and Columbia students protesting against racial segregation.

During her time at Barnard, Cowan took part in a protest against a tuition hike. Twenty years later, in 1980, then-SGA President Marcia Sells ’81 penned a memo addressing the threat to on-campus housing for Barnard seniors, which led to the dormitory expansion to West 110th Street. In 2016, when students

were at risk of losing winter housing, then-SGA President Shivani Vikuntam ’16 commissioned a survey that revealed just how necessary it was, particularly for those who didn’t feel safe returning home.

CONVERGING CULTURES

Barnard is a unique fusion of people, cultures, and experiences. The college’s nearly 600 special interest clubs are a reflection of that diversity. Born in Cincinnati, Sells attended Barnard in the late ’70s during a period known as feminism’s second wave. Her suitemate, Ellen Doherty ’79, was a member of Lesbian Activists at Barnard (LAB). At the time, LAB was challenging notions of womanhood and acknowledging racial dynamics within the movement, conversations that Sells recalls as thoughtful and boundary-pushing. It was Doherty who encouraged Sells to run for student government.

As a member of SGA, Sells helped revive an event dormant for 10 years. The Celebration of Black Womanhood, hosted by the Barnard Organization of Black Women (BOBW), now known as the Barnard Organization of Soul and Solidarity (BOSS), was critical for the personal and professional development of Black students on campus, she says. In 1980, Sells served as one of the event’s main coordinators. According to the April 7 issue of Barnard Bulletin in the archives, the “scarcity of Black professors” and “the omission of Black perspectives in courses” were cited as key concerns that year.

During her studies, Sells pursued her lifelong passion for dance. She remembers experiencing racial discrimination despite her readiness and skill. Race and gender issues weren’t resolved during or after Sells exited the Barnard gates as a graduate. But she valued that as a Barnard student, she could embrace her and others’ whole identities.

“I felt like Barnard was mine. It was my school; it was my place,” says Sells. “Black woman or not, I had every right to be there.”

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT HOME

When Norah Hassan ’21 arrived at Barnard, she noticed harmful tropes and misconceptions about Islam and the Middle East still lingered in post-9/11 New York. In classroom discussions and assigned reading materials, Hassan saw little representation that would otherwise offer a more nuanced understanding of the places she called home.

Hassan describes herself as a “third-culture, mostly confused kid.” She was born in Boston to Egyptian and American parents. When Hassan was 4 years old, the family relocated to the U.K. and later to Libya. Living abroad ignited her interest in politics and international affairs.

Despite being a U.S. citizen, Hassan hadn’t lived in the country for 13 years when she arrived at Barnard, and her parents encouraged her to enroll as an international student. Barnard’s Class of 2021 was very active on Facebook, and so was the SGA — particularly the Inclusion and Equity Committee. Posting to a 600-person Facebook group became a form of advocacy for Hassan, a way to address the needs and concerns of POC students at Barnard more directly. Growing weary of her deliberations on social media, Hassan decided to turn words into action and run for sophomore class president. Her mentor, Professor Margaret Vandenburg, encouraged her to write her winning campaign speech.

“I wanted to help Arab students. I wanted to help Muslim students. I wanted to help other students of color and other groups I don’t belong to,” Hassan says. “But I don’t think I had an idea of what that actually meant.”

Hassan was surprised to learn about a Muslim prayer space in the basement of Milbank Hall. The ill-kept room felt more like an afterthought than a place of

worship. Being an SGA representative meant Hassan was connected to the people and departments who could help lead a transformation. Working closely with Columbia University’s Muslim Students Association (MSA) and the Muslim Afro Niyyah Students Association (MANSA), SGA helped secure the launch of a new interfaith prayer space in 2019.

LEARNING LEADERSHIP

The SGA Representative Council provides critical support in organizing events, fundraising, and drafting policy-shaping surveys, says Gitchell. The 2016 council president, Shivani Vikuntam, capitalized on SGA programs like the Desserts After Dark Survey to poll students — a low-stakes trade-off involving Baked by Melissa cupcakes in exchange for opinions on issues such as the creation of a student ombudperson.

A former software engineer at Microsoft and burgeoning lawyer, Vikuntam is today a skilled and confident communicator. As a kid, she was often told she talked too much, a superpower she refined as a student government representative, which she says enhanced her ability to command a room of male tech executives.

“All my confidence came from there,” Vikuntam says of the SGA. “Where else do you get the opportunity in your early 20s to address deans of colleges, the provost, and the president of Columbia about what students are advocating for?”

Even for those just going out into the world, like recent graduates Gitchell and Todd, these histories serve as a reminder of SGA’s power and potential. From the practical to the monumental, there’s documentary evidence of student government representatives speaking truth to power. “It’s a very clear sign to me of how much SGA is willing to represent the student body,” affirms Gitchell. “No matter what the outcome is.” B

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FRESH LOOK, MORE TO EXPLORE

#BetterTogether

A message from the new AABC president, Sooji Park ’90

Dear wonderful, bold, beautiful, Barnard alumnae family: Thank you for the opportunity, privilege, and honor of serving as your president of the AABC and alumnae trustee! I love Barnard and want to do my part to elevate our beloved college and community to be the best it can be. I want to get to know as many of you as possible and find meaningful ways for you to remain connected/reconnected with Barnard.

A little bit about me: I practice gratitude daily and choose to be joyful. I try to live my best life today with kindness and passion. I’m a single mom of three wonderful sons and blessed with an abundance of amazing friends. Barnard continually shapes me to be the strong, confident, bold, and kind woman and entrepreneur that I am today.

During my 40s, I learned a few pivotal life lessons while volunteering at Barnard that I continue to share with other women and practice in my daily life. President Deborah Spar positively redefined what “women can have it all” meant for me. She used the analogy of shopping at a boutique and clarified that we can have it all, just not all at the same time. That was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, because up until then I thought I was missing out and just not enough no matter what I had accomplished. Ladies, as Lydia Fenet, our Barnard Gala auctioneer, says, “We are the architects of our lives!” Whatever stage of life or circumstance that you are walking, jogging, running through — you are always Barnard and always enough!

Fortunately, the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being will be a brilliant breakthrough for our students — and the entire community. At the core, when students feel well, they do well, and the Center will provide programs to support their physical, mental, and financial wellness to ultimately propel them to succeed both inside and outside the classroom.

I’m a firm believer that women need other women to support, encourage, and cheer for one another. I have had my share of being supported, encouraged, and cheered for by my Barnard sisters. In my role as AABC president, I feel compelled to continue to do the same. Let’s elevate one another while enjoying the journey.

Thank you, President Beilock, and welcome, President Rosenbury. We are grateful to have these strong women lead Barnard with grace, wisdom, and grit.

Looking forward to seeing you all in person or online. Please say hello and introduce yourself, if I don’t get to you first. Have a wonderful summer!

With gratitude and hugs,

Sooji Park ’90 AABC President and Alumnae Trustee

The 2023 AABC Awardees

A highlight of Reunion is the annual presentation of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College (AABC) Awards, where we recognize extraordinary honorees and have the opportunity to hear their inspiring acceptance speeches. This year’s awardees continue the tradition of spanning generations, professions, and contributions to Barnard and society as a whole.

League of Their Own, HBO’s GIRLS, Silicon Valley, Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Russian Doll, and Only Murders in the Building, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series.

Babbit began her career as Martin Scorsese’s intern on The Age of Innocence. The Itty Bitty Titty Committee, her second feature, won the Grand Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival, and her short film Stuck won a jury prize at Sundance. She has been profiled in The New York Times, Out magazine, Time Out, The Los Angeles Times, Filmmaker magazine, and Vanity Fair.

Barnard community for 20 years through the Wellness Spot (formerly Well-Woman) Health Promotion Program. Inspired by her time as a student peer educator (2001-2003), she joined the staff of the Wellness Spot in 2004, later becoming director of health promotion and education.

JAMIE BABBIT

’93 Woman of Achievement Award

Jamie Babbit has directed several feature films and executive-produced and directed multiple award-winning television shows. Her debut film, But I’m a Cheerleader, was listed by The Independent as one of the top 20 romantic comedies of all time. It is considered a seminal queer film and can be seen on Netflix.

Her TV directing credits include A

Babbit grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and was a Centennial Scholar at Barnard. She lives in Los Angeles with her girlfriend and two daughters. Her daughter Finley Sperling just finished her first year at Barnard.

JESSICA T. CANNON ’03

Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism

Jessica T. Cannon is a health educator and student wellness advocate who served the

In that role, she had the privilege of providing support and education to students exploring the complexities of health and wellness, both their own and that of their communities. Working with the peer educators she trained and supervised, Cannon expanded the programming and scope of the Wellness Spot, ensuring that students had a comfortable space on campus to use their voices, ask difficult questions, support one another, and, most importantly, “come as you are,” the program’s unofficial motto.

Cannon has a passion for equitable and inclusive reproductive healthcare and was integral in supporting the Primary Care Health Service’s long-acting reversible contraceptives initiative, providing contraceptive counseling to all students

From top left: Jamie Babbit, Jessica T. Cannon, Kathleen Drohan, Naomi Goldberg Haas; bottom row: Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, Lisa Najavits, Aditi Somani, Linda Sweet

seeking these options and facilitating the peer educator “IUDoula” program.

After leaving Barnard in 2021, Cannon and her husband, Hal, moved to her hometown in Virginia to be close to family. She recently began a new chapter at the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and is eager to share the many lessons in mental and physical well-being she learned at Barnard with a new generation of students.

KATHLEEN DROHAN ’88

Distinguished Alumna Award

Kathleen Drohan is a veteran musical storyteller, equity activist, and community builder. She serves as the chief marketing and communications officer for the Cleveland Institute of Music, one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories. She was previously vice president of communications for the New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy, whose mission is to prepare graduates of music programs for leadership roles in professional orchestras and ensembles around the world. While there, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Drohan created Miami Art Strong, a collective of more than 100 South Florida arts organizations that came together to keep art and culture alive and accessible to audiences worldwide during the lockdown. She also oversaw the creation of radio programming with WGBH Boston showcasing the music of the Harlem Renaissance.

Drohan is the creator of the WQXR Instrument Drive for New York Public Radio, which collected, repaired, and redistributed musical instruments to public school and community music programs in NYC and Newark. The program collected more than 6,000 instruments, supporting music education for more than 30,000 students annually. The project garnered worldwide attention and became the most high-profile outreach effort in the history of WQXR. One donation to the program inspired the 2016 Academy Awardnominated film Joe’s Violin

She is the creator and co-founder of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, which, since 1994, has allowed access to NYC arts for hundreds

of thousands of NYC students. She also conceived of and implemented the Uniquely U scholarship, which provides opportunities for NYC students to attend the Long Islandbased Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts.

Drohan has served as a consultant with the Defiant Requiem Foundation, honoring the legacy of the Jewish prisoners in Terezín; the Library of Congress concert series; and singer-songwriter James Taylor. Her writing is featured in the New York Timesbestseller Worn Stories, and she has written extensively about her solo travels through the Himalayas, Andes, Atlas Mountains, and more.

NAOMI GOLDBERG HAAS ’83 Distinguished Alumna Award

Naomi Goldberg Haas is the founding artistic director of Dances for a Variable Population (DVP), established in 2009. DVP is a multigenerational dance company and educational organization committed to promoting strong and creative movement among older adults of all abilities, enabling them to build creativity, improve their mental and physical health, strengthen social connections, and enhance their quality of life. DVP’s model of community creative aging education program, MOVEMENT SPEAKS®, annually serves over 2,500 older adults in NYC and is a model in best practices for creative aging in community-based performance and education programs for older adults.

As a choreographer, Goldberg Haas has over 35 years of experience in concert dance, theatre, opera, and film. She has collaborated with the Klezmatics, composer Michael Nyman, directors Brian Kulick and Oskar Eustis, and playwright Chuck Mee. She choreographed the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner’s It’s an Undoing World, with music by Alicia Svigals; Kushner’s A Dybbuk at the Public Theater; and plays performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, and the Mark Taper Forum. Her film work includes Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame Goldberg Haas conceived Talking Dance with the Los Angeles Music Center Education and Outreach Division; this

unique traveling chamber piece toured for 12 years, reaching over 750,000 students throughout Southern California. She founded the successful intergenerational and mixed-ability dance company Los Angeles Modern Dance & Ballet (1990-2004).

She trained from age 8 to 18 at the School of American Ballet, holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has performed with Pacific Northwest Ballet. She currently teaches and trains teaching artists in her popular MOVEMENT SPEAKS® method for older adults throughout NYC. Her work with the Silesian Dance Theatre and persons with disabilities was presented at the 17th International Dance Festival and Conference in Bytom, Poland, and with seniors and professional dancers in 2010 in Vancouver, B.C. She has been a leader in the field of creative aging and has presented at numerous national conferences and has published articles advocating for the wellbeing of older adults through the power of dance.

Goldberg Haas received the Gibney ART + ACTION award (2011) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s Award for Performing Arts (2014), served on the Age Friendly Media, Arts & Culture Working Group (2015-2018), and received the Dance/USA 2019-20 Fellowship for Artists addressing social change. In February 2023, she received the New York State Dance Education Association Lifetime Impact in Dance Education award in recognition of her extraordinary lifelong imprint on dance and the dance education community.

She is currently collaborating with Mikhaela Mahony ’11 on a book, Moving Through Life: The Essential Lessons of Dance (University of Florida Press, 2024).

GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON ’13

Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism

Gabriella Karefa-Johnson is a New Yorkbased stylist and editor with a keen eye for up-and-coming designers as well as a narrative-led approach aimed at diversifying representation in fashion. Known for her looks pairing disparate colors, textures, and silhouettes, KarefaJohnson worked as associate fashion editor under fashion director Tonne Goodman

at Vogue and as fashion director of Garage Magazine in 2017. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to style a cover of Vogue As global contributing fashion editor-atlarge, she has styled many Vogue covers, featuring Serena Williams, Paloma Elsesser, Kamala Harris, Amanda Gorman, and more. Karefa-Johnson is also a member of the Committee of Experts of the 2023 LVMH Prize, which rewards young fashion designers selected for their talent and outstanding creativity, supporting the emergence of a new generation of designers.

LISA NAJAVITS ’83

Distinguished Alumna Award

Lisa M. Najavits, Ph.D., is director of treatment innovations and adjunct professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School. She was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years and was a research psychologist at Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Boston, for 12 years.

Her major clinical and research interests are substance abuse, trauma, comorbidity, behavioral addictions, veterans’ mental health, community-based care, development of new psychotherapies, and outcome research. She is the author of more than 200 professional publications, as well as the books Seeking Safety, a treatment manual for trauma and addiction; Finding Your Best Self: Recovery from Addiction, Trauma, or Both; A Woman’s Addiction Workbook, and the upcoming treatment manual Creating Change

Najavits has served as president of the Society of Addiction Psychology of the American Psychological Association and has consulted widely on public health efforts in addictions and trauma, both nationally and internationally, including for the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Surgeon General, the United Nations, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine. She is on various advisory boards, and her awards include the 1997 Young Professional Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the 1998 Early Career Contribution Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research,

the 2004 Emerging Leadership Award of the American Psychological Association Committee on Women, and the 2009 Betty Ford Award of the Addiction Medical Education and Research Association.

Najavits received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University. She is a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts and conducts a psychotherapy practice.

ADITI SOMANI ’18

Young Alumna Award

Aditi Somani is the special assistant to the first-ever counselor for racial equity at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The counselor’s office leads efforts to advance equity in all of the Treasury’s work, including implementation of the historic Inflation Reduction Act.

Prior to joining the Treasury Department, Somani served in the White House, where she was appointed to President Biden’s Oval Office team on day one of the Biden-Harris administration. She started her career as a technology investment banker at J.P. Morgan and later joined the Biden for President paid media team to support the 2020 general election campaign.

Somani received her B.A. in economics cum laude at Barnard, where she completed the Athena Scholars Program and worked with several organizations dedicated to advocacy and improving economic outcomes for women and girls. Somani is a native New Yorker from Queens and a proud daughter of Indian immigrants.

LINDA SWEET ’63 Award for Service to Barnard

Linda Sweet was a founding partner and director of the museum practice at Management Consultants for the Arts, where she is now partner emerita. Sweet began her museum career as an educator at the Brooklyn Museum and was dean of the Department of Public Education at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has taught art history and museum education at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Bank Street College, and Leslie College, and in 1974 was awarded a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to study museums in Europe.

Sweet majored in art history at Barnard and received a master’s degree from New York University and a certificate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business Administration’s Institute for Notfor-Profit Management.

An active member of the American Association of Museums (now the American Alliance of Museums), Sweet was a founder of the Education Committee and its vice chairperson from 1978 to 1980. In 1976, she was elected to the Council of the Alliance and for eight years served on the Membership Committee.

Sweet has been in service to Barnard since her undergraduate days, when she was a member of the student government. As an alumna, she has served on the Barnard Board of Trustees, as AABC president, as chair of the Annual Giving Committee and member of the Leadership, Fellowship, and Nominating committees, and in various fundraising roles that saw her connecting with fellow alumnae to raise vital funds for Barnard. An incredible force of progress and innovation for the AABC, Sweet is forever a positive fulcrum for Barnard.

Sweet is a past president of ArtTable, a national membership organization of women in the visual arts, and a former member of the Collections Committee of the Grey Art Gallery of New York University. She was a trustee of Barnard College from 2015 to 2019, where she was co-chair of the Committee on Academic Affairs, served on the Governance Committee, and was a member of the Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. She chaired the Annual Fund Committee and Leadership Council for the Alumnae Association of the College and was an active member of several other committees. She was a member of the board of the Greater Hudson Heritage Network and chair of its Governance Committee and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. She sits on the Development Committee of the Tompkins Corners Cultural Center in Putnam County, New York.

Since 2015, Sweet has been a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. B

Observing Indonesia

The pre-Barnard gap year taken by sociologist Rachel Rinaldo ’94 turned into a lifelong connection to the island nation

by Janet Faller Sassi

In March 2003, while working on a Fulbright-Hays research project in Indonesia, Rachel Rinaldo ’94 and her husband witnessed a million-strong march through the streets of Jakarta to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rinaldo was sympathetic to the anti-war values of the marchers, some of whom she knew from her research project about feminism and Islam.

Looking around in the throng of demonstrators, she spotted no other foreigners. As she and her husband passed a group of men on the sideline, they saw her and shouted, “America terrorist!” It was a moment of realization for the sociologist, who wanted to participate in the lives of those she was studying. “I realized I couldn’t escape my U.S. identity no matter how critical I myself may have been of American politics,” Rinaldo wrote in a 2015 essay.

Her relationship with the largest Muslim country in the world began when she was just 17. Her parents suggested that she experience a gap year before starting at Barnard. She applied to the AFS exchange program and was assigned to a host

family in East Java, Indonesia. “I knew nothing of the country,” says Rinaldo, who is now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado.

For the next year, Rinaldo attended a school in the inland city of Malang, where all the students and teachers spoke Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language. She was expected to learn the language solely through immersion. Furthermore, the limited English skills of her host family made complex conversations impossible. There were only Indonesian newspapers to be found, so Rinaldo spent her evenings with an English-Indonesian dictionary deciphering the day’s articles. “It was a tough year,” she recalls. “And sometimes lonely.”

By the time Rinaldo entered Barnard College as a freshman, however, she’d been changed forever by her experience. The country — with its multiple religions and ornate cultural traditions in music, art, and dance — had left an enduring impression.

A TURN TO ACADEMIA

At Barnard, Rinaldo studied political science with an emphasis on the comparative politics of developing countries. She was active in social causes

Alumnae Adventures

on campus, notably the Earth Coalition, which she led, the Anti-War Coalition, and Students for Choice. Her senior thesis was on anti-fascist youth movements in 1980s-’90s Germany and Great Britain, and Rinaldo credits her parents and her thesis adviser, visiting instructor Sanya Popovic, with encouraging her to earn a Ph.D. She applied and was accepted to the sociology program at the University of Chicago.

After a junior year spent at the University of Edinburgh and her teenage exchange experience, Rinaldo knew that she wanted to do international research. It wasn’t clear to her exactly where, however, until the late 1990s, as she watched from afar as Indonesia became a democracy after 32 years of military dictatorship under Suharto. Seeing this transformation unfold in part through grassroots activism, she decided to return and do her dissertation on Islam and women’s activists during the democratization era.

“My interest is in how social change happens,” she says. “And I was aware that things were changing all around the world when it came to women and gender. The types of changes that American women saw in the U.S. beginning in the 1950s are now playing out all over the globe.”

Rinaldo’s first Indonesian Fulbright-Hays coincided with the “war on terror” initiated by the U.S. following 9/11. In fact, her research year was sandwiched between two major al-Qaida-linked events in Indonesia: the 2002 bombings in Bali that claimed 202 lives and a 2003 suicide bombing at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, which killed 12. The U.S. Embassy urged Fulbright scholars to leave the country, but Rinaldo stayed because she felt too invested in her research.

Her year abroad resulted in her first book, Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford, 2013), which looks at how Muslim women activists are reinterpreting the Quran to define it as a text that’s more inclusive of women and marginalized groups.

Rinaldo has just finished a second year of Fulbright research in Indonesia, examining the impact of the pandemic on women’s work and careers as well as their experiences balancing work and family in general. She and her team have interviewed 125 women — from rice farmers and teachers to housewives and lawyers — and hope to document social patterns in this rapidly developing majority-Muslim society. This cohort of women are not educated feminists; many of them are traditionally religious. Yet they are at the forefront of a cultural shift.

Rinaldo’s qualitative study, which consists of in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, has found that many savvy Indonesian housewives entered the workforce during the pandemic through the informal economy when their husbands lost their jobs or saw their income reduced. Such online activities — for example, selling stylish hijabs or baked goods from their tablets and cellphones — enabled women to both earn money and care for their children in a culture where husbands are not expected to help with domestic work.

Just like the Indonesian feminists who are reimagining the Quran, the nation’s working women are reimagining their place in the post-pandemic economy, says Rinaldo: “They’re coming to recognize their own capabilities and expressing pride in being able to earn money.”

HOMEGROWN COLLABORATION

A 2014 study by researchers at the University of Chicago placed Indonesia’s academic citations among the lowest in Southeast Asia, especially when compared with Singapore and Malaysia. To strengthen the nation’s scholarly reputation, the Indonesian government has created a new agency that requires foreign researchers to have an Indonesian counterpart and work through a domestic institution.

Rinaldo has found an invaluable collaborator in Fina Itriyati, Ph.D., a sociologist at Gadjah Mada University in the city of Yogyakarta.

As a Muslim who can speak colloquial Javanese with interviewees, Itriyati was first to notice that the housewives’ pandemic sales activities on WhatsApp or Instagram deserved a closer look. Indeed, the informal sector accounted for more than 60% of Indonesian employment during the pandemic. And within that sector, 64% of the workers are female. Itriyati notes that, in addition to picking up the economic mantle through what was an extremely strict nationwide lockdown, wives often became the family glue as well.

“I saw that men were quite emotionally fragile when they lost their jobs,” says Itriyati. “Women had to make the family emotionally stable, to take care of their kids and the husband.”

FIRST EXPERIENCE ABROAD

Rinaldo says that today’s Indonesia is a different place than the Indonesia of her first Fulbright in 2003. It is a majority-Muslim country with an emerging economy and democratic government, and citizens freely hold conservative or liberal views of their religion. Only one province, Aceh, enforces Shariah, the Islamic canonical law. Rinaldo notes that many Indonesians remain critical of U.S. foreign policy, but Indonesian anger at the U.S. has greatly dissipated.

The change has meant that Rinaldo and her husband, Robert, felt comfortable enough to bring their 8-year-old son, Nathaniel, along for the full year. The boy’s first experience abroad, she says, has opened his eyes to the larger world. “We’ve spoken to our son about social justice issues and the ills of the world, but it’s one thing to know it intellectually, and it’s another thing to see it.”

Recently Rinaldo asked Nathaniel to reflect on a Sumatran jungle trip that made the whole family sick. “Nate’s reply was, ‘That was so hard, but it was worth it to see the orangutans in the wild.’”

Rinaldo’s decades of research on women in social movements have shown her that women have collective power and are catalysts of social change. There is “no ceiling” on their potential around the globe, provided societies don’t hold them back.

“There have been a lot of advances,” she says. “But there’s a lot of pushback as well. We’re seeing it in the U.S. right now. Whenever women gain more rights, it challenges the status quo.

“But if we want progress, we have to be willing to push for it.” B

Camden Calling

Nonprofit president and CEO Kathleen Noonan ’89 leads by taking a back seat

by Tom Stoelker

The first palpable experience with racial injustice for Kathleen Noonan ’89 was, of all places, at a courthouse. Her mother was seeking alimony from her father, a New York City police officer who made it clear that he would not fully support the family going forward. But that wasn’t the only affront. As she and her mother — the only white people there besides the lawyers — sat in the court’s waiting area, one of the administrators, also white, ushered them ahead of the many Black families. (Capping it all off, once inside the courtroom, the 13-year-old Noonan wanted to speak in support of her mother but was told by the judge that she could not participate in the hearing.)

Years later, when she was a candidate for the position of president and CEO at Camden Coalition in New Jersey, a healthcare nonprofit advocating for individuals and families with complex health and social needs in a mostly Black and Latino city and around the country, the interview process made it painfully clear to her how there should have been many more qualified candidates of color applying for the position. Once again, she was at the front of the line. She got the role and is determined to change the status quo at the organization going forward.

“I am a white woman, running an organization in a place that is mostly nonwhite,” she says. “I feel a very, very strong sense of responsibility to groom a lot of our staff here for leadership positions.”

The coalition’s role is that of supportive liaison between the area’s many health systems, community-based organizations, government agencies, and, most importantly, patients. Prior to heading Camden Coalition, Noonan spent a decade as an administrator at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), often working directly with the CEO, which made her appreciate the nimble qualities of smaller community-based organizations in addressing health crises.

“[Working at the hospital] really showed me what a hospital could do, and all the value they could bring, and really what they couldn’t do, and so the idea of coming to a community-based organization was very appealing,” she says. “We have incredibly good [vaccine uptake] numbers from COVID in Camden city that we’re really proud of. … Our numbers outpaced national numbers.”

OUTSIDER ON THE INSIDE

Growing up in a big Irish Catholic family near the beach on Long Island, Noonan rarely saw people that didn’t look like her. Her community and her family shared a culture where the “troubles” of Ireland were far closer than the other side of the ocean. Her grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Army, and dinner conversations often included recollections of the Great Famine of the 19th century. It was an upbringing that rarely exposed her to people from outside of her community, except when folks from the city came out to the nearby state beach during the summer. Then she saw the rich mosaic of humanity that New York City is known for. Her neighbors were none too fond of the sight, she says, but she loved seeing people different from herself. Ultimately, however, it was the sight of fathers playing with their children that struck a chord.

Noonan’s curiosity about other cultures and about ideas would soon propel

her to Barnard, where she encountered people from all walks of life for the first time: not just different ethnicities but also different financial backgrounds, religions, and political affiliations. This was a large shift for a first-generation college student whose mother’s annual salary was equivalent to a year’s tuition.

She eventually homed in on a psychology major and studied under J. Lawrence Aber, the internationally renowned child psychologist, and began working at the Toddler Center. Aber encouraged her to think more about policy, procedures, and children’s rights. By her senior year, she’d taken a job at Bank Street College in their department of public policy, which ultimately became her focus.

She skipped summer vacation and took a full-time job right after graduation. From there, she moved to the Citizens Committee for Children of New York, an advocacy group that sent her out to site visits in the South Bronx at the height of the crack epidemic and the AIDS crisis. She visited and worked in dozens of day care centers and therapeutic nurseries and learned how to just “be” in a community.

“Sometimes, I’m sitting next to a 4-year-old who doesn’t speak, or I’m sitting next to this other child who can’t walk, and you just sort of develop a way of learning how to communicate,” she says. “I had a little boy in one of my classes who no one could understand what he said, but I could understand him perfectly.”

Fully focused on policy, Noonan attended Northeastern University School of Law to get her J.D., quickly followed by a period in corporate law, concentrating on real estate. While many of her peers felt guilty about going into corporate law, she had no such qualms. The student loans had to be paid back. In addition, she says, she remained zeroed in on state and local, not federal, policy. “I wanted to be closer to where programs were implemented,” she says. “I also trained as a mediator and had many pro bono clients.”

While her experience in law and at Children’s Hospital made her an ideal candidate to head up Camden Coalition, it was her deft touch with families that helped convince her Camden colleagues to hire her, as site visits were a very important part of the interview process.

HOMING IN ON POLICY

In 1999, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and Noonan left corporate law to care for her before she died. During this time, she also took stock of her career and decided to take the full dive into public

PHOTO BY TOM STOELKER

policy related to kids and families, which brought her to Children’s Hospital to research the “social drivers of health.” Together with a pediatrician colleague, David Rubin, she founded CHOP’s PolicyLab, whose mission is to achieve optimal child health and well-being by informing program and policy changes through interdisciplinary research.

“We were looking at kids who had a lot of issues that were not necessarily driving the balance sheet of the hospital, so we were not looking at cancer, cardiac care, or the like,” she says. “We were looking at kids who had domestic violence in their lives or mental health issues.”

Her switch from research to enacting and advocating for policy at Camden Coalition has finally brought her full circle. She says she goes to the community meetings and events and has worked the vaccine lines. But she empowers her staff to lead at most onsite events.

“Taking a back seat to them is really important to me,” she says. “I like to be involved in our community meetings without being central to them.”

And, yes, of course, there’s the fundraising, and other boards that she sits on. After years in Morningside Heights and then corporate law, she’s as comfortable in

the C-suite as she is at the local bodega, though she says in the end she prefers the bodega. She recalls a story of being at an academic meeting and hearing a professor who should have known better refer to an underserved neighborhood as not being a “nice place” while presenting his research.

“It was in one of those beautiful rooms with paneling, you know, lots and lots of pedigree,” she says. “I looked around this room, at many people who I considered to be complete overachievers, who would go to the head of the class, stepping on whoever they needed to step on to get there. And I thought, ‘Well, actually, this place is not nice.’

Because I can assure you, if I go back to Camden, and I stop in the bodega, I’m going to meet more nice people there than I am here. That’s somebody’s home. Right? So don’t, don’t talk about it that way.” B

Sources

Building Opportunity, Together

Barnard is dedicated to strengthening the resources and initiatives that empower our students to thrive, both personally and academically, and our community is united in its support of this mission. Together, we are developing amazing resources that support every aspect of the student experience.

Every student on campus has a unique identity, background, and story. Our commitment to supporting the diversity of our community is evident in our funding initiatives — the four funds featured here reflect the broad range of areas that the College, and our community, are committed to supporting.

Contributions to these funds can be made via check or online by credit card, PayPal, or Venmo. To give online at barnard.edu/gift, select “Other Designation” in the gift designation drop-down menu and type the name of the fund in the field.

If you would like to learn more about these funds, or would like to start your own, please contact Kate A. Martinez, associate vice president, Development and Alumnae Relations, at kmartinez@barnard.edu.

The Herb Sloan Prize in Early American History

Historian and professor Herbert Sloan enriched the Barnard-Columbia intellectual community for over 30 years. Wishing to celebrate his contributions to our community and broader academia, Barnard College has established the Herb Sloan Prize in Early American History, an annual award that recognizes an outstanding student thesis or paper in early American history. With the generosity of our faculty, alumnae, and friends, we can build this fund into an enduring resource that honors Herb’s legacy and encourages generations of talented student historians. The Herb Sloan Prize in Early American History will be open for contributions until November 2023.

The Writing Fellows Support Fund

The Barnard Writing Fellows program is one of Barnard’s longest-standing and most renowned resources for writers. It is built on the foundational belief that knowledge production can happen outside of a classroom and is not solely dependent on a professor. Writing Fellows staff the Erica Mann Jong ’63 Writing Center and work in courses across disciplines, collaboratively helping fellow students expand and explore their writing. The Writing Fellows Support Fund fosters the continued growth, education, and development of Barnard’s exceptional young writers and provides financial support for this transformational, one-of-a-kind program.

Gender-Affirming Support Fund

Understanding that students’ undergraduate years represent a period of change and self-discovery, Barnard seeks to support trans and nonbinary students as they acquire clothing to match their gender identity. Clothing and accessories allow trans and nonbinary individuals to express their gender identity outwardly and proudly. Many students, however, are unable to cover the costs associated with gender-affirming clothes. That is where the Gender-Affirming Support Fund comes in: It assists members of Barnard’s trans and nonbinary student population as they access critical necessities.

Francine A. LeFrak Foundation

Center for Well-Being StudentAthlete Space

Established in fall 2020, the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being now serves as a centralized hub for wellness-related initiatives across the Barnard campus. Construction on the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being is underway; the new facility will open to our community in early 2024. In addition to its focus on three tiers of well-being — physical, mental, and financial — the Francine LeFrak Center will prioritize the needs particular to women athletes and will include facilities that meet our scholar-athletes’ needs. Within the StudentAthlete Space — which will celebrate the close relationship between Barnard and Columbia athletics and support its ongoing growth — women athletes will have opportunities to socialize, de-stress, participate in cohort-building activities, and be inspired by the accomplishments of Barnard’s trailblazing alumnae athletes.

An Independent Voice

Rebecca Akers ’83 was a writer with a passion for history and freedom

by Marie DeNoia Aronsohn

Rebecca Akers ’83 and her husband, Mark Axinn, had an annual Fourth of July tradition of reading the Declaration of Independence aloud together. The principles outlined in that document align with her deep commitment to individual freedoms, principles that guided much of Akers’ life and especially her writing.

Akers, who died of cancer in April 2022, published articles and opinion pieces in many publications, including The New York Post, Barron’s, and Forbes.com. But mostly she wrote for websites or for periodicals that were consistent with her political philosophy and the Libertarian Party.

“Becky was very much involved with writing in favor of individual responsibility and individual freedom. The sort of live-and-let-live philosophy,” says Axinn, who served as chair of the New York State Libertarian Party from 2010 to 2015.

Akers’ early formative experiences demonstrate the power of her own sense of individual responsibility. Born in Akron, Ohio, on November 6, 1959, the oldest of four children, she was just 18 when her mother died. Akers stepped in to help as caretaker of her younger siblings.

“She dropped out of high school right then and there,” says Axinn. While she had more than enough credits to graduate with her class, Akers decided to put her higher education goals on hold. She took on the work of helping raise her youngest brother, who was just 2 years old. She also set out to earn money for the family, working as a waitress, at a gas station, and at other odd jobs.

Her dream to study ancient Greek and Latin languages and history came true a few years later thanks to a full merit-based scholarship to attend Barnard, where she enrolled in 1979. She continued to work part-time as she studied. Axinn says that when they met, Akers was a sophomore working the overnight shift as a guard at one of the Barnard dorms and managed on a tight budget.

“She told me that she sometimes went to events on the Barnard campus because there would be food. So she would hear the speakers and go because that way she would have a meal for the day. She was broke,” recalls Axinn.

Akers majored in ancient studies to further her understanding of Greek and Latin cultures, and she excelled. “At the time that I met her, she was dreaming in Latin,” says Axinn. “She told me all these stories of the Greek legends and Roman legends.”

After graduating in 1983, Akers went on to work in public relations and advertising, but she also began to write for herself.

Her early fiction was based on the Greek myths she had come to know so well. But it was her fascination with American history that compelled her to write her two novels. She became intrigued by a Revolutionary War figure — America’s first spy, Nathan Hale

Children’s book authors had told the story of the young soldier who stole British Army secrets to help the American fight for independence, but there was no adult historical fiction about Hale. Akers dug into the story, inventing an antagonist to help drive the narrative, then wrote and published Halestorm. Later she wrote and published Abducting Arnold, another historical novel, about Benedict Arnold. “In both novels, she created another fictional character, a nemesis who was the

adversary,” explains Axinn.

One can get a sense of the lighter elements of Akers’ character from her online bio: “Becky spends most of her time with notes and keyboards — either a computer’s or piano’s. When clacking away at the latter, she often fears the ghosts of Beethoven and Bach may rise to wreak their vengeance. She’s a better cook than musician and proudly reports, ‘Ain’t no one died from my vittles yet!’”

Akers’ death came just three months after she received a cancer diagnosis. But her voice and convictions remain present in her voluminous published writings and in the mind and heart of Mark Axinn, her partner of four decades. While they never took wedding vows or became spouses in the eyes of the law, Axinn describes Akers as his wife and says that after they met on his birthday in 1981, they never parted. Soon after Akers’ death, Axinn wrote a poignant piece for Columbia College Today describing their time together.

“We had 41 years, one month, and 18 days,” he wrote. “It was not enough. Becky died in the middle of Passover, which she loved; my devoutly Christian wife made the world’s best matzo balls. I will miss Becky every day of my life but also know that she wants me to carry on, which I will do, just not as well.” B

Learning From Nature

California naturalist and scholar shares hope gleaned from the state flower

by Helen J. Doyle ’84

As a biology student at Barnard, and later at Columbia for my doctorate, I spent hours in the lab immersed in the discoveries that molecular biology fueled in the 1980s. Throughout my career, I’ve held roles that supported science and education in academia, scholarly publishing, and philanthropy. Recently retired, I decided to recommit to my love of science and education with a new identity, as a California naturalist.

California naturalists are certified via a statewide program run by the University of California. Now that I’m able to commit more time, I volunteer giving public tours in a variety of natural settings in the San Francisco Bay Area. Together with many individuals and organizations, I also work to restore natural habitats and increase access to nature.

In the aftermath of the destructive fires, droughts, storms, and floods that we’ve seen in California and elsewhere, nature continues to surprise us with its resilience, as it has with “superblooms” of native wildflowers following a stormy winter and the regrowth of the forest understory after a fire. The golden California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), for example, has exploded with color this spring, sustaining its blooms well into summer. California’s state flower, the poppy has been popping up in unexpected places after the dramatic winter storms and an unusually chilly spring. Bursts of color appear in unkempt planters on decks, under street trees where dogs relieve themselves, and along roads too dangerous for humans to tend.

To me, these abundant yet fragile flowers symbolize renewal and resilience. I’m reminded that while nature can adapt to environmental changes, its adaptive capacity is limited. If we want to see the poppy thrive, then we need to do more to restore native habitat and protect biodiversity so that nature can renew itself and flourish. Only then can we ensure that all people have the opportunity to enjoy and thrive with nature.

I’m continually awed by the beauty and grace of the California poppy and the nature around me, whether in the city or in a more natural landscape. I hope others will also notice this tenacious yet fragile flower. It doesn’t open if the skies are overcast. Its colors vary from creamy yellow to reddish orange, and its pods are packed with little black seeds, which can be blown by the wind along with its paperthin petals.

The poppy gives me hope that we can and will do better, with our laws, policies, and individual behaviors, to take care of nature and, in turn, of each other. B

Helen J. Doyle ’84, Columbia Ph.D. ’89, is a San Francisco-based educator, writer, and California naturalist.