TERP Winter 2019 by University of Maryland

ATHLETICS REFLECTING AND REBUILDING PG. 6

W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 / CO N N EC T I N G T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY

MONUMENTAL CHANGE

M O N U M E N T S T O S L AV E R Y A N D I T S V I C T I M S H AV E T O L D T H E I R S T O R I E S Q U I E T LY. A MARYLAND PROFESSOR IS LISTENING, A ND URGING OTHER S TO DO SO. P G. 2 4

ALUMNI

FROM THE ARCHIVES

ENLIGHTENED

These words appearing on the short wall surrounding Frederick Douglass Square on Hornbake Plaza were the motto of an influential abolitionist newspaper that he founded in 1847. The square, completed in 2015, features more of his inspirational quotes and a 7 1/2-foot-tall bronze statue of the Maryland native, 2

orator and statesman. T E R P. U M D . E D U

Photo by John T. Consoli

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

WINTER 2019

ON THE MALL

ALUMNI

NEWS

06 Athletics Reflects and Rebuilds 08 New idea in the Works 10 umd Memorializes Capital Gazette Shooting Victims 10 Diamondback Garage Shines at Opening CAMPUS LIFE

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Digesting Dining Waste “Feeling Good” at Blues Great’s Home Leadership Lessons Handling Life’s Curveballs Ultimate Goal Achieved Documentation of an Occupation A Modern Take on an Ancient Immigration Tale

EXPLORATIONS

18 Frogs Find a Way 19 Model to Forecast Cholera Outbreaks 19 How Clean Power Could Make a Desert Bloom 20 Patchwork Problem 21 Newly Discovered Shark Named for umd Biologist

CONTENTS 2

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40 42 44 46

Alumni Association How to Win Followers and Influence People Global Identity From the Archives

FEATURES

ONLINE

Who’s a Puzzle Master? Crossword maker Erik Agard ’15 showed off his smarts on “Jeopardy!,” winning $66,802 in four appearances on the TV show.

—

Tastes of Home The Recipes From Home program returns to dining halls with a twist: To mark the Year of Immigration, families submit recipes with significance to their heritage.

—

Making a Splash

Monumental Change America’s memorials to slavery and its victims have lived quiet lives in public spaces. A Maryland professor is traveling the country to learn their stories. BY SALA LEVIN ’10

Damage, Controlled Haunted by memories of war, umd researcher Ron Capps struggled to find his footing stateside. Now he shares with other veterans what helped him heal: writing. BY LIAM FARRELL

Time of Our Lives Short on free time? Of course you are. But a umd lab has the answers for where the hours are going and what may give you more. BY CHRIS CARROLL

Jason Williams ’66, the first AfricanAmerican diver in the Atlantic Coast Conference, returned to establish a scholarship fund for Incentive Awards Program students. Find new stories every week at TERP.UMD.EDU.

TRANSFORM THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Fearless Ideas Every issue of Terp features examples of how umd transforms the student experience. This time, we further highlight those stories with a “ .” We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to turn imagination into innovation, discover new knowledge and inspire Maryland pride.

WINTER 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

I’m more likely to spend Saturday afternoons running errands, wrangling kids and making the house un-embarrassing than watching college football. But even I was pulled into the Terps’ game against powerhouse Ohio State. After hearing the crowd roar in the first quarter, I bolted from the kitchen, dish bubbles on my hands, and saw the Terps were up 14 points. I peeked at the TV a few more times, then sat down when I discovered that the Buckeyes had tied the score in the last seconds. In a hold-your-breath OT, the Terps went for a two-point conversion to win and came up inches short, 52-51. That seemed to exemplify Maryland’s 5–7 season, surely one of the most emotional and trying in its history: a remarkable blend of spirit, determination and heartbreak. The university community has been reeling since the June death of one of our football players, Jordan McNair, who collapsed from heatstroke during a workout and didn’t get proper treatment from the athletics staff. It prompted an apology from President Wallace D. Loh, an external investigation and a probe of the entire program’s culture, which together resulted in new protocols to ensure student-athletes’ safety, the departures of the strength and conditioning coach and two trainers, and the firing of our football coach. Throughout the fall, across the country, people watched the turmoil and expressed sadness, shock and anger. They debated who should bear responsibility and how. Others wrestled with the role of athletics at universities. Amid all this, the grieving team played on, chins up, resolved to remember and honor their teammate. That seems like a solid model to follow in College Park these days: Reflect on what went wrong, do our best to make things right, and remember why we’re here. From my editor’s perch, I can scan the campus landscape and see the good that takes place at Maryland, and you’ll find some of those stories in this issue of Terp: The anthropologist identifying the barriers that immigrants seeking health care face on Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore. The students working to preserve the childhood home of jazz-blues great Nina Simone. The researcher who in his free time helps military veterans like himself heal through writing. The university is still reckoning with the tragedy that occurred here last year. But we’re more than that tragedy, too.

Lauren Brown University Editor

Publisher JACKIE LEWIS Vice President, University Relations

Advisers JOEL R. SELIGMAN Associate Vice President, Strategic Communications MARGARET HALL Executive Director, Creative Strategies

Magazine Staff LAUREN BROWN University Editor JOHN T. CONSOLI Creative Director CHRIS CARROLL ANNIE DANKELSON LIAM FARRELL SALA LEVIN ’10 Writers JASON A. KEISLING MATT LAUMANN Designers STEPHANIE S. CORDLE Photographer GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Assistant and Archivist JAGU CORNISH Production Manager COLLEEN CROWLEY M.JOUR. ’19 Graduate Assistant CARLY TAYLOR ’19 LINDSEY COLLINS ’20 Interns Production and design by Valerie Morgan. EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu ONLINE terp.umd.edu NEWS umdrightnow.umd.edu FACEBOOK.COM/ UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM/UofMaryland VIMEO.COM/umd YOUTUBE.COM/UMD2101 The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability. COVER PHOTO by Stephanie S. Cordle

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INTERPLAY

Raising the Bar

I just wanted to let you know that your alumni magazine and magazine website both look phenomenal. I’m a designer at St. Mary’s in San Antonio, and I’m always on the lookout for higher ed design inspiration. You’ve raised the bar for alumni magazines, and your team deserves major kudos! —EMILY HARRIS, ST. MARY’S UNIVERSITY

Learning to Listen

A New Chapter for the M Book

As a former M Book editor, I am thrilled to hear the freshmen-new student guide is coming back. Digital information is wonderful and usually easily accessible, but there is nothing like a little guidebook to get you through the day without having to check for an app on your phone. —GLORY SLONE GIFFIN ’57, SAN DIEGO, VIA TERP ONLINE

Backyard Battle

I am glad to see that (how ticks spread Lyme disease via animals) is being studied and hope to see results. I live in just such an area—edge of woods with lots of wildlife. My dogs wear tick collars, but unfortunately I don’t. I contracted Lyme disease several years ago.

Kudos From a Peer

I want to commend you all on a great fall issue. From cover to cover, it was very well done. I may be a tad biased as a journalism alumna, since there were so many wonderful and moving stories related to the school. As a current library science student at Catholic University, I was also thrilled to see a profile of the archivist at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Seriously, so cool. I currently work in the Office of Marketing and Communications at Catholic University. In the last couple of years, I’ve been dedicated to producing web content. But for the decade or so before that, I worked on our alumni magazine. I know all the hard work that goes into these magazines. You should be proud. Keep up the great work!

My son is a student at umd, and his brother has cochlear implants. Although he is too old now for this program (19 years), I know the big difference that this kind of program can make in their lives. As a mom, I feel proud of umd’s fearless ideas. —NURIA TORRES, GUAYNABO, PUERTO RICO, VIA FACEBOOK

I am a pre-kindergarten inclusion teacher and after reading the article, I am just so impressed!! I do hope this program expands to year-round! —DONNA STICKLEY, VIA FACEBOOK

—LISA CARROLL ‘05, WASHINGTON, D.C.

—NANCY KRESSLER ’60, M.S. ’72, GREENBELT, MD.,

WRITE TO US We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments— and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or

Terp magazine Office of Strategic Communications 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742

M B O O K COV E R S CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES ; D ES I G N BY H A I L EY H WA S H I N ; P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

WINTER 2019

ON THE MALL

NEWS

Reforms to Maryland Athletics aim to better protect the health and safety of student-athletes in football and all other Terp sports.

Athletics Reflects and Rebuilds

Department Presses Ahead to Protect Student-Athletes maryland athletics is continuing to implement a series of reforms to improve student-athletes’ safety across all sports following the death last June of sophomore offensive lineman Jordan McNair. In January, the athletics department was expected to announce the appointment of a new Athletic Medicine Review Board, comprising independent experts who will routinely review the department’s policies and their implementation. In addition, Maryland Athletics has retained sports medicine consulting firm Walters Inc. to

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support its progress; this same firm conducted an independent investigation into McNair’s death after he suffered heatstroke during a team workout. The Walters report outlined a series of mistakes by Maryland’s athletics training staff and recommended 20 changes in policies and practices to ensure the safety and well-being of student-athletes. University President Wallace D. Loh and Athletics Director Damon Evans vowed to carry out every one. “The death of Jordan McNair has touched the lives of every member of our community,

and Jordan’s legacy will forever live on as a part of Maryland Athletics,” Evans said. “We are committed to honoring his life by making sure something like this never happens again.” The university will also soon appoint an advisory council, one recommendation from a second external review into Maryland’s football program that identified a number of troubling practices in the athletics department. This new group is charged with helping to foster a culture that represents the university’s values.

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; L O C K S L E Y P H O T O : G R E G F I U M E / M A R Y L A N D A T H L E T I C S

The department completed many of the recommended reforms spanning all sports during the fall semester, including developing venue-specific emergency action plans, making cold water immersion devices available for all activities, providing enhanced trauma bags for all practices and games with thermistors to assess core temperature and tarps for cooling, and initiating a medical timeout before all practices. In addition, student-athletes who use stimulant or related medications will be informed each year about their potential impact on heat and exercise tolerance. “It shows you they are sincere about this,” said Rod Walters, president of Walters Inc. “It’s amazing how much more clarity there is.” The department has also introduced new ways for student-athletes to voice their concerns, including an anonymous online reporting system, and to increase oversight and accountability among Athletics’ leadership. A revised ethics code for the staff is now under review, and the department will solicit feedback on it from across campus. The ultimate goal, Evans said, is to support student-athletes as they pursue success in the classroom and on the field. “The work across these four areas will serve as our starting point for further reforms and an opportunity for us to share what we have learned with universities across the system,” he said.

Locksley Takes Over as Head Coach THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND has turned to a familiar face to shape the future of its football

team: Michael Locksley, a D.C. native who spent a decade on the Terps’ coaching staff and became one of the nation’s most successful recruiters. Locksley was lured from his post as offensive coordinator at Alabama in December—on the same day he won the 2018 Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach. “My No. 1 priority and focus will be the health, development and safety of this family,” he said at an introductory press conference. “I want to create the right culture and environment, and winning will follow.” Locksley was offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in College Park from 2012–15, and running backs coach and recruiting coordinator from 1997–2002. Athletics Director Damon Evans praised him as “ingrained in the very fabric of who we are as a state and who we are as Terps.” “This has been a difficult season for our team. They deserve someone who can bring us together,” Evans said. “Coach Locksley doesn’t just consider himself a coach while the student-athletes are here. He’s their coach for life.” When first meeting with the team, Locksley said he told the players how proud he was watching them beat eventual Big 12 runner-up Texas in the first game of the year. “What passion, energy, toughness this team played with,” he said. “I’m not coming into a bare cupboard. I’m coming into a team that has fight in them.” Locksley played safety at Towson University and was the team’s defensive mvp as a senior in 1991, when he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing. He started his coaching career at Towson as a defensive backs and special teams coach in 1992, and subsequently worked with the Naval Academy Preparatory School, the University of the Pacific, Army, Florida and Illinois. Known as a recruiting guru with a pipeline into the best football talent of the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, he helped sign eight top-25 incoming classes, including four in the top five. Although Locksley’s two-plus years as a head coach at New Mexico from 2009–11 ended with a 2-26 record, the new Terps leader said he has grown in the years since, particularly after coaching under Alabama’s Nick Saban, one of the premier coaches in college football history. “I just spent three years saturated in winning,” he said. “It’s my goal … to recreate that environment here.” Locksley and his family have also dealt with tragedy, as his son, Meiko, was shot and killed in 2017. He said that experience strengthened his friendship with late offensive lineman Jordan McNair’s parents, which began when their kids went to high school together. McNair’s father, Marty, attended the introductory press conference. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you Michael Locksley, shown at a 2015 Maryland game vs. Indiana, brings a familiarity with umd and the recruiting region to his new role as head football coach.

love. It’s not something that just goes away. It’s a day-to-day fight,” Locksley said. “I’m looking forward to fighting this battle with our team.”

WINTER 2019

ON THE MALL

NEWS

New IDEA in the Works Alum Donates to Engineering Innovation Space ver since he can remember, Emilio A. Fernandez Jr. ’69 has been tinkering, imagining and experimenting. Now, the accomplished entrepreneur and inventor is helping the University of Maryland’s creative minds do the same. Fernandez, who helped develop e-reader technology and made key contributions to the railroad industry, has pledged $10 million toward building the E.A. Fernandez idea (Innovate, Design and Engineer for America) Factory, a substantial addition to the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building designed to encourage faculty and students to disrupt conventional thinking in areas such as robotics, manufacturing, quantum technology and the “internet of things.” A ceremonial groundbreaking was held on Nov. 13 on the site of the neighboring Potomac Building, demolished over the summer. Construction is expected to be completed in 2021. “Synergy—when the sum of two plus two is a lot more than four—is a crucial part of the Factory’s mission,” says Fernandez (at right, fifth from left). “And that’s what’s going to happen here.” A member of the umcpf Board of Trustees and the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s Board of Visitors, Fernandez came to the U.S. from Cuba alone at an early age, first living with friends in Florida, and then his parents in Bethesda, Md. He spent his high school years taking apart radios, toasters and other electronics and entering science fairs. To help finance his education at umd, he worked part-time in a physics lab, assisted with research and learned technical skills, but he spent most of his time in the engineering building, calling it his home away from home. Fernandez met fellow Cuban immigrant Angel “Angie” Bezos there during sopho-

T E R P. U M D . E D U

more year and asked him one day in class if he wanted to start a company. The pair developed a locomotive recorder device after graduation, then in 1977 co-founded Pulse Electronics, whose patents include train brake controls and separation detection. The idea Factory will be a 60,000-squarefoot space with five floors, including research and design labs, conference rooms and offices. alex’s Garage, a space for student competition and design teams will be another prominent feature. (The acronym refers to a project designation associated with the development of the e-book.) Long vistas will make the activities throughout the building visible to passersby. The idea Factory will also be home to the Startup Shell, the student-run incubator. Fernandez hopes to encourage scientific dialogue, and the idea Factory’s open con-

cept and plan for a dining area strives to foster the sharing of ideas. “There could be a casual understanding of what one group is doing just over a cup of coffee,” he says. The idea Factory will advance the Clark School’s mission of developing leading engineers, transforming the engineering discipline and accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship. “The E.A. Fernandez idea Factory will be a space for the greatest minds of our time to work together to create engineering breakthroughs and solve the grand challenges of the 21st century,” says Darryll Pines, Nariman Farvardin professor and Clark School dean.—ad See a video on the idea Factory at terp.umd.edu.

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ON THE MALL

CAMPUS LIFE

Diamondback Garage Shines at Opening

UMD Memorializes Capital Gazette Shooting Victims THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND is

Maryland Athletics paid tribute to

honoring the five victims of June’s

McNamara, a sports reporter who cov-

mass shooting in the Capital Gazette

ered Terps football and basketball for

newsroom in Annapolis, Md.

two decades, with a moment of silence

The Philip Merrill College of

in the press box before the first home

Journalism renamed the executive

football game of the season. Press box

seminar room in Knight Hall for alumni

seats in both Maryland Stadium and

John McNamara ’83 and Gerald

Xfinity Center have been permanently

Fischman ’79, adjunct professor

dedicated to him.

Rob Hiaasen and their colleagues,

“From his time as a young reporter

Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters. A

for The Diamondback, John dedicated

dedication ceremony, co-hosted with

much of his life to reporting news and

The Diamondback student newspaper,

sharing stories of our student-athletes,

was held in December—the same day

coaches and programs at Maryland,”

that Time magazine named the Capital

Athletic Director Damon Evans says.

Gazette newsroom staff among its

“The seats dedicated in his honor will

2018 Persons of the Year: “The

serve as a constant reminder to the

Guardians and the War on Truth.”

dedication and passion he had for

Merrill College will also create

Maryland and sports journalism.”

writing competitions in memory of

He and four others were gunned

Fischman and McNamara, as well as a

down on June 28, allegedly by a man

teaching award in memory of Hiaasen.

with a long-standing grudge against

“These people served their com-

The Capital, including a reporter and

munity by practicing and supporting

publisher who no longer worked there. It

journalism,” says Lucy A. Dalglish,

was possibly the deadliest single day for

dean of Merrill College. “We hope these

journalists in American history.

remembrances will be a consistent reminder of their example, and that their memory inspires others to seek truth and do good.”

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Maria Hiaasen (left) and Andrea Chamblee ’83, the widows of Capital Gazette shooting victims Rob Hiaasen and John McNamara ’83, view the newly named Capital Gazette Memorial Seminar Room in Knight Hall.

the $2 billion revitalization effort known as Greater College Park is centered on Baltimore Avenue, but the latest major addition is invisible from the road. Tucked under the parking garage behind the Hotel at the University of Maryland is a glassed-in, wired-up, tricked-out innovation hub called the Diamondback Garage—a space where student startups mix with Fortune 500 firms and an “entrepreneurial ecosystem” is strengthening its campus roots. The 20,000-square-foot facility opened in November, featuring the kickoff of the Capital One Tech Incubator, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the McLean, Va.based bank. The space is dedicated to machine learning, predictive analytics and cybersecurity, and creates a pipeline of job opportunities for students in computing and a pool of talent for industry. The opposite end of the facility is home base for Immuta, a startup founded in 2014 by umd undergrads and former U.S. intelligence analysts; it’s become the leading provider of enterprise data management solutions for artificial intelligence. If that sounds forbidding, the space the company inhabits is anything but, with vibrant original artworks painted onto the walls and an uber-chill central lounge/meeting area with table games and an impressive kitchen. In between the two companies, Startup umd provides shared office, meeting and high-tech work spaces where student entrepreneurs can find support. Among the tenants are the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, UM Ventures and the Do Good Accelerator.—cc Peek inside the Diamondback Garage at terp.umd.edu.

M E M O R I A L A N D D I A M O N D B A C K G A R A G E P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

Digesting Dining Waste A Guide to How Dining Hall Waste Has Vanished remember dumping your tray at the conveyor belt on your way out of the dining hall? Half-eaten chicken tenders, cold mozzarella stick shells and dirty dishes just disappeared, right? Today, you can trash such misconceptions on food waste at Maryland. Dining Services and the Office of Sustainability are savoring successful efforts to eliminate trash from students in the dining halls. The biggest difference: switching to Anytime Dining in 2016, which allows students on meal plans to eat as much as they like on reusable dishes in the three dining halls, but bans disposable or takeout containers. (That alone saves 6.3 million single-use items every year.) Other ecofriendly actions have included removing trays, to eliminate the temptation to fill them with food that goes uneaten, and focusing heavily on composting. Collection of compostables across campus is up 48 percent since Anytime Dining launched. Think mealtime at Maryland couldn’t have changed so much? Feast on this.—lb

Fruit-infused water: Served from dispensers

Salad: Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and cukes may have come from Terp Farm

Potato chips: Purchased in huge boxes, then individually portioned

Buffalo chicken wrap: No. 1 deli selection

Chocolate chip cookie: Baked in-house—no packaging

•N O TRASH CANS in the dining room •N O TRAYS, as dishes go to dish room via plate collector •F OOD WASTE scraped from plates is trucked to organic composting facility •H IGH-TECH DISHWASHERS save 800,000 gallons of water per year vs. predecessors •T ERP FARM in Upper Marlboro uses UMD compost to grow more veggies

P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

WINTER 2019

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CAMPUS LIFE

“Feeling Good” at Blues Great’s Home National Trust to Preserve Nina Simone’s Birthplace, Following UMD Report he tiny, weather-beaten cabin in rural Tryon, N.C., doesn’t seem to have much in common with the Washington National Cathedral or the Grand Canyon. Yet the building, the birthplace and early childhood home of singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone, now shares a place with them on a list of “National Treasures,” thanks to an effort in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Historic Preservation Program. And it’s on the path to being saved. Brent Leggs, a clinical assistant professor, and graduate students Daniela Tai, Kelly Schindler and Chris Bryan spent the Fall 2017 semester researching and writing a report about Simone’s home that recently influenced the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s efforts to preserve and reuse it. Leggs, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund director for the National Trust, proposed the project in a preservation economics course after an African-American artists’ group, Daydream Therapy, purchased the home for $95,000 in March of that year. “Many African-American historic places are undervalued, underfunded and are currently vacant,” Leggs says. “I was excited about bringing to the classroom a real-world project and teaching students the process for advancing a preservation and business strategy for reuse, but also approaches for building a case of support and engaging the broader public.” Simone, born Eunice Waymon in 1933, lived in the home for only two years before

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her family was forced to move due to financial struggles. She started playing piano at age 3 and the Tryon community, recognizing her talent, established a fund to support her piano lessons and send her to private high school. Rejected by the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, Simone was instead discovered while auditioning at an Atlantic City bar. She went on to become “the High Priestess of Soul,” blending blues and jazz in hits like “Feeling Good” and “I Put a Spell on You” and turning to social activism with songs including “Mississippi Goddam.” She died at her home in France in 2003. Historic preservation students in their report highlighted Simone’s legacy, Tryon’s rich cultural history and past efforts to save the home. Capturing both local and national interest

in the project was key, Schindler says. The students found the Tryon community receptive to celebrating Simone, as it has already dedicated a memorial to her. A real hurdle is the house’s unassuming exterior, Schindler said. “When you get these buildings that don’t look spectacular, you have to figure out a way to convey that story,” she says. The report suggests an artist residency would be a good use of Simone’s home to “allow the artist the flexibility to engage with the homestead and possibly the community.” The National Trust in June deemed the home a “national treasure,” signifying its dedication to preserving the endangered site. The organization is creating a sustainable plan for reuse and hopes to open the restored site in the next two years, Leggs says. —ct

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M A R G A R E T H A L L ; S I M O N E P H O T O C O U R T E SY O F R O C K & R O L L H A L L O F FA M E ; H O U S E P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F N AT I O N A L T R U S T F O R H I S T O R I C P R E S E R VAT I O N

Leadership Lessons

Immersive Gettysburg Experience Shows Business Students How to Lead t’s one of the most visceral displays of competing leadership in American history: two armies, face-to-face in the fields and hills near a small Pennsylvania town in the summer of 1863, fighting for the fate of a nation and its enslaved people. And while the stakes in an average company boardroom don’t reach the heights of the Battle of Gettysburg, umd’s Robert H. Smith School of Business believes students and professionals can learn a lot from the decisions of Robert E. Lee, George Meade, James Longstreet and Joshua Chamberlain. In December, the school renewed a partnership with the Gettysburg Foundation to educate executive development clients and executive mba students with one of the Civil War’s turning points. “You have this amazing, living, immersive leadership development experience,” says Jeffrey Kudisch, a clinical professor in the Department of Management and Organization who helps lead the program. “People don’t only learn about the battlefield, they learn more about the leaders involved in the battle, and ultimately, more about each other.” Rather than looking at specific tactics employed over the course of those three July days, the program delves into the leadership qualities of soldiers and how they led to success or failure. Participants take a personality assessment beforehand that allows them to compare themselves to historical analogues, seeing how Chamberlain’s inspirational approach helped secure Little Round Top and Daniel Sickle’s narcissistic, dominant style weakened the Union’s defenses.

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T L A U M A N N ; PA D F O L I O I M A G E : I S T O C K

It’s a gateway to considering how concepts such as teamwork, strategic thinking, succession planning, persuasion and conflict management function in students’ own workplaces, Kudisch says. “They can see themselves,” he says. “It’s where psychology meets history, and where self-reflection fuels leader transformation.” Sue Boardman, the leadership program director and a licensed battlefield guide for the Gettysburg Foundation, says even history-skeptical participants are won over by walking in the footsteps of Civil War figures and seeing how mentorship and toxic leadership expressed themselves on the field. “That’s our target audience: the six who would rather go to the dentist,” Boardman says. “We try to introduce these characters as real people.”—lf

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CAMPUS LIFE

Handling Life’s Curveballs After Beating Cancer, UMD Pitcher Looks for More Wins on Mound

T E R P. U M D . E D U

laying time isn’t guaranteed for redshirt sophomore Billy Phillips, as the University of Maryland baseball team added several arms since last season. But that’s an obstacle the left-handed pitcher doesn’t mind after overcoming a much more difficult one. “If I don’t pitch a lot,” he says, “I’m not supposed to be here anyway.” During his senior year of high school in 2015, Phillips was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. After weeks in the hospital and a more than yearlong intensive recovery—and with support from his umd teammates—he made his collegiate debut last season, and he’s ready to keep the Ks coming. For Phillips, getting back to baseball was getting back to living. His baby pictures feature him holding a baseball, and he was the only kid on his T-ball team who could hit the ball from

the plate to the playground in the distance. During Phillips’ junior year at St. Mark’s High in Wilmington, Del., the Terps’ pitching coach at the time, Jim Belanger, came out to see him. “I probably threw the worst game that I’ve ever thrown in my life,” Phillips says. “And he called me up and was like, ‘You’re still our guy. I still want you.’ And right then and there, I was like, ‘There’s no better place than Maryland.’” After committing to umd, though, Phillips didn’t get to play as a senior. He woke up one morning with a terrible pain in his hip, one that never subsided. He became anemic and pale, his lymph nodes swelled up, and he lost more than 20 pounds. Blood tests revealed he had developed leukemia. “I was actually kinda glad that they figured out what it was,” Phillips says, “because that pain was just ridiculous.” He “kicked butt” on the introductory round of chemotherapy, and was optimistic

P H O T O S BY G R E G F I U M E / M A R Y L A N D AT H L E T I C S

SPORTS BRIEFS

“His desire to be great is what really drew us to him. That sure as heck hasn’t changed.” —BASEBALL COACH ROB VAUGHN

Ultimate Goal Achieved Men’s Soccer Tops Akron for Program’s Fourth National Title FIFTY YEARS AFTER ITS FIRST national

championship and 10 years after its most recent, the University of Maryland men’s soccer team

that he might get to return for the second half of the season at St. Mark’s. But after a bone marrow transplant, he developed graft-versus-host disease, in which donated stem cells attack the patient’s healthy tissues and organs. The Terps made his extended hospital stays a little bit easier. Head coach Rob Vaughn, an assistant at the time, drove to Delaware with other coaches to visit Phillips. The players’ caps that spring had “#BP15”— Phillips’ initials and high school graduation year—stitched on the back. In November 2015, the team participated in the Light the Night Walk for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Phillips healed enough to arrive at umd in August 2016. He didn’t play that season, but by last year, he had gained enough weight to be reinstated. He still wasn’t expecting to get the ball on Feb. 18, a Sunday night game vs. Tennessee. “I was freaking out,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m about to pitch against an sec team right now.’” He doesn’t remember the jog from the bullpen to the mound, but he does recall each pitch he threw to that first batter, who struck out looking. The next hitter singled over the shortstop’s head, but Phillips induced a double play to end a clean first collegiate inning— one of 20 frames recorded last season. Now, instead of wondering if he’ll be healthy enough to pitch, Phillips is looking forward to building on that inning total. He strives to be a weekend starter. “His desire to be great is what really drew us to him,” Vaughn says. “That sure as heck hasn’t changed.”—ad

netted the top prize again. Senior captain Amar Sejdic scored on a penalty kick in the 57th minute to send the 11th-seeded Terps past Akron, 1–0, in the College Cup Final on Dec. 9 in Santa Barbara, Calif. The national title is Maryland’s fourth in program history (1968, 2005, 2008) and third under longtime head coach Sasho Cirovski. “It means so much to me to wear the captain’s armband for this university,” said Sejdic, named the College Cup’s Most Outstanding Player. “And it’s an honor for us to be able to lift up this trophy.” UMD (13–6–4), led by redshirt junior goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair, didn’t

allow a goal in 450 minutes of NCAA tournament action, closing out the season with five straight shutouts. “We talked about this being a big moment for our program,” Cirovski said. “They were pushed and hardened after a challenging schedule. And now, they’re jewels. I am incredibly happy for them.”

Field Hockey Falls to UNC in NCAA Title Game THE UMD FIELD HOCKEY TEAM, competing in its second straight NCAA

championship game, lost 2–0 to No. 1 North Carolina on Nov. 18 in Louisville, Ky. The defeat halted Maryland’s quest for a ninth national title and eighth under longtime Coach Missy Meharg. The Big Ten-champion Terps (22–3) controlled much of the second half, outshooting the undefeated Tar Heels 9–3 in the period and 9–8 overall. “I couldn’t be more proud of our team,” Meharg said. “North Carolina has had an incredible season. To outshoot and outcorner them is a great testament to Maryland.”

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Japanese citizens and American GIs rub elbows in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district in this 1948 illustration from the book “Atarashii ginza.”

Documentation of an Occupation

New Libraries Exhibit Showcases Publications in Post-WWII Japan n the pages of children’s books, heroic American GIs play catch with smiling Japanese children. Lifestyle magazines show the latest fashions from the West, and newspapers make no mention of war or the atomic bombs dropped just a short time earlier. Neatly shelved, boxed and stacked on the climate-controlled fourth floor of Hornbake Library are hundreds of thousands of such documents published during the United

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States’ occupation of Japan after World War II. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Gordon W. Prange Collection, a new exhibit, “Crossing the Divide: An American Dream Made in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” showcases approximately 60 examples of materials revealing the everyday of that extraordinary period. The exhibit also features personal photographs from former U.S. commanders who worked and raised their families in Japan

until the end of the occupation in 1952. Under Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (scap) government, the Civil Censorship Detachment (ccd) monitored all Japanese civilian correspondence, including personal letters, phone calls, radio and printed publications from 1945 to 1949. All Japanese publishers were required to submit their prepublication copies to the ccd for review. The collection has a central irony, says Yukako Tatsumi, East Asian studies librarian and curator for the Prange collection, because censoring publications requires a wide net of historical record keeping. “You have to collect materials to hide,” she says. “But that means making a whole comprehensive collection like this.” Prange, a history professor at umd prior to and following the war, served as chief historian for MacArthur during the occupation and recognized the historical value of the censored materials, which consisted of thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, photographs and posters. When the ccd was dismantled in 1949, Prange requested ownership of these documents, plus the many ccd-approved materials, and spent two years shipping them to the university, where they sat in the basement of McKeldin Library for over a decade, until the university saw their potential. The Prange Collection is now the world’s most comprehensive archive of print publications from the Allied occupation of Japan. —c o c THE EXHIBIT IS ON DISPLAY THROUGH JULY IN THE MARYLAND ROOM AT HORNBAKE LIBRARY, OPEN FROM 10 A.M. TO 5 P.M. MONDAYS THROUGH FRIDAYS AND 1 TO 6 P.M. ON SUNDAYS.

I M A G E C O U R T E SY O F T H E G O R D O N W. P R A N G E C O L L E C T I O N

The Year of Immigration A YEARLONG SERIES of events, programs

and conversations underway at Maryland aims to celebrate its large and diverse international community while increasing understanding and action. The Year of Immigration focuses on issues related to immigration, global migration and refugees. Maryland has a student body representing over 135 countries, and partners with the surrounding Prince George’s County community, where nearly

A Modern Take on an Ancient Immigration Tale Terp’s New Opera Explores Struggles of Refugees he first draft of this story was written millennia ago: A mother and her child, forced to flee their home, embark on a journey to seek out a better life. The refugee crisis in modern Syria is the backdrop for a newly relevant take, an opera written by a Terp. The Artist Partner Program and the School of Music’s Maryland Opera Studio commissioned Elisabeth Mehl Greene D.M.A. ’11 to create an original piece for the New Works Initiative for the university’s Year of Immigration, a series of events and conversations surrounding global migration, immigration and refugees. The result was “Hajar,” based on the Jewish and Islamic accounts of Abraham’s concubine and their son being cast into the desert, and fleshed out by news reports and firsthand accounts of female Syrian refugees. “She’s just a mom, com-

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y B R I A N G . P AY N E

one in four residents are foreign-born.

ing to America with her kid,” Greene says. “Given that our protagonist is a female, Muslim immigrant, I wanted to show her as much more well-rounded than what we usually see.” Greene, an accomplished woman in a historically male-dominated field, was the “clear choice” for this project, says Craig Kier, director of the Maryland Opera Studio. As the author of “Lady Midrash: Poems Reclaiming the Voices of Biblical Women” and a visiting researcher at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, she has extensive knowledge of women’s issues and history in the Middle East. She’s also a librettist, but she revels in the work, saying that opera “gives you space to explore the heightened emotional moments.” Greene hopes those moments will move audiences to be more empathetic toward immigrants and refugees. “(Hajar) and all other immigrants aren’t just numbers,” she says. “They have families and homes. They’re people.”—c o c

Highlights so far have included the selection of the First Year Book, “The Refugees,” by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, as well as panel discussions, courses, study abroad programs, translation and interpretation events, and library and art exhibitions. Still to come: ARTS & HUMANITIES DEAN’S LECTURE SERIES: EDWIDGE DANTICAT (FEB. 20): The award-

winning novelist joins Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Merle Collins for a conversation about their experiences as Caribbean Americans. REFUGEE PANEL DISCUSSION (MARCH 7): The School of Public Policy

and the Office of International Affairs welcome Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International; Nancy Lindborg, president of the United States Institute of Peace; and Ambassador Dina Kawar of Jordan. ESTUDIOS UNIVERSITARIOS (MARCH 9): As part of the new “Terps

Translate” program, Prince George’s County Public Schools and UMD provide Spanish-speaking families with extensive resources on college preparation and the admission process.

The world premiere of “Hajar” will be at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15 in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. For tickets, visit theclarice.umd.edu.

Find more events and volunteer opportunities at yearofimmigration.umd.edu and follow on social media at #YearofImmigration.

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Frogs Find a Way Researchers Explore Survival After Amphibian Apocalypse FOLLOWING THE PATHS that biology

Applications, lead author DiRenzo and

Professor Karen Lips established decades

senior author Lips show that frogs are

ago to survey frogs along the streams

now able to get on with their lives in the

and through the lush cloud forest in the

presence of the deadly chytrid fungus—with

highlands of central Panama is a compara-

the majority population of infected frogs

tively lifeless journey these days.

surviving at the same rate as the smaller

“On a good night, you’ll find maybe 20

It’s a hopeful development, though not

really sad,” says Grace DiRenzo Ph.D ’16,

exactly a feel-good story, Lips says. El Copé,

a former student of Lips who has studied

she points out, hosts a lot of sick frogs.

the worldwide amphibian die-off caused

they don’t call as much,” she says. “They’re

“There’s so much empty space; I can’t

not super-sick, but even when you just

imagine what Karen saw before the crash.”

have a cold, you can’t do as much. So they

El Copé National Park in late 2004,

don’t get as big, they probably can’t be as successful, but they can survive.”

wiping out 42 of 74 local frog species and

In addition to evolutionary changes

drastically depleting the rest, Lips had to

within species that helped frogs survive,

watch out to avoid treading on the colorful

their far lower density in the environment

hoppers, and surveying one transect and

following the die-off may also lessen the

all its chirping frogs took five hours. In the

threat of the disease, DiRenzo says. The

following years, “the streams were dead

disappearance at El Copé of a so-called

silent,” and she could cover three of the

“super-shedder” species, the Panamanian

routes in one hour. So when they returned to Lips’ field study site at El Copé to survey the amphibians from 2010 to 2014, they thought they might find remnant populations drifting toward

golden frog—effectively a “Typhoid Mary” of chytridiomycosis, she says—may also have reduced its effect. And now the frogs may be slowly coming back. “This gives us a glimpse of hope that

extinction. But what they found

amphibian populations can persist in the

didn’t line up with expectations.

face of major threats,” DiRenzo says. “It

In a paper published in October in the journal Ecological

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“Maybe they’re not as active; maybe

by chytridiomycosis, a fungal skin disease.

Before the apocalyptic affliction hit

percentage of uninfected ones.

frogs on a 200-meter transect, which is

doesn’t mean they’ll ever fully rebound.” —CC

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

Model to Forecast Cholera Outbreaks RESEARCH BY MARYLAND microbi-

Colwell—who began studying the bacterium in the late 1960s and conceived the idea of forecasting and proactively fighting cholera outbreaks in 1995—says seeing her vision realized “is the greatest satisfaction any scientist, mathematician, or engineer could possibly have… essentially a dream fulfilled.”

ologist Rita Colwell is enabling a new

Using data from NASA satellites and

international aid effort to predict and

other sources, the team’s computer

stop potential epidemics of cholera

model provides risk maps for cholera

before they happen.

in Yemen and other regions based

The British-led effort, which began

on factors that include air and water

last summer in Yemen, draws on decades

temperatures; precipitation; severity of

of Colwell’s work to understand the

natural disasters; availability of clean

water-borne bacterium Vibrio cholerae

water; sanitation and hygiene infrastruc-

that causes the disease, and uses a

ture; population density; and severity of

computer model designed to forecast

natural disasters.

cholera outbreaks developed by a team

How Clean Power Could Make a Desert Bloom

“By being able to predict when and

of U.S. scientists headed by Colwell, a

where cholera is of highest risk, it

Distinguished University Professor in

makes it possible to deliver supplies

the University of Maryland Institute for

and arrange for safe drinking water

Advanced Computer Studies, Antar Jutla,

effectively and accurately,” said Colwell,

a hydrologist and civil engineer at West

a former director of the U.S. National

Virginia University, and UMD’s Anwar Huq,

Science Foundation whose career has

a former graduate student of Colwell’s

bridged the disciplines of microbiology,

who is a research professor in the

genetics, ecology, infectious disease,

university’s Maryland Pathogen Research

public health, data analysis and satellite

Institute.

technology.—CC

Large-scale solar and wind farms in the Sahara would more than

Eugenia Kalnay, a Distinguished University Professor in the Depart-

double the precipitation in the Sahara,

ment of Atmospheric and Oceanic

said Yan Li, a former postdoctoral

Sciences, said in a NPR interview she

FILLING THE SAHARA, the Earth’s

researcher at Maryland and a lead

hit on the idea when considering the

largest hot desert, with wind and

author of the paper. The installations

mechanisms that cause deserts to

solar electricity generation farms

would affect land surface properties,

grow.

wouldn’t just create a lot of clean

altering regional climates. The

energy—it could reverse creeping

study, published in September, was

[cycle could] go in the opposite way,

desertification and open up broad

conducted with a novel, interactive

so it would increase precipitation, and

landscapes to agriculture, according

combination of a global climate

vegetation, and then more precipita-

to a UMD-led study in Science.

model and a land/vegetation model.

tion,” she said.—CC

F R O G P H O T O C O U R T E SY O F G R A C E D I R E N Z O ; WAT E R I L L U S T R AT I O N BY K E L S E Y M A R O T TA ; C A C T U S I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M A R G A R E T H A L L

“It occurred to me that the same

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Patchwork Problem

Research Examines Health Care Challenges for Rural Immigrants ndocumented and uninsured, “Verónica” had no choice but to go to the hospital last year when one side of her body went numb and she thought she was having a stroke. Married to another undocumented Mexican immigrant who works in a plant nursery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Verónica is a caterer who struggles to navigate a labyrinthine health system. She developed thyroid issues after coming to the U.S. 15 years ago, and while her children are citizens who qualify for some medical assistance, the co-pays stack up and the youngest child, who has thyroid problems as well, occasionally has to see a specialist in Baltimore, more than 100 miles away. It turned out that Verónica was actually having an anxiety attack, a diagnosis that came with a $4,452 bill from the emergency room and the daunting prospect of having to find not only a doctor she trusts to treat her mental health, but an interpreter too. For the past five years, Thurka Sangaramoorthy, an associate professor of anthropology at umd, has been documenting the lives of people like Verónica on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and how they wrestle with an expensive yet patchwork health care system to get treatment in a rural area reliant on immigrant labor, both legal and not.

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In general, she says, rural areas like the Eastern Shore suffer from higher levels of poverty and mortality than urban places, with fewer hospitals, physicians and insurance networks plus lower reimbursements for Medicare. Those issues are intensified for immigrants, who are a critical labor source for the Eastern Shore’s agricultural, poultry and seafood industries but lack everything from English language skills to reliable public transportation. They cope, Sangaramoorthy outlined in a September article in American Anthropologist, by employing “Band-aid care” tactics, from bartering and rationing to relying on the

goodwill of providers. Through interviews with health care workers and immigrants, she collected narratives: a maid cleaning houses for insulin, a nurse getting paid in tamales and doctors skipping paperwork to keep visits off the books. “(Immigrants in the United States) suffer from some of the same conditions that we study abroad,” she says. “It’s about how people get by in severely constrained environments.” “Lupe,” a Mexican immigrant who lives and works on a farm with her family, says it’s common for workers to collapse from exhaustion while picking crops in the heat of summer. With so much fatigue and little

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M AT T L A U M A N N

Newly Discovered Shark Named for UMD Biologist

and shark biologist Toby Daly-Engel, a

A NEWLY IDENTIFIED species of deep-sea

female shark biologist, she was one of the

shark was named for a pioneering marine

first people to study sharks.”

biologist and late UMD professor emerita of biology. Squalus clarkae, also known as Genie’s

co-author of the paper, told the university’s news site. “She was not just the first

Clark’s career spanned 60 years; beyond her fundamental contributions to understanding of shark and fish behavior,

dogfish, honors Eugenie Clark, aka “the

she was a groundbreaking science

shark lady,” who died in 2015 at age 92.

communicator as well. She rose to public

The shark, indigenous in the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic Ocean, has

prominence with her bestselling autobiography “Lady With a Spear,” followed by

unusually big eyes and a short stature,

articles in National Geographic and TV

typically measuring 20 to 28 inches in

appearances. Clark was also, according to

length. Its existence was confirmed by a

a tribute from her former student and later

team of researchers and published in July

department chair Arthur Popper, professor

in Zootaxa.

emeritus of biology, likely the only female

“She is the mother of us all,” Florida Institute of Technology assistant professor

scientist to ever study aboard Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso.—CC

time to cook, the workers often subsist on Red Bull and ramen, ignoring ingrown toenails or fungal infections from wet fields until they become emergencies. “I see too many people who are not legal here and don’t have the opportunity to go to the doctor,” Lupe says. “They don’t have money.” Immigrants also are not a monolithic community, Sangaramoorthy says. For example, just increasing the number of Spanish-speaking interpreters at hospitals won’t help the area’s Haitian community. “I still don’t think we truly understand the complexities of what it is like to live in a rural environment,” she says.—lf

S H A R K P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F M A RA L L I A N C E ; C L A R K P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES

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FA C U LT Y Q & A A L L E N S TA I R S

Answer Man

Philosophy Professor’s Internet Advice Points Out the Limits of Common Sense IS THERE A POINT in listening to sad music? Does

was also being used to justify the government’s

may be a bit better than most people at helping

pure chance actually exist? Is dating my brother’s

bad actions. As a Canadian who is now a U.S. citi-

to take the question apart, see what the pieces

ex-girlfriend immoral if it freaks out my family?

zen, I also think about nationality and nationalism.

are, see the different ways you can look at it,

For more than a decade, philosophy Professor and

I just tried to offer empathy with their personal

and consider different answers that might be

Associate Chair Allen Stairs has fielded questions

situation and provide a little clarity on some

reasonable.

like these on AskPhilosophers.com, where he

peripheral issues, even if I couldn’t do much more.

and colleagues worldwide wrestle with “Dear

Any advice for the rest of us confronting a dilemma, philosophical or otherwise?

inquiries into the nature of reality. Stairs, who

What do philosophers have to offer people seeking answers?

studies the meaning of quantum physics, actually

When it comes to personal questions in particular,

are likely to be right. Be willing to recognize when

prefers the former—he finds it refreshing not to

I emphatically don’t think philosophers have

common sense has something to say, but be

hand out answers, but to help people carefully

any special training or insight that allows them

willing to step back and not take the easy answer

examine problems—and he’s become the site’s No.

to deliver perfect answers. But a philosopher

for granted.

Abby”-style relationship questions alongside

Resist the impulse to just assume your instincts

1 contributor, approaching 700 responses. —CC

That’s a lot of questions answered. Is this just for fun, or do you feel a sense of duty? There’s certainly an element of pleasure about it, because no one’s going to do philosophy for many years if they don’t find it satisfying to try to come to a right answer. But I do feel a responsibility to take questions seriously and give something useful to carry away. I occasionally get people following up offline to ask for further thoughts—in that case, you know you’ve done something worthwhile.

How long do you spend on a response? Sometimes I feel like I have something useful to say and I can write it up in five or 10 minutes. There are other cases I start drafting something and then I’m not happy with it, so I come back to it, and I can end up spending hours.

What’s the most meaningful question you’ve dealt with? There was someone in Zimbabwe struggling with the difficult situation in their country, and trying to understand if patriotism was an acceptable motivation to work for good, because patriotism

T E R P. U M D . E D U

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G

THE BIG QUESTION

What is humanity’s most enduring mystery? ANDREW BADEN

ANDREA CHRONIS-TUSCANO

CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

The origin of the universe is one of the most fundamental mysteries, driving personal and professional dedication. We live in an age where technology enables the kind of precision measurements that are needed to unravel this mystery. The feeling of awe from understanding that comes from combining data, computation and the sheer beauty of mathematics rivals the humility one feels standing before the Grand Canyon, seeing something truly beautiful and larger than us.

What motivates some people to behave kindly while others have a tendency to respond aggressively? Is this something in our biology or learned in our environments? How can we as a society alter these individuals’ natural tendencies from the earliest possible age? What a wonderful world this could be!

—

MERLE COLLINS DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR-TEACHER, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

—

Over the centuries, human beings have settled in various places, marked territory acquired and found ways to keep others out.

The “why” that this makes me ask is more than just about the attitude of one particular nation or the other. It is about humanity’s attitude to humanity, humanity’s fear for and of itself. One of the great mysteries of life is humanity’s lack of “human” understanding.

projects and brain imaging technologies that increasingly explain our behavior. But we are still baffled by what happens in that special place in our hearts where something seemingly beyond ourselves gives us comfort and makes us feel connected.

FATEMAH KESHAVARZKARAMUSTAFA

ELAINE ORAN

PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, ROSHAN INSTITUTE FOR PERSIAN STUDIES

—

Humanity’s most enduring mystery is its search for its own inner mystery. We have conquered mountain peaks and ocean floors. We have played God with genome

GLENN L. MARTIN INSTITUTE PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING, DEPARTMENT OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

—

Humanity’s most enduring mystery is answering the question: What is humanity’s most enduring mystery?

Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ4 Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu

P H OTO BY G O O D F R E E P H OTOS.CO M

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BY SALA LEVIN ’10

MONUMENTAL CHANGE Mario Chiodo’s 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture “The Path of Thorns and Roses” at Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery in Alexandria, Va., represents the anguished struggle from slavery to freedom. It is one of 25 memorials and monuments to slavery and its victims nationwide that Renee Ater, associate professor emerita of art history, is documenting.

P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E

America’s memorials to slavery and its victims have lived quiet lives in public places. A Maryland professor is traveling the country to learn their stories.

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few steps off busy South Washington Street in Alexandria, Va., where the roar of traffic demands that conversation be held at a raised pitch, is a statue depicting a towering series of men and women cast in bronze. Mario Chiodo’s “The Path of Thorns and Roses” represents the anguished path from slavery to freedom—emphasis on the anguish. Even the toes of the bodies, twisted and halfclothed, are bent in agony. Several yards away, the 2014 memorial extends to an open room-like structure. Its Virginia limestone walls bear the names of escaped slaves and free African-Americans, some not even a week old, buried in the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery that the memorial crowns. Renee Ater Ph.D. ’00, associate professor emerita of art history, believes such a memorial can help heal a community. She brushes cobwebs from its crevices, noting, with surprise, that this is the first time she’s been here without seeing flowers laid at its feet. For nearly 150 years, this monument perched atop a small hill would have been almost unimaginable. Memorials to slavery and its victims—reminders of suffering and a na-

tion’s shame, not battlefield glory—are, by and large, no more than two or three decades old. For eight years—long before the controversy over Confederate monuments became a deafening national conversation—Ater has been studying monuments to the nation’s slave past. Her research attempts to answer a thorny question: What makes a successful monument to slavery? Is it one that an art historian appreciates, or one that’s valuable to a community trying to reckon with its past? One that serves as a rallying point for protests and demonstrations? One that calls attention to itself, or one that blends into the scenery as naturally as daffodils on the roadside? And, she wonders, how does their commemoration of the pain and enforced anonymity of slavery fit in with the national story Americans want to believe? In a project funded by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Research Institute, Ater is traveling to 23 states documenting 25 memorials and monuments to slavery and its victims, many of them little-known and the result of grassroots advocacy, making sense of their place in the American cultural and historical landscape.

She’s looking for answers across the nation, from a ball and chain protruding from the earth at Brown University to Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation, the rare plantation museum to focus not on the owner but on his slaves. Ultimately, she’ll produce a digital publication placing the monuments into six categories, ranging from sites memorializing the transatlantic slave trade and Middle Passage to statues honoring Harriet Tubman to those celebrating freedom. To exclude these stories from the national narrative, Ater says, is denying history. “Civil War history should always include stories about the lives of free, enslaved and emancipated African-Americans.”

Above: Alison Saar’s “Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial” was dedicated in Manhattan in 2007. Left: Ater examines Mario Chiodo’s “The Path of Thorns and Roses” in Alexandria, Va. Opposite: At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Do-Ho Suh’s “Unsung Founders Memorial” commemorates the slaves who helped build the university.

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AT E R P H O T O BY S T E P H A N I E S . C O R D L E ; S TAT U E P H O T O C O U R T E SY O F R E N E E AT E R

t didn’t take long for the first Civil War monuments to appear—a granite pyramid memorializing 18,000 Confederate soldiers buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery was completed in 1869. Initially, monuments in the North and South marked graves and were largely about mourning, says Sarah Beetham, assistant professor of art history at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, who specializes in post-Civil War monuments to soldiers. The hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed represented death on “a scale that was unimaginable up until this point,” she says. Soon, though, monuments—especially those in the South—became statements of pride. By the 1880s and ’90s, monuments “have much more of a civic-minded idea, representing an idea of what an American citizen is supposed to look like,” says Beetham. That meant they were white, a sign of enduring white supremacy. They also appeared in town squares and in front of courthouses, indicating an end to nominal attempts at racial progress. When a statue of Robert E. Lee was the first installed on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 1890, the city’s Times newspaper wrote, “The work of noble men and patriotic women is ended, and they can now point with pride in the majestic memorial in granite and bronze, and tell their children in seeking human dignity, bravery, love of truth and devotion to duty and affection for country, to model their lives as closely upon the lines laid down by Lee as the best means of obtaining their ambition.” The Richmond Planet, a newspaper started in the early 1880s by 13 former slaves, criticized the statue, writing, “The south may revere the memory of its chieftains. It takes the wrong steps in so doing, and proceeds to go too far in every similar celebration. It serves to retard its progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be bound.” Northern states generally tolerated these monuments, and even built some of their own. In Pennsville Township, N.J., a granite

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To exclude these stories from the national narrative, Ater says, is denying history. obelisk memorializes Confederate prisoners of war who died at Fort Delaware. In the Philadelphia National Cemetery stands the granite Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument. After the destruction and agony wrought by the war, Beetham says, a desire for reconciliation meant that “the North has to start ignoring a lot of things that had once been important and agreeing with the Southern ideology—which is untrue—that says the war wasn’t about slavery.”

n the 1950s and ’60s, a Ku Klux Klan resurgence and backlash to the civil rights movement created an environment ripe for a second wave of Confederate monuments. At the same time, protests over those monuments went mainstream. In 1965, a University of North Carolina

student condemned Silent Sam, the 1913 bronze statue commemorating unc students who fought for the Confederacy, calling it in the student newspaper “no less an affront to the Negro peoples and the intelligentsia than is the gaudy Confederate flag flying from the lily-white dome of Alabama’s capitol.” But it took more than a half-century for discussion about Confederate monuments to reach a tipping point, when in August 2017, white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., to oppose the removal of a monument to Lee and clashed with counterdemonstrators, culminating in the murder of 32-year-old paralegal Heather Heyer. Soon after, Baltimore’s city council ordered the dismantling of the city’s Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument. In Memphis, monuments to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and Capt. J. Harvey Mathes were taken down. Still, many politicians and not a few ordinary citizens have been reluctant to take down the statues or favor keeping them, arguing that they represent American heritage. Corey Stewart, who lost his recent race in Virginia for the U.S. Senate, was born in Minnesota but has become a poster boy for the cause, once tweeting, “Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don’t matter.”

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gainst this 150-yearold backdrop, more recent monuments aim to tell a different story. The earliest in Ater’s study is Ed Hamilton’s Amistad Memorial, a 14-foot bronze sculpture depicting Sengbe Pieh, leader of the 1839 slave revolt on the Amistad, a ship carrying cargo and slaves to a sugar plantation. It was dedicated outside New Haven City Hall in 1992. On unc’s campus, Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture “Unsung Founders Memorial,” a round black granite slab held up by 300 small bronze figures of enslaved people, was dedicated in 2005, partly as a counterbalance to Silent Sam, which demonstrators forcibly took down in 2018. Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in April by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, honors more than 4,000 victims of lynching from 12 states, including Maryland. At the memorial, steel pillars hang from above, echoing the hangings. What accounts for the spike in these kinds of memorials? “Part of this push has to do with reparations,” Ater says. “Memorialization becomes an incredibly minor form of reparations.” Part of it, also, is a growing willingness to look truthfully at the past, often beginning at a grassroots level. The Alexandria statue was born out of the efforts of two local women—Lillie Finklea, who’s African-American, and Louise Massoud, who’s white—who had both read a 1997 Washington Post article about an African-American cemetery underneath the site of a gas station, office building and parking lot. “It was utterly forgotten,” Massoud says. She and Finklea launched a public campaign to protect the site and eventually secured the support and funds to create the memorial at the Contrabands and Freedmen Cemetery.

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This replica of Michael Walsh’s Middle Passage Monument, which sits on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, is located in Bermuda.

By functioning as memorials to the past and correctives to Confederate statues unlikely to disappear anytime soon, Beetham says, these monuments to the slave past have the weighty task of “taking this history that was such an important part of the growth of America as a nation and bringing it to the forefront.”

rowing up in the ’70s in overwhelmingly white Portland, Ore., Ater was acutely—and sometimes dismayingly—aware of cultural and historic differences that weighed on her and her classmates. In a seventh-grade class on slavery, “every white kid in the classroom turned and stared at me,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m not a slave, why are you staring at me?’” Born in 1965 in Covington, Ky., Ater was the daughter of a white mother and a black father. The two weren’t married, and Ater and her sister, 15 months younger, spent their early years

in an orphanage and foster care in Cincinnati. They were adopted in 1972 by a white couple in Portland, he a lawyer and she a social worker. Ater’s adoptive parents, who had three biological children and two other black adopted children, were strong believers in the civil rights movement and viewed adoption of black children as a form of support for the cause. “If they had space and love, they wanted to do something,” she says. “One of the things I can say I learned from them deeply is to be generous to all human beings despite religion, class or race.” Not everyone learned the same lesson. White kids called Ater the n-word, while black kids called her an Oreo—black on the outside, white on the inside. “Part of it was because I was such a nerdy kid,” says Ater. “Because I loved learning, I got classified in a certain way.” Ater had long found refuge in books; getting a library card as a young child in foster care was a transformative moment. Her fami-

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ly’s Oregon house was lined with bookshelves, and visits to the library were a weekly ritual. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, she dove deeper into race, power and art. An art history major and black studies minor, she took courses on black literature, feminist literature and freedom movements in Africa. She describes herself as “radicalized” at the famously politically aware Ohio school. “It changed the way I thought about the world.” After college, Ater worked at Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum, then moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at arts and museum associations. Eventually, she decided to go to umd for a doctorate in art history. After writing her dissertation on late 19th- and 20th-century African-American artist Meta Warrick Fuller, including her statue “Emancipation”—posthumously installed in Boston in the 1980s—Ater focused more generally on modern American sculpture. Eight years ago, the editor of the American Art Journal asked Ater to write a piece on Fuller. She proposed an alternative: the exploration of little-studied contemporary monuments to slavery that, in her formal retirement, has become a full-time pursuit.

our hundred and twentyseven kilometers east of New York Harbor, a 12-foot-high aluminum arch sits on the bottom of the ocean floor, invisible. The Middle Passage Monument, designed by sculptor Michael Walsh, was dedicated on July 3, 1999. After a funeral procession and blessing ceremony, the monument was taken out to sea on a slave ship replica. The 427 kilometers represented the number of bodies discovered in 1991 at a construction site in lower Manhattan—a cemetery for Africans taken across the ocean to be slaves. “I still think about that memorial even though I didn’t participate in those events,” says Ater. “That speaks to me about the power that its abstract form allows us to think about slavery.” If a monument defined by its visual

absence can, in Ater’s estimation, succeed, it’s worth asking: What’s the point of a monument? The Middle Passage Monument is what James E. Young, professor emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, describes as a counter-monument: “memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument.” In his work on Holocaust memorials in Germany, Young has wondered why we even build monuments. “It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember,” he writes. Ater understands how building a monument might seem like checking off the task of remembering. And she’s aware that, over time, monuments blur into the background. “Think about how many times you drive around circles in the District,” she says. “Do you look at those guys on horses?” But she is heartened by an emerging trend, especially on college campuses: people using these memorials as sites of civic engagement. At Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., demonstrators have gathered at the Soldiers’ Memorial, which honors members of the United States Colored Infantries, to protest racial prejudice, especially in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American. “It activates students, as the model of the black soldier sacrificing for the nation despite racism, despite slavery,” Ater says. As she stands in the midday Virginia sun, no shade anywhere except in the immediate shadow of Chiodo’s sculpture, Ater hopes that it’s not just African-Americans who are activated—or at least moved to remember— by these memorials. “People can say, ‘Oh, that’s black history,’” she says. “No, it’s not. This is American history. I think we have to think about this kind of place as a bigger story about who we are as Americans. In fact, the story of slavery is American history.” TERP

Statues by State Associate Professor Emerita Renee Ater is traveling the country to research the stories behind the following memorials:

CONNECTICUT • “Amistad Memorial,” Ed

Hamilton, New Haven. DELAWARE • “Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit

of Freedom,” Mario Chiodo, Wilmington. FLORIDA • “Memorial to the 2nd Regiment Infantry,

U.S. Colored Troops,” D.J. Wilkins, Fort Myers. ILLINOIS • “Knockin’ at Freedom’s Door,” Preston

Jackson, Peoria. LOUISIANA • The Whitney Plantation,

Wallace. MASSACHUSETTS • “Step on Board,” Fern

Cunningham, Boston. MICHIGAN • “Underground Railroad Memorial,”

Ed Dwight, Battle Creek. MISSISSIPPI • “African American Monument,”

Kim Sessums, Vicksburg.; Corinth Contraband Camp, Corinth. MISSOURI • “Soldiers’ Memorial,” Ed Dwight,

Jefferson City. NEW YORK • “‘The Ark of Return’: The Perma-

nent Memorial at the United Nations in Honour of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Rodney Leon, New York City.; “Middle Passage Monument,” Mike Walsh, New York Harbor.; “Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial,” Alison Saar, New York City. NORTH CAROLINA • “Unsung Founders

Memorial,” Do-Ho Suh, Chapel Hill. PENNSYLVANIA • “Harriet Tubman Memorial

Statue,” James Gafgen, Bristol. RHODE ISLAND • “Slavery Memorial,” Martin

Puryear, Providence. SOUTH CAROLINA • “African American History

Memorial,” Ed Dwight, Columbia.; “Denmark Vesey Monument,” Ed Dwight, Hampton Park. TEXAS • “Texas African American History Memorial,”

Ed Dwight, Austin. VIRGINIA • “The Edmonton Sisters,” Erik Blome,

Alexandria.; “Memorial for Enslaved Laborers,” Meejin Yoon and Eric Howeler, Charlottesville.; “The Path of Thorns and Roses,” Mario Chiodo, Alexandria. WASHINGTON, D.C. • “Spirit of Freedom: African

American Civil War Memorial,” Ed Hamilton.

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By Liam Farrell

umd r esea rcher sh a r es w ith v eter a ns w h a t h e l p e d h i m h e a l f r o m wa r : w r i t i n g

the night ron capps decided not to kill himself, he read a story. It was 2005, and after a decade of working in war zones as an Army and Foreign Service officer, Capps had begun to suffocate under a blanket of guilt woven from the raids he hadn’t stopped and the villages he couldn’t save. After stints in Kosovo, central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, Capps was helping train African Union peacekeepers during the Sudanese Civil War when he borrowed a pistol from a U.S. soldier, took two bottles of beer from his refrigerator, hopped into a Toyota pickup truck and drove west into the desert to die. Then, serendipity in a luckless place. As recounted in his 2014 memoir, “Seriously Not

All Right,” Capps had just loaded a bullet into the chamber and switched off the safety when his wife at the time called from thousands of miles away. The ringing cell phone stopped him from pulling the trigger. “I’ll be careful, don’t worry,” he told her before driving back to town and returning the pistol. “I’ll be home in a few weeks.” Once back in the United Nations guesthouse where he was staying, Capps picked up a collection of J.D. Salinger short stories and read one called “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” In the story, a World War II veteran who suffered a nervous breakdown—“like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in a series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective”—finds hope in a letter and package from

P O R T R A I T B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y B C R E A T I V E G R O U P

a young orphaned English girl he met before heading to combat. Since then, Capps has resided at the intersection of war trauma and the written word. A researcher at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (start), Capps is also the founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project. His nonprofit, created in 2011, holds free writing seminars and workshops for veterans, service members and their families to build community and find healing through stories. More than 3,000 people in 22 different states have taken the courses, which will soon expand to include songwriting. “Either you control the memory,” Capps says, “or the memory controls you.”

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“EITHER YOU CONTROL THE MEMORY, OR THE MEMORY CONTROLS YOU.” -RON CAPPS

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on a summer morning about 13 years removed from that night in the desert, a dog is snoring on the floor of Capps’ office. Harry, a rescued Labrador-hound mix once used as bait in a dog-fighting ring, has become a mascot of sorts for start, where Capps writes for the International Communication & Negotiation Simulations (icons) Project. “I’m as much his service human as he’s my service dog,” he says. With long gray hair, a beard and silver hoop earring, Capps looks more like a caretaker of wayward animals than a military officer. (He swears the hair isn’t a conscious rebellion.) The objects in his office tell that martial story— awards from the State Department and cia, shrapnel and the nose cone of a rocket from Darfur, books on isis, Boko Haram and North Korea. One shelf mixes in some whimsy: finger puppets of dictators alongside action figures of “The Simpsons” villain Sideshow Bob and “Game of Thrones” heroine Brienne of Tarth. Born in Florida, Capps was raised in the Navy town of Virginia Beach and surrounded by family who had served—his grandfathers had fought in World War I, some uncles in World War II and his father in Korea. He joined the Army in 1983, after bouncing in and out of college and making a go of it as a professional musician. He spent time in the National Guard, patrolled the East German border in the waning days of the Soviet bloc and was trained in intelligence before joining the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. From 1995–98, Capps worked in central Africa, dealing with the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and the violence spilling over its border into Zaire. It was during the Kosovo War as a diplomatic observer that he first gazed into the deepest abyss of human brutality. Living among civilians often targeted by soldiers, Capps would be one of the immediate responders to a village after an attack, when the air would reek from smoldering houses and

decaying corpses and witnesses would be reeling in shock. Once, while inspecting a village with a colleague and a translator, his car was surrounded by armed Serbs; one held a pistol to Capps’ head before he was able to floor the accelerator and escape with his group. “I knew somehow that Kosovo had changed me,” he says. “My emotions were a lot closer to the skin, but I was also a lot more empathetic.” For a long time, his strategy for dealing with traumatic events was the well-worn military method of compartmentalization. Something bad happens? Put it in a box and fix it later. You have a job to do now. But by the time Capps arrived in Afghanistan in 2002, the mutilated dead were talking to him in his dreams, and his waking hours were wracked by panic attacks. “There was a crack in the box,” he says, “and those memories started leaking out.”

“It started to reveal itself as something very worthwhile and therapeutic for him,” Florman says. “He has made very conscious efforts to identify, take hold and manage his struggles that are not only inward-looking, but meaningful for others.” War writing in and of itself—what Union soldier and author Ambrose Bierce once termed the “phantoms of a blood-stained period”—has a long history in the United States, from Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway to Karl Marlantes and Phil Klay. Writing narratives allows an author to “(piece) back together the fragmentation of consciousness that trauma has caused,” says psychiatrist John Shay in his landmark 1995 book “Achilles in Vietnam.”

Ron Capps served in numerous war zones for the U.S. Army and State Department, including Iraq (above, holding the flag of a designated terrorist group captured by U.S. forces in 2004) and Afghanistan (below, standing at an outpost along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 2002).

after they started dating in August 2007, Capps would occasionally tell his wife of now 10 years, Carole Florman, that he was “crazy.” It was a description at odds with his trim government haircut, tailored suits and State Department job, which Capps had begun after requesting to be psychologically evacuated from Darfur. “He was seemingly in terrific shape,” she says. There were hints of his struggle, like anxiety in crowds at the 9:30 Club and a baseball game. But it was after Capps lost his security clearance for transferring files with a thumb drive to a classified network that she saw how consuming his post-traumatic stress disorder and depression could be. She remembers asking him: “Do I have to be worried that I’m going to come home and find you dead?” Capps retired from the government, ending the official inquiry, and then began a master’s writing program at Johns Hopkins University. Hoping to help others through his education, he created the Veterans Writing Project.

I M AG ES CO U RT ESY O F RO N CA P PS

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Capps wrote his 2014 memoir not only to heal himself but also in the hopes that going public with his story could reduce the stigma around asking for help. For many veterans, it is difficult to open up to the wider world: While the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has reported a tremendous spike in disabilities due to post-traumatic stress disorder, tripling in a decade to more than 940,000 cases in 2017, the share of the U.S. population with military experience has plummeted, according to the Census Bureau, from 18 percent in 1980 to 7 percent in 2016.

The Veterans Writing Project steps into this gap. Seminars are held around the country in college classrooms, public libraries and arts council meeting rooms, generally lasting two days and covering basics of storytelling like dialogue, scene-setting and plot development. Classes include as many as 25 students and as few as four. “What stands out (among veterans) is an eagerness to be able to tell stories and not be judged,” says Capps, who teaches along with three other veteran writers and consulted with Shay and prominent psychiatrists on the curriculum.

M.L. Doyle, who served 17 years in the Army Reserve and helped write the 2010 memoir of the United States’ first black female prisoner of war, attended a workshop in 2012 and has since self-published mystery and romance novels. Writing is a solitary pursuit, Doyle says, so gathering with other aspiring veteran-writers was motivating and built confidence. “There is a very active, very vibrant veteran writing community I never knew existed,” she says. “You’re speaking the same language. All you have to do is say, ‘Kandahar,’ and people know what that means.”

Lisa Barber, who served in Afghanistan as a human resources officer, found solace in a writing seminar with Capps. “It helped me feel a little less special,” she says. “That’s good.”

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P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

in february 2012, 51 days after her deployment to Afghanistan as a human resources officer ended, Lisa Barber boarded an airplane for Marrakech, Morocco. As she recounts in “I Was There,” a story written for O-Dark-Thirty, the Veterans Writing Project’s literary journal, she was overcome by anxiety on the plane ride and curled into a ball on the tiny bathroom floor, trying to distract herself by naming bands and musicians for each letter of the alphabet, and sipping a can of Pepsi brought by a concerned flight attendant. “The Army spent three months training me for the worst possible day, and I was 100 percent convinced the worst possible day was going to happen,” Barber says. “I had a very hard time turning off that fear.” The writing seminar she took in 2013 came along when she “needed something positive to do,” and she stays in frequent contact with her instructor. “(Capps) really has done an amazing job at building a supportive community,” Barber says. “There are still lots of struggle days. There are also lots and lots of great days, and there weren’t (before).” In his job at start, Capps is part of a team that develops war games and other policy simulations for education, government and private sector and nongovernmental organization clients. “Ron has the perfect profile. He has all the background and credibility you need,” says Devin Ellis, the director of icons. “On top of it all, he’s a phenomenal guy.” Capps has also gone back to school fulltime to create a songwriting curriculum for the veterans project, taking online courses through the Berklee College of Music on music theory, digital recording, guitar and piano. When completed, he envisions adding music composition and lyric classes to the Veterans Writing Project repertoire. Each week, he teaches writing for Creative Forces, a National Endowment of the Arts

CONFRONTING TRAUMATIC MEMORIES IS LIKE TOUCHING A HOT STOVE, HE SAYS; BY APPLYING A NEW SKILL AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE OF SENSING DANGER, YOU ARE PUTTING A GLOVE ON YOUR HAND FIRST.

program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the Department of Defense’s top research and treatment institute for ptsd and traumatic brain injury in Bethesda. It has a similar curriculum to the Veterans Writing Project but is geared more toward just engaging them in creative writing as an emotional outlet; a typical class would be writing for 15 minutes about an important personal memento and, if anyone wants, sharing it with other students. Capps is an evangelist for the healing power of the arts. Confronting traumatic memories is like touching a hot stove, he says; by applying a new skill against the evolutionary

impulse of sensing danger, you are putting a glove on your hand first. “Writing,” he says, “is that protection.” Barber thinks it may be time for her to take another seminar from Capps’ project. Part of her is cautious—she works from home to avoid commuter crowds and Metro tunnels, and wonders if confronting old memories could re-trigger some of her worst symptoms. But she also misses the catharsis of the seminars and being around people who knew, without knowing, her story. “It helped me feel a little less special,” Barber says. “That’s good.” terp

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TIME LIVES OF OUR

Short on free time? A UMD lab shows how society may be robbing you of yours— or giving you a bonus

By Chris Carroll Illustrations by Jason Keisling

BASKET PILED WITH UNFOLDED LAUNDRY.

Kickoff for the big game in 10 minutes. A toddler waking up grumpy from a nap. Although these circumstances may appear unrelated, ask yourself how you’d typically handle each one. With just that information, researchers in the Maryland Time Use Laboratory, the country’s leading center for time-use studies, can start drawing a picture of who you are, from your gender to the kind of work you do. If that sounds like a parlor game, the field’s real goal is to understand how people live their lives and how sweeping social and economic changes affect them, says Liana Sayer, a sociology professor and the lab’s director. Researchers there analyze data stretching back to the 1960s and collect new information

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through “time diaries” kept by study participants. (Sayer and colleague Sandra Hofferth, family studies professor emerita, maintain a repository of such data—ipums Time Use—drawn on by researchers nationwide.) These detailed accounts bypass faulty memories and wishful thinking about how we think we should spend our time. They also provide insights into persistent societal inequities that determine who actually has to fold the clothes, who gets to sit back and watch a game on TV and who cares for a family’s children. “Time-use studies give us an unvarnished assessment of what people and societies value, and how those differ by gender or by race, ethnicity or social class,” Sayer says. “It’s a useful lens to view broad macroeconomic shifts as well as normative shifts, and connect those to people’s everyday lives.”

Dads’ Leisure World The mother-father leisure gap has grown—nearly doubling since 1975—as more women have moved into the workplace, taking on new responsibilities while still carrying the load at home.

67 minutes

7.8 hours