USC Dornsife Magazine Fall 2022/Winter 2023

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN Making Sense of It

As humans, we construct our reality through an intricate, subconscious balancing act between biological sensory perception and prior knowledge. That balance was impacted over the past few years as many of our interactions shifted to virtual modes of socializing and communicating.

As this shift took place, it was fascinating to me to see how some people thrived in tha t recalibrated world, while others found online interaction exhausting and couldn’t wait to return to in-person interactions.

But it isn’t just the evolving technological landscape and our individual makeup that complicates the ways in which we experience the world. Our sensory pathways are undergoing alterations and recalibration all the time to keep up with an external environment that’s rapidly transforming — from the increased noise and bustle of growing cities to the effects of climate change.

Fortunately — through advances in neuroscience and imaging, along with better understanding of the ways that culture affects our perception of the world — we can develop strategies to navigate new sensory environments. We can also begin to anticipate what reality might look, feel and sound like in a technologically enhanced future.

This issue of USC Dornsife Magazine taps our academic researchers for insights on a wide range of topics related to the ways in which our senses help us perceive the world. You’ll read about different ways that scent has been conceptualized in India, how taste is a passport to experience Los Angeles, the ways sound shapes our world, touch deprivation in the internet age, and more. I hope you enjoy the experience.

AMBER D. MILLER Dean, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Susan Bell

ART DIRECTOR / PRODUCTION MANAGER Letty Avila

SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR COMMUNICATION AND MARKETING Jim Key

WRITERS AND EDITORS

Margaret Crable Darrin S. Joy Meredith McGroarty

VIDEOGRAPHER AND PHOTOGRAPHER Mike Glier

SENIOR WEB SPECIALIST Michael Liu

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Christopher Ortiz ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT Crisann Smith

CONTRIBUTORS

Tania Apshankar, Maddy Davis, Greg Hardesty, Stephen Koenig, Rachel B. Levin, Paul McQuiston, Nina Raffio, Vanessa Roveto, Grayson Schmidt

USC DORNSIFE ADMINISTRATION

Amber D. Miller, Dean • Jan Amend, Divisional Dean for the Life Sciences • Emily Hodgson Anderson, College Dean of Undergraduate Education • Stephen Bradforth, Senior Advisor to the Dean for Research Strategy and Development • Steve Finkel, College Dean of Graduate and Professional Education • Moh El-Naggar, Divisional Dean for the Physical Sciences and Mathematics • Jim Key, Senior Associate Dean for Communication and Marketing • Stephen Koenig, Senior Associate Dean for Creative Content • Peter Mancall, Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences • Renee Perez, Vice Dean, Administration and Finance • Eddie Sartin, Senior Associate Dean for Advancemen t • Sherry Velasco, Divisional Dean for the Humanities

USC DORNSIFE BOARD OF COUNCILORS

Kathy Leventhal, Chair • Wendy Abrams • Robert D. Beyer • David Bohnett • Jon Brayshaw • Ramona Cappello • Alan Colowick • Richard S. Flores • Shane Foley • Vab Goel • Lisa Goldman • Jana Waring Greer • Pierre Habis • Yossie Hollander • Janice Bryant Howroyd • Martin Irani • Dan James • Omar Jaffrey • Bettina Kallins • Yoon Kim • Samuel King • Jaime Lee • Arthur Lev • Roger Lynch • Robert Osher • Gerald Papazian • Andrew Perlman • Lawrence Piro • Edoardo Ponti • Kelly Porter • Michael Reilly • Carole Shammas • Rajeev Tandon • Matthew Weir

USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE

Published twice a year by USC Dornsife Office of Communication at the University of Southern California. © 2022 USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The diverse opinions expressed in USC Dornsife Magazine do not necessarily represent the views of the editors, USC Dornsife administration or USC. USC Dornsife Magazine welcomes comments from its readers to magazine@dornsife.usc.edu or USC Dornsife Magazine, SCT-2400, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

A Feast for the Senses

Ever turned a blin d eye? Touched a nerve? Played it by ear? Smelled a rat? Been left with a bad taste in your mouth?

We have heard these idiomatic phrases so often that we take them for granted and yet if we stop for a moment to think about them, we realize the vital role our senses play in conveying meaning. After all, our senses are the conduit to how we experience and learn about the world — how it feels, tastes and smells, what it looks like and how it sounds — so perhaps it isn’t surprising that these references are so ingrained in our everyday language.

In this issue, we explore our principal senses — sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch — through the lens of our scholars’ teaching and research. But we don’t stop at five. Neuroscientists and philosophers now think we may have up to 33. We explore some of these lesser-known senses, along with the so-called “sixth sense,” altered states and visions. We also meet USC Dornsife mathematician Felicia Tabing who has synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes her to see numbers as particular colors. Tabing uses her synesthesia to inspire her art.

In writing about taste for this issue, I interviewed Karen Tongson, chair and professor of gender and sexuality studies, and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, who uses Los Angeles as a laboratory to teach about food. The first task she sets her students is to reflect on their “Proustian moment” — their most memorable or meaningful taste and how it inspired them. Our conversation led me to think about my own defining taste moment. I was 14 and my father had taken me to London for the first time. For lunch one day we went to an old pub by the Thames — sawdust on the floor and scrubbed pine tables. On the menu were “escargots” (snails). I ordered them, curious about this impossibly exotic — and possibly disgusting — French delicacy. As the buttery, garlicky taste and oddly rubbery texture filled my mouth, I knew I was tasting another culture, another world that was larger and very different from my own, until then, sheltered existence in a small Scottish town. I knew then that that’s what I wanted: to live a bigger, wider, wilder life, to explore and taste all of it, in all its strange, diverse, exotic glory.

That day, I experienced an eye-opening feast for my senses; we hope that this issue provides you with a feast for yours. — S.B.

FROM THE HEART OF USC Celebrating 50 years of JEP; First comprehensive list of imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII; Research advances fight against COVID-19 variants; Largest endowment gift to any United States university history department; Clarifying climate messaging to inspire action; Inactive sitting increases dementia risk.

Argentina’s “Cueva de las Manos” (Cave of the Hands) is named for hundreds of paintings of hands stenciled on the rock walls. Created between 7,300 BCE and 700 CE, it is considered by some scholars to be the best material evidence of early South American hunter-gatherer groups. THE SENSES

ISSUE

Nourishing the Soul

A beloved Los Angeles landmark, the Nayarit, founded by the grandmother of USC Dornsife historian Natalia Molina, fed the senses but also provided a haven where the marginalized could feel seen and find belonging. By Susan Bell

The Eyes Have It

Sight allows us to explore our world, to orient ourselves within it and to find joy in its myriad manifestations of beauty and wonder. By Rachel B. Levin

Whether it takes the form of a rousing rock concert, a friendly greeting or the lulling buzz of cicadas on a summer evening, sound holds the power to energize us, to cheer us, to soothe us and — above all — to connect us. By Meredith McGroarty

A Question of Taste

From sautéed grasshoppers to fusion food, USC Dornsife scholars use taste as a passport to explore diverse cultures, histories and identities. By Susan Bell

The Most Powerful Scents?

From aiding romance to communicating with God, scent has long been attributed near mystical abilities.

By

Margaret Crable

The Human Touch

From cradle to grave, touch brings us comfort, pleasure and sometimes pain, reminding us of our countless connections to the world and to humanity — including our own. By Meredith McGroarty

How Many Senses Do We Have?

If we think of our senses as limited to only five, we might be missing out. By Margaret Crable

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Nourishing the Soul

A beloved Los Angeles landmark, the Nayarit, founded by the grandmother of USC Dornsife historian Natalia Molina, fed the senses — not only with its acclaimed regional Mexican cuisine but also by providing a haven where the marginalized could feel seen and find belonging. By Susan Bell

This image by celebrated photographer Edward Ruscha shows the Nayarit in 1966 at the height of its popularity. Although the Echo Park restaurant is long gone, the building on Sunset Boulevard with its iconic sign remains — a cherished part of local history.

Drive through Echo Park and you can still see the original sign, faded now but still elegant, spelling out “Nayarit” in the slanting script of a bygone era. In its heyday in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, people came from far and wide, eager to enjoy the authentic regional cuisine served at this popular neighborhood eatery,

described by a Los Angeles Times restaurant critic as one of the best Mexican dining rooms he had ever visited.

But to its devoted patrons, this beloved restaurant was much more than a place to eat. For a quarter century, the Nayarit was a beacon of belonging and acceptance for those — many of them

immigrants or members of the LGBTQ community — who struggled to meet these basic human needs in midcentury Los Angeles, where discrimination and segregation were rife.

The Nayarit was founded in 1951 by Natalia Barraza, a Mexican immigrant and the grandmother of USC Dornsife’s Natalia Molina,

Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Intrigued by her formidable ancestor, Molina plumbed her family’s history to understand Barraza’s story, and in the process illuminated many facets of the immigrant experience through the lens of her grandmother’s

restaurant. Molina reveals her findings in a new book, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (University of California Press, 2022).

COOKING UP THE AMERICAN DREAM Barraza immigrated alone from Mexico to L.A. in 1921

PHOTO: EDWARD RUSCHA, EDWARD RUSCHA PHOTOGRAPHS

OF SUNSET BOULEVARD AND HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD,

GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, 1966.

at age 21. As she realized her own American dream, running a successful business — the Nayarit — and adopting two children, she also sponsored, housed and employed dozens of other Mexican immigrants, encouraging them to lay claim to a city long characterized by anti-Latino racism. Along the way, the Nayarit became a vibrant cultural space that embodied her vision

of respect, community and mutual support, as well as an “urban anchor.”

Molina explains that urban anchors are usually considered to be civic projects, such as libraries or hospitals, but in our daily lives, the places where we feel seen, where we feel safe, are often places that we choose to go: bars, restaurants, cafes. These urban anchors, she says, are a different way to look at the city — not as a city planner envisioned it, but as immigrants finding their place in their new hometown.

“These are more than businesses,” Molina says. “They are sociocultural spaces, nourished by the countless small acts of everyday life that build and sustain affective relationships.”

The Nayarit was to become a prime example, providing a supportive “family” for immigrants and other marginalized people in L.A.

NOURISHING THE SOUL OF AN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY

Molina notes that most Mexican restaurants of that period were called something more accessible, such as El Cholo or El Zarape.

“That my grandmother chose to name her restaurant for her home state of Nayarit signals to me that she had “patria chica” — literally, ‘love of a small country,’” Molina says.

It also created a beacon to others from that region. “When they wanted something familiar, they knew that regional food would really satiate not just their stomachs, but their souls,” she says.

In her book, Molina details

her grandmother’s efforts to serve authentic regional food while still turning a profit.

“Sometimes she served much less expensive cuts of meat — pigs’ feet, organs. As the business developed and she had more money, she was able to offer whole fish when it was available. She would travel down to Tijuana for ingredients,

Spanish-language broadcaster for the team.

“Latino baseball players had money, but they wanted to go somewhere where they could feel comfortable, speak their language and not be discriminated against,” Molina says. “When I asked Señor Jarrín why he enjoyed going there, he said, ‘I wanted to see friends, bump

turn a profit, she could have focused on just hiring experienced Mexican wait staff, but she used the restaurant as a way to bring over family legally from Mexico by providing jobs and the necessary paperwork to obtain visas.”

like moles and chiles. She offered a taco enchilada combo and served freshly made flour tortillas, more associated with Northern Mexico, that became one of the restaurant’s claims to fame.”

The restaurant was a place where you could go, not just to eat food from Nayarit, but to meet people from Nayarit, Mexico, Cuba and other parts of Latin America, and speak Spanish. It became an immigrant hub. And, Molina explains, because the food was so good and the atmosphere so lively, and because Echo Park was both a geographic and cultural crossroads, it drew people from all walks of life.

Musicians would go there after finishing their set, movie stars would eat there after a premier or a long day’s work, and Hollywood celebrities in mixed-race relationships would celebrate there because they felt accepted. When the L.A. Dodgers were in town, Latino baseball players would come to the Nayarit, as would Jaime Jarrín, the

into people I knew and speak Spanish.’

“Everybody that I interviewed, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, said that the Nayarit was the place to go,” Molina says. “And those that I interviewed in Mexico said, ‘If you visited L.A., but didn’t visit the Nayarit, it was like you hadn’t really visited L.A.’”

But in addition to the stars, the locals and the tourists, many others came to the Nayarit to find acceptance and a sense of belonging, among them immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community.

“Anyone who was facing discrimination could go to the Nayarit and find acceptance,” Molina says.

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

So, how did Barraza establish the Nayarit as a place where marginalized people felt they belonged?

One way in which her grandmother achieved this, Molina says, is through her hiring practices.

“If she had just wanted to

Barraza was attentive to the needs of women, helping many single and divorced women immigrate. She also hired gay men and made them feel welcome.

As the book description says, “In a world that sought to reduce Mexican immigrants to invisible labor, the Nayarit was a place where people could become visible once again, where they could speak out, claim space and belong.”

Today, the Nayarit is long gone, yet its spirit lives on. Sold by Molina’s mother in 1976 after Barraza’s death in 1969, the space continued to operate as a Mexican restaurant until the turn of the century, when it was transformed into a very different urban anchor, The Echo — a music venue celebrated for its punk concerts, where another often-marginalized population finds acceptance. The Echo’s owners opted to leave the Nayarit’s iconic sign rather than put up their own. It still remains — a reminder to anyone seeking a home away from home, a place to be seen and a place to belong.

“Anyone who was facing discrimination could go to the Nayarit and find acceptance.”

FROM

Half a Century of Service

100,000 USC students have provided more than a million hours of service to neighborhoods near USC campuses through the auspices of the Joint Educational Project, recognized as one of the oldest, largest, and best university service-learning programs in the country.

Jasmin Sanchez might not have chosen a science major in college if not for the work of USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP), which enables participating USC students to assist in local classrooms.

In elementary school, most of her science lessons came from books or lectures, with little hands-on learning. When USC students from JEP showed up in Sanchez’s classroom one day, it changed everything.

“They provided all the materials for the students to have hands-on experiments,” she says. “One of the reasons I got into science was because I had these students coming in and teaching me.”

Sanchez graduated from USC Dornsife last spring with a degree in health and human sciences and plans to become an occupational therapist. During her time at USC, she came full circle, teaching science to third graders through JEP, just as she had been taught a decade earlier.

This was the exact outcome that the early organizers of JEP, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, hoped for when the organization began in 1972.

In the early 1970s, tension marred USC’s relationship with its neighbors. Barbara Seaver Gardner, a research associate at USC’s Center for Urban Affairs, had the vision to make a change by bringing USC and its surrounding neighbors together around a common goal: helping children.

Gardner arranged for USC students to teach in elementary school classrooms near campus, providing valuable support to schools that were often underfunded and short-staffed. JEP grew out of this vision, with Gardner becoming its inaugural director.

Around 2,000 USC students now participate in JEP programs each year. While they gain valuable teaching experience in the classroom, their young students benefit, as did Sanchez, from hands-on learning, and teachers get a little help with their workload. Since its founding, some 100,000 JEP students have provided over a million hours of service to schools.

JEP offers more than just classic educational support focused on math, literacy or science. The Peace Project trains USC students in peace education curriculum that they then bring into classrooms. A program called Little Yoginis provides elementary school children with yoga instruction.

Students also go beyond the classroom in their mission to connect with the surrounding community. The Understanding Homelessness Through Service program pairs students with

organizations such as Chrysalis, which prepares people to reenter the workforce.

Alumni of JEP are as impacted by the program as the young students they teach.

Tom Chan ’96 originally majored in business, but participating in JEP ignited a new enthusiasm for social service and teaching. He switched to a liberal arts major, served in the Peace Corps in Thailand, then earned a master’s degree in educational administration.

“If I had never served in JEP, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to change my major to liberal arts as a junior,” says Chan. “I never would have become a professional journalist, certainly never would have joined the Peace Corps, and never would have chosen education as a career path.”

He also would not have met his wife. The two connected while hanging out at the JEP House on campus.

Fifty years of success doesn’t mean the JEP crew is content to rest on their laurels. In partnership with the global educational organization Room to Read, JEP recently released a series of 10 children’s books exploring subjects related to science, technology, engineering, arts and math. Some 9,000 sets of the books will be distributed to children and schools through USC neighbor educational programs.

“I’m just so incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in these 50 years,” says Susan Harris, executive director of JEP. “So many students have come through JEP’s doors and been able to make a meaningful change in communities and then go on to do amazing things in their own lives.” —M.C.

PHOTO BY STEVE COHN

Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian presents a commemorative anniversary plaque at JEP’s 50th Anniversary Gala on Nov. 3. From left, Suzanne Nora Johnson, chair of the USC Board of Trustees; Susan Harris, executive director of JEP; Tammara Anderson, associate dean of experiential and applied learning; USC President Carol L. Folt; Krekorian; USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller.

Some

Protecting Against Tomorrow’s Threats

New degree program adopts holistic approach to educate students on how to improve global security.

Connecting climate change with Canada’s recent increases in naval defense spending might not seem obvious, but this type of holistic perspective is the focus of USC Dornsife’s new Master of Arts in Global Security Studies. The program seeks to understand our changing world through the lens of experts in political science, international relations, economics, spatial sciences and environmental studies.

The two-year, full-time program, which launched in fall 2022, is especially geared toward students looking to pursue or advance a career in government; with nongovernmental organizations such as those dealing with human rights or disaster relief; or at private firms, including those specializing in national security, says Steven Lamy, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Spatial Sciences.

Lamy explains that the

program’s spatial sciences element is one thing that sets it apart from similar offerings at other institutions. It is spatial sciences data that allows analysts to make connections between actions taken on the world stage and the various causes and catalysts of these actions. One example might be how Canada’s naval spending is affected by warmer temperatures leading to ice loss that exposes more of the coastline.

“Government agencies, and non-governmental and private sector actors are looking for people who have the skills in spatial sciences to do things like assess attacks made during war and how the populations there are affected, using mapping data,” Lamy says.

Amy Carnes, acting chief of staff for USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, explains that her institute’s extensive

resources, including the testimonies of survivors of war and genocide, will also give students a unique opportunity to study the human impact of mass violence.

“Because we have connections with partners around the world that are doing work that is related to human security and the aftermath of mass violence, we have many resources and bring a lot to the table in terms of practical, hands-on experience,” Carnes says. —M.M.

We Finally Know All Their Names

The list of names of Japanese Americans forcibly interned during WWII has always been woefully inaccurate. Now, a USC Dornsife scholar sets the record straight.

Battling New Variants

Pioneering research could help predict — and protect against — new COVID-19 strains.

Researchers have found the first experimental evidence explaining why the COVID-19 virus produces variants such as delta and omicron so quickly.

The findings could help scientists predict the emergence of new coronavirus strains and possibly even produce vaccines before those strains arrive.

Scientists led by USC Dornsife’s Xiaojiang Chen, professor of biological sciences and chemistry, figured out the COVID-19 virus hijacks enzymes within human cells that normally defend against viral infections, using those enzymes to alter its genome and make variants.

The scientists infected human cells with the coronavirus in the lab and then studied changes to the virus’ genome as it multiplied. They noticed that many mutations that arose as the virus replicated itself were caused by changing one particular nucleotide, cytosine (C), to Uracil (U).

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration, fearful that those of Japanese descent would remain loyal to their ancestral home rather than to the United States during World War II, issued Executive Order 9066. The order forced Japanese Americans from their homes to remote camps throughout the U.S. Some 1,600 prisoners died during their incarceration and many lost property and businesses they were forced to abandon.

A complete and accurate list of victims of the executive order has remained elusive over the years. Many names were misspelled and others lost while identities of those born in the camps were often omitted. The Reagan administration’s Civil Liberties Act of 1988 issued an apology to those interned as well as a check for $20,000 to the roughly 80,000 people — including survivors and their families — that the government was able to trace. However, a lack of technology at the time meant that the total number of victims remained inaccurate.

The first comprehensive accounting of those imprisoned is now complete, thanks to the work of Duncan Williams, professor of religion, American studies and ethnicity, and East Asian languages and cultures and director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.

Williams spent years collecting names from camp rosters and other primary source documents, building a list that not only accurately spells each name, but also produced an accurate tally of the number of people sentenced to the camps.

“Up until this point, everybody’s been guessing,” says Williams. “We came to a total of 125,284 when we finished the project.”

The names are printed in a book titled Ireichō, or The Book of Names, a choice inspired by the Japanese tradition of “Kakochō,” or “The Book of the Past.” A kakochō lists those who have passed away and is placed on altars and read during memorial services.

The book is part of Williams’ and the center’s ongoing effort to memorialize the victims of Executive Order 9066. Their project, Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration, received a $3.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. It will eventually include an online archive and a series of monuments at former camp sites in memory of those imprisoned.

In September, The Book of Names was put on display at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where it will remain for a year. Relatives of victims can stop by to place a Japanese “hanko,” or seal, by their family member’s name, as a way to acknowledge their memory. Relatives can also request changes or additions to the list.

Once any edits have been entered at the end of the book’s residency, the list of those who were interned in the camps will be considered finally complete. —M.C.

The high frequency of C-to-U mutations pointed them toward a group of enzymes called APOBEC, which cells often use to defend against viruses by converting Cs in the virus’ genome to Us with the aim of causing fatal mutations.

In an experimental first, Chen and the team found that the C-to-U mutations actually helped the COVID-19 virus to evolve and develop new strains faster than expected.

“Somehow the virus learned to turn the tables on these host APOBEC enzymes for its evolution and fitness,” Chen says.

Fortunately for researchers looking to overcome COVID-19, every good offense has its weakness. In this case, the mutations created by APOBEC enzymes are not random — they happen at specific places in the virus’ genetic sequence. So, scientists can look for these hotspots and possibly use them to predict what new COVID-19 variants might emerge and suggest how to update vaccines so they protect against any new variants that are likely to spread. —D.S.J.

One for the History Books

A USC Dornsife alumna donated $15 million in her family’s name to the Department of History at USC Dornsife, the single largest gift to a USC humanities department.

The landmark gift from Elizabeth Van Hunnick follows her donation in 2016 to establish the Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Chair in European History. Combined, Van Hunnick’s gifts to the department represent one of the largest endowment contributions to any university history department in the United States.

The gift endows three faculty chairs, establishes a faculty research fund, creates a graduate student fellowship and names the department the “Van Hunnick History Department.”

The three new faculty chairs will be named after Van Hunnick and her late father and sister: the Elizabeth J. Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History; the Garrett Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History; and the Wilhelmina Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in History.

The previously established Garrett and Anne Van Hunnick Endowed Chair in European History was named in honor of Elizabeth Van Hunnick’s late parents.

“This landmark gift will not only provide essential support for our researchers to pursue cutting-edge scholarship, it will help the department become a magnet for outstanding new faculty, propelling this already strong department to a position of national preeminence,” said USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller.

Van Hunnick, an alumna of USC Dornsife’s history department and resident of San Diego County, said she hopes her gift will help elevate the department to even greater prominence and support the development of more informed leaders.

“I am encouraged by the fact that we’ll have an outstanding history department, hopefully known nationwide and attracting many prominent scholars,” she said. “That’s important because you can see what’s happening in the world today; you see leaders and politicians making the same mistakes over and over again.

“Things could be different,” she said, “if they would just look at history and understand what happened in other cultures and civilizations. You can truly learn a lot from the past.”

Jay Rubenstein, professor of history, chair of the newly renamed Van Hunnick History Department and director of the USC Dornsife Center for the Premodern World, noted that the “astonishing” gift will transform the department.

“The world has always been a highly interconnected place, and the story of its past is a tangled and serpentine tale,” he said. “To tell that story properly requires history departments with great geographic and chronological reach. Thanks to this gift, USC Dornsife’s history department can

attain that degree of wide-ranging excellence.”

Van Hunnick’s parents, Garrett and Anne, emigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in the 1920s.

“Since both my parents were born in the Netherlands, we were raised learning about European culture and history, and we traveled frequently to Europe,” Van Hunnick said.

A teacher, she journeyed to dozens of storied locations around the globe, documenting her excursions on film and sharing them in her classroom.

“I was interested in going to centers of ancient cultures,” she said, including Greece, Rome, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. “I took thousands of 35mm slides, and I would show them to my students. Or maybe the term is ‘bored them,’” she added, laughing, “but I thought it was valuable to share what I saw and learned.”

This spirit of seeking broader knowledge led to Van Hunnick’s support of USC Dornsife and the history department.

“I agree with the Greeks that in order to be a well-educated person you should study many, many different things,” she said. “It’s not just taking a course to get a job. That’s fine, but it’s important to be — I guess the oldfashioned term is — ‘well-rounded.’”

For History Department Chair Rubenstein, the gift is nothing short of historic.

“This moment is — and as a historian, I don’t use this term lightly — a revolution.”

USC Dornsife history alumna Elizabeth Van Hunnick and her family have long been supporters of USC.

Alumna Elizabeth Van Hunnick’s $15 million endowment puts the history department on a path to preeminence. By Darrin S. Joy

How Alumni Continue to Learn From USC Dornsife Faculty

If

don’t see the connection between black holes,

and the economics of happiness, you’re probably one of our few readers who hasn’t yet discovered the monthly, virtual event series known as Dornsife Dialogues. The hour-long forums, which skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, feature USC Dornsife scholars (and others) engaged in fascinating discussions on a wide range of topics.

SHARING EXPERTISE

“Unless you’re a student, you’ve got few opportunities to hear our brilliant scholars share their expertise on a wide range of interesting and topical issues,” says USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller. “Dornsife Dialogues changes that dynamic, offering our alumni and others the opportunity to not only hear directly from our faculty and researchers, but to ask them questions.”

Launched in 2017 as a limited series of in-person forums that were recorded and shared via USC Dornsife’s YouTube channel, Dornsife Dialogues was revived in early 2020 as a series of live Zoom events. The first event of the new series, “The Pandemic Election,” featured the leaders of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, Robert Shrum and Mike Murphy, in a lively discussion about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election.

There have been 38 events since then; collectively they have had well over 60,000 views.

HUNGER TO CONNECT

“We sensed there was a hunger among our alumni, particularly early on in the pandemic, to not only connect with their alma mater, but to hear from experts on timely and interesting topics,” says Sarah Sturm, senior executive director of USC Dornsife alumni relations. “What we didn’t know was how intense the interest would be and that more than two years later, it would remain so strong.”

Ben Wong ’78, who has a PhD in cellular and molecular biology, says he has watched about 20 Dornsife Dialogues. “I truly enjoy learning new things,” says Wong, “especially since there are no quizzes, midterms or final exams.” His favorite event was titled “How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.”

PROVIDING BALANCE

“I trust the information to be current, accurate, reliable and presented without an agenda, other than to inform,” Wong says. “Certainly, speakers have their own viewpoints, and frankly if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be very interesting. But USC Dornsife does an excellent job of providing balance.”

The politically themed events were some of the most popular for Larry Goodkind ’84, who says he watches to enjoy “a discussion that’s well-rounded and thoughtful on ways forward.” But the double major in political science and broadcast journalism says he has also enjoyed some of the discusions that “were lighter in nature,” including one regarding the history of the Olympics, hosted by a student. —J.K.

A series of free, virtual events enable alumni to connect with USC Dornsife experts and savor the joys of lifelong learning — without the stress of quizzes, essays or finals.

Scan the QR code to watch highlights from past Dornsife Dialogues. Visit dornsifedialogues.usc.edu to watch past events and subscribe to the email list.

“This process of scientific progress is important for us to wrap our heads around. I think there is a big part of the overall community that is actually coming along on that journey and that might speak to a future where we take public health and our own health much more seriously.”

“You can’t get rid of belief in the supernatural. It’s in your pockets like lint.”

“My job was to get imminent threat information from them in an effective manner.”

— Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion and professor of religion and history

— Peter Kuhn, Dean’s Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of biological sciences, medicine, biomedical engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering and urology

—Tracy Walder, (BA, history, ’00), former CIA/FBI field agent

“Witches: Beyond Myths and Magic” aired October 31, 2022

“The Unexpected Spy” aired May 6, 2020

you

COVID-19

“The Evolution of COVID-19” aired January 19, 2022

Climate Clarity

Experts aim to inspire action on climate change by refining messaging to increase public engagement.

with the topic. Then we can move to heighten their motivations to pay attention to messages around climate change and to perhaps take actions in their own life to mitigate its effects by adopting more sustainable practices,” Sinatra says. —P.M.

Risky Behavior

Watching TV might be relaxing but research shows sedentary inactivity may increase risk of dementia.

Adults aged 60 and older who sit for long periods watching TV or engaging in other passive, sedentary behaviors may be at increased risk of developing dementia, according to a new study by researchers at USC Dornsife and the University of Arizona.

Recipients of the 2022 Faculty Innovation Awards, presented by the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, based at USC Dornsife, are taking steps to explain to the public the threat posed by climate change — such as more powerful tsunamis and hotter temperatures — in ways that inform and inspire action rather than deepen cultural divisions.

“To make the best use of climate change research, experts need to share that knowledge with the public in ways that are clear and meaningful,” says Jessica Dutton, executive director of the USC Wrigley Institute and adjunct assistant professor (research) of environmental studies.

For example, Matthew Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics and Spatial Sciences, and Rob Metcalfe, associate professor of economics, both at USC Dornsife, are using cutting-edge digital tools to accurately convey potential long-term environmental risks for homebuyers. They have partnered with Redfin and the First Street Foundation to incorporate historical and current weather data to assign properties with a risk score for flooding or wildfire. The two are also investigating the effect this data is having on purchasing tendencies.

“More homebuyers are asking: Is the home in a fire zone? Is there a risk for flooding?” Kahn says. “Thus, buyers are less likely to regret their purchase and sellers can take steps to offset Mother Nature’s punches so that they can still sell their asset for a high price.”

Meanwhile, experts on science communication are investigating how political affiliation may distort understanding of climate terms.

Gale Sinatra, professor of education and psychology, says personal emotions and motivations play a large role in an individual’s receptivity to climate-related messaging. For instance, the term “climate crisis” can prompt a different emotional response than “climate justice” or “global warming,” she notes.

“The goal is to leverage emotions in a positive way — in other words, not to get people upset or angry, but rather to elicit emotions that heighten concern and engagement

The study used self-reported data on sedentary behavior for more than 145,000 participants aged 60 and older in the United Kingdom — all of whom did not have a diagnosis of dementia at the start of the project. After an average of nearly 12 years of follow-up, the researchers used hospital inpatient records to determine dementia diagnosis, and after adjusting for certain demographics (such as age and gender) and lifestyle factors (such as smoking and alcohol use), they arrived at their findings.

Researchers found the link between sedentary behavior and dementia risk persisted even among participants who were physically active. However, the risk is lower for those who are active while sitting, such as when they read or use computers.

“It isn’t the time spent sitting, per se, but the type of sedentary activity performed during leisure time that impacts dementia risk,” says study author David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at USC Dornsife. He adds that sitting for long periods has been linked to reduced blood flow in the brain, but intellectually stimulating activities may counteract some of these negative effects.

“What we do while we’re sitting matters,” Raichlen adds. “This knowledge is critical when it comes to designing targeted public health interventions aimed at reducing the risk of neurodegenerative disease from sedentary activities through positive behavior change.” — N.R.

Our World

Armageddon’s Amphitheater

USC Dornsife scholars uncover region’s first-known Roman amphitheater, yielding clues about lives of ancient Roman soldiers stationed outside fabled city.

In 1902, the archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher conducted the first survey of the ancient city of Megiddo in northern Israel. The area is better known as Armageddon, where the Christian Bible prophesizes that the armies of the world will clash in a final battle.

Schumacher uncovered evidence of occupation by the Roman army and a large, circular depression in the earth that he guessed was an ancient amphitheater. In July, an excavation led by historian and archaeologist Mark Letteney, a former postdoctoral fellow at the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World Program, finally proved his hypothesis correct.

The amphitheater was built for the local military base, occupied by Legio VI Ferrata (the 6th Ironclad Legion), which protected Rome’s holdings in what was then the Province of Judea. It’s the first Roman military amphitheater uncovered in the Southern Levant, which encompasses Israel, Jordan and Palestine.

Assisting Letteney was Krysta Fauria, a doctoral student in religion, who found a gold coin that helped the team more accurately date the structures. The coin, which has lost none of its brilliance over the centuries, dates from 245 AD, during the reign of Emperor Diocletian.

Research on the site will continue next summer, with Letteney back in the trenches. He’s hoping to uncover more of the east and west gates of the amphitheater, enabling the team to achieve more precise dating and better understand Roman construction style of nearly 1,700 years ago. —M.C.

Balancing Body and Mind

A new health-focused minor teaches students how to tackle stress and stay fit.

Some 800 years ago, the Maya worshipped the god of honey in the sacred town of Tulum on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The town’s importance as a site of spiritual practice remains, with thousands of people visiting the area each year to attend yoga and meditation retreats.

This year’s visitors included a group of USC students on a week-long Maymester course. Led by Isabelle Mazumdar, senior lecturer in physical education, the students took yoga lessons, meditated and explored the region’s history.

The trip was part of USC Dornsife’s new Mind-Body Studies minor, which aims to help students tackle stress and stay fit by teaching them the fundamentals of good health, from sleep to physical exercise.

For neuroscience and cognitive science major Christina Maineri, the new minor also connects directly with her career interests. “I hope to use what I learn from the Mind-Body Studies minor, particularly in regard to how we train our brain, to assist dementia patients,” she says. —M.C.

Greener Research Labs

Pioneering researchers forge path to more sustainable laboratory practices.

At USC Dornsife, two chemistry professors have recently implemented techniques to make their respective research labs greener.

In 1998, the American Chemical Society developed 12 principles of green chemistry, which include measures such as energy efficiency, pollution prevention and the proper disposal of wastes.

In her freshman laboratories, Jessica Parr, professor (teaching) of chemistry, has nearly eliminated the use of mercury in experiments. Her students now also use waste containers, rather than a drain, for water and salt disposal.

“If we introduce students to these practices early, they hopefully will retain some of these ideas and sustainable processes as they go on to other laboratory experiences,” Parr says.

Meanwhile, Travis Williams, professor of chemistry, says his lab has cut energy use.

“We upgraded to a new microfocus diffractometer, which is not only a much better scientific instrument, but uses a fraction of the electricity,” Williams says. “Then we put some blinds on the windows to keep the solar heat out, and now we’ve nearly halved the amount of electricity we use.” —G.S.

FACULTY Los Angeles

STUDENTS Tulum, Mexico

FORMER POSTDOC/STUDENT Megiddo, Israel

ALUMNUS Washington, D.C.

Memorial to Those Lost

Alumnus helps finally establish a national World War I memorial in the nation’s capital.

Although the United States mobilized more than 4 million troops and lost nearly 120,000 soldiers during World War I, no official memorial had been built at the nation’s capital in the ensuing century since the conflict.

It took a years-long effort from people like alumnus and former Navy captain Chris Isleib, who served as director of public affairs for the World War I Centennial Commission, to secure land and funding to build a memorial. Finally opened in April 2021, the memorial is inscribed with the words of poet and WWI veteran Archibald MacLeish: “We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.”

The memorial is a fitting accomplishment for Isleib. After graduating with a degree in creative writing in 1985 and serving on the USS Iowa, he spent his career in communications telling stories of the military, from Hollywood to the Pentagon, to ensure they are not forgotten.

—M.C.

Undersea Resilience

More than 90% of the Earth’s ocean species died off in a mass extinction caused by global warming and ocean acidification at the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. USC Dornsife paleobiologist David Bottjer and PhD student Alison Cribb, along with an international team of researchers, have found ancient clues on the seafloor that show how life bounced back.

By studying trace fossils and ancient seabed burrows and trails, they discovered that shrimps, worms and other bottom-burrowing animals were among the first to recover after the catastrophic event. The research team — which included scientists from China, the United States and the United Kingdom — were able to piece together the revival of sea life by analyzing samples representing 7 million years and that showed details at 400 sampling points.

“One of the most remarkable aspects of the data is the breadth of ancient environments we could sample,” says Bottjer, professor of Earth sciences, biological sciences and environmental studies.

Trace fossils mostly document soft-bodied sea animals with little to no skeleton. But the data can indicate how the behaviors of these animals also affected the evolution of other species, including those with skeletons.

It is estimated that it took about 3 million years for the ecological recovery of soft-bodied animals to match pre-extinction levels.

“The first animals to recover were deposit feeders such as worms and shrimps,” says Cribb. “The recovery of suspension feeders, such as brachiopods, bryozoans and many bivalves, took much longer.” Cribb suggests that the deposit feeders may have churned mud that prevented suspension feeders from settling on the seafloor or that prohibited them from feeding efficiently.

Understanding mass extinctions of the distant past and how soft-bodied species recovered can provide important insights relevant to the present and future.

Bottjer said the team’s findings show a variety of ways different groups of seafloor dwellers responded to changing environmental conditions over time, and how that may have played a more important role in the evolution and ecology of species as life recovered than previously understood.

FACULTY/STUDENT South China Sea

Which ocean creatures were first to recover after history’s largest mass extinction?

The Eyes Have It

From Inuit hunters in their endless snowy landscape who have no concept of what it means to be lost to profound leaps in microscopy that enable scientists to watch an eye as it forms — sight allows us to explore our world, to orient ourselves within it and to find joy in its myriad manifestations of beauty and wonder.

By Rachel B. Levin

Though there is no consensus about which of our five senses is the most important, sight has an edge. Philosophers from Aristotle to Galileo have exalted vision above other sensory capacities, tying it to humanity’s noblest pursuits. From a neuroscientific perspective, visual processing is the most dominant sensory function in the brain. And culturally speaking, most Americans believe there could be no health outcome worse than losing their eyesight.

The perceived value of sight is reinforced by the fiercely visual nature of contemporary life. Screens are now constantly at our fingertips. They saturate us with visual information to process, and the remote social interactions they facilitate are devoid of embodied inputs like smell and touch.

Our sense of sight confers power. We use it to investigate and surveil the planet (and beyond) and take pleasure in its splendors. But sight is also a source of vulnerability. The biological processes that allow our visual system to observe the world accurately can also lead us to perceive illusions — and we don’t always know the difference.

BRAIN GAME

Sight begins in the eye. Light passes through the domeshaped cornea and enters the eye’s interior through the opening called the pupil. The iris (the colored part of the eye) controls how much light the pupil lets in. Next, light passes through the lens, the clear, inner part of the eye that focuses light on the retina. This light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye contains special cells called photoreceptors that turn the light into electrical signals.

Yet even as the eye receives visual input, “seeing” actually happens in the brain. Electrical signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the occipital lobe, an area toward the back of the brain that contains the visual cortex. Half of the brain then becomes involved, directly or indirectly, in interpreting the signals.

There’s quite a lot that needs interpreting. Light passing through the eye is bent twice — first by the cornea, then by

the lens. This double bending means that whatever you’re looking at appears upside down on your retina. Your brain makes sure you perceive it as right-side up. Likewise, you perpetually receive two images of the world, one through each eye, and your brain combines them into one.

The role of the brain in sight is most apparent when we’re confronted with visual stimuli that are ambiguous. For example, the “impossible” staircase in M. C. Escher’s Ascending and Descending appears to climb up and down simultaneously because, as your brain attempts to translate the 2D image into 3D reality, it falls back on assumptions that lines are straight and corners are 90 degrees.

Perhaps you remember the bad cellphone photo of “the dress” that went viral in 2015? Some insisted the dress was white and gold; others swore it was black and blue. Research revealed that people’s life experiences influenced their color perception.

Night owls were more likely to see the dress as black and blue, whereas early risers tended to see it as white and gold. That may be because of assumptions each group made about whether the garment appeared in bright daylight or under an indoor bulb — a difference of illumination that cues our visual system toward divergent color interpretations. Those who burn the midnight oil were more inclined to assume artificial lighting than those who rise with the sun, perhaps because of more exposure to it.

“We rely so much on our sense of sight that we trust what we see with our own eyes,” says USC Dornsife’s Norbert Schwarz, Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing. “Seeing is believing, as the saying goes. But our visual processing can be fallible.”

YOU ARE HERE

Making accurate visual judgments is a core part of human survival. We evolved to rely on sight for orienting ourselves to our environment, avoiding danger and navigating through space. Jennifer Bernstein, a visiting scholar at the

USC Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute, notes that all cultures have developed practices for wayfinding, which involves figuring out where you are and how to get where you need to go.

Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic provide an example of how sharply developed our visual perception can become in the service of wayfinding. Amid the snowy landscapes of the Igloolik region, few topographical landmarks stand out to differentiate routes. Young Inuit learn through years of tutoring by elders to orient themselves by attending to visual cues as subtle as snowdrift shape and wind direction. Amazingly, up until the recent adoption of GPS devices, the Inuit had no concept of being “lost.”

If you’ve ever felt directionally challenged without your mapping app — or gotten lost even while using one — you’re probably aware that digital tools are eroding our visual attentiveness to navigational cues in the landscapes we traverse. Bernstein points to research linking GPS use to lower spatial cognition and poorer wayfinding skills.

But she cautions against demonizing the technology, arguing that GPS tools can function as visual “prostheses” that augment our powers of sight. GPS can help those with visual or spatial impairments navigate the world independently. For sighted individuals, mapping apps can facilitate a shift in visual attention from the “how” of navigation to an appreciation of the sights along the route.

“If I can just get in the car and drive, I can look at the fog and the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Bernstein of letting GPS guide her around the Bay Area. In other words, when technology “sees” the path for us, our sense of sight is no longer just a tool of survival — it’s a window into pleasure.

CHASING BEAUTY

Our visual system is designed for delight. The neural pathway that extends from the retina to the occipital cortex contains opioid receptors, which, when activated, trigger a cascade of chemical changes linked to feelings of pleasure.

The late Irving Biederman, Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences, and professor of psychology and computer science, and director of USC Dornsife’s Image Understanding Laboratory, explained this neural system in a previous issue of USC Dornsife Magazine. “When [our eyes] are not engaged in a deliberate search, such as looking for our car in a parking lot,” he said, “they are directed towards entities that will give us more opioid activity.”

Gazing at beautiful things — natural vistas, compelling artworks, attractive people — stimulates our brain’s reward system and makes us feel good. But the old adage is also true: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

According to Schwarz, individuals develop an aesthetic preference for visual stimuli that they find easy to process. In one of Schwarz’s experiments, subjects were given a list of words to learn. In one group, the word “snow” was on the list; in the other, the word “key” was featured. Both groups were then shown pictures of a snow shovel and a door with a lock. Those in the “snow” group rated the shovel as prettier; those in the “key” group rated the door as more attractive.

“Any variable that makes processing easier increases perceived beauty, even if it’s a variable that has nothing to do with beauty,” says Schwarz.

In addition to neurochemical and cognitive factors, cultural norms also influence what we see as beautiful. When viewing paintings or sculptures, we often prize the

sophistication of an artist’s vision — a sort of “inner eye” that interprets what it sees in a unique way. But USC Dornsife’s Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English, explains that artistic and social norms of each era influence both the creation and reception of art.

“Beauty in a work of art … is incredibly culturally determined,” she says. “There are conventions of what constitutes the beautiful at certain times, which then get upended by other generations, other traditions.”

SEE FOR YOURSELF

Romantic poet William Blake once mused on the possibility of seeing a world in a grain of sand. He was alluding to not only the grandeur but also the knowledge we can access with our powers of sight — if we pay close enough attention.

Of course, with the naked eye, we can’t actually see the (microscopic) world in a grain of sand or, for that matter, the (telescopic) world in a speck of celestial light. Our desire to know and understand truths beyond our visual limits has driven the development of increasingly powerful sight-enhancing technologies.

State-of-the-art telescopes have offered astrophysicists like USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller the opportunity to visualize faraway stars and look back in time. The first images released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope earlier this year revealed the presence of never-before-seen galaxies, whose light originated more than 13 billion years ago — around the time of the Big Bang. Miller has likened such images to “‘baby pictures’ of the cosmos.”

Much closer to home, USC Dornsife scientists are making profound leaps in microscopy. At the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, the cryo-electron microscopy core facility that opened last year is enabling researchers to glimpse molecules as tiny as individual proteins. And the Translational Imaging Center (TIC), based at USC Dornsife and USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is at the forefront of developing new tools that enable scientists to watch the biological processes of cells as they are unfolding — building microscopes that can collect technicolor images with a speed and sensitivity once thought impossible. TIC researchers can watch the circuit changes in the brain that accompany learning down to the single synapse level. Their collaborators at Keck School of Medicine of USC, Brian Applegate and John Oghalai, are even able to observe and measure the nanometer-sized movements in the human cochlea, part of the inner ear, as it converts sound to neuronal signals.

These technological advances are making it possible for biologists to see the eye itself in impactful new ways. Scott Fraser, Provost Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Physiology and Biophysics, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Pediatrics, Radiology, Ophthamology and Quantitative and Computational Biology, directs the TIC. He and his team have been able to peer into an animal’s eye as it takes shape and forms connections in the brain. Recently, Fraser and his team have turned their tools to the human eye, observing the changes wrought by age and disease. Their hope is that better understanding the eye’s cellular processes can lead to new treatments for vision-robbing diseases like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.

Fraser’s research captures the fragility of sight and its strength all at once. Our eyes may be susceptible to a host of pathologies, but they also have the potential to bring clarity to life’s greatest mysteries.

When technology “sees” the path for us, our sense of sight is no longer just a tool of survival — it’s a window into pleasure.

H EAR, HEAR!

Whether it takes the form of a rousing rock concert, a friendly greeting or the lulling buzz of cicadas on a summer evening, sound holds the power to energize us, to cheer us, to soothe us and —above all — to connect us.

By Meredith McGroarty

When Ludwig van Beethoven began losing his hearing as a young man in 1798, he blamed it on a fall, though modern researchers believe illness, lead poisoning or a middle ear deformity could have been factors. Whatever the cause, the hearing impairment did nothing to sweeten the acclaimed composer’s notoriously sour disposition, understandably contributing to his melancholy and ill temper.

Today, more than 200 years after the onset of Beethoven’s hearing problems, we know far more about the nature of sound and the causes of hearing loss. We also better understand how the brain comprehends language, and the power of music to affect brain activity.

But if we now have the means to protect against certain diseases that affect hearing, solutions to address the most common cause of hearing loss, aging, have been more challenging. The effects of aging on hearing can be slowed or partially ameliorated without biomedical devices, but they cannot be reversed — yet.

NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAF

USC Dornsife’s Charles McKenna, professor of chemistry, believes he, along with scientists at Harvard Medical School’s Massachusetts Eye and Ear Institute, may have discovered a drug to repair inner ear cells that are damaged not only from aging, but from prolonged exposure to noise. This drug has the potential to treat damaged areas without being washed away by the ear’s natural fluid — a crucial breakthrough.

McKenna explains that neural sensors turn the vibrations

we perceive as sounds into electrical impulses that the brain can register and decipher. When these sensors are damaged, hearing loss and other issues occur.

“A nerve can send a signal to the brain that lets the brain say, ‘This is a Mozart composition’ or ‘This is someone speaking,’ ” McKenna says. “The theory is that if you could regenerate the neural sensors, you would restore hearing to those who have lost it. Though there are drugs that appear to have the ability to induce regeneration of these neural sensors, successfully deploying those drugs has been a tremendous challenge.”

First, the cochlea, the part of the inner ear where damaged cells are located, is bony, making it difficult for drugs to adhere to it. Second, even if a compound is shown to attach to the structure, the inner ear’s naturally occurring fluid tends to wash it away before it can work.

Based on encouraging findings from their latest study, McKenna says he and his colleagues are optimistic their compound will adhere to the cochlea long enough to be effective. With more research, they hope to prove its efficacy.

THE POWER OF MUSIC

While Beethoven struggled with hearing problems, his music, perhaps paradoxically, may help improve the brain functions of others.

Assal Habibi, head of the Brain & Music Lab at USC Dornsife’s Brain and Creativity Institute and associate professor (research) of psychology, explores how music and song affect brain activity using data collected through

electroencephalography and neuroimaging. She and her colleagues have found that music can have several quantifiable benefits for the human brain, particularly in children. For example, playing music can help children hone their concentration skills.

“Music training helps with what is known as speechin-noise perception — for example, when you’re in a noisy environment and someone is calling your name or saying something you need to hear,” Habibi says. “This is a crucial ability for children in a noisy classroom who need to be able to hear the teacher and tune out background noise.”

Music training has also been shown to help some children reach developmental milestones faster. If ongoing research can establish the connection, music training might be able to prevent the onset of certain behavioral and learning issues and lead to new therapies for children who struggle with them.

“One hypothesis is that if music can assist children in reaching developmental milestones faster, for example if they develop language skills earlier, they will be able to better express their feelings and communicate more effectively,” Habibi says.

THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE

While music therapy can help individuals sharpen their ability to discern the signal from the noise, linguistics is the discipline that deals with how we create and process the signal — speech itself.

Linguists specialize in the building blocks of language, or how sounds combine to create a word that is understood

by different people, despite the fact that no two people will speak a word completely identically. Dani Byrd, professor of linguistics at USC Dornsife, examines how the vocal tract creates and combines these sounds in everyday speech, and how languages evolve to structure these sounds for encoding information.

“As a linguist I ask, ‘What are the rules that languages use to build their structures, to build their words and phrases? How do they differ from language to language?’ And I look at how and why we can understand these sounds as we do.”

Byrd says our complicated and incredibly nuanced sense of hearing mirrors a corresponding complexity in how we shape our words and sounds to convey meaning.

“The sensory cells of the inner ear are the most sensitive mechanoreceptor of the body. They have movements on a nanometer scale,” she says. “When air pressure fluctuations move your eardrum, that creates movement and an electrochemical cascade inside the inner ear.”

Our sense of hearing has the power to move us in a myriad ways. It also has the power to inspire wonder at its many — as yet — still unsolved mysteries: Why is it that we understand a gasp as a signal of surprise, or possibly fear? Why does the key of D minor often provoke feelings of sadness in one listener but not another? And how is it that our brain can take these vibrations of air and transform them into words, emotions or messages?

“Isn’t it amazing,” says Byrd, “that these tiny fluctuations in air pressure can make you laugh or cry, can convey urgency, can make you fall in love?”

HOW OUR SENSES WORK

Our nerves relay signals to the brain, which interprets them as sight (vision), sound (hearing), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation) and touch (tactile perception). These five basic human senses help us perceive and understand the world around us.

Olfactory bulb

Olfactory tract

Cribform plate

Smell

Chemicals in the air stimulate signals that the brain interprets as smells.

Equipped with 400 olfactory receptors, humans may be able to detect more than 1 trillion scents, according to the National Institutes of Health. We can accomplish this impressive feat thanks to the olfactory cleft found on the roof of the nasal cavity next to the region of the brain responsible for interpreting smell — the olfactory bulb and fossa. When we sniff or inhale through the nose, chemicals in the air bind to specialized nerve receptors located on hairlike cilia at the top of the nasal cavity. This triggers a signal that travels up a nerve fiber to the olfactory bulbs then along the cranial nerves and down the olfactory nerves toward the olfactory area of the cerebral cortex, enabling the brain to interpret what we are smelling.

Hearing

The complex labyrinth that is the human ear uses bones and fluid to transform sound waves in the air into electrical signals.

Music, laughter, speech — all reach our ears as sound waves in the air. The outer ear funnels the waves down the narrow passageway called the ear canal to the eardrum, or tympanic membrane, creating mechanical vibrations. The eardrum transfers the vibrations to the middle ear, occupied by the auditory ossicles. These three tiny bones — the malleus (hammer), incus (anvil) and stapes (stirrup) — amplify and transport the vibrations, sending them to the cochlea, a snail-shaped structure filled with fluid in the inner ear. There, tiny specialized hair cells detect pressure waves in the fluid, activating nervous receptors that send electrical signals through the auditory nerve toward the brain, which interprets the signals as sounds.

Olfactory nerves

Nasal cavity

Auditory nerve

Auditory canal

Cochlea

Specialized receptors within our skin relay tactile sensations to our brain via peripheral nerves.

Thought to be the first sense that humans develop, touch consists of several distinct sensations communicated to the brain through specialized neurons in the skin. Our skin is made up of three major layers of tissue: the outer epidermis, middle dermis and inner hypodermis. Within these layers, specialized receptor cells detect tactile sensations and relay signals through peripheral nerves toward the brain. The presence and location of the different types of receptors make certain body parts more sensitive. Merkel cells and Meissner corpuscles both detect touch, pressure and vibration. Other touch receptors include Pacinian corpuscles, which also register pressure and vibration, and the free endings of specialized nerves that feel pain, itching

Circumvallate papillae Fungiform papillae

Taste

Taste bud

Optic nerve

Taste buds on the tongue enable us to identify what we are eating. The small bumps, or papillae, on the surface of the tongue contain taste buds. The number of taste buds we have can vary widely; the average person has between 2,000 and 8,000, which are replaced every two weeks or so. Most are located on the tongue, but they also line the back of the throat, the epiglottis, the nasal cavity and the esophagus. Chemicals from food stimulate gustatory cells inside the taste buds, activating nervous receptors which send messages to the brain — in particular to the thalamus and cerebral cortex — enabling us to identify whether the food we are eating tastes sweet, sour, bitter, salty or savory.

Our eyes translate light into image signals for the brain to process. The dome-shaped cornea is transparent to allow light to enter the eye and curved to direct it through the pupil, which is an opening in the iris (the colored part of the eye). The iris works like the shutter of a camera, dilating or constricting to control how much light passes through the pupil and onto the lens. The curved lens then focuses the image onto the retina. This light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye is a delicate membrane of nervous tissue containing photoreceptor cells. These cells, shaped like rods and cones, translate light into electrical signals. Cones translate light into colors, central vision and details. Rods translate light into peripheral vision and motion and enable vision in limited light. These signals travel from the retina through the optic nerve to the occipital lobe near the back of the brain. There, the visual cortex interprets them to form visual images.

Pacinian corpuscle

Meissner corpuscle

Epidermis

Hypodermis Merkel cell

Retina Sclera

Lens Iris

Pupil

Cornea

A Question of Taste

From sautéed grasshoppers to fusion food, USC Dornsife scholars use taste as a passport to explore diverse cultures, histories and identities.

By Susan Bell

Sporting miniature chef’s hats and blindfolds, my 4 -yearold son and a dozen other under-fives at his Paris public preschool gathered excitedly around a long table covered with a cheerful red-and-white checked tablecloth. They were observing “La Semaine du Goût,” an annual week-long celebration of that most French of senses: taste. Set before them were different foods representing the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory. The game was to sample each — without peeking — and correctly identify its taste.

This national awakening of the senses through the education of the palette is a perfect example of the importance French culture places on taste. Nor is it a one-off exercise. This emphasis on the cultivation of taste continues throughout a French child’s education. Each weekday, 7 million public school children receive a four-course, subsidized lunch that would be the envy of most adults worldwide.

Each meal features a different cheese course with a typical starter of artichoke hearts, lentil or beet salad. Main courses might include roast chicken with green beans or salmon lasagna with organic spinach while dessert is typically a healthy serving of fresh fruit. The foods many Americans associate with classic kids’ fare — pizza, hamburgers and fish sticks — are served in French schools once a month at most. Thus, an entire nation grows up with an appreciation for healthy food and a palette trained to enjoy a wide variety of sophisticated flavors.

A PASSPORT TO DIVERSITY

More than 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles, USC Dornsife is taking the concept of taste as a teaching tool considerably further. Michael Petitti, associate professor (teaching) of writing in the Thematic Option program, is one of several USC Dornsife scholars who use taste as a passport to explore multiple cultures — all without leaving L.A.

His Maymester course “From Pueblo to Postmates” is inspired by the work of the late Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer renowned for his culinary explorations of the L.A. area and the historical unpacking through food of its past and the myriad diasporas that call it home.

The course provides insights into L.A.’s ethnic and cultural diversity, how that’s expressed through taste, and how the city intersects and comes together through its culinary creativity.

TAKEAWAYS

“You can map the history of L.A. through food,” says Petitti. “We spend a lot of time in Boyle Heights, now a predominantly Latino area but which, like much of East L.A. during the early to mid-20th century, used to be a Jewish neighborhood with numerous Kosher restaurants and food stores.”

Petitti broadens his students’ palettes by taking them to “El Mercadito de Los Angeles,” a Latino market where they taste “nopales” salsa with cactus and “chicharron” burrito — crispy, crunchy pork rinds cooked in a fiery chili sauce made with cactus and wrapped in a tortilla. They also try dried salsa garnished with pumpkin seeds and chili flakes and sample a new fusion of Lebanese and Mexican cuisine that serves up falafel made with chorizo.

In the San Gabriel Valley — a Japanese and Mexican enclave for much of the early to mid-20th century and now inhabited by a Chinese immigrant diaspora — Petitti takes his students to eat authentic dim sum.

In South L.A., students explore the prolific Mexican American and Latino food scene, eating fresh tamales and visiting a working farm in Compton — a city that was once L.A.’s agrarian heart.

Guest speakers, such as Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, also provide expert insider views on the evolution of different areas of L.A.

“One of the most rewarding aspects of this class is that many native Angelenos have taken it and say it opened their eyes to the city, its history, neighborhoods, cuisine, and how others live and experience it. Students discover new insights into the complexity and richness of L.A. through our readings, visits, and guest speakers, as well as their ethnographic interviews and final research projects. That nuanced, epiphanic experience of L.A. is the goal of the course,” Petitti says.

A RICH STEW

Another USC Dornsife scholar using taste as a lens to understand the city’s complexities is Sarah Portnoy, professor (teaching) of Spanish, who has been teaching Latino food culture for 12 years. Her courses put students in touch with their senses while increasing their Spanish vocabulary and widening their knowledge and experience of Latino culture.

Portnoy agrees with Gold’s description of L.A. as “a rich mosaic.”

“The wealth of Mexican cuisine here is unparalleled in the United States,” she says. “We have the largest population of Koreans anywhere outside of Seoul. We have Salvadorean, Guatemalan, Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese communities — among many others.”

This rich stew of overlapping cultures has provided the perfect springboard for the creation of fusion food, led by pioneers like Roy Choi, founder of the legendary Kogi food trucks, renowned for their Korean Mexican combos.

To sample the vast array of flavors found in the city’s Latino communities, Portnoy takes her students to visit restaurants and to meet chefs and street vendors.

She encourages students to establish a sense of place and history as she prompts them to describe the tastes they encounter.

“I ask them to find out the story behind the restaurant and then to describe the neighborhood, what the place looks like and the diners, before talking about the dish, the colors, the key ingredients, the aromas and what they evoke. Then I ask them to find a metaphor for their experience,” she says.

Portnoy extends this learning experience to her threeweek Maymester course in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, she invites students to taste and describe such unfamiliar items as crunchy “ chicatanas” (ants), smoky mezcal and spicy salsas made from a variety of local chilies.

FOOD, IDENTITY AND PLACE

Portnoy’s scholarship focuses on food-centered life histories. Her work was rewarded this year with a more than half million-dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, shared with her teaching partner, to make a documentary series that explores culture and cuisine on both sides of the Mexico border. Abuelitas (Grandmothers) on the Borderland will be filmed in L.A. and three other U.S. cities, as well as the grandmothers’ Mexican towns of origin. Her partner in the project is Amara Aguilar, professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Earlier in 2022, Portnoy curated the museum exhibition “Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories,” which showcased the role traditional dishes played in the lives of 10 Mexican and Mexican American grandmothers living in L.A. and how they passed their culinary knowledge on to their children and grandchildren.

Comprising oral histories, kitchen artifacts and recipes, the exhibition also featured a documentary produced by Portnoy and filmed by USC Dornsife alumni about the grandmothers’ relationships with food, identity and place.

“Food-centered life histories have the capacity to portray the voices and perspectives of women who have traditionally been ignored or marginalized,” says Portnoy. “This project aims to amplify the voices of a group of

indigenous, “mestiza” (of mixed indegenous and Spanish descent), Mexican American and Afro Mexican grandmothers who have cooked, preserved, and passed on Mexican food culture, while creating communities and cultures that are unique to Southern California.”

THE TASTE OF LOVE

Portnoy says the project aims to capture not only traditional recipes, but how food is woven through the fabric of the women’s lives. Many of their stories are deeply moving, such as that of Maria Elena who recounts spending long hours selling tamales from a cart in Watts in South L.A. so she could feed her five young children.

Another abuelita, Merced, is filmed preparing “mole poblano” from her Mexican home state of Pueblo. Merced has not been able to return to Mexico to see her children and parents for more than 20 years, but she says the taste of this thick, savory chocolate and chili sauce connects her to them — and particularly to her mother.

“Merced can no longer touch her mother,” Portnoy says, “but still feels viscerally connected to her by this dish she taught her to make as a child.”

The documentary delivers an emotional punch: Food connects generations through tastes, recipes and traditions, but most importantly it is an act of love.

“I asked each of the abuelitas ‘What does this dish represent to you?’” Portnoy says. “They all responded, ‘Amor’ (love).”

TASTING THE PAST

So, taste can connect us to our family, our history and our homeland. But it can also serve as a passport that enables us to travel through time.

A prime example is Petitti’s favorite L.A. restaurant, The Musso and Frank Grill. Dripping in history, the legendary dining room was the storied haunt of literary heavyweights William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hollywood greats Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

But what Petitti loves most about the place is that it still serves throwbacks to high-end cuisine of the past such as liver and onions, avocado cocktail and jellied consommé.

“You can go there and eat the kind of meal that Fitzgerald might have eaten. You can actually taste the past, which I think is absolutely fascinating,” Petitti says.

A trip to Tito’s Tacos for what is now — especially in L.A. — an outmoded version of a taco with its hard shell, ground beef, sliced or shredded cheddar cheese and iceberg lettuce, offers another path to explore the past.

“We tend to look down our noses at this classic American taco because now we want a homemade tortilla with what we now consider ‘authentic’ ingredients, probably served from a food truck,” Petitti says. But, he argues, it’s important to understand that this taco was created in the early-to-mid 20th century because Mexican immigrants to Southern California didn’t have easy access to the ingredients they would have had in their homeland.

“Again, it’s a passport to understanding a time and history and the ways that tastes adapt to circumstances,” Petitti says.

“I asked each of the abuelitas ‘What does this dish represent to you?’ They all responded, ‘Amor’ (love).”

BUGS — THE FOOD OF THE FUTURE?

If taste can transport us into the past, it can also project us into the future. Petitti thinks our culinary future will be based around alternative proteins, such as the “chapulines” — grasshoppers fried with chili and garlic and garnished with lime — that he takes his students to sample at “La Princesita” market in East L.A.

“They seem like a novelty item to many people, but they also could represent the future of food,” he says.

Another way L.A. is exhibiting cutting edge practices around food, he says, is its leading role in popularizing sustainability and plant-based foods.

“I think what L.A. does in terms of food is so innovative,” Petitti says. “Look at Choi — born in South Korea but raised in L.A., he’s ostensibly a native son who takes Korean food and infuses it into L.A.’s most iconic and celebrated food item, the taco. That kind of innovation, and the fact that it’s affordable, represent L.A.’s approach to taste. It’s truly outstanding.”

THE BIOLOGY OF FOOD

Speaking on Zoom from his home office, Grayson Jaggers, associate professor (teaching) of biological sciences, points out the four large, black ceramic crocks proudly displayed on his bedroom mantelpiece. They contain the fermenting miso his students made last semester during his course “The Biology of Food.”

In addition to exploring microbiology through the process of fermentation, his students learn about different concepts of genetics, the nature of mutation, evolution and how that relates to the production of genetically modified organisms.

One of Jaggers’ goals is to give his students — the majority of whom are not science majors — a broader appreciation for biology.

“The main thing I want students to get out of laboratory exercises like these is to try out new things and not be afraid of them,” he says.

HOW TASTE WORKS

Jaggers points out that two elements are key to our perception of food: taste, of course, but also aroma. They are, he stresses, two very different things.

Taste is detected by receptors on our tongue that can bind certain chemicals, such as sugar and salt, which we perceive as sweet and salty tastes. Sour tastes originate in acids within the food. Umami (savory) taste, comes from glutamate, an amino acid that is one of the building blocks of protein. Bitter tastes, engendered by a wider range of molecules, signal to us that something is potentially toxic. This is why we inherently don’t like bitter foods, although bitterness can be an acquired taste.

“But if you say that something tastes sweet, that doesn’t tell you about the flavor, which might be chocolate or vanilla,” Jaggers says. “Flavor comes from aroma, while the sweet taste comes from sugar.”

Aroma in flavor is highly complex. Chocolate, for example, contains around 600 different molecules that work together to provide its flavor.

Volatile flavor molecules within food can also be released into the air, enabling us to smell dill or mint, for instance, without tasting it. Once we chew these

herbs, what we taste is a more intense version of what we were smelling.

“Those same molecules that we were smelling are now being released into an area about the size of a postage stamp located in our nasal cavity,” Jaggers says. “Some 10 million different receptors in this area bind to those molecules, sending signals to the brain about flavor characteristics of that particular food.”

So, how do we learn to recognize and identify flavors? Conveniently, that area connects to a region called the limbic system near the forefront of our brain associated with olfaction and long-term memory.

Not surprising then that the taste of madeleines — small French sponge cakes — unleashed such a torrent of childhood reminiscences for Marcel Proust in his seminal novel, In Search of Lost Time

Karen Tongson’s first question to students in her “Gender, Sexuality and Food Cultures” Maymester class is to identify and discuss their “Proustian moment” — that one taste that stands out in their life story.

Her own Proustian moment, she says, is the Kentucky Fried Chicken she tried for the first time in Honolulu after moving there from the Philippines with her family at age 4.

“I remember being blown away by how delicious it was, but I also remember the melancholy I felt because it made me realize I was very far from home.”

FINDING IDENTITY

Tongson, chair and professor of gender and sexuality studies and professor of English, and American studies and ethnicity, also uses L.A. as a laboratory to teach about subjects that we can look at through the lens of food and taste — including gender and identity.

She argues that taste is how we formulate our sense of self. “Taste extends across every realm of aesthetic experience,” she says. “So much of who we are and how we define ourselves is routed through our experience of taste, whether it’s food or how food aligns with our relationship to other aspects of our culture.”

Tongson notes that the first way we’re often introduced to each other — even before we may understand each other’s language or culture — is through each other’s food.

Through food, she says, we also discover similarities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Angelenos, for example, share an affinity for food on skewers. “If you work your way through Historic Filipino Town and down Temple towards Alvarado and into MacArthur Park, you’ll find all sorts of foods being grilled on open fires and on skewers,” she says. “So, even if food is at first an encounter with the other, it eventually becomes an encounter with ourselves, as we come to find these shared and intersecting ways that we experience and taste life.”

Tongson says this is why taste is so important and so pleasurable to us — because it’s a gateway to our identity, a way of understanding ourselves in relation to the world.

“To taste is to have this profound and deeply tactile multisensory encounter,” she says. “The concept of taste also affirms who we are and how we’re perceived. It can be the gateway to a rich exploration of not only our personal histories, but of the places we live and the people who surround us.”

“They (insects) seem like a novelty item to many people, but they also could represent the future of food.”

The Most Powerful Scents?

By Margaret Crable

Smell is, in many ways, the most magical and mysterious of the senses. It is what allows us to perceive something that is silent, invisible, can’t be touched and is frequently so unique it cannot be bottled or duplicated. The smell of your beloved, the scent of your child, the odor of a city you visited — all are complex and tantalizingly elusive, yet instantly recognizable and familiar. But — much as we might want to — they’re impossible to preserve for posterity, the way one might photograph a loved one or record their voice.

“Researchers have tried to find the smell that reminds people of home, but there isn’t one universal smell that works for everyone,” says Norbert Schwarz, Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing.

In Western culture, scent is strongly associated with memory, capable of generating vivid flashbacks to past events. In a famed passage from In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust recounts how dipping a fragrant madeleine — a small French sponge cake — into lime flower-scented tea unlocks precious childhood memories, declaring: “…when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.”

Scent’s ability to evoke the past is not its only power. From facilitating romance and seduction to communication with the divine, our sense of smell plays an outsized role in our emotional and spiritual worlds.

THE NOSE KNOWS

It turns out, there’s an anatomical reason why smell seems so urgently powerful. Scent is the only primary sense that does not first get processed through the brain’s thalamus (known as the mind’s central processing unit) before being dispatched to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.

Instead, when we inhale a whiff of cedar or chocolate, this input is immediately sent not only to the olfactory and piriform cortex for interpretation but also to parts of our brain that process emotion, associative learning, memory and behavior — the amygdala-hippocampus complex. “No other sensory system has this direct and intimate connection,” says USC Dornsife’s Kurt Kwast, associate professor (teaching) of biological sciences.

The swift, involuntary reaction we have to certain scents is likely an evolutionary advantage. Stench, for instance, warns us of spoiled food, illness or death. The smell of smoke or rain, wafting toward human encampments long before the arrival of a forest fire or storm, can also be a first sign of danger.

Our aversion to the odors of rotting organic matter, that if fresh could otherwise have served as food, is so strong it transcends culture. Languages around the world possess an expression similar to the English phrases “something smells fishy” or “doesn’t pass the sniff test,” which align scents of decay with a feeling of suspicion.

Simply adding a rotten smell to a room has the power to alter human behavior, says Schwarz. “When we play economic trust games in the presence of a fishy smell, it reduces willingness to share by about 50%,” he says.

When subjects are asked questions that contain erroneous

From aiding romance to communicating with God, scent has long been attributed near mystical abilities.

statements in a well-ventilated room, many don’t notice, he adds. “However, if it smells fishy, you are more than 20% likely to notice something is wrong,” Schwarz says.

Ancient India was so taken with perfume that savoirfaire about how to mix and blend scents was akin to wine knowledge today — a sign of elite status.

“Educated people appear to have been far more interested in and articulate about smells than we are,” McHugh says. “Anyone who was anyone in premodern India had to have a fairly sophisticated knowledge about the art of perfumery.”

Medieval Indians were comfortable with the pungency of their natural environment. They also preferred high levels of aromatics, in sharp contrast with today’s Western society which, as McHugh observes, is often far more concerned with masking or removing odor than creating it.

SCENT-IMENTAL REASONS

Sweet scents, on the other hand, have been famed since antiquity for their ability to attract. In Greek mythology, the god Zeus, disguised as a white bull, seduced the princess Europa (after whom the continent is named) with an overpoweringly seductive aroma. Women in ancient Rome anointed their hair with perfumed oils and Cleopatra was said to smear her lips with such sweet scented oils, so that her lovers would be reminded of her all day.

In the Sanskrit epic of ancient India, the Mahābhārata, the fragrance of flowers is depicted as playing a central role in the founding of a dynasty.

But if smell in Western society has long been intricately linked with the evocation of memory, providing a pathway back to a former self, removed in time — although not necessarily in space — from the present, this notion was not shared by premodern Indians.

“People in medieval India thought scents please or displease, and correspondingly attract or repel. They’re not interested in the whole smell and memory thing,” says James McHugh, professor of religion. McHugh is the author of Sandalwood and Carrion, Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012), which explores the olfactory sense in premodern India.

During the medieval period, India — where the sense of smell played a crucial role in daily life and religious ritual — was the hub of the aromatic world.

“Not only did the country produce many key ingredients,” McHugh says, “including sandalwood, saffron and cardamom, it was also at the crossroads of the trade in rare and exotic aromatics used to make costly perfumes, with cloves, nutmeg and camphor coming from Southeast Asia, frankincense and myrrh from the Persian Gulf and musk from the Silk Route to the north.”

During that period in India, the complex and creative use of aromatics was considered vitally important in enhancing pleasure to achieve an ideal love life, with perfumes of the period bearing deceptively avant-garde names such as Uproar, Moon Juice, Outrage and Who’s He?

Medieval Indian perfumes also provided a visual experience. Fragrances were diffused using pastes, tinted orange from saffron or white from camphor, rather than alcohol, which was not at that time used as a base for perfumes.

“Nowadays, you can’t tell if I’m wearing a scent. In medieval India, with perfume, you could see it. You would feel it on your body, everyone would see you wearing it, it was a multisensory experience,” says McHugh.

That doesn’t mean we inhabit a scentless world, however. “Often when you wash your clothes or your dishes, you’re using perfume, although we don’t think, ‘I’m going to go put some perfume on my plates,’” says McHugh.

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

A more intimate smell has recently emerged as a potential factor in human attraction: “pheromone-like” secreted or excreted chemicals that trigger a social response. The possibility that love — or at least sexual attraction — might literally “be in the air,” has not only engendered an ongoing cultural and scientific debate, but has unsurprisingly been seized upon by scent manufacturers. A roll-on perfume with a “pheromone elevation” became a Tik-Tok phenomenon last summer.

The science is still unclear, however, on how dominant a role personal odor actually plays in generating attraction, particularly considering humans lack the vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson’s organ, used by other mammals, as well as amphibians and reptiles, to interpret true pheromones.

However, small-scale studies have demonstrated that olfactory cues may still influence mate selection. A study in which women were asked to sniff shirts worn by men and then select the most attractive, found that they liked men genetically dissimilar to themselves.

Another study in which men sniff-tested cotton pads that women had used to swab their armpits found the men preferred the fragrance of women who were closer to ovulation and therefore more fertile.

“The idea of scent attraction is not mythical; there’s enough to suggest an association,” says Kwast. Of course, mate selection isn’t entirely down to smell. Other studies have found that people select mates whose faces most closely resemble their own, and lived experience shows us that people are attracted to others for a whole range of reasons beyond the physical.

HOLY SMOKES

Scent has also long been associated with the divine. Incense is used in the worship of deities worldwide, from paganism to Buddhism to Christianity. Smoke from frankincense or sandalwood was thought to carry prayers up to heaven, a sentiment reflected in Psalm 141:2 of the Bible: “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.”

A sweet-smelling church was an effective incentive to draw people to Mass by providing them with some relief from the

“Anyone who was anyone in premodern India had to have a fairly sophisticated knowledge about the art of perfumery.”

unpleasant odors of an everyday life in which plumbing was largely nonexistent. Incense helped people envision what heaven might be like.

“For Catholicism, burning incense is partly about creating a ritual atmosphere that supports prayer and worship,” says Dorian Llywelyn, president of USC Dornsife’s Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.

But incense and its sensual pleasures were also believed to have the power to disrupt. Early Christians denounced its use as pagan practice and, later, during the Protestant Reformation, incense was banned from churches, along with other “decadent” accessories like flowers and images.

“The Reformation thinkers were generally very distrustful of all the senses — except for hearing. Words were the big thing that counted, and they feared anything else would distract people’s religiosity and lead them into idolatry,” says Llywelyn.

Smell can also connote profound personal holiness. In 1918, Padre Pio, an Italian monk, was reported to have begun displaying the stigmata — marks resembling Jesus’ crucifixion wounds — while also emitting a strong perfume of violets.

The bodies of many Catholic saints, among them Saint Teresa of Avila, are reputed to have smelled of flowers after they died.

For Catholic believers, such stories seem to confirm that saints possess extraordinary holiness and show the truth of the Christian gospel of resurrection, which promises to restore the deceased to new life. “Such smells are almost a foretaste — a ‘glimpse through the nose’ — of what

salvation would actually include,” says Llywelyn.

Parallels can be drawn with medieval India, where odors not only had the power to attract or repulse but were also considered indicators of virtue. Indeed, perfumes and aromatics, along with the sense of smell itself and other odors — both good and bad — were used as tools to create order in the universe as well as material and ethical hierarchies. Thus, for medieval Indians, the good and the godly literally smelled divine, while evil stank.

SAVED BY THE SMELL

We’re still devising new ways to use the power of scent. Alumni Marat Zanov ’09 and Dawn McDaniel ’10, who both earned PhDs in psychology, added odors to their virtual reality program, which eases symptoms of PTSD in veterans by enabling them to relive past trauma in a safe environment.

Zanov, a former U.S. Air Force captain, notes the power of smell to take us back to moments of extreme stress.

“A veteran might be mowing his lawn on a peaceful summer’s day and suddenly the smell of gasoline from the lawn mower will trigger a flashback to a terrifying roadside bomb attack he experienced while serving in Afghanistan,” he says.

Incorporating such odors in the VR program, in which participants are guided visually through distressing memories, is an effective way to help participants relive painful episodes from their past in an effort to combat PTSD. Evoking the past through smell, Zanov and McDaniel argue, could help us heal for the future.

THE HUMAN TOUCH

From cradle to grave, touch brings us comfort, pleasure and sometimes pain, reminding us of our countless connections to the world and to humanity — including our own.

By Meredith McGroarty

Of all the heartrending phrases that came to define the deprivations of the COVID-19 pandemic, one stands out as particularly poignant: “skin hunger” — our visceral need for skin-to-skin contact.

Touch has the power to express or trigger countless feelings, from love, desire and comfort to menace, aversion or fear, often conveying the nuances of what our words cannot adequately voice. Perhaps then it is not surprising that touch is also the sense that philosophers and artists through the ages have embraced to define what it means to be human.

Aristotle believed that the sense of touch is what separates animals from plants, and its complexity in humans is what distinguishes us from other creatures. He posited that humans, lacking the tough hides, shells or hooves that protect other animals, often must rely on touch to keep us from harm: A scalding drop signals that the water is too hot; a sharp edge warns us to move away from a dangerous object.

During the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel shows God reaching out to touch Adam’s outstretched finger, the contact signifying the origin of humanity itself.

One of our oldest and most ubiquitous social customs, shaking hands dates back to the fifth century BCE. What began as a way to signal that neither person was carrying a weapon was widely adopted as a symbol of peace and

friendship and an expression of trust and good intention. It has long been echoed in expressions such as “staying in touch” and “losing touch.”

But in recent years, as we move into a progressively digital world where life is increasingly mediated through a screen rather than experienced directly, the hitherto primacy of touch faces challenges from artificial intelligence and haptic technologies, begging the question: Are we in danger of losing a significant part of what makes us human?

CHILDHOOD COMFORT

There are some reasons to be optimistic. Skin-to-skin contact between infants and their parents is now widely recognized by pediatricians as vitally important in terms of bonding and development, although it’s still a relatively new concept for some European and North American cultures. Even after the age-old custom of dispatching babies to a wet nurse had largely died out in the West by the early 20th century, the prevailing attitude, that touching and holding children, especially boys, would render them “soft” and spoiled, persisted, says Darby Saxbe, professor of psychology and director of the Center for the Changing Family at USC Dornsife.

In fact, it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that animal experiments demonstrated that infant care entailed more than simply feeding a child to keep it alive.

In the studies, baby monkeys were given a choice between two maternal simulations, both made of wire. One simulation dispensed milk. The other didn’t, but was covered with soft cloth. The baby monkeys preferred the soft figure, even though it provided no food. This study and others, which showed how children who have a lack of physical contact with caregivers have more difficulty regulating emotions as adults, caused psychologists to shift course and stress the importance of touch and comfort in child development.

“ The intentional approach of not being emotionally available to kids tends to backfire and create children and adults who are often more emotionally needy,” Saxbe says. “There is a world of research that has really confirmed that young children need a lot of closeness and comfort in the early years of life.”

THE CUDDLE SYSTEM

But while recognition of the importance of touch in emotional development has led to pediatricians and psychologists promoting touch for young children and families, research shows that physical closeness is declining among adults.

Loneliness has become a newsworthy topic in recent years, with some experts classifying the trend as a health epidemic. According to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”

But most people who discuss solutions to the issue of loneliness focus on medication and talk therapy and tend to ignore how physical proximity and touch — or the absence of it — affect mood, says alumna Sushma Subramanian. In her book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch (Columbia University Press, 2021), Subramanian, who graduated in 2015 with degrees in political science from USC Dornsife and print journalism from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, discusses several facets of the sense of touch, including how increased isolation has affected young people both romantically and socially.

Subramanian believes the increases in loneliness have been fueled by the general isolation of our modern world: Living alone has become more common; friends gather less frequently, both due to the pandemic and the prevalence of the internet; and touch occurs mostly between romantic partners. Add to this the fact that an increasing awareness of personal boundaries has resulted in a decrease in casual or friendly touching, especially for men, and you have a difficult situation, she says.

“The truth is we’ve created very limiting conditions for a lot of people to receive touch,” Subramanian says. “Men can basically not touch unless they’re in a romantic relationship or playing sports. It’s more acceptable for women to touch each other, so maybe they’re missing it less. But there are many limits on who gets to touch and when, depending on identity and class.”

“The truth is we’ve created very limiting conditions for a lot of people to receive touch.”

Returning to an age when people were expected to put up with unwanted touching is obviously not the answer, Subramanian says, but she notes that people have found some ways to increase physical contact in a positive way. She believes that one such response is the popularity of activities such as yoga, which encourage a positive awareness of and relationship with one’s body. A number of groups have popped up online for people interested in gathering for platonic hugging and touching, and it is possible the future might see a rise in “professional cuddlers” who can provide nonsexual comfort or contact.

“Professional cuddling has been very valuable for a lot of people,” Subramanian says. “Some told me that by developing that practice of touch through a professional cuddler, they felt more confident going out in their lives and having romantic relationships and interactions.”

BLOCKING THE PAIN

But touch does not simply exist in the emotional sphere; it is essentially a physical function. And one of its responses — pain — is at once essential for protection in some circumstances (for example, a signal to move one’s hand away from a hot stovetop) and detrimental to a person’s functioning in others. Understanding how and why we feel pain is an area of expertise for USC Dornsife’s David McKemy, professor of biological sciences, whose research explores how temperature regulation is linked to pain responses.

Previous research using capsaicin — found in chili peppers — has examined the function of a bodily protein that senses heat. McKemy’s research instead uses menthol — found in mint — to study how the body responds to cold. He is particularly interested in how a menthol receptor, which is a cold-sensing protein, functions in individuals with chronic pain conditions, such as migraines.

“A number of genome studies have looked for genes that might be associated with migraines, and one particular menthol-sensitive protein that enables us to detect cold temperatures keeps popping up in every single one of these studies,” he says. “People who have a specific mutation in this gene are more likely to have migraines and are more sensitive to cold because they make more of this protein. Another mutation in which individuals make less of this cold-sensing protein means those people aren’t as likely to have migraines and can’t sense cold as well.”

In addition to migraines, McKemy is interested in how chronic pain develops. For example, women undergoing treatment for breast cancer often report feeling pain when they come into contact with something cool, a side effect of the toxicity of chemotherapy. When there is damage or injury to part of the nervous system, McKemy has found that a small protein is released that interacts with the menthol receptor to increase its sensitivity to cold, causing pain. Blocking the function of this protein can specifically prevent this type of pain that occurs after injury, he notes.

“We’re focusing on understanding how these particular proteins might play a role in migraines and the chronic cold pain that people get in different conditions,” McKemy says. In the future, the research may help prevent or better treat these types of cold-related pain.

A NEW SENSATION

While McKemy’s research seeks to identify the intricacies of sensation, USC Dornsife’s Andrew Hires is working on the

topic from another angle: how to restore the ability to feel and touch in individuals who have lost it. Hires, assistant professor of biological sciences, is working with mouse models to identify how the brain senses the location of objects and how this translates into sensations of touch.

“I’m looking at how forces of touch are represented by patterns of electrical activity within the cortex of the brain,” Hires says. “There’s some integration that takes place, where the motion of the touch sensor, like fingers on a surface, has to be combined somehow with the signals coming from the fingers.”

Hires’ research looks at how mouse whiskers, which function similarly to fingers in humans, send signals to the brain when they move across an object or bump into a surface. Looking at how the cortex of the brain processes these signals, researchers observe patterns in brain activity that correspond to different perceptions or sensations of surfaces and objects. Then, by looking only at those brain patterns, researchers can deduce the positioning of an object encountered by the mouse.

“When we look at how touch perception is represented in the brain, we find there’s a lot of variation — or plasticity — in the activity patterns,” Hires says. “By observing the neurons turned on at any given time and studying how they change, we hope to determine the rules that govern this reorganization and relearning of particular touch perceptions.”

If we understand the neural patterns the brain makes in response to certain sensations, it may be possible to help “retrain” the sense of touch. This could benefit survivors of strokes who suffer from paralysis by reprogramming the brain to receive sensations from the paralyzed body part. Understanding cortex signals could also help “connect” the brain with artificial hands or feet, helping amputees restore feeling.

“So, an amputee could be fitted with artificial fingers that can ‘feel’ the surfaces of things,” Hires says. “This would work by stimulating particular nerve patterns within the remaining, biological arm. The brain can relearn to interpret those patterns in order to reawaken the ‘sensation’ of fingers in the prosthetic hand.”

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

Aristotle’s theory that touch is what sets humans apart from animals or plants may be scientifically incorrect — he had no way of knowing that one day science would show that the genomes of chimpanzees and humans are 96% identical. However, in highlighting how essential the sense is, and how it connects to the complexity of human emotions, his theory continues to present a strong metaphysical argument for what makes us human.

“We live in bodies that are most alive when they’re open and permeable to what is around us,” Subramanian writes. When the handrail wobbles, we know to exercise caution in the face of potential danger; a hug from a family member conveys love and comfort; the cool caress of a silk blouse is synonymous with luxury; plunging our fingers into damp earth to plant a seed makes us feel in tune with nature.

“Touch is a constant affirmation that we exist as selves, separate from our surroundings but connected to them,” Subramanian writes in the conclusion of her book.

And perhaps that is the aim of every human being — to live a life full with feeling.

How Many Senses Do We Have?

If we think of our senses as limited to only five, we might be missing out.

By Margaret Crable

While the notion that people have five basic human senses is often considered a universal truth and can be traced back to Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul ), many philosophers and neuroscientists are now debating whether we may have anywhere from 22 to 33 different senses.

Among these lesser-known senses are equilibrioception, which is associated with our sense of balance; proprioception, which enables us to know which parts of our bodies are where without looking; and chronoception, how we sense the passing of time.

And that’s just humans. “There are senses that other species have that we don’t, like directional senses and magnetic senses,” says Tok Thompson, professor (teaching) of anthropology. Iron oxide in the abdomen of honey bees, for example, can detect changes in the Earth’s magnetic field that enable them to navigate to their hive.

THE

“X”

SENSE

Then there is the hotly debated existence of the so-called “sixth sense.”

“The ‘sixth sense’ usually refers to an ‘unknown’ sense, but now that we know there are more than five senses, the idea could perhaps be better thought of as the ‘x sense,’ where ‘x’ equals the unknown — whether some yet undiscovered natural sense, or something more along the lines of psychic abilities,” says Thompson.

In some Indian philosophies, the mind, or “manas,” itself is considered a sixth sense that coordinates the five primary senses with other mental faculties.

Western societies generally equate the sixth sense with

extrasensory perception — something that in Celtic culture is traditionally known as “second sight.” Among the supposed powers of those with the gift was the ability to predict death, even seeing fish scales (implying a watery grave) appear on someone they sensed would drown soon.

Do a little online digging into the sixth sense and you will find myriad claims of life-changing premonitions that appear to defy the idea that our five senses are our only faculties of perception.

Among them is the inner voice that Wall Street executive Barrett Naylor claimed saved his life — twice. According to a 2009 book about premonitions by physician Larry Dossey, Naylor was heading to work at the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, when something told him not to go into the building. Later that day, it was bombed. That same instinct, Naylor claimed, also saved him from the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. But a belief in mystical, psychic abilities isn’t required to believe that our perceptions can extend beyond the physical senses.

“There are many layers to the mind,” says University Professor Antonio Damasio, professor of psychology, philosophy and neurology, and David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience. “Facts, actions, feelings — all those contents can be retrieved, but are not equally accessible. Some are essentially shrouded in darkness, making conscious access to them difficult.”

As a result, Damasio notes, our unconscious mind can suddenly provide us with an answer when we least expect it.

“Intuition is not a myth; it calls attention to the richness of our minds,” he says.

Painting By Numbers

ASSISTED VISIONS

Seeing what others don’t can sometimes require a catalyst. In many indigenous cultures, psychedelics are ingested to induce ecstatic experiences that bring revelations. The mushroom Psilocybe mexicana is regarded with such awe by Mexico’s indigenous communities that the Aztecs dubbed it “teonanacatl,” or “God’s Flesh.”

Visions, primarily those brought on by lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, have also been the focus of scientific study. A chemical compound accidentally invented by Swiss researcher Albert Hofmann in 1938, LSD induces powerful, emotional hallucinations.

Of course, LSD eventually found its way into the counterculture, and its ability to inspire visions of an interconnected world helped power the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s. However, the drug’s potent effects also triggered numerous tragic outcomes.

Researchers are now evaluating the potential for microdoses of other hallucinogenic substances such as psilocybin mushrooms to help people suffering from PTSD, depression and anxiety.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Not all visions require chemical prompting, however. Catholic saints who claimed to have striking visual or auditory hallucinations often lived piously in religious orders. Saint Catherine of Siena is said to have had her first visitation from Christ at the age of 5 or 6. Those in deep, meditative states sometimes tell of encounters with light beings or other strange, visual phenomena.

Nowadays we might assume that these sorts of visions, if not induced by mind-altering substances, are the product of a brain disorder like schizophrenia. But even in medieval times, the church questioned the authenticity of such visions and imposed strict rules to evaluate a vision’s legitimacy.

“This is well before psychiatry, of course, but people living during this era still recognized crazy when they saw it,” says Lisa Bitel, Dean’s Professor of Religion and professor of religion and history. “If someone was mentally ill, their visions would not be taken seriously. You had to be well-regarded in the community and whatever you saw had to be doctrinally correct. A claim that you saw the Virgin Mary riding in on [the medieval equivalent of] a celestial skateboard wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

For the devout, the modern argument that seeing angels is actually evidence of insanity, or at the very least the result of an overactive imagination, appears absurd. The devout believe that a person who has spiritual visions has gained special access to the truth, not lost their mind. “They would say that the enlightened person is actually seeing things as they really are,” says James McHugh, professor of religion.

Visions are still a regularly occurring phenomenon, despite our supposedly more rational approach to the world, says Bitel. Today’s reported sightings of UFOs, sometimes said to be inhabited by celestial beings bearing wise words, might just be the descendants of yesteryear’s angels.

“Cultural terms may have changed, but the apparitions go on,” she says. “ The visions we hear about are just the tip of the iceberg.”

What color is Tuesday? What does purple smell like? Does the word “star” have a taste? These seem like absurd questions to most of us but for about 3 % of the population, they make perfect sense.

That’s because about one in 2,000 people have synesthesia, a neurological condition in which sensory input creates unlikely reactions. Hearing music generates smells, seeing shapes may induce a taste. Or, as in the case of Felicia Tabing, a USC Dornsife lecturer in mathematics, numbers appear as a particular color. Neuroscientists still don’t know the exact cause of synesthesia.

Tabing only put a name to her unusual abilities a few years ago. “My husband was listening to a program on NPR about synesthesia and he asked me, ‘What color is three?’ and I said, ‘It’s pink,’ ” recalls Tabing. Before this exchange, she had assumed everyone saw numbers in distinct colors.

Tabing’s numerical rainbow inspires her artistically. She paints “geometric series,” sequences of mathematical fractions that can be visualized using boxes. She then colors the squares in shades evoked by the fractions. “For example, in the decimal for Pi, 3.14, three is pinkish, one is white and four is red. The number Pi is purplish,” she explains.

An artistic mathematician may seem unusual, but creativity and math are actually closely linked, Tabing says. Think of architecture, for instance. Perspective drawing, which deploys carefully measured grids to get angles correct, is another example. These sequences of boxes bear a considerable resemblance to Tabing’s geometric series.

Others may place a street scene over the top of their perspective grid. Tabing, however, will dab blue, lavender or yellow colors inside the boxes, depending on what the numbers tell her. —M.C.

“What color is three

For some people, like USC Dornsife mathematician Felicia Tabing, the senses pair up and produce inspired results.

This painting, titled The Colors of My Numbers, by USC Dornsife mathematician Felicia Tabing was inspired by her synesthesia, a neurological condition that enables her to see numbers as colors.

Forgotten Photos of Nazi Deportations

Bundled up against the winter chill, two little girls gaze out of the black-andwhite photograph. The younger child at right offers a rueful smile. But it is the solemn little girl on the left, wearing a fur scarf and hat, her mournful gaze directed straight at the camera, who holds our attention. Her beauty and sadness alone are enough to haunt our dreams. But when you add the Stars of David stitched to both children’s coats, branding them as Jewish under Nazi rule, and then

note the photograph’s date — Nov. 11, 1941 — the image becomes unforgettable.

The two children shown in the photo, along with nearly 1,000 other German Jews, were deported from Munich on Nov. 20, 1941 — then murdered days later in Nazi-occupied Lithuania.

Through the study of more photographs depicting Nazi deportations, like this rare image — one of only a few hundred known to exist worldwide — participants in a groundbreaking new initiative hope to improve

their understanding of these events and piece together the untold stories of both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. For assistance, they are turning to the public.

“Photographs of these tragic events are rare, but with the public’s help, we hope more, currently unknown, images will be discovered — not only in archives and museums, but also in private attics and basements,” says Wolf Gruner, founding director of the Center for Advanced

Genocide Research (CAGR) at USC Dornsife, ShapellGuerin Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of history.

CAGR is currently the only institution outside Germany supporting the initiative #LastSeen — Pictures of Nazi Deportations, launched late last year. Funded by the German government, the goal of the project is to gather, analyze and digitally publish pictures of Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Romani people and people with disabilities from the

German Reich between 1938 and 1945.

“Who knows how many photographs like the one of the two little girls above are lying forgotten in the homes of survivors and their descendants?” says Gruner. “As the only North American organization involved in the project, we need the English-speaking public’s help to search for these images, so we can analyze them to build a more detailed picture of what happened during Nazi deportations.” —S.B.

USC Dornsife’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research is the only non-German partner in the #LastSeen project, the first major international initiative to search for and analyze forgotten images showing Nazi deportations during World War II. Here, two young Jewish girls await deportation from Munich to a Nazi-established ghetto in 1941. Their identity is unknown.

Faculty News

CHRISTOPHER BEAM, assistant professor of psychology and gerontology, won the Fuller and Scott Award from the Behavior Genetics Association — the highest honor given to a junior association member.

A paper by DANIELA BLEICHMAR, professor of art history and history, was elected as one of 12 preeminent articles published in the Renaissance Society of America’s commemorative 75th anniversary issue of Renaissance Quarterly

ROBIN COSTE LEWIS, writer in residence, was named an inaugural Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at The Museum of Modern Art.

JOAN FLORES-VILLALOBOS, assistant professor of history was named a 2022 Career Enhancement Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

LAURA MELISSA GUZMAN, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and Quantitative and Computational Biology, received a 2022 ASN Early Career Investigator Award from The American Society of Naturalists.

PIERRETTE HONDAGNEUSOTELO, Professor Emerita of Sociology, and MANUEL PASTOR, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity, and Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, received a Robert E. Park Book Award honorable mention from the American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology Section for their book South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A. (NYU Press, 2021).

SCOTT KANOSKI, associate professor of biological sciences was elected 2023 President of the International Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior.

SMARANDA MARINESCU, associate professor of chemistry, received a Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, supporting her research aimed at achieving environmentally sustainable energy storage and production.

NATALIA MOLINA, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, was elected a member of the Society of American Historians.

ALAINA MORGAN, assistant professor of history, was named a Scholars-in-Residence Fellow by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

CHRISTIAN PHILLIPS, assistant professor of political science, received the 2022 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award for Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2021) from the American Political Science Association and the International Political Science Association.

KAREN STERNHEIMER, professor (teaching) of sociology, received the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association, recognizing her work as creator and founding editor of the Everyday Sociology blog, deemed “an individual project of outstanding impact on the teaching and learning of sociology.”

KAREN TONGSON, professor of gender and sexuality studies, English and American studies and ethnicity, was named the 2023 Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Center at the University of Sydney.

DAVID TREUER, professor of English, was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. He will use the fellowship in Berlin to work on his book The Savage Mind, an autobiographical essay about the nature and culture of American violence.

WENDY WOOD, Professor Emerita of Psychology, was elected to serve as presidentelect of the Association for Psychological Science.

HAJAR YAZDIHA, assistant professor of sociology, was awarded a 2022 Ford Foundation Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

HONORS

Prestigious Distinction

Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC Dornsife, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the academy convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas and address pressing national and global issues.

Pastor, who holds the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change and is director of USC Dornsife’s Equity Research Institute, is the 27th faculty member at USC Dornsife to be elected.

He joins 260 accomplished individuals in the academy class of 2022, including such luminaries as authors Sandra Cisneros and Salman Rushdie, retired military leader and diplomat John R. Allen, singer-songwriter Buffy SainteMarie and actor Glenn Close.

An award-winning, nationally recognized scholar, Pastor studies issues surrounding the economic, environmental and social conditions that low-income urban communities face, as well as the social movements that aim to address and improve those conditions.

news/ dornsife.usc.edu/alumni-canon/ dornsife.usc.edu/faculty-canon/

Pastor has authored and edited numerous books delving into socio-economic issues. His work led California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 to appoint Pastor to the governor’s new Council of Economic Advisors, which aims “to keep California moving toward an economy that is inclusive, resilient, and sustainable.”

Pastor views election to the academy as a call for scholars — particularly those early in their careers — to bring their work to bear on societal challenges.

“In a world that faces multiple crises — climate change, widening inequality and the fragility of our multiracial democracy — we need more academics to enter what USC Dornsife has termed the ‘public square.’ Fortunately, this next generation of scholars wants to do exactly that,” he said. “This award — which notably was given in the category of public affairs — gives all of us both a permission slip and a mandate to make sure our work makes a difference.” —D.S.J.

Sociologist Manuel Pastor named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

PHOTO BY MIKE GLIER

CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST

ENTER THE USC DORNSIFE MAGAZINE CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST

As an alumnus/alumna or student of USC Dornsife, you are invited to enter the USC Dornsife Magazine Creative Writing Contest. The winner will have their work published in USC Dornsife Magazine, which has won more than 45 awards for excellence and is distributed to 70,000 alumni, faculty, staff, parents and friends of USC Dornsife.

Entries will be judged by Dana Johnson, professor of English and director of the USC Dornsife PhD Program in Creative Writing and Literature; David Ulin, professor of the practice of English, editor-in-chief of USC Dornsife’s literary magazine Air/Light, author and former book critic of the Los Angeles Times; and Susan Bell, editor-in-chief of USC Dornsife Magazine. Both Johnson and Ulin have served as judges for National Book Award and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. In addition, Ulin has twice been a Pulitzer Prize judge and Johnson has served as a judge for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

RULES:



The contest is open to USC Dornsife alumni and students (undergraduates and graduates) — with the exception of published authors.

CONGRATULATIONS to the winner of the inaugural USC Dornsife Magazine Writing Contest — Tania Apshankar. A senior in creative writing who writes under the pen name Tanaayaa, her winning entry, “Waiting for Curry,” was the unanimous choice of the contest judges. Launched in August, the contest was open exclusively to USC Dornsife students. It attracted 28 entries from 18 students across a diverse range of majors. The brief was to write a maximum of 500 words inspired by the theme of this issue, “The Senses,” in any of the following genres: fiction, poetry, memoir or essay.

The judges were impressed by the high quality of work submitted. “These stellar entries to USC Dornsife Magazine ’s first creative writing contest reveal the varied and impressive talent of our students, whose poetry and prose shines with beauty, humor and deep insight,” said Dana Johnson, one of the contest’s three judges.

WHAT THE JUDGES SAID ABOUT THE WINNER:

“Filled with small moments observed by a young girl, this story reverberates with meaning and nuance and beautifully illuminates the small moments that change lives forever.”

DANA JOHNSON, professor of English and director of the USC Dornsife PhD Program in Creative Writing and Literature



Deadline to submit entries is March 15, 2023.

 You may enter creative writing in any of the following genres: fiction, poetry, memoir or essay.



All entries must be original, previously unpublished work.

 Your entry must be inspired by the theme of the Spring / Summer 2023 issue of USC Dornsife Magazine — “Energy.”

 Entries must not exceed 500 words.

We reserve the right to edit entries in consultation with the writer.

The winning entry will be published in the Spring / Summer 2023 issue of USC Dornsife Magazine, accompanied by a short bio of the author.

We may also publish the winning entry in our e-newsletters to students, faculty and staff and alumni and post it on the USC Dornsife website.

Good luck! We look forward to reading your entries.

“From the opening line, ‘Waiting for Curry’ is sharp, specific, and heartfelt, with a subtle set of undertones that remind us there is more at stake here than there appears to be.”

DAVID ULIN, professor of the practice of English, editor-inchief of USC Dornsife’s literary magazine Air/Light

SUSAN BELL, editor-in-chief of USC Dornsife Magazine

To read the second and third place winners visit: dornsife.usc.edu/runners-up

“Tania Apshankar evokes the senses with tremendous descriptive power to create a compelling and moving tale of a little girl on the cusp of a life-changing revelation.”

And the Winner Is …

Tania Apshankar (Tanaayaa), a senior majoring in creative writing, grew up in India and California. Hours spent helping her grandmother prepare food in her kitchen in India inspired her winning entry, “Waiting for Curry.”

Waiting for Curry

By Tanaayaa (Tania Apshankar)

Each strand of the basmati was long and thin. Nani sprinkled some salt, ruby pomegranates and coriander. Finally, she squeezed a lemon over it and the rice was the most fragrant dish I had ever known.

“Kadhi ke liye toh ruk.” Wait till you taste the curry. But all my attention was on the rice.

When I rubbed the grains between my fingers, a starchy web formed.

“Chakh le,” she probed. So I tried it, and it was more delicate than any other rice, as though each grain had been individually boiled in a special cooker the size of a fingernail. I smiled at the thought of a thousand tiny pressure cookers lining the counters of my grandmother’s kitchen.

Ma entered, elated to see her 7-year-old daughter taking an interest in cooking. She had worn her hair different, braided, with coconut oil keeping the stray strands in place. I was irritated that she had not braided my hair under the white tube light in the guest bedroom. I wanted her fingers on my scalp, smoothening the knots in my black strands. Here, in Nani’s house in India, she wouldn’t hug me the way she did in California. In India, she wore long “kurtas” — loose collarless tunics — the hollows under her eyes dark, scalp always smelling of coconuts and her

skin of sweat. She asked me to help in the kitchen, and in the evenings, to play cricket with my cousins.

Ma announced to Nani, “Lawyer’s papers are in. We’ll ship the last boxes here soon.”

“What paper?” I asked, accusingly. I could sense that Ma was hiding from me, always texting on her phone in the dark when the lights were out. Pa had also disappeared during the vacation, without saying goodbye. My heart ached for him, the familiar woody cologne on my shirt after he hugged me, his mustache against my cheek.

“Nothing. Wash the other lemon.”

Sulking, I turned my back to them as they moved to the living room, talking in hushed voices. My heart beat fast as I strained to eavesdrop. Under the faucet, a strong lemon scent released into the summer air thick with humidity. I rubbed at the slimy peel that gave way to a roughness.

They returned to the kitchen with the “chum-chum” of Nani’s anklets in every footstep. “Can I eat the rice?”

“Curry isn’t ready,” Nani said.

I hovered, inhaling the rice aroma that was slowly disappearing into the room. It was the longest wait, the curry bubbling to my side, hot droplets flying towards the ceiling spotted with brown stains. I turned to see Ma’s fallen face, wet streaks marking her brown cheeks.

“Kha le,” Nani said tenderly. Go eat.

Ma bent down to wrap her arms around me, squeezing tight, spreading her warmth over my back.

I put the rice in my mouth, the acidity blending with juicy pomegranates, coconut flakes in the curry, tangy “kokam” spice and a soft bark of cinnamon. Eyes closed, my tongue warm and a little sweet.

Apshankar’s interest in learning languages blossomed when she took her first Spanish class during her freshman year at USC Dornsife. She now speaks four languages and is currently learning a fifth.

Her love of languages also inspired her to help start Trojan Bloom, USC’s only multilingual journal. Launched in Spring 2022 and featuring undergraduates’ writing in 15+ languages, it is published online by USC Dornsife’s Center for Languages and Cultures. Apshankar serves as editor-in-chief.

A strong believer in giving back, Apshankar joined the Joint Educational Project (JEP) as a tutor in its ReadersPlus literacy program in her first semester at USC Dornsife. She now supervises a team of tutors at Vermont Avenue Elementary, a member of the USC Family of Schools served by JEP.

Apshankar says her goals are to write and to increase access for aspiring writers in under-resourced spaces. —S.B.

USC DORNSIFE SCHOLARS IN THE MEDIA

“The inner core is not fixed — it’s moving under our feet, and it seems to be going back and forth a couple of kilometers every six years.”

JOHN VIDALE, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences, in a June 11 story on his new research that finds Earth’s core travels more slowly than the outer surface and changes direction.

“They forged passes to give the impression they were traveling with the permission of their masters. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch.”

ALICE BAUMGARTNER, assistant professor of history, in a July/August story about enslaved people who fled the United States for freedom in Mexico prior to the Civil War.

“Although there is a certain kind of pain in witnessing, there’s also a responsibility on our part to bear witness.”

LANITA JACOBS, associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, and anthropology, in a Nov. 1 article regarding a new film about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman.

“The poet laureate position in the U.S. has always been exemplified by choices of poets who were both superb writers, superb artists, but who also recognize that there was a moral urgency in language that poetry embodies.”

University Professor DAVID ST. JOHN, professor of English and comparative literature, in a July 12 story about the new poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón.

“The dead were traditionally believed to continue to see the living, although the living could only occasionally see them.”

TOK THOMPSON, professor (teaching) of anthropology, in a Oct. 23 article regarding the pre-Christian realm of the dead, known as the Otherworld.

“That’s kind of like the opposite of what most economists think happens in marketplaces.”

ROBERT METCALFE, associate professor of economics, in a July 22 article regarding his new research, which found that shoppers who use Amazon more frequently were more likely to be affected by phony ratings.

ANN CRIGLER, professor of political science and policy, planning and development , in an Oct. 23 story regarding the U.S. midterm elections and election deniers.

“We’re just saying, it’s not a bad idea to think about what you’re doing while you’re sitting.”

DAVID RAICHLEN, professor of biological sciences and anthropology, in an Aug. 23 article about his new research on the value to older adults of exercising their bodies and minds to decrease the risk of dementia.

VIDALE ILLUSTRATION BY EDWARD SOTELO;LIMÓN

PHOTO BY SHAWN MILLER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; TILL

“Democracy is fragile and vulnerable to corruption if not for vigilant, honest participants in the process of voting and governing.”

COSMOS

SMITHSONIAN

LOS ANGELES TIMES

THE ECONOMIC TIMES U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

LOS ANGELES TIMES

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

AXIOS

THOMPSON, Associate Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy, worked at research labs in France, the Soviet Union and Germany before joining USC Dornsife in 1970. At USC, he served as director of graduate studies in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, becoming a beloved mentor and colleague in the ensuing five decades before his death on Oct. 7 at age 83.

“Dick was thoughtful and sincere, bringing a lot of compassion and warmth, especially towards graduate students from abroad who had to undergo hardships to get here,” said Stephan Haas, chair and professor of physics and astronomy.

Born in Hobbs, New Mexico, Thompson earned his PhD at Harvard in 1966.

At USC Dornsife, he specialized in research on superconductors — materials that show no electrical resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. His focus on changes in electrical conductivity that occurred as a result of fluctuations in temperature led to his bestknown contribution to the field — the Maki-Thompson effect. This arises from important fluctuations in electron transport that occur in superconductors when they are close to their critical transition temperature. —M.M.

A Voracious Seeker of Knowledge

Neuroscientist Irving Biederman explored the brain’s role in vision.

Driven by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, neuroscientist Irving Biederman, Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences and professor of psychology and computer sciences, forged a career spanning nearly six decades. Biederman died on Aug. 17. He was 83.

Biederman, a Brooklyn native, was regarded as a giant in the field of the brain’s role in vision, including shape, object, and scene and face recognition.

“He was very much driven by the seeking of truth and knowledge and how to see the big picture,” said Laura Baker, professor of psychology. Describing him as “a force, a powerhouse,” Baker said Biederman “was probably one of our most illustrious faculty members at USC.”

Biederman joined USC Dornsife in 1991. As director of the Image Understanding Lab, Biederman concentrated on how a scene, object or face can be recognized in a fraction of a second — even if an image had never been encountered before. He and his lab colleagues also probed the neural basis of perceptual and cognitive pleasure, based on a gradient of opioid receptors in the same pathway by which image understanding is achieved.

“He was someone who loved biology, science and psychology. He was a real intellectual and a good scientist and very productive,” said Gerald Davison, professor of psychology and gerontology. “He added luster to our department and to the entire university.”

Biederman was a beloved mentor to countless students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom are now prominent scholars around the world.

In 2019, on his 80th birthday, Biederman’s former students held an “Irv-fest” in his honor at USC. One former student came all the way from Germany and another from Israel.

“That speaks a lot about how much Irv was admired and respected,” said Antoine Bechara, chair and professor of psychology. —G.H.

CHARLOTTE FURTH

,

Professor Emerita of History died on June 19. She was 88.

During her 30-year career at USC Dornsife, Furth’s achievements included a groundbreaking book on the history of Chinese women’s reproductive care, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History 960-1665 (University of California Press, 1999).

Born Charlotte Davis in Charlottesville, Virginia, she met her future husband, Montgomery Furth, in New York when both were in third grade.

In 1981, Furth was one of the first scholars to enter China on a Fulbright Scholarship once the program resumed following its disbandment after the 1949 communist revolution.

Furth later recorded her experiences in a memoir, Opening to China: A Memoir of Normalization, 1981-1982 (Cambria Press, 2017).

Furth was an accomplished teacher, helping develop the doctoral program in Chinese history at USC Dornsife and mentoring PhD students.

In 2012, she was honored with the Association of Asian Studies Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies. She retired in 2018.

Furth is warmly remembered as a generous colleague, mentor and friend.

“She was so smart; every conversation was stimulating and challenging,” said Brett Sheehan, professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures. “Talking with her always gave you an electric charge.” —M.C.

THOMPSON PHOTO BY PETER ZHAOYU ZHOU; BIEDERMAN PHOTO BY PHIL CHANNING; FURTH PHOTO BY IRENE

Globe-trotting physicist RICHARD “DICK”

HOMECOMING PICNIC PHOTOS BY ILIANA GARCIA; ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN

PHOTO BY CHRIS SHINN

USC DORNSIFE ALUMNI FIGHT ON! AT INAUGURAL HOMECOMING PICNIC

The sense of excitement was palpable as more than 400 alumni, family and friends attended USC Dornsife’s first-ever Homecoming Picnic on Saturday, Nov. 5 — shortly before the Trojans triumphed 41-35 over the Cal Bears at the Coliseum.

ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN

Affectionately dubbed “The Cheese Grater” for its unusual facade, the USC Ahmanson Center for Biological Research on USC’s University Park Campus was designed in 1964 by renowned Los Angeles-based architect William Pereira. His unmistakable architectural style, influenced by his love of science fiction, helped define the look of mid-20th century America.

University of Southern California SCT-2400 Los Angeles, California 90089

Life Moment

A red-tailed hawk finds a nighttime perch atop the graceful statue of Hecuba that rises 20-feet-high above the Central Piazza of USC Village.

PHOTO BY CHRIS SHINN