College of Letters & Science
IN FOCUS
September 2021, Vol. 11, No. 9
Reading to a ‘T’ Linguist shows how mothers’ ‘T’ pronunciation helps their babies learn Pg. 6
CLACS summer ser
Contents Feature Stories CLACS summer series features children’s lit JAMS instructor’s book covers teen refugees Linguistics student studies moms, reading, ‘T’ Biologist named Animal Behavior Society fellow Atmospheric scientist explains hurricane forces New grant will diversify UWM study abroad UWM lands a supercomputing grant
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Columns In the Media People in Print Upcoming Events Passings Video Story Laurels and Accolades Alumni Accomplishments
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The International Youth Library was established in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Founder Jella Lepman strongly believed that children’s books were one of the best vehicles with which to raise children in a world of empathy and understanding. Today, Julie Kline tears up when she thinks about that mission. “There are a lot of people in children’s books with good will who are really keen to make connections,” she said. That’s one of the reasons she and Natasha Borges Sugiyama were so excited to virtually host children’s authors for this year’s annual CLACS summer series. Kline is the associate director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UWM, and Sugiyama is its director. As part of the Center’s mission to provide outreach and support for Latin American education in the region and around the world, they organize the CLACS summer series each year, which focuses on a unique aspect or issue pertaining to Latin America. This year, the focus was on children’s authors. CLACS was well-poised for such an event; for 18 years, the Center administered the Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Books which recognizes authors who “authentically and engagingly portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States.” Arranging authors The summer series spanned six sessions, each held virtually in both English and Spanish. Starting in June and taking place periodically throughout the summer, each talk was hosted by a moderator and invited book authors and illustrators to discuss their stories. Kline worked closely with the International Youth Library to coordinate the events. She reached out to the Jochen Weber, in charge of the Latin American section of the library, to collaborate. Weber was delighted to help; he suggested six authors and also suggested moderators to lead the sessions, resulting in lively conversations. “A partnership with an organization in Germany to identify authors based in Latin America – it’s really this global reach that Julie was able to pull off, which is so incredible,” Sugiyama said.
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Meeting each author was inspiring and educational, but for Kline, Brazilian illustrator Roger Mello particularly stood out.
ries introduces Latin American kids’ lit “He has a lot of books that deal with social justice in Brazil and youth. One of his books is called ‘Charcoal Boys.’ It examines youth who make their living by producing charcoal,” Kline said. “The visuals are so incredible. It takes you into a story you likely didn’t know before.” The one downside to discovering so many wonderful new Latin American book creators, she added, is that so few of the books are available to audiences in the U.S. Many have not yet been translated to English. Connections worldwide But this was exactly the point of the CLACS summer series, said Kline – to expose attendees from around the world to literature they may have never seen before. And truly, she said, they were from around the world. As the series wrapped up, CLACS counted 500 guests from more than 35 countries and every continent except for Antarctica. All attended via Zoom, with some exceptions. “We had some Cuban participants sign up at the very beginning. I had not known that Zoom was not accessible to Cubans in their country,” said Kline. “We did some playing around and set up Facebook Live for them, because they could access Facebook.” Audience members, especially those from Latin America, were excited to see a U.S. university shine a thoughtful spotlight on Latin American culture and literature. “The series has provided a true mosaic of current Latin American literature for children and young people. It has brought together some of the most representative voices and has managed to cover different literary genres,” wrote Denise Ocampo Alvarez, a faculty member at the University of Havana in Cuba. “In short, the series has been an example of quality and plurality and an extraordinary opportunity for its audience.” “The effort being made by CLACS, the International Youth Library, and UWM Translation & Interpreting Studies, left an excellent impression on me, to publicize the creative work of our authors and illustrators with a critical but respectful and generous gaze,” added Constance Mekis, President Fundación Palabra (Chile) and the director for the Latin American and Caribbean of the International Board on Books for Young People. Even though the summer series has concluded, the world will still be able to learn about these authors and illustrators. The U.S. Board on Books for Young People has asked to link to CLACS’ recordings of each talk, and a foundation in Chile has expressed an interest in doing so as well. It’s a gratifying feeling, said Sugiyama.
Listen in The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies recorded each of the summer series’ book creator talks and has made them available online. Find the full list of talks and videos at https://uwm.edu/clacs/7441-2/. Antonio Malpica, Mexico Recorded June 24. View the talk here. Isol, Argentina Recorded July 1. View the talk here. María Teresa Andruetto, Argentina Recorded July 22. View the talk here. María José Ferrada, Chile Recorded July 29. View the talk here. Roger Mello, Brazil Recorded Aug 12. View the talk here. Gusti, Argentina Recorded Aug. 24. View the talk here.
“We might often think about films and music and dance, but I do think another piece of that cultural production … that maybe is underrecognized, is the young adult and children’s book field,” she said. “This is such a great opportunity for us to highlight different stories, different voices, different perspectives.” By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 3
Sullivan High School in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood is home to many refugee students.
UWM journalist’s d It was 2017. President Trump had just taken office. One of his first acts was to declare a ban on incoming travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, and Elly Fishman was angry. “Like many people watching the news, I was shocked and motivated to protest what I thought were these draconian new rules, so I went to a protest at O’Hare Airport in Chicago,” she recalled. “While I was there, I was looking around and there were so many people holding up signs. … It made me think about who was on the other side of the wall. Who were these people who were stuck at immigration and unable to enter the country?” So Fishman, who was a writer at Chicago Magazine at the time, began looking for refugee communities in Chicago. She was quickly pointed to Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the northeast side that is among the most diverse locales in the city. “I’ve always written about young people. I’ve always been fascinated by how they see the world and how they move through the world. I was immediately curious about where young refugees landed, and it became clear quite quickly that Sullivan High School (in Rogers Park) was the place,” Fishman, now an instructor in UWM’s Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program, said. She began speaking with students at the high school and her resulting article, “Welcome to Refugee High,” was published in Chicago Magazine that summer. But it wasn’t enough for Fishman. “I spent two or three months reporting the article, and I felt like I barely touched the surface,” she said. So, she wrote a book. Her debut work, “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America” was released on August 10. Writing a refugee narrative The book follows four students at Sullivan High for one school year. There is Belenge, who, though from the Congo, was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania; Shahina, a young woman from Myanmar who escaped an arranged marriage; and Alejandro, who, days before graduation, will find out if he is allowed asylum in the United States or will be deported back to Guatemala. Another young woman and her family fled from violence in Iraq. Fishman was inspired to tell their stories in part because this is a part of refugee narratives that are rarely told: What happens after they flee war, famine, or oppression and are resettled in a new home?
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Fishman spent the last three years with these students, visiting their houses, talking with them and their families,
debut book spotlights ‘Refugee High’ and exploring intimate details of their lives. “Before I even started reporting or turned on my recorder, I would just have conversations with them: In the library, in the cafeteria, in the hallways, so we could build some amount of trust before we began embarking on what would become a three-year reporting process,” Fishman recalled. Along the way, she uncovered harrowing stories of trauma, both in the teens’ countries of origin and in their new home. Belenge, for example, fled violence in the Congo only to see one of his friends shot in gang conflict in his new home in Chicago. But as she reported their stories, Fishman found rays of light amidst the darkness of the students’ pasts.
UWM Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies instructor Elly Fishman released her debut novel in August. Photo courtesy of the New Press.
“I think the beautiful thing about reporting out of a school is that you also see them be teenagers. You see them eat cafeteria food and gossip and do TikTok dances,” Fishman said. “Despite all of these individual traumas and burdens that they carry, there are so many experiences that teenagers across the globe share.” Sullivan High School There’s one more character in Fishman’s book: The school itself. Sullivan High School is a special place. For more than 100 years, it has welcomed students of every ethnicity and race. About half of its student body is made up of refugees or first-generation immigrants, hailing from 35 countries and speaking 38 languages. Fishman was struck the first time she stepped through the doors. “I’ve never been inside a building like that before,” she said. “It’s just this cacophony of sound. You hear Arabic and Swahili and Spanish and you see fashions from the Congo and Myanmar and Afghanistan mixed with American styles. I was completely blown away.” And if Sullivan is a special place, its staff and teachers are exceptional. Fishman’s book also follows the school’s English Language Learner coordinator, Sarah Quintenz,
who goes to such great lengths for her students that they call her “Mom.” Fishman also spotlights Chad Adams, the principal of Sullivan High School. “He was struggling from the fallout of a very challenging assistant principalship at another Chicago High school that was, if not the most violent, one of the most violent high schools in Chicago. I think the fact that he was dealing with his own traumas made him a sympathetic leader at a school like Sullivan,” Fishman said. She doesn’t shy away from people’s flaws – Fishman stresses the book isn’t a white savior narrative – but “I wanted to show the symbiotic relationship and the broader ecosystem in which all of these complicated and imperfect people exist – kids and teachers alike,” she said. Fishman is still in contact with each of the students in her book, and she hopes that they’ll tell their own stories in their own words one day. Until then, you can find “Refugee High” at Boswell Books, on Amazon, or wherever books are sold. Fishman also gave a presentation at Boswell Books on August 31. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 5
Moms teaching tin
Linguistics student’s research shows how They might not be saying “goo-goo ga-ga,” but mothers are actually speaking baby talk each time they read to their young children. That’s according to a new study by Robin Fritche, who is working toward her PhD in linguistics at UWM. Her new paper, “Do adults produce phonetic variants of /t/ less often in speech to children?” was published earlier this year in the Journal of Phonetics. To conduct her research, Fritche recorded mothers reading to their young children, about ages 1-2. She analyzed their speech patterns to determine whether and how the mothers enunciated /t/ sounds. Then, she repeated the experiment while having the mothers read to an adult, and compared the results. Her findings have implications for how young children develop their language skills, and perhaps even Englishas-a-foreign-language students learn a new tongue. Fritche sat down via Zoom to talk about her work. As a mother of a young child myself, I’ve never thought about how I read to him. How did you become interested in moms’ pronunciation? I had two advisors on this article: My advisor, Jae Yung Song, and [her] former postdoc advisor, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. They had found previously, comparing mothers’ speech to the children’s speech, that mothers were pronouncing /t/ sound variants more than the kids. The next steps were to see, are the moms speaking normally to the kids, or for some reason, are they still using those enunciated /t/s? The next step was to compare how moms talk to kids versus how they talk to adults, and see if there’s a difference. How old were the kids? They were a bit younger than one, up to two years. My youngest was 10 months. They’re starting to gear up to talk. We figure that mothers might be unconsciously expending a bit more effort just because of the stage of language acquisition their child is in. 6 • IN FOCUS • September, 2021
So, moms might want to really enunciate /t/s so that their child will pick up those sounds and mimic them. Right. When many people think of child-directed speech, they think of, “Do you want your ba-ba?” But that’s not what we’re looking at. We’re just looking at, within normal speech, are mothers making different sounds? Are they treating the children differently than they would speak to adults? Why did you go with moms over dad? Generally, women would be more likely to be more proper, to use more standard language than men, which has been found in other studies. That meant there would be fewer things to control for. Plus, the register would be different between the voices. We didn’t want to have to control for other variables. What’s so special about the letter T? Why did you focus this experiment on /t/ sounds? The /t/ is made on a bumpy ridge behind the teeth. It’s called the alveolar ridge. That ridge is where we make sounds for T, D, R, L, N, S, and Z. The /t/ can be pronounced many ways. We can think about the letter T like a category. As native speakers, sometimes /t/ is really well-enunciated and sometimes it’s not. That is how people seem to describe it.
ny toddlers to a ‘T’
w reading moms help kids learn language But it’s not that. We’re making different sounds. The ‘T’ in ‘pretty’ is not a /t/ sound, for example. It’s more like /d/, isn’t it? It’s not even a /d/ because that would be ‘prid-DEE.’ It’s actually called a flap. It happens with words that have /t/ or /d/ between two vowels and the second vowel doesn’t have stress, and that just happens in North American speech. It’s really common. Only when we’re trying to enunciate and be really clear will we say ‘pre-TY’ or ‘ci-TY.’ I thought that the moms would do that more – like, “Look at this kit-TY!”, but they mostly said ‘kitty’ (with the flap). But the difference between ‘button’ and ‘but-TON’ – they are most likely to say ‘but-TON’ to the child than they were to an adult. In ‘button,’ your tongue is not doing the same thing as in ‘kitty,’ not even close. You’re making the sound down in your throat. What other /t/ sounds were you analyzing? There’s the flap. There’s the sound like the first sounds in the interjection ‘uh-oh’ (which is a consonant that we don’t have a letter for in English), like we might say in ‘button.’ There are also /t/s at the end of a word, like in ‘cat’ or ‘what.’ We rarely say ‘whaT.’ You don’t really make that big burst on the end; it’s not aspirated. In a word like ‘star’ or ‘stop’ it’s not ‘sTar’ or ‘sTop.’ If you record that and you cut off the s sound at the beginning, it will sound like ‘dar’ or ‘dop.’ They’re not really voiced, but in American English, if the sound is made on the alveolar ridge and the
UWM linguistics PhD student Robin Fritche’s research shows that mothers reading to their young children over-enunciate the letter ‘T’ in some instances to help their children learn its pronunciation.
following vowel sound starts within a certain amount of time – within 20 milliseconds – we’ll hear the /t/ as if it was voiced anyway. Then there’s the regular pronunciation where there’s a burst of air coming out. ‘Toy,’ for example. So, I’ve been studying a lot of /t/ stuff. My whole life revolves around /t/. You asked moms to read to analyze their speech. Did the stories have an overabundance of /t/s? I wrote stories and drew terrible pictures. I’m not an artist. I came up with a list of possible words – two syllable words with a /t/ in the middle ending in an ‘ee’ or ‘er’ or ‘ing,’ for example. Then I had to try to come up with a couple of stories. That’s why there are cats in both stories, because of all of the /t/ words you can get out of ‘cat.’ There are no dogs, because the word “dog” was useless to me! Continued on Page 8 College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 7
Reading ‘T’ Continued from Page 7
The first story was about a star who wanted a kitten, and the other one was about a little girl with a big sister, and they wanted a cat.
UWM biologist named a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society
And then you listened to each recording and analyzed how moms read to their kids versus an adult. Did moms pronounce the /t/s differently between the two?
Rafael Rodriguez, UWM professor of biological sciences, has been elected as a fellow of
Yes! In the case of words like ‘button’ and ‘mitten,’ and ‘kitten,’ they did. And at the end of words like ‘cat,’ they would enunciate the /t/ more often. Flaps didn’t really change (when speaking between children and adults).
in recognition of his research contributions in animal cognition and sexual selection, contained in more than 90 publications.
What does that mean for how children learn language? I think it’s not really conscious. Some people insisted they didn’t speak any differently at all. I think what the mothers are doing is they are using a combination of a sound. None of the moms only said ‘butTon’ or ‘kit-Ten.’ They had a mixture. Sometimes they would speak like they would speak to an adult, and sometimes they would really enunciate the /t/ with a hard burst and the aspiration of air that comes out. We thought that maybe, by having a combination, they are giving kids the idea that this is a category. They’re hearing the same words used in the same context, and sometimes the mom enunciates the /t/ and sometimes doesn’t. This is just a guess, but the children might think, “Sometimes mom makes this sound and sometimes she makes this sound. It must not change the meaning.” By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science
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the Animal Behavior Society
There have been only three previous ABS fellows from Wisconsin, and only one of those was from UWM – the late Millicent “Penny” Ficken. Rodriguez joined the UWM faculty in Rafael Rodriguez 2007. His research focuses on the causes of variation in behaviors that can help scientists understand the course of evolution. His studies have included communication, memory and mate preference, especially with insects and spiders. His research also has shown that such tiny brains show characteristics of higher intelligence. Rodriguez has been active in the ABS, helping to organize the 2018 annual meeting at UWM and editing a special issue of the society’s journal. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Costa Rica and his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and entomology from the University of Kansas. The ABS is one of the largest professional organizations for animal behaviorists in the world, and it publishes the journal Animal Behaviour. Rodriguez’s election occurred Aug. 6 at the annual meeting of the society. By Laura Otto, University Relations
Hurricane Ida swirls off the coast of Louisiana on August 29, 2021. Photo courtesy of NOAA.
Learning why some hurricanes are more dangerous inland In almost every region where hurricanes form, their maximum sustained winds are getting stronger, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And NOAA predicts it’s likely that greenhouse warming will cause the most intense hurricanes to be even more intense in the coming century. Most of these storms strengthen when over water, then weaken after making landfall. But research by Clark Evans, an atmospheric science associate professor, explores how some tropical storms, including hurricanes, threaten inland areas by maintaining, or even intensifying, their power once they’ve moved inland from the coast. Evans hopes the research leads to a better understanding of the core physical and thermodynamic processes that support such storms maintaining their intensity or increasing it while over land. He also wants insight into another important aspect: “How well can we actually predict this?” Evans grew up in Orlando, Florida, and encountered his first hurricane – Erin – in 1995. His ongoing research uses models to examine two theories on why some tropical storms don’t lose intensity over land. One is that they draw energy from the wet ground directly below them. The other is that the energy comes from the warm, moist oceans hundreds of miles away and is carried by warm winds toward the storm.
Clark Evans
The research uses factor separation, in which individual physical processes – such as exchanges of heat and moisture between the ground and air – are isolated in simplified weather simulations. Doing this helps identify which processes are most important to tropical storms that don’t weaken over land. “It also considers collections of weather model simulations, starting with marginally different atmospheric conditions,” Evans says. “They help determine the importance of these physical processes relative to our inability to perfectly forecast the weather.” By Tom Kertscher, University Relations College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 9
UWM awarded grant to diversify study abroad The U.S. Department of State has awarded UWM’s Center for International Education a nearly $35,000 grant designed to diversify study-abroad efforts. The IDEAS (Increase and Diversify Education Abroad for U.S. Students) grant comes from the State Department’s Capacity Building Program for U.S. Study Abroad. The goal of the program is to encourage and prepare students to improve their international understanding and increase the diversity of U.S. students studying abroad to reflect the country’s diverse population. UWM is one of only 26 institutions, out of 132 that applied, to receive the grant this year. The university plans to use the funding to support a cotaught modular course that looks at the Black experience in the U.S. and internationally. The course, Black Lives Matter: A Global Comparative Study, will be offered in the spring of 2022. It will be followed by a two-week summer study abroad program to one of the areas studied, according to Yomarie Castellano, CIE study abroad coordinator and part of the team that wrote the grant. “This course can give an international perspective,” she said “Racism isn’t only something that affects the U.S. We want to look at how Black Lives Matter is playing out in other areas of the world.” The grant will support promotion of the course and the five faculty members who will each prepare and teach one of the three-week modules. “It’s been amazing to have this idea and have so many departments and disciplines involved,” Castellano said. The idea for the initiative grew out of the Black Lives Matter movement, spurred on by the death of George Floyd, according to Castellano. The themes of the course will be on how the BLM movement has galvanized communities and inspired the push for racial justice, including areas such as global economics, community health, movies and media, and the mobilization of people in various areas. Each faculty member will focus on his or her area of expertise as it relates to the BLM movement in a particular world region. The faculty proposed to teach the course include: David Pate, associate professor of social work; Ermitte Saint Jacques, assistant professor, and Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, associate professor, of African and African Diaspora Studies; Jennifer Kibicho, associate professor of nursing; and Portia Cobb, professor of film.
In conjunction with the course, the Global and International Studies degree program aims to create a new Global Fellows cohort that amplifies African American global scholarship. Faculty teaching modules of the BLM course will become Global Fellows. The UWM Global Studies Fellows program was established in 2010 to support faculty teaching and research in global themes and issues. “We really wanted to focus on supporting Black faculty and their engagement in study abroad,” said Castellano. UWM’s campus dialogue on racial justice in summer of 2020 with panels of faculty, staff and students also emphasized the need for more Black faculty and courses like this, she said. The eventual goal is to make the course a permanent offering at UWM, she added. The Center for International Education and the Global and International Studies staff collaborated in this successful effort. The team included Sharon Gosz, director of study abroad; Castellano and Ramona Washington, study abroad coordinators and co-managers of the grant; Christine Wolf, assistant director of global and international studies; and Caroline Seymour-Jorn, director of global and international studies and professor of French, Italian and Comparative Literature. “Putting together the grant and the program took a lot of people and a lot of effort,” Castellano said. “I was proud to work with such an incredible team to make this happen.” By Kathy Quirk, University Relations
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Physics professor leads charge in securing supercomputing grant The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation to upgrade the university’s aging supercomputing infrastructure. The $400,000 grant will expand campus research capabilities and research-related educational opportunities. Supercomputers are used in fields that require high-speed computation, such as weather forecasting, physical simulation, molecular modeling and astrophysics. However, UWM’s Philip Chang cluster, which was established in 2009, is no longer powerful enough to accommodate many researchers’ needs. “Supercomputing looms large in both the volume and funding associated with UWM’s computation-intensive research,” said Robert Beck, UWM associate vice chancellor and chief information officer. “These NSF grant funds will add unique resources not currently available within our aging cluster environment.” The need for computation in research has exploded over the last 10 years, said Dan Siercks, interim director of research computing. Last year alone, the supercomputing cluster ran more than 600,000 computational jobs, and seven of the top 10 research projects at UWM used the cluster. Designing a model that works Philip Chang, associate professor of physics, recruited 11 other researchers across disciplines to write the grant. Coauthors on the grant represented UWM research in astrophysics, atmospheric science, cancer research, genomics, fluid dynamics, biophysics and quantum mechanics. “We found that no single kind of supercomputer would satisfy all the competing requirements for different computational projects in terms of computing, storage and memory,” Chang said, “so we designed one that does.” This new investment will support science and engineering throughout the region, not just UWM, Chang said.
“Innovation sparked by the research will directly drive high-end industrial development and the resulting economic rewards,” he said. For example, Professor Ryo Amano’s research involves modeling the performance of turbine blades for wind energy, and Associate Professor Kevin Renken optimizes heat exchangers used in air separation plants and transport industries. Both require simulation software with hefty computing requirements. Distributed computing consortium The upgrade also will allow UWM to participate more fully in the Open Science Grid, a distributed computing consortium that includes 42 universities, including UW-Madison and UWM. Distributed computing links many partners’ individual supercomputing clusters so that the idle time of any computers across the consortium can be used to process large datasets. “The idea is to keep the computers of all partners in use all the time,” said Siercks, and that increases the high-performance computing resources for partners. The new supercomputer will have educational benefits as well. In the next five years, between 60 and 100 undergraduates will use the cluster for education and research, while more than 100 graduate students will use it for coursework and research. And it will enhance UWM’s ability to recruit and retain students from underrepresented groups in the STEM disciplines. Besides Chang, Renken and Amano, the following researchers helped write the grant: Sarah Vigeland, David Kaplan, Abbas Ourmazd, Peter Schwander, Russell Fung and Michael Weinert from physics; Clark Evans from atmospheric science; Mahsa Dabagh from engineering; and Rebecca Klaper from freshwater sciences. The grant comes from the NSF’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure program, which invests in campuslevel networking and cyberinfrastructure improvements for science applications and distributed research projects. By University Relations
College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 11
In the Media and Around the Community Karyn Frick (Psychology) presented her research focused on “Potential Memory-Enhancing Effects of the Novel Estrogen Receptor Beta Agonist EGX358 in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease” at the annual Spark Symposium hosted by the University of Wisconsin System.
The New York Times cited a report by the Center for
No spectators and a global pandemic changed the way that this year’s Olympics were broadcasted and viewed from previous years, Michael Mirer (Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies) told WUWM Radio.
How did the U.S. House become capped at 435 representatives? Margo Anderson (emerita History) explained in a blog post by FiveThirtyEight. She also weighed in via The New York Times about how the 2020 U.S. Census may have been impacted by the pandemic and political turmoil.
Chia Vang (History) explained to WUWM Radio what it means to the American Hmong community to see American Hmong gymnast Sunisa Lee win a gold medal at the Olympics. She also talked to the station about the parallels between the American evaculation of Vietnam after the Vietnam War and the evacuation from Kabul following President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan. It’s too soon to tell if the late start to Wisconsin’s summer thunderstorms is due to climate change, Clark Evans (Atmospheric Science) said on WUWM Radio, but climate change may push these “derechos” farther north. Darian Dixon (‘15, BS Geosciences) shared his experiences working at NASA and advice for starting on a STEM career path on WUWM Radio. Ermitte Saint Jacques (African and African Diaspora Studies) noted how Giannis Antetokounmpo has become a symbol of African migration in southern Europe on WUWM Radio. On the eve of the Wisconsin Mallards baseball team’s tribute game to the Negro Leagues, graduate student Ken Bartelt (History) told PBS Wisconsin the story of the Milwaukee Bears, the city’s Negro League baseball team. Blogger Don Fenley quoted Kundan Kishor’s (Economics) rule of thumb about fair rental prices in a July 31 blog entry. 12 • IN FOCUS • September, 2021
Economic Development analyzing the racial disparities in Milwaukee’s COVID cases in an article examining how Geographic Information System mapping has helped combat the pandemic.
Krista Lisdahl (Psychology) is a coauthor on a study that determined that while teens’ use of alcohol decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic, use of nicotine and misuse of prescription drugs rose, according to a report by UC San Diego News Center. A broken flask? A fused beaker? Glassblower Neal Korfhage (Chemistry and Biochemistry) is on it. Discover Magazine profiled this remarkable UWM staff member and how his work benefits his department. Graduate student Clayborn Benson (History) is the founder of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society and pushes to preserve critical history of the state’s Black residents, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Despite many accomplishments in the 17 years he has held office, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has failed to improve life for Black Milwaukeeans, according to research by Marc Levine (emeritus History) cited in an op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His research was also referenced in a PBS Wisconsin article about universal basic income.
Jean Creighton (Planetarium) told WUWM she is excited to reopen the Planetarium for in-person public events. Researchers, including Abbas Ourmazd (Physics) used supercomputing-derived movies to find a hidden ‘gate’ in spike proteins on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that opens to allow COVID infection, Science Daily reported.
People in Print Ian Hayes, Di Wei, T. Metz, Jian Zhang, Yun Suk Eo, Sheng Ran, Shanta Saha, John Collini, Nicholas Butch, Daniel Agterberg (Physics), aharon kapitulnik, and Johnpierre Paglione. 2021. Multicomponent superconducting order parameter in UTe2. Science. Online. https://bit.ly/3zSOyeN Matthew B. Cox, Elise Dixon, Katie Manthey, Maria Novotny (English), Rachel Robinson, and Trixie G. Smith. 2021. Re-imagining Doctoral Writers and Their Others. In Re-imagining Doctoral Writing (Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell, and James Buford, eds.). https://bit.ly/3jy10eP
Seunghyun Khim, Javier F. Landaeta, Jacintha Banda, N. Bannor, M. Brando, Philip M.R. Brydon, D. Hafner, Robert Kuechler, Raul Cardoso Gil, Ulrike Stockert, Andrew Mackenzie, Daniel Agterberg (Physics), C. Geibel, and Elena Hassinger. 2021. Field-induced transition within the superconducting state of CeRh2As2. Science, 373(6558): 1012-1016. https://bit.ly/3jzMByy
Upcoming Events Stranger in the Shogun’s City: From the Archive to the Page Amy Stanley of Northwestern University, will deliver this presentation. In the early nineteenth century, an irrepressible woman named Tsuneno ran away from home. Defying convention, she made a life for herself in the big city of Edo (now Tokyo) in the decades before the arrival of Commodore Perry and the fall of the shogunate. But as she was an unknown person, finding out what happened to her is a difficult task. This talk focuses on how images and documents in the Japanese archive can be used – carefully – to tell her story. When: Sept. 24, 1-2:30 p.m. Where: AGS Library (3rd Floor, East Wing of the UWM Golda Meir Library)
Doors Open: UWM Planetarium
César Ferreira (Spanish) and David Wood, eds. 2021. Medio siglo de Un mundo para Julius: Ocho lecturas. Lima: Editorial Universitaria Universidad Ricardo Palma, 144 pp.
Join the Planetarium for Doors Open Milwaukee! The Planetarium will offer free 20-minute-long stargazing shows inside the planetarium every 45 minutes. For questions, please email planetarium@uwm.edu.
Thomas Haigh (History). 2021. Women’s Lives in Code. communications of the ACM, 64(9): 28-34.
When: Sept. 26. Shows at 10:15 am, 11 am, 11:45 am, 12:30 pm, 1:15 pm, 2 pm, 2:45 pm, 3:30 pm, and 4:15 pm.
https://bit.ly/3kOa9zl
Jeffrey Sommers (Global Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies) and Kaspars Briskens. 2021. Latvia a decade out from the world’s largest GDP crash: How it collapsed and how to improve its economic performance. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Online. https://bit.ly/3h3iPAT Viktorija Bilic (Translation and Interpreting Studies) (Translator and ed.) and Alison Clark Efford (ed.). 2021. Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. University of Georgia Press: Athens, Georgia. https://bit.ly/3kY1oCK José Lanters (History). 2021. Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (2006) and the Ars Moriendi. In The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016, Vol. 2. (eds. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase): 109119. Liverpool University Press. Timothy O’Brien (Sociology) and Shiri Noy. 2021. Threatening Morality: Religious and Political Opposition to Science in the United States. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Online. https://bit.ly/3BLsjsu
Where: UWM Manfred Olson Planetarium More information: uwm.edu/planetarium
Virtual Career Fair – Actuarial Science, Math, Economics, Data, Accounting, Info Tech & Finance majors This Virtual Career Fair will offer employers and students an opportunity to connect. Students majoring in mathematics, data science, economics, accounting, finance, data analytics, information technology, and actuarial science can share their talent and learn about open positions and internships. When: Sept. 28, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Where: Online via Handshake Register at: https://uwm.edu/careerplan/ handshake/
College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 13
Passings Dr. Mark R. Mantyh, a former Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, passed away on Aug. 12, 2021. Mark received his MA in sociology in 1988 and his PhD in urban studies in 1994, both from UW-Milwaukee. Mark taught sociology at UWM for 30 years before retiring in 2015. During his time at UWM, Mark helped scores of sociology majors connect their sociological knowledge and passions to the job market and potential career paths via his internship courses. A colleague of Mark’s shared that “he brought so much energy and enthusiasm not only to his teaching, but also to so many different pursuits around the community, both before and after retirement.” Mark loved music and was very active in the Milwaukee jazz scene, and he also enjoyed traveling. A full obituary is available online.
Dr. Walter Irwin Trattner, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, passed away on Aug. 24, 2021. Walter received a BA in history from Williams College, a Master’s in education from Harvard, and a Master’s in history and a PhD in philosophy from UW-Madison. Walter taught American history and social welfare courses at UW-Milwaukee for 36 years. Among his many books and articles, his Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (1970) and, in particular, his From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (1974), were especially influential. From Poor Law to the Welfare State went through six editions and was the standard textbook in the field. Walter’s obituary is available online. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the American Cancer Society.
Video Story
Ava Udvadia, UWM associate professor of biological sciences, has been named by the University of Wisconsin System as one of three 2021 Regent Scholar recipients. The honor recognizes both Udvadia’s research into the genetics that allow healing of nerve damage (her research may one day provide new treatments for eye injuries or diseases) and also her efforts to encourage undergraduates to participate. “Being able to give that experience to our undergraduates, that’s probably been the thing that I’ve loved the most at UWM,” she says.
The UWS Regent Scholar program, which was introduced in 2014, provides a one-time $50,000 grant to individual faculty members or campus programs that undertake undergraduate research projects with the potential to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and talent development. https://youtu.be/9w9WVbAqA1k 14 • IN FOCUS • September, 2021
Laurels and Accolades Kimberly Blaeser’s (English and American Indian Studies) poem, “Wellspring: Words from Water” is featured in an audio poetry installation at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana. A project of Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation and Tippet Rise, the installation features a stickwork sculpture, “Daydreams,” and eleven poems, including Blaeser’s. In conjunction with the installation, a clip of her poem was also included in Yellowstone Public Radio’s, “Resounds: Arts and Culture on the High Plains.” Graduate student Jana Gedymin (Geography) was selected to receive a scholarship from the Wisconsin Land Information Association Foundation and Damon Anderson Memorial Scholarship Fund. The $1,000 prize also includes a free registration and accommodations for the 2022 WLIA annual conference in February 2022. John Berges and Erica Young (Biological Sciences) will lead UWM’s involvement in 27-institution alliance, headed by Auburn University, that received a $10 million award from the National Science Foundation. The five-year research effort is aimed at increasing the number of disabled students entering college and completing a degree in a STEM-related field. Timothy O’Brien (Sociology) and his co-author, Shiri Noy, were named the winners of the Distinguished Sociology of Religion Journal Article Award for their article, “Political Identity and Confidence in Science and Religion in the United States,” which was published in 2020 in Vol. 81 of the journal Sociology of Religion. The award, conferred by the Association for the Sociology of Religion, was presented at the ASR annual meeting in August. Cary Costello (Sociology) was nominated by UWM for the 2021 University of Wisconsin System’s Dr. P. B. Poorman Award for Outstanding Achievement on Behalf of LGBTQ+ People. The award recognizes LGBTQ+ people and their allies for advocacy leadership in advancing the inclusion, rights, and opportunities of LGBTQ+ people on campus and within the community.The award will be presented at a reception at UW-Madison in November. Kelly Kohlmetz (Mathematical Sciences) is a recipient of the Carnegie Math Pathways Hero Award. The award highlighted how her “dedication has made a difference to the success of the Carnegie Math Pathways, and most importantly to the success of tens of thousands of students, who are benefitting from a more empowering and equitable math learning experience.
Alumni Accomplishments Su Cho (‘21, PhD English) was named one of the winners of the National Poetry Series, a literary awards program that sponsors the publication of five books of poetry each year solicited from entries throughout the country. Cho’s work, Symmetry of Fish, will be published by Penguin Books. Richelle Martin (‘06, BA Art History, Political Science, and Psychology) is the director Su Cho of the venture capital fund Winnow Fund and made the Fund’s first investment in July. Winnow Fund invests in Wisconsin-based seedstage companies and invested in KaPloint, Inc., an entertainment and marketing company developing a mobile player platform that gamifies slot machine data from partner casinos. Trevor Jung (‘17, BA Urban Studies) was named the City of Racine, Wisconsin’s Transit Manager and took over his new position at the end of August. Jung will step down fom his seat on the Racine Common Council, where he served as chair of the Common Council’s Transit Committee. Trevor Jung He has also served on several transportation-related committees and boards. Alex Heaton (‘19, PhD Mathematical Sciences) was named a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics at Lawrence University. He recently finished work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fields Institute for Research in mathematical Sciences in Toronto. Ae Hee Lee (‘21, PhD English) published her collection of poetry, entitled, “Dear Bear,” in England earlier this year. Her collection has received glowing praise.
Fred Helmstetter (Psychology) was recognized as a “Daily Expert” by Expertscape, which highlights the world’s top experts in clinical and research medicine. Helmstetter was featured on Aug. 21 in honor of Interntiaonal Day of Rememberance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism. College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 15
Welcome back, Panthers!
