Tricia Shalka, an assistant professor in the Warner School of Education, studies the impact of trauma on students’ developmental outcomes. What distinguishes trauma from other kinds of negative experiences, she says, is that trauma entails “some kind of lasting adverse consequence because of what you’ve experienced.”

Those consequences can play out in ways that significantly diminish the quality of a student’s college education.

Shalka’s recent project is a qualitative study of students and recent graduates who experienced their trauma during their time at college. Her goals in the study, published in The Review of Higher Education, were to find out how the trauma played out in their daily lives, and what that meant for their experience of college.

She was struck by a theme: for these students, the campus itself had become “a kind of battleground.” In walking from a class to a dining hall, from a car to the library, “survivors navigated campus environments through the lens of threats to safety and integrity,” she wrote. Post-trauma, her participants described their felt experience of campus spaces as utterly transformed. Learn more.

“It’s a complicated history. But I want to be clear that what’s going on in Ukraine now is a brutal act of aggression with absolutely no justification,” says Matthew Lenoe, an associate professor of history, who is an expert on Russian and Soviet history, Stalinist culture and politics, the history of mass media, and Soviet soldiers in World War II.

While the history of the Ukrainian state probably cannot be traced back any earlier than 1918, Lenoe says “to be clear—today Ukraine is a nation state” where polling in elections indicates that the “vast majority of Ukrainians” want to preserve their independence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made several dubious historical arguments, most notably in his 5,000-word essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin’s website in July 2021. In it, he elaborates on his assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” as a precursor to and defense of the invasion of Ukraine.

For example, Putin argues that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians share a common heritage of a realm known as Kievan Rus (862–1242), which was a loose medieval political federation located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia.

“When Putin says this is the heritage of these three Slavic peoples—in one sense, he’s not wrong. But there’s no continuous line to be traced from this loose river confederation to the Russian state. And there’s also no continuous line to be traced from this loose confederation to the Ukrainian state.” Learn more.

Humanities Center fellows for 2022-23, upper left to lower right: Joanne Bernardi, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Jennifer Lynne Musto, Matthew Omelsky, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, and Zeynep Soysal.

Joan Rubin, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, announces these external and internal fellows for 2022-23. “We are especially pleased that our top two choices in our external fellows competition accepted our offers,” she says.

EXTERNAL FELLOWS

Jennifer Lynne Musto, associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, is an internationally known scholar who uses “qualitative research methods and a feminist approach informed by intersectional and anti-carceral/abolitionist theories to examine state responses to sex work, human trafficking, and labor exploitation the United States.” Her project for her fellowship year is “The Afterlife of Decriminalization: Anti-Trafficking and Trauma-Informed Alternatives to Punishment.”

Shanté Paradigm Smalls, associate professor of Black studies at St. John’s University, will bring their record of accomplishment in performance studies to their project for the fellowship year: a draft of a book titled Androids, Cyborgs, Others:  Black Afterlives in Imaginary Futures. They write: “This book project aims to preserve Black life, creativity, and futurity by investigating how Black sentient life—human, plant, hybrid, machine—renders itself and gets rendered in representations of the past, near-present and, distant-future.”

INTERNAL FELLOWS FALL 2022

Joanne Bernardi, professor of Japanese and film and media studies, will work toward completing her book manuscript Films for the Living: The Cinema of Jūzō Itami. The project focuses on the late film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and social critic, born Yoshihiro Ikeuchi (1933-1997). Joanne notes that Itami scripted, directed, and produced ten groundbreaking feature films between 1984 and his death in 1997, providing a “rare window” on modern Japan.

Anaar Desai-Stephens, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the Eastman School, will work on her book Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and the Dreamwork of Contemporary India, which “explores the social life of Bollywood songs and the aspirational projects of imagination and striving that they facilitate during a time of significant social, economic, and political change.“  Anaar writes that the project “traces how a range of actors in contemporary India use Bollywood songs to perform what I call dreamwork, the musical and discursive labor of articulating, imagining, and striving for desired selves and futures.”

INTERNAL FELLOWS SPRING 2023

Matthew Omelsky, assistant professor of English and faculty member in the Frederick Douglass Institute, will undertake initial work of his second book, Black Punk: Toward a Global Black Cyberpunk Aesthetic, a project that “examines how black writers, filmmakers, and artists use science fiction to critically interrogate the layered crises of our contemporary world.” His work “beautifully complements that of our external fellow Shante Smalls,” Rubin says.

Zeynep Soysal, assistant professor of philosophy, will focus on the philosophy of journalism in the era of social media and misinformation.  She argues that attention to journalism from a social epistemological and ethical point of view is essential and urgent, especially in light of the phenomenon of “robot journalism” and other dystopian scenarios.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic, there were hopes that pre-existing immunity to the common cold could protect people from COVID, but new evidence suggests that sometimes the opposite can happen.

A new Medical Center study shows that prior infection and immunity to one of the common cold coronaviruses may have put people at risk of more severe COVID illness and death.

The study, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, examined immunity to various coronaviruses, including the COVID-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, in blood samples taken from 155 COVID patients in the early months of the pandemic. Of those patients, 112 were hospitalized and provided sequential samples over the course of their hospitalization.

These hospitalized patients experienced a large, rapid increase in antibodies that targeted SARS-CoV-2 and several other coronaviruses. While big boosts in antibodies – protective proteins generated by the immune system – is usually a good thing, in this case, it wasn’t.

The study showed that these antibodies were targeting parts of the spike protein (which sits on the surface of coronaviruses and helps them infect cells) that were similar to common cold coronaviruses the immune system remembered from previous infections. Unfortunately, targeting those areas meant the antibodies could not neutralize the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. When levels of these antibodies rose faster than levels of SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, patients had worse disease and a higher chance of death.

“In people who were sicker – those who were in the ICU or died in the hospital, the immune system was responding robustly in a way that was less protective,” says lead study author Martin Zand, the senior associate dean of Clinical Research at the Medical Center. “It took those patients longer for the immune system to make protective antibodies… unfortunately, too late for some.” Learn more.

Older people with advanced cancer tend to have an unclear understanding of how long they will likely live and overly optimistic beliefs about whether their cancer is curable, according to a Wilmot Cancer Institute study published in JAMA Network Open.

Some oncologists, too, were noted in the study to be quite optimistic. In fact, 22 percent of oncologists thought that a cure was possible, even though the patients who participated in this study had incurable, advanced cancer.

The consequences of discordant beliefs can impact how health care is delivered: For example, researchers found that more hospitalizations and lower use of hospice services was a result.

The study conveys several important messages, including that nothing in medicine is 100%, says lead author Kah Poh “Melissa” Loh, assistant professor of hematology/oncology at the Medical Center and a geriatric oncology specialist at Wilmot.

Although it is rare, some people with stage 4 cancer with limited cancerous lesions have been cured or at least stabilized. But the study also shows that misunderstandings about what is more likely to happen can lead to unexpected hardship. Learn more.

Co-Directors Martin Zand and Nancy Bennett of the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI) urge all faculty members to complete an online survey on research collaborations.

The survey takes 10 minutes or less and will help focus efforts to foster collaborative science and support emerging investigators and networks.

Participants can request their results by contacting the Research Help Desk.

The deadline has been extended to Friday, March 18.

University staff and faculty are invited to a free conference that will cover a wide range of topics related to conducting clinical trials from March 29 to April 1.

Hosted by Advarra, the Onsemble Spring Virtual Conference will cover such topics as leveraging technologies to improve the conduct of clinical research.

Continuing education credits (ACRP, CBRN, SOCRA, CIP) are available.

Attend as few or as many sessions as you would like. Email Clinical Research to register through the University’s unlimited institutional registration.

The AS&E Graduate Student Association announces the Conference Travel Award for the Summer 2022 session.

The deadline is 11:59 p.m., March 31.  Apply here.

GSA also reserves part of the total award for master’s students in AS&E. So, master’s students are also encouraged to apply.

All travel awards will be released in accordance with the University Travel Policy for National and International travel at that time.

For any questions, queries, or suggestions, contact gsatravelgrants@ur.rochester.edu 

This pilot program is intended to provide seed funding to obtain preliminary data for extramural grant submissions. The program aims to help established (assistant professor level or higher) investigators develop new research directions and promote new interactions among investigators related to environmental health sciences research.

Submit initial applications to Pat Noonan-Sullivan by Friday, April 1. Learn more.