(iStock)

Economic prospects improved for small mountain farmers in Guatemala when consumers developed a taste for coffee brewed with beans grown at high altitude, according to a new study from the Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies.

A passion for sipping the “Strictly Hard Bean” brew grown above 4,500 feet has led to improvements in the modest living conditions of these indigenous Maya growers, researchers Edward F. Fischer and Bart Victor of Vanderbilt found.

“Coffee is a little like fine wine,” explained Fischer, director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology. “When the bean gets stressed, the flavor is richer.” Fischer’s research partner in the study, “High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala,” was Bart Victor, Cal Turner Center for Leadership and Moral Responsibility Professor.

The study, co-funded by Anacafe’, the Guatemalan national coffee producers association, is to be published in a forthcoming issue of Latin America Research Review. The paper sought to examine how the desire for a better future steered small producers toward the newly emerging market for high altitude beans.

Struggling Maya farmers benefit from changing coffee tastes

While producing high-end coffee is labor-intensive, it has represented a means to a better life for native Mayas, who have suffered discrimination and economic disadvantages. They were driven off their lands to live hardscrabble lives growing corn and beans on the steep sides of former volcanoes while the lower altitude lands they formerly inhabited were developed into rubber plantations and other crops by the descendants of European settlers, according to Victor.

“The poetry of this is that now the valuable coffee land is at higher altitudes,” Fischer said.

There’s little chance that more opportunist investors will rush to buy up the higher elevation lands now to grow trendy beans, Victor explained. That’s because the Arabica crop, considered more flavorful, is more difficult to coax out of the land than the heartier Robusta plant grown at lower elevations. But it represents a better way of life for the small farmers than working on a large plantation, where many of them formerly labored in difficult conditions for little pay, he said.

Will new growers survive economic storms?

The next question for study is how these newer coffee growers will weather economic tests, such as the spreading coffee rust disease that threatens the crops, and how such threats will impact the cost and demand for high-end coffee, he said.

Coffee rust already has caused production of high elevation coffee beans to decrease by 15 percent. It is predicted to wipe out as much as 40 percent of crops next year, with potentially devastating impact for the newer mountaintop farmers, Victor said.

Pointing to his own morning cup of joe, he said, “The question is whether our cups will be empty or just more expensive.” Will growers replant and wait three or five years for mature, productive plants? Or will they return to the basics, growing corn and beans? The next research project, with initial funding from a Vanderbilt Discovery Grant, will follow and study that process.

Growers not getting rich but getting out of poverty

“These decisions have an incredibly large impact,” Fischer said. “As researchers, we’re interested in what’s going to happen and how it’s going to impact everyone from small families to your morning cup of coffee.”

The current research included 82 in-depth interviews with newer smallholding coffee growers in Guatemala, from a database maintained by Anacafé’. The research team found that the farmers are not getting rich, but they are getting out of poverty.

“Coffee has produced an advantage for lots of these farmers,” Fischer said. “It would be a shame for all of that to go away.”

Coffee collaboration built over many cups of joe

Many conversations, likely over a cup of coffee, preceded the current collaboration between Victor and Fischer. It turns out that coffee makes for an interesting research topic from many perspectives that concern both a business professor and an anthropologist. Just for starters, it is one of the world’s most traded commodities.

Bart Victor and Edward F. Fischer

The Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies was established in 1999 in the Department of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The institute moved to the Vanderbilt Center for Latin American Studies in 2007 to expand its mission beyond the biomedical aspects of coffee to include historical, literary, sociological and economic importance.

Among the more recent ICS findings is that coffee lowers your risk of morbidity for all causes. Turns out what’s good for you is good for small farmers in Guatemala.

Edward F. Fischer and Bart Victor’s study titled “High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala” can be read here.

Delegation of Vanderbilt faculty visit Moore Surgery Center in Guatemala. (courtesy of Ted Fischer)

Vanderbilt University’s expanded commitment to research and sustainable development in Guatemala is reflected in this spring’s opening of a Guatemala City field station that is home to 13 projects.

The field station, located at the Moore Pediatric Surgery Center, provides support for diverse programs ranging from pediatric surgery to study of Mayan languages as well as small-scale coffee production.

“The 13 initiatives share a common vision for sustainable improvements in the quality of life,” said Edward F. Fischer, professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt. “Bringing them together under one roof complements the ‘one university’ model espoused by Vanderbilt’s senior leadership.” He noted that this initiative, by building on collaborations among Vanderbilt departments, programs and schools, avoids the tendency of units in some large research universities to operate in isolation and in competition with each other.

“The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt is proud to be part of this ‘one university’ plan being implemented in Guatemala,” said John W. Brock III, surgeon-in-chief and professor of urologic surgery. “Our relationship with the Shalom Foundation and the state-of-the-art Moore Surgery Center allows us to provide continuity of care for children in this region. The field station deepens our relationship with other Vanderbilt departments involved in Guatemala.”

Primeros Pasos offers Vanderbilt students opportunity for service learning. (Courtesy of Center for Latin American Studies)

Each year at least 50 Vanderbilt graduate and undergraduate students travel to Guatemala to carry out research and engage in service learning. Vanderbilt’s work in Guatemala began in the mid-1980s with archaeological excavations and expeditions led by Arthur Demarest, the Ingram Professor of Anthropology. At the time, Guatemala was still in the midst of a 36-year civil war that ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996. Since then, Vanderbilt’s interest and presence in Guatemala have steadily increased.

“In a country that has experienced some transitory aid efforts, Vanderbilt has achieved effective and sustainable initiatives involving the School of Medicine, Nursing, Engineering, Owen and the College of Arts and Science,” Fischer said. “Guatemala’s proximity and diversity makes it an ideal site for these projects. The Central American nation is roughly the same size in area as Tennessee, with double the population and less than a fifth the size of the state’s economy.”

The field station received significant support from the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, Vanderbilt International Office, Center for Latin American Studies and Shalom Foundation.

Current Vanderbilt initiatives in Guatemala include:

• Moore Surgery Center in Guatemala City. The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital has worked closely with the Shalom Foundation as part of an innovative “medical timeshare” for surgical missions to Guatemala.

• An intensive summer program for the study of the K’iche’ Mayan language in Nahualá, Guatemala. The program, directed by the Center for Latin American Studies, receives U.S. Department of Education funding to offer a two-year sequence of intensive K’iche’.

• Primeros Pasos, a rural health clinic in Quetzaltenango founded by Vanderbilt alumnus Brent Savoie. He leads the Inter-American Health Alliance that provides most of the funding for Primeros Pasos. The clinic provides a base for service-learning trips, the Emphasis Program and Project Pyramid.

• Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which surveys opinions regarding democracy and security in Guatemala and elsewhere. Every two years LAPOP carries out the AmericasBarometer survey, which currently covers 26 nations.

• Service-learning course taught by Cynthia Paschal, associate dean and associate professor of biomedical engineering. Students work on medical equipment at Moore Surgery Center and other Guatemalan hospitals. They collaborate with engineering students from the Universidad del Valle of Guatemala.

• Manna Project, with one of three permanent sites in Guatemala. Manna is an organization dedicated to connecting Vanderbilt students with service opportunities through a range of local and global initiatives.

• Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies. The institute collaborates with Anacafé, the national coffee producers association, to study multi-dimensional measures of development around small-scale coffee production.

• Project Pyramid, led by Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at the Owen Graduate School of Management. Students develop strategic planning and business models for projects ranging from micro-finance to malnutrition.

• An international component to the Nurse-Midwifery Program in the Vanderbilt School of Nursing. Students work with local midwives and Primeros Pasos.

• Vanderbilt Cancuén Archaeology Park, directed by Demarest. The program integrates local development, health projects and eco-tourism.

• Vanderbilt’s Alternative Spring Break program. Groups that are organized through the Office of Active Citizenship and Service have traveled to Primeros Pasos annually since 2005.

• A year-long Vanderbilt Initiative for Scholarship and Global Engagement (VISAGE) course, which is offered by the centers for Medicine, Health, and Society and Latin American Studies. Students spend a summer working on projects in Guatemala.

• Maní+, a project started by Fischer with support from the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health and the Shalom Foundation. Its purpose is to combat childhood malnutrition.

For more information on Vanderbilt initiatives in Guatemala, email Avery Dickins de Girón, executive director, Center for Latin American Studies or call 615-343-1750.

Kate Daniels, Jane Landers and Daniel J. Sharfstein have been chosen from almost 3,000 applicants for the highly coveted fellowship. Guggenheim recipients are appointed on the basis of prior impressive achievement and exceptional promise.

“The Guggenheim Foundation has recognized the pathbreaking quality of humanistic research at Vanderbilt,” said Carolyn Dever, dean of the College of Arts and Science. “Kate Daniels and Jane Landers are national leaders in their disciplines, and the Guggenheim Award recognizes both their accomplishments and their potential. Kate and Jane are highly visible leaders on our campus, as well, whose efforts in teaching and program building have advanced the Arts and Science mission on every front. The Guggenheim Award is a great tribute to the full range of their accomplishments.”

Sharfstein (Vanderbilt)

“A Guggenheim Fellowship is a singular honor, and I cannot think of anyone more deserving than my colleague Dan Sharfstein,” said Chris Guthrie, dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law. “He is a creative scholar, a gifted writer, and an insightful and empathic person. Despite all of the accolades he has already received, he has only begun to scratch the surface of his potential. I am grateful to Guggenheim for supporting Dan’s important work, and like everyone familiar with Dan’s scholarship, I am anxiously awaiting Dan’s next book.”

Daniels, professor of English, will devote part of her fellowship to writing new poems related to her archival research of Eastern State Hospital. Established in Virginia in 1770 as The Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds, it was the first public institution for the mentally ill in the United States. It remains in operation.

Daniels (Vanderbilt)

“Part of my interest in capturing this subject matter is related to two of my classes: ‘The Art of Medical Writing’ and ‘Why Write: Perspectives on Literary Creativity,’” Daniels said. “Both of these investigate poetic language, literary creativity, and the psychology of creative writers.”

In addition, Daniels will work on another poetry project that takes an interdisciplinary approach to subject matter spanning the field of medicine/illness/health care, and its many connections with creative writing. She will focus on bipolar disease, in particular, including its prevalence among poets across time and new ways of understanding its role in linguistic creativity and literary production.

Daniels, who directs Vanderbilt’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Medicine, Health and Society. She previously served as associate dean in the College of Arts and Science. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Virginia, as well as a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University. Recent poems of Daniels, who came to Vanderbilt in 1994, have been published in Best American Poetry 2010 and Best American Poetry 2008. Her books include A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU 2010), Four Testimonies (LSU, 1998) and The Niobe Poems (Pittsburgh, 1989). She has received the Pushcart Prize, the James Dickey Prize and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hanes Award for Poetry, among others.

Landers (Vanderbilt)

Landers, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, has written extensively on Africans in the Atlantic World, including Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard, 2010). The book won the Rembert Patrick Prize and an honorable mention for the Bolton-Johnson Prize for Best Book in Latin American History from the Conference on Latin American History.

“I plan to complete a book on the evolution of communities of African descent in the Iberian Atlantic from their earliest formulations as autonomous kingdoms in the wilderness through their last vestiges as formally recognized free black towns in the 18th century,” Landers said. “This project, which builds on more than 20 years of ethno-historical archival research in Spain, Cuba, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Brazil, is informed by archaeological investigations of African sites in the Americas.

She noted that archival records for Africans in the Iberian Atlantic are rich and diverse with Catholic Church records dating from the 1500s as well as historical records from both free and enslaved Africans in the Iberian colonies.

Landers, who earned her doctorate at the University of Florida, serves as director of the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies digital archive at Vanderbilt. Its mission is to preserve the oldest records for Africans in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and the present-day United States. The former associate dean in the College of Arts and Science joined the faculty in 1992. Landers has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, British Library Endangered Archive Programme and Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. She currently co-directs Vanderbilt’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar, “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World and the Circum-Atlantic World.”

Sharfstein, professor of law, was awarded a fellowship for his new book on post-Reconstruction America, Thunder in the Mountains: The Clash of Two American Legends, Oliver Otis Howard and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. “This is an exploration of post-Reconstruction America that focuses on the experiences of a Union general who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War,” Sharfstein said. “The general later commanded army forces against Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest.”

Sharfstein’s first book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011), won the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Prize for nonfiction, among other awards. For his research on civil rights and the color line in the American South, Sharfstein was awarded an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.

Sharfstein co-directs Vanderbilt’s Social Justice Program and teaches courses in American legal history and property law. He was honored with the student-selected Hall-Hartman Award for Outstanding Teaching for his seminar, “The Legal History of Race in the United States.”

A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he clerked for Judges Dorothy W. Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Rya W. Zobel of the Massachusetts District Court. Prior to law school, he worked as a journalist in West Africa and Southern California. He was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2007. He is an affiliated professor in the Department of History.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by U.S. Senator Simon Guggenheim and his wife as a memorial to a son who had passed away.

In 2012, Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, and William Luis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish, were honored with Guggenheim Fellowships.

Other Vanderbilt recipients include William Caferro, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History; Michael Bess, Chancellor’s Professor of History; Barbara Hahn, Distinguished Professor of German; Ruth Rogaski, associate professor of history; Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities and professor of English; Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English; Vereen Bell, professor of English; Paul Freedman, former professor of history; John Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor; Mark Jarman, Centennial Professor of English;  Matthew Ramsey, associate professor of history; Edward Saff, professor of mathematics; and Vaughan Jones, Stevenson  Professor of Mathematics.

Helena Simonett's book on the accordion and other accordion paraphernalia (Joe Howell/Vanderbilt)

It says a lot that the second chapter of a new scholarly book about the accordion devotes an entire chapter to a sampling of jokes about the instrument. An example:

Q. What do you call an accordionist with a beeper?
A. An optimist.

You get the idea. But Helena Simonett, associate director of the Center for Latin American Studies and adjunct assistant professor at the Blair School of Music, both at Vanderbilt University, believes that the saga of the “the little man’s piano” can tell us something aboutAmerica, especially in terms of class.

“People either love or hate the accordion,” Simonett said. “There’s very little in-between, and that’s because it’s associated with the working class. It’s music that was played in taverns and brothels.”

Simonett traces the history of the instrument from its invention during the Industrial Revolution in the first chapter of the book The Accordion in the America: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco and More! She also wrote the introduction and edited the other chapters.

In the United States, accordions are traditionally linked with “white immigrants, polka music and this kind of low-class image,” Simonett said.

Some of the reasons the accordion was popular in the 19^th century explain the upturned noses from the upper crust. It was mass-produced and therefore a cheap instrument to obtain, it was rather loud and could play bass, chords and melody all at once, meaning it could function as a one-man band.

International Programs professor Helena Siminott in her office with her accordion (Joe Howell/Vanderbilt University)

“You could entertain a whole crowd of dancers with an accordion,” Simonett said. “Poor people now had access to a way to make their own music. Back then, guitars were not loud and sturdy enough to play polkas and marches and waltzes for a crowd.”

Accordions have continued to thrive in various regional ethnic music that are unconcerned with validation from critics or mass audiences. Cajun, zydeco, merengue and tango all thrive in regions of the Americas. But despite occasional flare-ups in popularity (Lawrence Welk played one and rock musicians occasionally use them), the accordion is not taught in conservatories and is unlikely ever to be used in orchestras, Simonett said.

“No, not the noisy accordion,” she said. “It still has that working class stigma and it still makes that sound. It’s not considered a classical sound.

“There are very few orchestral pieces that have integrated the accordion. I don’t see it finding its way into the regular orchestra.”

Benson Hall (365@VU)

Faculty in the Department of History have received a variety of prestigious research awards and fellowships in recent months.

Dennis Dickerson, James M. Lawson Jr. Professor of History, has received the Berlin Prize for a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin during spring 2014.

Leor Halevi (Vanderbilt)

Leor Halevi, associate professor of history and professor of law, has won a senior fellowship from the Institut d’études avancées de Paris for the 2013-14 academic year. He also received a two-year grant (2012-14) from the Social Science Research Council under its New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative.

Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for 2013-14. The award will help fund her project “African Kingdoms, Black Republics and Free Black Towns in the Iberian Atlantic.”

Assistant Professor of History Alistair Sponsel has been named the 2013 Ritter Fellow by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Ritter Memorial Fellowship is awarded biennially to a historian, scientist or other scholar whose research enlarges and deepens understanding of the history of the earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences.

Four Ryskamps in a row

Catherine Molineux (Vanderbilt)

Assistant Professor of History Catherine Molineux has been named a Ryskamp Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies. She became the fourth College of Arts and Science faculty member in the same number of years to receive the fellowship. Assistant Professor of History Samira Sheikh, Assistant Professor of History Edward N. Wright-Rios and Associate Professor of History and Professor of Law Leor Halevi were Ryskamp fellows in 2012, 2011 and 2010, respectively.

The competitive Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships support assistant and untenured associate professors in humanities and related social sciences. The fellowships recognize faculty whose scholarly contributions have advanced their fields. Key to earning the award are well-designed and carefully developed plans for new research.

Mural at Hadley Park in Nashville (Metro Nashville Archives)

Nashville should form a new public-private partnership to move the city toward becoming an “ever more welcoming and inclusive city,” according to a report prepared by Vanderbilt sociologist Dan Cornfield in collaboration with Nashville for All of Us and intended to provide recommendations for a new 25-year plan for the city.

Dan Cornfield (Vanderbilt)

The report, Partnering for an Equitable and Inclusive Nashville, was submitted to NashvilleNext, a joint effort of Metro Nashville government, local businesses, service organizations and community members to create a countywide plan to guide Metro Nashville through 2040. Several Vanderbilt faculty members are contributing to other reports in the NashvilleNext series, which can be viewed on the website.

The report on inclusivity was formulated with contributions from the steering committee of Nashville for All of Us chaired by Vanderbilt Law School professor Alistair Newbern. Nashville for All of Us was founded in 2008 as part of a successful citywide campaign opposing a proposed English-only ordinance that would have required Metro Government to conduct business only in English. Today, Nashville For All of Us serves as an independent, diverse community coalition that informs and shapes public policy to promote a productive, just and welcoming Nashville.

The 25-year plan for Nashville’s future is being prepared for implementation in 2015. Metro released the inclusivity report on Feb. 25 at an event in the NashvilleNext speaker series held at the Scarritt-Bennett Center.

Inspired by the 1960-era non-violent Nashville civil rights movement, the report recommends a partnership for elevating and sustaining Nashville as an inclusive community in light of its increasingly diverse population. Recommendations pertain to the social integration of diverse groups, including racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, the LGBT community, religious minorities, women, and people with disabilities.

The private-public partnership would develop, measure and annually present the results of indexes that measure the progress the city makes in being inclusive of Nashville’s socially diverse residents. The partnership also would encourage the development of socially integrative initiatives in awareness, advocacy and human services, and operate a Nashville-area internship program for college students.

Representatives from a wide swath of the community would meet regularly to address issues of equity and inclusion in the city identified in the indexes produced by the partnership.

Alistair Newbern (Vanderbilt Law School)

“Nashville is thriving as a city, but its continued strength depends on ensuring shared prosperity and the participation of all community members in decision making,” Newbern said. “By bringing issues of equality and inclusion into the planning process, Nashville has made clear that these core values are part of our vision for the city’s future.”

The inclusivity report itself is a private-public partnership of members of the academic, community and government sectors. In addition to Newbern, members of the steering committee who produced the report are the Rev. Sonnye Dixon, Mark Eatherly, Stephen Fotopulos, Kathleen Murphy, Tom Negri, Avi Poster, Floyd Shechter, Renata Soto, David Taylor, Stephanie Teatro, Hedy Weinberg and Anderson Williams. Important contributions to the report were made by Caroline Blackwell, executive director of the Metro Nashville Human Relations Commission, and Dr. Kimberlee Wyche-Etheridge, director of the Bureau of Family, Youth and Infant Health at the Metro Nashville Davidson County Public Health Department.

The complete report can be read online.

Argentine courts have pointed the finger at Iran since the bombing, but the government of that country has refused to cooperate with the investigation. Now, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced that a five-person Truth Commission will be jointly established, involving two members nominated by Argentina, two by Iran and the fifth to be selected based on mutual consent. Both chambers of the Argentine legislature, as well as the legislature of Iran, must approve the memorandum for it to become operative.

SURVEY RESULTS ON TRUST

LAPOP (Vanderbilt University)

In March 2012, LAPOP interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 1,500 Argentines as part of a broader study conducted in 26 countries of the Americas. In 24 of those countries, every second respondent was asked about how much they trust the government of Iran.

“Only 11 percent of Argentines trust the government of Iran. People in only four of the 24 Latin American and Caribbean countries surveyed expressed a lower level of trust,” said Mitchell A. Seligson, director of the LAPOP and centennial professor of political science at Vanderbilt.

SOME SUPPORT OF IRAN

LAPOP (Vanderbilt University)

A statistical analysis of the Argentine data reveals that trust in Iran varies across individuals and regions in Argentina. Those who believe that the government of the incumbent president is performing well are significantly more likely to trust Iran.

• 25 percent of those who give the Argentine government’s performance a top rating (“very good”) express trust in the government of Iran. This is higher than the national average, but still represents only one-quarter of the respondents.
• Geographically, Argentines who live in the Northern part of the country are more trusting of Iran than those who live in other regions
• The northern regions historically have been Peronist and President Fernández received a landslide victory in those provinces.

“If the results of the Truth Commission are to function like those of other truth commissions that have been established in the aftermath of national traumas, such as civil wars in Central America or Apartheid in South Africa, much work will need to be done to establish its credibility,” said Seligson. “An important first step in doing so will be the selection of its members.”

Read an analysis of this issue and other research from the Latin American Public Opinion Project.

]]> http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/02/argentines-iran-community-survey/feed/ 0 http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/02/morrill-benedict-resignation/ http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/02/morrill-benedict-resignation/#comments Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:10:40 +0000 Ann Marie Deer Owens http://news.vanderbilt.edu/?p=169434

Pope Benedict XVI’s unexpected resignation will raise his stature among Catholics, even among those who sharply disagree with his policies, according to Bruce Morrill, the Edward A. Malloy Professor of Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

“There is respect around the world for Pope Benedict as his decision reflects deep humility,” said Morrill, who is also a Jesuit priest. “What is striking is that he does not identify in his person the papacy, and for many Catholics as well as others, that is Catholicism. That is a huge gift he has given the church as it moves along through the 21st century with people living much longer than previous generations.”

Morrill views Benedict’s papacy as one that was both troubled and effective to a certain extent. The Vanderbilt professor said that for a number of reasons, including the Catholic sex abuse scandals and cover-ups, Benedict did not make significant progress toward his goal of “re-activating Catholicism” within an increasing secular Europe.

On the other hand, Morrill believes Benedict’s influence will continue for many years through those that he appointed as bishops and cardinals. “Benedict appointed 29 cardinals during the past year, putting into place men who will build on the conservative agenda of Benedict and John Paul II, with its emphasis on orthodox teachings and obedience.”

Morrill noted that a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll showed that the third largest group in the United States consists of ex-Catholics who have not affiliated with any other religious group. “We would certainly expect that the voting cardinals would think about the importance of reversing this alarming trend of declining membership in Europe, North Atlantic, the United States, Latin America and elsewhere as they consider who will succeed Benedict.”

Morrill also pointed out that even if the church is going through some turbulence with its membership, it remains a large social force in the United States. “We see that in terms of American politics, not only electoral politics, but also the politics of running the government, with such hot-button issues as abortion and coverage of contraceptive services. We don’t usually see the pope weigh in directly on these issues. Rather it’s the men that the pope appoints to these positions in the United States that the Vatican and the papacy can rely upon to be in sync with these doctrinal and moral agendas,” he said.

(iStock)

The years a prison sentence takes away from an inmate don’t end at the time spent behind bars, said a Vanderbilt researcher. For every year actually spent in prison, overall life expectancy decreases two years.

A new study published by Evelyn Patterson, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt, looks at New York parolees released between 1989 and 2003. The result, published online Jan. 17 by American Journal of Public Health, was a 15.6 percent increase in the odds of death for parolees compared to people who had never been to prison, which translates to a two-year decline in life expectancy for every year served inside prison.

“There is a growing need to understand the health consequences of incarceration because more people experience this event now than at any other moment in American history,” Patterson said.

The average American male has a 9 percent chance of going to prison in his lifetime, Patterson said, citing 1991 incarceration rates. That jumps to 16 percent for Hispanic males and 28.5 percent for black males.

“Much work on prison inmates concentrates on outcomes such as denial of citizen rights, increased morbidity risks and erosion of lifetime earnings and job opportunities,” Patterson said. “Such collateral consequences of incarceration can be reversed.

“Death, though, cannot be reversed. It is this lack of reversal that makes this area of study so consequential.”

Evelyn Patterson (Vanderbilt)

The study did turn up a small bright spot, Patterson said. If a prisoner serves out parole without returning to prison, he eventually gains the years back to his lifespan lost during his prison stay.

“This finding is in line with prior research which reports high risk of death initially that declines over time,” Patterson said.

The difficulty of getting proper health care in the months immediately after prison is a particular problem, Patterson said. Many times an inmate with an illness is discharged from prison with a 30-day supply of medication and little chance of connecting with a new health care provider.

“Scientists have dedicated centuries of research in an attempt to understand the levels of mortality in human populations and lowering them,” Patterson said.

“This study demonstrated that one of the United States’ core institutions does the exact opposite. This is particularly distressing given that the United States supersedes every other nation in its propensity to incarcerate.”

Emilie Townes (Yale University)

Emilie M. Townes, a distinguished Yale University scholar and administrator whose areas of expertise include Christian ethics and womanist theology, has been named dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School, effective July 1, 2013.

Townes, an ordained American Baptist clergywoman, succeeds James Hudnut-Beumler, who will take a year’s sabbatical after serving as the school’s dean since 2000.

Townes, who will be the 16^th dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, pending approval by the Vanderbilt Board of Trust, has been appointed to a five-year term, according to Richard McCarty, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. She will also hold an endowed chair as a tenured faculty member.

“Emilie Townes is an amazing scholar, a wonderful mentor to students, and a leader in theological education,” McCarty said. “She is also ready to lead, and I am delighted that she has accepted our offer to be the next dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School. Her impact as dean will be felt in the Divinity School and across the university as well as nationally and internationally. I look forward to welcoming her to the Vanderbilt community.”

Townes is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology and associate dean of academic affairs at Yale Divinity School. Previously, she was the Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.

Carolyn Dever, dean of the College of Arts and Science and professor of English, chaired the search committee for the new Divinity dean. “In every aspect of her profile, Emilie Townes epitomizes the Vanderbilt Divinity School’s dedication to renowned scholarship, ecumenical leadership and commitment to social justice,” Dever said. “We warmly welcome her to a community that is passionate about the scholarship and teaching of religion, and about empowering students to change themselves, and the world, for the better.”

“I look forward to working with the faculty, staff and students of Vanderbilt Divinity School to engage in university-wide conversations as we explore the role of religion and values in a university setting and beyond,” Townes said. “I am excited and honored to be asked to lead and guide a school with a long commitment to helping clergy and laity prepare for Christian ministry. It’s working to re-envision ministry to meet the needs of our times by combining spiritual and intellectual growth with a sense of social justice and the formation of new generations of scholars. With its hallmarks of academic excellence, diversity, faithfulness, networking in a university setting, and a collaborative spirit in teaching and learning, the Divinity School is positioned to be an even greater voice in theological education and world Christianities in a world of religious pluralism.”

The pioneering scholar in the field of womanist theology is the author of Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Scholars Press, 1993) and In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Abingdon Press, 1995). Her most recent book is Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006). In addition, she co-edited Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).

Her other broad areas of teaching and research include Christian ethics, critical social theology, cultural theory and studies, and postmodernism and social postmodernism.

Topics of particular interest to Townes include health and health care; cultural production of evil; exploration of the linkages among race, gender, class and other forms of oppression; and development of a network between African American and Afro-Brazilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations.

In her teaching, Townes strives to “move students beyond the strictly academic into a realm where words are wedded to belief and action,” according to an article on the Yale University website.

Townes received her bachelor’s degree in religion and the humanities at the University of Chicago. She then earned her master of arts and doctorate of ministry from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She also received a doctorate of philosophy from the joint Northwestern University/Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary program.

A former president of the American Academy of Religion, she currently serves as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (2012–2016). Townes was inducted as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Vanderbilt Divinity School is one of only five university-based interdenominational institutions in the United States and the oldest one in the Southeast. The school seeks to engage men and women in a theological understanding of religious traditions; to help persons, both lay and ordained, re-envision and prepare for the practice of Christian ministry in our time; to encourage individuals in their spiritual and intellectual growth; to prepare leaders who will be agents of social justice; and to educate future scholars and teachers of religion.

Jeremy Wilson (John Russell/Vanderbilt)

Few musicians win their first orchestral audition, and the likelihood that the first audition is with the prestigious Vienna Philharmonic is very slim. That puts Jeremy Wilson, Blair School of Music’s new associate professor of trombone, in a class all by himself.

Wilson was a master’s degree student at the University of North Texas when he entered the International Trombone Association’s solo competition. One of the judges for that competition was Ian Bousfield, the principal trombonist of the Vienna Philharmonic.

“He heard my competition CD and liked the way I played,” Wilson said. “They had an audition coming up in a few months, so he contacted the competition coordinator and asked who I was. That’s how I got the initial audition invitation.”

Wilson prepared while completing his master’s degree, then traveled to Austria a week before the audition at Bousfield’s invitation for some final coaching.

“This was one audition I wanted to win,” Wilson said.

Win it he did. For the last five years, Wilson has circled the globe, playing in the world’s finest concert venues with one of the world’s finest orchestras.

“It actually was two jobs in one,” Wilson explained. “You get in the Vienna Philharmonic by auditioning for the Vienna State Opera. When you combine the two entities—the state opera and the philharmonic—it’s the busiest orchestra in the world.”

That meant Wilson performed in the state opera orchestra about 15 evenings per month in addition to rehearsals, plus he played two or three philharmonic blocks per month.

“I’ll miss playing with the orchestra, but I won’t miss the busyness,” he said.

As a result of the constant playing and touring, Wilson has amassed an enviable repertoire—one that most musicians would take twice as long to master.

“Even though I was there only five years, I feel even more prepared to teach. It’s a lot of repertoire, so I’m very grateful to have had that chance.”

The McMinnville, Tenn., native is glad now to have the chance to come home. He, his wife (also a native Tennessean) and their 3-year-old son are enjoying time with each other and with family.

“It was tough being so far away,” Wilson said. “Some people are truly world citizens. They’re wired to live wherever. We’re not wired that way, so having this job is unspeakably awesome. I’m glad I’m here. I’m having a blast already.”

View the complete list of new university faculty for 2012-13.

View the complete list of new medical faculty for 2012.

by Bonnie Arant Ertelt

An online archive dedicated to the dulcimer and conceived at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music is extending the work of legendary musician David Schnaufer in reviving the Appalachian instrument.

The Appalachian Dulcimer Archive went live in February. It contains sound clips of Schnaufer playing various dulcimers, photos and history about dulcimers from Schnaufer’s collection, biographical material about Schnaufer and other information. Future plans call for other dulcimer players to be able to upload information about their instruments to the archive.

“The original concept for the archive came from David Schnaufer himself,” said Jacob Schaub, a music librarian at the Anne Potter Wilson Music Library at Blair. “He died in 2006, but with the help of his colleagues Sandy Conatser and Zada Law, who both now teach dulcimer at Blair, we were able to get it up and running.”

Schnaufer, a native of Texas, moved to Nashville in 1985 having already won the first National Mountain Dulcimer Competition in 1976. He played with Johnny Cash, The Judds and many other country music stars.

As critic Michael McCall put it: “David’s pulled off a near miracle. He’s made a close-to-forgotten acoustic instrument relevant, and he’s done it in a hi-tech age obsessed with drum machines and the latest synthesized equipment.”

The Appalachian Dulcimer Archive is part of Vanderbilt’s Global Music Archive, which began about a decade ago with the collection of folk music from Uganda. Schnaufer is also represented in a free exhibit running until June 2013 in Vanderbilt’s Central Library and Special Collections, Stage & Screen: The Star Quality of Vanderbilt’s Performing Arts Collections.

David Blackbourn (John Russell/Vanderbilt)

Communicating with the departed is something David Blackbourn does on a daily basis. As a scholar of German history and the Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair in History, he sees his life’s work as a way to “get into the heads of dead people.”

“History is, in a way, communicating with the dead,” Blackbourn said. “I’m drawn to the strangeness of the past.”

Blackbourn, the son of a civil servant in Linconshire in the East Midlands of England, was the first in his immediate family to attend college. He had a love of history as a child, and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1976. He taught at London University for 16 years before moving to the United States in 1992 to join the Harvard University faculty. He came to Vanderbilt this fall.

“The study of history is looking at the past through its own eyes,” said Blackbourn, who is the author of six books. “I’ve researched and written about supposed apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarck’s Germany and what they can tell us, and I’ve also written about the environment and the German landscape and how it was transformed. I take pride in not sticking with the same thing.”

Blackbourn believes that if his students want to understand the Third Reich and the Holocaust, they need to know about more than just the events of the 20th century.

“For me, teaching history is about helping undergraduates to understand the human dimension,” he said. “Train travel, for example, changed the way people viewed time and space. The advent of bicycles, the telephone—these things changed the way people lived their daily lives. There is value in knowing not just what happened, but what the human experience was really like.”

Blackbourn has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy and is working on a book about Germany in the world since 1500.

This year he is teaching courses on Germany in the 20th century and religion and popular culture in 19th-century Europe, as well as a graduate seminar on problems and their sources in modern German history.

“I can’t imagine a more perfect life than reading, writing and teaching history. It is endlessly fascinating,” he said. “And when you are passionate about a subject, I believe that communicates itself to students.”

View the complete list of new university faculty for 2012-13.

View the complete list of new medical faculty for 2012.

Jaco Hamman (Daniel Dubois/Vanderbilt)

The Rev. Jaco Hamman’s decision to avoid the draft—the one by the South African military to maintain apartheid—propelled his 1993 move from his native country to the United States, where work as a hospital chaplain shaped his career.

“In the South African apartheid system, all white males were drafted at age 16, but I was able to defer while a student,” Hamman said. “At age 26, with a master’s from the Stellenbosch University Seminary School, I couldn’t put this off any longer and had to leave.”

Hamman is the new director of the Divinity School’s Program in Theology and Practice and also an associate professor in the area of religion, psychology and culture. He was born and raised in South Africa, where his ancestors, many of whom were members of the Dutch Reformed Church, settled in the 18th century.

Jaco Hamman (Daniel Dubois/Vanderbilt)

Hamman’s interest in people’s emotional, spiritual and relational experiences deepened while serving as a chaplain for Yale New Haven Health System and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. He enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary, where his dissertation focused on the biblical figure Job. Hamman earned his doctorate in 2000 and spent three years as a pastoral psychotherapist, group therapist and marriage and family therapist in New York City.

Hamman loved his work but did not relish the Big Apple’s hectic pace. He landed a teaching position at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Mich., which is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. There he was a professor of pastoral care and counseling. One of his books, A Play-Full Life: Slowing Down and Seeking Peace, focuses on the value of play for adults as a transformative experience that encourages learning and discovery for all ages.

“Having grown up in Africa, I bring a sense of community and collaboration to my work that seems different from the emphasis on individuality that I found in North America,” Hamman said. “Many African people, and I recognize this within myself, live according to the principle of ubuntu. In the language of Xhosa or Zulu, this word literally means ‘I am because of who we are.’ Ubuntu is the defining principle for me in terms of my strength and identity.”

As expected, Hamman will apply the principle of ubuntu to his leadership of the Program in Theology and Practice, which recently received a $5 million grant awarded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.

“This is already a fantastic program,” he said. “Now we must build awareness among seminary schools that will hire our graduates about their unique strengths as groundbreaking scholars who do practical theology in every discipline.”

View the complete list of new university faculty for 2012-13.

View the complete list of new medical faculty for 2012.

Gordon Logan, Jerry Kimbrough (Vanderbilt University)

Gordon Logan has always thought that he and his fellow guitar players were different somehow. As a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, he set out to prove it.

Through a set of experiments, Logan, Nashville musician Jerry Kimbrough and Matthew Crump (now of Brooklyn College-CUNY) have illustrated that guitarists – and players of other related instruments like mandolin, banjo and bass – tend to acquire their skills differently than most other musicians.

“Guitar players learn on the street, compared to musicians such as piano players,” said Logan, Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt and an expert on how people acquire skills.

Though many aspiring guitarists have started out learning and using music notation like brass players or pianists, Logan and quite a few others taught themselves by watching other guitarists and copying them.

“If I wanted to teach you to play guitar, I’d sit you down and show you a G-chord and a C-chord and a D-chord,” Logan said. “If you have those three chords, you could play 50 percent of country and rock songs. And if you learned one more chord like E-minor, you could do 80 percent.”

To test their theory, Logan, Crump and Kimbrough performed a series of tests. The results were published in the September issue of Music Perception, published by University of California Press.

“What we wanted to do was marry standard techniques of cognitive psychology with the guitar,” Logan said.

First, they took pictures of Logan playing various chords on the guitar, made diagrams of the musical denotation of chords and also letters that denote chords. Then they tested how fast guitarists could either say or play the chords based on these cues.

“We found out that letters cue the fastest responses compared to diagrams and pictures,” Logan said.

Unlike with the other cues, responses to the picture version of chords were faster or slower depending on how the picture was rotated, showing that guitarists are faster to recognize chords from familiar viewpoints, like when they are watching themselves or another guitarist play a chord.

For another test, the researchers showed subjects pictures of chords while at the same time playing a chord – sometimes the correct chord and sometimes not. When the wrong chord was played, guitar players were fooled by the photograph, while non-musicians were not.

“The point of that was that the guitarists were influenced by the visual representation of the chords, and they couldn’t turn it off,” Logan said.

Reading music is harder for guitarists because any given note on the guitar can be played on different strings of the instrument. So simply knowing what note to play isn’t enough information for guitarists; they need to know the most efficient way to play the note in the context of the piece of music they’re playing.

“There’s also the reality that guitarists playing popular music usually need to display a bit of showmanship, which is much easier to do without having to keep your eyes glued to a music stand,” Logan said.

“The fact that guitar players don’t read music too often frees up their eyes so they can look at their hands,” he said. “When you play piano or violin, you are trained not to look at your hands.

“We’re showing that guitar players know what they’re doing,” he said. “There’s evolution working there.”

AMS is the world’s largest society dedicated to mathematical research, scholarship and education. The new fellowship program was established to recognize members “who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.”

The Vanderbilt members are professors Dietmar Bisch, Mark N. Ellingham, Edward Saff, Guoliang Yu and Glenn F. Webb; Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bjarni Jónsson; Distinguished Professor and Stevenson Professor Vaughan F.R. Jones; and, Centennial Professor Mark Sapir.

The inaugural class contains 1,119 members from 600 institutions around the world.

The humble pawn shop, once the last and somewhat shady resort to hawk grandpa’s watch for some quick cash, has evolved to become a viable alternative for families with bad credit under economic stress.

And they’ll still give you cash for that watch.

“Pawn shops are seen as more legitimate now,” said Paige Marta Skiba, associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University Law School and co-author of The Pawn Industry and Its Customers: The United States and Europe, a paper in progress with Marieke Bos of Stockholm University and Susan Carter of the United States Military Academy.

Pawn shops, Skiba said, are “essentially … the more efficient Craig’s List.”

Paige Marta Skiba (Vanderbilt Law School)

Perhaps pulled more into mainstream consciousness by television shows such as “Hard Core Pawn” and “Pawn Stars,” pawn shops have several advantages over the payday loan operations that have become the most visible source of loans for those with poor credit ratings.

“Pawn credit … has the unique – and, to many borrowers, desirable – quality of having no direct impact on one’s credit score and, therefore, no impact on one’s future access to credit,” Skiba and her co-authors write in the paper.

That’s because the cash is secured by collateral of an item, often gold, that is surrendered to the pawnbroker if the loan is not repaid. The customer’s credit rating is never at risk.

Skiba’s research also found that the typical pawn shop customer was more likely when compared to the general population to be female; to be experiencing significant instability in both job and marital status; less likely to own a home; more likely to have significant child-rearing costs; and more likely to have bad credit scores and to have maxed out lines of credit.

“My research shows that 7 percent of U.S. households have used pawn shops, so that’s about 8 million households,” Skiba said.

Use of pawn shops has been growing about 3 to 4 percent a year for the past two decades, with an explosion in growth of more than 20 percent starting in 2007, which is probably related to surging gold prices, the most commonly used collateral for pawn shop loans.

Pawn shop customers do pay high interest rates, about 15 percent. But unlike many payday loan customers, the majority of pawn shop customers repay their loans promptly. Payday loans can have annualized interest rates of more than 500 percent.

“About 85 percent of pawn shop borrowers return to repay their loans, although we do have anecdotal evidence that this number has deteriorated in the last few years,” Skiba said.

“I think sentimentality and affection for objects plays a big role here,” Skiba said. “My research has found that people are more likely to make good on their pawn contract when they’ve pawned something sentimental, like a wedding ring or class ring. So that can actually help borrowers from getting trapped into making a series of interest payments for weeks or months on end.”