Wall, a historian who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2010, received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research how Cold War politics and efforts by ethnic, religious, civic, patriotic and labor groups to spur, shape or halt immigration reform transformed vast swaths of American life.

“When President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he downplayed its importance,” she writes in her proposal to the NEH. “‘[This] is not a revolutionary bill,’ he declared. ‘It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.’ Few predictions have proven faultier.”

The act did away with a system of national origins quotas in place since the 1920s that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. It replaced this with a system that favored the reunification of families and, to a lesser extent, skills. This opened the door not only to Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also to millions of newcomers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also put a ceiling for the first time on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, greatly contributing to illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Neither popular writers nor historians of postwar America pay much attention to how we got the Immigration Act of 1965,” she says. “It’s often portrayed simply as the product of a great liberal moment — we got the civil rights and the voting rights, and the Immigration Act got thrown in there too. … I’m interested in both how we got the act, and why it took the shape it did.”

Immigration reform then was just as contentious an issue as it is today, she says. The Cold War was raging, and proponents of reform argued that failure to make changes in the policy was offending the newly decolonized people of Asia and Africa that the United States wanted to keep out of the Soviet Union’s orbit. Ethnic groups such as Greeks and Italians used Cold War rhetoric too, arguing that population pressure in their home countries encouraged social unrest and provided a fertile ground for communism.

“There were also people on the other side of the equation, people who didn’t want to open the borders. They said, ‘Ah, well, if we open the borders, then we’ll have all these spies coming in,’” Wall says. It’s a familiar argument in 2016, with some politicians seeking to limit or ban immigration from Muslim countries because of the fear of terrorism.

Andrew J. Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Colgate University, recommended Wall for the NEH fellowship. He says any book she produces will be carefully researched and beautifully written, in part owing to her background as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

“Wendy has an astonishing knack to make history come alive through the prism of current events — in this case, the (often poisonous and nearly always ill-informed) debate over immigration,” Rotter says. “Her story promises to place these debates in a deep and illuminating context.”

Seden Akcinaroglu analyzes trends in domestic terrorist attacks to predict when they will occur in the future.

Akcinaroglu, an assistant professor of political science at Binghamton, specializes in international conflict and rivalries. In the past, she has focused on three general areas: civil wars, international rivalries and terrorism. Her interdisciplinary project with Binghamton University computer scientists homes in on the relationships between major events in a country and its terrorist attacks.

“We are trying to understand, in a very dynamic way, how we can actually predict some terrorist attacks,” Akcinaroglu says. “Right now, a lot of the studies are very static.”

Yu David Liu, an assistant professor of computer science, says Akcinaroglu’s dynamic research direction is “challenging but essential, considering the fast pace of global events.”

He says the project uses public sources such as online newspapers and databases. “It then performs data analysis to correlate individual factors and the historical attack data,” Liu says. “Prediction is made based on findings of these correlations from historical data.”

Liu says computers streamline the data collection and analysis so predictions can be made quickly.

Previously, Akcinaroglu worked to unravel the effect of natural disasters, economic status and militarized disputes on terrorist attacks. “When states are engaged in militarized disputes with other states, terrorist attacks increase,” she says. “The terrorists find it as an opportunity to attack.”

The same is true, Akcinaroglu says, for cases in which a country is weakened economically. When natural disasters hit, however, terrorist attacks tend to decrease.

“It seems that terrorists do care about reputation to a certain extent,” Akcinaroglu says, “so during times of natural disasters, they don’t want to alienate supporters.”

These findings challenge how terrorist organizations are normally perceived to operate. “For us, any atrocity can be attributed to a terrorist organization. The fact that they kill civilians is basically telling us that they don’t care,” Akcinaroglu says. “But they do care about reputation, and some of them care more than the others.”

Her current project uses a complex model to encompass as many factors as possible and look at how those factors affect terrorist organizations’ decisions to attack.

Akcinaroglu, who is from Turkey, says her interest in researching terrorist attacks began when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel organization in Turkey, announced it would not attack the country following the devastating 1999 earthquake. Akcinaroglu says she saw the same thing occur in Indonesia later, and it made her curious about terrorist organizations’ hesitation to attack.

Many students progress from J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world to J.R.R. Tolkien’s re-fashioning of Norse mythology in The Hobbit to Arthurian legend and eventually to medieval history. But Ben-Ezra is taking a larger step: to understanding how one political campaign nearly 800 years ago still applies to today’s socio-political realities.

“My interest lies in how the three major religious groups get along,” says Ben-Ezra, a Binghamton University undergraduate majoring in history and political science. Her research, supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, fills in details of how Christians, Jews and Muslims could demonize each other.

During the Sixth Crusade in 1228, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, already excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX, negotiated control of Jerusalem and several other cities held by Egypt.

Sound like a hallmark for diplomacy over militarism? Think again, Ben-Ezra says. Papal supporters in Italy demonized Frederick for finding a diplomatic rather than military solution. He was demonized both as a propaganda tool and, quite literally, in religious documents portraying him as the Anti-Christ. However, she also found intolerant references to Muslims eventually dried up in German documents.

Ben-Ezra admits her insight faces its limits. She speaks excellent Hebrew and is learning Arabic, but her Latin is rudimentary and she doesn’t speak German or French. She must rely on translations.

However, not all history is written, and Ben-Ezra has talent examining artwork and religious iconography, says Elizabeth Casteen, an assistant professor of history and Ben-Ezra’s adviser. “The material she is working with is material that’s incredibly complex,” Casteen says. “The texts are very, very strange. … You have to see the images themselves as text.”

The Sixth Crusade created as much conflict in Christian Europe as it resolved in the nexus of the three religions in Jerusalem, Casteen says.

“She’s fascinated by questions of identity. She’s fascinated by questions of tolerance,” Casteen says. “It’s part of what makes Ilana’s research incredibly relevant now.”

Ben-Ezra and Casteen hesitate to draw direct parallels between the 13th century and the 21st century, but they have common elements: the demonization of political and religious competitors; the balance between military and political solutions; the ways social groups create self-identity by segregating themselves.

All this from Harry Potter? It’s actually a pretty common progression, Casteen says. Many of her students found their interest the same way, or through the TV series Game of Thrones.

For Ben-Ezra, the Sixth Crusade is one step on a path that started with a major in pre-medicine and may lead to work in policy, Near-Eastern studies, international relations or perhaps law.

“It’s all part of a larger interest,” she says, “in the growth of intolerance.”

Palfreyman, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, came to Binghamton in 2010 to study the American Revolution and the early Republic. His dissertation ponders what happened to the Loyalists — the American colonists who stayed loyal to England — after they lost the American Revolution.

“My research indicates that the vast majority of Loyalists who chose to stay in the states after the war reintegrated back into American society,” he says. The process was never simple or uncontested, but most former supporters of the king quietly became Americans. There was no ongoing, systematic violence in the early republic, as is so often the case in the aftermath of civil war — no permanent political cleansing, no stubborn pockets of insurgents to root out.

“We like to think of the revolution and the founding as unanimous decisions made by a united people,” Palfreyman says. “We often forget that this country was founded, in part, by people who had never wanted to be independent, and never wanted to create a new nation.”

Diane Miller Sommerville, an associate professor of history at Binghamton, predicts that Palfreyman’s research “will constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of the processes of how the new, young government incorporated not only political opponents into the electoral system but also former enemies of the Revolution.”

Because he so enjoys teaching, Palfreyman seeks out a variety of opportunities to educate, including a summer 2013 contribution to the Civil War blog of The New York Times. His article described the 1863 draft riot in Boston, an event not as well known or documented as a larger protest in New York City.

“The draft riots piece definitely gave me an opportunity to write for a different kind of audience,” he says. “It was about setting a scene and letting the natural drama unfold. And that’s what historians really love to do. We love to tell good stories.”

The Red Hook, N.Y., native discovered one downside to expanding his audience. “The online format does provide a kind of instant commentary that is a new thing in scholarly fields,” he says. “And, in my case, not all of the comments were flattering.

“But first and foremost, I’m just happy to see that people care enough to read and comment. I think it’s a mistake to let serious discussions about history be cloistered in scholarly journals and college classrooms.  … I hope to be able to do both in my career — to put in my time in conversation with the specialists in my field but also to tell stories in such a way that makes other people interested in the same things that interest me.”

Flynn took a more fact-based, analytical approach, which he’s pursuing as a doctoral candidate in political science. “I like to step back from the heat of the fire,” he says, “and see what the evidence shows.”

What has that view shown him? Recently, it was an examination of efforts to shame nations that have a spotty record on human rights and whether multinational corporations distance themselves from those countries. He and colleagues found foreign corporate investment had a positive relationship with greater respect for human rights. Likewise, publicly shaming those countries led to reduced foreign investment.

“It’s a hopeful finding,” Flynn says, one that points straight at his research interest: political networks, the interaction of domestic and international politics and their intersection with human rights and conflict. The study, published in International Studies Quarterly, joins an analysis of domestic politics and their influence on military spending published in Foreign Policy Analysis.

“U.S. foreign policy, especially since the Cold War, touches on so many issues,” Flynn says. And domestic and even individual political needs drive foreign policy, despite a separation promoted in American politics since George Washington was president.

Add to that the rise of the military-industrial complex in the 1950s, increased human rights awareness following World War II and U.S. involvement in world economic development, and quickly you see that foreign relations becomes domestic politics and vice versa.

“People, whether they be representatives or bureaucrats, have some kind of interest they’re seeking to advance,” Flynn says.

Flynn’s work corrects how people view foreign relations, says Benjamin Fordham, Flynn’s doctoral committee chairman. “Most people tend to focus on international conditions” as driving foreign relations, says Fordham, a professor of political science. “But you can’t understand the whole situation until you understand the internal situation.”

That’s a worldwide approach, but Flynn is supporting it with research into U.S. foreign policy operatives since World War II. Even now, Flynn admits to a certain bemusement at teaching a classroom of students who have no experience of the Cold War, who instead grew up with the threat of terrorism in their backyards. They’re often unaware of how the same institutions — banking interests, individual bureaucrats, international economic realities — affect or even create the world they live in.

“I love that interconnectedness,” he says.

Nadia Rubaii, an associate professor of public administration, received a Fulbright grant to conduct research beginning in January at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She will study how accreditation of public administration schools can improve graduate education and, ultimately, build more effective governments.

By conducting her research in Latin America, Rubaii hopes to examine to what extent U.S. standards can be used in other countries, based on whether they make sense culturally, politically and economically.

“What it’s forcing us to do is to learn from each other,” she said, “and to recognize that our way of doing things, which might be good, isn’t necessarily the only way or the best way.”

Rubaii believes that better public administration education will lead to more effective government institutions and ultimately increase the quality of life for people. “The real end goal,” she said, “is for governments all around the world to have sufficient capacities to engage in sustainable economic development, to promote improved health, education and security and to reduce crime, inequality, discrimination and poverty among their populations.”

An intermediate step is to improve the professionalization of government, she noted. She hopes that societies all around the world will value people who have a formal education in public administration as having something to contribute to government — not necessarily as elected officials, but as the people who do the day-to-day work of government.

Schools can seek public administration accreditation in the United States, and now internationally, through the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA). Rubaii oversaw NASPAA as its president and chaired its accreditation board for two years.

“Accreditation offers a kind of stamp of assessment and approval of quality,” Rubaii said. “If you as a student are looking to choose among programs, you know that the ones that are accredited have already been reviewed by somebody.”

Accrediting bodies evaluate a program’s curriculum quality, faculty credentials, student experience, placement record, admission standards and what knowledge and skills students have after graduating. Rubaii’s research focuses on how those standards differ internationally.

“Accreditation now from this organization is available to programs outside the United States, but the standards for accreditation are based on how we think about quality in the U.S.,” Rubaii said. “Those are not necessarily universal values or measures of quality.”

Sebastian Lippez De Castro, a graduate of Binghamton’s public administration graduate program and member of the faculty at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, worked with Rubaii in Binghamton researching the possibility of applying NASPAA standards to graduate public service programs in Latin America.

“She was always genuinely interested in listening, on both our experiences with Colombia’s higher education system and what we were able to learn about other Latin American countries’ systems,” De Castro said. “Her leadership style includes her cultural sensitivity.”

De Castro said he and other faculty members at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana look forward to working with Rubaii next year. “We not only expect to learn from her knowledge and experience regarding specific public administration topics, but also expect her research will help or graduate public service programs improve their quality,” De Castro said.

Other research of Rubaii’s, centered on the role of local governments in helping immigrants assimilate in the United States, helped shape a philosophy on diversity that drives her research. “It increasingly has been expanding to a focus on international diversity and cultural diversity, and so it’s an appreciation for diversity that connects the two,” she said. “It also reflects a genuine commitment to a notion of being part of a global community.”

The work of three Binghamton University researchers, all raised in South Korea, demonstrates that the needs of Asian immigrants in the United States are more complex and nuanced than many have assumed. These researchers offer important insights to social workers, teachers and others who try to help individual immigrants thrive.

What they find is more important than ever: Asians have passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. In 2011, Asian-Americans numbered a record 18.2 million, or 5.8 percent of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1 percent in 1965, according to data published by the Pew Research Center.

Outside the enclaves

“Researchers like me try to categorize people,” says Suk-Young Kang, assistant professor of social work, who studies the needs of elderly people as well as the needs of Asian immigrants. Categories can be tricky, though. Not only does each immigrant group have distinct needs, but even people who come to the United States from the same country may live through different versions of the immigrant experience.

Kang grew curious about immigrant diversity after working with elderly Korean immigrants in Chicago for several years, and while helping his dissertation chair at Columbia University with a monograph on the healthcare needs of Asian immigrants in New York City. The findings of that study might also apply in Los Angeles, Chicago or Toronto — cities with large Asian-American populations. But what about immigrants living more isolated lives?

“There are small numbers of people who live outside the major metropolitan areas, where they don’t have access to the resources of ethnic enclaves,” Kang says. Few of their neighbors speak their language, eat their food or understand their culture. “I wondered if they lived differently.”

Kang started to explore that question while working at Arizona State University. He interviewed 240 elderly Arizona residents — half of them born in Korea and half born in China — about interactions with their local healthcare systems.

Preliminary findings show that small communities of Asian-American elders face different challenges than their counterparts in cities with big Asian populations. Language is one key concern.

“In New York City, they can see doctors who speak Korean or Chinese,” Kang says. But in Arizona, Asian-born patients usually rely on phone-based translation services. And translators often miss the finer points of the language.

“The interpreters aren’t familiar with nuances such as honorifics” — for example, the right verb form to use when addressing an older person, Kang says. Offended by such blunders, some elders refuse to use translation services. That makes it hard to get medical attention or to make use of what might be valuable information.

Besides Asian-American immigrants outside urban Chinatowns and Koreatowns, Kang is curious about at least two other ethnic subgroups — the tiny number of immigrants in the United States who hail from North Korea as well as Korean-speaking immigrants from China. He also hopes one day to add an Asian-American perspective to another important strand of his research: exploring ways to reduce stress on people who care for elderly family members.

Kang’s findings demonstrate that while heritage is important, it’s a complex factor. Social workers who are developing intervention plans shouldn’t assume too much based on what they think they know about their clients’ backgrounds.

“When I started in social work, I heard, ‘Everybody is unique,’” Kang says. “Sometimes people forget that.”

What caregivers want

If geography may help shape an immigrant’s needs, so may a person’s role in his or her household.

Consider a Korean-American immigrant caring for a loved one with dementia. Depending on whether the patient is the caregiver’s parent or spouse, the caregiver will feel different pressures, gain different rewards and seek entirely different kinds of help, says Youjung Lee, an assistant professor of social work at Binghamton.

Most studies of relatives who care for dementia patients focus on the burdens that those caregivers endure, Lee says. But according to a study she conducted, many caregivers also draw satisfaction from the work.

Lee surveyed 85 Korean-American caregivers in Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago to learn what factors made caregiving a positive experience. She assumed that culture would play a key role: The more a person held to Asian values, with their emphasis on family ties, the better he or she would feel about caregiving.

That initial hypothesis was wrong. “It turned out that culture was not that important,” Lee says. Far more crucial was the way in which relatives and friends pitched in to help with patient care and household chores. “When Korean caregivers have quality social support, it influences their positive appreciation of caregiving,” she says.

Lee next decided to find out more about the roles of culture and social support. She was curious about what kinds of support caregivers wanted most. To that end, she conducted in-depth interviews with eight Korean-American caregivers in Flushing, N.Y.

That’s where the differences emerged between people caring for husbands or wives and people caring for parents.

Spouses, Lee discovered, see dementia care not as a blessing or curse, but simply as a feature of the marriage compact. And those older caregivers don’t wish for a great deal of day-to-day help. What they really want is medical information in Korean, to help them provide better care.

For grown Korean-born children, the job of tending to a parent with dementia comes as one more duty on top of others, such as earning a living and caring for children of their own. These caregivers may feel overwhelmed. But they also feel good about helping their elders, Lee says: “They are fulfilling  the expectations of Asian culture that they should be good daughters, sons or daughters-in-law.”

Because they speak English, younger caregivers have an easier time negotiating the healthcare system. Still, juggling elder care, child care and outside employment, all while living with a foot in each of two cultures, causes a great deal of stress. “They need more specialized and individualized mental-health services,” Lee says.

Like Kang, Lee cautions against oversimplification. All families are not alike — not even all immigrant families from South Korea. “We need to investigate the level of acculturation, their relationship to the U.S. community, their level of income, their level of education in America,” she says. “All those factors should be taken into consideration when we assess an immigrant family and each family member.”

From anger to gratitude

Hyeyoung Kang also emphasizes the positive side of the immigrant family experience. It’s a poorly understood subject, since studies of minority families so often concentrate on challenges and conflicts, says Kang, an assistant professor of human development.

Much of her research aims to fill that gap by exploring relationships between immigrant children and their parents. She’s also interested in what factors contribute to these individuals’ resilience.

There are certainly occasions for conflict in immigrant families. “They’re usually starting life here at the bottom,” Kang says. “They need a lot of support from family members.” For example, parents who don’t speak English rely on their children to help them transact business outside their own communities.

Many Korean-American parents put in long hours running small businesses rather than nurturing children at home. Because of their cultural background and busy work life, they may eschew the open, affectionate communications that Americans consider the norm, while demanding unquestioning obedience and hard work from their kids. One of the most common complaints Kang hears from Korean-American young people is that their parents expect them to earn straight A’s.

Given those pressures, and the cultural gap between foreign-born parents and their U.S.-raised children, one might expect bitter feelings to endure as children grow into adulthood and away from their roots.

Not so, says Kang. “There seems to be a transformation during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.” During that period, some of the very behavior that made kids’ blood boil when they were teens — the demands for perfect report cards, the weekends spent working at the family business — often begins to inspire gratitude and affection.

In research she conducted with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kang surveyed and interviewed Korean immigrant families and adolescents as well as Korean-American young adults, ages 18-25. Most of those subjects said that, yes, they had often resented their parents in the past. But now they saw their upbringing in a more positive light.

One phrase that kept coming up, Kang says, was “parental sacrifice.” The young people often attributed positive meaning to their challenging past experiences with their parents. For example, they would say, “My parents were unavailable because they gave up their life to provide for me so that I can live a better life than them,” instead of staying bitter about their parents’ absence early in their life. Some, Kang says, come to embrace their elders’ vision. “They say, ‘My parents came here so that I could be successful in this country. I have to work hard and give back.’”

This evolution comes in part because Korean-American children mature cognitively, gain physical distance from their parents and are exposed to a dense ethnic peer network as they leave their teens and enter their 20s. However, Kang notes, there are some Korean-American youth who feel pressured and continue to stay disconnected or bitter toward their parents.

In future studies, Kang hopes to extend this research to other immigrant populations, especially Latinos.

One lesson Kang draws from her findings is that the ingredients that make up a “normal” family experience vary greatly. “For example, we often hear that it’s important for parents to communicate with their children and express affection,” she says. “But these kids stay connected to their parents and maintain positive relations despite previous challenges.”

After Algeria won independence from France in 1962, political unrest and an expanding French economy led hundreds of thousands of Muslim Algerians to migrate to France. The French state’s solution to the unexpected migration was spatial separation of the Algerian population, but that was only the beginning.

Funded by several competitive fellowships, Wadowiec traveled to France and spent months chasing leads and collecting archival evidence of the effects of the mass migration. In colonial archives in the south of France, Wadowiec found the voices of Muslim Algerian women through a chance encounter with some surprising documents, changing the scope of her project entirely.

Before 1962, France had extended citizenship to Algerian men and women. Women in particular took this idea at face value. “There’s this explosion in this brief time period of letters to state officials from these women saying, ‘This is what I want from the state and this is how I view myself as a citizen,’” Wadowiec says. “But after ’62, that’s all gone.”

Wadowiec reframed her project to answer that gap in history: Why aren’t there records of these women after immigration?

“It’s not so much that I’m going to recapture voices that have been lost, because they’re lost for good,” Wadowiec says. “I want to explain the operations of both racism and sexism and how those things overlap in terms of citizenship.”

The French state considered the Muslim Algerians as a specific race rather than a religious minority. The Algerian women were seen as the embodiment of Islam — and as a danger to the identity of the French citizen.

“Women were specifically oppressed in a lot of the ways you see discussions about Middle Eastern women today,” Wadowiec says. “What my dissertation does is work through the roots of that and why we perceive Islam as a cultural racial threat.”

Wadowiec’s research is unique. Not much scholarship exists on this period and the application process to view many of the documents tests a scholar’s patience.

“Jaime is an infinitely creative reader of documents,” says Elisa Camiscioli, associate professor of history and women’s studies at Binghamton. “She uses school books, old-school nationality laws; she has very eclectic, amazing historical instincts.”

With her undergraduate students, Wadowiec stresses the importance of looking beyond what is familiar: “To go out in the world and explore is so important,” she says. “When you’re studying things like race, sexuality and gender, you kind of have to take that world view, adopt an open perspective.”

“In order to decrease its debt and get loans, Ghana had to get rid of a lot of social programs,” she says. “The two men I was interviewing grew up around that time. My goal was to tell a story about what had happened historically in Ghana and how it manifested in the lives of these two young men.”

From there, the sociology major’s work took a more personal turn.

Batiz’s honors thesis focuses on the Garifuna community in New York City. The Garifuna, including her own family in Brooklyn, are descendants of marooned slaves who were exiled when the British took over St. Vincent. The New York City community has grown to some 100,000 people.

“My inspiration was my own search for identity here in the United States,” she says. “Growing up, people would say to me, ‘You can’t be Latino; you’re black.’ For me, it was that confusion that drove me to write an honors thesis.”

Batiz conducted a survey of Garifuna and used census data to see whether individuals considered themselves black, Latino, both or neither. The results left Batiz with questions about how Americans negotiate race and how culture is transmitted. “Is it your phenotype?” she asks. “Is it the social condition you grow up in?”

Batiz’s advisor, Michael West, considers her self-directed and ambitious. “Her research shows that the Garifuna, as befitting a people spread over several nation-states in Central America, with roots in the Caribbean islands, have multiple identities,” says West, a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Binghamton. “They are at once Hondurans, Belizians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, etc., and Americans, and also Latinos, and black, plus of course Garifuna. Along this cultural continuum, there are varying degrees of identification with any of the categories according to class, gender, religion, age, education and so forth. The beauty of Luisa’s thesis is that it speaks to all of these issues.”

Last summer, Batiz traveled to the University of California, Berkeley, as a public policy and international affairs fellow. The program gave her a dynamic view of how to tackle issues, she says. She was part of a team tasked with improving education in Micronesia. The group didn’t find an easy fix, but the experience led her to an insight: “Often when we try to solve a problem, we come up with a Band-Aid when the real issue is that the problem is adaptive,” she says. “You’re only fixing part of the problem.”

Batiz, who will join Teach For America this fall, plans to pursue a doctorate in public policy.

“I do want to do research, but I also want to be sure that I am an advocate for what I’d like to see changed in the world,” she says. “Too many people accept things the way they are.”

Yet, besides the color of the skin, this change is nothing new in the American experience. For more than 150 years, foreign groups flocked to the United States in successive waves, concentrating in big-city neighborhoods and small rural towns, making many native-born Americans anxious as the immigrants changed the look and feel of their new environs.

“I try to show students historically that it’s a constant trend,” says John Frazier, who was recently named distinguished service professor by the State University of New York. “The role of human geography is to explain what places in the country are like and how they are changing, and in this context, due to immigration and ethnicity.”

Frazier, who received the Ethnic Geography Career Award from the Association of American Geographers for his pioneering work on ethnicity, is also the founder of the Conference on Race, Place, and Ethnicity, which he and a group of colleagues initiated at Binghamton University in 2002.

First the Irish came and met resistance. In Chicago, merchants displayed “Irish need not apply” signs and a candidate for mayor suggested decorating light poles with hanging Irishmen. Then the Italians came and met with the same antagonism. Then the Germans, the Scandinavians and so on.

“This country, for all of its wonderful traits, has a bias as part of the culture,” Frazier says. “So what I try to do is enlighten students because it’s easy to focus on the here and now, but you have to have a context for culture and for the history of this country to understand how intolerance evolved and how it affected everything from Europeans to African-Americans to Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese.

“It isn’t that we want to beat up America. We want to frame these experiences in periods of intolerance and learn from them and also relate them to today and our views of other cultures that are coming to the United States and how we can interact with them.”

He noted that students also need to understand what is different about the current period. He says one important difference is in the origins of immigrants, now largely Hispanics/Latinos and Asians, and many coming with capital that leads to different settlement structures. New immigrant gateways have emerged and many immigrants settle in suburbs.

Frazier spends a lot of time studying Queens, N.Y., the most diverse 100 square miles in the world. He looks at how ethnicity changes the visual landscape as an ethnic group moves into a neighborhood and expresses its values through clothing, landscape and building styles.

For instance, in Bellerose and Queens Village, which have rapidly increasing Asian, Indian and South Asian populations, it’s common to see houses influenced by Indian architecture, with paved-over yards and stainless-steel fences and railings.

Frazier digs past how things change and tries to understand why.

“It’s not just the patterns,” he says. “The other part is understanding what causes these processes to occur, being able to explain reverse migration, being able to explain why Puerto Ricans and, more recently, a diversified Hispanic population are moving to Allentown and York and Reading, Pa. It’s also understanding the issues and the impacts. That’s all in geography.”

He has found that different ethnic groups can move for the same reasons. For instance, when he looked closely at Allentown, which has seen a large influx of Hispanics in the last couple of decades, at the same time that Anglos and Germans have moved out, he came across answers that could have been given during the “White Flight” to the suburbs in the 1960s.

“‘Tranquility,'” they told him. “‘It’s a place that’s green. It’s low key. It’s quiet. It’s beautiful. It’s pleasant. And I can raise my family here.'”

Frazier says that understanding diversity’s past and current trends is essential in a country in constant flux, especially as the world quickly shrinks and we come into contact with other cultures more and more.

“We need to be tolerant,” he says. “But it’s one thing to talk about bringing together a large number of people from different backgrounds, another to get them to mix and do interactions that lead to cultural awareness and cultural understanding.”

Ricardo René Larémont, a professor of political science and sociology, discussed the potential threat posed by groups called Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al Shabab.

“What I told the committee is that military options are not necessarily the most important,” Larémont said. “When you look at northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is trying to grow, you have a society in which about 20-25 percent of the women are educated. You have high levels of fertility among women. And when you combine high fertility with low literacy, you have a recipe for social, economic and political disaster. Also, you do not have a U.S. diplomatic or developmental presence on the ground whatsoever, so you do not have any idea about what is going on.”

When Larémont was invited to testify, he was on his way to a conference in Malta organized by the European Union. He had about a week to prepare his Nov. 30 remarks for the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. The subcommittee works to ascertain present and future trends that may affect the security of the United States.

“Frankly, I was like a child in a candy store,” said Larémont, who had never testified before Congress. “I was simply amazed by the grandeur of the place. … It’s just physically impressive.”

Larémont, a Carnegie Corporation Scholar on Islam who travels the world for his research, said he found the members of the subcommittee quite knowledgeable. “They were prepared,” he said. “The chair of the committee is a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Congressman Patrick Meehan. The ranking Democratic member is Congresswoman Jackie Speier from California. They were both very well informed.”

He was given just five minutes to read his remarks before members of the subcommittee posed questions.

Essentially, he said, the U.S. concern is that Islamist extremists are gathering strength in the Sahel, a region between the Sahara and tropical Africa. The committee wanted to understand the degree to which these groups are “aspirational” vs. “operational” in nature.

Larémont, who has written extensively about Islam, conflict resolution and democratization in Africa, offered a brief history of three jihadist groups and his views on their possible plans in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings. He expects that Boko Haram, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al Shabab will attempt to expand their operations now that Muammar Qaddafi’s regime no longer exists. Larémont said that even though Qaddafi was unpredictable in many ways, he played an important role in stabilizing the countries of the Sahel. The security vacuum created by Qaddafi’s ouster may offer an opportunity for jihadist groups to work together to destabilize several states in West Africa, Larémont told the subcommittee.

“The U.S. budget is essentially broken, so we obviously have to take care of this home front,” he said afterward. “But even while we focus on this home front, we have to realize that there are things happening overseas that may affect our security. The urgent task is to remain focused on threats developing overseas while at the same time finding a way to jump start this economy. Until that’s done, we won’t get security here or security overseas.”

“My research is about what happens to the ideal as the Empire declines because it is so tied to the Empire,” said Gopinath, an assistant professor in Binghamton University’s English Department. “What happens to that ideal, which was an embodiment of the imperial nation, in the second half of the 20th century?”

It’s a question she answers in her book “Scarecrows of Chivalry: The Literature of English Masculinities after Empire.”

She’s working on revisions now after completing the writing during a 2010 fellowship from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Gopinath is interested in the idea of the British gentleman — the well-mannered, leadership-driven “good Englishman” — who was turned out by boarding schools with a certain set of traits to be used to rule the country and the Empire. These traits, her work, points out, only emerged in hierarchical relation to those considered inferior: the colonized, the working class and women.

The subject first attracted her attention when she read P.G. Wodehouse novels as a teenager. “They were comedic, entertaining novels about the upper-crust of England, full of style and wit. But still, no one talked about the Empire, or how and where Wodehouse’s silly rich gentlemen were getting their money or how they got away with being such idiots,” she said. “I always went back to the moment of reading.”

Her research interests have led to papers on diverse topics, from James Bond to George Orwell. She has also covered case studies of modern-day representations of the “likeable” Englishman, like actor Hugh Grant in his many romantic comedies. In her other projects, she considers the fluidity of masculinity in Hindi (Bollywood) film, and the construction of masculinities during the Northern Irish “Troubles.”

Another, a pioneer in the study of women in German history, details in her latest book how advancements in social justice spring from a deep well of hope among average citizens.

A third won a Pulitzer Prize for his page-turning look at Japan’s World War II Emperor Hirohito, exploring in new ways the ethical dimensions of his reign.

Binghamton professors David Cingranelli, Jean Quataert and Herbert Bix embrace the role of history and political science in understanding human rights. The quest for justice is informed by the historical or political themes they coax into modern relevancy every day.

Measuring social change

Cingranelli’s brainchild, the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project with David L. Richards of the University of Connecticut, has become the gold standard for quantifying human rights.

His inspiration was former President Jimmy Carter’s articulation of the responsibility of the United States to advance human rights around the world, but the connection to his own work came after he read a senior scholar’s assertions that U.S. international aid regularly flowed to draconian regimes.

“I was stunned by that,” Cingranelli says.

So he dug deeper, found flaws in the methodology, and knew he could do better. “It’s impossible to engage in meaningful social change without measuring what it is you want to change,” he says. “Otherwise, you can’t tell if you are being successful or not. I want to do something that theoretical scholars can use that also might help policy makers make the world a better place.”

Some bristle at Cingranelli’s application of statistical analysis to such a human cause, or at state leaders’ acceptance of his data. He notes that coming up with reasonable definitions about what constitutes rights can be challenging. But relying on self-appointed arbiters of what is worthy of quantification means missing a major avenue toward change.

The data set describes a wide variety of government human rights concerns, including torture, workers’ rights and women’s rights, over a more than 25-year span.

Consider some of the more challenging definitions in the project: While it might be culturally sound in some countries to limit the movement of women in relation to their husbands or families, Cingranelli doesn’t buy such exceptions.

“If you can’t get a visa because you are a woman or unless your husband agrees or your father agrees, well, we decided that if half the population can’t move, we’d say that wasn’t good,” he says. “There is no international court (to decide these things), so we have to come up with measures. There are things we never would have thought of until we got into this.”

Todd Landman, director of the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution at the University of Essex in England, says the CIRI data set is the leading resource for cross-national and time-series, standards-based measures of human rights. When asked about Cingranelli, Landman says simply:  “His work has had a tremendous impact on human rights scholars and practitioners over the last 30 years.”

Exploring the personal

If Cingranelli hopes to find truth from a view above the political and cultural fray, colleague Quataert wades deeply into all human complexity can offer.

In her latest book, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), readers learn how 14 middle-aged, mostly working-class mothers in Argentina transformed the cases of their “disappeared” loved ones into a matter of national urgency. She also describes how the work of one South African woman brought her struggles against apartheid to an emerging global feminist mission.

Quataert’s internationally recognized scholarship relies on the personal. In the book, she recounts how one of the Argentinian mothers describes her missing son: “Everything was important about him, his studies, his work, his political ideas. Every part of his life was important, his marriage, the birth of his children, his work. He had so much, his dreams, his ideas, all cut off.”

Quataert follows: “In these mothers’ conceptual universe, their children had the right to pursue the gift of life that they, as mothers, had given them.”

Most people, she says, have a political view of human rights violations, summoning images of state abuses and genocides.

“I am reminded of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who went to China a few years ago and said, ‘I am not here to talk about human rights but about climate change,’ as if you can exclude the ecological and environmental integrity of the globe from human rights considerations,” Quataert says.

“But human rights forces us to think about the kind of society and world we live in — after all, rights are not ends in themselves but means to achieve the full development of the human person and ensure a life of dignity.

“Poverty and deprivation may not make the headlines of newspapers, but they are a terrible threat to human life,” she says.  “They make all of the other pressing problems of the globe much more difficult, for example, the problems of failed states, the dangers of not educating young people, providing adequate food and water, even terrorism.”

The human rights system

The idea that human rights cannot be considered an abstract concept anymore is a significant vein that runs through the three professors’ work.

Quataert hopes her scholarship will inspire others to get involved, whether by writing letters or speaking out. Bix wrote a scathing critique of Israel’s actions in attacking the Turkish aid flotilla off Gaza last year. Cingranelli continues to push students in his classes on human rights to question their assumptions.

“I’m always delighted to have students in the class who are critical because it helps us have great debates,” Cingranelli says.

Quataert, who oversees a minor field in the history of human rights, says she hopes her students come to understand just how dynamic and global the human rights system is as it confronts abuses and violations.

“Much of the literature on human rights is written from the perspective of the present, so I offer an historical account of the emergence of the human rights system,” she says. “It was created through the post-World War II collective system of the United Nations, and I stress the many complex factors and human actions that led to its formal emergence between l945 and 1949: changes in the international system with the codification of international law, emerging international organizations, transnational advocacy groups, new intergovernmental agencies, growing literacy, and print and media circulation.”

Students read early international humanitarian law for its values of common humanity and shared fate and examine the notions and ideas behind the many transnational movements for justice emerging after the middle of the 19th century. Then Quataert has them examine the way human rights principles were incorporated into the U.N. Charter and the creation of the U.N. institutions for human rights oversight, including the Commission on Human Rights and the Commission on the Status of Women. “My view is that the whole U.N. system is shaped from below,” she says, “by people caught in real-life crisis.”

A comparative approach

Bix, whose current research centers on Japanese and American wars of the 20th century, brings to his work a focus on human frailty and susceptibility to political and religious illusions and dogmas.

The author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan continues to explore the war crimes for which Japanese defendants in post-World War II international criminal trials were punished. He also compares them to the war crimes perpetrated by U.S. military and civilian personnel in recent years.

“As a historian of modern Japan and its wars, I tend to think in comparative terms, contrasting U.S. and Japanese behavior in different phases of their imperialist expansion, in different regions of the world,” he says.

Indeed, Bix goes so far as to call this an “age of oligarchy.”

“We easily demonize the Taliban who resist us, and we commit war crimes against the civilian populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq,” he says. “Yet we do not view ourselves as fighting wars of choice that destroy their societies and harm ourselves. Aren’t these contradictions worth thinking about?”

Bix says his aim is to bring historical knowledge to bear on the study of important contemporary issues. “Why, for example, are legal benchmarks for punishing war criminals ignored whenever American forces or friends of America such as Israel are involved?” he asks. “Who is the enemy and who gets to define him? What light does a nation’s way of waging war shed on its institutional structure and military decision-making?”

Add to that the Cold War threat of nuclear attack and only nascent ideas of informed consent and you have the environment in 1960 when Dr. Eugene Saenger, radiologist and an expert in nuclear medicine, began his now-notorious clinical trials. Using patients  with advanced cancer at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Saenger tested for the U.S. military the effects of total-body irradiation, sometimes with fatal results.

To the shock of those investigating his work, the patients — about 90 between 1960 and 1971, a majority black — served as proxies for soldiers, in part to better understand radiation effects from nuclear attack.

In his latest book, Contested Medicine: Cancer Research and the Military, Gerald Kutcher, associate professor of history at Binghamton University, re-examines Saenger’s work in a new context. Kutcher reinterprets the events through his unique experience as a radiation oncology physicist, a Cambridge-educated historian and through the application of the science studies approach, which seeks to delve into the cultural and ideological framework around scientific practices.

He wrestles with a question that has vexed many who have studied Saenger and his work for decades: Was this one of the most outrageous examples of ethically flawed medicine in the 20th century or a product of its times? Kutcher does not let the reader come away with such neat conclusions.

“I don’t judge the characters,” Kutcher said. “What’s more interesting to me is why they were accepted by colleagues.”

No one is absolving Saenger of responsibility, Kutcher said, but there is much we can learn in viewing past clinical trials not through a lens of today’s bioethical standards and concepts of informed consent — simply not fully formed during Saenger’s day — but in the context in which they operated at the time. All these decades later, judgments against Saenger remain ambiguous, despite the deaths and, by Kutcher’s count, nine investigations into his program. Families say their loved ones may have consented to the radiation, but they were not told of its deadliness or the military’s role.

That Saenger was not immediately or universally vilified after such disclosures reveals something fundamental about the character of medical research itself, Kutcher said: It was dynamic and very much a part of the world in which it existed.

A new perspective

Kutcher was well versed in the world of clinical trials and cancer treatment as chief of the clinical physics service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center before pursuing his doctorate in the history of science.

Dr. Samuel Hellman, a former colleague of Kutcher’s at Sloan-Kettering, where he was physician-in-chief, said Kutcher’s professional evolution could not be more unusual. “He has a remarkably different career than most people,” said Hellman, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he served as dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine.

Kutcher started in medical physics and became a senior figure in that field, making contributions such as maximizing radiation to tumors while saving as much healthy tissue as possible. It was a great advance, Hellman said, and when computer technology linked ever more precision to radiation therapy, “Jerry was one of the most important people doing that.”

Kutcher, leading a clinical service of about 50 physicists who were responsible for the planning and delivery of radiation treatments to more than 3,000 patients per year, contributed to changing much in the field, including how prostate cancer is treated with radiation.

It is with that experience that he confronts a central point in the book — a detailed accounting of the emergence of informed consent. A turning point, Kutcher writes, came in the mid-1960s when James Shannon, director of the National Institutes of Health, pushed through a program that required all research funded by the NIH to go through local peer review. Around the same time, a New England Journal of Medicine article revealed 22 cases of unethical experimentation, which included injecting mentally disabled residents at Willowbrook State School in New York with hepatitis to see how it was spread. No effort at consent was made.

“It’s interesting,” Hellman said. “Most of the examples came from very prestigious professors at very prestigious institutions and published in very prestigious journals. They did not create a great ethical outpouring, most of them, and they were so egregious.”

Uncovering the Cincinnati trials

Saenger’s trials were halted in 1971 by the University of Cincinnati, but the troubling nature of Saenger’s work was first questioned in 1966. Documents released later detailed concerns by university faculty about the level of radiation and how Saenger was informing his patients, but it was not enough to stop the work. In fact, the Department of Defense not only funded the research through March 1972, according to congressional testimony, it approached the university with an offer to renew the contract for another term. The university refused and the experiments ceased.

It was also in 1971 that the press began to write about Saenger’s work. That proved the initial tug in unraveling the fabric of Saenger’s legacy and led to scores of investigations.

Martha Stephens, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati, became aware of the trials through a short article in the Village Voice, published in October 1971. She was stunned to learn that radiation experiments were happening so close to home. She began pressing the university for more details, made her findings public, and continued investigating. Those efforts culminated in a 2002 book, The Experiment.

What laypeople may see as black and white, Kutcher views as another gray area of medicine, tinged by his own experiences in the field. “You are treating people right on the edge,” he said. “Scientists tend to rewrite their own history. They never tell you about all of their failures. No one is even close to typical idealized versions of science in the making.”

During Saenger’s experiments, patients were subjected to massive doses of full-body radiation. And they weren’t told of the military’s involvement until after outsiders started questioning the experiments.

Yet his work, Saenger believed, was part of developments in total-body radiation that by today have led to a nearly 85 percent survival rate among those diagnosed with childhood leukemia. He was among the first to discover that irradiation in children for benign conditions caused tumors and authored a 1968 study that proved radioiodine therapy didn’t increase incidences of leukemia. Saenger was also considered a leader in establishing radiation safety standards for medical workers.

A career of twists and turns

Kutcher’s career has followed a most unusual path.

“Toward the latter phase of my career at Sloan-Kettering, I became more and more convinced that I wanted (indeed, I seemed to need) to look at medicine from a more historical and social perspective,” Kutcher writes.

He recalled an incident at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He noticed one patient lying on a gurney when a distress code sounded. The patient died.

“Later, I learned that the patient had advanced cancer and was a subject in a clinical trial testing partial-body radiation to alleviate the painful effects of distant metastases.  I remember thinking at that time: Who was looking out for this patient? Why was a patient on the verge of death participating in a clinical trial? Later, I would begin to appreciate something that perhaps I should have understood at the time, namely, that one of the ethical tenets of clinical trials is that often the most aggressive and certainly the most experimental of trials are tested in the sickest patients who are often the most vulnerable.”

However, that was not the central force in his career change. Rather, he said, it showed that his fundamental approach and interest in medicine would always extend beyond the scientific into broader social and ethical contexts: Where one person saw a patient or device, he would be connecting the dots.

Saenger’s legacy

Saenger died in 2007, at the age of 90. His legacy is mixed at best, lying somewhere between an “American Mengele” and misunderstood pioneer.

In 1999, a federal judge awarded his patients’ families $3.6 million, to be paid by the government, the University of Cincinnati, researchers and the city of Cincinnati, former operator of the hospital.

Despite the investigations and ongoing criticisms, Saenger continued for years after the experiments ended to write articles in his defense, Kutcher said. In the mid-1990s, Saenger was investigated by a number of government bodies, including the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, established by then-President Bill Clinton.

“The political and cultural climate in which he was judged differed substantially from that of the early 1970s,” Kutcher writes. Bioethics had established itself as the most authoritative voice of ethical conduct, yet the committee was badly split. “When the committee attempted to compare Saenger’s research to that of his contemporaries, it could not distinguish his practices from his peers’ and could only reach an ambivalent judgment.”

“I was amazed at how naïve I was: I thought everyone was basically the same as me,” said Laats, now an assistant professor in the School of Education at Binghamton University. “But parents were hawks, as they should be, about what was being taught in the classroom. Things I thought we agreed on, such as evolution, still raised their ire.”

During graduate school, Laats turned his attention to Protestant fundamentalism in the 1920s. He found that the movement has had a major effect on the American school system and also helped lay the foundation for today’s culture wars.

“The trenches were dug in the ’20s for the fights that still go on today,” he said. “The positions and even the names — including ‘fundamentalist’ — began in the ’20s.”

Laats was one of 20 scholars to receive the prestigious National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2009. A book based on his research, Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars, will soon be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Unlike other movements of the period, fundamentalism did not arise in the 1920s because of new ideas. Instead, Laats said, it was a reaction to new ideas in schools, religion and culture, such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“The fundamentalist movement came about in part because people felt their basic beliefs had been dismissed by educators,” said Laats, who considers himself secular. “Fundamentalists worried that students were being taught dangerous ideas. In the 1920s, two ideas of what schools should be doing came into conflict. All of a sudden, schools seemed to be teaching ideas that were turning students away from their faith.”

The confrontation came to a head in a courthouse in tiny Dayton, Tenn.

In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of evolution in place of the Bible’s account. Teacher John Scopes agreed to challenge the law by violating it in the classroom. The so-called “monkey trial” drew a firestorm of publicity and featured two leading orators — William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow — on opposite sides.

Scopes was convicted and the anti-evolution movement sought similar laws in other states. But fundamentalists lost the battle for public opinion. Darrow’s questioning of Bryan’s biblical views on the witness stand helped the media and evolutionists portray fundamentalists in stereotypical terms, such as barbarians, bigots and ignoramuses, that resonated across the nation.

The trial and its aftermath proved to be “a shock to the fundamentalist system,” Laats said. Fundamentalists were especially stunned that they were not seen as having the moral high ground of the debate.

In the wake of the trial, the fundamentalist movement became a smaller group that cared little about what mainstream America said. In fact, Laats said, fundamentalists embraced the fact that they would not win over the opposition.

“If they wanted to have control over education, they had to start their own subcultural institutions,” he said.

Fundamentalists did just that by founding Bob Jones University, becoming active at schools such as Wheaton College in Illinois and forming Bible schools and radio stations across the country.

“It’s that environment,” Laats said, “that nurtured people like Billy Graham, who re-emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and said, ‘We hold our beliefs, but we need to re-engage with mainstream America.’”

Bob Jones University became instrumental in the rise of Christian day schools and home schooling when it started a series of textbooks in 1973 written from a Bible-based perspective.

These influential books brought the work of 1920s-era fundamentalists into the latter part of the 20th century, Laats said, energizing a new generation.

“If you had not had this turning inward of fundamentalists and the building of educational infrastructure, you couldn’t have had the explosion of home schooling and Christian day schools in the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. “You can’t have schools without books; you can’t have Christian schools without Christian books.”

The dissension and debates that exploded in the 1920s are still a part of today’s public schools and society, whether focused on evolution, sex education or saying the Lord’s Prayer in the classroom, Laats said.

“Some of the venom of today’s culture wars comes from this divide in basic beliefs about who humans are and how humans fit into the universe,” he said. “If you think what’s being taught in schools is hurting children, it’s difficult to say, ‘It’s more important that we all get along’ than to do something about it.’”

Whether it is in schools or society, Laats believes the impact of fundamentalism in the 1920s cannot be overestimated.

“I sensed this was a story that hadn’t been fully explored,” he said. “Most of the literature that looks at the roots goes back to Billy Graham in the 1950s instead of the 1920s, where a lot of the direct beginnings come from. I thought the topic would be interesting, provocative and important not just for historians, but for all kinds of Americans.”

Political thinkers through the years have debated the economic role of Jews. Yet Jews who study Jewish history have long avoided the subject of economics.

“These historians didn’t want to contribute to the stereotype, to the negative image of Jews as merchants or Jews as Shylocks,” Karp said.

Examining writings on politics and economics published throughout the period, Karp’s new book traces evolving ideas about Jews’ traditional functions in the economy and, based on those functions, what rights they should have in society.

Karp said he focused on the years 1638 to 1848 because that period marks an important transition in thought about the economic roles of Jews. “At the beginning,” he said, “writers and debaters were saying, ‘Sure, bring the Jews in. Let them do their magic. They neither want, nor will we give them, any political rights.’ Jews were a safe bet as long as they remained non-citizens.”

But the French Revolution changed the rules. Under the new order, in many countries, a person who followed local customs and pledged loyalty to the state could become a citizen. In theory, Jews could gain political rights, but not if they still stood apart as a merchant class.

“The fact that Jews were anomalous in their occupations was a serious obstacle, in the minds of many statesmen and philosophers, to their acculturation, or their subordination to the discipline of citizenship,” Karp said. Society faced a dilemma: “Either we have to kick them out, or we have to transform them and reform them, so that they’ll no longer be a commercial people.”

That dilemma lasted well beyond the period of the book — in fact, until the Holocaust. The debate points to the fact that anti-Semitism didn’t spring only from religious prejudice or distaste for moneylenders, Karp said. It also grew out of ambivalence toward capitalism.

Because Jews gravitated to commerce, and because people weren’t sure whether commerce was a good or bad force, even when Jews seemed to assimilate, people weren’t sure they could trust them. “They’d say, ‘Aha! They are behaving as Jews, because they are behaving commercially. These people may share our language and culture, but their predominance in commerce shows that they have their own agenda, that they are a fifth column.’”

It did not occur to people who thought this way, Karp said, that Jews’ commercial orientation was the result of centuries of habituation and restriction. For this reason, the focus on traditional roles and stereotypes also makes Jewish economics a perilous area for scholarship today.

“It’s very tricky to talk about the subject objectively, without giving perceived ammunition to anti-Semitism,” said Karp, who is delving further into historical thought on Jewish economics this academic year as a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.  “That’s why it’s such an explosive topic.”

Larémont, professor of political science and sociology, is one of 21 Carnegie Scholars for 2007. Each will receive grants of up to $100,000 to pursue Islam-centered research themes during the next two years.

Larémont has written several chapters for a book to be titled Islamic Law and the State in Nigeria.

“What I am examining is the role of Islamic law in providing legitimacy for different governments, from the pre-colonial era to the post-colonial era,” he said. “I’m tracing the relevance of Islamic law, both in terms of social and political identity, especially in the north of Nigeria.”

Islamic law was the de facto law of northern Nigeria from about 1804 until about 1960, Larémont said, including the period when the country was a British colony.

The book will also examine what happens in a society divided roughly evenly between Muslims and Christians. “The interesting intellectual and political challenge,” Larémont said, “is how do you talk to and engage with the masses and with political elites so they can reconcile these two rather different philosophical and political orientations in terms of what the law should be in a society?”

Muslims, he noted, believe it’s impossible and possibly even heretical to divorce Islam from government. Christians often have a murkier view about the separation of church and state. “What we can learn in Nigeria may have applications for other societies and states that are similarly split on religious questions,” Larémont said.

The Carnegie funding will allow him to spend several months in Nigeria during the next year. Larémont, who recently wrapped up five years as chair of the Binghamton University Sociology Department, plans to take a year of chair’s leave as well as a one-semester sabbatical to focus on the book project.

Candidates for the Carnegie Scholars Program are first identified by a distinguished group of nominators, then are evaluated and selected by a committee of Carnegie program leaders and external advisers.

Larémont is author of Islam and the Politics of Resistance in Algeria, 1783-1992. He also edited Borders, Nationalism, and the African State and The Causes of War and the Consequences of Peacekeeping in Africa.

Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, published by the University’s own Global Academic Publishing, draws on the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference held at Howard University. But it’s not merely the proceedings of the convention; the writers recast their papers in language suitable for undergraduates. The timely volume includes essays on topics ranging from health and health care to anti-predatory lending legislation and pieces focusing on places such as Buffalo, the Texas Panhandle and Washington, D.C. The book explores major themes in geography, including how humans interact with their environment and help shape it as well as migrations and how they affect people’s origins and destinations.

Frazier, a professor, and Tettey-Fio, an associate professor, both contributed pieces in addition to editing the book. Department Chair Florence Margai and Assistant Professor Mark Reisinger also wrote for the volume.

Frazier and Tettey-Fio have taught as a team in the past, and their rapport is evident as they discuss race and ethnicity as well as how they’ll use the new book in Geography 103: Multicultural Geographies of the U.S., a course each teaches.

The two rattle off a list of places changed by new communities. Allentown and Pennsylvania Dutch country are increasingly Latino, for instance, while Bosnians are reshaping Utica. Southeast Asians have transformed Flushing.

“Groups want to preserve their ethnicity,” Frazier said. So you’ll see Spanish signs in Allentown and different restaurants and churches than you might have found before. “The landscape informs you of who’s there and how they’re transforming it.” He and Tettey-Fio are not shy about citing these examples in the classroom.

“Students can see that even the towns from which they come have become laboratories for what’s discussed in class,” Tettey-Fio said. “Students can really relate to this material.”

Tettey-Fio and Frazier are interested in how organizations such as refugee resettlement offices and political institutions such as the Federal Housing Authority contribute to the transformation of these places.

“Also, we tell students that this is not something new,” Tettey-Fio said.

The United States has a long history of immigration and of bringing in cheap labor, but Tettey-Fio and Frazier often find that students are surprised by how much that need for cheap labor has influenced policy.

Students are also forced to confront some of their own stereotypes in the course, too, whether about the idea of “model” minorities or about the persistence of the black ghetto.

“You have to talk about race as a social construct in this country,” Frazier said.

Tettey-Fio chimed in with the perfect example. “I didn’t know I was black until I got here,” he said with a laugh. “I used to think I was African, or Ghanaian.”