There, she found her future.

Materials from Africa, artisans from China and designs from Spain, all bolstered by trade with the Americas: The fortified church was a visible recreation of the fusion of cultures that has created the modern Philippines. All right there, from architecture to iconography.

Little, a doctoral student in art history, finds that kind of cultural blending fascinating. “I’ve always been interested in the visual exchanges between the West and Asia,” she says. “And I’ve been fortunate to get funding to visit.”

What she found on that hilltop — something that dots the 7,000 Philippine islands — was a key moment in modern Filipino culture: Pacific Islanders who imported ivory and other materials from Africa — and some of that culture; who drew artisans from China — and their culture; who attracted Spanish priests looking to spread European faith — and economic models.

The icons and architecture were needed to impress cultural values on an indigenous population. The fortifications protected communities from pirates. And despite strict Spanish control of the designs, there’s no eliminating the fusion of African and Chinese influences.

The churches bear a functional similarity to fortified cathedrals in Germany and Romania, Little says, but those were built in communities where Catholicism was already prevalent. These churches had the dual need to convert people.

The work, says Nancy Um, Little’s adviser, “has never been done before. She’s really pioneering in the field.” Little is bringing together a record of religious and devotional objects from a perspective of art history, and analyzing them with historical records.

For Little, this is gold. She has already secured a fellowship at the Lilly Library in Indiana and grants to visit Europe as well as the Philippines. “That fieldwork aspect is very important,” says Um, an associate professor of art history.

Little, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science before pursuing a master’s degree in art history, also spent time last year at the Newberry Library in Chicago, examining 18th-century Filipino manuscripts. She’s looking for traces of immigration and hiring of Chinese workers.

“I’m peeling back the layers,” she says. “It’s more than just evangelizing — there are political and economic factors. There might be just one sheet of paper I find, but I that’s what I love. I’m a historian.”

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.”

This perspective comes from a study of ancient DNA carried out by an international research team. Rolf Quam, a Binghamton University anthropologist, was a co-author of the study led by Anders Götherström at Uppsala University and Love Dalén at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

“The Neandertals are our closest fossil relatives and abundant evidence of their lifeways and skeletal remains has been found at many sites across Europe and western Asia,” said Quam, assistant professor of anthropology. “Until modern humans arrived on the scene, it was widely thought that Europe had been populated by a relatively stable Neandertal population for hundreds of thousands of years. Our research suggests otherwise and, in light of these new results, this long-held theory now faces scrutiny.”

Focusing on mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neandertal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain, the research team found some surprising results. When they started looking at the DNA, a clear pattern emerged. Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were older than 50,000 years and individuals from sites in western Asia and the Middle East showed a high degree of genetic variation, on par with what might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. In fact, the amount of genetic variation was similar to what characterizes modern humans as a species. In contrast, Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were younger than 50,000 years show an extremely reduced amount of genetic variation, less even than the present-day population of remote Iceland.

These results suggest that Western European Neandertals went through a demographic crisis, a population bottleneck that severely reduced their numbers, leaving Western Europe largely empty of humans for a period of time. The demographic crisis seems to coincide with a period of extreme cold in Western Europe. Subsequently, this region was repopulated by a small group of individuals from a surrounding area. The geographic origin of this source population is not clear, but it may be possible to pinpoint it further with additional study.

“The fact that Neandertals in Western Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us,” said Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. “This indicates that the Neandertals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought.”

Quam concurs and suggests that this discovery calls for a major rethinking of the idea of cold adaptation in Neandertals.

“At the very least, this tells us that without the aid of material culture or technology, there is a limit to our biological adaptation,” Quam said. “It may very well have been the case that the European Neandertal populations were already demographically stressed when modern humans showed up on the scene.”

The results presented in the study are based entirely on degraded ancient DNA, and the analyses have therefore required advanced laboratory and computational methods. The research team includes statisticians, experts on modern DNA sequencing and paleoanthropologists from Sweden, Denmark, Spain and the United States.

“This is just the latest example of how studies of ancient DNA are providing new insights into an important and previously unknown part of Neandertal history,” Quam said. “Ancient DNA is complementary to anthropological studies focusing on the bony anatomy of the skeleton, and these kinds of results are only possible with ancient DNA studies. It’s exciting to think about what will turn up next.”

In a study published recently by The Journal of Socio-Economics, Yang reports that an aversion to the number 4, combined with a preference for the numbers 6 and 8, may translate into a “surcharge” of as much as 1.4 percent of China’s gross domestic product.

In China, the world’s second-largest economy, superstition plays an important role in the pricing of consumer goods. The number 4 shares the same sound as “death” in Chinese; 6 is a lucky number that represents “smooth”; and the number 8 sounds like the word “prosperity” in Chinese.

It’s not uncommon for a culture to have such preferences, Yang notes: Consider Americans’ aversion to the number 13. The difference is that the Chinese superstition has significant economic implications.

Yang, who grew up in China and travels there several times a year, had made casual observations about the effect of these superstitions in the past. When he set out to test his theory, he hired someone to collect random prices from Chinese shops without telling him what kind of research he was doing. In the end, Yang analyzed more than 11,000 Beijing-area prices of items in five categories: food, electronics and appliances, clothing, real estate and services.

“Through meticulous analysis of the collected data, I conclude that retailers in China could have gained as much as an extra 4.16 percent by manipulating price tag numbers to take advantage of superstitions,” he writes, “which could translate into as much as 1.40 percent of annual GDP in 2007, where these retailer gains are consumer losses.”

Essentially, any time a Chinese retailer changes the price of an item to avoid the number 4, he uses a higher number. The practice leads to higher prices; Yang found that 4 is significantly under-represented and that 8 is significantly over-represented in the final digit of prices.

Previous studies in marketing journals have identified this pattern, but haven’t addressed the winners and losers it creates. “The use of superstitious numbers in pricing and the exploitation of superstition in retail sales is more than a cultural phenomenon,” Yang writes. “Given its ubiquity, the use of superstitious numbers in prices should not be viewed as a mere marketing gimmick either.”

It’s this conclusion that distinguishes Yang’s paper, which was highlighted in the January/Febrary edition of Harvard Business Review.

“Consumers overpay for what they purchase in China in general,” he says. “There’s a lot of profit margin, which means there’s a lot of room for manipulation.”

Yang, whose research primarily focuses on energy and environmental economics, tackled the question of lucky numbers on a lark. He may return to this topic for a future project, though: He’d like to examine consumer purchase patterns as they relate to “lucky” numbers in China.

But the residents were suspicious.

“People would sometimes sit out there with their arms crossed just watching our every move, watching the screens to see what people were picking up and laughing that we were picking up rocks and pottery,” says Savery, a doctoral student at Binghamton.

She laughs at the memory but is quick to point out that this reaction is understandable given that outsiders have been stealing from the country for centuries, from the days of Christopher Columbus to the present, when most of the tourist industry, by far Jamaica’s largest, is largely owned by foreign entities that take most of the profits out of the country.

“That’s where that suspicion comes from,” Savery says. “And you have to take that very seriously.”

To help people understand her motives, Savery invites school children and opens the site to anyone who wants to learn basic archaeology techniques. She hopes that what community members unearth will spark a larger conversation about heritage and help them demand responsible social and economic development through eco-friendly, community-based tourism.

“Archaeologically speaking, Bluefields is like an open frontier because so little work has been done there,” Savery says. “And as development is sort of looming in the background, it’s important to document all we can, but also to assist the community in the negotiations as to what kind of development, what will be developed and how it will develop.”

Partnering with Missouri State University, the University of the West Indies, Northern Caribbean University, several community groups and a host of researchers and developers, Savery deepened her involvement with the community and started surveying estate houses of landowners interested in attracting tourism. One possible outcome is a heritage trail that links historic landscapes with contemporary communities.

“The community is very much involved in not only the process of archaeology, but the development and the design,” she says. “They are a driving force and inspiration in the Bluefields Archaeology Project.”

Savery’s work has earned her a Fulbright scholarship, which will allow her to intern with the Bluefields People’s Community Association and Jamaica National Heritage Trust so she can understand the complex relationship between archaeology and tourism in Jamaica.

“If we can help the community develop natural and cultural resources in such a way that has really wide-spread benefit, they don’t have to sell out to these larger, all-inclusive hotels,” Savery says. “We’re trying to make tourism work for heritage, rather than the other way around.”

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.”

A tiny figurine made out of thread — a former student’s representation of the character Odradek from Franz Kafka’s “The Cares of the Father of the Family” — hangs from one of Pages’ bookshelves. It’s material proof of the way Pages’ students engage with Kafka in his classroom and beyond it.

“I’m astounded by the extent to which they are able to bring to bear critical approaches to representation based on their readings,” he said. “They are inspired by the texts in such a way as to understand how the texts have inspired others.”

Pages, an associate professor, holds a joint appointment in German and Russian Studies as well as Comparative Literature. He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities this year. The funding gave him some space to consider his work at the intersection of teaching and undergraduate research.

“As Paul de Man once said, ‘All scholarship has to be eminently teachable in order to be scholarship,’ Pages said. “The two have to be intertwined. They have to inform one another. Good teaching comes from research.”

Kafka, who was born in 1883 and died in 1924, lived an extraordinary life during extraordinary times and interacted with the important literary figures of his day in Prague. The author, who may be best known for his novella “The Metamorphosis,” never published a novel during his lifetime.

Pages is interested in Kafka’s continuing influence not only on literary scholarship but on musicians, visual artists, writers and others. His undergraduate seminar, Kafka and His Readers, considers that cultural influence as well as how the author’s biography influences the way he is studied.

Kafka’s language is very clean, Pages said. A short piece of his prose can be understood without translation by students after just a few semesters of German instruction. That’s exciting to him as a teacher because his students can often access the original texts in their research.

Even those who read Kafka in English seem excited by what they find. “That’s one of the interesting things about Kafka,” Pages said. “An American audience feels it has access to him without going through a translator, even though he is translated. He’s an author that undergraduates still recognize.”

Pages said undergraduates are often uncomfortable as they move from consuming knowledge to producing knowledge, in part because they haven’t been introduced to the way research is conducted in the humanities. He helps them to see how critics construct arguments and to understand the background that scholars such as Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida bring to Kafka’s work.

Pages is developing a website that will serve as a resource for students in his classroom; it may also lead to a version of the class being taught online. “I wasn’t taught in a virtual environment,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean this class shouldn’t be taught in a virtual environment.”

Schleuse, who received a fellowship from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, spent the summer of 2010 in Italy and London, where he researched archival and musical sources for Vecchi.

Schleuse’s critical edition of Vecchi’s “Selva di varia ricreatione,” a large collection of many kinds of pieces, will be published later this year by A-R Editions in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance. It will be the first time the music of Vecchi’s “Forest of Varied Recreations” is available to performers and scholars in a modern edition (the original was published in 1590).

He is writing a second book with a working title of “The Poetics of Recreation: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi,” which he plans to complete in 2012. The monograph will combine a survey of Vecchi’s career and music with a study of his unusual conception of the music-book.

“Much of Vecchi’s music has been neglected or misunderstood,” Schleuse said. “Today we are accustomed to thinking of musical performers and audiences as separate individuals, but when a group of singers themselves are the audience, it changes the way they interact with the musical and poetic texts, and calls for a different kind of analysis.”

Schleuse, who is also a composer and performer, is also interested in bringing early music to today’s audiences.  Last year he gave a talk as part of the Music Department’s Friedheim Lecture-Recital Series on Il lamento d’Arianna (Ariadne’s Lament), the only surviving music from 17th-century composer Claudio Monteverdi’s second opera. Schleuse’s lecture was illustrated by examples played by members of the Binghamton Baroque Ensemble (a group he co-directs with Professor Andrew Walkling), and concluded with a complete performance of the work.

“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.”

“One day a member gave me this book about a drummer who got interested in world drumming through meeting other people and studying their drumming culture,” Burns says. “That’s when I first saw the name ethnomusicology, and all the interests I had just clicked into one word that meant world culture, travel and music.”

Now a professor of ethnomusicology at Binghamton, Burns produces and distributes CDs of music from African countries such as Ghana, Togo, and Benin. His field work creates a positive image of Africa through music.

“What I want to do is bring traditional music out in a way that people can appreciate,” he says. “A lot of people have negative associations with Africa that they pick up from the media, whereas music portrays the best side of every culture.”

Since 2000, Burns has completed 15 CD projects.  One of the discs, from a dance-drumming group in Ghana titled “The soup which is sweet draws the chairs in closer,” is available on Amazon.

Burns also records music videos.  He says his most remarkable experience occurred while filming a religious ceremony. “The dancers wanted to perform a miracle by saying a prayer, while someone stuck their hands into a pot of boiling palm oil,” he says. “They asked me if I wanted to participate. On the video you see me afraid to do it, and then the priest grabs my hands and puts them into the oil. It felt like I stuck my hands in a bath of ice!”

He quit his job to learn Korean and earn a doctorate. His interests refined from history to literature to culture, focusing on the premodern period. But cultural studies often are limited to the upper class, Pettid says: “I was always interested in the nuts and bolts.”

He wanted to look at all strata of society and chose to do so through food. By telling how people ate, he has been able to show more clearly how people lived. Although there have been Korean cookbooks before, his Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History (Reaktion Books, 2008) is probably the first English work on the history of Korean food. (It does include 20 recipes.)

Pettid disproved widely held beliefs about the “timelessness” of classic dishes. Even kimch’i, Korea’s signature pickled cabbage, underwent dramatic transformation when, in the 17th century, peppers first were imported from the Americas.

The book has made Pettid the “go-to” guy for commentary about Korean cuisine, quoted everywhere from The New York Times to Wikipedia. A Korean publication featured a chapter by Pettid about how to globalize Korean cuisine. His recommendation? Serve traditional meals — “lots of items, lots of flavors” — just as they would be found in Korea. No fusion cuisine; no Westernizing.

Pettid’s studies have moved from food preparers to food suppliers. He now is researching Korea’s agrarian history. He also recently co-edited Women and Confucianism in Choson Korea, which will be published by SUNY Press in November 2011.

Goodman decided to update the translation for Shantideva’s “Siksasamuccaya” (“Training Anthology”), allowing Buddhists and scholars to have a better understanding of many important components of one of the world’s largest religions.

“With more and more Americans becoming interested in Buddhism, it is important to have authentic texts available,” Goodman says. “And with trade so important to our economy, understanding Asian cultures is more important than it has ever been.”

Goodman, an associate professor of philosophy and Asian and Asian American studies, came to Binghamton in 2003 after earning his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He is the author of the book “Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics.”

His work translating the Shantideva has taken him twice to the Central University for Tibetan Studies in India, where in 2010 he spent about three months working mainly with the Venerable Tashi Tsering on the revised translation. Goodman’s relationships with Tibetan scholars make his work unique; the authors of the original translation, published in the 1920s, did not have such access.

Once Goodman’s book is completed in 2013, it will serve many purposes. Scholars will be able to see how Buddhism developed historically, as Shantideva’s work quotes texts that don’t exist in other forms, or the original Sanskrit has been lost. Goodman says he hopes the book will help Buddhists live a more kind and compassionate life and help people understand Buddhist culture’s influence on many Asian countries.

“When we translate the text correctly,” Goodman says, “we see that Shantideva was a more sophisticated ethical and philosophical theorist than we gave him credit for.”

In 2001, Rodrigo Nunez, director of Duoc’s professional acting program, came to Binghamton to pursue a master’s degree. The relationship quickly transcended that of student/teacher to that of colleagues eager to collaborate.

“He found my approach to actor training intriguing and exciting and wanted to find a way to introduce it to his faculty and students,” Kremer says. “My first trip to Santiago was to give a two-week workshop to his faculty. His university came up with the funds to send a group of English-speaking Chilean acting students here.”

Together they created a scene festival with one-on-one pairings of Duoc and Binghamton students. “It was a great success,” Kremer says, adding that seven more such festivals have been arranged since 2001.

There also have been full-scale joint productions of West Side Story, directed at Binghamton by both Nunez and Kremer, and The Threepenny Opera, directed first in Santiago and then in Binghamton by Binghamton’s Anne Brady and Duoc’s Sebastian Dahm. A third joint production is planned for the 2012-2013 season.

Next up for Kremer: Directing Glengarry Glen Ross this summer in Duoc’s new professional theater for its alumni in downtown Santiago.

Besides having a translator available, Kremer will have collated two copies of the play, one in Spanish and one in English, so that he can, shall we say, always be on the same page as his actors. He’ll also be relying on facial expressions and body language.

“You can watch actors,” Kremer says, “and it doesn’t matter what language they’re speaking. You can tell if they are telling the truth.”

“It is mind-boggling with the level of communication we have today that this type of caricature of Africa exists,” she says.

Africaresource.com, an educational website, features content that raises awareness of conversations taking place in African communities on topics ranging from feminism to economic development.

“My goal is for this type of information — and access to this information — to become available for everyone,” she says. “If you don’t understand the generosity of the spirit that Africans have to offer, then you don’t understand the society.”

Nzegwu, former chair of the Africana Studies Department, joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1990. A native of Nigeria, Nzegwu received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Ife before earning a doctorate from the University of Ottawa in Canada.

Africaresource.com has served more than 10 million visitors from more than 90 countries since its first posts in 1999. Today, more than 110,000 people visit it every week. The site received a “Best of the Web” citation from PBS, and has been cited by other media for its expertise. Five online scholarly journals and a building in Endicott, N.Y., called the Africa House, support the effort.

“It began to grow in ways we never envisioned,” Nzegwu says.

Nzegwu’s latest project focuses on U.N. Dispute Tribunal Judge Nkemdilim Amelia Izuako, whose rulings against those in power have led to attempts on her life. Nzegwu has traveled to Kenya to study Izuako’s moral framework, in order to understand why she is willing to risk her life to uphold the law.

“This African woman has done tremendous things but no one knows about her,” says Nzegwu, who plans to include Izuako’s story in a book on African women achievers.

Her monograph The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port, published in 2009 by the University of Washington Press, explores how maritime trade saturated Mocha, a major player in Yemen’s coffee trade.

Research has carried the globe-trotting researcher from Yemeni villages that “look like they’re falling off” hillsides to Dutch and British libraries that house detailed records of European trade ventures. “I use a lot of different sources,” says Um, who has been praised for her innovative merging of archival and architectural materials to recount the glory days of a city whose commercial center now lies mostly in ruins.

She is returning to those sources for her latest research into commercial exchange and merchant tribute in Yemen from 1600 to 1750. Essentially, local rulers expected gifts before granting trade privileges. “Gift exchange was much more than a simple exercise of good manners or polite gestures,” Um writes. “Rather gifts were serious and necessary aspects of merchant protocol.”

Um says that, although other scholars have acknowledged the importance of gift-giving, “they often cast this preoccupation … as examples of the insatiable appetite that fickle oriental despots had for trinkets.” She, however, has seen the opposite. “I’ve been intrigued by how totally prosaic most of the gifts were,” Um says, listing trade items such as firearms, textiles and porcelains.

Although her current research focuses on the Dutch and British East India Companies, Um stresses the Europeans “were minor players in Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade whose importance has been blown out of proportion.” They were, however, better record keepers, carefully documenting each gift given.

Climate change and its anticipated health effects vary by place, with broad regional impacts and disproportionate risks among various populations. Emerging diseases are among the most far-reaching consequences of global warming. In the decades ahead, we need to develop a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. That will require partnerships with health professionals and policymakers.

What’s an emerging disease?
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, or ERIDs, are infectious diseases that have increased in incidence or geographic range, recently moved into new host populations, recently been discovered or are caused by newly evolved pathogens. Noteworthy also is their timeline; diseases have been classified as ERIDs if their incidence in humans has increased since the 1970s or threatens to increase in the near future.

ERIDs have received a lot of public attention due in part to recent pandemics and how rapidly they are diffusing globally. For example, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was the first pandemic to emerge in the 21st century. Following its initial diagnosis in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, it spread to more than 30 countries within six months. About 8,450 cases were diagnosed globally, with a 10 percent fatality rate.

Within a couple of years, concerns about SARS were overshadowed by the emergence of the H1N1 virus, which originated in Mexico and the southern United States in April 2009, and then spread to more than 206 countries in less than seven months. As of November 2009, H1N1 — also called swine flu — had infected 526,060 people, killing at least 6,770.

Commenting on this worrisome trend, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant noted that we might be entering the age of pandemics. This certainly may be the case since more than 30 new diseases have emerged or expanded their geographic territories during the last three decades. Some, such as the drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and tuberculosis, pose significant global health risks.

The climate change connection
Scientists are beginning to piece together the causal links between ERIDs and global warming. The underlying factors, the routes and the pathways of disease transmission, however, are complicated with potentially long latency periods. Alongside climate change and environmental disturbances, the underlying factors include the changing demographics of communities and human behaviors (urbanization, migration, risky behaviors); increasing global trade and travel; changes in industrial and agricultural practices (including food production, processing and distribution); the breakdown of public health measures in many countries; the overuse of antibiotics; and the development of resistant or new strains of disease pathogens.

More recently, some diseases have re-emerged because of bioterrorism (as in the case of anthrax), conflicts in world regions and persistent inequities among populations. Human susceptibility to ERIDs has also increased due to the aging population (longer life expectancies) and the adverse and synergistic effects of HIV/AIDs and other autoimmune diseases.

The spatial variability of climate change, the regional differentiation of its impacts and the rapid and intense spread of emergent diseases all suggest the need for a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. Such a framework will require a deeper level of understanding of the biophysical changes that are occurring in these places, the demographic characteristics of those areas and the range of social, institutional, technological and behavioral adaptations that are — or, in some cases, are not — being put in place to alleviate these challenges.

Like the anticipated changes in climate, the potential for loss of life as a result of exposure to these hazards varies. Some places, particularly low-lying coastal areas and floodplains, urban heat islands and disease vector border regions, are more likely to bear the brunt of these hazards than others. Societal impact will also vary from place to place, with disparate risks among different populations depending on pre-existing disadvantages such as racial/ethnic disparities and income inequalities.

Within the United States, for example, Hurricane Katrina uncovered the deep divide by race and class in New Orleans. Our study of the hazardous exposures arising from this 2005 catastrophic meteorological event showed that the most vulnerable populations living in the maximum inundated areas were minorities and low-income populations. This study confirmed that the biophysical attributes, socio-demographic characteristics and the local context of communities are key drivers of vulnerability when evaluating the health impact of climate change.

A recent call for public health preparedness for global climate change published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine underscores the need to formally incorporate a place-based approach in developing health strategies for these environmental threats. A focus on place, the authors argue, would emphasize the local nature of both human exposures and responses to these hazards. A spatial perspective would bring attention to the local areas that would be most affected by these events. The geographically based approach will showcase the strengths of the local people, enabling the collective participation of local stakeholders in environmental health planning to promote sustainable and livable communities.

Why look to geographers for answers?
Geographers bring numerous tools to the table to work with public health professionals and policy makers. Geographers can offer a number of analytical approaches and technologies for disease surveillance and intervention, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, geostatistics and cartography.

One such example can be drawn from the landscape epidemiology approach, which relies on geospatial methodologies to delineate the geographic territories of transmissible diseases. Using this approach, the ecological niche of a transmissible disease can be delineated by overlaying the spatial distribution of the pathogenic agent with the distribution of the disease vectors and host populations. Within this distribution range, one can determine the biophysical and social conditions that favor the survival and transmission of the disease pathogen. This approach has been used to monitor vector-borne ERIDs such as the West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the United States.

Another example of geography in action can be seen in the fight against malaria, another ERID. The disease is now endemic in 109 countries, with nearly 3.3 billion people at risk, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, poverty, armed regional conflicts and the scourge of HIV/AIDS have all contributed to the persistence of this disease. These conditions, along with increasing globalization and international migration, have heightened concerns about its potential emergence or re-emergence in temperate regions. In the United States, for example, malaria is now the most commonly imported disease, with more than 1,000 cases reported each year. With the anticipated changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity, there’s a real possibility of re-emergence in the United States.

The use of geospatial models to predict malaria risk and transmission has been quite informative, with projected net increases in the global at-risk population to 8 billion by 2080. Though these models have been criticized for using coarse spatial resolutions and overly emphasizing temperature changes, the results provide a valuable starting point for countries to develop public health strategies. Along with the development of the predictive models, geographic fieldwork and site-specific activities have been beneficial in assessing the social, economic and behavioral factors that influence disease transmission, and the treatment or preventive practices used in high-risk communities.

One such study was recently undertaken in a low-income community in Sierra Leone, in which we assessed the prevalence, severity and duration of malaria episodes among 731 residents; their risk factors; knowledge, access and use of reliable treatment options; and the efficacy and benefits of alternative therapies. Chloroquine was still the most widely used therapy for malaria in this community despite the growing resistance of p falciparum parasites to this drug. The research findings provided a useful context for developing a health intervention program for the community. Educating residents about the environmental risk sources of malaria, in addition to promoting the use of bednets, homeopathic methods and artemisia-based therapies, offers hope for reducing the malaria burden in this community.

These efforts demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagements to develop and advance meaningful and sustainable approaches for dealing with environmental risks and health challenges that affect the livelihoods of residents in vulnerable communities.  As the threats from global climate change continue to emerge, the need for scientific networks that bolster such initiatives and collaborative partnerships across disciplines such as geography and public health becomes even greater.

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The Age of Pandemics by Larry Brilliant

The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009

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.”

Murray, a professor of sociology at Binghamton University, is the author of a new book, Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid, published by Cornell University Press. The volume will be part of a trilogy of books about Johannesburg, a project that Murray conceived in the mid-1990s after the end of South Africa’s formal system of racial segregation.

“Even though everything was changing, with everyone in the country having the right to vote and one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, at the same time it was visible that little had changed,” Murray recalled. “The enormous differentiation between rich and poor was still there. Those who lived well continued their lives as if nothing had changed.”
He set out to explore questions of urban space and to understand why and how the affluent were able to insulate themselves from having to make any real sacrifice.

Johannesburg is the dominant city in South Africa, and Murray felt it was the best place to measure and see how much had changed after Apartheid. Forty percent of the population is unemployed, he notes, but it’s also a city of incredible wealth, with luxurious hotels, opulent shopping malls and massive new developments of gated communities.

Murray said he identified three new spatial forms in Johannesburg:

• Office citadels, huge cities within cities that companies have created for their workers, complete with amenities ranging from salons to doctors’ offices.

• Large enclosed shopping malls, offering movie theaters and restaurants as well as shops.

• Gated communities, ranging from huge private homes arranged around golf courses to clusters of townhouses.

All of these spaces are made possible by private security, Murray said. There are 10 times as many private security officers as publically employed police in Johannesburg. And residents are constantly under surveillance; the city has the second-largest number of closed-circuit TVs in the world, behind London.

The flip side of this tremendous wealth is the city’s “outcast ghettos,” where some 3.5 million people live in informal settlements that lack basic services such as water and electricity.

Murray thinks of the three books in his series as Johannesburg red, Johannesburg blue and Johannesburg yellow.

“The colors metaphor is a reference to my thinking that all cities are actually more than a single place,” Murray explained. “They are multiple colliding places that require different views to unpack their complexity and heterogeneity.”

Taming the Disorderly City is Johannesburg blue, with a focus on the struggle between urban poor, urban planning and real estate capitalism.

Johannesburg red, to be titled City of Extremes, focuses on the built environment, including the architecture and real estate of the city. One major theme in this volume will be South Africa’s interest in Western styles, evoking places in Europe and California.

Johannesburg yellow – the final book – will address the city in the popular imagination. Its working title, Panic City, seems apt when Murray talks about the ways in which Johannesburg’s elite have made their homes and even their cars into fortresses.

Just one example? A device like a flamethrower intended for drivers who fear being carjacked.

For better or worse, Murray sees cities like Johannesburg as the model for the future. A third to half of downtown is under the control of so-called business-improvement districts, essentially privatizing public space and forcing out the poor.

“Americans have a tendency to look at cities in Africa or Asia as lagging behind or lacking certain features,” Murray said. “I think it’s the opposite. The template for the future is in Africa or Asia: an entrepreneurial or private city that has leapt beyond the U.S.”

By using explosive devices to send shock waves through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle and by employing emerging technologies to record and “image” the Earth using the wave, the project could help scientists around the globe find subsurface faults and better understand how tectonic forces act to build mountains. This knowledge will ultimately enable scientists to predict earthquakes more reliably.

“I often joke that when we talk about blind faults, we are talking only abou t faults that we as geologists can’t see,” Wu said. “But we may be able to image them with seismic waves; and once we can locate small earthquakes at crustal depth precisely, we can determine whether these faults are active.”

Seismic waves produced by earthquakes, explosions or controlled vibrating sources are the primary method of underground exploration. They will also be the key in Wu’s project to unlock the mysteries of mountain building and tectonic activity that gives rise to earthquakes.

By sending waves through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle with controlled explosions, and by sensing, recording and tracking waves from natural seismic events, Wu’s team intends to develop a virtual three-dimensional image of the crust and upper mantle under Taiwan. Wu compares the process to that used by doctors to “see” cancerous tumors deep within the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Seismic shock waves bend inside the Earth because of changes in speed as they move through material of different density, composition and temperature. Abrupt changes in direction occur at the boundary between two layers, affording researchers an opportunity to see what lies deep beneath the surface.

A professor of geophysics at Binghamton, Wu has spent a significant portion of his research career doing fieldwork in the eastern hemisphere. Having worked in Tibet and New Zealand, among other regions, he is now concentrating on Taiwan. The small island nation, shaken by about 15,000 detectable earthquakes a year, provides an extraordinary laboratory for Wu’s current project, known as TAIGER (pronounced “tiger”), Taiwan Integrated Geodynamics Research.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and headed up by Wu, the five-year, $8 million TAIGER project involves nine investigators from six U.S. institutes, one from a Canadian university and scientists from five Taiwanese universities, as well as Taiwan’s Institute of Earth Sciences and Academia Sinica, supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

The project calls for geophysical experiments that will help researchers determine the locations, factor the scale and impact, and obtain multi-scale images of the forces at work within the Earth’s crust and upper mantle during manmade and natural seismic events.

By providing a better understanding of the forces involved in mountain building and the earthquakes to which that process gives rise, Wu hopes that TAIGER might also give scientists a better idea about which major faults to monitor for the purpose of early warning for earthquakes. For some potentially hazardous faults in Taiwan, a warning of 40 seconds or more for a metropolitan area may be possible.

“Some people might ask the question, ‘What is the use of this information if we will only know 40 seconds before the earthquake?’

“Maybe this would not be so useful for city dwellers who face a congested highway as they try to evacuate the city,” Wu said. “But on the other hand, even in cities, high-speed transport could be stopped, people could evacuate tall buildings and many businesses, particularly in the semi-conductor industry, which is very big in Taiwan, could have enough time to shut everything off. If you have tens of minutes, you can do all kinds of things. And if we could eventually predict within a few days of an earthquake, then we could effectively prevent loss of life.”