Peter Farquharson, a junior majoring in art history, saw more than 300 murals during his two weeks in Buenos Aries and Quito. While he originally intended to major in political science, he maintains his interest in politics through finding political themes in artforms like muralism.

He planned the trip to South America on his own, including reaching out to artists and mapping out the neighborhoods to view the murals, says Pamela Smart, associate professor of art history.

Some days, he met artists and they provided a direct explanation of the message behind their own murals.

“Other days it was just people who live in the area,” Farquharson says. “Because that’s an important factor to get in the research. They’re the audience to some extent.”

He sought to compare modern murals to those from several previous decades to see just how artists, their work and the messages they want to convey have changed.

“I’m also finding that the means of visual representation, in some ways, are exactly the same,” he says. “There’s a sense that artists are evoking the past of the medium, but in about the other half of the cases, it’s ‘No, we want to do something completely different.’”

Farquharson categorized the murals under two complex umbrellas: art as a political and social statement, and art as a form of creative self-expression. Many of the murals he documented showcase vibrant colors, sharp contrasts between light and dark as well as powerful outlines.

The contrast between the social and political murals guided his trips between the two countries. Argentina’s murals centered more on the political, especially the last 100 years and the legacy of the Peróns, the massively influential first family of Argentina during the late 1940s and 1950s. The murals he studied in Ecuador, meanwhile, focused more on the cultural identity of the country, centering on the recognition of indigenous peoples and defining the country’s pre-colonial legacy.

Farquharson’s language skills came in handy during the trip; he said he made it a point to converse with artists in Spanish whenever possible. On campus, the Long Island native acts as an English language conversation partner. He is also a teaching assistant for an inter-disciplinary course titled Materials Matter.

Smart said Farquharson was her first choice to run the student discussion sections and assist in teaching the course.

“He stood out in the class last semester, such that he was the person I thought would make a great undergraduate TA,” Smart says. “There are several elements there. One was the quality of his work, his work ethic… and the degree of his interest and engagement.”

Farquharson maintained that interest even when he was forced to rearrange his plans due to safety concerns while traveling for this research with the Summer Scholars and Artists program.

“If you have an idea and there’s something you want to do, there isn’t a way that you can’t manage,” Farquharson says. “There’s enough resources on campus and people who want you to succeed, there’s no reason you can’t take your own idea and make it a reality.”

Mclauchlin, a rising senior at Binghamton University, grabbed the attention of Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biological sciences, not only with his scientific background but also with his art portfolio.

With guidance from Hua, Mclauchlin created an interactive art exhibit with 20 pieces ranging from a painting of tadpoles to a papier-mâché organism. The project explored art’s influence on perception of research.

“It was a combination of two studies actually,” says Mclauchlin, an environmental studies and graphic design major. “We not only tested for perception of research, but also for comprehension and retention of information in the exhibit.”

Perception of research was measured by a pre-quiz and follow-up quiz. In total there were around 80 participants from both scientific and non-scientific backgrounds. Participants without scientific backgrounds had a 20 percent increase in research interest after attending the exhibit, and scientifically inclined participants had a 10 percent increase.

On the other hand, Hua’s ecology students experienced no change in perception of scientific research. The students even decreased in retention of information in a follow-up quiz one week later. Most students retained information better after reading scientific abstracts instead.

“This suggests that art can facilitate scientific appreciation and is most influential for individuals with non-scientific backgrounds,” Mclauchlin says. “I can see this information being used for science museums, exhibits or by scientists who want to communicate their research to the public.”

Mclauchlin aims to create a larger, more cohesive exhibit in the future, with more diversified participants in the study. For the learning and retention aspect of the exhibit, he plans to administer more follow-up quizzes to the ecology classes, in order to analyze memory at varying times of the day and amounts of time after the exhibit.

Understanding the influence of different mediums could be important for the future of science communication, especially in a time where there is a divide between the scientific and non-scientific world.

Vanessa Wuerthner, a doctoral student in Hua’s lab, says Mclauchlin brings something to the lab that no other student does: He turns research from the lab into art. “Ben puts in an immense amount of time and effort in making art pieces that he then brings together at art shows that are open to the public,” she says. “All of his artistic efforts allow the lab to really bridge the gap between the science community and the local community.”

Mclauchlin received a Summer Scholars and Artists fellowship to conduct research on marine debris and plastics in Binghamton this summer. He spends his time outside of the lab volunteering in the Nature Preserve, attending Ballroom Dance Club and participating in the Hinman Production Company, a student-run theater group.

Mclauchlin says he tries to balance his workload each semester with half science courses and half art courses.

Hua says she was impressed by Mclauchlin’s range of skills. “Ben is very creative, and his willingness to help others makes him an asset to the lab,” Hua says. “It could be 1 a.m., and he’ll be the first person to offer help to another student in the lab.”

Reno, a cultural anthropologist, doesn’t find solutions to all the waste humans create — 220 million tons a year in America, according to the Duke University Center for Sustainability and Commerce. (That’s enough to cover 82,000 football fields 6 feet deep.)

Reno studies humans’ relationship to waste, the economics and politics — even empires — that waste creates, and the almost religious significance to how we treat waste. He focused on anthropology and psychology as an undergraduate at Cornell University before earning a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. He also spent a year as a paper picker at a landfill. His job? To make sure trash didn’t blow off the landfill, an acolyte on the altar of excess.

Reno pauses outside the sewage treatment plant and sniffs. “Hydrogen sulfide,” he diagnoses. “Not too bad, actually.”

He describes the opening to the book he recently completed:

His boss at a Detroit-area landfill, Bob, described his worst day. A co-worker fell head-first into a vat of human sludge and couldn’t get out; Bob dived in to save him. Firefighters and EMTs didn’t want to drive up on the waste pile.

Reno says Bob worked up to his armpits in human excrement, even as emergency workers later checked into hospitals because they had touched poop. The co-worker died. As Bob straightened up, he saw the line of trucks waiting to dump more sludge. And behind them an endless trail of trucks looking to dump solid waste.

“The garbage,” Bob said, “just keeps coming.”

We keep trash in a special place, treat it a special way. Even just a couple of seconds at the top of the garbage can is enough to turn something perfectly useful into garbage — a zombie-like quality of undeath that mocks the cycle of life-death-decay-regeneration that many religions embody.

“We separate two things that throughout history have been combined,” Reno muses. “Cemeteries and waste.”

“But we paradoxically have turned waste into something sacred,” he adds. “When we recycle plastic bottles, we feel good. It’s almost a spiritual thing.

“The reality of recycling is a lot more dirty and frightening,” he continues, because many recyclables are shipped to countries willing to pay near-slave wages to turn refuse into resource.

“Josh is an early pioneer in this,” says Robin Nagle, a New York University anthropologist and author of Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, which is based on her experience as a garbage collector. “If we don’t understand the genesis of garbage, we can’t provide an effective solution.”

Nagle already uses Reno’s dissertation in her research and classes, and looks forward to the added authority of his book, to be titled Waste Away: Living and Working with a Northern American Landfill. “There’s a promise implied in messages of how we live,” she says. “It’s all very grounded in consumption and things and stuff.”

Marilynn Desmond brings a feminist focus to the literature and history of the High Middle Ages. Now the Binghamton University literary scholar will study a medieval manuscript at the Vatican library with support from a prestigious Rome Prize.

“Being able to work at the Vatican for six months is a privilege,” says Desmond, a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature. “It’ll be exciting to be able to spend as much time as I want to work with the manuscript and get to know it.”

The fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is one of about 30 awarded annually to individuals who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Desmond is one of only two award recipients in medieval studies this year.

“The research possibilities are tremendous,” says Desmond, noting she’ll have access to a number of well-regarded libraries in Rome. “And it is a very special intellectual community, with opportunities to establish connections with people well outside your field.”

Desmond, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1985 after earning her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, serves as director of the University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She’s the author of several books on the reception of classical Latin texts in medieval France and England.

Her latest project is a book to be titled The Fall of Troy and the Origins of Europe: Homer and the Medieval West. It addresses the way the Trojan War was depicted and understood in medieval European vernacular cultures. “The Greek text of the Homeric epics was unavailable to the medieval Latin West,” Desmond notes. “The narrative of the Fall of Troy was transmitted only through Latin texts.”

Desmond believes a French manuscript known as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Ancient History Until Cesar) served as the critical connection in the transmission of the Troy narrative from the ancient world to western cultures that lacked Greek literacy. She has studied this manuscript at the British Library for the past decade. Most of the 400-page manuscript does not exist in a modern edition.

During her upcoming research trip to Rome, Desmond will have access to a manuscript of the Roman de Troie produced in Italy around 1300. This artifact, now housed at the Vatican, was among the source materials for the Histoire ancienne. Since this extensively illustrated manuscript has not been digitized, its visual aspects can only be studied in person.

“The Troy material is everywhere in Western Europe,” she says. “It’s very well represented in Latin materials. And yet, because it’s not based on Homer, the importance of this tradition has generally been overlooked by scholars.”

In our candy-colored digital world, there’s no time for rust. Gadgets from five years ago are worthless to a “new-every-two” culture. And a man working long hours alone in a garage is presumed to harbor grand ambitions of becoming a start-up millionaire.

But on Robinson Street in Binghamton, you can pick up a distinctly analog signal. It emanates from the cramped studio of sculptor Ronald Gonzalez, a Binghamton University faculty member who transforms the detritus of the last century into burned and blackened figures that speak to the 21st century’s values, politics and ideas of beauty.

Step inside, and you’ll see a workbench that will never witness the birth of a shiny, high-tech gizmo. It’s dotted with drips of wax and home to ancient coffee cans bristling with tiny paintbrushes. The jumble of not-yet-art objects stacked against the walls includes a red typewriter, bicycle seats, a deer skull, a rotary phone, broken guitars, a doll-sized bathtub and hopelessly scratched 45s. Standing guard among this trove are completed works, figures with names like “Stitch,” “Bug” and “Stir.”

A slight, soft-spoken man in a black T-shirt, dark jeans and gray sneakers, Gonzalez is perhaps more at home among these curiosities than anywhere else. “I’ve got a great eye for decay,” he says, scanning his treasures. “The more dilapidated something is, the more attracted I am to it.”

Only in Binghamton

Gonzalez, a prolific sculptor and recipient of the 2013 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, has had solo exhibitions at world-class museums such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park near Boston. He has mounted shows at the Spoleto Festival, the Purchase Biennial and in places as far away as Peru and Germany. But his roots bind him to Binghamton, where Gonzalez grew up a bit of a street kid in the 1950s and ’60s.

His mother was religious; his father just the opposite. He was an altar boy who knew how to shoplift. In fact, Gonzalez says, the major dichotomies in his life can all be traced back to his childhood. Contrasts of sex and guilt, rich and poor, God and atheist, imagination and reality, life and death shaped his emotional and psychological outlook.

“I am definitely a TV and telephone kid from the 1950s,” he says. “I am a product of post-World War II existential Binghamton and the Atomic Age.”

Gonzalez was awakened to art through religious statuary stored in the basement of the local church, where he would pretend to be a sculptor. He was intrigued by the idea that someone could use his imagination to manipulate the human form.

Gonzalez went to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City with his mother when he was 12. He got lost and recalls wandering through the exhibits until he came to Michelangelo’s Pietà, which was there on loan from the Vatican. Gonzalez couldn’t see over the people crowding around it, but remembers feeling “a sense of reverence and awe” among the onlookers.

That moment and one other, a few years later, sparked something inside Gonzalez. When he was in his teens, he saw pictures of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. His first thought was of the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which sometimes featured the main character striking that classic pose. But Gonzalez’s second thought (in a moment of boredom) was to look for art books at the library.

He managed to locate a book about Rodin and another about Vincent van Gogh. “I became fascinated with the presence and power of the swirling sea of figures in Rodin’s The Gates of Hell,” Gonzalez says. “I went out and bought a bag of clay that day. I brought it into my bedroom and started making things. I’ve never really stopped.”

It was the late 1960s, but the art books he remembers finding in the public library highlighted figurative sculpture from the 1940s and ’50s. He learned about French sculptor Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, artists often concerned with themes of isolation and anxiety. “There was enough there to get my mind going,” Gonzalez says, a slight smile crossing his lips.

In the mid-1970s, he met Ed Wilson, who taught sculpture at Binghamton University. Gonzalez eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Binghamton, where he returned in 1999 as a faculty member. Today, he says, he sometimes feels “good vibrations” while critiquing student work in his office, which used to be Wilson’s. Though Gonzalez came late to teaching, he values the one-on-one contact with students. “I help them develop a personal language in sculpture,” he says. “I’m trying to turn them into themselves.”

Gonzalez says his own feeling for being an artist and making things, which began as a kid, still lives deep inside him. “It’s like I’m 60 going on 6 in some way,” he says. “That same thud of an idea and impulse I had as a child is something I never let go of. It’s still there, and I’m still making things from what I can find in my immediate environment.”

He has adapted to that environment, especially the wintry grayness of the upstate valley that has been his home all these years. “Geographic location defines identity,” he says. “My work is saturated with time and the moments of my life. I remember the black-and-white Twilight Zone qualities of the Binghamton diners, streets and train station growing up. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was right when she said there is no place like home. But home sickness is not something you get just when you miss home. It is also something you get because you never left.”

Don’t confuse Gonzalez’s strong roots with provincialism, though. He spent time last summer touring the museums and galleries of London and has made other pilgrimages abroad. “New perspectives are always healthy, even for a self-proclaimed homebody,” he says. “When you stay in one place your whole life, time and space take on a tremendous weight. There is no place like home — and no place like the rest of the world.”

The creative process

A new chapter in Gonzalez’s lifelong project on the personification of things might originate with something like an air filter from a car or a gas mask. He has a special fondness for objects that were designed to communicate and that are now useless. A telephone or speaker, for instance, could become the head of a new figure.

Gonzalez generally begins with a welded metal armature, almost a template, with legs and arms. He wires objects onto this base, starting with the item or items that will form the “head.” “From there, I try to create a persona, an identity for the figure,” he says.

He fills journals with possible titles for sculptures, and so sometimes he has a name in mind right from the start. “Stitch” features footballs with the stitching as a scar; several change purses were transformed into a piece called “Tabernacle,” suggesting an internalized sacred space.

Often the source material can be identified immediately, but other figures challenge the casual observer to look more carefully. The head of a piece titled “Stir” was made from stirrups you’d use to ride a horse, but they’re obscured by the sculpture’s insect-like quality. Gonzalez wants the objects to be recognizable if you look at them long enough.

At this point in the process, Gonzalez critiques the figure. Some will be thrown away. The ones he likes will be coated with paint, metal filings and carbon from a settling tank. Next, he scuffs the figure with steel wool and coats it with beeswax. For a final touch, he sets fire to the piece in a small courtyard next to his studio. That burns off the extra wax.

“I like the idea of corrosion because of its expressive power,” he says. “Destroying things is part of making things. It’s part of the process. A lot of things fall away.”

Sculpture is a day-in, day-out process for Gonzalez, who estimates that he has produced hundreds and hundreds of figures during the past five years.

While he’s in the studio, he keeps a schedule that bears more than a little resemblance to his father’s day when he was cutting soles for shoes at an Endicott Johnson Corp. factory. “I get up in the morning and come to work, take a break, come back, work,” he says. “At 5, I usually go home, have half a glass of wine and eat something and go to bed early. I think that assembly-line mentality is something I developed early in life. There are days when I think of my studio as a figure factory.”

Gonzalez isn’t a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He says he doesn’t even like jokes. But in the studio, this introvert finds a sense of balance, one that energizes him. “There have been times in my life when things were horrible,” he says, “and I could come to my studio and be resurrected through my work.”

Forging ahead

His time in that studio, which he likens to a part of his body, may be coming to a close. The property, owned by Gonzalez’s elderly mother, recently went up for sale, and he has begun to consider losing the place that has informed the spirit of his work for nearly four decades.

This spring, he plans to create a new work space at his home. He’s carving out room in an outbuilding, tucked into the lush, beautifully landscaped yard where his old dog likes to play. Gonzalez expects the studio move to be a difficult transition, but he has grown accustomed to working through challenges.

There are the challenges common to all sculptors: where to store the work that’s not on display, how to transcend small studio spaces, buying a pickup truck that’s big enough to haul pieces to shows.

And there are the challenges more particularly his own: the paucity of Atomic Age objects available at flea markets and garage sales these days, chief among them. Younger generations often don’t value older things, he says, and at the same time eBay has given people a different way to make money on antiques.

“I’ve done things the hardest way possible,” Gonzalez says. “I work by myself. I make everything by hand. I’ve never been very strategic.”

Art carries a huge risk, he notes. It’s not just a lack of money or a traditional career trajectory. It’s hard to live through rejection. “Artists work out of a need for self-expression, not a need for recognition,” he says, possibly echoing conversations he has had with himself over the years.

Only a small sliver of artists achieve fame or even real recognition, Gonzalez says. And even those with tremendous ability may not get the attention of the art world. He draws a comparison that few artists would be likely to make: Artists toiling in obscurity are like Jimmy Bivens, a talented heavyweight boxer who never managed to get a title fight.

Gonzalez sees 21st-century digital culture as a colorful, hypnotic place in which a confusing visual experience is presented as reality. “It’s a kind of mummified world now,” he says. “There’s a loss there.”

He’s determined to keep sending out his unique analog distress signal and hopes his blackened minions will stand their ground against the electronic tidal wave. After all, he says,  “I am from the world of mud.”

It’s the downside of the medium — films are made for profit. “If Hollywood is going to invest X millions of dollars, it has to appeal to everybody, which means it doesn’t appeal to anybody,” said Wall, an assistant professor of cinema and art history at Binghamton University.

That sounds like what his latest research interest — Theodor Adorno — might say. Adorno, about whom Wall is writing a book, was a composer and neo-Marxist social thinker of the Franklin School who turned his attention to popular media.

“The sheer idiocy of a mass product created especially for you assumes the character of a ghastly necessity,” Adorno wrote. “Individual needs have been so ruthlessly eliminated from the product that they have to be involved like magic formulae to prevent the customer from becoming aware of the murderous ritual of which he is the victim.”

Wall argues with that view in Theodor Adorno and Film Theory: The Fingerprint of Spirit. He looks at four films, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man and The Big Lebowski, to suggest that film, while an industrial product, can be art in its own right.

Heavy stuff for a guy who’s as interested in Cary Grant rom-coms as he is in films of the Weimar Republic, which evolved into the film noir that still fascinates him (Kiss Me Deadly is his favorite film, at least today), and influenced modern filmmakers such as Quentin Tarentino and Steven Spielberg.

Wonder about that? Watch 1922’s Nosferatu, Wall said. See how it uses light and shadow to tell the story. See how it plays with the idea of the living and the dead. See how it comments on Jews and anti-Semitism in Germany, given the vampire turns into a pile of gold and physically resembles Germany’s ethnic Jews.

Watch The Maltese Falcon or Kiss Me Deadly. Same techniques. You’ll find them in Raiders of the Lost Ark and throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

What were the filmmakers trying to say? And in what social and political context were they saying it? That’s as much fun as the roller coaster modern film can be.

Now consider the need for profit and the context. A typical multiplex film costs $100 million to make and distribute. Social commentary is ditched in favor of commercial appeal, which is why Wall scrambles for a pen when told of The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, a sub-$100,000 film that used its Internet fan base to fund both production and distribution, skipping the traditional route.

That’s what Wall took with him when he watched one recent blockbuster: The Dark Knight Rises. Director Christopher Nolan made the crew watch The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film commissioned by the Algierian government after its revolt from France. It portrays both sides of the conflict as sympathetic characters in an exercise, Wall said, of “political schizophrenia.”

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all.

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.”

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.”

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.