November 9, 2022Ramapo Represents at the Student Conference on United States Affairs!

Professor of Political Science Jeremy Teigen was invited to be a Co-Chair at the Student Conference on US Affairs, or “SCUSA.” Ramapo also sent two student delegates, Matthew Wisneski and Hannah Scroggins (pictured here). The event, hosted by the United States Military Academy at West Point, took place November 2-5, 2022. Around 180 students, half of them cadets at West Point and the other half being civilian delegates from colleges and universities from all over the country, assembled and were grouped into working teams to develop foreign policy briefs on various international challenges facing the US. Co-Chairs’ jobs included helping the student groups organize themselves, debate options, and eventually guide students to write and present a policy brief. The keynote speaker this year was United States Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield and this event’s theme was “American Foreign Policy in an Era of Polarized Politics and Revisionist Powers.”

Categories: Events, Faculty News, Student News

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September 28, 2022Hugh Sheedy's Design Flaws Due Out in November

Advance praise for Hugh Sheedy’s (Literature) Design Flaw: Stories (University of Chicago Press) recently appeared in Publisher’s Weekly:

“Sheehy (The Invisibles) delivers a dark and dazzling collection pocked with surface tension and an undercurrent of menace. The bewitching title story chronicles a troubled married couple who adopt a ‘designer animal,’ part monkey and part cat, who is soon accused of mutilating neighborhood animals. The son in “Amontillado” laments his aging mother’s declining mental agility while attending the funeral of a childhood bully. A man in ‘Demonology, or Gratitude’ takes in a hard-partying woman, falls in love with her, then watches her self-destruct from abusing various drugs. The good Samaritan driver in ‘First Responder’ seeks only to help an increasingly menacing hitchhiker he meets at a gas station, but winds up getting so much more than he expected. Closing out the collection is the thoughtful ‘Modern Wonders,’ about a computer interface that accesses users’ memories and shows them uncomfortable truths about themselves. Artfully imagined and written with a distinctly devilish edge, these beguiling yarns plumb the depths of humanity and explore how human behavior can be twisted and modified by science. Often murky and mysterious, with some only a few pages long, Sheehy’s curious tales never fail to enchant and entertain.”

Categories: Faculty News

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September 28, 2022John Gronbeck-Tedesco Publishes Operation Pedro Pan

Congratulations to John Gronbeck-Tedesco  (American Studies) whose new book Operation Pedro Pan: The Migration of Unaccompanied Children from Castro’s Cuba (Potomac Books) was published in August 2022.

Operation Pedro Pan explores the extraordinary undertaking by the Miami Catholic Diocese, federal and state offices, child welfare agencies, and anti-Castro Cubans to bring more than fourteen thousand unaccompanied children to the United States during the Cold War. Operation Pedro Pan was the colloquial name for the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program, which began under government largesse in February 1961. Children without immediate family support in the United States—some 8,300 minors—received group and foster care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations as young people were dispersed throughout the country.

Categories: Faculty News

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September 28, 2022Todd Barnes's Shakespearean Charity and the Perils of Redemptive Performance Wins Accolades

Congratulations to Todd Barnes (Literature), whose recent book, Shakespearean Charity and the Perils of Redemptive Performance (Cambridge, 2020) was included as one of ten works included in their “This Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies,” published by the Shakespeare Survey.

The author of the year’s review, Jane Kingsley-Smith, notes that the book, “which examines the phenomenon of the TV-documentary-about-underprivileged-students-being-transformed-by-their-experience-of-Shakespeare. . . resonates with much larger questions. When we as Shakespeare scholars, teachers, readers, and theatregoers, think about Shakespeare as being ‘good for you,’ for whom do we mean exactly? What does it mean to give Shakespeare as a ‘gift’ to students and what do we expect in return?. . . Barnes’s central argument is that embracing a transcendental Shakespeare allows these films to erase cultural and racial differences. ‘Shakespeare’ serves to deflect attention away from the social injustices that create difference, on the individual’s responsibility to ‘redeem’ themselves.

Categories: Faculty News

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September 28, 2022Rebecca Root's Human Rights In Latin American published

This summer, Rebecca Root (Political Science) and Sonia Cardenas published Human Rights In Latin America: A Politics of Transformation (Second Edition) with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Rebecca is using the book in her course this fall, also titled Human Rights in Latin America.

From the publisher: For decades, Latin America has been plagued by civil wars, dictatorships, torture, legacies of colonialism, racism, and inequality. The region has also experienced dramatic—if uneven—human rights improvements, shedding light on the politics of transformation. The accounts of how Latin America’s people have dealt with the persistent threats to their fundamental rights offer lessons for people around the world.

Human Rights in Latin America provides a comprehensive introduction to the human rights issues facing an area that constitutes more than half of the Western Hemisphere. This second edition brings together regional case studies and thematic chapters to explore cutting-edge issues and developments in the field. From historical accounts of abuse to successful transnational campaigns and legal battles, Human Rights in Latin America explores the dynamics underlying a vast range of human rights initiatives. In addition to surveying the roles of the United States, relatives of the disappeared, and truth commissions, Sonia Cardenas and Rebecca Root cover newer ground in addressing the colonial and ideological underpinnings of human rights abuses, emerging campaigns for gender and sexuality rights, and regional dynamics relating to the International Criminal Court.

Engagingly written and fully illustrated, Human Rights in Latin America fills an important niche among human rights and Latin American textbooks. Ample supplementary resources—including discussion questions, interdisciplinary reading lists, filmographies, online resources, internship opportunities, and instructor assignments—make this an especially valuable text for use in human rights courses.

Categories: Faculty News

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September 28, 2022US-China-Taiwan in the Age of Trump and Biden Published

Dean Chen (Political Science) published a new book, US-China-Taiwan in the Age of Trump and Biden: Towards a Nationalist Strategy in July 2022 (Routledge). He describes the book’s content as “Heightened competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) reflects not just a structural transformation in the prevailing international balance of power but also a significant shift in the U.S. strategic lenses from a liberal internationalist perspective toward a U.S.-centric nationalist (or “Jacksonian”) orientation. That stance has driven Washington’s more confrontational approach toward Beijing and a much-bolstered support of Taipei by both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations. Biden’s presidency has partially reverted the multilateralist strategic stance of the pre-Trump era, but strong nationalist forces and hardened China sentiments unleashed by Trump constrain the Biden administration from returning to the pre-Trump U.S.-PRC engagement era. Both Trump and Biden adjusted the US One-China policy to better accommodate elevated U.S.-Taiwan relations, especially with their formal inclusion of President Ronald Reagan’s Six Assurances into the One-China policy description, which previously only included the Taiwan Relations Act and the Three U.S.-PRC Joint Communiqués. That has given the U.S. more elasticity and creativity to deepen Washington’s security, political and economic ties with Taiwan, without abandoning America’s longstanding position on the Taiwan Strait.

Dean notes that “The book’s first chapter is a collaboration between me and a former Ramapo/HGS student Michaela Zabel (class of 2021), who doubled-major in Political Science and International Studies. Her honor thesis which I had the privilege to supervise contributed to some of the theoretical framework discussion used in this book.”  The book was profiled in Politico on August 4, 2022 in their China Watch blog.

Categories: Faculty News

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December 4, 2021Yvette Kisor’s Essay Published

Yvette Kisor’s essay “Children’s Beowulfs for the New Tolkien Generation” appeared in the volume Beowulf as Children’s Literature: Studies in Adaptation for Youth edited by Britt Mize and Bruce Gilchrist and published by University of Toronto Press in December 2021. Her work on this essay was supported by a travel grant from Ramapo College to the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, where she delivered a paper that was an early version of the published essay.

Categories: Faculty News

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November 4, 2021Update from James Hoch

Semi-semi-semi-semi professional soccer player in the over 50 division for the Cornwall Eternos and Professor of Creative Writing, James Hoch has two books forthcoming. Radio Static from Green Linden Press and Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey. The former engages the difficulty of brothers trying to communicate across the expanse of a political and experiential divide. It interrogates language’ as the necessary but insufficient  vehicle for connection and intimacy. The latter completes a trilogy of the decadence and bliss, grace and tumult that is the life of a white boy from Jersey. Masculinity (such as it is) parenthood, the flux that is self thread through the collection like a yellow road through black pine. Of Radio Static, Elizabeth Scnalon, Editor of The American Poetry Review, writes: “I love the only way I can,” writes James Hoch, and that love is woven throughout this excellent treatise on compassion and masculinity. Hoch knows a great deal about the complexities and solace of brotherhood, and in these poems we experience an endangered tenderness—the recognition that another can be both yourself and not yourself at the same time. This willingness to grapple with differences and come away with a connection merits your attention. Pick up the walkie-talkie and you will hear “each calling the other: / You there? You there?” Of Last Pawn Shop, poet Matt Donovan comments:  This is an astonishing, beautiful, and utterly unforgettable book, packed with honed and deeply moving poems that drop “lead sinkers in the gray bay of self” as a means of interrogating, among so many other things, grief, privilege, fatherhood, the solace and failures of art, the many ways in which we wound each other, and the inexhaustible desires “we lug our flooded selves toward.” The twins arrive around the holidays.

Categories: Faculty News

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