Jennifer Boum Make, Rutgers University Press

Alex Brostoff, The MIT Press

Jamall Calloway, Columbia University Press

Daniel Cano, Trayecto

Alexandra DeCandia, et.al., Molecular Ecology

Paul Elie, MacMillan Publishers

Tania Gentic, Durham: Duke University Press

Bradley Gorski, Cornell University Press

Nathan Hensley, Chicago University Press

“”
Kelsey Alejandra Moore, The Public Historian

Rosemary Ndubuizu, The University of North Carolina Press

Felicitas Opwis, Leiden: Brill Publisher

Manus Patten, Harvard University Press

Robert Patterson, Oxford University Press

Cristina Sanz, John Wiley & Sons

Danielle Wiggins, University of Pennsylvania Press

is a professor in the Department of History and the founding director of Georgetown’s . He studies 19th-century U.S. history with a focus on the history of slavery and emancipation.

Rothman is the author of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South and Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, which won the American Civil War Museum’s book prize . 

Here, he shares the books that have shaped his understanding of the past and why they matter today. 

What is a book that everyone should read?

Everyone — or at least everyone in the Georgetown community — should read The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns. 

Swarns is the New York Times journalist who covered Georgetown’s ten years ago and traced the emergence of the and their developing relationship with the university and the Jesuits. In 2024, she published a book that explores the long, tangled history of the Jesuits, Georgetown and the enslaved families owned and sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838. As a historian of slavery at Georgetown, I’d be remiss not to recommend it. 

What is a book that you revisit every year?

Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot is a perennial in my classes. 

I assign it to everyone from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students. Trouillot opens our eyes to how the stories we tell about history come to be, and what gets lost, neglected, omitted and suppressed in the process. It’s especially timely now for obvious reasons. At John Carroll Weekend in Philadelphia in 2025, and I led a walking tour of Independence National Historical Park that ended at an outdoor exhibit about slavery at the President’s House. The current administration has since ordered the National Park Service , and the exhibit remains subject to an between city and federal officials. Talk about silencing the past.   

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

That’s a tough one because there are so many but I will say Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, even though its subtitle is a little cringey today. The book was published in 1948, and I first read it in high school in the 1980s. Hofstadter was a brilliant historian and an elegant writer. His profiles of the leading political figures in American history are complex, ironic and counterintuitive. He made me want to study — I mean really study — history. 

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

Probably the novel Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, which actually came out in 2023. It tells the story of a family trying to get by in a country that is descending into authoritarianism, with people being kidnapped and disappeared off the street by the government. Like I said, it’s fiction.

What is the perfect book for the beach (or curled up in front of a fire, or down time, or…)?

Moby Dick, of course!

In a quiet office in the , the past is anything but distant for , a professor of environmental history. History is a guide to understanding what lies ahead and helps find potential solutions for one of the world’s most pressing and urgent challenges: climate change.

That challenge, in his view, is a question of survival, equity and resilience.

“The world has warmed by about one and a half degrees Celsius since the late 19th century,” he said, noting that at this threshold, “certain things start to break down, like the coral reefs, globally.”

The question of why has become central to his work and reveals a key insight: climate change does not produce uniform outcomes. Some communities suffer, while others adapt or even thrive, depending on social and economic conditions.

In his research, Degroot, who is an expert on climate change, space exploration and existential risk, does not approach the past in isolation. 

“I’m a very unusual historian in that my research into the past is shaped by my perception of what matters now and in the future,” he said.

Responses to Climate Change

Growing up in a small town near Niagara Falls in Canada where “there are more cows than people,” Degroot said he was fascinated with anything that could take him far away.

That curiosity became a way of expanding beyond the limits of place. At first it took the form of science — astronomy, weather systems, the atmosphere — but eventually found a home in history. Today, as an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University ������̳ of Arts & Sciences, Degroot’s work sits at the intersection of climate, society, space and time. 

He was recently honored with the ������̳’s Stevens Faculty Excellence Award for excellent research, effective mentoring of student research and innovation in a social sciences field.

Degroot discovered his interest in environmental history when he was studying for his master’s degree at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. 

“I had this idea that I could find out how the climate changed even before the rise of greenhouse gas emissions and industrialization,” Degroot said. “That I could perhaps discover how different populations responded to changes in the climate, and use their responses to try to figure out where we might be headed in the future.”

His doctoral research at York University in Toronto focused on the Little Ice Age, a period of natural climatic cooling between the 13th and 19th centuries. Degroot studied the Dutch Republic, a society that “seemed to prosper and grow as the climate cooled,” he said.

“Many people suffered, but at a fundamental level, their society got stronger,” Degroot said. “It grew, it prospered.”

That research ultimately led to his first book, , published in 2018. In the book, that being more connected to the rest of the world could help a society be more resilient in the face of climate change. 

“The Dutch prospered not because their republic was rich but because much of its wealth derived from activities that benefited from climate change,” Degroot wrote “Today, we can learn from the republic by strengthening social safety nets, by investing in technologies that exploit or reduce climate change and, more broadly, by thinking proactively about how we will adapt to the warmer planet of our future.

Degroot believes that the more you mitigate climate change, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the less you have to adapt. “The less you mitigate, the more you have to adapt, until you can’t adapt,” he said. “You can think of mitigation as being significantly more important than adaptation — but adaptation still matters, and history might be able to teach us how to adapt.”

To Degroot, history offers a clear lesson: inequality can weaken resilience. Communities marked by inequality are more vulnerable to environmental shocks while more equitable societies are better equipped to respond. That’s partly because it’s poor people who are often most at risk of flooding, for example, or high food prices caused by extreme weather. 

“A society that thrives as climate changes probably can’t have extremely high levels of socioeconomic inequality,” Degroot said. “I think that it can make a society brittle in many different ways.”

Existential Risks

Degroot’s research now extends beyond Earth. 

In his new book, , he explores how space research has revealed risks that .

One example begins with dust storms on Mars. Scientists studying these storms discovered that atmospheric particles could cool a planet, which is an insight that eventually contributed to the theory of nuclear winter.

In another case, early space missions raised fears that dangerous microbes could travel between Earth and other worlds, imperilling environments on a vast scale. Yet, in spite of these concerns, “the actual systems that were developed to avoid contamination were full of problems, some of which were understood at the time, and some that escaped detection” Degroot said.

His research on space allowed him to identify a recurring pattern: intense pressure and competition between countries has led to existential risks throughout history, risks that threaten the survival of humanity. 

During the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, both countries fought for the court of public opinion. 

“Faced with this kind of constant competitive pressure, people prioritized known risks to missions or astronauts over unknown risks to planetary environments,” Degroot said.

It reminds him of the modern competition between corporations and world powers over artificial intelligence. 

“History shows us how dangerous that kind of competition can be when it’s applied to areas that can create existential risks,” Degroot said. “I think a policy solution there is to try to reduce that competition as much as possible.”

The Joy of Discovery

Despite the weight of his research subject matters, Degroot finds joy in discovery.

At Georgetown, that excitement carries into the classroom, where he encourages students to think differently about history. He also explores new ways of storytelling, including digital projects that bring climate history to broader audiences.

Degroot is the writer, narrator, and producer of “,” a multimedia project on the history and future of climate change. The series draws on research in archaeology, history, climatology and geology to explain how climate change has influenced humanity. With dramatic storytelling, it targets the widest-possible audience. 

For Degroot, part of the value of history lies in its ability to inform what comes next. Environmental history, in that sense, is about the future that is still being shaped.

“We’ve got 300,000 years of human history,” he said. “And I think this deep legacy of our ancestors is so under-realized as a way of helping us to understand where we might be headed in the future. The world today is, of course, very different from the world of the past, but people, I think, inherently are kind of still the same. My goal is to write histories that can help us understand how to avoid risks, how to thrive in spite of them, or even because of them going forwards.”

What happens to a society when it becomes more driven by data than by understanding? What if we can optimize everything but no longer grasp what we’re optimizing for? How do we preserve depth in a world addicted to immediacy, speed and efficiency? 

The humanities ask what our systems quietly leave unexamined. As algorithms make decisions, technology reshapes communication and global challenges grow more complex, the central questions of the humanities — about meaning, identity, language, ethics and power — are no longer abstract. They become urgent. 

Therefore, whether you are skeptical about the value of the humanities in your curriculum or already drawn to them but unsure about their relevance, here are some points to rethink them not as an impractical domain but as a vital component of our intellectual and ethical grounding.

Fluency in Ambiguity 

The humanities push us beyond ideological simplifications to interrogate the complexities beneath seemingly straightforward facts. 

While some technical fields justifiably prioritize predictability and short-term, quantifiable outcomes within the constraints of time, measurement or implementation, the humanities teach you to grapple with thorny problems that resist closure and require you to hold competing perspectives simultaneously.

That habit of mind — linking ideas across differences while working through contradiction and uncertainty — is powerful training in mental agility and intellectual resilience. The job market itself is a moving target. You will likely have multiple careers in your life, many of which do not yet exist. A vocational degree may carry you into your first role. A humanities formation equips you to learn, unlearn and relearn –– to reorient yourself and keep going when the map runs out.

Thinking in Context 

Delving into literature, visual arts, history and philosophy trains you to read and look at the world with the attention and depth required for critical interpretation, recognizing that meaning is never fixed. It shifts across cultures, historical moments and social conditions.

When you think in context, you ask not only what something is, but where it comes from, how it came to be and what assumptions it carries. Behind a data point, historians see the decades and even centuries of cultural tensions and transformations that led to it. Literary scholars’ way of reading a text uncovers layers of messages, voices and situations that reconfigure how that text speaks through space and time. 

This humanistic capacity to identify and problematize the “why” behind the “what” distinguishes the thoughtful exercise of judgment from mere task execution.

The Power of Stories 

Employers tend to respond more to narratives of intellectual development than to degrees alone.  A humanities formation helps you tell your own compelling story.

We make sense of the world through stories by transforming lived experience into shared meaning. Thanks to the humanities, we realize how profoundly these narrative structures inform thinking. We also recognize that stories are never neutral, and no single story ever captures the whole truth.

The narrative imagination does not stop at detecting patterns and correlations. As it organizes scattered events and memories, it animates them. It ascribes intention, emotional depth and moral weight. It speculates, reframes and even questions reality, opening space for alternative possibilities.

The ability to cultivate imagination as a generative force is a highly valued asset in any field, especially in the age of AI. As machines increasingly output text, images and analysis, what remains most distinctly human is not the mere production of content, but the creative thinking that can give it direction and value and determine which stories deserve to be told. 

An Ethical Compass

As repositories of how humans have wrestled with vulnerability, purpose and hope across times and cultures, the humanities invite us to reflect on what kind of life and of society are worth building.

Our increasingly polarized world intensifies divisions and deepens isolation, often relocating human interaction to virtual domains of simulation and abstraction. The humanities counter this trend by foregrounding the interpersonal and the collective. They remind us that we are constitutively relational: meaning, identities, rights and duties are co-created with others.

When we step into the fictional world of a novel or the defamiliarizing world of a foreign language, we learn to inhabit perspectives that expand and challenge our own. We become part of a dialogue with otherness and grow into more engaged listeners –– prerequisites for empathy and emotional intelligence.

With automation fast taking over evaluative processes and aspects of human agency, this recognition of our interconnectedness and shared responsibility stands out as critical. The humanities return the ethical compass to our hands for the choices that shape human lives.

Why All This Matters 

Far from entrenching ourselves in tradition, to study the humanities today means drawing on centuries of ideas, experiences and cultural expressions to develop the intellectual and emotional toolkit needed for present and future challenges. 

When you look at the underlying demands of leadership, policy-making and innovation, you find the skills nurtured by a humanities education already in action. In other words, studying the humanities does not remove you from the world of work. It prepares you to enter it with cultural awareness, insight and creativity. These forms of nuanced, contextual and reflective understanding are among the qualities that technology can least easily reproduce or replace.

So, if you still ask “What can I do with the humanities?,” my answer is “Anything!”

Yet, ultimately, the humanities transcend career pursuits. They engage you in an open-ended exploration of the human condition: how societies organize themselves, how ideas are born and evolve, how emotions influence perception, relationships and action, and how we confront our fragility and finitude.

Perhaps, then, a more compelling question might be “What can I become through the humanities?,” to which I’d readily reply, “Someone who, besides filling a professional role, is also an inquisitive, inventive and caring participant in the world.”

Nicoletta Pireddu is the director of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and a professor in the Department of Italian Studies and the Global and Comparative Literature Program.

And that cutting off — the Latin word caedere, the root of “decision,” means “to cut” — can be hard.

When I face a decision, I try to approach it in three stages, and during each, I pose to myself a series of questions and challenges to help me proceed as soundly as possible. Like the rest of us, I can make poor decisions; I can skip stages, questions and challenges, either intentionally or unwittingly; and I can be dissatisfied with the outcome of a decision, even when I make a “good” decision, that is, one that adheres to the following process. 

Stage One: The Conditions

No decision appears out of thin air. The circumstances of our lives and our worlds converge, and at some point out come the scissors to start cutting. I find that attending to three conditions underlying a decision is especially worthwhile.

How do I want to spend the time I have to make this decision? You may be the sort to want decisions on and off the table as quickly as possible, or the sort who waits until the very last moment to make a decision. Most of the time, you probably join me in being somewhere in the middle.

What is important to me? This is a question of values, only some of which will come into play in a given decision. Choosing between a cappuccino and a macchiato prioritizes the value of taste and pays no mind to the value of what one thinks it means to live a good life. Choosing between career paths should do the opposite. The most complex decisions we make will touch on a variety of our values. We do well to identify those values and weigh them, not with the goal of producing a ranked list, but in order to discover what is of great, and even greatest, importance to us.

What are my options? You own only so many shirts, and you know only so many people who could be a potential spouse or friend. The options before you in almost any decision are limited, and it is advantageous to identify as many of them as is reasonably possible. No, you cannot meet every person in the world before locking arms with one, but you can look at every shirt in your closet. When you are making a decision, devote time to unearthing the options before you, including options that might be hidden at first. Even though you are told to choose between  x and y, perhaps there is a z yet to be revealed or created.

Stage Two: The Making

Once the conditions become clear — and, note, they can shift throughout the decision-making process — I move from asking questions to presenting myself with some challenges. Two of them are vital.

Have some conversations. I try to find the Goldilocks zone between the extremes of crowd-sourcing my decisions (everyone but me has a say) and making them in total isolation (no one but me has a say). The sorts of voices I need to hear to empower me to make decisions in my life, especially major decisions, are varied: friends, family, mentors, wisdom figures and experts are just a handful of them. The two voices that I always strain hardest to hear are my own and God’s. Neither comes to me in an auditory event, but both, if I give them time, well up in unmistakably clear ways.

Execute a decision. I can articulate this challenge even more briefly: cut! Many people find choosing a way forward, and as a result, leaving any number of ways behind, the single most challenging aspect of making a decision. They have good reason to think this way, especially when a decision is of a “one way” nature, that is, I cannot undo it without great cost, time or effort. When I come to the moment of execution, I try to remind myself that I have taken seriously the conditions surrounding and listened carefully during the conversations informing my decision. And then I cut, sometimes nervously.

Stage Three: The Aftermath

All done, right? If we are talking about deciding between a turkey or tuna sandwich, yes, but for the more consequential decisions, no. A challenge and a question remain.

Live into the decision. Once I make a decision, especially an important one, I try to put it behind me and follow out its implications without immediately second-guessing myself. If my decision is to run a marathon, then I need to start training for those 26.2 grueling miles. Muscle soreness after the first few practice runs does not mean I decided poorly. If my decision is to become a physician, then I need to start studying my natural sciences. Earning a C on an organic chemistry exam does not mean I made a mistake. The fruits of an executed decision often require our work and our patience to mature. 

Do I want to reconsider my decision? There are, of course, decisions whose hoped-for fruits will not blossom, no matter how much work, no matter how much patience you devote to living into them. At some point, you might have to reconsider a decision, even a “one way” decision, and return to the beginning of this process. When is the time to do that? Identifying that moment is more art than science, but there is a guiding question I have for myself when I suspect that I am approaching that moment: Is my decision integrating the various parts of me to help me become someone of depth and meaning, or is it disintegrating those parts and making me superficial and shallow? If I am walking the path of disintegration, it is time to find another path. 

Fine Tune Your Decision-Making

“Measure twice, cut once.” 

This maxim of tailors and carpenters ought to be the mantra of our decision making too. Measuring carefully, that is, following a process of decision making like the one I have articulated here, does not guarantee that each of our cuts, each of our decisions, will have perfect results. No process can do that. These three stages, though, reveal the component parts of decision making and allow you to fine-tune them so that you make the decisions of your day, of your life, with greater awareness and purpose.

Fr. Peter Folan, S.J. is an assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.

Her award-winning book, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice, examines how racial identity, neighborhood and school environments can shape young people’s understanding of themselves and their place in society. 

Shedd shares the books that have influenced her teaching and continue to inspire her.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins (1990) 

This book is a North Star for those seeking a model of how to use their unique biographies to generate and test foundational theoretical perspectives — “intersectionality” is Collins’ concept — and it is a perfect example of the “sociological imagination” we seek to ignite in our sociology students. Similar to the literary strategy of another shero of mine, Toni Morrison, Collins moves an often marginalized group, Black women, to the center of rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. Everyone could benefit from the insights and analyses she offers in this work.

What is a book that you revisit every year?

The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights by Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham (1995)

This book has been with me for over twenty-five years, usually on my shelf at home. As an undergrad, I was a junior year domestic exchange student at Spelman ������̳, and we were allowed to take classes at other schools in the Atlanta University Center Consortium. I was one of only two female students in Davis’ Race and Law class at Morehouse ������̳, and this course changed my academic trajectory. 

Davis, who retired after 40 years on the faculty of that all-male institution, would call on me first every class session in his booming baritone: “Miss Smith ������̳, give me the facts of [insert Supreme Court case here]!” He gave me a taste of the pressures and rewards that I now know first-year law students feel while taking Constitutional Law, and it might’ve been a big reason why I decided to pursue a doctorate in sociology instead. I now teach (sans the Socratic Method); this book’s coverage of landmark Supreme Court Civil Rights Cases is both informative and inspirational in our enduring struggle for equality in this country. 

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

The Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois (1899) 

This is the book I was assigned my first year of graduate school that modeled how I could merge narratives, statistics and maps to present a fuller picture of sociological phenomena (e.g., my focus on adolescents’ educational experiences and contact with the criminal legal system). Although Du Bois has been installed to his proper place in the sociological canon in recent years, he researched and wrote this book while simultaneously navigating: 1.) immense disrespect in academia as the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University who wasn’t given a real professorship until he went to Atlanta University; 2.) scrutiny and skepticism from the Black residents of Philadelphia’s sixth ward whose lives he sought to examine empirically; and 3.) the resultant hesitation from his benefactors to accept Du Bois’ explanations of the challenges faced by this population because he connected them to an inequitable environment instead of the respondents’ personal failings.

What is the best new book that you’ve read in the past year?

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fannone Jeffers (2021)

I finally read the book this past year. It is a monumental debut work of fiction — it runs around 800 pages — by a poet who deftly weaves the life and words of Du Bois into the history, culture and experiences of one American family across centuries. Jeffers that she initially planned for this work to be short beach-read, but the stories just kept coming to her. I see this novel as a beautiful parallel to the non-fiction work I describe above, which is the closest I can get to a beach-read, without guilt. It centers on the central protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is educated at a fictionalized HBCU similar to Spelman ������̳ and learns about her family and American society in her quest to become a historian. 

What books are you looking forward to reading?

Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster by Yuki Kato (2025) and The Undesirable Many: Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital by Rosemary Ndubuizu (2025)

I am super excited about new books by two of my colleagues in the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences. Gardens of Hope is the final book we’ll read in my Urban Inequality seminar this fall, and I can’t wait to discuss it with my students. It’s an account that centers the agency and collective efficacy shown by New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This narrative of hope and resilience is just the tone I need for closing out a semester of intense focus on unequal cities. 

The second book, The Undesirable Many, examines Black women’s tenant activism in DC via a Black feminist materialism framework that I have a feeling will reveal itself as the next iteration of scholarship that furthers the intellectual work of our academic forebears — Collins and Du Bois — mentioned above. It just all comes together. 

(All photos by Oxana Ware Photography)

His trumpet teacher, a retired member of the United States Marine Band, taught Desinord how to learn scales by providing the first few and then challenging him to figure out the rest based on patterns he saw. It became a game for Desinord.

“I would sit and I would write out everything,” he said. “He only asked me to do the next scale for the next week, but I did all of them. From that point, I was hooked.”

Desinord is now the one teaching others.

This fall, the he joined the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences as a and an assistant professor of music in the Department of Performing Arts. He will spend his first year researching before teaching music theory courses starting next fall. Desinord’s current research focuses on harmony and gospel music. 

“Basically, I look at how harmony is used as a communicative tool,” he said. “How it transmits emotions and feelings within a song but also within church services.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the ������̳ excites Desinord. He hopes to collaborate with colleagues in philosophy, linguistics and Black studies, among other fields.

“I look forward to Richard taking advantage of the interconnections within the department and across the university,” said , a professor of music and chair of the Department of Performing Arts. “He is poised to produce impactful scholarship that reflects the generosity and collaboration of colleagues here. I also look forward to seeing him develop new intellectual spaces that invite students into his expertise and curiosity, particularly in how he thinks about music theory and race.”

Sources of Inspiration

Desinord was born and raised in DC to Haitian immigrant parents who he calls his “greatest source of inspiration.”

“They exemplified hard work, perseverance and selflessness in pursuit of a better life for our family,” he said.

Midway through elementary school, Desinord and his family moved to Prince George’s County in Maryland, and he graduated from the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at Suitland High School. 

It was during his time there that the teaching spark first emerged. By senior year, Desinord’s music theory teacher had given him opportunities to tutor his peers and lead lessons.

“Those experiences revealed how rewarding it could be to help others engage with and understand new material, and they solidified my interest in education as a vocation,” Desinord said. 

Teachers have always had a big impact on him, and Desinord marveled at the influence his teachers had over students. 

“I was really inspired by teachers who really cared about what we were doing, who really emphasized core parts of teaching but also were just really human,” he said. “I understood that I was growing in their presence.”

Prior to Georgetown, Desinord served as an assistant professor of music theory at Michigan State University and a lecturer of music theory at Howard University. He also taught music at a public middle school in DC for three years. 

Desinord has a Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, an master’s in music theory from Penn State University and a Bachelor of Music in music education from Howard University. 

At Georgetown, Desinord said he plans to teach courses on Black music, including analysis and the history of gospel and R&B. 

“That ‘aha moment,’ to watch somebody learn something — I don’t care if it’s me doing it or anyone else — that moment is really inspiring to see,” Desinord said.

Academic Role Models

There were moments during Desinord’s academic journey where he doubted himself. 

While flipping through a copy of Music Theory Spectrum, a leading journal in the field of music theory, as an undergraduate, Desinord thought to himself, “I cannot do this. I’m not intelligent enough to do this.”

He explains that part of the reason he felt that way is because he did not see many Black people studying music theory nor many academics in the field studying it from a Black perspective. Desinord’s professors urged him to keep going.

“I was fortunate to take classes with Black professors at Howard University in the field who not only modeled exceptional teaching but also encouraged and nurtured my research interests,” he said. “Seeing them excel in a space where representation is still limited was profoundly inspiring and affirmed my desire to contribute to the discipline in my own way.”

, Desinord wrote for Music Theory Spectrum, and his scholarly work has also appeared in the , and . 

“I understand the difficulty of looking at a field and seeing how few numbers there are of people like you and how daunting that could feel,” Desinord said. “A piece of advice is to not let the scarcity of people like you keep you from doing something. It just takes one.”

“The stadium exploded,” she said in American Sign Language through an interpreter. “The stadium went wild, and everything else just disappeared.” 

Team USA won the match, 4-0, and took home gold – the first of four gold medals that Offreda would win with the , which has Offreda also won gold at the 2013 Deaflympics and at the Deaf World Cup in 2012 and 2016. She officially retired from competitive soccer in 2016.

Offreda was “born with a soccer ball” at her feet and started playing soccer around age 3, she said. Sports have always been a part of her story.

This fall, Offreda joined the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences as an assistant teaching professor in the disability studies program. She currently teaches Introduction to Disability Studies and Deaf Culture and Literature. Next semester, she will be teaching Disability in Sports, which will “challenge traditional narratives of ability” and explore how access and representation transforms communities, she said. 

Prior to Georgetown, Offreda served as the head women’s soccer coach, senior woman administrator and Title IX coordinator for ’s athletic department, as well as an and a middle school English teacher. 

“We are extremely lucky to have Professor Offreda join Georgetown and the disability studies program,” said , who is the director of the program. “She brings a wealth of not only scholarly and lived knowledge, but also leadership.”

Creating an Accessible Space

The disability studies program at Georgetown is one of the first of its kind.

The program was launched in 2017 by English professor and has grown to include a minor, a graduate certificate and now a major. This fall marks the first opportunity for students to declare a major in disability studies. 

In addition to the program, Georgetown’s Disability Cultural Center (DCC) opened on the ground floor of the New South building in 2023, which is an accessible space for disability cultural events and meetings. 

Georgetown’s commitment to the community and investment in disability studies attracted Offreda to the university, she said. 

“I was drawn to the opportunity to contribute to a space where disability is approached as a form of knowledge and culture, not simply as a medical condition,” she said. 

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field, as much connected to the humanities as it is to sports. The discipline also greatly overlaps with the Jesuit commitment to cura personalis, meaning “care of the whole person,” and faith that does justice, said Reynolds. 

“At the core of disability studies is an appreciation that we are complex, embodied creatures that rely upon one another to flourish,” Reynolds said. “Without education, faith and justice, it’s hard to see how one could flourish. In so many ways, [disability studies] and Georgetown are a perfect fit.”

A Love of Storytelling

Offreda is a storyteller, and she incorporates this love for storytelling into her classes. 

Going from teaching, to coaching and then to working within athletic administration, Offreda sees athletics and teaching as being connected. For Offreda, athletics are simply an extension of the art of storytelling. 

Sports are a “language, a form of expression and an expression of identity,” she said. “When I’m on the field, when I’m coaching on the field, I feel like I’m bringing my true self.” 

Offreda’s father was born in Italy and introduced soccer to her at a young age. He told that he saw her potential in the sport by the time Offreda was 5 or 6 years old.

“The way she ran, the way she moved, anybody that knew soccer, you could tell, she had the potential to be something, to be somebody,” he said.

Soccer allowed Offreda to travel internationally, and in 2016, Offreda was named one of the top deaf soccer players in the world. She was “thrilled,” but the moment was bittersweet, as she knew she was about to retire. When she got the news, the first thing she thought about was her gratitude for the people she had met on her athletic journey. She also thought of her dad, who taught Offreda “so much about resilience and never giving up.”

Offreda encourages students to consider the power of narrative and how language shapes our understanding of the world and of each other. In her classes, students explore the narratives and perspectives of people who have disabilities and come from a wide range of backgrounds. 

Her students consider how their definition of disability changes over time, and many credit these narratives for expanding and shifting their perspective. Storytelling becomes a way to “redefine disability,” Offreda said. She believes sharing stories is a way of bridging the gap to understanding. 

It connects people and brings them together, Offreda said.

Chemistry Professor Sarah Stoll is transforming the tiniest structures into big discoveries. As the principal investigator of the Stoll Research Group, she leads undergraduate and graduate students in better understanding magnetic nanoparticles, leading to advances in everything from targeted MRI contrast agents that are safer for individuals with kidney complications to new ways of storing and manipulating magnetic data. It has garnered her everything from a National Science Foundation CAREER Award — which recognizes exceptional potential in early-career faculty members — to being named a Sonneborn Chair for Interdisciplinary Collaboration at Georgetown. Here, she shares some of the books found in her office in Regents Hall that shaped her identity, calling and worldview.

What is a book that everyone should read?

Susan Solomon’s Solvable, which provides the history of six environmental challenges. At a time where there is so much “outrage fatigue,” this book has the urgency but not the alarm of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is optimistic, identifies successes and is perfect for anyone who asks, “How did we get here, and how can we solve something as big as climate change?”

What is a book that inspired your academic journey?

I was a first-year student when I read Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. It was significant in that it marked the moment that I knew being a chemist was part of my identity. Chemistry was the lens through which I learned about the world.

What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

It’d either be Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? or Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. The former is a great book about science communication and as someone who spends time carefully selecting my words, it made me pause to consider the role of nonverbal communication. The latter is a nonscientific text that expanded my understanding of what it means to be human.

What is a book you revisit every year?

I frequently return to The Second Law by Henry Bent. In addition to the importance that entropy has to chemistry and the environment, each chapter has a short history of an important scientist who contributed to thermodynamics, often in their own words, allowing Bent to not only humanize an abstract subject but unveil the observations and theories that over time form the cathedral we call thermodynamics.

#SHELFIE

If you’ve never had a class with Duncan Wu, you may know him as the professor boisterously cheering from the stage every time one of his students’ names is called during commencement.

His enthusiasm is genuine, perhaps buoyed by the reality that despite earning two degrees from Oxford University and teaching at Georgetown for the past 17 years, a part of Wu is surprised that he went to — let alone is now teaching at — university. Or perhaps from knowing how one teacher can change the trajectory of your life.

“It was difficult being a half-Chinese boy in England’s Home Counties, where Chinese people were expected to run laundries and little else,” said Wu, who is the Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies. “Whether for that reason or some other, I managed to win the bad opinion of all my teachers except for one: Alan Burke.”

Wu met Burke when he was 16. Wu’s education performance up to that point could best be described as floundering or, more optimistically, as uninspired. His parents — and most of his teachers — assumed that his educational pursuits would end with high school.

Burke foresaw something else.

“He was the first teacher in my life who thought that I wasn’t an idiot and I deserved some serious attention,” Wu said. “I’m surprised at the number of students, even at Georgetown, who are in the same situation. They’ve never really had serious attention from a literature teacher, and the moment they get it, it makes them different people.”

For Wu, it transformed him into a lover of modern poetry.

“From that point onwards, I was absolutely hooked,” he said. “I couldn’t put poetry down.”

It also made him someone who wanted to study literature at Oxford.

Wu remembers telling his teachers — provocatively, he admits — that he was applying to the prestigious school. They weren’t just dismayed; in fact, they let Wu know in no uncertain terms he didn’t belong at Oxford, informing him that if he applied, they’d write the university telling them all the reasons he shouldn’t be admitted.

“They were true to their word,” Wu said. “But nonetheless, I did apply to Oxford, and the bad reference worked to my advantage. The Oxford professors were almost more interested in me as a result and gave me a place.”

Wu graduated three years later and got a job at the BBC making documentaries about the arts before returning to Oxford to pursue a Ph.D.

To this day, Wu remains a voracious reader — among his current favorite authors are Cormac McCarthy and Philip Larkin — and an equally prolific scholar. Over the years, he has edited and authored at least 26 books and a slew of academic articles about William Wordsworth and the Romantic period, among others. Recently, he added a new descriptor: poet.

“I stopped writing poetry when I was 18,” he said. “I started again about six years ago now, and everything I wrote then was terrible. It was enough to make you want to give up. But I kept going because there were certain things I had inside me that I wanted to say and that I felt I could only say this way.”

Last summer, his first book of poems, Origin Myths, was published by Shearsman Books. In it, he writes about life along the banks of Scott’s Run, which feeds the Potomac in northern Virginia, with a fictional dog named Dakota. There, he explores traces of the Indigenous people who once flourished on the same land.

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, poetry editor and book reviewer (and Georgetown archivist) Amanda Holmes, writes that his poems “demonstrate the power and beauty inherent in classical structures” and that they remind her of the “raw, unsentimental and guttural language of Ted Hughes, which first turned me onto poetry.”

In many ways, the poems are an extension of Wu’s love of America and of being an American.

“I love this country” he said. “That is not a superficial claim. It’s a claim that goes deep inside me, and it’s something that is important to me. I think that if you are an American in a serious way, you should be aware of the history of the country, and should regard yourself as an extension of it.”

The poems are also an extension of growing older. Wu is now in his 60s. He cannot ignore news of people his age “just sort of dying” every day.

In Tintern Abbey, one of his more famous poems about aging and revisiting a meaningful place years later, Wordsworth writes about the pleasures that:

The gift Burke gave Wu nearly half a century ago was a love of poetry and a vision of his life as something expansive rather than circumscribed. It is those acts of encouragement that Wu strives to pass on to his students, whether in the classroom or from the commencement stage. And it is the individual moments — small and large, remembered and unremembered — to which Wu is now memorializing with just the right words and structures.