Accomplished

“I’m really interested in politics, particularly the relationship between borders and the political process. I’m interested in when and why people participate in elections, voter turnout and how this participation affects policy processes.” 

"At the risk of seeming flippant," she writes in Slavery’s Metropolis, "only in New Orleans could the paradigmatic site of slavery be a party. The way that the systematic exploitation of enslaved people and their labor was foundational to the creation and growth of the city — that story has to be told alongside the powerful story that’s being told at Congo Square."

“As I teach my students at Thayer, having a good idea that’s slightly better than existing technology usually is not enough,” Fossum says. “You have to have something that is better in a very compelling way before it can displace an incumbent technology.”

"Jodie Mack is an experimental animator [combining] the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres. Her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning…The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life."

“When I was first studying science, I found it really exciting that you could predict certain events. Think of the universe as speaking a language, or making music. There’s always the question of what kind of song is being played. That song is the motion of galaxies, and physicists try to figure out what that song is.”

“One of the lovely things about being here is being able to teach everything from ‘French 1’ to ‘French 70,’ to courses in the master’s program in comparative literature. I always inject the lyric and the poetic in my French courses. And I discover new things when I’m working through texts with my students.”