A copy of the poem “Monologue of a Tree Line” by Franz Hodjak, written in the poet’s own handwriting, hangs in the Roger Williams Hall office of Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi.

It was a gift from her dissertation adviser, Peter Stenberg, who had persuaded her to “take a closer look” at Hodjak’s poetry.

“Writing a book about the post-war generation of Romanian-German poets — of which Hodjak is a part — was as close a look as I had imagined at the time,” Cernahoschi says. “But Peter’s gift is a reminder that closeness is subject to the chosen way of seeing.”

The poem:

i always run
in two
opposite directions
at once

while i follow
the path
i remain
immobile

i’ve completely mastered
the art of the dialectic

Cernahoschi had seen the poem in its printed version, in the volume Open Letters, where it “conversed” with the poems around it, she says. “I knew that the selection of poems in the volume reflected not only the artistic intentions of the poet but also the effects of censorship” of the era.

Cernahoschi says that the word “dialectic” in the last line is ironic. “In socialist Romania, the Marxist dialectic of historical progress, with the victory of the working class as its end, was a prized trope.”

In the poem, she says, “the dialectic of the tree-lined path points both forward and backward, however. While it nods to progress (‘while I follow the path’), it actually acknowledges standing still (‘i remain immobile’).”

Cernahoschi says she marvels at the poet’s audacious way of seeing, his ability to sneak “uncomfortable truths” past the censor onto the printed page.

Now, she says, she views the poem, isolated by itself in the frame on her wall, differently.

“Seeing clearly the jagged lines of m’s, l’s, f’s, and g’s has helped me discover a new friction in the poem, as if the writing itself were an opposition.”

In the poet’s signature, however, “the round stroke of the H and the finality of the y,” she says, offer a contrast: “Liberation. I can relate — writing is an activity that winds us tighter and tighter until that last stroke or push of the button that signals ‘done.'”

But, she concludes, “I also see past the framed poem to the trees lining the path outside my window, running in two directions at once, moving and immobile at once. Their dialectic is true no matter the prevailing ideology. Some days, it’s a precious reminder, on others, a warning.”

Frieda Esther Lopatka, grandmother of Rachel Baumann.

�ֲ���ý senior Rachel Baumann discusses her grandparents’ travails during the Holocaust, and offers insights into both wartime history and the importance of humanity and faith, in a talk at 4:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 15, Room G65, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Titled Why My Grandmother Converted to Judaism in Nazi Germany During 1936, the talk is sponsored by the Multifaith Chaplaincy. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please email hbalcomb@bates.edu.

Baumann, of Fairfield, Conn., traveled to Europe last summer on the strength of a Phillips Fellowship from �ֲ���ý to retrace her Jewish grandparents’ steps through Berlin, Warsaw and the surrounding suburbs where they sought refuge as Jews during Nazi rule.

Her grandmother had converted to Judaism — perhaps for the sake of being in love, perhaps because she was simply moved by the faith — at the same time that Nazis began their persecution of the Jews.

Baumann also studied today’s Jewish community in Berlin and spent time at the Jewish Museum Berlin to get an understanding of the contemporary identity and climate for Jews in Germany.

Through studying how Berlin actively remembers the atrocities of World War Two, from large memorials to individual stones in the street, Baumann was able to piece together both her family’s missing narrative and a greater story of how a country broken by war and hatred can self-consciously rebuild a narrative of peace and remembrance.

Baumann is the same age that her grandparents were when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Though they were able to survive their trials in Europe and emigrate to America, until this summer their young adulthood was a mystery to Baumann and her family.

�ֲ���ý College’s other 2013 Phillips Fellow, Asha Mohamud ’15 of Lewiston, spent her summer in Tanzania working for an HIV/AIDS clinic and learning about community-driven public health initiatives.

The Phillips Student Fellowship is a summer research grant given to two �ֲ���ý students every year, allowing them to explore another culture, conduct immersive research, and grow personally and intellectually through their unique experiences.

Ali Akhtar, assistant professor of religious studies and of classical and medieval Studies. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Six new tenure-track members of the faculty began teaching at �ֲ���ý College in autumn 2012, representing the fields of dance, economics, German, neuroscience and psychology, religious studies, and classical and medieval studies.

All beginning their �ֲ���ý careers as assistant professors, they are:

Ali Humayun Akhtar, religious studies and and classical and medieval studies;

Rachel Boggia, dance;

Jason Castro, psychology and neuroscience;

Raluca Cernahoschi and Jakub Kazecki, who were hired in a joint appointment to the German faculty;

and Paul Shea, economics.

(�ֲ���ý has also engaged biologist Larissa Williams, who starts at �ֲ���ý during winter 2013, and historian Lydia Barnett, who begins teaching at �ֲ���ý in autumn 2013.)

Ali Humayun Akhtar

Read a profile of Akhtar.

Assistant Professor of Dance Rachel Boggia. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Appointed assistant professor of religious studies and of classical and medieval studies at �ֲ���ý, Akhtar studies the complex interactions among political, religious and intellectual establishments in Europe and the Islamic world in medieval and early modern times.

Akhtar is a native of New Jersey. Prior to �ֲ���ý, he taught at Bard College and at New York University, where he received his doctorate in both history and Middle Eastern studies. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Cornell in 2004.

Rachel Boggia

Read a profile of Boggia.

Appointed assistant professor of dance at �ֲ���ý in 2012 after two years at the college as a visiting faculty member, Boggia employs sophisticated technology in her art and teaching.

Boggia served as acting director of the �ֲ���ý dance program in 2010-11 after teaching at Wesleyan University and at Connecticut and Dickinson colleges. She earned her MFA in dance from The Ohio State University in 2003 and a bachelor of science degree in neurobiology at Cornell in 2000.

Jason Castro, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Jason Castro

Read a profile of Castro.

Analyzing neural electrical patterns and chemical imaging that reveals cellular activity, Castro, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, investigates the relationships between the properties of neurons and sensory capabilities, such as the ability to distinguish between odors.

Castro came to �ֲ���ý from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he had been a postdoctoral fellow since 2008, the year he received his doctorate in neuroscience at Pittsburgh. In addition to a 2002 liberal arts diploma from the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin, Germany, Castro earned bachelor’s degrees in biology and English literature at the University of Rochester.

Raluca Cernahoschi

Read a profile of Cernahoschi.

Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Cernahoschi, who has been a visiting professor at �ֲ���ý the past two years, is a native of Romania. But her Romanian education never introduced her to one of her primary academic interests: the literature produced by that nation’s German minority.

Instead, it wasn’t until her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia that she discovered this literature. “I happened to be taught by one of the only North American experts on this literature,” Cernahoschi explains — Peter Stenberg, now professor emeritus of German at UBC.

She taught previously at Central Connecticut State University, McMaster University and UBC. She earned a bachelor’s degree in German studies and English at Mount Holyoke College.

Jakub Kazecki

Read a profile of Kazecki.

Kazecki has done considerable research on the connection between war and humor, as evidenced by his book Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives, released in July 2012 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

A native of Poland, Kazecki taught at Central Connecticut State University for four years prior to �ֲ���ý, and previously taught at McMaster University in Ontario and the University of British Columbia, where he received a doctorate in Germanic studies.

He earned master’s degrees at Adam-Mickiewicz-University in Poznan, Poland, and at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.

Paul Shea

Read a profile of Shea.

People’s expectations influence the economy, which makes the accurate prediction of expectations important to economists. That’s an aspect of the field that interests Shea, a macroeconomist and econometrician who develops mathematical models for such predictions.

Working with algorithms that simulate various factors affecting economic behavior, he aims to model expectations such that the agents — the theoretical people in his models — “are just about as smart as the people who actually make decisions in the economy.”

Paul Shea, assistant professor of economics. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College. Photograph by Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Jakub Kazecki, assistant professor of German. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

If you grew up with M*A*S*H  or the World War II cartoons of Bill Mauldin, the power of battlefield humor won’t be new to you.

Jakub Kazecki, hired in 2012 as assistant professor of German in a joint appointment with Raluca Cernahoschi, has invested considerable research in the topic — as evidenced by his book Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives, released in July 2012 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Kazecki’s book focuses on World War I fiction with an autobiographical basis, including such well-known works such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But while Kazecki’s field is German literature, he points out that humor operates in similar ways across nationalities and other constructs of identity.

Within a given military setting, Kazecki argues, even pro- and anti-war factions tend to find the same things funny. Remarque is considered a pacifist, but what his soldiers laugh at “is much the same as what the soldiers in works by more conservative authors laugh at. They subscribe to a similar set of values.”

“Humor has a strict social function that organizes relationships between members of groups,” he says. For instance, when we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel, “it means, first, that we’re bonding and creating a group.”

But it also means that the group is marking as undesirable a trait — here, clumsiness. “We’re acknowledging shared values about not being clumsy,” he explains. “That function is universal across cultures.”

In short, you’re either laughing with someone or laughing at them — but both have the same result, the strengthening of group identity.

A native of Poland, Kazecki taught at Central Connecticut State University for four years prior to �ֲ���ý, and previously taught at McMaster University in Ontario and the University of British Columbia, where he received a doctorate in Germanic studies.

He earned master’s degrees at Adam-Mickiewicz-University in Poznan, Poland, and at Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S.

Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Raluca Cernahoschi and Jakub Kazecki were hired in a joint appointment as assistant professors of German. Cernahoschi, who has been a visiting professor at �ֲ���ý the past two years, is a native of Romania.

But her Romanian education never introduced her to what is now one of her primary academic interests: the literature produced by that nation’s German minority.

Instead, it wasn’t until her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia that she discovered this literature whose brightest names include Herta Müller, Richard Wagner, Rolf Bossert and Franz Hodjak.

“I happened to be taught by one of the only North American experts on this literature,” Cernahoschi explains — Peter Stenberg, now professor emeritus of German at UBC.

The Romanian German poetry she studied “was a literature of resistance, and double resistance.” Coming of age in communist Romania after World War II, these writers at first rebelled against their minority-German heritage. “They didn’t want to represent that minority, which for them was regressive, very traditional, politically compromised — the older generation has a murky association with the Nazis.”

Instead, they identified as authors with the larger German literature and as political beings with the relatively liberal Romanian socialism of the late 1960s and early ’70s. This identification was short-lived, however. As Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies became increasingly repressive, their poetry became critical of the country’s social and political conditions.

Meanwhile, these writers became more accepting of their German minority origins. “They realized they were writing against something that was doomed anyway,” says Cernahoschi. “They started to sympathize and understand more where their parents and grandparents were coming from.”

Today, many of these writers have moved to Germany and joined the literary mainstream. “It’s a very dynamic literature still,” says Cernahoschi. “In interesting ways, they are still trying to position themselves” — a situation of particular fascination for Cernahoschi, whose research incorporates the problems and rewards of cross-cultural encounters.

Cernahoschi taught previously at Central Connecticut State University, McMaster University and UBC. She earned a bachelor’s degree in German studies and English at Mount Holyoke College.

From left, Mary Rice-DeFosse, Francisca López, and Jane Costlow listen as Rhea Coté Robbins reads one of her poems.

It had to be said: Sometimes, “something gets found in translation, too.”

This truth was stated during the opening of Translations: Cross-Cultural Exchange Through Poetry, the second edition of an innovative festival dedicated to the translation of poetry, a creative act every bit as demanding as the making of a new poem.

The speaker was Jane Costlow, professor of environmental studies, who welcomed the listeners filling Chase Lounge late in the afternoon of Oct. 25. If poet Robert Frost felt that poetry gets lost in translation, Costlow said, what gets found is “the beginning of wisdom”: a glimmering of our own places amidst “the vast variety of human creativity.”

Poet Rhea Coté Robbins reads.

The session was the first of five readings during the , which runs through Oct. 29 (and includes a conference on the practice of translation). Most of the poets write in languages other than English, and the festival’s format is the simultaneous presentation of poems in both the author’s voice and English translations, created by �ֲ���ý faculty and students and projected as text on a screen.

Following Costlow’s welcome were readings by poets Rhea Coté Robbins, a Franco-American writer, editor and teacher from Brewer, Maine; and Francisca López, �ֲ���ý professor of Spanish.

Costlow established a helpful conceptual landscape for the listeners. She situated the festival in the context of the week’s Open to the World: �ֲ���ý Celebrates Unbounded Learning events, marking the renovation of two academic buildings that are, as she said, “devoted to the study of language, culture and our complex ethical relationships to each other and to the more-than-human world.”

And Costlow suggested that the meanings of poetry are not always textual. “I invite you, for at least part of each poet’s reading, to forget about what it means, and just submerse yourself in the music.”

The music began with Coté Robbins, whose early life in “down the Plains” — a Francophone neighborhood in the Maine mill town of Waterville — resonated through her work. She was one of the festival’s two poets reading in English (the other being �ֲ���ý senior lecturer in English ). Reading quickly and undramatically, she delivered more than 20 poems animated by the tensions of unattainable dreams and of class and gender conflict.

From left, poets Naomi Otsubo and Polina Barskova listen attentively.

In her father’s mill the papermaking machines cook, gas, electrocute and eat the workers. The bosses in her mother’s shirt factory urge the women to work “Faster, Faster, Faster.” Women — Coté herself, Peyton Place author Grace Metalious — negotiate the visceral conflict between creative and family needs.

“We Spread the Dirt” depicts Coté Robbins and family bringing to her parents’ graves soil from France, in lieu of the homeland visit they could never make:

we are priests
without ritual—
Eiffel Tower pink-tinted dirt and rocks
for her
France-on-the-Loire brown
country farmer’s soil
for him

A native of Andalusia, in southern Spain, López writes poetry in Spanish. The festival translations of her 13 poems were created by departmental colleague and festival organizer Claudia Aburto Guzmán.

Francisca López speaks with a member of the audience after the reading.

López described herself as a rational person for whom poetry is a way to address the questions that rationality can’t touch. Where Coté’s work was markedly social and political, López’s poems were more abstract, organic, inward-looking, intimate. Her reading style, too, was softer, closer.

“Jump to the Abyss” was an attempt to make sense of a student’s senseless death:

you greet, joke, toast with someone
in the distance

and get closer . . .
to the wings of glass

for your flight
toward the encounter.

“The Soul’s Rags” could be about the people of our past who become like ghosts: “you lay dozing with me / in the silence of eternity.” “The Kiss” may describe the imbalance of power in a passionate encounter:

You keep the air
the hunger and thirst
the joy and sorrow
the need to move on

A senior from Pomona, Calif., double-majoring in Spanish and in women and gender studies, Jeanette Mariscal was running the Translations slide projection for the second year. Last year, she said, hearing German poet Lothar Quinkenstein gave her a whole new sense of the expressive capability of the German language.

Hearing poetry as opposed to simply taking it off the page, she said, “gives it life. When they read it, you get a better feel for their thinking.”

“In truth, poetry is as much a performance as anything else,” Aburto Guzmán remarked after the readings. “All these poets are good at that.”

Professor of Environmental Studies Jane Costlow welcomes Chase Hall listeners. Google Earth presentations showed the poets’ journeys.

French professor Alex Dauge-Roth gestures during the faculty conversation about global citizenship held prior to the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

�ֲ���ý’ global reach has been a driving theme behind , a celebration of new academic spaces including Roger Williams Hall, home to the college’s foreign language programs and Off Campus Study Office.

So the foreign language faculty took an hour or so during the afternoon of Oct. 27, the day the newly renovated Bill and Hedge Hall were dedicated, to present a sampling of courses and projects in their repertoire.

Dedicated to the idea of educating students for global citizenship, here are a few highlights from the presentation in the brand-new Language Resource Center:

• Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French, talked about his course “Border and Disorders in French and Francophone Literature and Films.” An apt choice for a week of �ֲ���ý programming devoted to breaking down borders, the course examines representations of inclusion and exclusion — for example, two opposing political ads that use, in nearly identical ways, the symbol of a black sheep among white ones to support either openness to immigration or rejection of it. “The idea is to complexify for students how they define their borders,” Dauge-Roth said. “You cannot be at home without excluding others.”
• Against a backdrop of Central European images taken last year by Rachel Morrison ’13, Professor of German Craig Decker offered a capsule history of �ֲ���ý Fall Semester Abroad programs in Vienna and Berlin. Noting that all FSA programs, not just the German-language trips, are interdisciplinary by design, he said, “It’s interesting to see how students combine what goes on in the two courses.” It’s a kind of synthesis “that doesn’t always happen on campus.”
• Sarah Strong, professor of Japanese, cut to the heart of cross-cultural exchange in describing her course “The Fantastic in Modern Japan.” Looking at comics, fiction and anime film, the course encourages students to discover what’s common among cultures — but more important, to “encounter what is unfamiliar that they can learn about and bring into their sphere of understanding.” For example, how the young heroine in the manga and film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind comes to terms with the toxic fungal forest that is consuming a post-apocalyptic world.
• A fascinating translation project undertaken by Professor of Spanish Francisca López, Lecturer in French Laura Balladur and others: Students in certain foreign-language courses have translated work by the poets participating in the college’s annual international poetry festival (taking place concurrently with the Open to the World events). During the festival, the student translations have been projected on a screen while the poets read them in the original language. For the second part of the course, the students translate into French and Spanish poems written by students in a poetry course taught by Senior Lecturer in English Robert Farnsworth — and all the students, translators and translated, meet to discuss the linguistic and cultural issues that are gained in translation.

During the first Translations poetry festival at �ֲ���ý College, in 2010, organizer Claudia Aburto Guzmán had an encounter that seemed to crystallize the event for her.

This innovative festival presented international poets reading their work in the original language, with English translations prepared by �ֲ���ý faculty and students. Working with Somali poet Omar Ahmed, “it struck me that I was involved in the true practice of communication,” says Aburto Guzmán, associate professor of Spanish.

• .
• Note: The time for Rafael Carpintero’s talk has been pushed back to 7 p.m. Friday.

“He and I had to communicate through layers of cultural expectations — his Somali culture and my Chilean culture, in addition to U.S. culture. I had to be so clear with language.”

Taking place Tuesday, Oct. 25, though Saturday, Oct. 29, this year’s festival celebrates cross-cultural communication with readings by poets from the Americas, Europe and Japan. New to the event is an Oct. 27-29 conference, organized by Visiting Assistant Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi, exploring the art and practice of literary translation.

The festival is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8293 or gdumais@bates.edu.

The festival begins at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, with a welcome, readings and a reception in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave. Readings continue in Chase at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, Oct. 26-29.

The conference begins with registration at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday in Chase. Conference sessions take place at 8 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, and at 9 a.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 28-29, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

A closing reception in the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art, 75 Russell St., follows the Saturday readings.

Here are the poets and the dates when they read (all the poets read on Oct. 29):
Oct. 25: Rhea Coté, of Brewer, Maine, and �ֲ���ý faculty member Francisca López, a native of Spain;
Oct. 26: Miguel Angel Zapata, of Peru, and Naomi Otsubo, a native of Japan living in Maine;
Oct. 27: Polina Barskova, a native of Russia, and �ֲ���ý faculty member Robert Farnsworth;
Oct. 28: Danny Plourde, a Francophone poet from Canada, and Carmen Elisabeta Puchianu, a poet from Romania who writes in German.

Conference presenters include Enrique Yepes, a Colombian critic and scholar of Latin American literatures; and Rafael Carpintero of Spain, a translator whose works include Spanish editions of titles by best-selling Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Yepes offers the talk Carving the Air: On Poetry Festivals at 7 p.m. Thursday in Chase Lounge, and Carpintero discusses the translation of poetry at 7 p.m. Friday in Chase.

The authors’ work will be available at the �ֲ���ý College Store, 56 Campus Ave., throughout the festival.

“Poetry, widely defined, can illustrate all issues pertinent to our times and culture,” says Aburto Guzmán. “In the public sphere, translation can help us focus on the challenges involved in cross-cultural communications.”

George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who served as President Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace until last spring, delivers the keynote address during a weeklong celebration of international and interdisciplinary education at �ֲ���ý in October.

Mitchell speaks at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, in the �ֲ���ý College Chapel, 275 College St. His talk follows the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls, recently renovated by the college into academic facilities that are advancing the �ֲ���ý education still further across national and interdisciplinary boundaries.

Visit the Open to the World website.
More about the Hedge and Roger Williams renovations.
.

During the 4:15 p.m. dedication, Paul Marks ’83, chairman and CEO of the aerospace materials maker Argosy International Inc., offers remarks about living as a global citizen. Mitchell’s talk and the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls culminate Open to the World: �ֲ���ý Celebrates Unbounded Learning, the Oct. 24-28 series of events.

The week’s speakers also include Gary Hirshberg P’13, “CE-Yo” of yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm. The full Open to the World schedule will be announced later in October. For more information, please contact 207-786-6336 or arichard@bates.edu.

Here are events that have been confirmed to date:

Monday, Oct. 24: �ֲ���ý observes United Nations Day.

Tuesday, Oct. 25: opens with a 4 p.m. welcome, readings by international poets at 4:45 accompanied by English translations, and an evening reception at 6, all in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

This five-day event includes poets from around the world presenting their work, accompanied by translations created by �ֲ���ý faculty and students; and a conference on the art and practice of translation. For more information, please contact gdumais@bates.edu or 207-786-8293.

Wednesday, Oct. 26: At 6 p.m. is a screening of Food, Inc., the Academy Award-nominated documentary exposing the corporate-controlled, industrialized underside of American food production. Following the screening at 7:30 p.m., Hirshberg, a prominent figure in Robert Kenner’s 2008 film, offers remarks. Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Thursday, Oct. 27: Hedge and Roger Williams halls are rededicated at 4:30, followed by Mitchell’s keynote. The keynote will be simulcast in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). A reception in the atrium follows Mitchell’s speech.

Friday, Oct. 28: In “Global Possibilities,” five young �ֲ���ý alums discuss their experiences with initiatives that have both local and global consequences; at 4 p.m. in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall.

Anne Connell ’10 has received an English Teaching Assistantship from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. These grants support recipients in positions as teaching assistants abroad who work with local students on their English language skills and knowledge of the United States. As the same time, the teaching assistants pursue individual research.

Connell will teach in Germany. She feels a deep engagement with the work of breaching language barriers and exploring the circumstances of Germany’s Turkish population.

This longtime student of German language and culture is ready to make the transition from visitor to social and cultural participant, and hopes that the Fulbright experience will enable her “to become an active, integrated and contributing member of a community in Germany.”

Outside the classroom, Connell will continue exploring the intersections of race and women’s healthcare policy in Germany, a topic she investigated for her 2009 senior politics thesis.