It’s obvious that Professor of Economics Lynne Lewis is a dog lover.

Her second-floor Pettengill office contains a large dog crate and framed photographs of various dogs that have been a part of her life, including the two she has now. “I absolutely love them,” she says.

One dog that’s very meaningful to her, Spike Jr., is inanimate:  a metal figurine bedecked with colorful ribbons that she keeps close at hand. “I mean, look at this guy,” she says of the gritty junkyard figure. “He’s so quirky. It’s ridiculous.”

Lynne Lewis and Spike Jr. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Spike belonged to Lewis’s late friend and colleague David Aschauer, who died in 2011 while swimming in a summer triathlon off the coast of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 58 years old. “He died as he lived — doing something he loved and doing it with intention and passion,” said Lewis in a memorial tribute she presented at the first faculty meeting following Aschauer’s death.

During campus memorial preparations, Lewis got to know Aschauer’s family well, and they, her. His daughter, Erika, gave Spike  — who had resided in Aschauer’s Pettengill office — to Lewis. “She thought he would have wanted me to have it, which made it very special,” she says.

“David and I were friends, but we were really different, worlds apart sometimes in what we worked on and in our politics,” she remembers. He was a macroeconomist, she a microeconomist. He was, she says, “one of our politically conservative colleagues who was always arguing with us about absolutely everything and of course was usually right.”

But this dog, she says, “reminds me of David and his contributions to �ֲ���ý, and it reminds me of what I like about this place.” Spike isn’t the only thing that Lewis inherited from Aschauer. She holds the same chair, the Elmer W. Campbell Professorship of Economics, that Aschauer held.

David A. Aschauer, photographed in his Pettengill Hall office in 2009. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Known nationally for research illustrating the economic stimulus created by government spending on public infrastructure, Aschauer left really big shoes to fill, says Lewis, noting that his famous 1988 paper on the importance of spending on core infrastructure, published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, has been cited close to 3,500 times.  “He was very focused on making positive change.”

In that sense, economics is a behavioral science, she says. “We teach about human behavior, how markets work, and how economies function, but we also teach about decision-making and evaluating policies that change behavior.”

Lewis is proud of the work being done by her economics colleagues to carry Aschauer’s legacy forward. “They are doing really good things to make the world and �ֲ���ý a better place. They’re offering their students the education they need to go into the world to accomplish the same.”

That’s what she thinks when she sees Spike Jr.

Spike Jr. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The history of Chinese emperors and generals has been written,” says Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney. “I’m interested in telling the stories of everyday life.”

He’s doing that with historical contracts related to land, household division, and marriage that he has collected from antique marketplaces near farming communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

This household division contract allows two brothers who want to live separately to divide their family inheritance (dated from 1914). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Dating from 1800 to the mid-1900s, these records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. Chaney can’t actually reproduce their voices à la Studs Terkel, yet he’s always looking for those places where individual experience bubbles up. His collection represents this effort — “the voice of the subaltern” is muffled, he says, but trying to hear these peasants’ stories is “what I like about it.”

Each contract has its own distinctive texture, color, and calligraphy. There’s also a distinction between red and white contracts. The former display the government office seal. The latter — comprising most of Chaney’s collection — were never registered with the county office, making them technically illegal, since they mimic the red ones but without a tax payment.

Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney looks through his collection of Chinese land, household distribution, and marriage contracts in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Chaney’s Pettengill office, he pulls out a household division contract from January 1914 that represents the realities of Chinese peasant life. According to Confucian ideology, he says, brothers remain in the same household for life. In reality, that often fails to work out. In this particular case, where two brothers didn’t get along, the contract stipulates how each brother will receive exactly half of their deceased father’s inheritance.

Chaney reads aloud from a list that, in addition to a few parcels of land, includes “one shoehorn, a broken wok, seven sheep, and a leather strap.”

This contract also provides their widowed mother with assets to support both her life and the cost of her eventual funeral.

A land exchange contract dated from 1938 in Huzhu County, Qinghai Province. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s typical of the hundreds of contracts he has collected, and together, they tell the story of an illiterate peasantry who left no written record other than the kinds of municipal and private contracts he has in his possession. “You can construct the history of a family over time and the kind of changes in the land that they owned and why,” he says.

These records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In preserving these stories of everyday village life, Chaney imagines the different ways in which he can use these papers in his research on Chinese law and land disputes. “These are not seen as important documents, they’re not seen as important to the writing of history, but I think these voices are important to history. And so I think there’s a moral argument for why I’m collecting them,” he says.

Eventually, he would like to return to China — when it’s politically feasible — and donate the documents to local libraries in their counties of origin so they can be accessible to everyone.

This Short Term, Chaney will work with a �ֲ���ý student to catalog more of these documents that he often shares in the classroom. In an increasingly digital world, Chaney says it’s essential for his students to experience what the document would have felt like.

“There’s an importance to the materiality here,” he says, “and we lose that when we read it on Lyceum or downloaded onto our phones or computers. It’s actually important to touch things.”

The ash tree is an important part of Wabanaki history and culture, says Associate Professor of History Joe Hall. That’s why he keeps a hunk of the hardwood — a gift from one teacher to another — in his Pettengill Hall office.

An expert on Native American interactions with Europeans in Colonial times, Hall is well-versed in the history of the five nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy that lived in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec.

In the origin story of one tribe, the Penobscot Nation, the cultural hero Gluskabe splits an ash tree with his arrow, from which emerge the first Penobscot man and woman.

Joe Hall works in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Native peoples in Maine have long used the wood of brown ash (also known as black ash) trees to make beautiful and functional baskets. Hall had learned about the importance of the ash tree from a number of Wabanaki educators, but even after living in Maine for 10 years, he had never actually seen such a tree.

That changed one day about five years ago during a visit to his sons’ Auburn elementary school, where he ended up talking trees with one of their science teachers, Jim Chandler. “Can you show me what an ash tree looks like?” Hall asked.

Chandler took him into the woods behind the school and said, “This is an ash tree.” Hall also learned how to identify the species and what kind of soil it grows in.

Hall then explained his interest in Wabanakis and that ash trees really matter a great deal to them. “Oh, I have something you might want,” replied Chandler, who went back into his office and returned with a piece of splintered brown ash that showed “both what the wood looks like and how it is that you actually turn this strong, hard wood into splints for weaving baskets,” Hall says.

Hall holds a prized possession. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As Hall has learned from Wabanaki basketmakers, to create the ash strips called splints, you whack the wood with the back of an axe or other blunt instrument. That separates the growth rings so eventually they peel off. A tool called a splitter may be used to make the first splints even smaller and thinner.

These strips are ideal for weaving a basket. “If you’ve ever held a wooden baseball bat,” Hall says, “you get a sense how solid and dense ash is. These strands also show how flexible it is, so the tree can be used to make baskets that are incredibly light and strong. They’re really marvelous constructions.”

A closeup of Hall’s piece of split brown ash. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

This important Wabanaki tradition is now threatened by an invasive beetle species from eastern Asia, the emerald ash borer, that since 2002 has gradually spread from Michigan and other parts of the Midwest into New York and more recently Maine.

Hall shows the piece of ash to students so they can appreciate how Wabanakis turn wood into a basket, “because it doesn’t immediately make sense that you can make wood weavable,” he says. It’s also a reminder that “there’s nothing in our lives that isn’t made from other things, things that we all depend on in our connections to the world around us, such as the trees that surround us.”

Most of the time, Hall’s prized possession sits on a shelf facing his computer so he can look at it as he works. “It provides me with this connection to the people — Wabanakis and non-Indians — who have educated my children and also educated me.”

Walk into Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s second floor Pettigrew office, and you’ll enter an alien environment. Not that it’s strange or different from other faculty offices. Rather, it’s filled with objects connected to alien beings.

Kelley-Romano, who teaches rhetorical theory and criticism, wrote her doctoral dissertation on “The Myth of Communion: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Narratives of Alien Abductees,” in which she drew from 130 interviews with people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

One of her conclusions is that people who believe they’ve been abducted have woven a collective myth that acts as a kind of religion, and she’s at work at turning the dissertation into a book, What’s Up: Alien Abductions and Why They Matter, the outline of which appears on her office blackboard.

Today, Kelley-Romano’s calling out a favorite pop-up book, Alien World: Fact or Fiction, that includes three-dimensional paper presentations on aliens, UFOs, and the supposed 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., which birthed a wide variety of conspiracy theories about alien spaceship landings.

This particular book, like many of the UFO-themed collectibles in her office, are gifts from her students, some of whom have taken the course she teaches on the rhetoric of alien abduction. “�ֲ���ý has incredible academic freedom in terms of what we can teach,” she says.

After offering the course, she began to receive gifts from students, often from study abroad locations, who would discover all kinds of curiosities: alien root beer, condoms, rolling papers, dolls, soaps, and salt and pepper shakers, to name a few.

At top, some of the alien collectibles in Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Pettigrew office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Her gifts include non-alien items, including a piece of the University of Kansas basketball floor — she’s a huge Jayhawks fan — and whatever the gifts, they often come from students with whom she enjoys longstanding connections. “It’s a reminder, an acknowledgement of the fondness we have,” she says, “of the relationships that I’ve created and maintained for almost 20 years now.” She remembers how the mother of a student in her alien abduction course years ago quilted an alien blanket for her newborn son, who is now 16.

Students often arrive in her classroom with one question: Does Kelley-Romano actually believe in alien abduction? Subsequently they learn to ask better questions about how we create our belief systems. “Alien abduction functions as a system of beliefs that offer a larger kind of metaphysical grounding,” she says.

“When students take that understanding and apply it more broadly to systems of belief that are created through narratives and stories, they’ll consider why we believe some stories and not others.” They learn to critique and assess different arguments, including conspiracy arguments, how they work, and how we combat them —a legitimate skill sadly necessary for their generation.

Kelley-Romano loves watching her students move “from a place of bemused skepticism to the recognition of this is how we create truth.” They spread their wings, set off to new universes, but their lives remain linked. And the gifts arrive.

A striking black-and-white photographic portrait of Associate Professor of Philosophy Susan Stark’s great-grandmother Flora Perrotta occupies a place of honor in her Hedge Hall office.

Stark takes great pride in her ancestor, who in 1905 was a 16-year-old motherless girl when she emigrated from near Naples, Italy, to join her father and siblings in New York City, where the teenager worked as a skilled seamstress to help support her family.

Stark considers herself lucky to be Flora’s great-granddaughter, but not in the way you might think of “lucky.”

Susan Stark takes great pride in her great-grandmother. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Stark works in moral psychology and social philosophy. This semester she’s teaching a course on “moral luck,” the idea that individuals are morally good by virtue of the lucky or unlucky things that have happened to them.

“Our identity is largely a matter of luck: who our parents are, what time period we live in, which country, what our race or gender is, what our sexual identity or sexual orientation are,” she says.

Many of these factors are not really determined by us but rather by our genes. True, environment plays a part, at times, in some aspects of our identity. “But we don’t get to pick the culture that we live in and how it regards our gender or race. A lot of it is not up to us.”

And simple luck plays a part in Stark’s very existence, she says. In her early 20s, Flora had a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which infamously burned to the ground on March 25, 1911. One hundred forty-six garment workers — mostly recent Italian and Jewish female immigrants — died from fire, smoke inhalation, and jumping to their deaths in one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

For some unknown reason, Stark’s great-grandmother stayed home from work that day, perhaps escaping death. “Luck not only affects these fine-grained aspects of our lives but my very own existence, the existence of my whole family. I’ve often thought about how, if she had gone to work that day, my grandmother wouldn’t have been born, my mother wouldn’t have been born, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

The shelves in Stark’s Roger Williams office feature family photographs and artwork by her children. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Stark’s great-grandmother lived to be 100, and Stark got to know her as she grew up. She notes that Flora married and raised children during a time when Italian immigrants encountered significant discrimination in the United States. “It’s interesting to think about the challenges they faced,” she says. Her great-grandmother passed her immigrant’s fortitude to Stark’s grandmother, today a progressive 100-year-old, who raised Stark’s mother to be a strong woman. “And my mother raised me to be a strong woman,” says Stark. She keeps pictures of all of them on her office shelf display.

Stark believes that it can be really uncomfortable for people to acknowledge the contingency and uncertainty in their lives. “But,” she says, “I think our lives are much more contingent than we are typically willing to admit.”

“If this is a way to start a conversation, then I am excited,” says Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer.

She’s talking about the assortment of oversized plush microbes in her Hathorn Hall office that reflect one of her research interests: mathematical modeling of infectious diseases.

“Usually it’s how they spread through a population of people, although sometimes it’s how they reproduce and spread within a person’s body,” she says.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer poses with two of her plush microbes: a zombie virus and cyanobacteria. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The plush figures, from the company GIANT Microbes, remind her of projects she’s worked on over the last 20-plus years. Each a gift from her husband, Brian Pfohl, they depict different cells and organisms more than a million times their actual size.

Pfohl initially purchased two. As Greer’s research or class projects shifted, he added new ones to the collection.

“These cute little pink ones,” she says, “are supposed to represent the virus that caused the outbreak of what was then called swine flu,” a disease she has studied extensively with her biology colleague Karen Palin. The algae one, she says, symbolizes the cyanobacteria she’s been working on for several years with Holly Ewing in environmental studies.

From left, closeups of GIANT Microbes: Ebola, Swine Flu, and Mad Cow. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

An Ebola microbe reminds her of her students who studied the deadly Ebola outbreak. And finally, there’s the “zombie” virus, “just making a joke about the zombie thing,” she says.

Greer has taught a First-Year Seminar on how one might model a zombie outbreak mathematically, an excellent way to use flow charts and modeling software to introduce students to college-level mathematics, she says.

Greer hopes that students who visit her office can see a playful side of mathematics and realize that math can be helpful in surprising ways.

The plushies “can be fun for students who also ask questions about doing math research on disease. It’s another way to talk about it,” she says.

They’ve served a more practical purpose, too. When her two daughters were younger, they provided a welcome diversion during office visits; ditto for the children of faculty colleagues or alumni who stop by her office for a visit.

Every day as she walks to her desk, Ann Marie Russell passes a Haitian-made artwork on the wall. And nearly every time, it makes her think of something different.

Russell, who directs the college’s Office of Institutional Research, Analysis, and Planning, purchased the work online a few years ago while redecorating the office in Lane Hall. She wanted pieces that would symbolize both the work of the office and the spirit of the college.

And how, exactly, does this work evoke the world of institutional research with its swirl of numbers, facts, and data? “My intellectual eyes see a spreadsheet, which ties in well with our data work,” she explains. “But through another lens, I see interconnection. Maybe it’s a web, or a net, or a basket; maybe it’s meant to hold something precious.”

Anne Marie Russell poses with “White Branches,” an abstract work of art made in Haiti. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Importantly, all its parts connect, and that’s �ֲ���ý. “We believe that the �ֲ���ý community connects to the world as a single human family,” she says. The piece was handmade by Haitian artisans from locally sourced, organic materials. “It doesn’t get more �ֲ���ý than that!”

Russell’s heritage is Jamaican. Having a piece of Haitian art in her office makes Russell also think about the African diaspora and Afro-Caribbean self-identity.

“Jamaicans and Haitians were once together as Africans until we were separated by the slave trade and Middle Passage,” she explains. “In that sense, the artwork is hopeful: It’s about breaking down the human boundaries that were created between us.”

A framed black-and-white photograph hangs in the Pettengill Hall office of Associate Professor of African American Studies Sue Houchins, a reminder of family and the power of education.

Taken 80 years ago this month, on March 15, 1938, it depicts 20 African American leaders who comprised President Franklin Roosevelt’s so-called : some of the country’s finest minds and specialists in a variety of fields, including Houchins’ father, economist Joseph Roosevelt Houchins.

He’s in the second row at far right in the photo, taken by photographer Addison Scurlock, famous for documenting black Washingtonians. All 20 people in the photo are men, except the legendary educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, known as “the First Lady of the Struggle.”

Associate Professor of African American Studies Sue Houchins. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Growing up, Sue Houchins knew of the photo because her father kept it rolled tightly in his top dresser drawer. “Every now and then we would unroll it, although it stayed rolled up for too long.”

A Cornell University–trained attorney and labor economist, Joseph Houchins led Roosevelt’s Division of Negro Affairs in the U.S. Department of Commerce until 1953. He later joined the president’s Committee on Government Contracts, where he used his skills as a lawyer and economist to address discrimination by federal contractors, including the denial of jobs to blacks at shipyards in Mississippi and Alabama.

“He was a troublemaker, and he knew what people needed,” says his proud daughter. It’s what she learned from him, she says.

In 1950, Houchins prepared an influential analysis of the African American population based on the U.S. Census, work that was featured in Ebony magazine, providing census data to a popular audience.

In 1961, he joined the economics department at Howard University, where he served as chair and mentored younger scholars. Sue Houchins occasionally meets one of those now-elderly scholars, and they sing his praises as “the father of black economics” or as the source of important economic data that strengthened the NAACP’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.

To raise awareness of her father’s contributions to American society and to academe, Sue Houchins and Howard economist Rodney Green recently co-authored a scholarly , including publication of two Commerce reports he authored in the 1930s.

One analyzed the high failure rate of black-owned insurance companies, and the second reported on a national survey Houchins conducted to create a complete listing of black chambers of commerce that could be used for intra-racial communication and support.

Joseph Roosevelt Houchins at Cornell University, circa 1930.

Sue Houchins also remembers the kind of father he was — one who instilled a love of learning. “On Saturdays, he would take me to a second-hand book store, put some money in my hands, and send me to where I wanted to go. He would go where he wanted to go, and then we’d have an ice cream sundae afterward.”

Born in the South in 1900, Joseph Houchins grew up in the Ithaca, N.Y., home of an uncle who was a janitor. He earned four Cornell degrees: two bachelor’s, plus a master’s and a doctorate of the science of law.

Sue Houchins says that her firebrand mother, Frankie V. Lea Houchins, a physicist and photographer, engineered her father’s Commerce job by applying for it in his name without his knowledge. They hadn’t yet wed, and he was teaching at a small historically black college in Texas at the time.

According to family lore, Frankie seemed much more interested in marrying him if she could arrange a move up North. And she succeeded.

A framed, typed manuscript of a famous poem by the late Seamus Heaney hangs by the desk of Professor of Psychology Georgia Nigro in her Pettengill Hall office. At the bottom is a handwritten note: “To Georgia — hoping you approve of this order — how you heard it! S.”

In the early 1990s, Heaney, who was a friend of Nigro’s husband, Senior Lecturer in English Robert Farnsworth, gave a reading at �ֲ���ý. The reading included one of his newer poems, “A Sofa in the Forties.”

Georgia Nigro holds a framed copy of Seamus Heaney’s poem “A Sofa in the Forties” that he inscribed for her.

The poem begins with children on a sofa pretending they’re riding a train, but the reader soon understands that “it is really about the trains taking Jews to concentration camps,” Nigro explains. That shift, “from playful to serious was so startling, but beautifully done. I liked the way it grabbed me and sort of massaged my emotions from one place to another.”

After the reading, she made a point of telling Heaney how much she admired it. What Nigro didn’t know at the time, nor did anyone else in Schaeffer Theatre that night, was that during the reading — as he was at the lectern — Heaney swapped the order of the third and fourth stanzas, and that new arrangement was how the poem would later be published.

She learned about the switch when he mailed her the original typewritten poem, with hand-drawn edits — made right after the �ֲ���ý reading, reflecting his new preference. And that’s how the poem appears in 1996’s The Spirit Level, published a year after Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Nigro recalls the thrill of receiving the unexpected gift from a poet who is “the voice you want reading you bedtime stories when you’re an adult.”

She’s loved his work all these years, recalling his “stunning” reading of the poem “Digging” at �ֲ���ý in 1986, when he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.

Nigro has always kept the framed poem — and a photo of the family dogs — near her. The placement is intentional, she says, because the poem is a treasure. “I like having his poem and a picture of my dogs to remind me that there’s more to life than the large screen in front of me.”

“I’m really proud of this,” says Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill, holding a laminated, but yellowed, newspaper clipping that recalls a historic moment of protest by African American women.

The clipping is from the year 1991. In the midst of the infamous confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Hill was one of 1,600 black women who lent their names to a full-page ad in The Sunday New York Times. (Signatories also included Sue Houchins, now associate professor of African American studies.)

The ad, headlined “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves,” protested the racist and sexist treatment of Anita Hill (no relation to Leslie), the black attorney who had come forward to say that Thomas had sexually harassed her in their government workplace.

Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill inspects “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Hill, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 1988, has for a long time kept the clipping under wraps in her Pettengill Hall office. But this year, as the #MeToo movement has gained power, Hill “decided to go public” by sharing it with students in her course on race, ethnicity, and feminist thought.

Hill recalls the “disturbing recognition that Anita Hill was being incredibly disrespected.”

Today, the #MeToo victims often say they’ve kept silent out of fear of retaliation or that they would not be believed. Well, they have good historical reason: In 1991, the senators and the media alike treated Anita Hill shabbily, like a liar.

Back then, as Leslie Hill watched the hearings on live television with millions of other Americans, she recalls “a disturbing recognition that Anita Hill was being incredibly disrespected.”

In protest, a trio of African American feminist academics — historian Elsa Barkley Brown, sociologist Debra King, and historian Barbara Ransby — organized a response that culminated with a full-page advertisement in the Nov. 17, 1991, edition of the Times and other newspapers.

The ad reflected “this fury about the way Anita Hill was being treated, but also about the way in which black women’s experiences were being dismissed,” Hill says, recalling how the mostly white mainstream media framed the story through white women’s experiences, when it was about gender plus race and class — what we today call “intersectionality,” a term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.

There was a “reticence on the part of black women to assert the nature of our own experiences, lest black men come under attack.”

Twenty-six years after the Thomas hearings, Hill’s students know the concept. “They’re familiar with it, and so that door is already open for making sense of what’s going on now.”

In 1991, African Americans were divided about Thomas’ fitness for the Supreme Court. “That made it hard for black women to come out defending ourselves,” Hill says. In addition, many in the black community were wary about “airing dirty laundry in public”; alluding to Crenshaw’s work, Hill says there was a “reticence on the part of black women to assert the nature of our own experiences, lest black men come under attack.”

Thankfully, the combination of dynamic, new scholarship and the multitude of public voices and role models makes it possible “to engage in public discourse about gender discrimination and oppression in ways that do not exclude the experience of black women and other women of color.”

The text, surrounded by 1,600 signatures, of “African American Women In Defense of Ourselves,” as it appeared in the Sunday New York Times on Nov 17, 1991.

Hill points to Oprah Winfrey’s recent remarks at the Golden Globes and how Winfrey was able to “talk about sexual harassment and sexual violence and to do so in a way that brought in the experiences of black and working class women, in particular.”

In 1991, Hill was in Atlanta when the Times ad appeared. In that pre-Internet era, word of its pending publication “got out through various kinds of networks,” she recalls. “We bought every copy of the Times that was in Atlanta that day.”

Today, the historical memento inspires Hill’s efforts to create a classroom conversation about sexual harassment and sexual violence “that puts the most disadvantaged women at the center of the discussion: What kind of policy, what kind of action, what kind of practice, needs to be put in place in order to stop these violations, change this culture?”