In mid-August, the award-winning Diverse BookFinder, a for multicultural children’s picture books, saw an unusual spike in web traffic to its �ֲ���ý College website.

Coinciding with events overseas, the trending Google search term “children’s books about Afghanistan” was directing web users to a site. There, the selection of awareness-expanding books included The Library Bus, a story of a young girl, set against the backdrop of war, written by an Afghan author and appropriate for ages 5 and up. 

For �ֲ���ý Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson, founder and director of the Diverse BookFinder, the Google-driven traffic was good news on multiple levels.

For one, the traffic indicates that librarians and teachers — the BookFinder’s major users, in addition to parents — are accessing its resources. It’s also “evidence of how these educational leaders are always seeking ways to use multicultural picture books to teach and guide young children.”

Reflecting its growing importance to educators and librarians around the country, the BookFinder will play a major role in a new summer institute hosted by �ֲ���ý in 2022 and funded by a $175,000 grant from the .

Geared toward elementary school teachers who want to use picture books to develop more equitable teaching strategies, the institute represents a collaboration between two academic experts at the forefront of diversity, equity, inclusion and childhood education: Aronson at �ֲ���ý and .��

The pair will serve as co-directors of the institute, titled “Identity and Multilingualism through Picture Books.”

Boyle is an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at Bowdoin who also directs the college’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies program. In 2017, she launched established as a partnership between Bowdoin students, pre-K through second grade students and teachers, and families in the local Brunswick community.

Picture books “provide a perfect platform for beginning to have essential conversations about race and culture with children.”

The institute’s focus on elementary school educators underscores what experts like Aronson, who also serves as an associate dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý, and Boyle have long known: While popular wisdom was that high school or even college is the right time to learn about inclusion, race, culture, and identity, such lessons are more effectively taught at an earlier stage, in elementary schools. 

And a powerful teaching tool to help achieve all that, Aronson says, is the children’s picture book, with their almost magical capacity to help children begin to have “cross-cultural conversations with curiosity, compassion, and understanding. They provide a perfect platform for beginning to have essential conversations about race and culture with children.”

Picture books, says Aronson, can be “utilized as the basis for conversations about race and culture with very young children. Fifty years of psychological research has demonstrated that such conversations are essential for helping children develop positive identities and intercultural competence in support of academic success.”

Officially launched on Sept. 26, 2017, the Diverse BookFinder has made big strides toward fulfilling its mission statement: “to be a go-to resource for librarians, educators, parents, book creators, and publishers who seek to create collections in which all children can see themselves — and each other — reflected in the picture books they read.”

The BookFinder was recognized in June 2021 as one of the year’s “Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning” by the American Association of School Librarians, the preeminent professional organization for the school library community. In the past year, the BookFinder website has averaged 46,000 page views per month and gotten 1.25 million page views overall. 

The BookFinder offers a few different resources. Its search tool allows anyone, from educators to parents, to easily locate and explore children’s picture books.

In addition, the platform also offers a free, online collection-analysis tool that helps libraries diversify their picture-book holdings by identifying who is represented — among Black and Indigenous People and People of Color — in their collections and what themes and messages are presented.

Plus, the BookFinder also offers a circulating collection in Ladd Library, available through interlibrary loan.

Aronson and her team offer consulting services to libraries in all 50 states, “including hundreds of libraries in Maine and Massachusetts, just to give a sense of the scale,” she says. The NEH grant and the summer 2022 institute “will allow us to expand our engagement to include educators more directly.” 

As co-director of the institute with Boyle, Aronson will guide educators through the ins and outs of the BookFinder and how picture books serve as bridges to important ideas. She’ll also explain how children understand the concept of race and describe the current landscape of multicultural children’s literature in the U.S. 

The two co-directors will be joined by a supporting team of educators, experts, scholars, and author-artists.

Sessions over the 10 working days of the institute will be both virtual and in-person. Topics will  include “Picture Books and Performance,” which provides guidance on classroom read-alouds and storytime theater; “Addressing Equity in Social-Emotional Learning”; “Curating Your Classroom Library”; “Multilingualism and ‘Language Stories’”; and “How Do Children See Race?”

Using the collections of the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art, Boyle will lead an “Ashley Bryan Intensive,” featuring close inspections of art objects, including paintings, puppets, oral histories and personal correspondence of the Black artist who was the subject of a major exhibition at �ֲ���ý in fall 2020. Institute participants will also travel to the Bowdoin campus to explore the at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Diverse BookFinder is also made possible through support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

“Identity terms” are the words that people use to affiliate themselves and others with particular groups — ethnic, racial, religious, social and so on.

Cynthia Baker, associate professor of religious studies at �ֲ���ý, recently received $50,400 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her research into one of history’s most fraught identity terms: “Jew,” a word that can convey praise, pride, prejudice or pure description.

No studies exist that analyze the use and the historical development, from ancient times through the postmodern era, of that term, Baker says. The NEH grant will enable her to research and write a book slated for publication in the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” series published by Rutgers University Press.

The book will map the emergence, evolution and current permutations of the term “Jew.” Baker’s yearlong research will involve experts and archives in the U.S., Europe and Israel, among other resources. She will examine ancient inscriptions and conduct art-historical analyses of images of Jews including those from medieval European churches, manuscripts, modern cartoons, propaganda and current pop art.

“The project is important both in its specificity and as a case study for analyzing the dynamics of identity formation and attribution,” Baker notes in her proposal for the grant. “Who decides the content of identity terms, and how does that content come to be generated over time, within and across societies? How is it that a single identity term — ‘Jew,’ for example — can be made to convey such a broad range of (often diametrically opposed) meanings?”

She notes that worldwide political and social developments make this research more compelling than ever. “In an age of ethnic nationalisms, mass migrations and identity formations across national lines, understanding the dynamics of collective identification becomes an increasingly urgent concern,” Baker says.

Baker will carry out her research in several phases, including the examination of ancient evidence for the origins of the term “Jew,” and the exploration of the term’s many overlapping and competing definitions over time — Christian, anti-Semitic, nationalist, etc.

Baker earned her B.A. at Wesleyan, master’s degree at Harvard, and doctorate at Duke. She has taught at Duke, Cornell, Swarthmore and Santa Clara University. Her research explores ideas about gender, ethnicity and nationalism in the formative periods of Judaism and Christianity and in modern historiography on these periods. Her book Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.

Baker’s NEH grant is called a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars.

The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 established the NEH. An independent federal agency of the United States government, it is dedicated to supporting research, preservation, education and public programs in the humanities.

Dr. Khassan Baiev, a Chechen physician, author and human rights activist, will speak at �ֲ���ý College on International Human Rights Day at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 11, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave. The public is invited to attend the talk, titled Chechnya Today: A Doctor’s Perspective, free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-6289.

A surgeon during the first (1994-1996) and second (1999-present) Chechen wars, Baiev operated on both Russians and Chechens, attracting criticism and death threats from both Russian special forces and Chechen extremists. Physicians for Social Responsibility helped Baiev apply for asylum in the United States, where he emigrated in 2000. Today he lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their six children.

Author of a widely acclaimed memoir, The Oath: Surgeon Under Fire (Walker & Company, 2004), Baiev has said: “I wrote The Oath for two reasons. I wanted the world to know that war is a hellish thing, which victimizes the innocent. In war there are no winners. Second, and equally important, I wanted to introduce my readers to the Chechen people.” The Boston Globe describes Baiev’s volume as a “vivid, disturbing account” that “unfolds in the mind’s eye like a movie. His extraordinary empathy for both sides is inspiring.”

During the last three years, Baiev has become an outspoken advocate for human rights, focusing his efforts on the International Committee for the Children of Chechnya. Featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, he has been honored by Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and Amnesty International. His talk at �ֲ���ý follows his visit to the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College, Room 170, 51 Westminster St., where he will participate in a daylong human rights celebration with a Chechen focus. Read about these USM-LAC activities, or call 207-753-6574.

Baiev’s �ֲ���ý talk is sponsored by the college’s medical studies program, the biology department, the German and Russian studies department, the humanities division and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Scholars and human-rights advocates will join survivors of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda to discuss its origins and outcomes on Friday and Saturday, March 30 and 31, at �ֲ���ý College.

Titled Rwanda: From National Disintegration to National Reunification: The Legacy of the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, the conference is open to all free of charge. Sponsors of the event include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information, please contact Assistant Professor of French Alexandre Dauge-Roth, the event’s organizer, at 207-786-6281.

This interdisciplinary gathering will gather speakers from Rwanda, Europe and the United States, including members of the Rwandan diaspora living in New England. “Envisioned as a place of encounter and relationship-building, it will allow survivors of the genocide of the Tutsi to share stories, struggles and hopes to promote a better understanding of this traumatic legacy,” says Dauge-Roth.

In a prelude to the conference, students in Dauge-Roth’s seminar “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” will offer posters and performances reflecting their correspondence with genocide survivors at 4:30 p.m. Friday, March 30, in Pettengill Hall. The presentations are part of the Mount David Summit, a celebration of academic achievement at �ֲ���ý.

The conference itself begins with remarks and a reception at 7:45 p.m. Friday in Chase Hall Lounge. It continues with a day of panel discussions in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52) starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 31, and concludes with a Rwandan dance performance and remarks at 8 p.m. in Chase Hall. (Click the links for a full conference and a list of .)

The panel presentations will proceed chronologically from a discussion about the origins of the genocide, to eyewitness accounts of the massacre, to an examination of the country’s efforts to rebuild and to effect national reconciliation.

Speakers include faculty in diverse disciplines from �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin and Colby colleges and the University of Paris; experts on the genocide including a Human Rights Watch specialist on Rwanda, a Rwandan national prosecutor and the director of the Refugee and Immigration Services at Catholic Charities Maine; and survivors including founding members of an association for the genocide’s widows and children, and two authors who bear witness to the massacres in their works.

The event takes place about a week before the 13th anniversary of a genocide whose scale and ferocity stunned the world. As Dauge-Roth points out, 2007 is midway through the timeline for the Rwanda government’s Vision 2020, a program, devised in the wake of the tragedy, for the impoverished nation’s reconciliation, reconstruction and economic revitalization.

“We are 13 years after the genocide and 13 years before 2020,” Dauge-Roth says. “So it’s also a moment where we can learn, evaluate and reflect on what has been accomplished and consider what the challenges are in the longer term.”

Dauge-Roth, a Swiss native who started at �ֲ���ý in 2005, organized the conference as an extension of his own research into the Rwandan genocide. He is exploring the personal, literary and film narratives created about Rwanda in the years since Hutu extremists massacred as many as a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

“I’m examining how these authors use an aesthetic of haunting,” he says. “These testimonies and documentaries find ways to haunt the reader and the viewer, so that we cannot go back to our usual business and forget about it.”

During a 2006 trip to Rwanda, Dauge-Roth established a network of genocide survivors who have corresponded with �ֲ���ý students in this winter’s “Documenting the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda” seminar. (French is an official language of Rwanda.)

“I hope that students will reflect on what it means to listen to a survivor,” says Dauge-Roth. “There’s a lot to learn from them about the ability to struggle and to live on despite horrific loss.”

Several speakers from the �ֲ���ý event will also take part in similar panels at Harvard University (5-7 p.m. March 27, Tsai Auditorium, South Building, S010), at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. (4-6 p.m. March 28, Hogan Campus Center, Room 519) and at the University of Colorado at Boulder (April 3).

“My hope is that these conferences will be a key step to building personal relationships with Rwandan community partners for future projects,” Dauge-Roth says.