A global pandemic, a national reckoning with systemic racism, and a contentious and violent election coalesced in one volatile year to test the viability of our health and welfare, shared humanity, and democracy. While the losses were devastating, adversity proved a potent litmus test for our creative and scholarly community, resulting in new work, new missions, and new breakthroughs. Read more about how some of our faculty, students, and alumni have adapted and thrived in a world turned upside down.
Adriana Weisleder, assistant professor in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, has spent her professional life researching, connecting with, and advocating for bilingual children, particularly those from immigrant homes. A new community partnership with the nonprofit Northwestern Settlement is ensuring that her work reaches the populations that need her expertise most. A 2021 Racial Equity
Filmmaker Kyle Henry isn’t interested in coming-of-age stories. The associate professor of radio/television/film has found that older adults boast more nuanced relationships, choices, and journeys. In his latest project, Traces of Time, Henry contemplates pandemic isolation by documenting the last six months of his mother’s life in a nursing facility in Rochester, New York. In turn, this self-examination explores her
In the spring of 1921, a vibrant Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was destroyed at the hands of violent white rioters. Homes and businesses were looted and burned, innocent people were executed, and a prosperous area of a booming city was effectively wrenched from the Black residents who had built it. The massacre was covered up and rarely mentioned in
Rishi Mahesh (C21) remembers writing a paper in high school about math in music. It described harmony as conflicting motion and posited that the contrary motion of motion is built into every function of the universe. Mahesh didn’t anticipate this lesson to pop up again his senior year of college. “In the last year of swinging so hard in one
Teaching vocal performance in the music theatre program, Melissa Foster (BSM96, GBSM01) is well aware of the power and potential of controlled breathing. And with a new research partnership through the Buffet Institute for Global Affairs, she will apply her expertise to a six-year grant addressing trauma endured by children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma, Music, and the Breath is
Viewers of evening news broadcasts last fall likely caught glimpses of author and performance studies alumnus L. M. Bogad (GC97, GC01) protesting in city streets. But the 2021 Guggenheim fellow and chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis, may have gone unrecognized—thanks to the blue United States Postal Service mailbox replica he was
Opening a new research center during a pandemic may seem like a bad idea. But assistant professor of communication studies TJ Billard has a wildly different take on the launch of their interdisciplinary, cross-institutional Center for Applied Transgender Studies. “The timing around everything seems to make sense, as we were coming into a new political administration in the US, and
In a year of what-could-have-beens, the sudden, heartbreaking stop to the Northwestern women’s basketball team’s 2019–20 season still strikes a nerve. Blazing red-hot with a 26-4 record and a Big 10 championship, the Wildcats were on the verge of returning to the NCAA tournament when COVID-19 abruptly ended their run. The team’s dazzling star guard, then junior Lindsey Pulliam (C21), was crestfallen.
The switch to remote learning for school-aged children sounded immediate and persistent alarms both for parents charged with carrying the educational load and teachers scrambling to connect with students online. For researchers like Kiriko Takahashi (C99, GC01), the change spotlighted the inequities and opportunities that virtual schooling and technology present for children with disabilities. Takahashi is the director of the
Telehealth, licensure laws, petitioning state governments, time zone differences, privacy considerations, compliance with regulatory agencies, the hurdles in making no-contact hearing-aid repairs. For Diane Novak, director of the Northwestern University Center for Audiology, Speech, Language, and Learning (NUCASLL), the list of last year’s challenges has gone on and on. “I mean, the stories!” says Novak. “And then the water was
When America’s theaters went dark, the team at the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center got creative. They launched Imagine U Storytime, online family programming that racked up more than 22,000 views; engineered traditional staged plays and readings for better virtual attendance; successfully staged an in-person production of Tomas and the Library Lady for virtual audiences; and celebrated summer with a Broadway
