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Patricia Rosenmeyer was named the Seymour and Carol Levin Distinguished Term Professor in Jewish Studies and director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies in fall 2022. Although her Ph.D. from Princeton University is in comparative literature, her new position is helping her explore a deeper understanding of Jewish history, culture and thought.
The Carolina Center for Jewish Studies celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2023. Rosenmeyer was quick to credit her predecessors, the late Jonathan M. Hess and Ruth von Bernuth, for creating such a solid foundation.
Recent events at the center have included topics as wide-ranging as Yiddish culture in Ukraine, Southern Jews and the Lost Cause, and Jewish perceptions of justice during and after the Holocaust. The center has hosted more than 200 events since its founding in 2003.
Rosenmeyer is particularly grateful for the fellowships and research grants for students that have been made possible through private support, including gifts made during the Campaign for Carolina.
Rosenmeyer’s professorship was established in 2010 by Seymour Levin ’48 and Carol Levin, providing her with support for directing the center.
“We really are keen on supporting the next generation of scholars, and they don’t have to be academic scholars,” said Rosenmeyer. “They can find a career that they love, and it doesn’t have to be teaching at the university level. But we want to give them the foundation and experience in Jewish studies that they can combine with whatever other interests they have.”
Rebecca Fry’s lab is one of the first to study the effects of prenatal exposure to toxic metals as it relates to the epigenome — she has shown how behaviors and the environment can cause changes that affect the way genes function.
“This method highlights a way that we can understand how chemicals can have very long lasting and even transgenerational impacts,” said Fry, the Carol Remmer Angle Distinguished Professor in Children’s Environmental Health at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. In other words, environmental hazards can change a gene activity and those changes can be passed to future generations.
Thankfully, Fry’s lab is focused on solutions. “One of the things I love about working at Gillings is having opportunities to translate our work to something meaningful to communities and populations,” Fry said. “And we do that from many different angles.”
One of Fry’s first environmental health studies was on the effects of arsenic exposure during pregnancy and how that influenced the health of the child. While that study was focused on arsenic exposure in Thailand, Fry learned quickly after coming to Chapel Hill that she wouldn’t have to go outside the state’s borders to continue her research on arsenic poisoning. She launched the Institute for Environmental Health Solutions and is using funds from the Angle Professorship and the UNC Superfund Research Program, which she directs, to work with North Carolina communities that have contaminated drinking water and provide them with cost-effective filters.
Building on that research and more than 20 years of data, she collaborated with colleagues across campus and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to launch NC ENVIROSCAN. The user-friendly, web-based tool integrates the state’s data on chemical exposures, social factors and various health outcomes to identify areas of environmental injustice, where chemical exposure is high and where communities likely don’t have the money they need to have their water tested or have filters in their homes for protection. Community members, policymakers, clinicians, government agencies — everyone has access to this tool at 
Jim White is a passionate and tireless supporter of the enduring value of a broad-based liberal arts education and often gives public talks on the topic. He also believes that diversity, equity and inclusion go hand in hand with what it means to provide an excellent liberal arts education, which values diverse ideas, cultures and perspectives.
White came to Carolina in July 2022 from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for five years and a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences for more than 30 years. An internationally recognized expert in climate science, White has published some 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and is a highly cited researcher in the field. He was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014. At Carolina, he is a member of the faculty of the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences.
In a Q&A, Dean White was asked about how the College of Arts and Sciences is fulfilling Carolina’s mission of teaching, research and public service. White pointed to the new steps the IDEAs in Action curriculum brings to prepare Tar Heels for the modern world.
“Lots of universities emphasize the importance of written communication, but our curriculum recognizes that students need oral and digital communication skills as well. We are emphasizing the listening, rhetoric and discourse skills that allow students to have difficult conversations. We have a required data literacy course to ensure that our students can make sense of the numbers that are thrown at them every day. We are emphasizing experiential education because we know what an effective learning tool that can be.”
