BY THE NUMBERS • One-third of the University’s graduate students and about 15 percent of its undergraduates come from outside the United States, with the largest numbers coming from China followed by India, South Korea, and Taiwan. • More than 70 percent of the University’s graduate housing residents are international students. • There are nearly 11,000 University of Rochester alumni living abroad, with the largest numbers living in China and India. • The University teaches a dozen languages, including English as a second language.
Art and Digital Scholarship Joan Saab, associate professor of art and art history and of visual and cultural studies, is contributing to the evolution of how humanities scholarship is carried out. For several years, she has been an investigator for the Alliance for Network Visual Culture, a group that aims to enhance scholarly understanding of visual practices in digital culture and to create scholarly context for the use of digital media. This work has been supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Saab’s new book project, Searching for Siqueiros, about Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, has become a test case for the future of “born digital” scholarship— scholarship expressly created for, not simply adapted to, a digital format. As part of the Mellon grant, three university presses— Duke, MIT, and the University of California—have agreed to publish the projects using Scalar (a digital platform) as part of the Mellon grant.
Physics and Photo Preservation Nicholas Bigelow, the Lee A. Dubridge Professor of Physics, is bringing his expertise in nanotechnology to bear on the field of photo preservation through research on 19th-century daguerreotypes. Using 21st-century technology, Bigelow and curators at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, located a few miles away from the University, are studying why these unique, nonreproducible images are starting to deteriorate. The Eastman House holds one of the world’s largest collections of daguerreotypes, with about 5,000 images. Through microscopy, the research team has found that the silver daguerreotype plate is a biologically active surface, a remarkable finding because silver is naturally antimicro-
24 DISCOVERIES IN THE HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES
bial. The team is finding that small colonies of fungi are growing and damaging the surface on nearly every daguerreotype they examined. “There’s a miraculous piece of all this. Forget about the daguerreotype for a minute: what on earth is going on in the physics that underlies this and the chemical process that forms this?” says Bigelow. At the University’s Integrated Nanosystems Center, known as URNano, Bigelow and others are trying to find answers to these questions.