Lenses on the World
Researchers Marcia Landy and Judith Yang change the way others look at life
Marcia Landy certainly wasn’t thinking much about culture, politics, gender, historical context…or Italian fascism when, at age 11, her father dropped her off at a neighborhood theater in Cleveland to see movie star Barbara Stanwyck in The Gay Sisters.
“To me, movies were a doorway to the world that seemed quite alien and compelling and which connected me emotionally but not physically,” she remembers. “It was a complicated form of escapism. But my father wouldn’t go in himself because he said movies were lowbrow and vulgar.”
Some 63 years later, Landy—a Pitt professor of English—has become one of the world’s foremost film-studies scholars, particularly in Italian and British cinema. In February 2005, the University awarded her a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award in the Senior Scholar category for her work in trying to make sense of the world and its complexities as depicted through the lens of a movie camera.
One could argue that Landy is remarkably similar in her academic quest to Judith Yang, a 2005 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Awardee in the Junior Scholar category. Yang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, already has, in only six years, built a distinguished teaching and research career in the nascent field of nanoscience by trying to make her own sense of the world—but through the lens of a powerful transmission electron microscope.
These two faculty members represent parallel stories of strength and vitality when it comes to women scholars at Pitt. They are driven by intense curiosity, lifelong desires to learn and solve problems, and prolific writing abilities. But the similarities don’t end there. Both also change the way others view life through the development of novel research methodologies, curricula, and fields of study. Their stories are of persistence and pioneering change, of discipline and knowledge.
Drama and life
Landy grew up largely under the guidance of her father, a Russian immigrant who indulged his daughter’s fascination with film while maintaining his own view of what being cultured really was about.
“His idea of culture was printed things such as books and maybe even newspapers,” Landy says of her father. “And because he was an immigrant, he wanted me to pursue a secure position for a woman, such as being a secretary or becoming a businesswoman. But that seemed rather boring to me. I didn’t see that gratifying my curiosity and especially my desire to travel.”
What Landy really wanted to do in life was to pursue drama, to become an actress. Still, she learned from her father to love books along with the movies—to the point where she says she would “cut school at noon and just go downtown to the library. I had a very eccentric background.”
Dropping her acting aspirations somewhere along the way, this spirited scholar parlayed her background into an academic pursuit at the University of Rochester that produced a master’s thesis titled “Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Hardy’s Paradise Lost” in 1962 and a doctoral dissertation in 1962 titled “Of Highest Wisdom: A Study of Conversion in Milton’s Samson Agonistes.”
What fascinated Landy most, she says, was the comparative study of literature within the context of culture, politics, religion, and, in general, history.
“I see literature as a production of cultural artifacts, putting out a set of conceptions, ideas, and practices in relation to the world,” she says. “I still think I’m an intellectual, and I prize very highly learning and knowing.”
Women, culture, and film
Landy came to Pitt in 1966 as an assistant professor of English and continued to publish her work in comparative studies of literature, particularly focusing on German, French, and English literature. But by the late ’60s, she began to explore literature even more specifically for comparative studies of women’s roles and gender in general, along with the politics of the times. And that ultimately led her to become a driving force in the creation of a women’s studies program at Pitt.
“The 1960s were very important to me because there were so many interesting questions raised about knowledge, culture, and learning,” Landy says.
“The range of her interests has led her to create interdisciplinary programs that we now take for granted, particularly with regard to gender and feminism in relation to other fields,” says David Bartholomae, chair of Pitt’s English department. “She certainly has been an activist on this campus and has led movements to revise women’s studies and gender studies, among others.”
Soon, Landy also was applying her methodologies in comparative literature studies to studies of the mass media and then, ultimately, to the emerging study of film.
“There were a lot of misconceptions about what cinema was like,” Landy says. “Cinema wasn’t only Hollywood. It was experimental, cultural. And the relation between culture and politics [in cinema] always seemed to be worth examining.”
By 1979, Landy had become a full professor of English and film studies, with a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures. And by 1986, she had published her first seminal work in film studies, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton University Press, 1986). The book propelled her into the international arena as a serious and respected film studies scholar. American Historical Review described the book as providing “an extremely important and highly original, as well as readable, treatment of a number of crucial films and directors. …Out of her study emerge a number of significant ideas that ought to change the way historians and film scholars perceive fascist Italy’s cinematic culture.”
Books and more books
Indeed, Landy has proven most prolific in the film studies arena during the last 15 years, publishing an additional 10 books on subjects ranging from British cinema and society, theatricality and spectacle in Italian cinema, and history and memory in cinema to film and television melodrama, movie stars, and even a book titled Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Wayne State University Press, 2005). Currently, she is completing the book titled Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Tracking Italian Stardom—An Analysis of the Transformations in Italian Media and Politics via the Changing Cultural Figurations of the Star, which is scheduled for publication in 2007 by the Indiana University Press.
Add to her books 21 essays or chapters of books, 12 encyclopedia entries, and four reviews, and one begins to understand why Bartholomae describes Landy as “remarkably productive.” In his nomination letter for the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award, he wrote: “Marcia’s achievements place her among the world’s most visible and productive scholars working in language, literature, cinema, and cultural criticism; the quality of her work and its influence on and beyond her field places her at the very top tier of distinguished scholars in the humanities.”
But Bartholomae also notes an attribute that he says often gets overlooked about Landy’s career at Pitt: her relationship with her students. “She has been quite an inspiration to quite an interesting range of graduate students and has had a real impact on them,” he says.
Is Landy changing the world with her work? She shrugs and chuckles.
“I’m not saying I have the meaning of life, but my work is geared to help situate these [film] productions,” she contemplates. “My studies help to provide insight into how knowledge gets disseminated. There is no ‘What’s the world like?’ really, but what we are doing is beginning to understand. I now look at things in a way where I know how to ask the proper questions.”
Landy shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. With several books in the works and a host of speaking engagements lined up for the coming year, she jokes, “I’m overwhelmed. I have sensory overload, knowledge overload. But I seem to be constantly wanting to understand the relationship between the past, present, and future. It’s exciting.”
Big success in small particles
Judith Yang seemed destined to become a scientist. She grew up in California with a mother who was a chemist and a father who was a biophysicist.
“I had constant exposure to it,” she says, “because of my father’s lab and the bunch of my father’s books at home.”
And she liked math, which would explain her decision to major in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s. “It was a puzzle that had a certain clarity to it,” she says of math and physics. Ultimately, she would receive her Ph.D. degree in physics with a minor in materials science and engineering from Cornell University.
But it was her exposure, Yang says, to the work of her thesis adviser while in graduate school—his study of the interfacial reactions of metals and ceramics—that set her onto a research career path that has transformed her into a materials science pioneer and a leader in her field of study at the University of Pittsburgh.
Since arriving at Pitt in 1999 as an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, Yang has embarked on an intense pursuit of what she considers a very old field in metals study: corrosion, or oxidation, of metals. In its simplest form, one would recognize the phenomenon as rust.
“It’s an important area because it determines environmental stability,” says Yang, who appears quiet and in constant thought, surrounded by shelves of books on materials science. But she has added a profound twist to her studies. While much is known about oxidation in dealing with metals seen by the naked eye, the burgeoning field of nanoscience—the study and manipulation of particles that are 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—has introduced new challenges.
Her timing couldn’t have been better. In 1999, the federal government’s National Science and Technology Council challenged the nation’s scientists to consider building things atom by atom, molecule by molecule. And in 2000, then-President Bill Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative.
The real intrigue, Yang admits, is that traditional rules and theories often don’t apply to metals at the nanoscale, which has opened up a whole new field of study.
“Corrosion is a very important problem at the nanolevel, and the regime is not well understood,” she says.
At this stage, she considers herself a basic scientist who isn’t so much interested in the design of new devices but rather fundamental reactions when it comes to oxidizing certain metals.
“Fundamental understanding leads to fundamental theories, which then can be used as predictive tools,” Yang says of the focus of her research.
Her research has looked at basic degradation mechanisms in low-Earth orbit, for instance, and she has acquired a unique hyperthermal atomic oxygen source to carry out these investigations, because atomic oxygen is the primary species in the low-Earth orbit attacking materials. And most recently, she received a grant for the development of nanometallic catalysts for the removal of nitrates from drinking water. All told, she has had nine proposals funded, including six individual awards totaling $1.59 million and three joint awards totaling $2.25 million.
Pioneering techniques
While these research efforts certainly have proved important to the field, perhaps Yang’s greatest contribution to the study lies in what she calls nanocharacterization.
To effectively study such small particles and how they change or react under different conditions, Yang has had to create new techniques for using the powerful transmission electron microscope to view this new world of science.
Her techniques, it turns out, have proven novel and pioneering in the field and now are being used by others in nanoscience and engineering research.
“Judy’s obviously an exceptional researcher and scholar,” says John Barnard, professor and chair of the materials science and engineering department in Pitt’s School of Engineering. “She’s not just an electron microscopist, because most researchers work in a postmortem fashion. Something happens to a material, and then the researchers prepare a sample and then examine it under the microscope.
“What’s different about Judy is that she can actually watch the reactions happen in real time, in situ” with the techniques that she developed. Moreover, he says, she has “built, from scratch, major internationally recognized research programs.”
Like Landy, Yang also has proven herself to be a prolific writer, publishing 17 journal articles and 19 proceedings since her arrival at Pitt. She received tenure and a promotion to associate professor in 2004.
Says Yang of her career—and life: “I see it as a sequence of problems to be solved—a sequence of opportunities.”• Daniel Bates
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