Driver

As his acting career expands from stage to TV to film, former UIndy student Adam Driver is the subject of a profile in Newsweek.

As the story points out, Driver has become something of a heartthrob for his “romantic antihero” role as Adam Sackler in the popular HBO series Girls. He co-stars in the acclaimed new indie film Frances Ha and has several other projects opening or in the works, including the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and This Is Where I Leave You, an ensemble comedy-drama with Tina Fey, Jane Fonda and Jason Bateman.

Driver grew up in Mishawaka and attended UIndy in the mid-2000s, after a stint in the Marines. As a student in the Department of Theatre, he appeared in Pippin, Endgame and other productions before leaving to attend Juilliard.

Read the Newsweek piece here.

Fuller

However, the conventional focus on the campaign between Republican Lincoln and Democrat Stephen Douglas ignores complexities in the story that reveal much about a young nation struggling with its identity, says UIndy Professor of History A. James Fuller.

With contributions from several colleagues – including fellow UIndy Professor Lawrence Sondhaus – Fuller has brought a richer version of the tale to life as editor of The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, published this spring by Kent State University Press.

“My conception of it was, let’s rethink this election and test the traditional interpretation of it,” says Fuller, who joined the university in 1999.

The book grew from the work of an informal Civil War Study Group formed by local historians in 2008. Since then, the group has expanded to a regional association that conducts an annual conference each fall, with members presenting papers for constructive criticism. Fuller organized the group’s 2010 meeting at UIndy, and several of the papers became chapters in the book.

The three chapters written by Fuller include a look at politics in Indiana, where a split among Democrats was more pronounced than previously thought, with tensions driven as much by personal and political ambition as by high-minded ideology.

“You take these national issues and apply them to Indiana, and it takes a much different shape,” says Fuller, who is finishing a biography of Indiana’s Civil War governor, Oliver P. Morton.

His other chapters cover the election’s two other major candidates: Vice President John C. Breckinridge, who represented the breakaway Southern Democrats and later became a Confederate general; and Constitutional Union nominee John Bell, a moderate who favored compromise. Each earned more electoral votes than Douglas, the Northern Democrat originally favored to win.

“There were these other guys out there who took very principled stands” but have been largely ignored in many accounts, Fuller says.

Another misconception the book dispels is that Lincoln – who collected only 40 percent of the popular vote – was a passive candidate who left the strategy to his handlers.

“Lincoln was a lot more active, and he was a political operator,” Fuller says, much like the character in the recent movie, Lincoln.

Sondhaus

Illustrated with historic political cartoons and pictures of the major players, the book also includes a chapter by Sondhaus, chair of UIndy’s Department of History & Political Science. A specialist in European history, he explores opinions held at the time in England, France, Germany, and Austria, where few anticipated the election’s sweeping consequences.

Though aimed largely at fellow scholars, the book also contains interesting material for casual history buffs, Fuller says.

“It’s got a lot for historians; it’s got a lot for political scientists,” he says. “And there’s a lot for anyone who’s interested in how that important election played out.”

Watch WTHR report

So many undocumented migrants are turning up dead in rural Brooks County, Texas, that the local cemetery is running out of space for them.

University of Indianapolis forensic anthropologist Krista Latham and four graduate students will be there next week, exhuming remains as part of a humanitarian effort to bring closure to grieving families.

Latham

Near the small town of Falfurrias, barely an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, 129 bodies or sets of skeletal remains were found in 2012 alone. The location suggests that the migrants, left to their own devices by smugglers paid to deliver them safely, might be trying to reach a nearby U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint and be sent back home rather than die in the countryside.

“That’s where people are running out of water, running out of food,” says Latham, an assistant professor in UIndy’s Departments of Biology and Anthropology. “A lot of them are women and children who are just coming here for a better life.” Some are from Asian countries, she noted.

Latham has more than 10 years of experience in locating burial sites, exhuming graves and analyzing skeletal remains to determine sex, age, height, and other factors that can assist in identification. She directs UIndy’s Molecular Anthropology Laboratory and also works on human-remains cases in UIndy’s Archeology & Forensics Laboratory.

She and her uniquely qualified students were called to Texas by Associate Professor Lori Baker of Baylor University, who has been involved in the missing migrant issue for a decade. Baker is director of Reuniting Families, a nonprofit program that coordinates with authorities on both sides of the border to identify and repatriate the remains of the missing. The all-volunteer effort is necessitated by the fact that the communities where bodies are found typically lack the manpower, expertise and funding to handle the growing number of cases.

The four UIndy students, all pursuing master’s degrees in human biology, are Jessica Campbell of LaFarge, Wis.; Erica Christensen of Indianapolis; Justin Maiers of Lapeer, Mich.; and Ryan Strand of Irving, Texas. Their goal is to exhume 59 sets of remains – often while wearing protective gear in the southern heat – and to prepare them for cleaning, profiling and storage while the project awaits a grant to fund costly DNA analysis.

The trip is a remarkable learning and service opportunity for the students, Latham says. But sadly for the victims and their families, the grim trend is likely to continue. She plans to continue taking student teams to similarly affected communities in future years to conduct further exhumations and analysis.

“I see this as a long-term mission,” she says. “It’s a crisis at this point, and I think it’s going to get worse.”

Texas photos courtesy Dr. Lori Baker, Baylor University

Graves of unidentified people line the roadways of the small cemetery in Falfurrias, Texas, where ranchers often discover remains on their property.

Sam

Just wrapping up his first year at UIndy, international student Henry Sam has received a $1,000 boost in his quest to become a physician and work for the betterment of his native Ghana.

A biology and chemistry double major with a pre-med concentration, Sam landed the scholarship money by placing second in a national essay contest sponsored by student insurance provider LewerMark. The theme: “How will an international education help me make a difference in the world?”

Sam’s essay notes the disparity in educational opportunities between the U.S. and his home country.

“The availability of state-of-the-art teaching equipment, improved and better teaching methods which I lacked in my juvenile education, has to a great extent given me the impetus to climb the academic ladder to the best of my ability,” he writes.

“The friendship ties and network I enjoy with like-minded students have the potential to help me in my future ambition of seeking to help reform the health sector of my country. Not only have my interactions with students sharpened my English for effective communication, but it has also helped me in dispelling the stereotypes I held previously. I now understand more profoundly, and appreciate more lovingly, the differences that come with different nationalities and cultures … .”

Sam plans to enter medical school, become a surgeon and also obtain a doctorate in genetic engineering. His contest entry was sponsored by Associate Professor Gerald Zimmerman.