Humanities and Social Science

This report is the result of new research in Jewish teen education and engagement. Funders in the Teen Collaborative identified a need to define shared outcomes in order to pursue their common goals and to effectively aggregate and compare evaluation findings. While this research was intended only to lead to the development of outcomes in this space, it yielded insights that can guide and inform Jewish teen education and engagement more broadly, and can be used by those in the Collaborative as well as others. The Jewish Education Project is excited to unveil these insights about Jewish teens -- from their interests, to their fears, to what brings them meaning in life -- along with shared outcomes, indicators, and measurement tools that will gauge Jewish education and engagement among teens participating in Jewish experiences. Throughout this report, we have included the voices of teens, in their own words, to help us get a better glimpse inside the minds of this population. The dire...

With this study, Maria Luisa Ardizzone adds to her pivotal investigations of the philosophical components of medieval poetry. She casts light on new intellectual scenarios by examining the auctoritates that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries filtered through the guarded boundaries of theological orthodoxy into poetry. In Dante: Il paradigma intellettuale, which follows her monograph on Dante's primo amico (Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages [University of Toronto Press, 2002]), Ardizzone presents the reader with a groundbreaking reading of a selection of poems included in Dante's Vita nova and Il convivio. Modeling her inquiry after his method of composition-gathering sources into a form that establishes new connections between them-Ardizzone identifies a paradigm that structures Dante's thought from the onset. Through this ''intellectual paradigm'' Ardizzone explains the nature of human ontology in Dante and rigorously documents the possibility, hinted at by Maria Corti in La felicità mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), of dating back the first nucleus of Il convivio to Dante's early years in Florence. In a passage from De vulgari eloquentia (2, viii), Dante compares writing to tying sticks together into a bundle. Adopting this simile, Ardizzone reads Dante's lines as composed sources pulled together and kept in balance even when they are drawn from contrasting doctrines. Her exegesis portrays Dante's cultural horizon as an enterprise that does not abide by a single and strictly orthodox tradition. In the conclusion of this formidable study, Dante is seen as responding to the collision of cultural universes in thirteenth-century Christian culture by comparing them, not by testing the truth of new content against the existing, mainstream one. Ardizzone concludes that for Dante the conciliatio consists of a system of contiguity that

Energy band structure of the bilayer graphene superlattices with δ-function magnetic barriers and zero average magnetic flux is studied within the four-band continuum model, using the transfer matrix method. The periodic magnetic potential effects on the zero-energy Dirac point of pristine bilayer graphene are exactly analyzed. Magnetic potential is shown also to generate finite-energy Dirac points at the edges of Brillouin zone the positions of which and the related dispersions are determined in the case of symmetric potentials.