When she is at home, Corriher keeps it simple with recipes like this one for fresh asparagus, which corresponds beautifully with the fresh fish recipe.

Simple Elegance—Four-Minute Asparagus

Perfectly cooked, gorgeous bright green asparagus literally in minutes

1 pound fresh asparagus, rinsed in cold water
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt, sea salt if possible
1/2 teaspoon sugar zest (grated peel) of [one] lemon (optional)

1. With one hand at the root end of an asparagus stalk and the other hand 3/4 of the way up the shaft, gently bend. The asparagus will snap where the tough portion ends.

2. Spread asparagus out on a jelly roll pan. Drizzle with oil, then roll asparagus to coat all sides.

3. Slip under the broiler, about 5 inches away and broil for 4 minutes only. Sprinkle with salt and sugar and place on serving platter or individual plates. Sprinkle with lemon zest and serve immediately.

Fresh Fillets With Macadamia Butter

Makes 6 servings

A mild fish like sole, flounder, haddock or orange roughy is a perfect match for this delicate topping. A real expert with fish, Susan Jones from Santa Clara Beach, Florida, and Hawaii, taught me the joy of macadamia nuts on fish.

6 medium-size mild fish fillets (sole, flounder, orange roughy, halibut)—about 1 1/2 pounds (680 grams). If the fillets are over 1/2 inch thick, I slice them at an angle into 1/2 inch slices.
Salt (sea salt)
2 ounces (about 60 grams) butter
1/2 cup coarsely chopped macadamia nuts
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 sprigs parsley, finely chopped
5 sprigs parsley

1. Preheat oven to 500°F (260°C).

2. Place fillets on a baking sheet. Bake uncovered for 5 minutes. Sprinkle with salt and remove to a warm serving platter.

3. While fillets are baking, melt the butter in a large skillet. Add the chopped macadamia nuts and cook until lightly browned. Stir 1/4 teaspoon salt in, then pour the macadamia nut and butter sauce over the fish fillets. Garnish the fillets with chopped parsley. Garnish the platter with parsley sprigs.

Corriher loves sharing her knowledge—and she extends that sharing to her signature biscuit recipe. While there are several key characteristics that make her biscuits famous, one of the most important ones is that she insists on using low-protein Southern flour. That insistence and her identification with low-protein flour has led to a partnership with Tenda-Bake flour, based in North Carolina. Packages of its gourmet self-rising flour will soon bear Corriher’s name and likeness.

From BakeWise (p. 151–153):
I do know biscuits. I have made biscuits all over the United States and Canada, and as far away as Europe. I even got a standing ovation for my biscuits at a meeting of food science writers in Erice, Sicily. …
I will, and have, put my biscuits up against anyone’s. …

Shirley Corriher’s “Touch-Of-Grace” Southern Biscuits

Makes 12 to 14 medium biscuits

As a little girl, I followed my grandmother around the kitchen. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner she made the lightest, most wonderful biscuits in the world. I used her bread bowl, her flour, her buttermilk—I did everything the same, and I shaped the biscuits just like she did. But mine always turned out a dry, mealy mess. I would cry and say, “Nanny, what did I do wrong?” She was a very busy woman with all my uncles and grandfather to feed three meals a day, but she would lean down and give me a big hug, and say, “Honey, I guess you forgot to add a touch of grace.”

It took me twenty years to figure out what my grandmother was doing that I was missing. I thought that the dough had to be dry enough to shape by hand, but she actually had a very wet dough. She sprinkled flour from the front of the bowl onto the dough, pinched off a biscuit-size piece, and dipped it in the flour. She floured the outside of the wet dough so that she could handle it. This wet dough in a hot oven creates steam to puff and make feather-light biscuits. A wet dough was the big secret. Now I make biscuits almost as good as my grandmother’s, and so can you, with a good wet dough and a touch of grace.

Nonstick cooking spray

2 cups (9 oz/255 g) spooned and leveled self-rising flour (low-protein Southern U.S. flour like Tenda-Bake or any self-rising flour)
1/4 cup (1.8 oz/51 g) sugar
1/2 teaspoon (3 g) salt
1/4 cup (1.6 oz/45 g) shortening
2/3 cup (158 ml) heavy cream
1 cup (237 ml) buttermilk, or enough for dough to resemble cottage cheese (if you are not using low-protein flour, it will take more than 1 cup)
1 cup (4.5 oz/127 g) plain all-purpose flour, for shaping
3 tablespoons (1.5 oz/43 g) unsalted butter, melted, for brushing

Preheat the oven to 425°F/218°C and arrange a shelf slightly below the center of the oven. Spray an 8- or 9-inch (20 or 23-cm) round cake pan with nonstick cooking spray.

1. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the self-rising flour, sugar, and salt. Work the shortening in with your fingers until there are no large lumps. Gently stir in the cream, then some of the buttermilk. Continue stirring in buttermilk until the dough resembles cottage cheese. It should be a wet mess—not soup but cottage-cheese texture. If you are not using a low-protein flour, this may require considerably more than 1 cup (237 ml) of buttermilk.

2. Spread the plain (not self-rising) flour out on a plate or pie pan. With a medium (about 2-in/5-cm #30) ice cream scoop or spoon, place 3 or 4 scoops of dough well apart in the flour. Sprinkle flour over each. Flour your hands. Turn a dough ball in the flour to coat, pick it up, and gently shape it into a round, shaking off the excess flour as you work. Place this biscuit into the prepared pan. Coat each dough ball and place the shaped biscuit scrunched up against its neighbor so that the biscuits rise up and don’t spread out. Continue scooping and shaping until all of the dough is used.

3. Place the pan on the arranged shelf in the oven. Bake until lightly browned, about 20 to 25 minutes. Brush with the melted butter. Invert onto one plate, and then back onto another. With a knife or spatula, cut quickly between biscuits to make them easy to remove. Serve immediately.

Recipes © 1976, 1989, 1998 Shirley O. Corriher.
Used by permission of the author and of Scribner.

Katherine Carroll in Iraq as a civilian member of the military’s Human Terrain System team.

Katherine Carroll’s year in Iraq is bookended by distinctly different memories. In the first, she had been in Iraq for just weeks when an Apache helicopter killed two insurgents planting explosive devices (IEDs) outside the walls of the U.S. military base where she was quartered.

“The IED blew up and their van blew up too. It was just guns and missiles and explosives going off everywhere,” Carroll recalls. “I was standing in my Eileen West nightgown in a cement bunker, crying.”

The other event happened near the end of her year. Carroll was in the community of Abu Ghraib, attending a meeting with several sheiks. A suicide bomber dropped by but was too nervous to detonate. Instead he went to a nearby market and killed around a dozen people. After the explosion, Iraqi soldiers began shooting. The American soldiers were new to Iraq and jittery, too. “We didn’t yet know the full story, but we knew there was a big explosion and gunfire all around us, and my interpreter and I were sitting in the Stryker [armored vehicle] gossiping and talking about what we were going to have for dinner,” says the assistant professor of political science. “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Carroll with Iraqi children.

To say that a year deployed in Bagdad as part of the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) team was life-changing is selling it short. Not only did Carroll learn to confront fears head-on, she also began to understand the U.S. military, a topic she hopes to continue to study. While she has spent much of her career studying Middle East politics, the military was a foreign concept. That is, until a recruiter knocked on her Vanderbilt office door in June 2007 looking for professors to embed with a unit.

The program’s goal is to help the military understand the social and cultural environment of the community in which they work. Participants had to have the credentials—a doctorate in anthropology or related field—and the physical abilities, such as carrying 50 pounds of gear and enduring long work hours on very little sleep.

Carroll was intrigued, but at the time the surge had just begun and both Iraqis and the military had endured months of heavy casualties. By July, though, Iraq began to stabilize. “It wasn’t clear whether this was a real decline or just a blip,” Carroll says. “I wasn’t in a position to make a decision, but it stuck in my head that I wanted to do this. There was nothing standing in my way except being afraid.”

In her work as a social scientist, Carroll met with sheiks to learn about the political and cultural environment.

After several months of watching the attack figures decline, she felt Iraq had become safe enough, and by January 2008, she was training in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. There, with military reservists and other social scientists and researchers, she learned how to conduct social science in a war zone.

Carroll eventually separated from that team and deployed to Baghdad where she investigated various elements of Iraqi culture, society and politics at the direction of the brigade commander. “My typical day was to go outside the wire (the military base) to someone’s home and meet with political actors or leaders. Or I’d go to the Rasheed Hotel on the edge of the Green Zone and talk to Iraqis about who was who in their neighborhood, what they needed or how they viewed the political environment,” the social scientist says. “I spent a lot of time talking to sheiks and figuring out who did what and who was influential in what area, so that the soldiers would know who to work with to solve problems of security, service provision and reconciliation. Then I’d write and work on briefings until 11 or 12 at night.”

Carroll found the Iraqis understandably suspicious, but she eventually won them over, always offering a business card and sending them drafts of reports for input. After she returned to Vanderbilt, she stayed in touch by phone and email with many of the Iraqis she had met, updating them on what was occurring in her classes. “Maybe some of them initially thought I was in the CIA, I don’t know, but they came around to the view that I was who I said I was—an embedded professor—and that I really was there to help Americans understand them better as people,” she notes. “Then they’d say, ‘What a great idea.’”

Still it was a dangerous situation. Three HTS professors have been killed—two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Nicole Suveges, the social scientist killed in Iraq, trained at Fort Leavenworth with Carroll, and the two had become instant friends. “We were two peas in the pod. Same age, same interests. We talked on the phone every day,” Carroll says. Suveges had just been in Sadr City a month when a bomb exploded in the room where she was attending a meeting, killing 12.

The professor with her interpreter, Maha El Sadder, at a political rally.

“I fell apart,” Carroll says. “It was hard to stay after that.

My mother, who had been very nervous about the whole thing, pointed out, ‘If you leave now, the whole experience will be about Nicole dying. You will have lost your whole investment.

If you stay, it could be about something else.’”

She stayed, comforted by soldiers who knew what it was like to lose a friend instantly. “They were so supportive of me in this perfect, quiet, gentle way when Nicole died. That was a moment when I felt the military would accept me,” Carroll says.

Now she returns the favor, hoping that the Humanities 161 course opened the eyes of students. “I’m trying to help students understand how the military learns and operates so they can be more informed as citizens, patriots and/or critics,” she says. “That’s to get them more intellectually engaged with a major U.S. institution, but it’s also to say, ‘You need to learn about other cultures, too.’”

Henderson

Physics major Calen Henderson has been keen on astronomy since he uttered his first intelligible word: “Moon.”

Even so, Henderson admits he has had “much more than a fleeting thought” about going into music full time rather than continuing on in physics. The graduating senior realizes one must eventually be vocation, and the other, hobby, but it doesn’t help that he is strongly gifted at both. In addition to being an award-winning piano soloist studying at the Blair School of Music, Henderson was recently lauded by the American Astronomical Society for a presentation at the group’s annual meeting. 

“As it’s turned out,” says the 21-year-old from Kansas City, “it’s definitely easier to be the physicist who plays piano than the concert pianist who studies physics.”

Henderson is far from alone in the interdisciplinary approach to his studies. Karen Ann Krieger, associate professor of piano at Blair, says she has worked with piano students who double major in areas as diverse as biomedical engineering, economics and computer science. They all enjoy the therapeutic effects of the music. Even so, Henderson is a little different. He is outstanding, Krieger says, due to his passion and enthusiasm.

“Calen would come in each week and had to tell me about things outside of Blair, the latest updates on his physics research,” Krieger says. “Sometimes I had no idea what he was talking about, but he made me want to know more. These students’ passions, their interests, broaden my world.”

Henderson connects music and astronomy by speaking of sound waves and light waves, but he admits that he finds other commonalities in the two.

“The music I’ve always been drawn to has been impressionistic,” he says. “To me, there’s a fundamental connection between listening to that kind of music and focusing on the kind of relationship it can have with you, and going out on a dark night and being allowed to be one with the heavens.”

Professor of Physics Norman Tolk has been one of Henderson’s mentors in both science and music. He and Henderson “had an affinity from the beginning,” Tolk says, in part due to the professor’s own musical interests. Henderson has visited the Tolks’ home and participated in chamber music parties, in which guests both perform and dine.

“We all sort of agreed that there has been a strong historical connection between music and physics,” Tolk says. “Einstein was a violinist, and a lot of people have done both. Both reflect an underlying order, a pattern that people can resonate to.”

Founded in 1988 to promote interdisciplinary research among faculty, the role of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities has expanded to serve as a catalyst for people in the humanities to come together around ideas and learn from each other.

Collaboration and Discovery

The center, originally known as the Vanderbilt Center for the Humanities, grew out of the Mellon Regional Faculty Development Program, a seminar housed at Vanderbilt each summer from 1979 through 1987, recalls Charles Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, who directed the seminars and chaired the philosophy department for a decade. The collaborative seminars generated so much energy and excitement among faculty that the need for the center was clear.

“A major problem that the center was designed to address was the relative isolation in which most humanities faculty members did their work. There were few occasions for collaborative endeavor,” says Scott, who served as the first faculty director of the Warren Center and is now director of the Vanderbilt Center for Ethics.

Renamed for Vanderbilt’s most famous literary alumnus after his death in 1989, the Robert Penn Warren Center serves as a site of discovery for Vanderbilt’s faculty, as well as for national and international scholars. Each year the Warren Center Fellows Program brings together eight professors from different departments to focus on an area of exploration. A visiting fellow joins the Vanderbilt faculty in the yearlong study of the topic, which may include discussions, meetings, lectures and seminars.

In addition to the fellows program, the center is home to a number of monthly seminars, with topics ranging from food politics to ancient and medieval studies.

“We really are a revolving door of people coming through with many different areas of specialties addressing a variety of topics,” Executive Director Mona Frederick says.

Supporting Young Scholars

Today the humanities center also serves graduate students, or “young scholars,” as Frederick prefers they be called. The Graduate Student Fellows Program, now in its third term, appoints seven graduate students who are expected to complete and defend their dissertations by the end of the following summer. Unlike the faculty program, it is not themed. The participants meet together, give presentations from their research, and provide feedback to each other.

David Richter, PhD’07, now an assistant professor of Spanish at Grinnell College, was in the first Graduate Student Fellows Program. “I knew the experience of working in the moderately structured environment that the Warren Center program provided would be a good motivation for me to be productive and finish my dissertation,” he says. “It was an exciting environment of intellectual growth and stimulation. This was key for me as a young scholar. Our conversations were relaxed, but intellectually rigorous.”

Such programs fit with the center’s mission to “provide a space for countless meetings of the mind,” says the center’s new faculty director, Edward H. Friedman, Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish and professor of comparative literature. “The Warren Center promotes innovative scholarly undertakings and collaborations, and at the same time, foregrounds the role of the humanities at Vanderbilt and in academia in general. Our students—notably, our undergraduates—have not forsaken the humanities. On the contrary, they seem to realize that, whatever their ultimate professional goals, it behooves them to take classes in literature, philosophy, history, religious studies and theater.”