Detective Work

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Yet Brandeis was never appointed to a full-time position. She exchanged correspondence about her plight with Constance Warren, president of the College from 1929–1945. The letters, which are included in the article, detail Brandeis’s struggle with an unwieldy workload and what she saw as unfit compensation.

As a member of the language faculty, this discovery was rather personal to Serafini-Sauli. “I was struck by how precarious the Italian curriculum was” at that time, she says.

After 1941, the language program at Sarah Lawrence was marginalized into private lessons that were independent of the curriculum. The wartime atmosphere made it difficult for Brandeis to press her case, and she left the College in 1942.

Serafini-Sauli enjoyed seeing how things at Sarah Lawrence have changed—and how they’ve stayed the same. “I had never written anything like this before, but it was fun.”

by Christina Mancuso ’08