Analyzing Asian Security; Probing Detective Fiction

Victor D. Cha, an expert on North Korea and Asian security issues, is about to take a leave of absence from Georgetown University for a job with the National Security Council. (Courtesy Of Georgetown University)

Victor D. Cha, an associate professor in Georgetown's Department of Government and the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, is a widely known author and expert on North Korea and Asian security issues with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He frequently comments on the nuclear situation in North Korea.

Cha, who has served as an independent consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, holds the D.S. Song-Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Studies, was a former John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University and is a two-time Fulbright Scholar and a former Hoover National Fellow at Stanford. His most recent book is "Nuclear North Korea."

His expertise is in such demand that Cha is about to take a leave of absence from GWU to be director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council. Because of his new job, he declined to be interviewed.

Maureen Corrigan, in her 16th year at Georgetown, is an adjunct professor in the English Department, specializing in detective fiction, 19th-century British literature and women's literature.

"I started reading detective fiction as a way to escape writing my doctoral dissertation on 19th-century British prose" and saw connections between the two genres, she said.

"The literature I was studying for my Ph.D. was all doom and gloom, and 20th-century American popular writers were looking at life in the city and the absence of satisfying work in most people's lives."

In addition to teaching, Corrigan is a book critic for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" and has co-edited and contributed to "Mystery and Suspense Writers," which won an Edgar Award, named for Edgar Allan Poe. (She has also written columns about mystery novels for The Washington Post.)

Her students, she said, "want a good argument for their parents on why they should be taking a course in detective fiction." She tells them of the long tradition of mystery literature, "way beyond who killed Col. Mustard in the drawing room with a knife."

Corrigan concentrates on classic texts that "investigate" what's wrong with America. "Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, they've been canonized. Butwhen you get into Mickey Spillane, things get a little dicey."

A Glover Park resident, Corrigan, 49, has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches three classes a semester, including a popular undergraduate course, "New York Stories." Late at night, if she can't sleep, she reads detective fiction.

Martha R. Weiss, an associate professor in the Department of Biology, examines the behavior and learning of butterflies, wasps and caterpillars.

She grew up "poking around in tide pools and hunting for mushrooms and chasing insects," so studying the natural world as an adult was a good fit. She has been teaching at Georgetown for nine years.

"Insects are very good learners, and they depend on learning for a lot of the jobs they have to do," Weiss said.

Butterflies, for example, associate the color of flowers with the presence of nectar. "You can give a butterfly a real flower or a fake flower, and put sugar water in it," she said, " and the butterfly will learn to choose that color out of a whole range of colors."

The research, she said, helps scientists understand the role of butterflies as pollinators and the evolutionary relationships between plants and insects. Some flowers, for instance, will change colors to tell the butterflies which flower to visit.

Caterpillars, she has learned, build very precise houses out of leaves and silk and then carefully eject their feces pellets away from their houses -- so the odor doesn't attract predatory wasps.

Weiss teaches classes in plant-animal interactions and introductory biology. She oversees senior thesis research projects and conducts her own research, mostly in the field. She raises caterpillars and butterflies in her campus lab and keeps a wasp colony.

A Tenleytown resident, Weiss, 46, has a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and "two little kids, which pretty much sums up my life."