Gabelli School students invited to join new book club

Announcements | Apr 10, 2015 | Gabelli School of Business

Most book clubs follow a similar script: Read a book. Gather with friends. Discuss what you’ve read.

A new club at the Gabelli School of Business, scheduled to form in the fall semester will add an enviable new wrinkle. Rather than just talking about the book with peers, students will get a chance to hear directly from the author.

The new club – brainchild of Greer Jason-DiBartolo, assistant dean for freshmen at the Gabelli School, and Lisa Green, the manager of the undergraduate integrated core curriculum – is designed to expose undergraduate and graduate students to the research and writing of Fordham University professors.

Jason-DiBartolo said the club’s reading list will feature books written by Fordham professors. The students will be given a book (free of charge), along with a study guide developed by the faculty author.

“The guide should prompt [the students] to consider certain questions or point out certain key highlights of the book,” Jason-DiBartolo said. “And then a few weeks after that, we will host our discussion.”

One book will be studied in each semester, and the discussions with the author, held over a lunch or dinner, will alternate between the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses.

The first book to be read will be Lerzan Aksoy’s The Wallet Allocation Rule, a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Aksoy is a professor of marketing at the Gabelli School.

The club, Jason-DiBartolo said, will serve a number of purposes. It will gather undergraduate and graduate students together, celebrate the achievements of Fordham’s faculty and expose students to some of the high-level research being conducted by the faculty. That exposure could also inspire students to conduct research of their own, she said.

“We’re looking for about 10 to 12 students [for the book club],” Jason-DiBartolo said. “If there is a huge demand, what we would ask the professors to be willing to do is maybe do two discussions, because we want a small enough number that everybody can be engaged in the conversation.”

Interested students should email Jason-DiBartolo directly at jason@fordham.edu.