March 2024
Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, was featured in The Washington Post for her research on hermeneutic labor in intimate relationships.
Anderson delivered the annual Edwards Lecture at Emory University on March 21, with a presentation titled “Feeling Myself: Self-Awareness and Objectification.” She also presented “Love and Limerence” at an invited symposium at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in Portland, Oregon, on March 23 and delivered an invited talk on “The Critical Phenomenological Turn” to the Kant and Post-Kantian Research Group at the University of Toronto on March 28.
Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, had one of her videos included in a screening event titled The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding at Heavy Manners Library in Los Angeles on March 8.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, alongside Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, and Adrien Redford ’14, programmed, prepared editions for, co-directed and played tenor viola da gamba in Musick Divine, a concert of 16th- and 17th-century English music for voices and viols, as a joint venture between Artifex Consort and PRISM Choral Ensemble (March 3, Bridges Auditorium).
On March 8, Bandy presented a paper titled “Through All Eternity: Clockwork, Memory, and Temporality in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Jesu dulcis memoria” at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, held at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL). Bandy then presented another paper, “Instruments of ‘Torture’: Viols, Dismemberment, and Transfiguration in German Baroque Passion Meditations,” based on his research as a 2023-24 Pomona College Humanities Studio fellow, at the Spirit of Gambo: The State of Viol Research conference, held March 15–17 at UC Berkeley.
On March 22–24 at venues in Palo Alto, Berkeley and San Francisco, Bandy performed with the early music ensemble Ciaramella on viola da gamba, alto shawm and Renaissance hümmelchen bagpipes, in a program of 15th-century repertoire presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society.
Alexa Block, associate director of news and strategic content in the Office of Communications, served as a plenary speaker and faculty member for The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Social Media and Community conference in Boston from March 18-20. The plenary sessions were titled “Social Issues, Social Climate and Social Media” and “Crisis Messaging and Protocols Workshop.”
Bana Marine Dahi, visiting assistant professor of French, presented a talk titled “L’intelligence artificielle (IA) au carrefour de la didactique du FLE : L’IA en Support à l’Apprenant et l’Enseignant” in the conference organized by the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF-SoCal) at USC on March 2.
Susanne Mahoney Filback, associate director, preprofessional programs & prelaw advisor in the Career Development Office, attended a graduate school advisor workshop hosted by The University of St. Andrews in Scotland from March 18-22. Pomona College was one of only 12 U.S. colleges and universities invited to attend.
Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, published two papers in the March 29 issue of Science Advances. With colleagues from the U.S., Australia and Korea, he published the article “Tectonic trigger to the first major extinction of the Phanerozoic: the early Cambrian Sinsk event.” With colleagues from the U.S. and China, he published the article “Lithium isotopic constraints on the evolution of the continental clay mineral factory and marine oxygenation in the earliest Paleozoic Era.”
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, delivered the 2024 Mosaic Lecture at Grand Valley State University on March 12. His talk was titled “Prime Time Math: Little Green Men, Locust Hordes, and Cybersecurity.”
Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with Kira Hamman of Pennsylvania State University and Mon Alto and Lew Ludwig of Denison University, facilitated a virtual discussion session titled “Revisiting Generative AI and Numeracy.” The session was hosted by the National Numeracy Network on March 21.
Karaali facilitated a virtual workshop, together with Ileana Vasu of Holyoke Community College, Geillan Aly of Compassionate Math and Jonas D’Andrea of Westminster University, titled “Equity in the Moment” on March 24. The event was hosted by NE-COMMIT (New England Community for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching).
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, co-chaired with Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, in organizing and hosting the 36th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-36), an international scholarly event at Pomona College from March 22-24. This event was sponsored by the College, Academic Dean’s Office, Asian Languages and Literatures Department, Asian Studies, Asian Library, Oldenborg Language Center, Pacific Basin Institute, and Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department. NACCL-36 at Pomona College marks the first time this international conference was held at a liberal arts college.
At NACCL-36, Lang collaborated with her students Sydney Tai ’26, Emma Tom ’26, Jenny Wey ’24 and Jessie Zhang ’26 to deliver a panel presentation titled “Incorporating Gender into Chinese Language and Linguistics Courses,” showcasing learning and teaching reflections from the two new courses Lang first offered: Introduction to Pop Culture in China in spring 2023 and Chinese Language and Gender in fall 2023.
Lang was invited to review the newly published book titled Pragmatics of Chinese as a Second Language, edited by Shuai Li. Lang's review was published in the journal Contrastive Pragmatics on March 12.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave a solo recital on the Piano Spheres series at Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles. Her program featured keyboard works with speaking and singing.
With the support of a Pomona research grant, Lee commissioned and premiered two new works by Chris Castro and Livia Malossi Bottignole. San Francisco Classical Voice gave her a glowing review.
Lee was a judge for the Oakland University (Michigan) 2024 Piano Day Competition for young pianists in two age groups between 11 and 18 years old.
Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, presented “Crisis Management: Conflict and Controversy in Forest Service History” to sessions of the USDA Forest Service Middle Leadership Program in Davis, California, Ogden, Utah, Anchorage, Alaska, and Missoula, Montana.
Miller’s essay remembering the late conservationist Estella Leopold’s passionate defense of ancient time was published by the Forest History Society.
Miller was quoted in Washington Post articles on the ephemeral Lake Manly in Death Valley National Park on March 2 and on the massive wildfires in the Texas panhandle March 5.
Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, spoke at the American Cinemathèque in Los Angeles on the anniversary of the execution of Missak Manouchian, an Armenian man who was active in the French Resistance. Saigal Escudero read a letter Manouchian wrote to his wife before being killed and additionally talked about her own situation during WWII and the women in the French Resistance whom she has interviewed.
Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, with co-authors from UCI, published a paper online in Family Process. The paper reports on the team’s efforts to culturally adapt their relational savoring intervention for implementation with minoritized groups.
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “Big losses are pushing venture-backed startups over a cliff and taking the IPO market with it” (MarketWatch, March 4); “When it comes to critical thinking, AI flunks the test” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12) and “The Flea Market of the Internet: Breaking the Addiction” (MindMatters, March 20).
Smith signed a contract with Business Expert Press for a novel, co-authored with Margaret Smith, Reboot: A Business Novel of Money, Finance, and Life.
David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, and his collaborators presented a talk, “Slot-die Coated and Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) Integrated Improved Semi-transparent Organic Solar Cells” at the Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS) 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages & literatures, gave an invited talk titled “AI and Adaptive Language Learning” for the course AI and Global Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University on March 18. He also gave an invited talk titled “Using ChatGPT API in Language Teaching” at the third lecture series on Chinese curriculum design. The event was organized by Beijing Language and Culture University Press and Phoenix Tree Publishing on March 22. Xiao gave a presentation titled “Facilitative and Inhibitive Factors in Processing L2 Chinese Compounds” at the 36th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics on March 23.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered “Did the War Have to End in the Way It Did?” and “Understanding Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1937-1945” at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater on March 5 and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology on March 7. The Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies funded these lectures, the fourth and fifth Yamashita has given as a member of NEAC’s Distinguished Speakers Bureau.
On March 16, Yamashita delivered a paper titled “Kaiseki Cuisine and the New Hyperlocal Cuisines” as part of a panel on “New Directions in Japanese Food Studies” that he organized for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, which was held in Seattle. On the following afternoon, Yamashita gave his “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” talk to Pomona College alumni in Seattle.
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was an organizer, chair and presenter at a panel titled “Transcultural Encounters in the Sin-Tibetan Borderlands” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference. Her scholarly panel examined cross-lingual, cross-ethnic encounters among Western missionaries, indigenous groups and Han Chinese intellectuals in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Zhang’s pedagogical essay “Visualizing Ethnic Minorities” was published in Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China (Modern Language Association). Her essay is probably the first systematic discussion of how to engage with and teach about China’s ethnic minorities in the classroom ever published in the English language.
Zhang was invited to give a special talk as part of the distinguished Tanner Talk Series at Utah State University. Her talk was titled “Understanding China from the Borders: The ‘Qiang’ and Multiethnic Chinese Literature, Cinema, and Visual Culture” and tackled ethnic minority creative expressions and diversity issues in the realm of literary and artistic productions in globalizing China and represents cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in Asian humanities.