October 2009 @Pomona Newsletter

Dear Faculty and Staff,

Here is the second edition of our slightly truncated newsletter that contains only accomplishments, plus a few other newsy tidbits. Our new-and-improved newsletter will arrive early next semester.

Best,
Laura Tiffany
Web Editor

News and Notes

• The faculty workshop “Teaching With the Flu” from Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick will take place on Thursday, October 15, at 12:10 p.m. in the Frank Blue Room. This workshop will cover Sakai tips to use while ill. Doors open at 11:30 a.m.
• Student Health Services is providing flu shots for staff and faculty for $20 on Wednesday, November 4, from 3:30 – 7:30 p.m., and Wednesday, November 25, from 11 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. in the Tranquada Multipurpose Room.
• Happy 122nd Birthday, Pomona College! Founder’s Day will be celebrated with food, games and music on Wednesday, October 21, at 5 p.m., on the south lawn of Smith Campus Center.
• The Pomona College Charitable Giving Campaign is underway. Visit www.pomonacollege.com/charitablegiving for more information.
• The new Staff section in My Pomona (http://my.pomona.edu) has more Human Resources information, as well as downloadable HR forms.
• Lastly, the idea of announcing new staff members was brought up in the recent Staff Forum. I would love to do this via our newsletter. Please post any new hires or recent promotions to us via the Community News/Accomplishments form (http://www.pomona.edu/atpomona/formnews.shtml).

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Lisa Anne Auerbach (Art & Art History) has a solo exhibition, “UMMA Projects: Lisa Anne Auerbach,” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, July 11-October 11, and another, “Take This Knitting Machine and Shove It,” at the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England, September 12-October 18. Her work is also featured in “Craftwerk 2.0” at Jönköpings Läns Museum, Jönköping, Sweden, September 19-January 17.

In conjunction with current exhibitions, she also gave talks about her work at the University of Michigan Museum of Art on September 11 and at the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England, on September 24.

A translation by Allan Barr (Asian Languages and Literatures) of an interview with the Chinese author Yu Hua was quoted extensively in an article ("The Cost of Rapid Change: Then and Now") in the National Post (Canada) on September 26.

On September 26, Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) gave a lecture at the Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the history of Chijnaya art. He also exhibited embroideries made in Chijnaya and showed a documentary, “Made in Chijnaya,” produced by Becca Russell-Einhorn ’10.

Laurie Cameron’s (Theatre & Dance) dance troupe, Laurie Cameron & Company, featuring Michael Szanyi ’08 and Thomas Tsai ’09, premiered a new work, “Swimming Upstream,” at the Manhattan Movement Arts Theatre in New York as part of the American Dance Guild’s annual choreography festival.

Bowen Close (Sustainability Integration Office) announces that her office just released our first Sustainability Annual Report and Climate Action Plan, along with our first update of our Greenhouse Gas Inventory (www.pomona.edu/sustainability) and a new green living guide. She also recently spoke spoke on a panel about sustainability at small schools at the Greening of the Campus conference (September 20-23) in Indiana, where Chelsea Hodge '09 received a student leadership award for the Pomona drying rack and sustainable laundry program.

Alfred Cramer (Music) is editor of the five-volume Musicians and Composers of the 20th Century (Salem Press, 2009).

Pierre Englebert’s (Politics) book Africa: Unity, Sovereignty and Sorrow was published by Lynne Rienner Publishers in June. Englebert was also awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to do research at the Centre d’Etudes d’Afrique Noire, in Bordeaux, France, starting in June 2010.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s (Media Studies) book project, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, scheduled for print publication by New York University Press in 2010, has launched online as part of an experimental open peer-review process being conducted by MediaCommons.

She was also the subject of an interview in the September/October issue of HUMANITIES magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave a colloquium talk, “Hidden Symmetries in Everyday Operators,” at the University of Richmond on September 28.

Roberto Garza-López (Chemistry) is the author, with John Kozak and Jack Brzezinski, of “Reaction Efficiency of Diffusion-Controlled Processes on Finite, Planar Arrays. II. Crystal Surfaces,” in Physical Review E 80:2, 021116 (2009).

With Sylvan Long ’07, Eric Grosfils (Geology) co-authored “Modeling the Effect of Layered Volcanic Material on Magma Reservoir Failure and Associated Deformation, with Application to Long Valley Caldera, California,” in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 186 (2009), pp. 349-60. The paper was based on Long’s senior thesis research.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) is the author of several recent publications: “Jo Handelsman,” in Cell Biology Education – Life Sciences Education 8 (2009), pp. 165-66; “Academic Climate Change for Women in Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison,” in AWIS Magazine 40:3, pp. 12-13; a review of Linley Erin Hall’s book Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie? The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology (2007), in AWIS Magazine 40:3, p. 30; and “Worn Green Chair,” in Silhouette: Bold Lines and Voices from WriteGirl (Los Angeles: WriteGirl Publications, 2009), p. 178.

On behalf of the Pomona College Museum of Art, Kathleen Howe (Art & Art History and Museum of Art) has been awarded a $10,000 matching grant from the Challenge America program of the National Endowment for the Arts to support the exhibition “Steve Roden: When Words Become Forms.” The exhibition is scheduled for fall 2010.

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed as a member of her trio, the Mojave Trio, in the Restoration Series at the South Pasadena Library on September 20.

With Christine Sargent ’10, Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave a paper entitled “The Campaign to Address Trafficking: Evidence of Civil Society in Dubai?” as part of a panel she had organized, “Complicated Intersections: Labor, Migration, Sex Work and Trafficking,” for the Society for Medical Anthropology’s 50-year anniversary conference, held in New Haven, Connecticut, in September.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) participated by invitation in a workshop with the New York City-based Tectonic Theater Project in Los Angeles on September 30. Creators of The Laramie Project, the Tectonic Theatre Project’s workshop focused on their methodology which examines current social issues.

Jennifer Perry (Anthropology) reviewed Rick Torben’s The Archaeology and Historical Ecology of the Late Holocene San Miguel Island (2007) in the inaugural issue of California Archaeology 1:1, pp. 135-37. She also gave an invited lecture, “Landscapes, Seascapes, and Spiritscapes of the California Channel Islands,” to the Pacific Coast Archaeological Society in Irvine on September 10.

Sheila Pinkel (Art & Art History) is exhibiting a reproduction of her Tongva mural, a public artwork permanently installed in the Sherman Oaks Library, at the San Luis Obispo Art Center in October and November.

Ami Radunskaya (Mathematics) co-edited “Mathematical Biology and Medicine,” a special issue of the journal Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems Series B 12:2 (September 2009), which includes as lead article her coauthored paper “Predicting the Drug Release Kinetics of Matrix Tablets,” pp. 261-77. The issue contains articles about problems posed in an NSF-sponsored workshop that Radunskaya ran in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) published “Empire’s Allure: Babylon and the Exception to Law in Two Conservative Discourses,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77:3 (2009), pp. 680-711.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages & Literatures) spoke about her book, Héroïnes Françaises 1940-1945, to the Alliance Française in Berkeley on September 25 and to Pomona alumni in Sacramento on September 26.

John Seery (Politics) received Phi Beta Kappa’s Sidney Hook Memorial Award, which recognizes national distinction in scholarship, undergraduate teaching, and leadership in the cause of liberal arts education. He was presented with the award and gave the keynote speech, “The Liberal Arts as a Vocation,” at a banquet held in Austin, Texas, on October 3.

Slavi Slavov’s (Economics) article “Should Small Open Economies in East Asia Put All Their Eggs in One Basket? The Role of Balance Sheet Effects” won the 2009 Best Paper Award of the Journal of Korean Economy. The article had appeared in the journal’s April 2008 issue.

Robin Thompson (Financial Aid) shares that her office recently hired Gina Green for the position of administrative assistant. Green previously worked for more than four years in the Registrar’s Office, but left the area for awhile before joining Pomona again.

Richard Worthington (Politics) is principal investigator on the project “World Wide Views on Global Warming: Process and Impact,” which recently garnered a $234,955 grant from the National Science Foundation. He also helped organize and conduct a training seminar for project managers from 43 countries of “World Wide Views on Global Warming,” a citizen consultation on climate change policy, which was held on September 26. The Los Angeles area event was held at Pomona College.