November 2009 @Pomona Newsletter

Dear Faculty and Staff,

Here is the latest edition of our @Pomona Staff and Faculty newsletter. We’re happy to announce a new section that features recent hires at Pomona. Help us welcome our new staff members to the Pomona community!

Best,
Laura Tiffany
Web Editor

News and Notes

• If you missed the Student Health Services flu shot clinic on November 4, you can still attend on Wednesday, November 25, from 11 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. in the Tranquada Multipurpose Room. Pricing is $20 for staff and faculty.
• Save a trip to Alexander Hall: In the new Staff section in My Pomona, you can find HR announcements of current events like HR training sessions and benefits open enrollment informational session times and locations, as well as commonly used HR forms.
• Benefits open enrollment continues through November 16. If you need to make any changes to your benefits plan, log onto https://wwww.cuc.claremont.edu/benefits before 6 p.m. on November 16.
• The holidays are upon us: The Thanksgiving Day holiday begins on Wednesday, November 25 with an early release of 3 p.m., and then full holidays on Thursday, November 25, and Friday, November 26.
• Reminder: Effective for wages paid on and after 11/1/09 through 12/31/09, state income tax rates will increase by 10%, which will be reflected on your November and December paychecks.  This increase is due to a signed legislation by Governor Schwarzenegger to solve a $24 billion budget deficit for 2009-10. It’s unknown whether the state tax tables will change beginning 1/1/10.
• The annual 5C Craft Faire will take place on Friday, December 4, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Stover Walk. (It will be postponed to December 11 if it rains.) For information on this year’s crafters, visit http://collegecraftfaire.blogspot.com. Contact Elaine Baker for information on participating in the faire.
• The Pomona College Charitable Giving Campaign is still underway. Visit the website for more information.

New Employees

Elisa Albán, a 2009 graduate of CMC with a major in government, is the new Student Services Assistant Registrar. Albán is from North Hollywood, and worked for Faculty Support at CMC while she was a student. She has replaced Adam Pave, who was promoted to Associate Registrar.  Kathie Rosacker, still half-time, has also been promoted to Associate Registrar for Data and Technology.

William Ransom is the new Safety and Technical Assistant working in the sculpture shop in the Art department teaching students the safe use of power tools and other equipment used in sculpture fabrication. He has his MFA in sculpture from CGU and his BA in sculpture and architecture from Bennington College. Ransom has shown his artwork in various galleries in Los Angeles and across the country, including a solo show at Pitzer College's Lenzer Family Gallery as the first artist in the Emerging Artist in Residence Program.

Wendy Rios, a Pomona native who attended Madison Elementary, Fremont Middle School and Garey High School, has joined the Business Office as a Purchase Order Specialist. She earned her BA in Accounting with a minor in Spanish from Cal Poly Pomona. She is married with four children and is an avid soccer fan and player.

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

The work of Lisa Anne Auerbach (Art & Art History) is featured in Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change, ed. Shepard Fairey and Jennifer Gross (New York: Abrams, 2009).Betty Bernhard’s (Theatre & Dance) documentary film In Search of Dignity: Sex Workers’ Theatre against Injustice in India is being shown at the 8th International Women Playwrights Festival in Mumbai.

Ralph Bolton’s (Anthropology) book Cuyes, camiones y cuentos en los Andes: Estudios antropologicos de la cultura expresiva (Guinea pigs, trucks and folktales in the Andes: Anthropological studies in expressive culture) was published in Lima, Peru, by Editorial Horizonte.

In August, Kim Bruce (Computer Science) chaired the annual meeting of the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium at Gustavus Adolphus College.  In October, he evaluated grant proposals for the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC, and participated in a Mellon-sponsored workshop on linguistics in liberal arts colleges at Swarthmore College.

He also gave an invited talk, “Introducing Concurrency in CS 1,” and served on a panel at the workshop “Curricula for Concurrency and Parallelism” in Orlando, Florida, on October 26.

Susana Chávez-Silverman (Romance Languages & Literatures) gave an invited reading from her book Killer Crónicas and her forthcoming work, Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters, at a symposium, “The Bilingual Mind,” held at Syracuse University on October 7.  Sponsored by the La Casita Cultural Center Project, she also gave a reading and workshop at the Mundy Public Library in West Syracuse, New York, on October 6. 

Ludwig Chincarini (Economics) has learned that more institutions are using his book Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management as a textbook for their courses, including Macquarie University in Australia; The University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Bocconi University; Warwick Business School; Harvard Business School; Hagan School of Business at Iona College; and Pepperdine University.

Alfred Cramer (Music) presented “Musical Functions of Emergent Properties: A View of Musicology, Music Perception, and Performance” at the Grieg Academy-Department of Music, University of Bergen, Norway, on October 23. He also attended a National Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowships Programme seminar in Oslo, Norway, October 20-21, as supervisor of a research project, "The Atonal Experience," funded by the programme.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Media Studies) gave a paper, “Peer-to-Peer Review: Critical Approaches to Authority in Internet-Based Publishing,” at the tenth annual Association of Internet Researchers conference, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 7-10.  She gave another paper, “Obsolescence,” as an invited panelist at the inaugural conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, held in Knoxville, Tennessee, October 22-25.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) and Hugh Howards have an article, “Every Graph Has an Embedding in S3 Containing No Non-Hyperbolic Knot,” in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 137 (2009), pp. 4275-85.

In October, Jennifer Friedlander (Media Studies) gave a paper, “Representing Uncertainty: Aliza Schvartz’s Unseen Yale Art Project,” at an Association for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society conference, and another paper, “Art and Radical Democracy: Christoph Schlingensief’s Deportation Installation,” at the Scripps Humanities Institute. 

Stephan Ramon Garcia and Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) served on the panel “A Mathematical Career at a Liberal Arts College,” held at UC Berkeley on October 19.

Paula Goldsmid (Graduate Fellowships) chaired the pre-conference Workshop for New Advisors at the conference of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors in Seattle last July. She was also elected NAFA National Secretary for 2009-2011.

George Gorse (Art & Art History) was elected to the board of the Renaissance Society of America and made an associate editor of Renaissance Quarterly.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) gave a lecture, “Resetting the Aging Clock in Yeast Meiosis,” at the School of Biotechnology & Biomolecular Science, University of New South Wales, on October 16, and a workshop, “Teaching with Microarrays,” at the Australasian Microarrays and Associated Technologies Association meeting in Katoomba, NSW, Australia, on October 21.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) is a co-author of “Impacts of Experimentally Increased Foraging Effort on the Family: Offspring Sex Matters,” in Animal Behaviour 78, pp. 321-28.

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed a solo program, featuring the world premiere of a work by Kurt Rohde, at the Department of Music, UC Davis, on October 15; and a solo recital, including the Bay Area premiere of a new work by Karl Kohn (Music, Emeritus), in the Old First Concert Series in San Francisco on October 16.  She also gave a series of three concerts on harpsichord and piano at the Garth Newel Music Center in Virginia, October 23-25. 

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) has given three recent talks: “Traffic Jam: Labor, Migration and Trafficking in Dubai” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, on October 9; “Youth in Transition: The Transformation of Masculinity, Marriage and Intimacy in Iran” at the UCLA conference “Marriage in Iran” on October 23; and “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran” at Concordia University, Montreal, on October 29.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) traveled to Mexico City in early October as a guest of the Mexican government’s cultural ministry, Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes, and the National Theatre Company of Mexico to begin preproduction meetings for a staging of Zoot Suit. She will serve as U.S./Mexico Project Coordinator and Actriz Invitada. She also served as an artist-in-residence at Tufts University, October 16-25.

Robert Mezey (English) has been invited to teach at his alma mater, Kenyon College, next semester. He will hold Richard Thomas Visiting Professorship.

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) is the editor of River Basins in the American West (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009) and, with Mark Ciioc, author of “Interview: Alfred Crosby,” in Environmental History 14:3, pp. 559-68. He has also recently reviewed several books: Patsy Pittman Light’s Capturing Nature: The Cement Sculpture of Dionicio Rodríguez in Southwestern Historical Quarterly (October 2009), pp. 282-83; Gordon Morris Bakken’s The Mining Law of 1872: Past, Politics, and Prospects in Forest Magazine (Fall 2009); and Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in Journal of Forestry (July/August 2009), p. 275.

Miller also recently gave two presentations at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas: “Running Dry: Water and Development in San Antonio” on October 22 and “Contested Waters: South Texas in an Era of Climate Change” on October 23.

Gilda Ochoa (Sociology and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies) was elected to a three-year term on the senate of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

With Elisha Nuchi ’09, Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) presented a paper, “An Analysis of Metaphony in Felechosa Asturian,” at the Mellon 23 Workshop on Linguistics at Swarthmore College, October 3.

Bryan Penprase (Physics & Astronomy) spoke on “Observations of Low-Metallicity DLA Systems with the Keck Telescope and ESI Spectrograph” at a conference, “The Chemical Enrichment of the Intergalactic Medium,” in Leiden, the Netherlands, in May.  He also gave a colloquium talk, “Exploring the Evolution of Elemental Abundances with Quasar Absorption Line Spectroscopy of DLAs,” at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, on July 9.

William Peterson (Music) has an article, “Storm Fantasies for the Nineteenth-Century Organ in France,” in Keyboard Perspectives: Yearbook of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, vol. 2 (2009), ed. Annette Richards, pp. 1-29.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages & Literatures) chaired a panel, “Poetic Creation and Transformation,” and presented a paper, “D’un oeil impressionniste,” at the 35th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, held in Salt Lake City, October 22-24.  

Leonard Pronko (Theatre & Dance) produced a DVD, Kabuki for the West, documenting his productions of kabuki plays in English, as well as Western plays using kabuki techniques, from 1965 to 2006.  The DVD is being marketed by Insight Video, New York.

Joti Rockwell (Music) published “Birdcage Flights: A Perspective on Inter-Cardinality Voice Leading,” in Music Theory Online 15:5, and he reviewed two books, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways and The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance, in the Journal of Popular Music Studies 21:3, pp. 310-15. Rockwell also gave a talk, “On Crooked Time: Metrical Disruption and Depth in American Roots Music,” at the Society for Music Theory conference in Montreal on October 29.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) has an article, “Detranscendentalizing Decisionism: Political Theology after Gayatri Spivak,” in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25:2, pp. 67-85.

Monique Saigal’s (Romance Languages & Literatures) Héroïnes Françaises 1940-1945 was chosen as the 2009 “One Book – One Federation” book by the Federation of Alliances Françaises, USA. Saigal also spoke about Héroïnes Françaises at the Kamm House in Portland, Oregon, on October 2.

Jack Sanders (Music) gave eight guitar concerts in Ohio, October 15-22.  His tour was sponsored by the Piatigorsky Foundation of New York. His essay “Heebie-Jeebies” appeared in Soundboard 35:3 (2009). He also built copies of a Rene Lacote guitar, circa 1830, for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in October.

Jianhsin Wu (Asian Languages & Literatures) published an expanded edition of her book The Way of Chinese Characters: The Origins of 450 Essential Words (Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company, 2009). She also presented a paper, “Teaching Chinese Characters: Analytical Way vs. Mechanical Reduplication,” at the Seventh International Conference on Chinese Language Pedagogy, in Guilin, China, on August 3.

Samuel Yamashita (History) delivered a lecture, “Coercion, Compliance, and Resistance in Wartime Japan, 1942-1945,” in the Claremont Discourse Lecture Series on October 7.