June/July 2010 @Pomona Newsletter

News and Notes

• Did you get your sweet treat last week at the first Staff Ice Cream Social of the summer? If not, the next events are scheduled for July 21 and August 13. Keep an eye on your email for more information.
• Cooling Off: As we enter the hot months of July and August, air conditioning will be on in academic buildings Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Residence halls and Smith Campus Center are not affected by this change. If you need a building to be air conditioned for an event or activity after 6 p.m. or on weekends, the adjustment will be made automatically if scheduled through the EMS. If not, contact Bob Robinson with the date, time and location of the event.
• Don't forget that Frank Dining Hall is now closed and Oldenborg is now the place to get breakfast (7:30-8:30), lunch (11:30-1:00) and dinner (5:00-6:00).
• The Staff Council have announced their newest members: Dani Aurourze (Office of the Dean of the College) and Bowen Close (Sustainability Integration Office). The other members of the Council include Lamar Arenas, Manny Cervantes, Cathy Hicks, Holly Duncan, Carol Thompson, Matthew Walker, Steve Comba and Tom Roybal. We would like to thank outgoing members Cathy Seaman and Art Rodriguez for their service on the Staff Council these past few years.
• Have you heard about the College's new Green Office Program? Read our news article, visit the Sustainability Integration Office's site, or email sustainability@pomona.edu for more information.


The Pomona College "float" for the Claremont 4th of July parade. Visit Flickr for more photos of the cart decoration and ice cream social.

• This will be our last @Pomona newsletter for the summer. Look for the next issue in September. Have a wonderful summer!

New Employees

Join us in welcoming our new and returning employees!

• Cindy Calderon, Publications Coordinator and Office Manager, Communications
• Madison De Van, Staff Dining Services, Dining Services
• Faye Epps, Office Manager, Alumni Relations
• Aura Hernandez, Advancement Records Coordinator, Advancement Services
• Courtney Whitmore, Assistant Director, Donor Relations

Saying Our Goodbyes

We wish Kent Warner '66 warm and hearty congratulations upon his retirement from Pomona College. Kent has been with us for 27 years in our Trusts and Estates office, first as director and then as associate vice president. Kent graduated from Pomona with a degree in history in 1966. He attended Harvard Law School and from 1969 to 1983, worked at a large law firm in Los Angeles. During his law firm years, he spent a great deal of time volunteering for Pomona College, including serving as the president of the Alumni Association in 1975-76 and on the Board of Trustees from 1981-83. He resigned from the Board when his Trusts and Estates (then called Annuity and Trusts) predecessor Howard Metzler convinced him to join the Pomona College staff. Kent has volunteered for his past five Alumni Reunion Committees and says he will likely volunteer again next year. We wish Kent the best and look forward to his continued presence on campus as a volunteer.

Note: If your office has a longtime employee who is retiring, let us know so we may congratulate them in the newsletter! Email Laura Tiffany with their name, retirement date and any other pertinent information.

Faculty Promotions and Wig Awards

We would like to congratulate all our faculty members who received promotions in June. The following faculty members received tenure and were promoted to Associate Professor:

• Robert Gaines (Geology)
• Arthur Horowitz (Theatre & Dance)
• Eric Hurley (Psychology and Africana Studies)
• Nina Karnovsky (Biology)
• Peter Kung (Philosophy)
• Sarah Raff (English)
• Ghassan Sarkis (Mathematics)

The following faculty members have been promoted to Professor from Associate Professor:

• David Arase (Politics)
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Media Studies)
• Sharon Goto (Psychology and Asian American Studies)
• Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies)
• Eric Lindholm (Music)
• Nivia Montenegro (Romance Languages & Literatures)
• Nicole Weekes (Psychology)

Promoted to Adjunct Professor:

• Jianhsin Wu (Asian Languages and Literatures)

We would also like to congratulate the following faculty members who are the 2010 recipients of the Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching. The recipients of the Wig Awards are elected by the junior and senior classes and then confirmed by a committee of trustees, faculty and students. The awards were announced at Pomona's 117th Commencement, held on May 16, 2010. They were established by Mr. and Mrs. R.J. Wig in 1955.

• Elizabeth Crighton (Politics)
• Phyllis Jackson (Art History)
• Michael Kuehlwein (Economics)
• Matthew Sazinsky (Chemistry)
• Sara Owsley Sood (Computer Science)
• Margaret (Meg) Worley (English)

Recent News

• Revisit Commencement 2010 With Videos, Photos and More
• Professor Stephan Garcia Awarded $164,890 Grant for Complex Symmetric Operator Research
• Kayla McCulley '09 Awarded NCAA Internship
• Professor Jonathan Matsui Awarded $440,149 Grant for Genetic Research on Sensory Systems
• Pomona College Class of 2010 Awarded 12 Fulbright Fellowships
• From the Magazine: Professor Jennifer Perry Explores Offshore Treasures in the Channel Islands
• Professor Philip Choi Wins $637,138 Grant for Advanced Telescope Optics System
• Eleanor Caves '12 Wins Goldwater Scholarship

Faculty & Staff Accomplishments

Sefa Aina (Asian American Resource Center) was invited to the White House celebration for Asian American and Pacific Island Heritage Month in May. He also participated in a DOE (Department of Education) briefing on AAPI educational initiatives while he was in Washington DC.

Darren Blaney (Theatre & Dance)performed an excerpt from his solo show, "The Bird Club: Letter to Sandra Bernhard," at homo-centric, a reading series for GLBTQ authors at Stories Books in Los Angeles on 17 June 17. Blaney has also organized and will be monitoring the "Why Theater Needs YOU more than YouTube" panel of theater practitioners at the Association for Theater in Higher Education Conference in Los Angeles on 4 August, and is hosting a talk by award-winning playwright Robert Patrick at the LGBTQ ATHE pre-conference on 2 August. Blaney has been contracted by Anthony Shay to write a chapter, "Queering Ethnicity: A Meditation on Disco as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” for Dance and Ethnicity" (Oxford University Press).

Paul Cahill (Romance Languages & Literatures) published an article, “Globalizing Good and Evil in the Poetry of Jorge Urrutia and Jorge Riechmann,” in MLN: Modern Language Notes 125:2 (2010), pp. 457-76. He also presented a paper, “A (Post-) Marxist Makeover of Late-Franco Spain: Aníbal Núñez’s Fábulas domésticas,” at the Peninsularistas Association’s spring meeting, “The Politics of Culture: Spanish Poets in 20th-Century Europe,” at California State University, Long Beach, on 7 May.

José R. Cartagena-Calderón (Romance Languages & Literatures) chaired a session, “Image and Devotion in the Early Modern Spanish World,” at the University of Southern California-Huntington Library Early Modern Institute’s annual conference, held in San Marino, CA, 7-8 May.

Audio files of Susana Chávez-Silverman (Romance Languages & Literatures) reading from her books Killer Crónicas and Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters are available on the University of Wisconsin Press website. Chávez-Silverman also read from her work and was interviewed by Tom Hill on KSPC on 16 June.

Pierre Englebert (Politics) gave an invited talk, “Civil Society and the Extractive Industries in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” at the World Bank in Washington, DC, on 19 May. He also convened and hosted a meeting of the Working Group on African Political Economy, 30 April-1 May, on the Pomona campus.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Media Studies) was part of a panel, “Brave New World: Post-Print Scholarship in Academia,” at the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium Colloquium at Loyola Marymount University on 11 May, and she gave a paper, “Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy,” at Dartmouth College’s “Symposium on the Digital Humanities” on 14 May.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) gave the keynote address, “When Topology Meets Chemistry,” at the Southern California Undergraduate Mathematics Conference held at the University of California, San Diego, on 1 May.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) received a $164,890 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project “Complex Symmetric Operators – Theory and Applications.” He also gave a talk, “Rationals, Irrationals, and Quotients of Primes,” at the Fullerton College Math Colloquium on 4 May.

Fred Grieman (Chemistry) received a summer research award from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to collaborate with Stanley Sander ’74 on laboratory kinetics studies of atmospheric reactions. Eric Newenhouse ’11 will work with him on the project.

Laura L. Mays Hoopes (Biology) read from her work at the Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles on 8 May.

Kathleen Howe (Art & Art History and Museum of Art) gave a talk, "Of Time and Place: Considering Architectural Travels in the Middle East," at the symposium “Zoom Out: The Making and Unmaking of the ‘Orient’ through Photography,” held at the Getty Center on 6-7 May. She also attended a symposium, “Core Matters: Students, Faculty and Collections,” at Wellesley College, 30 April-1 May. She was an invited participant in the symposium "Traces, Collections, Ruins: Towards a Comparative History of Antiquarianism" at the Getty Villa on 3 June and at the Getty Center on 4 June.

Katherine Hagedorn (Music and Dean of the College’s Office) performed in gamelan concerts with California Institute of the Arts Gamelan Burat Wangi at the Wild Beast Theatre of CalArts on 7 March and 7 May.  She also performed with members of Pomona College Gamelan Giri Kusuma as part of Alumni Weekend on 1 May and at Bridges Hall of Music on 3 May.  The Pomona group premiered a new piece, “Semara Dahana,” composed by Tyler Yamin and choreographed by Nyoman Wenten (Music) and artist-in-residence Young Tseng Wong.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) has received a Young Investigator Award ($29,756) from the National Security Agency (NSA) to be used in 2011-2012 as she continues her research on Yang-Baxter equations, super quantum groups and Hopf algebras. NSA's Young Investigator Award is granted to promising investigators within ten years of receiving their Ph.D.  and supports self-directed, unclassified research in the areas of Algebra, Number Theory, Discrete Mathematics, Probability, and Statistics.

Andrew Lear (Classics) and co-author Eva Cantarella gave a presentation of their book, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty, at New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò on 18 May.

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed works by Debussy and Schoenberg with Southwest Chamber Music at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles on 3 May.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave one keynote lecture, “Re-Thinking Trafficking as Forced Migration and Labor in the Middle East,” at Santa Clara University on 5 May, and she gave another, “Iran’s Green Sexual Revolution,” at the University of California, Los Angeles, on 18 May.

On 8 May, Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) introduced an open-air screening of the film Zoot Suit in Mexico City and led a question-and-answer session afterward. On 29 May, she lectured on “Chicano and Mexican Theatre” at Casa Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s summer language institute in Puebla, Mexico. Martinez was also interviewed on television station Mexiquense, a government-run channel in Mexico City, about the popular success of Zoot Suit, which opened there on 29 April. 

A book edited with new translations by Richard McKirahan (Classics), A. H. Coxon’s The Fragments of Parmenides (Parmenides Publishing, 2009), won ForeWord Reviews’ 2009 Book of the Year Award in Philosophy.

Lynne Miyake (Asian Languages & Literatures) gave a talk, “Shôjo Girls/Ladies/Gag and More: Japanese Manga Comics Looks at the 11th Century Tale of Genji,” at California State University, San Bernardino, on 20 January.  She gave a guest lecture titled "The Tale of Genji in the New Millennium: Novel? Nation Builder? ‘Soft Power’?” for the course "The Novel, The World" at Stanford University on 5 May.

Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) gave a talk, “The Role of Homophony Avoidance in Morphology: A Case Study from Mixtec,” at the Workshop on American Indigenous Languages, UC Santa Barbara, on 1 May.  She gave another talk, “There Is No Duplication Problem,” at the 18th Manchester Phonology Meeting, University of Manchester, on 22 May.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) gave a paper, “Torture by the Book: Psalm 137 after Abu Ghraib,” at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies annual meeting, held at Concordia University in Montreal, 29-31 May.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages & Literatures) gave a presentation about her book, Héroines françaises 1940-1945, at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla, CA, on 30 May. The audience included many Pomona College alumni.

Samuel Yamashita (History) delivered a talk, "Coercion, Compliance and Resistance in Wartime Japan, 1942-45" at the University of Hawaii-Manoa on 5 April and at the University of California-Santa Barbara on 17 April.