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September 2011 @Pomona Newsletter

Table of Contents

News and Notes

  • Save the date: The next staff forum will be held on Tuesday, September 27, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. If you wish to submit a question, email staffcouncil@pomona.edu.
  • Sign up for the new Faculty/Staff Wellness Program "TAKE ACTION CHALLENGE" by September 16. From September 19 to October 31, you can earn one sticker for every FSFW class or activity you participate in. You can earn two stickers for attending a class or activity in which you have never participated in before. Earn 20 stickers in six weeks for a prize! Email Lisa Beckett by September 16 to participate.
  • Bookmark this: The revised Staff Handbook is available on the College's Human Resources site [pdf] . The HR Department's goal is to reissue the handbook annually, posting updates via email and on the web, rather than reprinting the book each year (except for those who do not have online access).

Staff Council 2011-12

It's time to say thank-you to those who are leaving the Staff Council and say welcome to those who are joining this year! First, a thank-you to members who are leaving and have done a terrific job for the past three years: Lamar Arenas, Housekeeping; Manny Cervantes, Grounds; and Tom Roybal, Housekeeping.

The 2011-12 Staff Council:

  • Chair: Matt Walker, ITS
  • Vice-Chair: Steve Comba, Museum
  • Secretary: Dani Arouze, Academic Dean's Office
  • Treasurer: Carol Thompson, Business Office

The other members of the Staff Council include Frank Castrejon, Housekeeping; Stephen Guzman, Grounds; Yvonne Roybal, Housekeeping; and Connie Schmitz, Donor Relations. The council will also include a representative from Dining Services yet to be determined.

Sustainability Tip

Having an event on campus with food? Checkout a Greenware kit to reduce the impact of your event! Custom kits include reusable plates, cups, bowls and silverware in the exact quantities you need, plus a compost bucket and liner and helpful signage for responsible waste management. When the event is over, just return the kit back to Dining Services in Frank Hall so it can be cleaned for the next event. See more info at the SIO checkout website.

New Employees

  • Mauricio Aldecosea-Blixen, Spanish language resident, Oldenborg Center
  • Seth Allen, vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, Admissions
  • Santos Amabisca, groundskeeper, Grounds
  • Jakeob Beron, administrative assistant, Financial Aid
  • Alain Dunn, senior assistant dean ofaAdmissions, Admissions
  • Zeltia Fuciños-Mosquera, Spanish language resident, Oldenborg Center
  • Kristin Fukushima, community engagement coordinator, Asian American Studies
  • Jean-Pascal Gribaudi, French language resident, Oldenborg Center
  • Richard Hunt, staff dining services, Dining Services
  • Kelly Keala, staff dining services, Dining Services
  • Aki Kishihara, Japanese language resident, Oldenborg Center
  • Ryan Kuchler, web/database ontegrator Programmer, ITS
  • Madison McKay, staff dining services, Dining Services
  • Veronika Sergeeva, Russian language resident, Oldenborg Center
  • Brigitte Washington, campus life coordinator, Campus Life
  • Christopher Waugh, associate dean of students and director of Smith Campus Center and programs
  • Kimberly Wunner, catering manager, Dining Services
  • Jing Zhou, Chinese language resident, Oldenborg Center

Recent News

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

Colin J. Beck (Sociology) presented a paper, "Who Gets Labeled a Terrorist and Why," co-authored with Emily Miner '12, at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas, 20-23 August.

Susana Chávez-Silverman (Romance Languages and Literature) was an invited author at the Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao, Spain, on 16 May, where she gave a reading and participated in a discussion about her books and work in progress. On 20 July, she gave a reading and participated in a Q&A at the Sexto Simposio Internacional: Narratividad y discursos multiples, sponsored by UNESCO, at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires.

Cecilia Conrad (Economics) gave a presentation, "IAFFE: History and Philosophy," at pre-conference workshop of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference in Hangzhou, China, on 23 June. On 30 July, Conrad delivered a plenary address, "Is a Liberal Arts Education a Luxury Good?," at the Transylvania University seminar "Twenty-first Century Liberal Education: A Contested Concept."

Bob Gaines (Geology) gave a talk, "The Great Unconformity, seawater chemistry, and the Cambrian Explosion," at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution in Odense, Denmark, on 23 August.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave a talk, "On a problem of Halmos: unitary equivalence of a matrix to its transpose," at the International Workshop on Operator Theory and Its Applications in Seville, Spain, on 4 July. He also gave a series of four lectures on his research--"Complex symmetric operators I: Background and Basic Examples," "Complex symmetric operators II: Properties and Structure," "Complex symmetric operators III: Spectral Function Theory," and "Complex symmetric operators IV: Truncated Toeplitz Operators"--at a program on "Spectral analysis of non-selfadjoint operators and applications" at the University of Rennes 1 (Beaulieu Campus) in Rennes, France, from 13-17 June.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) presented several talks about her memoir, Breaking Through the Spiral Ceiling: 14 May at the Montclair Barnes and Noble; 15 June at the Claremont Sunrise Rotary Club; 9 July at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and 11 August at the Carnegie Library at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.

Karl Johnson (Neuroscience and Biology) and Julio Ramirez of Davidson College gave a talk, "Winning the Tenure Trophy at a Predominantly Undergraduate Institution," at the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience (FUN) conference at Pomona College, 29-31 July. Johnson and Ilya Vilinsky (University of Cincinnati) also presented three Drosophila Electroretinograms laboratory workshops at the conference, based on an exercise used in his Vertebrate Sensory Systems course at Pomona.

Meg Jolley (Theatre and Dance) led a panel discussion at the Freedom to Move: Alexander Technique and Dance Conference in New York City in May. In August, she taught two workshops at the 9th International Congress for the Alexander Technique in Lugano, Switzerland.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a talk titled "Solving the Yang-Baxter Equations over Lie Superalgebras" at the seventh international conference on Quantum Theory and Symmetries in Prague from 8-13 August.

Jade Star Lackey (Geology) presented a keynote lecture, "Oxygen Isotopes of Garnet In Granites: Revealing the Dynamics of Magmatic and Peritectic Growth and the Fate of Xenoliths and Xenocrysts," at the seventh Hutton Symposium on the Origin of Granites in Avila, Spain, on 6 July. In August, he convened a session at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Prague, and presented the talk "Recycling of Juvenile Supracrustal Rocks in Mesozoic Batholiths: Implications for Crustal Growth."

At the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology meeting in Salt Lake City in July, Laura Perini (Philosophy) presented two papers: "(Re)Presenting Data: Style, Substance, and Medium as Message," and "Image interpretation: Bridging the gap from raw data to evidential representation."

On 24 June, Jennifer Perry (Anthropology) presented a paper on "The Anthropology of Land and Sea in the California Bight" at the third annual meeting of the Association for Environmental Studies and Science in Burlington, Vermont.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages & Literatures) gave a talk, "Les bruits intermittents de Benjamin Péret," at Le silence d'or des poètes surréalistes, a Paris Sorbonne Colloquium, on 9 July.

Joti Rockwell (Music) delivered a paper titled "Frank Zappa's 'While You Were Art': Recompositional Processes and the Meanings of Electronic Music" at Lancaster University, England, on 31 July for the joint meeting of the Music Analysis Conference and the International Conference on Music Since 1900.

During the week 6-13 June, John Seery (Politics) served as the opening commentator on Martha Nussbaum's book, Not for Profit: How Democracy Needs the Humanities, in a virtual reading group organized by the Association for Political Theory. He also participated in a Liberty Fund conference on Montaigne, 28-30 July, in La Jolla, California.

Jason Smith (ITS) co-presented a talk with Ben Royas of CMC titled "Biting the Bullet: The trials and tribulations of upgrading Sakai at the Claremont Colleges" at the 2011 Sakai Conference held in Los Angeles in June.

On 20 August, Sam Yamashita (History) delivered a paper, "The Hunger of Victory: The Food Situation in Cities, Towns and the Countryside in Wartime Japan, 1942-45," at Food in Zones of Conflict, a conference jointly sponsored by the International Commission of the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition and the Modern East Asian Center at Leiden University College The Hague in the Netherlands.

Publications

Tahir Andrabi (Politics) published "Do Value-Added Estimates Add Value? Accounting for Learning Dynamics" in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3:3, pp. 29-54. The article is co-authored with Jishnu Das (World Bank), Asim Ijaz Kwaja (Harvard Univeristy) and Tristan Zajonc '02 (Harvard University).

Jay David Atlas (Linguistics & Cognitive Science; Philosophy) recently published several articles: "Whatever Happened to Meaning? Remarks on Contextualisms and Propositionalisms" in Current Research in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 24: Making Semantics Pragmatic, ed. K. Turner (Emerald Group Publishing, 2011), pp. 19-48; "Expressing Regret and Avowing Belief: Sadock's Expositive Adverbials, Moore's Paradox, and Performative and Quasi-Performative Verbs" in Pragmatics and Autolexical Grammar: In honor of Jerrold Sadock (John Benjamins Publishing, 2011), pp. 35-57; and "Intuition, the Paradigm Case Argument, and the Two Dogmas of Kant'otelianism" in Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on Grice, ed. K. Petrus (Macmillan/Palgrave, 2010), pp. 47-74.

Allan Barr's (Asian Languages and Literatures) translation of Yu Hua's essay, "The Spirit of May 35th," was published in International Herald Tribune Magazine, p. 28, on 24 June. His Chinese-language article, "The Origins of Niu Xiu's Tale of Lainiang," was published in Nanjing Shifan Daxue Wenxueyuan Xuebao 2, pp. 54-60.

Andre Cavalcanti (Biology) published, with Hannah Salim '09, Amanda Koire '11 and Nicholas Stover '11, "Detection of Fused Genes in Eukaryotic Genomes using Gene deFuser: Analysis of the Tetrahymena thermophila genome" in BMC Bioinformatics 12:1, p. 279. He also published, with Stover and Thomas Dixon '11, "Multiple Independent Fusions of Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase with Enzymes in the Pentose Phosphate Pathway," in PLoS ONE 6:8, e22269. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022269.

A revised version of "Magnetic Island Sueño Crónica" by Susana Chávez-Silverman (Romance Languages and Literature) was reprinted by permission in Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing, ed. Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), pp. 159-164.

Cecilia Conrad's (Economics) edited volume, AIDS, Gender, and Economic Development, co-edited with Cheryl Doss, was published by Routledge in July.

An article by Donna M. Di Grazia (Music), "Rejected Traditions: Ensemble Placement in Nineteenth-Century Paris," has been republished in a collection of essays on 18th- and 19th-century performance practice titled Classical and Romantic Music, ed. David Milsom (Ashgate, 2011), pp. 209-228.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) co-authored "Topological symmetry groups of K_{4r+3}" in Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems 4, pp. 1401-1411, with Dwayne Chambers (CGU) and John D. O'Brien '02 (University of Bristol).

Karl Johnson (Neuroscience and Biology) published, in collaboration with Ashley Smart '10, Meredith Course '12 and others, "Heparan sulfate proteoglycan specificity during axon pathway formation in the Drosophila" in July in Developmental Neurobiology 71:7, pp. 608-616.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) is co-author of the paper "Adverse foraging conditions may impact body mass and survival of a High Arctic seabird" published in Oecologia 167, pp. 49-59. She is also co-author of the paper "Different foraging effort does not influence body condition and stress level in little auks" published in Marine Ecology Progress Series 432, pp. 277-290.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) published an article with Sara Friedman (Indiana University) titled "Rethinking Intimate Labor Through Inter Asian Migrations" in the Asia Pacific Migration Journal 20:2, pp. 253-262.

Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) recently published two articles: "The verbal morphology and phonology of Asante Twi" in Studies in African Linguistics 39:1, pp. 77-120, and "Downstep in Tiriki" with Yuni Kim in Linguistic Discovery 9:1, pp. 71-104.

Tony Perman (Music) published "The Ethics of Ndau Performance: Questioning Ethnomusicology's Aesthetics" in The Journal of Musicological Research, 30:3, pp. 227-252.

Jennifer Perry (August) published two articles in California Archeology 3: "Landscape Archaeology in Southern and South-Central California" (pp. 5-10) with David W. Robinson and Gale Grasse-Sprague, and "Interactions and Interiors of the Coastal Chumash: Perspectives from Santa Cruz Island and the Oxnard Plain" (pp. 103-126) with Colleen Delaney-Rivera.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages & Literatures) is the author of "Du cannibalisme surréaliste à la poétique anthropophage de Benjamin Péret" in Poésie et politique au XXe siècle, ed. H. Béhar and P. Taminiaux (Hermann, 2011), pp. 103-118.

Jack Sanders (Music) published the essay "Pen Pal" in Soundboard 37:2.

Kevin Sea (Chemistry) was the co-first author on "ALS in California: A report from the First Annual California ALS Research Summit," published in Neurodegenerative Disease Management 1:4, pp. 281-284. The paper reports on the first annual California ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease) Research Summit meeting in San Francisco in June 2010.

A new book, Too Young to Run? A Proposal for an Age Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, by John Seery (Politics) was published by Penn State University Press in July. Seery also wrote three articles about the book in Salon, for the American Constitution Society and for Guernica Magazine.

Shahriar Shahriari (Mathematics), with Elinor Escamilla '09, Andreea Nicolae '08, Paul Salerno '09 and Jordan Tirrell (Lafayette College '08), had a paper titled "On Nested Chain Decompositions of Normalized Matching Posets of Rank 3" published in Order 28, pp. 357-373.

Marie B. Shurkus (Media Studies) published several essays and interviews in It Happened At Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973, the catalogue for the Pomona College Museum of Art's Pacific Standard Time exhibition of the same name. Her contributions include the essay "Lessons from Post-Minimalism: Understanding Theatricality as a Pictorial Value," two essays on Michael Asher and Jack Goldstein, and interviews with artists Ger van Elk, William Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg.

Valorie Thomas (English and Africana Studies) contributed the entry on Candomble in the Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World, ed. Mary Zeiss Stange, Carol K. Oyster and Jane E. Sloan (SAGE, 2011)

Exhibitions and Performances

Laurie Cameron (Dance) performed as a guest artist in Global Water Dances, part of a worldwide event to raise consciousness of water issues around the globe, with Zendora Dance Company in New York City's Central Park on 25 June. She also performed as a guest artist with the Marion Rice Denishawn Company in its centennial performance in Hebron, New Hampshire on 20 August.

In April, Genevieve Lee (Music) performed as a guest with Xtet at a University of Southern California concert celebrating the composer Donald Crockett. She performed on a new series, "Improvisatory Minds: Chamber Music by Jazz Musicians," at the Studio City jazz venue Vitello's. She continued to perform as the pianist of the Garth Newel Quartet and gave four concerts in Virgina. In May, she recorded a solo piece by Kurt Rohde at Skywalker Ranch in Northern California for an upcoming CD. Returning to the Garth Newel Music Center in Virgina in July, she worked with students in the summer chamber music program, gave a pre-concert talk on Nadia Boulanger, and played in four chamber music programs.

Jack Sanders (Music) performed solo guitar recitals and duo concerts with Lorna McGee, flute, at the 40th Sitka Summer Music Festival, 3-9 June, in Alaska.

Honors and Awards

Laura Hoopes (Biology) was reelected for a third year as president of the Inland Empire branch of California Writers Club in June. She was also elected president of the Alpha Alumni Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in August.

Meg Jolley (Theatre and Dance) was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Society of the Alexander Technique as Member at Large.

Anthony Shay (Theatre and Dance) has been elected vice president by the Committee on Research in Dance (CORD) for 2011-2014.

In May, Suzanne Thompson (Psychology) received an award from the NSF-funded Time-Share Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) in a competition jointly sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. The award funded the collection of a nationally representative sample of 585 U.S. adults for a study that applied the threat orientation approach to understanding citizen preparation for a domestic terrorist attack.

Marilynn Waters (Economics) was awarded honorable mention by the International Photography Awards in the fine art-collage category for "People at an Exhibition" and in the editorial-personality category for "The Conversation." Her portrait of a farm worker, taken during her spring 2011 Documentary Photography class with Professor Sheila Pinkel, was also selected a Photographers Forum Magazine finalist and will be later published in Photographers Forum's Best Photography of 2011.

Other

For six weeks this summer, Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) directed a volunteer program in Peru for The Chijnaya Foundation. Eighteen students from around the country, including five from Pomona College, taught English and worked on other projects in rural communities in the highlands of southern Peru.

David Haley (Physics and Astronomy) hosted the 17th annual Southern California Physics Technicians Associations (SCPTA) summer meeting on 16 June. Eric Pumas '14 presented on some of his work for Physics 72 as well as his summer research, and Kevin Ludlum '12 and Greta Mae Ferguson '12 gave an invited talk on their summer research developing a diode laser for single photon experiments. Haley also accompanied the Sagehens of Science (Ben Pollard '11, Jenna DeBoisblanc '11, Matthew Hasling '12 and Emily Yang '13) to present on the low temperature of physics materials at Claremont High School on 6 June.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) was selected as one of seven members of the Historical Narrative workshop with Charles Stozier at Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts from 26 June – 2 July.

Meg Jolley (Theatre and Dance) co-chaired the organizing committee for the Annual General Meeting of the American Society for the Alexander Technique in Las Vegas in June.

In July, Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) taught a course, Introduction to Phonology, at the African Linguistics School in Porto-Novo, Benin.

Frank Pericolosi (Physical Education) served as the head baseball coach and director of Youth Baseball Development for the Rättvik Baseball Club in Rättvik, Sweden, during the months of June and July.

Leonard Pronko (Theatre) spent the month of July in Tokyo where he prepared the English version of a website for his Japanese dance teacher, Hanayagi Chiyo, whose book, Fundamentals of Japanese Dance, Pronko co-translated and was published two years ago.

Jack Sanders (Music) built two baroque guitars, after Antonio Stradivarius, 1700, for the Waller-Maxwell Duo in Chicago.

Anthony Shay (Theatre and Dance) participated in the Pew Charitable Trust think tank project "Dance Advance." on 25 June.

@Pomona Newsletter