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June 2012 @Pomona Newsletter

Wig Award winners, from left: Frederick Grieman, Pardis Mahdavi, David Menefee-Libey, Ami Radunskaya, Vin de Silva, Joti Rockwell, and Jessica Borelli

News & Notes
Commencement Recap
Wig Awards
The 125th Anniversary
Staff Council Changes
Board of Trustees Changes
Sustainability Tip
New Employees
Recent News
Faculty & Staff Accomplishments

News and Notes

Upcoming holidays: Wednesday, July 4, will be observed as a paid holiday for eligible staff.
During the week of July 2 through July 6, Duplicating Services will be closed. If you need service, contact Pitzer's Duplicating Services at x18461.
Frank Dining Hall hours this summer are Monday through Friday, 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. for lunch, and Monday through Thursday, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. for dinner. Student/staff/faculty prices are $6.75 for lunch and $8.75 for dinner. Block meal plans are available through the College's Business Office in Pendleton. Meals to go are available. You can purchase a plastic clamshell for $5 from the cashier and exchange your dirty dish for a clean one each time you return.
Save the date: Staff Council will be hosting a morning refreshment break on Tuesday, June 26. Stay tuned for details from them. For more on Staff Council news, see our item below.

Commencement Recap

On Sunday, May 13, the College celebrated our Class of 2012 (and their mothers) at Commencement. U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter; educator Marigold Linton; jazz musician David Murray '77; and Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch offered Commencement speeches and received honorary degrees. To view photos, watch videos of the speeches (including President Oxtoby's and student speeches), or read the speeches, please visit our 2012 Commencement archive.

Wig Awards

Congratulations to our 2012 Wig Award winners!

Jessica Borelli, assistant professor of psychology
Vin de Silva, associate professor of mathematics
Frederick Grieman, the Roscoe Moss Professor of Chemistry
Pardis Mahdavi, associate professor of anthropology
David Menefee-Libey, professor of politics
Ami Radunskaya, professor of mathematics
C. Joti Rockwell, assistant professor of music

The Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching is the highest honor bestowed on Pomona faculty and recognizes exceptional teaching, concern for students and service to the College and the community. Recipients are elected by the junior and senior classes and then confirmed by a committee of trustees, faculty and students. For more information on each professor and to read their students’ comments, read our news article.

Gearing Up for the 125th Anniversary

We're busy preparing for the big 125 here on campus! We will be celebrating throughout the 2012-13 academic year, with the main event scheduled for Founders Day on Sunday, Oct. 14. It will be a grand, campus-wide, open house centered on Marston Quadrangle. In keeping with the anniversary’s theme of community, we are reaching out not only to the immediate Pomona family—faculty, staff, trustees, students, alumni, parents—but beyond, to The Claremont Colleges, the cities of Pomona and Claremont, and particularly to school children and their families.

Anniversary observances will extend throughout the year with special events and programs now in the planning stages. The virtual center of this effort will launch in the fall on the College’s web, including an innovative timeline that will both update our history and invite ongoing participation from all members of the community, thus creating a vibrant record of life at Pomona in our 125th year. Please save Oct. 14 on your calendars now, and look here for more information at www.pomona.edu/125 in coming months.

Staff Council Changes

At the picnic in May, new Staff Council members were announced. First, let's say thank you to outgoing members Steve Comba, Carol Thompson and Matthew Walker. Next, let's welcome the newest members of the Council: Frank Bedoya, Mary Booker and Deborah Wilson. Remember, you can always reach the Council through staffcouncil@pomona.edu. The full line-up is below:

Dani Arouze
Frank Bedoya (new)
Mary Booker (new)
Frank Castrejon
Stephan Guzman
Yvonne Roybal
Connie Schmitz
Rita Shaw
Deborah Wilson (new)

New Board of Trustees President and Members

We are happy to announce the election of Jeanne Buckley '65 as the new chair of the Pomona College Board of Trustees. Buckley has been a trustee since 1999. Paul Efron '76 will be completing his three-year term as the Board chair on June 30. Additionally, the Board will have two new trustees. Laszlo Bock '94 is the vice president of people operations at Google. Sam Glick '04 was a young alumni trustee from 2007 to 2001, and is now returning as a regular trustee. Glick is a senior manager at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Susanne Garvey '74, president of the Alumni Association, will serve as an ex-officio member for 2012-13. She is replacing Josephine (Dodie) Bump '76, who served as Alumni Association president in 2011-12.

Three trustees are stepping down on June 30: Paul Efron '76, who served for 12 years, Alex Gonzalez '72, who served for nine years, and Derek Weston '67, who served for 29 years.

Sustainability Tip

With fuel costs continually inching up, here are some tips that will help you drive more sustainably and save cash at the same time:

Don't idle. If you're stopping for more than ten seconds - except in traffic, of course - turn off your engine. Idling for more than ten seconds uses more gas than simply restarting your engine.
Don't speed. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that each 5 mph over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas.
Travel light and pack smart. Hauling an extra 100 pounds in your vehicle reduces fuel economy by up to 2 percent.
Keep your engine tuned properly. Checking spark plugs, oxygen sensors, air filters, hoses, and belts are a few examples of maintenance that can save you up to 165 gallons of gas per year, resulting in potential savings of $380.
Check the tires. Have your wheels aligned and keep your tires properly inflated. Low tire pressure wastes over two million gallons of gasoline in the United States every day.
Know when to use the air. Air conditioning can decrease your fuel efficiency by as much as 12 percent in stop-and-go traffic, so consider cracking the windows. But at high speeds, driving with the windows open can decrease the overall efficiency of the vehicle.
If you have a plug-in hybrid or electric car you want to bring, use a charging station. Twelve parking spots equipped with these are available in the South Campus parking structure.

New Employees

Piya Bose, associate dean, Campus Life
Roderico Meneo, building attendant, Housekeeping

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

Allan Barr (Asian Languages and Literatures) gave two talks in Taiwan on the author Dong Han (1626-after 1697) on 10 May at the Institute of Literature and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, and on 16 May at National Central University, Chungli.

Colin Beck (Sociology) presented two papers at the International Studies Association meeting in San Diego on 3-4 April: "Who Gets Labeled a Terrorist and Why?," co-authored with Emily Miner ’12, and "Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves before Nation-States."

Kim Bruce (Computer Science), with co-researcher Andrew Black of Portland State University, gave an invited talk (video) on their new programming language Grace at the Lang.NEXT conference on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on 2 April. Bruce also was interviewed about Grace on Microsoft's Channel 9. On 11 May, Bruce gave a talk on the impact of Alan Turing at the Phi Beta Kappa induction at Pomona College.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave a colloquium on "Quotient sets and Diophantine equations" at California State University, Los Angeles, on 15 May.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) was the moderator for the panel on "Blogging to Increase Sales" at the Biographers' International Conference on 19 May held at the Davidson Center at the University of Southern California.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a research talk on 24 May titled "Quantization and Superization" as part of the University of California San Diego Student Chapter of Association of Women in Mathematics Speaker Series.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) was an invited speaker at the “Workshop on the Effects of Climate Change on Advective Fluxes in High Latitude Regions,” held at the World Expo in Yeosu, Korea, prior to the PICES/ICES/IOC 2nd Symposium on the Effects of Climate Change on the World's Oceans, 15,20. At that symposium, she also presented the poster, “Arctic auks, advection and oscillations; the impact of climate change on planktvores of the Greenland Sea.”

Ben Keim (Classics) read a paper, "Isocrates and the Ghost of Empire," in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge (UK) on 21 May.

Genevieve Lee (Music) was recently a guest speaker in the Performance Forum at CalArts.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) helped organize and spoke at a roundtable held by Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations on the theme of "Rescue Gone Wrong: Misconnections between Policies and Lived Experiences of Human Trafficking" at the Googleplex Campus in Mountain View on 21 May.

On 16 April, Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) co-hosted Dolores Huerta's 82nd Birthday Gala, benefiting the Dolores Huerta Foundation, at La Plaza de la Cultura on Los Angeles’ Olvera Street. She also presented a lecture on 28 April on "Popular/Political Theatre: Austerity as Aesthetic" for the Chicano Studies Department at California State University Northridge.

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) presented "Sea Change: Globalization of the Pacific World": Comment for "Transnational Labor and the Environment" and was the organizer, chair and presenter for “Towards an Environmental History of Israel” at the American Society for Environmental History on 31 March. He also presented two mid-level leadership workshops at the USDA-Forest Service and University of Montana on 14 May: "Leading Change in the New Century of Conservation” and "The Greatest Good: History and Politics of U. S. National Forests and Grasslands.

The poem "Carino cubano" by Nivia Montenegro (Romance Languages and Literature), translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (Cuban Affection) and included in Levine’s new book, Reckoning, was part of a bilingual reading given by the author at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California, on 12 May.

Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) presented an invited lecture, "Why Doesn't Phonology Count?," at the seventh North American Phonology Conference at Concordia University, Montreal, on 4 May.

Frances Pohl (Art and Art History) presented a talk at Seattle University for the Department of Modern Languages on 4 May titled "Language/Image/Object: The Work of the Italian Artist Mirella Bentivoglio."

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) gave a presentation at Pomona College on 27 April for Alumni Weekend, discussing her experiences as a hidden Jewish child and the women in the French Resistance whom she interviewed for her book Women in the French Resistance 1940-1945: Courage, Strength and Ingenuity. From 7-13 May, she attended the Storytelling Festival at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where she spoke about the same topics to students from different schools and different grades, including giving the talk in French. On 15 May, she gave the same talk to the University Club at the Alexander Hughes Community Center in Claremont, and on 21 May, she discussed her book at a book club organized by Rita Schtaniak in Claremont.

Marie B. Shurkus (Media Studies) presented a lecture titled "Michael Asher Michael Fried & Situational Aesthetics" at the University of California, Irvine, on 30 May.

Patricia Smiley, Jessica Borelli (Psychology) and Jessica Stern '12 presented their research, "Direction of mother-child discrepancy in perceived use of conditional regard predicts children's adjustment problems," at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Chicago in May.

Publications

David Arase (Politics) wrote the blog entry "A summer of political drama for Japan" for East Asia Forum: Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific, published on 12 May. He wrote the op-ed piece “Why Would the Philippines Take on China?” for the 21^st Century Business Herald, published on 19 May.

Allan Barr (Asian Languages and Literatures) published an article in Chinese, "Further research on the Lin Siniang story," in Fuzhou daxue xuebao 1, pp. 55-59.

Virginie Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) has been invited to join the editorial board of the journal Cahiers Benjamin Péret, which focuses on the famous surrealist poet.

Robert Gaines (Geology) co-authored "Preservation of giant Anomalocaridids in silica-chlorite concretions from the early Ordovician of Morocco," published in the journal Palaios 127, pp. 317-325.

Malkiat S. Johal (Chemistry), Ali Nadim (CGU), and Angelika Niemz (KGI) published the paper "Multiphasic DNA Adsorption to Silica Surfaces under Varying Buffer, pH, and Ionic Strength Conditions" in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B 16, pp. 5661-5670. The paper was co-authored by Theodore Zwang '11 and Jessica Lin '14. Johal’s book Understanding Nanomaterials was recently reviewed in the May issue of Chemistry World from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) published an essay titled "Humanistic Mathematics: An Oxymoron?" about her fall 2011 ID1 course “Can Zombies Do Math?” in Diversity & Democracy 15:2, p. 21, a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) and Zachary Brown '07 were co-authors on the paper “Little auks buffer the impacts of current Arctic climate change,” published in Marine Ecology Progress Series 454, pp. 197-206.

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) wrote chapters in two books: "Domesticity Abroad: Work and Family in the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1820-1840," in The Role of the American Board in the World: Bicentennial Reflections on the Organization's Missionary Work, 1810-2010 (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012), eds. Clifford Putney and Paul T. Burlin, pp. 312-330; and “For Heaven's Sake: An Afterword" in The Role of the American Board in the World (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2012), eds. Clifford Putney and Paul T. Burlin, pp. 331-336.

Melissa Petreaca (Biology) published "Deletion of a tumor necrosis superfamily gene in mice leads to impaired healing that mimics chronic wounds in humans" in Wound Repair and Regeneration 20:3, pp. 353-366.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) published a book review of Pierre Stasse’s Hotel Argentina (Flammirion, 2001) in The French Review 85:6.

In May, John Seery’s (Politics) book, Too Young to Run? A Proposal for an Age Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, came out in paperback (Penn State University Press, 2012.

Performances and Exhibitions

Alan Blumenfeld (Theatre and Dance) recently finished performing the role of Matamore in Tony Kushner’s adaptation of The Illusionist at Pasadena’s A Noise Within Theatre from 17 March to 19 May. There, he led post-play discussions on 17^th-century Classical French Theater and Corneille's The Illusion and how it compares with Kushner's adaptation, and was also named a Resident Artist of the company.

Tom Flaherty’s (Music) "Water Ruminations" was premiered and recorded by Millennium Consort Singers (Martin Neary, conductor) and Pomona College Choir (Donna Di Grazia, director) in Bridges Hall in February. His composition "Under the Weather" was premiered by Cythia Fogg, viola, and William Peterson, organ, in Bridges Hall, also in February. His piece "Shepard's Pi" was performed by Aron Kallay on toy piano at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, in April. And "Delusional Paths" was performed and recorded by Volti (Robert Geary, conductor) in San Francisco in May.

On 29 April, Katherine Hagedorn (Music) performed on reyong and kantilan in concert with the California Institute of the Arts Gamelan Buran Wangi. During that concert, the group premiered "Dramatari Penyalonarangan 'Ragu’,” composed by CalArts MFA student Tyler Yamin. On 30 April, she performed on trompong, reyong, pemade, and gender wayang with Pomona College Gamelan Giri Kusuma. At that concert, the group premiered “Arjuna Tapa,” composed and choreographed by Nyoman Wenten.

In April, Genevieve Lee (Music) participated in a microtonal performance of Eric Satie's Vexations as part of the 2012 Festival of Microtonal Music in Los Angeles. In May, Lee performed with Southwest Chamber Music at the Colburn School, Los Angeles, as part of the Los Angeles International New Music Festival. And on 20 May, she performed at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica in the last concert of the Jacaranda music series 2011-12 series.

Joyce Lu (Theatre and Dance) danced in Cold Dream Colour: A Dance Homage to Louis le Brocquy at the Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, which played 16-20 May.

Alma Martinez (Theatre and Dance) has a supporting role in the feature film A Greater Glory, starring Andy Garcia, Peter O’Toole and Eva Longoria and which opens nationwide on 1 June, and was a special guest at the Los Angeles and Pasadena pre-screenings of the film.

Sandeep Mukherjee (Art and Art History) is showing work in "Lineamenta" at the Beacon Arts Building in Los Angeles, 12 May – 24 June.

Honors

Rebecca McGrew (Museum of Art), along with co-curator Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute, received the 2011 "Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum Award" from the Association of Art Museum Curators, for the critically acclaimed, year-long three-part exhibition "It Happened at Pomona College: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973."

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) was awarded two fellowships for this summer. The Edgar Brannon Conservation Fellowship at the Grey Towers National Historic Landmark funds a week-long residency for research and writing, and the Alfred D. Bell Fellowship will allow him to work in the Forest History Society's archives.

On 8 May, Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) received the first annual Philip Weiss Award for Peace and Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Other

Virginie Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) became a research associate for the Université de Montréal project "Savoir des femmes, 1870-1930," funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for 2012-2015.

Alma Martinez (Theatre &Dance) conducted a radio interview on KPFK’s "Nuestra Voz en la Cultura" with host Leonardo Lorca about the 70th Anniversary of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and the "Pachuca/o" as cultural-political agitator and catalyst for the 1960s Chicano Movement.

Laura Perini (Philosophy) served as an instructor at the History of Biology Seminar on Visualizing Biology at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, and gave a talk on "Representing with Images" in May.