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March 2013 @Pomona Newsletter

Table of Contents

News & Notes

  • Spring Break: The campus will be quiet next week as students go on Spring Break.
  • Upcoming staff event dates: The Staff Appreciation luncheon is on Wednesday, March 20. The Spring Staff Forum will be held on Wednesday, March 27, 1:30 - 3 p.m. You can submit anonymous questions to the Forum on the Staff Council website.
  • Upcoming holiday: Cesar Chavez Day will be observed on Friday, March 29.
  • Summer planning:  Parents, save the dates for the Summer Recreation Program, which will take place Monday, June 17, to Friday, July 26.

New Dean of the College

Pomona College has selected Janice Hudgings, currently associate dean of faculty and professor of physics at Mount Holyoke College, to be its new vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college. She will begin her new position on July 1, 2013.

Hudgings joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass., in 1999. She twice served as chair of the Physics Department and, in 2011, became director of the college’s Science Center, associate dean of faculty for science, and then associate dean of faculty in 2012. A highly successful researcher, Hudgings focuses on optics and semiconductor devices, including solar cells, energy efficient lighting, and lasers. She has published more than 30 articles in scholarly journals, many of which are coauthored with students. In 2002, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award of $375,000, for her work on vertical cavity surface emitting lasers.

Her overall research has led to three U.S. patents and, in 2007, she co-founded the company Alenas Imaging, Inc. with her research partner to commercialize thermal imaging technology developed in her lab. Hudgings earned a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in engineering, with distinction, from Swarthmore College. As a Rhodes Scholar, she studied “maths and philosophy” at Oxford University before receiving an M.Sc. in mathematics. She earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

For more information on Hudgings, read our news article.

New Library Dean

Kevin Mulroy has been appointed to serve as the A.J. McFadden Dean of The Claremont Colleges Library. He begins on July 15. Kevin comes to The Claremont Colleges from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he has served since 2008 as the associate university librarian for academic services. He is an academic and author with more than 25 years of experience managing some of the most esteemed research collections in the country. The preeminent academic resource for our seven colleges, the library has a general collection of approximately 2 million volumes, ranking third in the state of California among private institutions.

ITS Newsletter

 In an effort to keep you informed as to what ITS is doing, that department is now publishing a newsletter. In the first edition, you’ll find information about what kind of traffic ITS sees and some of their philosophies. The newsletter is published on the ITS website.

Social Media Help

If your office or department is thinking of starting a Facebook or Twitter feed, check out this helpful guide on the Communications website. We also have a list of Pomona College-related Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Groups.

If you need one-on-one help, have a question or want your office's social media account(s) added to our master list, contact Laura Tiffany.

New Employees

  • Nancy Anderson, administrative assistant, Study Abroad
  • Julian Silva, , cook III, Dining Services
  • Jessica Stanford, stuedent employment/loan coordinator, Financia Aid

Recent News

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

On 22 February, Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) delivered the invited lecture “Aplicando la Antropologa Aplicada en el Peru: De Vicos a Chijnaya, 1948-2013” at the Cultural Center of the Federico Villarreal University in Lima, Peru. The lecture was sponsored by the Guild of Professional Anthropologists of Peru at a special event to launch the idea of creating an Institute of Applied Anthropology. Bolton is the only foreign anthropologist honored with Honorary Membership in the Guild. On 25 February, he gave an invited talk at the Institute of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on "Apply Anthropology in Highland Peru: From Vicos to Chijnaya, 1948-2013.”

Paul Cahill (Romance Languages and Literatures) presented his paper “‘Dadme mis letras para recomenzar: (Dis)locating the Self in Marta Agudo's 28010" at the 41st annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held at the University of Louisville on 21-23 February.

Avi Chomsky (History) presented the Spanish version of her book They Take Our Jobs at the Havana Book Fair in Havana, Cuba, on 15 February.

Kevin J. H. Dettmar (English) participated on a roundtable, "Copyright and Fair Use Privilege," at the University of Tulsa College of Law on 20 February. While there, he also conducted a seminar on scholarly book publishing for graduate students.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave a talk on "Supercharacters on abelian groups" at the UCLA Combinatorics Seminar on 21 February.

Julie Journitz (Information Technology Services) was a participant in panel discussion on "Best Practices for Managing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): Q&A" at  the 17th annual International IT Service Management Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas from 17-20 February.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) gave a presentation titled "Seabirds in a warming climate: working hard to get their krill" on her research on the impacts of climate change on Antarctic food webs at the Pomona Valley Audubon Society meeting on 7 February.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave the talk "Rethinking Gendered Migration, Labor and Human Trafficking" at a conference on Human Trafficking Reconsidered at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on 2 Februrary.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) participated in the panel "National Theatre Conference's Women Playwrights Initiative" at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, Region VIII Conference, held at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on 15 February.  She was invited to read an excerpt from Father Gregory Boyle's book Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion at his public address at Our Lady of the Assumption Church, sponsored by Pax Christi, on 16 February.

On 6 February, Cameron Munter (International Relations) addressed the World Affairs Council of Riverside on Pakistan. On 13 February, he spoke on "policy options on Pakistan" at the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, DC, and on 16 February, he gave a keynote address at the Karachi Literature Festival in Karachi, Pakistan, on "narratives in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship." 

Suzanne Schultz Reed (Theatre and Dance) gave a presentation titled "Employer Expectations of Costume Shop Staff" at the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) career fair at Cal State LA at the end of January. The content was based on her informal survey of costume shops around the country.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) gave a presentation at Scripps College, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Women's Studies of the Claremont Colleges, on "Hidden Child & Clandestine Activities of French Women During WWII" on 18 February.

Jason Smith (ITS) made two presentations at the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Conference 2013 in Denver, Colorado, on 4-6 February: "One Size Does Not Fit All: Video Streaming Solutions at Pomona College” and "Thinking Outside the Image Repository: LUNA Image Repositories at Pomona College." 

Kyla Wazana Tompkins (English, Gender and Women’s Studies) gave a talk at the Modern Languages Association conference on 8 January called "Joel Chandler Harris' Biopolitical Fictions." She also spoke about her book, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century, at Colby College on 12 February and at Bowdoin College on 13 February. Finally, she spoke about her work-in-progress, a new manuscript titled So Moved, at the University of Pennsylvania on 20  February.

Publications

Jack Abecassis (Romance Languages and Literatures) wrote "Mangeclous et Moishe Pipik: Cohen, Roth et le problématique dédoublement juif (première partie)" in Cahiers Albert Cohen (Retour sur Mangeclous) 22, pp. 41-66.

Allan Barr (Asian Languages and Literatures) translated Yu Hua’s op-ed "Censorship's Many Faces" for The New York Times on 28 February. It is the first of several articles Hua has been commissioned to write as a guest columnist for the paper.

Colin Beck (Sociology) published a study co-authored with Emily Miner ‘12: "Who Gets Designated a Terrorist and Why?" in Social Forces 91:3, pp. 837-872.

Paul Cahill (Romance Languages and Literatures) published “Poetic Vision and (In)visible Pain in Antonio Méndez Rubio's Trasluz” in Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature 36:2, pp. 356-72.

Gabe Chandler (Mathematics) published, with Leif Johnson (Google), "Automatic locally adaptive smoothing for tree-based set estimation" in Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation 83, pp. 384-401.  

Pardis Mahdavi’s (Anthropology) paper "The Geography of Sex Work in the United Arab Emirates" was published as a book chapter in Geographies of Privilege (Routledge Press 2013).

Michael McGaha (Romance Languages and Literatures) translated Rifat Bali's From Anatolia to the New World: Life Stories of the First Turkish Immigrants to America (Libra Books, 2013). This is the third book he has translated from Turkish for Libra Books. The others are Vitali Hakko's My Life: Vakko (2011) and Eli Shaul's From Balat to Bat Yam: Memoirs of a Turkish Jew (2012).

Cameron Munter (International Relations) wrote "Here's How the U.S. Can Work With Pakistan" in The Atlantic in February.

Dan O'Leary (Chemistry), Aaron Fong '13, and a collaborator at UC Merced have published an article titled "Enthalpy/Entropy Contributions to Conformational KIEs: Theoretical Predictions and Comparison with Experiment" in the journal Molecules 18:2, pp. 2281-2296.

Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) published “Rethinking the 'duplication problem'” in Lingua 126, pp. 78-91.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) is the editor of a bilingual special issue dedicated to the myth of Salomé published by the Oscholars in February.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) wrote "Intolerance: Love's Struggle through the Ages (1916)," which appears in Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films (Routledge 2012), ed. by Adele Reinhartz, pp. 135-39.

John Seery (Politics) wrote "Stumbling Toward a Democratic Theory of Incest" in Political Theory 41:1, pp. 5-32.

Gary Smith (Economics) wrote the book Club Soccer: Insider’s Guide to Winning the Game about his adventures and misadventures in Club Soccer.

Thomas Pinney (English) edited The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge University Press, 2013), the first complete set of Kipling’s poems -- including 50 “lost” poems that Pinney discovered -- to be compiled. The discovery was featured by many media outlets, including The Guardian, Salon.com and The New York Times.

Samuel Yamashita (History) wrote the chapter "The 'Food Problem' of Evacuated Children in Wartime Japan, 1944-1945," in Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century Asia (Ashgate 2012), ed. by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, pp. 131-148.

Honors and Awards

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) has been appointed to the editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Journal of Biblical Reception, and Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) was honored with the Pomona College Alumni Service Award on 2 February for her long commitment to reaching out to alumni through speaking engagements and other activities.

Margaret Waller (Romance Languages and Literatures) received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for next year for her book project, Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest and the Fashion Press.

Other

Robert Gaines (Geology) traveled to the Colorado Rockies with a film crew from Japanese Public Television from 27 February to 3 March. The NHK network filmed a segment on his recent research on location for a program on the evolution of life on Earth that will air in May.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) hosted casting director Joy Dickson who taught a TV Audition Workshop in Martinez’s Acting for Film and TV class on 12 February. Dickson also had lunch with students interested in working in the entertainment industry.

On February 20, Cameron Munter (International Relations) was interviewed by Christine Amanpour on CNN International about the future of American diplomacy.

David Tanenbaum (Physics and Astronomy) notes that the new Scanning Electron Microscope Facility had its grand opening on 18 February. Photos and an article may be found here. 

Nancy Treser-Osgood (Alumni Relations) presided over the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District VII Biennial Conference in San Francisco from 1-3 March, which was attended by about 600 advancement professionals. She serves as District Chair and oversees all of the programs and activities for the southwestern United States.


@Pomona Newsletter