January 2026
Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published the research article “Incongruency Sequence Effects Reduce Taboo Interference in Picture Naming” in the journal Cognition and Emotion, co-authored with collaborator Katherine White (Rhodes College).
Abrams presented a talk titled “Healthy Aging vs. Dementia: How Brain Changes Influence Cognition” at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, California.
Anne Bages, professor emerita of physical education, had the new Coach Anne Bages Scoreboard installed at the Pauley Tennis Complex as a tribute to her leadership, her trailblazing work for women in sports, and the vibrant tennis community she helped create.
Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave a research talk titled “New Tools in Sulfur Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at the Pacifichem conference in Honolulu.
Ball completed his four-year term as a member of the Beckman Scholars Executive Committee at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. This includes serving as the committee chair in 2025.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, published the chapter “Scordatura as Dispositio: Notation, Rhetorical Figure, and Visual Effect in Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c.1680)” in the volume titled Jesuit Rhetoric across Space and Time: Local and Global Perspectives (Brill Jesuit Studies), edited by Sophie Conte, Cinthia Gannett, John Brereton, Manfred Kraus, Elizabethada Wright and Bartosz Awianowicz.
On January 29, Bandy presented a talk on “Archival Research and Materiality in the Digital Age” in conversation with historians Brian Brege (Syracuse University) and Alcira Dueñas (The Ohio State University) as a keynote speaker at the 2026 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library (Chicago).
On January 7, a videorecorded performance of Bandy playing Baroque double bass and featuring GRAMMY®-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan and Bach Collegium San Diego (dir. Ruben Valenzuela) was released as part of Phan’s international media project Bach 52. The full episode, “Theology, Music, and Modern Myths: Who Was J. S. Bach Really?,” contextualizes the performance through a conversation between Phan and musicologist Michael Marissen, author of Bach against Modernity (2023).
Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, co-authored a manuscript in Conservation Biology which shows how natural language processing and machine learning can lead to large-scale analyses of how people relate to nature.
Pierre Englebert, H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and professor of politics, wrote a piano trio entitled “Liberalism’s Last Dance.” Lecturers in music, Gayle Blankenburg (piano) and Cynthia Fogg (violin), as well as Professor Emeritus of Music Tom Flaherty (cello), performed and recorded the trio at Little Bridges Auditorium. Englebert also wrote the score for “The Work is Not Done,” an audio verbatim theater produced as a Spotify podcast by the Nairobi-based Busara Center and built entirely from the exact words of people living through the fallout of the USAID closure on January 24, 2025. The full music composition is titled Requiem for USAID.
Peter Flueckiger, professor of Japanese, published Dazai Shundai: Writings on Political Economy with Cambridge University Press.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor, published the following papers: “A noncommutative generalization of Hunter’s positivity theorem” (with Jurij Volčič) in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society; “Is AX = Y possible with a positive definite A?” (with Roger A. Horn) in the American Mathematical Monthly; “Numerical semigroups from rational matrices III: semigroups of matricial dimension two and a counterexample to the lonely element conjecture” (with Arsh Chhabra) in Communications in Algebra; and “Symmetric tensor powers of graphs” (with Weymar Astaiza, Alexander J. Barrios, Henry Chimal-Dzul, Jazzier Lopez de la Luz, Victor H. Moll, Yunied Puig, and Diego Villamizar) in Scientia Series A. Mathematical Sciences.
Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of chemistry, and his students published the following papers and gave the following presentations. Publications included “Structure-Based Virtual Screening for Small-Molecule Inhibitors of HPV-16 E6” in ChemRxiv with Ian Tam ’27, Andrew Chung ’27 and Liam Kwak ’26 and “Conformational Dynamics and Disorder of HPV-16 E6” in ChemRxiv with Kwak. At the American Chemical Society Conference in San José, California, Garza-López’s students delivered the following presentations: “In-silico Identification of Small-Molecule Inhibitors for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease” (poster by Chung); “In-silico Investigations of Flavonoid Inhibitors of Human Tyrosinase” (poster by Tam) and “Conformational Dynamics and Disorder of HPV-16 E6” (oral presentation by Kwak).
Kara Godwin, assistant vice president and chief global officer, was invited to join the advisory board for the Future Universities Alliance, a network that connects established, emerging and start-up universities worldwide to accelerate innovative initiatives, exchange insight, improve learning quality, and expand access to strengthen the global education ecosystem.
Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington D.C. from January 4-7. Goins ran an all-day special session for the Simons-Laufer Mathematical Research Institute (SLMath) titled “ADJOINT Mathematics Working Groups” on January 4; gave a keynote address for the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) Special Session on “Supporting Undergraduate Research” on January 5; and ran an all-day special session for the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) titled “50 Years of Math at Howard - Commemorating the First Doctoral Program at an HBCU” on January 7. He also organized his annual informal Black mathematicians dinner where more than 50 African American faculty took over the Yard House in D.C.
Goins recently joined the fundraising advisory board for Game of Genius, a soon-to-be released documentary on the life of statistician David Harold Blackwell, a prodigy from segregated Illinois who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at 22. In 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education, he became the first Black professor in the University of California system. Goins is featured in the teaser trailer for the documentary.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed with violinist Fritz Gearhart at four southern Oregon coast venues (Port Orford, North Bend, Brookings and Bandon) in early January. They presented works of Sergei Prokofiev, Ludwig van Beethoven, Manuel de Falla and Quincy Porter. These concerts were part of the winter season of the Redfish Music Festival.
Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is co-author of The Yale School of the Environment: The First 125 Years. His essay, “I Sing the River Electric,” has been posted on LA River X…Remixed and in the Western Water Archives at the Claremont Colleges Library, January 2026. Three students from his Fall 2025 seminar, EA 171: Water in the West, have also published essays on the LA River X site, including Fiona Herbold ’26, Shelby Stanton ’26 and Sascha Weiss ’26 (with more to come).
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Constraining Nuclear Molecular Gas Content with High-resolution CO Imaging of GOALS Galaxies” in the Astrophysical Journal.
Moreno appeared on NPR twice, on an episode titled “A failed galaxy could solve the dark matter mystery” and one on “A galaxy cluster hotter than the surface of the sun is shocking researchers.”
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Mobilité géographique et éthique minoritaire dans La peau hors du placard, de Jean-Baptiste Phou” at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2026 Convention held in Toronto from January 8-11.
Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published a discussion on Marie-Louise Popp and Jochen Trommer’s “Phonologically conditioned affix order is stratal” in Radical: A Journal of Phonology.
Adam Pearson, professor of psychological science, co-authored the article “A megastudy of behavioral interventions to catalyze public, political, and financial climate advocacy” in PNAS Nexus with a global team of 34 behavioral scientists, exploring factors that spur bipartisan collective action on climate change in the United States, involving over 31,000 U.S. residents.
John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics, had his forthcoming book, American Incest: How White Supremacy Became White Lawlessness, go live on the publisher’s website.
Adolfo J. Rumbos, Joseph N. Fiske Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, published an article co-authored with Leandro Recova (Cal Poly Pomona) in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. The title of the article is “Existence and multiplicity of solutions for a cooperative elliptic system using Morse theory.” Rumbos presented this paper at an American Mathematical Society Special Session on Advances in Nonlinear Partial Differential in the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington D.C. on January 4.
Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, co-authored a paper, “Attachment security to mother is associated with lower trait expressive suppression among girls in middle childhood,” published in Attachment & Human Development.
Stern wrote about her recent book in an article for The Conversation on how psychological science can be applied to navigate difficult relationships.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, professor of English, had her 2024 book Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants Jelly Rot selected for the Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Best Book in Queer Studies, awarded by the GLQ caucus of the Modern Languages Association and the American Studies Association.
Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, moderated a reading and discussion with acclaimed German writer Navid Kermani at the Goethe Institute Los Angeles on January 14.
Von Schwerin-High published her review of Todd C. Kontje’s 2025 book Global Germany Circa 1800: A Revisionist Literary History in The European Legacy.
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, published her scholarly monograph, Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China, with the University of Michigan Press on January 12. The book has been widely featured on major scholarly platforms in China Studies and Asian Studies in both the United States and the Chinese-speaking world, including Choice Forthcoming Titles and China Books Review, maintained by Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations. A special “Author-Meets-Critics” roundtable titled “New Methods, New Materials: An Interdisciplinary Conversation on Ethnic Imagination and National Belonging in Contemporary China” will appear at the 2026 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference.
Zhang authored a blog that the University of Michigan Press published on its home page titled “Foreign No More: Writing about China's Ethnic Minorities as an Epistemological Experiment,” reflecting on the nature of scholarly production about China across humanistic disciplines, as well as the cultural and social conditions of writing about ethnic minorities in our global era.
Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, accepted a position as co-section editor of the Cognitive Science of Language section for the journal Language and Linguistics Compass.