September 2025
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, began a nine-month residency as a long-term fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago), having been awarded The Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellowship to support work on his book project handling Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 Passion cycle Membra Jesu nostri (BuxWV 75).
On September 14 in South Pasadena, California, Bandy curated, organized and directed a program of 16th- and 17th-c viol consort songs and fantasias by William Byrd, Richard Farrant, Thomas Morley, Thomas Campion, John Jenkins, John Dowland and historical consort-mates Alfonso Ferrabosco II, John Coprario, Thomas Lupo and Orlando Gibbons for Tesserae Baroque. The performance featured soprano Andrea Zomorodian and included Artifex Consort members Ryan Baird (lecturer in music; double bass), Eric Tinkerhess and Leif Woodward, alongside whom Bandy played treble and tenor viols and offered spoken remarks about the program.
Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, published in Asia Major an article titled “A haohan in Yan’an: Xiao Jun Embattled, 1940-1942.”
Amelia Bransky, visiting assistant professor of theatre, was the lead production designer for the world premiere of Producer Jordan Peele’s film Him on September 17 at the historic Chinese Theatre. She led a team of designers, producers, actors and fabricators from conceptualizing the look and design of the premiere’s red-carpet experience through finalizing the scenic installation and event execution. She worked with her frequent collaborators at Freehold Group, a Los Angeles-based production company.
Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper, “Coming to (Terms with) America: Distant Close Encounters in Paloma Díaz-Mas’s Una ciudad llamada Eugenio (1992),” at the 46th Annual Conference of the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, held at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela from September 3-5.
Karla Cordova, visiting assistant professor of economics, presented a paper titled “Immigration Enforcement and Child Maltreatment” at the Hispanic Research Center Scholars Retreat 2025 hosted by The Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.
Cordova participated in a panel, “Latina Economic Impact,” at the Inland Empire Latina Economic and Policy Summit 2025 alongside Fernando Lozano, Morris B. and Gladys S. Pendleton Professor of Economics.
Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor and chair of the Department of Geology, published two articles in September. With colleagues from Caltech and Colorado College, he authored the article “Low sinuosity meandering rivers before vascular plants” in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, and with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, he published the article “The oldest diverse jellyfish fauna reinterpreted as sessile polypoid dinomischids (stem-group Ctenophora)” in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, was appointed to the editorial board of the American Mathematical Monthly. The journal, which was founded in 1894, is the flagship journal of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). This is Garcia’s second five-year term on the editorial board, having previously served on the editorial board from 2017-21.
Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a poem, “The Ruby Cube,” in Math Horizons.
Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, co-authored the book chapter “Sea Ice: A seabird world of its own” along with David Ainley and George Divoky. This book chapter is in Sea Ice: Its Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology and Societal Importance, Fourth Edition, edited by David N. Thomas and published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was invited to join the editorial board of Chinese Language and Discourse (CLD) for a three-year term beginning January 1, 2026. CLD is an international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing scholarship on Chinese and related languages, with a focus on current topics in Chinese discourse studies.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, was interviewed by Aera, a Japanese weekly magazine, on his book にほん老いと成熟の平和 on September 29. The interview was also carried by Yahoo News and MSN. His book was also positively reviewed by Record China on September 16.
Le presented a paper at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on September 12. The paper was titled “A Typology: Addressing Environmental and Demographic Crises through Smart Cities.”
Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published “Computational Scaffolding of Composition, Value, and Color for Disciplined Drawing” with Chau Vu ’26, Asya Lyubavina ’26 and Catherine Liu CMC ’26 at ACM UIST 2025. The paper was awarded the Best Paper Award (top 0.6%).
Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Vanessa Romo for NPR’s All Things Considered on “LA’s booming Gothicumbia scene.” Lippman also performed at the KCRW Summer Block Party at The Music Center’s Gloria Molina Grand Park on September 6.
Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, presented her work, “Limited Training, Lasting Impact: Personality Disorder Curriculum and Clinical Exposure in U.S. Doctoral Programs,” at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP) on September 27. Isabella Lindsay Castelli SC ’26 presented a poster, “Examining the Impact of Myth and Fact Education on Stigma: Potential Backfire Effects,” based on her work in Masland’s lab. Anjali Karp ’25 presented her senior thesis work, “ADHD and Rejection Sensitivity: The Role of Psychophysiological Reactivity.”
Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was elected president/chair of the American political thought section of the American Political Science Association (ASPA) at its annual meeting. Also at the APSA meeting, McWilliams appeared on four panels: 1) as chair of an author-meets-critics panel on Phillip Yaure’s Seizing Citizenship: Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionist Republicanism, 2) as chair of an author-meets-critics panel on Nicholas Buccola’s One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal, 3) as a critic on an author-meets-critics panel on Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, and 4) as chair of a panel on “Leadership, Ancient and Modern.”
On September 16, McWilliams was interviewed by the actress Janine Turner (Friday Night Lights, Northern Exposure) for the Constitutional Chats podcast sponsored by Constituting America. The episode was titled “What Holds Our Republic Together? A Wrap-Up on Checks & Balances.”
On September 17, McWilliams delivered the Constitution Day Lecture at San Diego State University. The title of her lecture was “The Constitution, The Campus, and the Capital.”
Wallace “Marty” Meyer, associate professor of biology and director of the Robert J. Bernard Field Station, published two papers: 1) an invited review paper in Pacific Science titled “Biology and impacts of Pacific Island invasive species. no17. Lissachatina fulica, the giant African snail (Mollusca: Achatinidae; Achatininae),” which synthesizes key information needed to make informed decisions regarding this widespread and impactful species, and 2) a research article in BioInvasions Records titled “Sorting out the stupefying systematics of Succineidae introduced to Hawaii” that resolves taxonomic ambiguities and provides information on the distribution of non-native succineid snails in Hawaii.
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, co-led a discussion on “galaxy formation and cosmic rays” at the 2025 Galaxy Formation in Southern California (GALFRESCA) conference, held in San Diego.
Moreno published three research articles: “How invisible stellar halos bias our understanding of ultra-faint galaxies” in the Astrophysical Journal, “Great Balls of FIRE IV. The contribution of massive star clusters to the astrophysical population of merging binary black holes” in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and “Star Formation Rates, Metallicities, and Stellar Masses on kpc-scales in TNG50” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, participated in the conference Contemporary French Civilization, held in North Carolina on September 26-27. He presented his chapter, “Podcasting as a queer archival method for an intersectional French culture,” at the roundtable dedicated to the volume Queer Realms of Memory: Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative, forthcoming in December 2025 by Liverpool University Press.
Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, currently has a very large photo work done in 1981 in the History of Photography exhibition at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.
Alexis Reyes, director of sustainability and energy management, presented as a panelist on a webinar titled “From Hurdles to Highlights: Navigating Carbon Offsets at Small Colleges.” She shared how Pomona College is integrating carbon offsets into the 2030 carbon neutrality goal and was joined by colleagues from Austin College and Oberlin College.
Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, published a paper with colleagues from UCLA titled “Previous Institutionalization is Associated with Elevated Functional Connectivity between the Nucleus Accumbens and Amygdala during Aversive Learning” in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. This work identified a candidate mechanism by which early life adversity changes human brain functioning, as well as evidence that these differences in neurodevelopment may recover throughout adolescence. Rosenberg also co-authored a paper with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania titled “Brain Changes Associated with Depression Treatment: A Meta-Analysis” in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical.
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, E. Wilson Lyon Professor of Humanities and chair of English, published the article “Time Travelers and Truth Tellers: Revisiting Cheryl Wall and Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Harlem Renaissance” in American Literary History.
Chef Martin Draluck of Black Pot Supper Club designed a series of dinners based on poems from Sherrard-Johnson’s Grimoire (Autumn House Press, 2020). A feature describing their collaboration appears in Edible LA.
David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, was interviewed live on Danish National Radio (DR) for the program P4 Afternoon South and Esbjerg on September 9 to discuss “Societal Acceptance of Solar Cells, and the Prospects for New Solar Cell Technologies to Improve the Aesthetics of Solar Energy Harvesting at Scale.”
Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, had three performances of her music this past month: Somewhere over the Clouds by Joel Ferst and Jeanne Hourez at San Angelo University; 2+ by Soundmap Ensemble at Southwestern University; and Four in the Morning by Emeritus Professor of Music Thomas Flaherty, Cindy Fogg and Rachel Vettel Huang at Pomona’s Little Bridges.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, did a visual workshop on AI-supported language teaching for the Chinese teaching team at University of Redlands on September 19.
Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-organized and chaired the 2025 Psychonomic Society Collaborative Symposium “We speak many languages! Bridging barriers to bring diversity of language experience into cognitive psychology” in conjunction with the 24th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP) on September 4. The goal of this symposium was to bring together bilingualism researchers from around the globe to present recent research on the importance of diversity (both linguistically and methodologically) in forming coherent theory in the field of bilingual cognition. As part of this symposium, Zirnstein also co-presented a talk with Judith F. Kroll (UC Irvine) titled “What variation in language experience tells us about cognition and the brain.”