Archived Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published the research article “Relating Tabooness to Humor and Arousal Ratings in American English: What the F*** Is so Funny?” in the journal Language and Speech, co-authored with Pengbo Hu ’21 and Genevieve Gray ’22 and collaborators Meredith Shafto and Lori James.

Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, delivered the keynote address for the 2024 Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love seminar series with a presentation titled “Hermeneutic Labor in Sexual Contexts” on Feb. 8. She also presented “On the Possibility of ‘Unrequited Love’: Limerence, Infatuation, and Crushes” at the 2024 Fagothey Conference “Problems with Love” at Santa Clara University.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented the paper “Didactics Beyond Depiction: Jesuit Dialectic in Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c.1680)” at a conference to honor 17th-century musicology pioneer Anne Schnoebelen, Mullen Professor Emerita of Musicology at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music (Houston). The conference took place Feb. 17–18 at the Brockman Hall for Opera and featured invited papers by 15 Shepherd School alumni from across the U.S. and Europe.

On Feb. 21, Bandy presented a lecture on the life and esoteric compositional practices of Dieterich Buxtehude (ca.1637–1707) at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library, at the event Playing / Play on Buxtehude, organized by the USC Collaborations in History, Art, Religion, and Music (CHARM) working group and co-sponsored by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies and the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company.

Bandy programmed and led a day-long workshop (Feb. 3, South Pasadena, California) for SoCal Viols, the local Viola da Gamba Society of America chapter, on the topic of fauxbourdon and its many symbolic meanings across sacred and secular music from the 15th through 17th centuries in Italy, Flanders and England.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, performed as harpsichordist with his Cornucopian Baroque Ensemble colleagues—violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music; theorbist Jason Yoshida, lecturer in music; and cellist Roger Lebow—in a Friday Noon concert of music by Handel and Telemann on Feb. 16 in Lyman Hall.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught an open-level community dance masterclass at Elite Movement Dance Studio in Cape Town, South Africa. During his time there, he worked with four local dancers on a short video project and interviewed studio owner and choreographer Densley “Deezy” Carolissen on the conversations surrounding hip hop dance today.

Champi premiered a new six-minute contemporary modern dance titled Reset with the Malashock Dance Company in San Diego, California. The work included new music by percussionist and composer Jonathan Rodriguez.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures and faculty director of Oldenborg Center, had a podcast interview on her translation of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass/ Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk published on Feb. 13 in New Books Network.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages & literatures, published a book titled Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life with University of Toronto Press.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, received a research grant from the National Science Foundation to design, conduct and analyze a national sample survey on research development and research administration at U.S. colleges and universities. Pomona is the lead institution, and Gerstein is the principal investigator, with colleagues from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Seattle University and Research Triangle Institute. This three-year project is titled “Collaborative Research: RD/RA Support Networks at Diversified Research Institutions (SUNDRI),” with an overall project budget of $1,884,361.

Gerstein was appointed to the Industries of Ideas University Advisory Board at the Social Science Research Council. Industries of Ideas is a three-year collaborative pilot project funded by the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships of the National Science Foundation.

Meg Gotowski, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, and Galia Bar-Sever, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, organized and hosted the Pomona Acquisition Workshop (PAW) 2024 on Feb. 23. The one-day event brought together invited speakers from UCSD, UCLA and UCI as well as graduate students from UCLA to present their most recent work on language acquisition research. Pomona faculty and students attended the event and interacted with other scholars in Southern California working on this topic.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, was elected to serve as a member-at-large of the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics and began her term in Feb. 2024.

Karaali gave a talk titled “Can Zombies Do Math? OR Humanism as a Philosophy of Mathematics” on Feb. 22 at the Mathematics Department Colloquium at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

Karaali gave a talk titled “ChatGPT and New Ethical Considerations for the Mathematics Classroom” on Feb. 24 at the WiMSoCal-14 Conference held at Pomona College.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, and biology major Philip Duchild ’24, attended the 50th annual meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group in Seattle from Feb. 20-23. Karnovsky chaired the session “Community Outreach” and presented the paper “Sowing Seeds of Futures in Seabird Conservation through Participation in Habitat Restoration Work on Anacapa Island.” In this study, Karnovsky found that participating in a field trip in her Advanced Animal Ecology classes had a lasting and large impact on the lives of Pomona students long after graduation. Duchild presented a part of his senior thesis in a poster, “Analysis of Laysan Albatross Diets from Two Colonies on Oahu, Hawaii.” Co-authors were Karnovsky and Lindsay Young of Pacific Rim Conservation. As part of the meeting there was an exhibit called “Faces of Conservation.” Kristina McOmber ’12, Jacob Ligorria ’23 and Clare Flynn ’19 were profiled in this exhibit. At the meeting, Kay Garlick-Ott ’18 won the award for best Ph.D. student talk, and Kristina McOmber ’12 won the award for best master’s student poster.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, was selected for the Institute for Global Affairs 2024 nonresident fellowship.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed at ChamberFest 2024 held at California State University, Northridge on Feb. 2. With CSUN faculty members, she played Khachaturian’s Trio for clarinet, violin and piano.

Lee was an invited guest on Global Village Thursdays with John Schneider on KPFK 90.7FM. She was asked to speak about her upcoming PianoSpheres recital at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles on March 5.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, performed with Pangea Playback Theatre under the direction of Hannah K. Fox for a presentation by Dailey Innovations, Inc. titled “Speaking Through Colors: Self-Expression Through Art (SETA) and using Playback Theater to Transform the World” on Feb. 22. This virtual event was sponsored by the School of Social Work and the Office of Professional Development and Continuing Education at Howard University.

April Mayes, professor of history and associate dean of the College, was one of three scholars featured in the podcast “Lost Women of Science” in an episode about Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser. Fraser was the daughter of Reverend Jeremiah Loguen, ex-slave, abolitionist and clergy member, and became one of the first African American women to earn a medical degree (Syracuse University). She immigrated to the Dominican Republic where she became the first woman certified to practice medicine, allowed to treat women and children.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, spoke to the Metuchen (New Jersey) Democratic Committee on Feb. 7 about the possibilities and probabilities for the 2024 election.

On Feb. 15, McWilliams published an article titled “He Took Children Seriously” as part of a retrospective forum on the historian Christopher Lasch in the journal Current.

McWilliams published an essay titled “Tradition, Transformation, and Democratic Education” in Political Science Quarterly on Feb. 28.

Wallace M. Meyer III, associate professor of biology and director of the Bernard Field Station, published an article titled “Acmispon glaber shrub canopies facilitate Bromus madritensis establishment after fire in California sage scrub” in the Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Meyer received, as a co-PI, a National Science Foundation BIORETS: REACHES grant for a project titled “Research experiences for advancing curriculum of Hawaiian ecosystem sciences.”

Meyer gave an invited talk at Cal State University San Bernardino titled “Using ecological information to develop a holistic approach to sustainable landscaping in southern California.”

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Inflow and outflow properties, not total gas fractions, drive the evolution of the mass-metallicity relation” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno and collaborators obtained approval for a research proposal titled “BonFIRE: Modeling Galaxy Formation in the Early Universe” under the JWST Cycle 3 Theory Program.

Michael O’Malley, professor of art, has new work in the show “This is not a chair” currently on view at the Claremont Museum of Art until April 20, 2024.

Zvezdana Ostojic, visiting assistant professor of French, chaired the panel “Crime is their Business” and presented the paper “À tout crime son châtiment : une réécriture impossible dans Maudit soit Dostoïevski d’Atiq Rahimi” at the 2024 20th- & 21st-century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium in Philadelphia.

Adam Pearson, associate professor and chair of psychological science, was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the largest international scientific organization of psychologists. Fellow status is awarded to APS members who have made “sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology in the areas of research, teaching, service and/or application.”

Pearson gave an invited address, “Social Psychological Pathways to Climate Justice,” at the Groups Preconference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in San Diego, California.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German, was awarded a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society in support of his edited book on the 20th-century Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt (under contract with Camden House). The volume brings together 12 scholars who (re)read and interpret Dürrenmatt’s multi-perspective work in the context of contemporary social, political and cultural developments.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published a paper (co-authored with Margaret Smith), “It May be a Mistake to Delay Social Security Retirement Benefits,” in the Journal of Financial Planning and wrote three opinion pieces: “How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study” (Retraction Watch, Feb. 21); “Why chatbots ( LLMs) flunk Grade 9 math tests” (MindMatters, Feb. 21) and “Retracted paper is a compelling case for reform” (MindMatters, Feb. 23). He was also quoted extensively in Ed Yardeni’s discussion of “AI Isn’t Intelligent” in Morning Briefing (Feb. 22).

Smith gave a presentation, “Generative AI Is Still Fake Intelligence,” to 381 people working with AI in O’Reilly Media’s “GenAI Superstream: Possibilities and Pitfalls” on Feb. 28.

Valorie D. Thomas, emerita Phebe Estelle Spalding professor of English and Africana Studies, published the chapter “Who Do You Worship?: #Memesis #whodoyouworship #BeyoncétheFeminist #AprilBey,” about Los Angeles artist April Bey’s Afrofuturist work on Black femme iconography, in the collection Dis…Miss Gender? edited by Anne Bray (MIT Press). She also published “Incidents in the Life of a Black Prof.: A Speculative CV” in the book Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education edited by Shardé M. Davis (UNC Press).

Margaret Waller, professor emerita of French, won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest Feb. 5.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, served as moderator for the Evening with Joy-Ann Reid event celebrating the publication of her new book Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America. The event was held in Bridges Auditorium on Feb. 15.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, presented her research project titled “Indigenous Articulations: Understanding the ‘Mother Tongue Movement’ of the Qiang People of China” at the Global Asias conference held at UC Irvine. The conference gathered scholars from Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, English and other fields to explore cross-disciplinary issues and find connections beyond area studies.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored the introduction to the special issue of American Psychologist “Ethical Challenges in the Use of Digital Technologies in Psychological Science” along with co-editors Leah Light (Pitzer College), Sangeeta Panicker (Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research) and Jina Huh-Yoo (Drexel University).

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, recorded viola da gamba and tanbur solos for the soundtrack to the television series Masters of the Universe: Revolution. The show, whose score features musical themes by Bear McCreary and music by Sparks & Shadows, premiered on Netflix on January 25.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was awarded a $40,000 Korea Foundation grant to design and implement a simulation on the geopolitical and economic consequences of a supply chain disruption originating with the People’s Republic of China. His co-principal investigator for the project is Ben Radd, visiting assistant professor of politics in 2022-23.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, published an article led by Hanna Kim ’23 in the journal Conservation Science & Practice. This article compared environmental NGOs in terms of their social media strategy across multiple platforms, ranging from TikTok to Facebook, and found several organizations that were influencers, or positive deviates for public reach online. This research was the product of a RAISE award earned by Kim in the summer of 2021.

Chang co-authored two manuscripts related to conservation planning and public outreach. Chang was the lead author in an article published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution showing that after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, environmental and climate voices declined markedly. This manuscript received press attention from venues including The Guardian, Quartz, New York Times, Le Monde and Gizmodo. Chang worked with an interdisciplinary team convened as a NIMBioS working group to mathematically model how incorporating information on conservation threats improves landscape planning outcomes; this article was published in Conservation Biology.

Chang gave invited seminars to Nanyang Technological University, Asian School of the Environment; Centre for Wildlife Studies, Banglore, India; National University of Singapore, Department of Biological Sciences; and University of Nottingham, Malaysia, Sustainable Environments Research Group.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, delivered the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS) invited address “Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about linear algebra?” at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in San Francisco on January 4. This honor was recognized at the Prizes and Awards ceremony on January 3. He also gave an hour-long lecture, “A second course in linear algebra: a call for the early introduction of complex numbers,” at the AMS Special Session on Issues, Challenges, and Innovations in Instruction of Linear Algebra on January 5, also at the JMM (a meeting attended by over 5,500). Garcia also co-organized, with Konrad Aguilar, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, the ILAS Special Session on Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, and its Applications on January 4-5.

On January 11, Garcia gave a talk titled “The quaternionic structure of 2x2 matrix inner functions” at the 2024 Workshop on Schur Analysis and applications to Hypercomplex Analysis, Neural Networks, and Linear Systems held at Chapman University.

Melissa Givens, assistant professor of music, was one of nine musicians who collaborated with Southwestern University Professor of Music John Michael Cooper on a video project in conjunction with the release of three volumes of previously unpublished volumes of music by Florence B. Price on January 1. Givens and Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave the world-premiere performance of Price’s “Lullaby (for a Black Mother),” a setting of a Langston Hughes text. The three volumes, published by ClarNan Editions and distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints, are “Twelve Pieces for Piano Solo,” “Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Florence Price, and Melvin B. Tolson) (original keys / medium voice)” and “Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets (transposed for high voice).”

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and Charles Taylor, chair and professor of chemistry, with Victor Chai ’23, Tiam Farajzadeh ’23, Yufei Meng ’25, Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25, published the paper “Chemical basis of microbiome preference in the nematode C. elegans” in Scientific Reports in January.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. The annual conference is the largest meeting of mathematicians in the world. On January 3, Goins organized and moderated a panel titled “What Makes Successful Research Careers.’’ Goins brought several Claremont Colleges students with him as part of his summer program experience: Tesfa Asmara ’24, Louis Burns ’24, Matilda LaFortune SCR ’23, Eli Pregerson HMC ’24 and Melinda Yang ’23.

Goins was featured in a new documentary on African American mathematical scientists. “Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience,” directed by George Csicsery, had its world premiere at the Joint Mathematics Meetings on January 6. The hour-long film “traces the evolution of a culture of Black scholars, scientists and educators in the United States. The film follows the stories of prominent pioneers, showing how the challenges they faced and their triumphs are reflected in the experiences of today’s mid-career Black mathematicians.” Goins is credited in the film as a consulting scholar.

On January 23, Goins gave a virtual colloquium talk at Alabama A&M University on “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy.”

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “The Legacy of the Institutional Route of the 1990s on the Dominican Feminist Movement Today: NGOization, Beijing, and Collaborating with the State” on January 27 at the 2024 Winter Meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico. Hernández-Medina was also part of the panel “Queering Spaces of Social Action: Integrating Teaching, Research, and Activism for Radical Inclusion” on January 27 at the same SWS conference. She shared her remarks on her trajectory as a scholar-activist who teaches and does research about how marginalized groups are able to influence public policy in Latin America while also being a member of the Dominican feminist movement for 30 years.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a talk on January 3 titled “ChatGPT and New Ethical Considerations for the Mathematics Classroom” at the American Mathematical Society Special Session on Ethics in the Mathematics Classroom that was a part of the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2024 held in San Francisco. At the same meeting, she gave a second talk on January 6 titled “Oblique Strategies for Classroom Poetry” at the Association for Women in Mathematics Special Session on Mathematics in the Literary Arts and Pedagogy in Creative Settings. Karaali was also one of two panelists invited to present at the Project NExT Session on Fostering a Growth Mindset in the Classroom (organized by Adam Yassine, visiting assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, and held on January 5) and gave a talk titled “From Growth Mindset to (Re)humanizing Mathematics.”

Karaali participated in the Claremont Center for Teaching and Learning Teaching Tune-Up for Spring 2024 and gave a presentation January 11 titled “Using ChatGPT for Fun and for Profit” as part of the Introduction to Generative AI session organized by Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, published the article “The blurry lines between popular media and party propaganda: China’s convergence culture through a linguistic lens” with Zhuo Jing-Schmidt in PLOS One.

Lang participated in the online conference “Grading Less-Learning More through Ungrading in World Languages, Cultures and Literatures” organized by the University of Southern California and shared her pedagogical exploration of collaborative grading, focusing on “Peer Evaluation of Student Presentations” on January 26.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed as a member of the Redfish Piano Trio at three Oregon venues (Port Orford, North Bend and Bandon) and at the Cultural Center of Crescent City, California, in early January. They presented works of Joseph Haydn, Joaquin Turina, Jennifer Higdon and Ludwig van Beethoven. These concerts are part of the off-season events of the Redfish Music Festival.

Miriam Merrill, professor of physical education, guest lectured at Hartwick College on January 5. Merrill's session discussed the impact of emotional intelligence on leadership.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Matrice nature: Repenser la crise d’un point de vue écoféministe et subsaharien avec Léonora Miano” in the panel Représentations francophones de la crise écologique organized by the International Council of Francophone Studies at the MLA 2024 Convention in Philadelphia.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, has a large mural about the history of the Tongva People exhibited at the Autry Museum beginning in January.

Carolyn Ratteray, associate professor of theatre, performed her one woman show, Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black), at the Wallis Center for Performing Arts from January 13-28.

Monique Saigal Escudero, emerita professor of French, was awarded a proclamation presentation by Pomona Unified School District on January 17.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had her Claremont-based photograph and poem “What is Sovereignty for the Hindu Today?” appear in this most recent Places Journal, a journal focused on public scholarship on architecture, landscape and urbanism.

Sharma’s “Ode to Badminton” appeared on The Slowdown podcast on January 16.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published a research paper, “Undoing mothers’ avoidant coping with children’s negative emotion: A randomized controlled trial of relational savoring” in Journal of Family Psychology in January. The work is a collaboration with colleagues and students in Claremont and at UC Irvine.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote five opinion pieces: “Let’s Dispose of Exploding Pie Charts” (MindMatters, January 2), “When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot” (MindMatters, January 8), “Computers still do not ‘understand’” (MindMatters, January 9), “Internet pollution—if you tell a lie long enough…” (MindMatters, January 15) and “Monetarist Madness” (MarketWatch, January 22).

Smith’s latest book The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha, co-authored with Margaret Smith, was published by Palgrave Macmillan on January 13. “Gary and Margaret have hit the ball out of the park. Both amateur and professional investors would be well-rewarded by reading and re-reading The Power of Modern Value Investing” (Brian Nelson, President, Valuentum Securities); “A book about investing that every investor should read” (Ed Yardeni, President & Chief Investment Strategist, Yardeni Research, Inc.).

Sharon Stranford, professor of biology and faculty co-director for the Institute for Inclusive Excellence (IIE), and Malcolm Oliver II, assistant director for academic affairs and interim assistant director for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, presented at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Annual Conference in Washington, DC (January 17-19). In their presentation they spoke about IIE programming, which emphasizes inclusive teaching, building community and sustained engagement. In particular, they highlighted the New Faculty Cohort (NFC) Program, DEI Faculty Cohorts and the new DEI Faculty Project Pairs Program.

Stef Torralba, visiting assistant professor of English, accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor of English and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Grinnell College to begin fall 2024.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, was elected to the board of directors of Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) USA on January 4. His three-year term will commence this May, during which he will serve as the sole CLTA board member representing a liberal arts college.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, gave a talk January 7 titled “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” to a group of alumni in San Francisco. It was the 21st alumni talk he has given since he arrived at the College in 1983.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, was featured in performances played on the radio show “In the Halls of Thornton,” produced by Classical California in partnership with KDFC San Francisco and aired on KUSC Los Angeles (91.5 FM) on December 3. The program excerpted viola da gamba suites by Marin Marais that Bandy self-recorded, edited and produced, as well as live performances of the USC Collegium Musicum in which Bandy played the vielle (medieval fiddle).

The television series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, with musical themes by Bear McCreary and musical score by Sparks & Shadows, premiered on Disney+ on December 19 and features Bandy as a yayli tanbur soloist as the theme for the “Lord of the Dead” in episodes 2, 3 and 7. On December 22, 20th Century Studios released the official soundtrack, also featuring Bandy’s solos, on all major streaming platforms.

On December 21, Bandy played baroque double bass in a period-instrument performance of Handel’s Messiah, a joint venture between the Long Beach Camerata Singers and Tesserae Baroque Ensemble, performed at the Beverly O’Neill Theater in Long Beach and directed by James K. Bass.

Tatiana Basáñez, visiting assistant professor of psychological science, had six research posters accepted for presentation.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, served as moderator at a December 5 closed-door event on the future of U.S. policy toward China sponsored by the UCLA International Institute and the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Los Angeles.

Boduszyński published an article titled “Can There Ever be Transitional Justice in Iraq” in the winter 2023-2024 edition of the Brown Journal of World Affairs.

Boduszyński participated as a lecturer on an American College of the Mediterranean/Institute of American Universities-organized January term on “Diplomacy and Human Rights” in Morocco and Spain. He will partner with ACM/IAU to lead the first Pomona College-sponsored Mayterm on Diplomacy and Human Rights in May and June 2024.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published two articles: “Queer Futurity and Conflicted Feeling(s) in the Poetry of Ariadna G. García” in Romance Quarterly and “Los árboles aquellos: Luis Cernuda en Mount Holyoke College” in Muy Verbum.

Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, gave a talk titled “Toward Critical Climate Histories of Eurasia” at the conference “Between the Black Sea and the Bering Strait: Environmental Histories across a Subcontinent” held at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Columbia University from December 8-9.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Methodological Individualism in Behavioral Economics” in The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism on December 27.

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis, as part of the Latinx Geographies Collective, co-authored a publication with Madelaine Cristina Cahuas, Cristina Faiver-Serna, Yolanda González Mendoza, Diego Martinez-Lugo and Margaret Marietta Ramírez. The paper in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies is titled “Latinx Geographies: Opening Conversations.”

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, was invited to give a workshop titled “Conducting Quantitative Analysis of Chinese Construction Grammar Using R” to graduate students at Tianjin Normal University in December.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a talk titled “Political Science” to Japanese students from Wakayama, Japan, through the Stanford/e-Wakayama program.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, performed with Pangea Playback Theatre under the direction of Hannah K. Fox at The International Playback Theatre Network Conference: Roots and Routes of Playback Theatre in Muldersdrift, South Africa. Pangea was sponsored by Dailey Innovations, Inc. and Howard University through their Playback Theatre Artists & Students Cultural Exchange program.

Richard McKirahan, professor of classics and philosophy, was chosen to be a member of the European Society for Ancient Philosophy and to attend its annual meeting.

McKirahan attended the opening ceremony of the “Stage of Ideas” project in the National Conservatory building of Athens. He was a member of the academic committee that discussed and approved the concepts that were implemented for the first installation and will continue to serve when plans are made for future installations. He also taught a three-hour long meeting of a course on Plato at the University of Athens.

McKirahan presented two papers at the University of Venice, one on the Sophists and one on Aristotle. The Sophists paper will be a chapter in a forthcoming book of his in the Ancient Philosophies series published by Routledge, and the Aristotle paper will be published in a collection of works on concepts in ancient philosophy which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

McKirahan participated in a Ph.D. examination at the University of Geneva.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, had an article on “The Abolition of Democracy” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Religion, Culture, and Democracy, as part of a special issue on the work of C.S. Lewis.

McWilliams wrote a book chapter titled “Up in the Air: Flying the Faithless Skies” that appeared in Faith and Film: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe, edited by Micah Watson and Carson Holloway and published by Lexington Books.

McWilliams’ book chapter on “James Ellroy's California” appeared in Dark Places: Crime and Politics in the Personal Noir of James Ellroy, edited by Joseph Romance and Darrell A. Hamlin and published by Lexington Books.

Nivia Montenegro, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, published a detailed article about the exploitation of gay dissident Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, “EXPEDIENTE | Reinaldo Arenas, Emmanuel Carballo y ‘El mundo alucinante’ (documentos y correspondencia) (1968-1981)” in Rialta, the premier digital journal of literary and cultural criticism in Spanish. This article, with accompanying archive of 29 documents, is the result of one year's worth of onsite research at both the Firestone Library of Princeton University and the Nettie Lee Benson Library of University of Texas, Austin. It documents the travails of Arenas with both Cuban government publishing bureaucrats and Mexican editor Carballo of publishing the first edition of El mundo alucinante, one of the most important novels of the so-called Latin American post-boom.

Thomas A. Moore, professor of physics, had a textbook, A Standard Model Workbook, published by University Science Books in December. This 591-page textbook introduces upper-level undergraduates to the Standard Model of particle physics, the accepted theoretical description of fundamental physics at the microscopic level (a subject many physicists see first only in graduate school).

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Gas morphology of Milky Way-like galaxies in the TNG50 simulation: signals of twisting and stretching” in the Astrophysical Journal.

On December 11, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “Cosmological simulations: JWST controversies and future ELT opportunities” at the ELT Science in Light of JWST conference at UCLA. Moreno was one of two theorists invited to make the case to the National Science Foundation and private donors on behalf of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program.

On December 5, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the 60 Years of the Sersic Law Conference in Córdoba, Argentina. Moreno also participated in a panel discussion aimed at seeking funding for astronomers in the Global South.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published the article “Queering Gay Tourism as Activism: Guy Hocquenghem’s Political Journey in the United States” in the special issue Queering the City of the academic journal Transatlantica.

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, associate professor of English, published “The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics” in Publications of the Modern Language Association.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, participated in the roundtable “Decolonizing Melodrama in Russia: Gender and Ethnicity” at the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Annual Convention in Philadelphia from November 30-December 2. Rudova also served as a formal discussant on the panel “Russian YouTube is on Fire: Dissent, Dialogue, and Division” at the same convention.

Erin Runions, Nancy J. Lyon Professor of Biblical History and Literature, published “Losing Ground: From Anti-Gang Apocalypticism to Social Dis/Repair” in Lee Edelman and the Study of Religion, edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill and Linn Tonstad and published by Routledge.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “The Dodgers are Getting Shohei Ohtani for a Steal” (MarketWatch, December 12), “New Ideas are Out There—We just need to look for them” (Fast Company, December 15) and “Large Language Models are Still Smoke and Mirrors” (MindMatters, December 15).

Smith was invited to return to the invitation-only Sci Foo Camp, which will be held for the first time in Cambridge, UK, instead of Palo Alto.

Kyle Wilson, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Investment, Subsidies, and Universal Service: Broadband Internet in the United States” in the Review of Network Economics on December 7.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, was invited by the Film and Media Department at UC Berkeley to participate in a colloquium honoring the work of Linda Williams and her pathbreaking book in the field of porn studies, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Wynter delivered a talk titled “When the Man Looks,” which examined the emergence of virtual pornography and interactive sex simulators in the 1990s.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was interviewed about the “Japanese turn” in fine dining in the U.S. and related developments in the contemporary restaurant world for Minxin Pei’s Asian Experts Forum.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored four poster presentations at the 64th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, which was held November 16-19 in San Francisco. Three Pomona cognitive science majors who are research assistants in Abram’s PRIME (Psycholinguistic Research in Memory) laboratory were the primary presenters of their posters: Emma Constable ’26: “A face without a name: How COVID-19 and facial characteristics affect name retrieval”; Aysha Gsibat ’24 and Majo Najas ’24: “Hands in Motion: The Role of Gestures and Self-Adaptors in Emotional Storytelling”; and her two other posters were titled “Laughter is the Best Medicine: The Relationships between Humor, Anxiety, and Working Memory” and “The Communicative Function of Gestures During Emotional Storytelling,” and these were collaborations with colleagues at the University of Florida and Rhodes College, respectively.

Seth Allen, vice president for strategy and dean of admissions and financial aid, served as a panelist for “Admissions Essays in the Age of AI” at the Council of International Schools Global Forum in Dublin on November 17.

Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, delivered a keynote address titled “In Defense of Sartre’s ‘Woman on a Date’: Erotic Ambivalence and Bad Faith” at the conference on Love and Sexuality at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen on November 13. She also gave a talk at Freie Universität, Berlin, on November 1 as part of the Practical Philosophy Colloquium series.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave a Faculty Lecture to the Pomona community titled “Activating Excellence Through Chemistry.” In this talk, Ball highlighted how his personal and family history has enabled him to facilitate a training ground that leverages students’ strengths and cultivates their identity as scientists.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at Cal Poly Pomona.

Ball received the Downing/Pomona Faculty Exchange Fellowship at Cambridge University, UK. At Cambridge, Ball will work with Matthew Gaunt to understand high-throughput reaction development.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played Baroque double bass in Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble’s program “Bach in Leipzig: 1723–2023,” directed by Preethi de Silva. The performance, held on November 4 at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California, and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Consulate General of Germany, marked the 300th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s appointment as Cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig and featured works by Bach, Telemann and Graupner.

Bandy facilitated, participated in and provided coaching for two Viola de Gamba Society of America events serving the local and national viola da gamba scholarly community: a play-in hosted by musicologists Lindsey Macchiarella (University of Texas at El Paso) and Zoe Weiss (University of Denver) held on November 10 at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (Denver, Colorado) and a day-long workshop with Lisa Terry (Parthenia Consort of Viols, New York) on November 18 (South Pasadena, California) and sponsored by SoCal Viols.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, delivered a lecture in Chinese on the topic “Wild Grass or Weeds? Remarks on Matt Turner’s Translation of Lu Xun’s Yecao” at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou on November 8, Hangzhou Normal University on November 10 and Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua on November 13. He also gave a talk at Yulin Normal University in Yulin, Guangxi, on the translation of Chinese literature in the United States on November 25.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1749-1789), 4th Bart., as a collector of Handel's music” at the Thirteenth Handel Institute Conference held November 17-19 in London.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was the main guest on the Polish CNN-equivalent news channel Polsat’s daily interview show “Gość Wydarzeń” on November 2 where he offered context and insights on U.S. foreign policy challenges including the Israel-Gaza and Ukraine wars.

Ralph Bolton ’61, professor emeritus of anthropology, co-authored a publication with Daniel E. Torres, Ines Contreras, Daphne Braden, Leah Dembinski and Maren Vouga. The last three were students at Bates College when they participated in the Pomona College Study Abroad Program in Peru in 1973. The paper, in the Revista Peruana de Antropología, is titled “La antropologia aplicada en Puno – El Proyecto Taraco-Chijnaya (1963): Una entrevista con el Ing. Hugo Contreras Quevedo” (“Applied Anthropology in Peru - The Taraco-Chijnaya Project (1963): An Interview with Engineer Hugo Contreras Quevedo”).

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Tracing Temperature in Ana Merino’s Curación (2010)” at the fall meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), held at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles on November 4.

Gabe Chandler, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, published “Data Gap: Air Quality Networks Miss Air Pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (with Alyssa Burns, Kira Dunham and Ann Marie Carlton) in Environmental Science and Technology. The article was highlighted as the ACS (American Chemical Society) Editors’ Choice on November 30.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a paper titled “Unmaking a mausoleum: Resignification and the material remains of Spain’s authoritarian past” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto on November 18.

Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, was an invited speaker at the Harvard University Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop on November 28. She and Peggy Levitt gave a talk on their recently published book Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders (Oxford University Press).

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, co-edited the special issue and wrote the introduction for the 2021 conference of the International Network of Economic Method (INEM).

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis, served as a panelist for “GIS in Education: A Tool to Increase Social Justice,” as part of the GIS Day Bridges to the Future conference held at Cal Poly Pomona on November 15.

Kouross Esmaeli, visiting assistant professor of media studies, who was a founding board member of AMEJA, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, rejoined the association in the past month to help work on the various projects related to the war in Palestine/Israel. These include AMEJA’s Statement of the Treatment of Journalists Covering the War in Palestine and Israel and the ongoing work with the Committee to Protect Journalists to document the killing of (so far 57) journalists in the region.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, with colleagues from Northwest University (Xi’an) published the article “Thermal history of Burgess Shale-type deposits: new insights from the early Cambrian Chengjiang and Qingjiang biotas of South China” in the Journal of Earth Sciences.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published the book chapter “Model Spaces” in the edited volume Lectures on Analytic Function Spaces and their Applications.

Garcia gave a talk, “What can chicken nuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the CSU Fullerton Mathematics Colloquium on November 17 and at the Claremont Colleges Algebra / Number Theory / Combinatorics Seminar on November 28.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, delivered three presentations at two virtual national conferences. On November 2, at the fall meeting of the National Organization for Research Development Professionals (NORDP), he presented “The Landscape of Research Development at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs): Results from a Pilot Study” with coauthor Jennifer Glass (UMassD), based on a 2021 survey of 87 PUIs. At the 2023 Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) conference on November 8 and 9, he presented the “CLASP 2023 Grants Review” with Krista Campbell (Hamilton), analyzing a new database of 1800 external grants received during FY22-23 by CLASP member institutions; and “Research Development and Sponsored Programs at LACs and other PUIs,” a panel overview of research support contexts and challenges, with Susan Ferrari (Grinnell) and Amy Cuhel-Schuckers (TCNJ).

On November 7, with Pomona staff members Ha Phan and Andy Schuster, Gerstein gave a workshop on post-award grants administration to visiting staff from the Atlanta University Consortium Data Science Initiative, led by Talitha Washington (Clark Atlanta.)

Gerstein was selected to join NORDP Consultants, a collective delivering research infrastructure assistance to minority serving institutions. This initiative is funded by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to Kimberly Eck (Emory). Gerstein also began membership in the CLASP List Advisory Group, where he joins Claremont McKenna College’s Beth Jager.

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and her research students presented two posters at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington DC from November 10-13. Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25 presented “The AWC neuron is required for attraction to 1-butanol in Caenorhabditis elegans.” Jeremy Callaway ’24, Taryn Kaneko ’24 and Catie Kaneshiro ’24 presented “Modeling a rare genetic disease in Caenorhabditis elegans.”

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a colloquium talk at the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Irvine on November 30. The talk was titled “Quasi-Critical Points of Toroidal Belyi Maps.”

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, published the chapter “The Right to a Complete Life: Struggles of the Dominican Feminist Movement” in the edited volume Women’s Rights in Movement: Dynamics of Feminist Change in Latin America and the Caribbean (Springer, editors Inés M. Pousadela and Simone R. Bohn) in November.

Hernández-Medina chaired the session “La crisis identitaria en República Dominicana y sus consecuencias sociopolíticas en la actualidad” (“Identity Crisis in the Dominican Republic and its Socio-political Consequences Today”) with Ruth Pión, co-founder of Junta de Prietas, the most important decolonial feminist collective in the Dominican Republic. The session took place virtually on November 18 at the conference LASA / Africa 2023: Africa and Latin America: Dialogues and Connections.

On November 28, Hernández-Medina was one of the keynote speakers at the XII Gender Studies Conference convened by the Gender Studies Center at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC) in the Dominican Republic. She presented virtually on “El Derecho a una Vida Completa: La Lucha del Movimiento Feminista Dominicano” (“The Right to a Complete Life: Struggles of the Dominican Feminist Movement”) based on the book chapter mentioned above.

Jeff Hing, assistant director for communications multimedia, and Eric Melgosa, director of creative content, collaborated on a Pomona College Magazine cover that was selected by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for the 2022-23 Best of District VII, which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. The cover of the 2022 spring issue featured Hing’s photograph of Ron Nemo, Pomona’s longtime manager of grounds and landscaping, holding coast live oak acorns in the wake of the 2022 storm that felled numerous old campus trees. In addition, Melgosa and editor Robyn Norwood led an Office of Communications effort that was recognized among the Best of District VII for alumni/general interest magazines printed twice a year by a four-year college or university (PCM typically publishes three times a year but printed two issues in 2022). The magazine earlier received a 2023 CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award in the category of writing/profile (less than 1,000 words) for the comic “Our Bird’s Beginnings,” which also earned district honors.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, published a joint book review of Proving It Her Way: Emmy Noether, a Life in Mathematics, by David E. Rowe and Mechthild Koreuber, and Emmy Noether: Mathematician Extraordinaire, by David E. Rowe, in the newsletter of Association for Women in Mathematics.

Karaali gave the 23rd Annual Kenneth C. Schraut Memorial Lecture on November 4 during the Undergraduate Mathematics Day 2023 at the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio. Her talk was titled “Languages, Alphabets, and Group Theory.”

Karaali ran a session titled “Developing a Social Justice STEM Curriculum: The First Steps” on November 3 at the 2023 American Association of Colleges and Universities Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference in Virginia. She also facilitated a workshop, together with Ileana Vasu of Holyoke Community College, Geillan Aly of Compassionate Math, and Jonas D’Andrea of Westminster University titled “Equity in the Moment” that same day.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, participated in the California Islands Symposium in Ventura, California. She was moderator of the session on education and presented the paper “Sowing Seeds of Futures in Conservation Through Participation in Restoration Work on Anacapa Island.” In this study Karnovsky evaluated the legacy of a field trip in the lives of students in her advanced animal ecology classes from 2017 and 2021.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, organized a panel presentation titled “A usage-based constructionist approach to CSL acquisition and pedagogy” at the 2023 ACTFL Annual Convention in November. Lang delivered a talk titled “Beyond the textbook: Corpus-informed pedagogy across proficiency levels.” Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, also contributed to the panel by delivering a presentation.

Lang’s co-authored article, titled “Gendered social address in China’s convergence culture: The case of mĕinǚ (beautiful woman),” was published in the latest special issue on storytelling and counter-storytelling in China Information.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, and Aron Kallay, lecturer in music, are featured on the album “Flotsam and Jetsam” that dropped November 3 on Microfest Records. They present the premiere recording of Kurt Rohde’s Altromondo at one piano and play melodicas, harmonicas, triangle, Chinese paper accordions and antique cymbals.

Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, co-curated and organized a sound works installation and performance, “Transmissions/ Transitions,” at the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meeting in Toronto from November 15-19. She exhibited her radio documentary “Cumbia on Broadway: Mexican Popular Music Industry in Los Angeles” and deejayed the post-installation reception which also featured performances by Farzaneh Hemmasi, Jay Hammond, Stefan Helmreich, Carmen Jarrín, David Novak, and the Sound Braid Collective. Lippman participated in a roundtable, “Chatting About Chat GPT,” at the AAA’s annual meeting where she spoke about the surprising uses of paper generator software in the 1990s and 2000s and the need to historicize Chat GPT and AI more broadly.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, published a paper titled “Corrective Experiences to Enhance Trust: Clinical Wisdom from Good (Enough) Psychiatric Management” in Journal of Personality Disorders. Co-authors included Dr. Lois Choi-Kain of Harvard Medical School (first author) and Dr. Ellen Finch of Harvard University.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, delivered the 2023 Vik-Bailey Lecture in American Politics at Harvard University on November 9. The title of her lecture was “A Tale of Two Liberalisms: Desegregating American Political Thought.” Earlier in the month, McWilliams delivered this lecture at Mercer University's McDonald Center for America's Founding Principles, where she also led a seminar on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

On November 15, McWilliams gave a talk titled “Party at Kesey's: The Merry Pranksters, The Hells Angels, and the Degeneration of American Politics” as part of the Special Collections Research Fellows Speaker Series at the University of Oregon.

On November 28, McWilliams led a seminar on Chita Banerjee Divakaruni’s “The Word Love” at Claremont McKenna College.

McWilliams chaired a panel at the annual meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association. The panel was held in celebration of the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of The Idea of Fraternity in America, which was written by her father, Wilson Carey McWilliams. McWilliams wrote the introduction to the book’s new edition.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Starburst driven by central gas compaction” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Moreno also published an article titled “Modeling the orbital histories of satellites of Milky Way-mass galaxies: testing static host potentials against cosmological simulations” in the same journal.

Zvezdana Ostojic, visiting assistant professor of French, presented a paper titled “Passages de l’auteur: Victor Hugo et la (pi)œuvre destructrice” at the 48th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference in Baltimore on November 10.

Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published an article titled “Akan morphological 'reversal' in historical context” in The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press,editors Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C.L. Yu).

Lina Patel, lecturer in theatre, received a workshop of her new play Sick Girl or, Don’t Hate Me ’Cuz I’m Pretty at Ammunition Theater on November 4. Her short play Karma opened at The Echo in Atwater Village on November 30.

William Peterson, professor emeritus of music and College organist, is a co-author of a book, Political Dreams and Musical Themes in the 1848-1922 Formation of Czechoslovakia: Interaction of National and Global Forces, by James W. Peterson and William J. Peterson, published by Lexington Books.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, currently has large artwork on prominent display at MoMA New York City.

Frances Pohl, professor emerita of art history, published the fifth edition of her textbook Framing America: A Social History of American Art. This edition has been thoroughly revised and contains a greater percentage of color plates than earlier editions.

Meranda Roberts (citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe), visiting professor of art history and guest curator at the Benton Museum of Art, has been appointed to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum inaugural committee of scholars.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, gave three community talks on redistricting and good governance recommendations for the Los Angeles City Council related to her work with the LA Governance Reform Project. These include a panel discussion at the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, a presentation at Mt. San Antonio Gardens, and a conversation with City Council President Paul Krekorian for the LA Business Council.

Sadhwani provided commentary to ABC News and USA Today on the prevalence of Indian American candidates running for president and to The Guardian and The Sacramento Bee on the impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict on the California Senate race.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, published the article “Remembering the Cotton Screwmen: Inter-racial Waterfront Labor and the Development of Sailors’ Chanties” in the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, was featured on the cover and had five poems in the November/December issue of American Poetry Review.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote four opinion pieces: “A Modest Proposal to save MLB” (MindMatters, November 6), “LLMs are Still Faux Intelligence” (MindMatters, November 8), “Computers May Know ‘How’ But They Still Don’t Know ‘Why’” (MindMatters, November 10) and “Here’s what really matters when you buy stocks, real estate and other investments” (Marketwatch, November 28).

Smith’s book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, was the lead review in “New and Noteworthy Titles on our Bookshelf” in Notices of the American Mathematical Society: “Through the lenses of disinformation, data torturing, and data mining, this book leads the reader through a history of instances where the public doubts the facts….Distrust is filled to the brim with examples of those who reject scientific evidence.”

Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology, organized the 2023 Southwestern Organismal Biology conference held at Harvey Mudd College on November 4. Participants represented over 25 colleges and universities from the southwestern region of the United States.

Kyle Wilson, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Local Competition, Multimarket Contact, and Product Quality: Evidence From Internet Service Provision” in the Review of Industrial Organization on November 17.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered a presentation titled “N-gram for Chinese Teaching” at the 2023 conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The presentation utilized Chinese as an example to illustrate the creation of a systematic, data-driven foreign language pedagogy based on N-gram language models.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, published “Understanding World War II Japan, 1940–1945” in the fall 2023 issue of Education About Asia. Based on his three decades of research on this topic, this article offers what the editors of this journal describe as “an accessible and fascinating article for instructors and students that draws heavily on a wide range of sources including government propaganda efforts and diaries of Japanese civilians.”

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a poster presentation at the 64th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, along with Sarah Wang ’23 and Feiya Suo, a past Pomona College language resident. The poster, titled “Brewing bilingualism: Inducing bilingual language regulation changes via sound immersion during reading,” was an extension of Wang’s senior thesis and Suo’s independent study project in the Cognitive Science program, both aimed at understanding the effects of naturalistic language immersion on Mandarin reading in Southern California.

Jack Abecassis, Edwin Sexton & Edna Patrick Smith Modern European Languages Professor, delivered a plenary lecture, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ‘croire’ pour Montaigne?” (What does belief mean to Montaigne?) at the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, Lectures, Méthodes, Inteprétations Colloquium organized by the Atelier Montaigne, La Société des Amis de Montaigne, and Le Centre Montaigne, University of Bordeaux, France, from October 11-12.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, served on the faculty at Viol Sphere 2, the 24th annual workshop sponsored by the Viola da Gamba Society of Southern Arizona (chapter, VdGSA) and held October 12-16 at the Biosphere 2 conference center in Oracle, Arizona. Bandy co-programmed and performed in a faculty recital and taught 11 classes on repertoire by Byrd, Weelkes, Ward, Gibbons, Coprario, Handl (Gallus) and more, in collaboration with faculty from across the U.S., including members of Parthenia Viol Consort, the Newberry Consort, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Quicksilver and the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra.

After co-organizing a day-long local workshop for SoCal Viols (South Pasadena, California) on October 21, as a founder and artistic director of the ensemble Artifex Consort, Bandy programmed, supplied program notes, and played viola da gamba in a concert of highly specialized French Baroque repertoire by Marin Marais and Louis Couperin, presented on October 22 in Pomona College’s Bridges Hall of Music and featuring violists da gamba Eva Lymenstull and Eric Tinkerhess and harpsichordist Ian Pritchard.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was an invited speaker at the October 3-4 Warsaw Security Forum, where he appeared on a panel to discuss accountability in Ukraine alongside Austrian Federal Minister of Justice Alma Zadić.

The Polish news magazine Dziennik Gazeta Prawna (roughly equivalent to the New York Times Magazine in the U.S.) published a long-form interview with Boduszyński about current U.S. foreign policy challenges, including Ukraine and Israel/Gaza.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, guest lectured at the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Visual Arts (IVA) department on the topic of risk and discomfort October 10.

Champi performed in a reconstruction of Speaking Ill of the Dead (2006), choreographed by Robert Moses, and Possession (1994), choreographed by Doug Varone, at Meany Center for the Performing Arts in Seattle from October 12-15.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures and faculty director of Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations, delivered a paper, “Human, Animal, Cannibal:  Radical Hope in an Age of Destruction,” on the fiction of Lu Xun and Zhang Ailing at the annual Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association meeting. She participated in workshops on how to make the humanities and the teaching and learning of languages relevant in the age of ChatGPT.

Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, was named the 2023 recipient of Pomona College’s Faculty Alumni Service Award. Announced this year at the new faculty dinner hosted by the Office of Alumni and Family Engagement, this award honors faculty “in recognition of their exemplary service to the alumni association over a period of years.”

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a virtual talk titled “Domestic Spanish handbooks: Language and Labor in the American home” at the University of Bern (Switzerland) on October 16.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, published “D’une carte postale contant fleurette” in the latest issue of the journal Histoires littéraires for which a postcard from her collection was chosen as the cover image.

Joanna L. Dyl, visiting assistant professor of environmental analysis, presented a paper titled “Power, Water, Sand: Conflicts and Contradictions at California’s Coastal Power Plants” at the Western History Association Annual Conference on October 26 in Los Angeles.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, published the article “The lower Cambrian Cranbrook Lagerstätte of British Columbia” in the Journal of the Geological Society (London).

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was appointed to the editorial board of the journal Complex Analysis and Operator Theory. He was also re-appointed to the human resources board of the American Institute of Mathematics, which is based at Caltech.

Garcia published the paper “The error term in the truncated Perron formula for the logarithm of an L-function” (with Jeffrey Lagarias and Ethan Simpson Lee) in the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin. He also published the editorial “A Word From…” in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, visited the University of South Carolina to give the James L. Solomon Lecture on October 16. This annual series honors James L. Solomon Jr., one of the first three Black students to integrate the university in 1963 and the first African American student in the graduate program in mathematics. Goins gave a public address titled “Growing MADDER: Building the ‘Mathematicians of the African Diaspora Database's Ensemble of Researchers.’” Earlier that day, Goins gave a talk in the USC Mathematics Department Discrete Math and Combinatorics Seminar titled “Monodromy Groups of Belyi Lattes Maps.” The student newspaper The Daily Gamecock covered Goins’ lecture.

On October 21-22, Goins hosted a workshop at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), a research institute at UCLA. PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory was a two-day intensive program which showcased number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of the program was to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory to the beauty of the subject. There were 20 students and faculty in attendance, including Posse scholar Lawrence Stampino-Strain ’26.

On October 27, Goins visited California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt to give the 80th Kieval Lecture. The Kieval lecture series includes topics on popular and/or broad aspects of mathematics attractive to undergraduates and the public. Goins gave a public address titled “Distance Makes the Math Grow Deeper: Rational Distance Sets, Nate Dean, and Me.” Earlier that day, Goins gave a colloquium talk at Cal Poly Humboldt on “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy.”

George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, gave a paper on “Genoa in Triumph: Transformation of a Medieval to Renaissance City” at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Baltimore on October 29.  Baltimore is “sister city” to Genoa, and this paper ended with comparison of these port cities and transformations of their harbor fronts during the 1980s and ’90s.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a virtual keynote address titled “İnsancıl Matematik Eğitimi’ (Teaching Mathematics Humanistically, in Turkish) at the 6th International Symposium of Turkish Computer and Mathematics Education held in Ankara, Turkey, from October 28-30.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English, had his 13th novel Brooklyn Crime Novel published by ECCO on October 3, and it was widely reviewed in the national press.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, led a seminar for the political science department at Williams College on October 25. The class focused on her book The American Road Trip and American Political Thought as well as broader issues relating to interpretive and theoretical methods in political science.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Disk settling and dynamical heating: histories of Milky Way-mass stellar disks across cosmic time in the FIRE simulations” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno delivered colloquia titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the University of California, San Diego, the Flatiron Institute, the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University.

On October 28, Moreno facilitated a three-hour faculty workshop on collective pedagogy and mentoring at Santa Barbara City College.

Joanne Randa Nucho, associate professor of anthropology, gave a keynote lecture titled “After the Grid: Electricity, Fragmentation, and Renewable Energy in Lebanon in the post 2019 era” (co-authored with Danielle Fheili) at the conference Economic Change and the Future of the Middle East at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Adam Pearson, associate professor and chair of psychological science, gave a keynote address titled “Bias as a barrier to climate justice: Intersecting challenges and opportunities for psychology” at the annual meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in Madison, Wisconsin.

Pearson and Corinne Tsai ’20 were named recipients of the 2023 Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (Division 9 of the American Psychological Association), awarded annually for the best paper or article of the year on intercultural or international relations, for their article “Building Diverse Climate Coalitions: The Pitfalls and Promise of Equity and Identity-Based Messaging.”

Pearson and Tsai were invited to present research on how to communicate effectively about climate change inequities to the Sustainable States Network, a network of regional and state government officials representing 65 million U.S. residents and 2,500 municipalities in 14 U.S. states overseeing local and state climate mitigation and resilience programs.

Kathy E. Quispe, assistant director of international student & scholar services, co-presented a session titled “Orientation 101: Creating an Orientation that Caters to Your Community” at the 2023 NAFSA Region XII Conference in Honolulu on October 18. She covered planning, content, activities and support needed to create a positive orientation experience for international students using the model she has developed at Pomona College.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review of Stéphane Maffli’s Migrationsliteratur aus der Schweiz. Beat Sterchi, Franco Supino, Aglaja Veteranyi, Melinda Nadj Abonji und Ilma Rakusa in Monatshefte.

Rindisbacher gave a paper on the Black American author Vincent O. Carter, who lived in Bern, Switzerland (Rindisbacher’s hometown), for 30 years of his life, titled “Negotiating Whiteness in a Frame Narration: Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book” at the 2023 PAMLA Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon, from October 26-29.

Hector Sambolin, Jr., associate dean for academic affairs, academic success and assessment in Pomona College’s Institute for Inclusive Excellence (IIE), and Sara Hollar, director of the 7C Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), cohosted and moderated a workshop titled “Inclusive Teaching Faculty Panel: How Do We Know It's Working?” In the panel discussion, faculty members from the Claremont Colleges shared assessment projects they’ve carried out. The event marked the beginning of a series of workshops by the CTL and IIE that will begin in Spring 2024, focusing on the art of authentically assessing one’s own teaching.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, collaborated with Revell Carr (University of Kentucky) to present a lecture-demonstration titled “Sea Chantey Myths and Misconceptions in the Wake of #ShantyTok” at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Ottawa, Canada.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, gave a paper, “Dance in Immigrant and Ethnic Communities in the United States,” on Zoom for the Greek Anthropology Society’s conference on Dance in the Diaspora on October 20 at the University of Ioannina.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote two opinion pieces: “Blue Zone BS: The Longevity Cluster Myth” (MindMatters, October 23) and “The MLB Coin-Flipping Contest” (MindMatters, October 27).

Smith’s book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science was reviewed by Jonathan Cowie for Concatenation (“It is whole-heartedly recommended for scientists who work analysing large data sets”) and Keith Raymond Harris for MetaScience (“vivid, important, and often amusing real-world examples…of several inter-related threats to the credibility of science”).

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, organized and hosted two speaker series for Introduction to Sociology and Qualitative Research Methods. The series for Qualitative Research Methods featured Isabel García Valdivia ’14, postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, on the experiences of illegality in late adulthood.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, published the review article “A Portrait of an Eighteenth-Century Explorer and Revolutionary: Georg Forster: German Cosmopolitan, by Todd Curtis Kontje” in The European Legacy.

Von Schwerin-High presented a talk at the 120th Annual PAMLA Conference (Portland, Oregon) titled “Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp’s translation of Ijoma Mangold’s literary memoir The German Crocodile” on October 27.

Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology, published the article “Effects of reproductive status on behavioral and neural responses to isolated pup stimuli in female California mice” in Behavioural Brain Research.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was quoted in “How L.A. Became Hub for Omakase, Bite by Bite,” which appeared on the NBC News website.

Yamashita delivered “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1860–2020” in the Claremont Discourse Lecture Series to a standing-room-only crowd in the Founders Room in Honnold Library on October 26. The lecture argued that the Japanese culinary influence on fine dining in the United States between 1980 and 2020 was comparable to the Japanese influence in the art and architecture worlds in Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, presented her research paper virtually at the conference Affective Intermediality: Cinema between Media, Sensation and Reality held in Europe. Her co-authored paper discusses contemporary Chinese cinema and cross-cultural communication in the 1980s.

Jack Abecassis, Edwin Sexton & Edna Patrick Smith Modern European Languages Professor, delivered a plenary talk, “Dr. Hesiod, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Perses-the-bomb,” at the “’Eclogues of Desire’: Cultural Myths of the Golden Age” conference at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.

Konrad Aguilar, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, is the recipient of a two-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for $189,661 to research “Noncommutative Geometry and Topology of Quantum Metrics” and support undergraduate research in mathematics. The start date of the award (number 2316892) was September 1.

Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, participated in an exhibition at the University of La Verne’s Harris Gallery. Curated by Martin Durazo, the exhibition dEE-lie-LA, Poderosa, The Healers: An Exploration of Wellness is part of the seventh SUR:biennial and will be on view from September 5 until October 12.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, presented a paper, “From La Chine en Dix Mots to China in Ten Words: ‘Trextuality’ in a contemporary Chinese classic,” at the conference “Trextuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Translated and Multilingual Texts” from September 7-9 at University of Turku, Finland.

Barr gave an invited talk, “Translating from Chinese: Challenges and Rewards,” at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, on September 26.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, performed as harpsichordist with his Cornucopian Baroque Ensemble colleagues—violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music; bassoonist Carolyn Beck, lecturer in music; theorbist Jason Yoshida, lecturer in music; Sherrill Herring, music department general manager of music facilities; oboist Aki Nishiguchi; and cellist Roger Lebow—in a concert of music by Boismortier, Geminiani and Telemann on September 24 in Bridges Hall of Music.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, participated in a workshop titled “Disturbing Stereotypes and Single-Story Narratives: Expanding Inclusivity & Belonging in Global Programming” at Miami Dade College in Florida.

Boduszyński spoke at the European Union Center of California about his work as an appointee at the Pentagon during 2022-2023 in a lecture titled “The United States and the Struggle for Accountability in Ukraine.”

Ralph Bolton ’61, emeritus professor of anthropology, gave a public lecture on September 20 at the San Agustin National University in Arequipa, Peru, at the invitation of the Professional School of Anthropology. The lecture was titled “Remembranzas de Jorge A. Flores Ochoa: JAFO y yo, vidas paralelas, dos caminos en la etnografia andina” (Memories of Jorge A. Flores Ochoa: JAFO and me, parallel lives, two paths in Andean ethnography). The lecture was based on the lead article by Bolton in a book published by the Municipality of Cuzco, Peru, in 2022.

Bolton attended the 60th anniversary of the Centro Poblado de Chijnaya, the community he co-founded as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1963. On this occasion he received from the mayor of Chijnaya the “Medal of the City.” Bolton joined the six surviving founding pioneers (ranging in age from 90 to 106) to celebrate this important milestone in the life of this Quechua-speaking community on the Altiplano. He also visited the new headquarters in Pucara, Peru, of the applied anthropology organization that he co-founded, the Pro-DIA Association which works on development projects in 41 highland communities.

Anthony Clark, assistant professor of computer science, published an abstract, “Creating Dynamic Simulation Environments With Unreal Engine 5,” at the Southern California Robotics Symposium on September 14. The article included five student authors, Daisy Abbott ’25, Anjali Nuggehalli ’26, Francisco Morales Puente ’26, Chau Vu ’26 and Ella Zhu ’26.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a talk titled “Spain’s Valle de Cuelgamuros: The limits and possibilities of monumental resignification” at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid on September 8.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Opportunity, not Welfare: How Behavioral Insights Should Lead to a Reorientation of the Normative Foundation in Law and Economics“ in the Journal of Contextual Economics on September 12. The article was co-authored with Elias van Emmerick ’21.

Dold published the article “Endogenous preferences: a challenge to constitutional political economy’s normative foundation?” in Constitutional Political Economy on September 15.

Joanna L. Dyl, visiting assistant professor of environmental analysis, was a guest on the podcast American History Hit for an episode on the history of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a paper (with Visiting Assistant Professor Ángel Chávez and Jackson Hurley ’23), “Norms on complex matrices induced by random vectors.”

Garcia participated in a panel discussion on “Applying and Interviewing for Jobs in Academia” at the University of Arizona (virtual) on September 26.

Melissa Givens, assistant professor of music, is a member of the Grammy®-winning choral ensemble Conspirare, whose 15th major label recording was released by Delos Music on September 8. The House of Belonging features music by composers old and new, including the recorded premiere of Margaret Bonds’ “Joy” and the premiere of Alex Berko’s Sacred Place and Shara Nova’s “The House of Belonging.” Conspirare is joined on the album by the celebrated Mirò Quartet. It is available on all streaming platforms and everywhere music is sold.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, was part of the Women Union’s faculty panel about the movie “Barbie” on September 21 along with Assistant Professor of Media Studies Ryan Engley and Professor of Politics Amanda Hollis-Brusky. The conversation included dozens of 5C students, faculty and staff in a lively discussion on the cultural phenomenon associated with the movie as analyzed in the consortium’s The Student Life newspaper.

Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “Ex Vivo Drug Screening Assay with Artificial Membranes: Characterizing Cholesterol Desorbing Competencies of Beta-Cyclodextrins” in Langmuir. The paper was co-authored by Jacob Al-Husseini ’22, Chris Wang ’25, Ethan Fong ’25, Joseph Ha, Meenakshi Upreti and Peter Chiarelli.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, attended the 11th International Penguin Congress held September 4-9 in Viña del Mar, Chile. She presented the poster “The fish component of Adélie, Gentoo and Chinstrap penguin diets breeding on two islands in the South Shetland Archipelago.”

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, presented “Understanding Oxygen Isotopes in Cordilleran Batholiths: A 190 Million Year, Top-to-Bottom Perspective from the Sierra Nevada, USA” at the 10th Hutton Symposium on the Origin of Granites in Baveno, Italy, from September 10-16.

Lackey was elected to the management board of the Mineralogy, Petrology, Geochemistry and Volcanology division of the Geological Society of America. This is a four-year succession of appointments as second vice chair, first vice chair, chair and past chair of the MPGV board.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed in a chamber version of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 at Jacaranda Music series in Santa Monica on September 23. The 2023-24 Jacaranda Music season is titled Planet Schoenberg, celebrating the works and influence of Arnold Schoenberg on the musical world.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, moderated a post-show panel for Nursing These Wounds featuring the artist-activist children of Pilipinx nurses, Frances Sedayao, Jo Cruz (aka love/speak) and Joshua Icban, whose stories informed the performance at ODC Theater on Ramaytush/Ohlone land September 24.

Lu received an emerging Individual Artist Fellowship for Los Angeles County funded by the California Arts Council and administered by Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP) for her work with LA Playback Theatre Company.

Richard McKirahan, Edwin Clarence Norton Professor of Classics and professor of philosophy, attended a conference in Perugia, Italy, in honor of the 85th birthday of Livio Rossetti (emeritus professor at the University of Perugia). At Rossetti's request, McKirahan gave a half-hour presentation on Rosseti’s new book Ripensare I Presocratici (Re-thinking the Presocratics).

McKirahan attended a conference in Ascea, Italy, the 2023 meeting of the biennial conference “Eleatica” that celebrates the ancient philosophers associated with Elea, a city that is now an archaeological site located next door to the town of Ascea. Four years ago, he was the principal speaker at the conference and gave three lectures in Italian. His lectures were published this year in the volume Aristotle and the Eleatics, edited by M. Pulpito and B. Berruecos Frank, Academia Press. The book is a volume in the series Eleatica, and it contains the lectures plus comments by several scholars who were present at the conference and his replies to their comments.

McKirahan accepted invitations to give lectures in Venice and in Paris in the next few months.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was a featured Constitution Day panelist at the Claremont McKenna College Athenaeum on September 19; the panel was on the topic of “The Role of Citizens in the U.S. Constitution.”

On September 24, McWilliams was the featured guest on The Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast, a biweekly podcast dedicated to American history, historical thinking and the role of history in our everyday lives, hosted by historian John Fea.

McWilliams participated as a reader in the annual Moby Dick read-a-thon held at Herman Melville’s estate Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, spoke to NPR about the latest James Webb Space Telescope discoveries and controversies.

Moreno delivered a colloquium titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, was a guest speaker and workshop facilitator for the University Supervisor Institutes at California State University, Los Angeles on September 29. The Institutes are geared toward increasing the quality and opportunities for enacting social justice pedagogies in teacher education.

Frank Pericolosi, professor of physical education and head baseball coach, was elected as chair of the NCAA Division III National Baseball Committee for 2023-2024. This is his fourth term as the chair of the national committee.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, received the Emerging Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Civic Engagement Section. She was also the recipient of the Alan Rosenthal Prize from APSA’s Legislative Studies Section for her co-authored study “Social Lobbying,” recognizing work that can be applied to strengthening the practices of representative democracy.

Sadhwani provided commentary in a New York Times article for her efforts to develop governance reform recommendations for the city of Los Angeles. She also presented on a panel at a Harvard Law School convening of scholars and voting rights experts titled “Race, Reform, and Multiracial Democracy.”

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave the presentation “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” at Bonjour Books in Kensington, Maryland (September 3), Jackie Abrams Agency in Arlington, Virginia (September 7), Café de Virginie in Arlington, Virginia (September 8), Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C. (September 9 and 10), Women’s Club in Arlington, Virginia (September 11) and Rotary Club in Claremont, California (September 15).

Hector L. Sambolin, Jr., associate dean for academic success and assessment, presented at the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD) 13th Annual Dean’s Institute on “Generative AI and Academic Success: Moving Forward” on September 26. He discussed strategies for leveraging generative AI technology to support student success initiatives and optimize outcomes as well as provided insights into the promises and pitfalls and proposed an ethical framework to guide its implementation on college campuses.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, edited and contributed chapters to Dance in the Persianate World: Aesthetics, Histories, Practices (Mazda Publishers, 2023), the first comprehensive scholarly book on dance of all genres in the Persianate or Iranian world.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “Can we defend against the online anti-science movement?” (Salon, September 1); “Buying this annuity guarantees that you’ll lose out on big money” (MarketWatch, September 19); and “Confusing Correlation With Causation” (Mind Matters, September 25).

Smith’s interview about AI on NYU Professor Vasant Dhar's Brave New World was posted on September 21. Professor Dhar: “It came out very well. I don’t think I’ve laughed as much on any episode!”

Several of Smith’s books were reviewed by IEEE Fellow W. A. Gardner: “I think of Gary as the modern-day equivalent of Darrell Huff, the author of the classic text How to Lie with Statistics.”

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, participated in an invited roundtable discussion on AI and language teaching for the International Symposium on Intermediated and Advanced Level Chinese Education on September 15. The symposium was organized by the U.S. Chinese Language Teachers Association and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was interviewed for an NBC story on the omakase format common these days not only at sushi bars but also at other types of Japanese restaurants.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, had her book review accepted for publication in the Journal of Asian Studies, the flagship journal of the Association for Asian Studies, which is the biggest professional organization in Asian Studies in North America. Her review discusses the book Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture, authored by Anne E. McLaren.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave two invited research talks at the 2023 American Chemical Society (ACS) national fall meeting in San Francisco. One talk–hosted by Organic Syntheses and the Division of Organic Chemistry–featured a symposium highlighting leaders in organic chemistry research at PUIs. The second talk was at another symposium focused on new organometallic methods using earth-abundant metals. Both talks featured the work of Pomona students, Robbins Postdoctoral scholar Ryan Cammarota, and collaborators.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at Rice University’s Department of Chemistry and the 23rd International Symposium on Fluorine Chemistry (ISFC) and the 9th International Symposium on Fluorous Technologies (ISoFT) in Québec City.

Ball published a paper in Canadian Journal of Chemistry titled “Synthesis of 2-arylpyridines by the Suzuki-Miyaura cross coupling of PyFluor with hetero (aryl) boronic acids and esters.” The paper is a collaboration with the research group of Jennifer Love at the University of Calgary.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, published the chapter “‘Im Himmel und auf Erden’: Geometry, Alchemy, and Rosicrucian Symbol in Buxtehude’s Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab’ (BuxWV 38)” in an edited volume titled Explorations in Music and Esotericism (University of Rochester Press; Eastman Studies in Music), edited by Marjorie Roth and Leonard George. Bandy’s chapter reveals an array of 17th-century Rosicrucian textual and numerical tropes in a setting of Psalm 73 by Dieterich Buxtehude, close examination of which elucidates Buxtehude’s compositional process while challenging modern (assumed) boundaries between 17th-century occult philosophy and Lutheran musical orthodoxy.

From August 6–12, Bandy served on viola da gamba faculty at the Viols West workshop, organized by the Pacifica Chapter of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (VdGSA) and held at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he taught classes handling viola da gamba articulation techniques, music from the court of Rudolf II, and rhetoric in motets by Cristóbal de Morales.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was a guest on the Chicago Council of Global Affairs Deep Dish Podcast alongside former ambassador Prudence Bushnell to discuss diplomacy and security on the 25th anniversary of the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam.

Boduszyński published a peer-reviewed book chapter with former student Calla Li ’22 titled “External Autocratic Influence, The Balkans, and Democratic Decline” in Geopolitical Turmoil in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Hall Gardner (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Behavioural normative economics: foundations, approaches and trends“ in Fiscal Studies on August 29.

Dold appeared on the podcast ePODstemology to discuss the question “Can we make the world a 'better' place with behavioural economics?” on August 14.

Anne Dwyer, associate professor of German and Russian, presented her work at the “Archaists and Innovators” Symposium at Princeton University from August 24-25. Her paper was titled “Traces, Not Monuments: Mediated Authorship in Shklovsky's Oriental Prose.”

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, and colleagues from Yale and the University of Chicago published the article “Exceptional lower Cambrian fossils from a long-lost locality in Vermont, USA” in the journal Geology Today.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Statistics, gave the Hans Schneider ILAS Lecture at the 34th International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, which took place July 31-August 4. The talk was titled, “What can chicken nuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?”

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, with colleagues from Bryn Mawr College, Seattle University, University of Southern Indiana and UMass Dartmouth, received an 18-month, $100,000 conference grant from the Office of the Director/Office of Integrative Activities of the National Science Foundation.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, successfully completed another summer of PRiME (Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience). This eight-week summer residential program, running from June 11 through August 5, hosted 20 undergraduate students, five graduate students and five faculty to conduct research in algebraic geometry and number theory. The entire cohort traveled to Tampa, Florida, at the end of the summer to attend the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) MathFest, where two of the five research groups won honorable mention for best poster presentation. Arsh Chhabra ’25, Xuehuai He ’25 and Melinda Yang ’25 received the accolades for their work with Goins on “Adinkras as Origami.”

Goins was elected as chairman of the board of directors for the Art of Problem Solving Initiative, Inc. (AoPSI), a non-profit organization which seeks to help underserved students find a realistic pathway towards becoming scientists, mathematicians, engineers and programmers. The organization oversees BEAM (Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics), a series of experiences for students in grades 6-12 which includes a sixth-grade summer program in Los Angeles and New York City and a seventh-grade residential summer program on college campuses. Goins will assume responsibilities as board chair on February 1, 2024.

Beth A. Hubbard, assistant director, gift planning, earned the Certified Specialist in Planned Giving (CSPG^CM) designation through the American Institute for Philanthropic Studies at California State University Long Beach Research Foundation.

Hubbard was admitted to the MA in Education program at Claremont Graduate University. Hubbard's concentration is educational evaluation and data analysis, along with two semesters through CGU’s School of Education that will result in an Allies of Dreamers graduate-level certificate. The Allies of Dreamers Certificate Program is the first of its kind nationally and provides the historical context, theoretical framework and specific knowledge to offer mentorship and advocacy for Dreamers and other undocumented students.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, presented the paper “South Polar Skua Reproductive Success Breeding on the Antarctic Peninsula and the Antarctic Silverfish Component of their Diets” at the XIII SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) biology meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand. This paper was co-authored by Mimi Starr ’15 and Wayne Trivelpiece.

Mike Kuehlwein, George E. and Nancy O. Moss Professor of Economics, had an article co-authored with Tahir Andrabi, Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics, titled “Information and Price Convergence: Government Telegraphs in British India” published in the Indian Economic and Social History Review.

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, co-authored “Magmatic surge requires two-stage model for the Laramide orogeny” in Nature Communications with colleagues from CSU Northridge and University of Vermont.

Lackey co-convened the session “Crystal to crustal perspectives on mush systems and volcanic-plutonic connections” at the V.M. Goldschmidt Conference from July 9–14 in Lyon, France.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, completed the Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future program workshop in Montana on August 21.

Le was interviewed by the Washington Post for an article about Japan’s response to an aging and dying population.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, continued her work as a faculty member of the Chamber Music Conference at Colgate University through the first week of August where she coached numerous chamber music groups. On August 5, she performed Cécile Chaminade’s piano trio as part of the faculty concert series.

Lee was a guest artist at the Garth Newel Music Center, Virginia, performing on August 26 and August 27. These concerts included the music of Schubert, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Gershwin and Gounod for piano four-hands, two pianos, and eight-hand/two piano arrangements.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, published “A Neighborhood, Authored” in the August 21 issue of The New Yorker.

Victoria Sancho Lobis, associate professor of art history and Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director, Benton Museum of Art, was invited to offer a course through the 92nd Street Y in New York on Dutch and Flemish drawings of the early modern period.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, taught workshops on “The Philosophical Origins of the Declaration of Independence” and “The Debate Over the Bill of Rights” during the first week of August at the New York Historical Society as part of the 2023 We The Educators Cohort Program. The program, which is sponsored by Civic Spirit and the Jack Miller Center, brings together middle- and high-school teachers from around the country to discuss and promote civic education in the United States.

McWilliams published “Why Allen Ran,” an article on the work of political philosopher Danielle Allen, in Polity and “The Stories of Betty Ford” in the Ford Forum.

On August 31, McWilliams was elected vice president/president-elect of the American political thought section of the American Political Science Association. McWilliams will serve a two-year term as vice-president, followed by a two-year term as president of the group.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “A jolt to the system: ram pressure on low-mass galaxies in simulations of the Local Group” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On August 29, Moreno delivered a colloquium titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, presented a talk titled “3D-Printed Molecular Orbitals and Transition State Structures for a First-Semester Organic Chemistry Course” at the American Chemical Society Fall 2023 Meeting, which took place August 13-17 in San Francisco. Students from his 3D Orbitals in Chemistry Pedagogy independent research course, including Christabel Akowuah ’25, Tymmaa Asaed ’25, Vaughn Brown ’25, Kendrick Cua ’25, Hiwot Endeshaw ’25, Elizabeth Giwa ’25, Jaylyn Gonzalez ’25, Aysha Gsibat ’24, Sokhna Lo ’25, Santiago Serrano ’25 and Haddi Sise ’25, presented three posters on this topic at the meeting.

Lina Patel, lecturer in theatre, workshopped her new play “Belonging,” centering the non-traditional family and illness, at East West Players. She is in her 17th week of striking as a proud WGA and SAG-AFTRA member.

Adam Pearson, associate professor and chair of psychological science, published the article “Public recognition of climate change inequities in the United States” in the journal Climatic Change.

Pearson and Corinne Tsai ’20 co-presented research on how to communicate effectively about climate change inequities to the Sustainable States Network, a network of local and state government officials representing over 2500 municipalities and counties in 14 U.S. states. Additionally, Pearson advised officials from the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, on public communications for their climate equity and resilience plans.

On August 4, Pearson gave an invited address at the American Psychological Association's Science Summits series in Washington, D.C., on “The Science of Climate Equity and Justice,” part of a special session on climate change.

Pearson was named a plenary keynote speaker for the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October.

Associate Professor of Theatre Carolyn Ratteray’s one woman show Both And (a play about laughing while black) was picked up for a limited run by the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts for 2024. Her show, which received a Los Angeles New Play project and premiered at Boston Court Theatre, will run January 13-28, 2024.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, presented her paper “Landscape as/of Memory of Deportation and Violence in Anatoly Pristavkin’s Fiction” at the 26th International Biannual Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL), Ecologies of Childhood, on August 14. She was also a moderator at the artist/author plenary for the award-winning young adult fiction author Eugene Yelchin on August 16. She was a member of the congress’s organizing committee. Pomona College was one of the Congress’s sponsoring institutions, along with Stanford University, Princeton University, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego. Aiste Abeciunaite ’25 and Asya Lyubavina ’26 served as the Congress’s assistants, from August 12-16, thanks to a generous grant from the Dean’s Office.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, was invited to submit a peer-reviewed article, “Dance in Iran and in the Diaspora: What we can learn from analyzing dance and other Patterned Movements about Iranian Society.” The article appears on the website Iran 1400.

Penny Sinanoglou, associate professor of history, published “Partition as Imperial Inheritance” in The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition, edited by Victor Kattan and Amit Ranjan (Manchester University Press).

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote a RealClear Markets opinion piece, “Be Wary of Applying Shiller's CAPE to Individual Stocks” (August 7); a MarketWatch opinion piece, “Startups no longer are $100 bills on the sidewalk—Venture capital is suffering even as the U.S. stock market is surging” (August 7); and a MindMatters opinion piece, “The LK-99 BS Further Undermines the Credibility of Science” (August 10).

Smith was interviewed by Ed Fulbright on NPR affiliate WNCU and by Renee Garfinkel on the New Books Network about his book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science. Distrust was also reviewed by Jeanette Ferrara for Rigaku Review: “Smith’s delivery is so delicately and effortlessly encrusted with endless dry wit that you might actually find yourself laughing out loud as you read it—surely to be followed by a deep frown as you contemplate the powerful implications of what he is saying.”

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, presented “Life After Status: Gendered Relational and Contextual Shifts in Legal Consciousness and Workplace Claims for Formerly Undocumented Immigrants” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on August 19.

Miguel Tinker Salas, emeritus professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, co-authored an op-ed in Mexico City’s La Jornada newspaper August 18 on technologies of hate deployed against immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, and Ceci Wade ’25 published a paper titled “Differences in Code-Switching between Chinese Heritage and Non-Heritage Learners in Computer-Mediated Communication” in Chinese Language Teaching Methodology and Technology.

Xiao published a commentary titled “ChatGPT and Its Challenges for Chinese Learning Assessment” in Chinese Teaching in the World.

Aimee Bahng, associate professor and coordinator of gender and women’s studies, led a pre-conference workshop on “Oceanic Ecologies and Pacific Resurgence” at the joint conference of The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) in Portland, Oregon, from July 9-12. In addition to being invited to lead the workshop, Bahng also presented her research on abolitionist environmentalism on a panel titled “Ecocriticism and Ethnic Studies.”

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, opened the 2023 Salzburger Festspiele (Salzburg, Austria) in performances on July 20 and 21 as a viola da gamba soloist with the Los Angeles Master Chorale in “Music to Accompany a Departure,” a staged production of Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien, conducted by Grant Gershon and directed by Peter Sellars. The performances took place in Salzburg’s Kollegienkirche, with the tour concluding on July 23 in Ingolstadt, Germany, in a final performance closing the Audi Sommerkonzerte 2023 series, held in the Festsaal of the Stadttheater Ingolstadt.

Bandy was a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to Season 2 of the Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Foundation, a streaming television series based on Isaac Asimov’s literary series of the same name. Premiering on July 14 with nine subsequent episodes streaming weekly, Bandy can be heard playing the viola da gamba throughout the season as well as its official Apple TV+ original series soundtrack.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published an article, “Repetición, fragmentación y escritura ‘leprosa’ en la poesía de Antonio Méndez Rubio,” in Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, as part of a dossier titled “Experimentación y rupturas en la poesía española del siglo XXI.”

Anthony Clark, assistant professor of computer science, published an article, “Does Kinematic-Based Pretraining Improve Evolution of Quadrupedal Gaits?” at the Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2023) held in Sapporo, Japan, in July. The article includes one student author, Kevin J. Ayala Ahumada ’22.

Karla Cordova, visiting assistant professor of economics, co-organized an undergraduate research session at the Western Economic Association International Conference in San Diego, California, on July 3. On July 2, Cordova also presented ongoing work on “Welfare Transfers to Children in Mixed-Status Households in the U.S.”

Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, and the 25-member Pomona College Glee Club traveled to England and Scotland after Commencement, giving benefit concerts at St. James’s Piccadilly in London, St. Michael le Belfrey in York and Durham Cathedral in Durham, raising money for various local philanthropic organizations that support people in need. The ensemble was also invited to sing a Sunday morning service at Trinity College, Cambridge, gave a joint concert with the St. Andrews University Madrigal Group at Holy Trinity Church in St. Andrews (Scotland) and was part of the Sunday at Six concert series at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published the paper “The strongly Leibniz property and the Gromov-Hausdorff propinquity” with Konrad Aguilar, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, and Elena Kim ’21 in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “Institutional Catalysts and Citizen Participation: The Case of the Historic Center’s Fiduciary Fund in Mexico City (2001 – 2012)” on July 1 at the XX World Congress of Sociology of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in Melbourne, Australia. The panel she was a part of, titled “Contesting Urban Governance. New Forms of Citizenship and the Power of Protest across Institutional Contexts. Part II,” was convened by ISA’s Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development (RC21).

Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, published the paper “LRP-1 Binds Fibrinogen in a Sialylation-Dependent Manner: A Quartz Crystal Microbalance Study” in Langmuir. The article was coauthored by Daniel L. Gao ’25.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, led a 75-minute workshop session titled “Equity in the Moment: Responding to Challenging Situations in the Classroom” on July 25 as part of the MAA Open Math Summer 2023 Workshops on Inclusion and Inquiry: Fostering Student Belonging and Ownership.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, attended the RCN-UBE Summit in Washington D.C., which brought together principal investigators of National Science Foundation grants that are Research Coordination Networks in Undergraduate Biology Education. Karnovsky represented RESCUE-Net (Research Experiences for Southern California Undergraduate Ecologists network). RESCUE-Net is a network of faculty in Southern California who are dedicated to training undergraduates to be the next generation of ecological leaders.

Phil Keen, lecturer in music, trombone, and Sarah Thornblade, lecturer in music, violin, performed in John Williams’s score in the recent film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, completed the U.S.-Japan Leadership Program conference in Kyoto, Hiroshima and Tokyo. He graduated to fellow after two years as a delegate. He also completed the Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholars Network program. Program site visits included Tokyo, Hong Kong, Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Lastly, he completed the Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future program. Program site visits included Tokyo, Iwakuni, Shimonoseki and Kitakyushu.

Le’s article titled “Japan as the Future: Demographic Crisis” was published by Tokyo Review.

Le, Angelina Chin, associate professor of history, Albert Park (Claremont McKenna College) and Seo Young Park (Scripps College) were awarded a two-year grant by the Japan Foundation for a project titled “Sustainable Futures: Overcoming Disparities.”

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, is a faculty member of the Chamber Music Conference at Colgate University this summer. She is coaching numerous chamber music groups. On July 26, she was the featured performer in Leoš Janáček’s Concertino as part of the faculty concert series.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, was a discussant on a July 8 Zoom panel titled “Toxic Workspaces, Self-Care, and Asianness: The Basics” with Quade French and Michael Sakamoto for the Gold Standard Arts Foundation.

Denise Machin, assistant director of Smith Campus Center and ballroom dance instructor, competed at the North American Same-Sex Partner Dance Championship on July 22 in Monterey Park, California. Dancing with Viola Ni CMC ’25, Machin and Ni became the 2023 woman/woman North American champions in the Latin category and the vice champions in the same-sex Latin category.

Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, published a chapter on Native American boarding schools in the United States and investigations of residential schools for Indigenous peoples in Canada in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume II: Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c. 1535 to World War One, edited by Ben Kiernan. McBride also presented his chapter “Lessons from Canada: The Question of Genocide in US Boarding Schools for Native Americans” at the 16th Biennial Meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars held at the Faculty of Law, University of Barcelona in Spain from July 10-15.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, moderated a panel titled “Together and Apart: Polarization in American Politics,” held at Amherst College. The panel featured elected officials and campaign staffers in a discussion about the on-the-ground realities of political polarization.

McWilliams Barndt published a piece on “What Is Liberalism?” in The Vital Center.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is author of “‘Mr. Forest Service’: Wilbur R. Mattoon and the Reforestation of the South” in Celebrating 100 Years of Forest Science: An Abridged History of the Southern Research Station, edited by Don C. Bragg.

Miller delivered the keynote address at the 2023 Eastern Sierra Book Festival in Mammoth Lakes, California, on July 16, focusing on his new book Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril. The book was also the subject of his talk to the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.

Miller was featured in the podcast Living Well into the Future in an episode titled “Deep Dive: Water, part 1.”

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Local positive feedback in the overall negative: the impact of quasar winds on star formation in the FIRE cosmological simulations” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On July 5, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “Extreme galactic collisions: opportunities for UV astronomy” at the Illuminating Galaxy Properties Across Cosmic Time conference in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Moreno was elected to become a member of the American Astronomical Society’s publications committee.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published a special issue titled Podcasting Disruptive Voices: New Narratives of Race and Gender for the journal CFC Intersections (Liverpool University Press). Co-edited with Audrey Brunetaux (Colby College), the issue explores the potential of podcasts to carry words and voices of minority subjects and groups that contribute to the fields of critical race theory, feminism and intersectional studies in contemporary France.

Claire Nettleton, academic curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, submitted the manuscript for her co-edited volume with Louise Mackenzie Viral Culture and Biotechnological Arts: From CRISPR-Cas9 to COVID-19 (working title), under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. The anthology contains chapters by Nettleton, Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish literature, Ira Fleming ’18 and 22 other renowned interdisciplinary artists and scholars. The volume was based on the Viral Culture colloquium in 2018 at Pomona College and Harvey Mudd College, co-organized by Nettleton and Rachel Mayeri (Harvey Mudd College), with assistance from Iren Coskun ’21, Fleming, Franco Liu ’20, Rena Hernandez ’20, Scott Pease ’19, Lilly Thomey ’19 and André Cavalcanti, professor of biology.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, shared her latest research on “The Chicana/o Movement and Activism in the San Gabriel Valley, the 1950s-1970s” with high school students in the Telluride Association at Cornell University on July 19.

Laura Perini, associate professor of philosophy, presented “The Aesthetic Life of a Life Scientist” at the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology conference in Toronto, Canada, on July 12.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor of Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, gave an invited lecture, “Landscapes of Trauma: Narratives of Deportation and Evacuation in Soviet Youth Literature About WWII,” at the Institute of German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, on July 4.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, was named the recipient of the Emerging Scholars award from the American Political Science Association’s Civic Engagement Section. She and co-authors were also awarded the Alan Rosenthal Prize for their paper “Social Lobbying.” The prize recognizes work that examines issues of importance to legislators and legislative staff and can be applied to strengthening the practice of representative democracy.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics, played baritone saxophone in the City of Pomona Concert Band’s concerts on July 13 and July 20.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote two MindMatters opinion pieces: “Using Data Like a Drunk Uses a Lamppost” (July 21) and “Sabrina Ionescu’s Hot Hand” (July 28). His book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, was reviewed by Thomas Lumley: “The stories of Gary Smith, an economics professor in California and author of The AI Delusion, … are compelling illustrations of a problem for science.”

Laura Wensley, director of leadership annual and reunion giving, was a workshop panelist at the Sharing the Annual Fund Fundamentals (S.T.A.F.F.) 2023 Annual Conference in Worcester, Massachusetts. The conference took place July 17-19 and was hosted by College of the Holy Cross. S.T.A.F.F. is a representative group of 46 small, selective colleges, which joined together over 30 years ago to implement successful and innovative annual giving programs through the sharing of information and networking. Membership institutions have 1,000-3,500 undergraduate students, an endowment of $100 million or more and at least $2 million in annual gifts.

Ken Wolf, the John Sutton Miner Professor of History in Classics, gave a paper at the Veneration in Motion in Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia Conference in Ravenstein, Netherlands, from July 11-12, hosted by Radboud University and the Roman Islam Center of the University of Hamburg. The paper, titled “Martyrdom and Its Discontents in Ninth-Century Córdoba,” represented a culling of his recent translations of the works of Eulogius (d. 859) and one by Paul Alvarus (d. c. 861).

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave a presentation titled “Chinese Ex Libris Seals from the Late 19th Century to the early 20th Century” at the 13th International Symposium on Chinese Calligraphy Education on July 29.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave two invited research seminars at the 2023 Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition (CSC) in Vancouver. The talks featured research in the Ball Lab centered on developing new reactions that add sulfur into organic molecules. One talk specifically showcased work from international principal investiagators who represent those who have been historically excluded from the sciences.

Ball presented his research at the 20th anniversary celebration of Melanie Sanford at the University of Michigan. Sanford was Ball’s Ph.D. advisor and the Pomona Chemistry Department’s 2023 Robbins lecturer.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, was a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to Season 7 of the Starz historical drama Outlander, a television series based on Diana Gabaldon’s novel series of the same name. This season, with a plot derived from An Echo in the Bone, premiered on June 16 on Starz (future episodes airing weekly), and Bandy can be heard playing historical string instruments, including viola da gamba and yayli tanbur, throughout.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, published an article on “The Pre-Publication Circulation and Scoring of Handel's Op.2 Trio Sonatas” in the 2023 issue of the Handel-Jahrbuch.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, participated in a one-week professional development program organized and led by the School for International Training (SIT) titled Grounding Faculty-led Programs in Experiential Education Pedagogy & Decolonial Perspectives in Accra, Ghana. The objective of his participation was to inform the approach to a proposed faculty-led traveling seminar next year.

Boduszyński was interviewed about his experience working in national security by a former student, Danica Harootian SCR ’17, as part of a podcast series produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures, was interviewed by BBC Asia for an article, “Kong Yiji: The memes that lay bare China’s youth disillusionment,” published on June 10.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the co-authored article “Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-analysis of 45 Crowd-sourced Experimental Designs“ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Dold co-organized the workshop “Behavioral Public Policy and Participatory Governance,” which took place at University College Dublin on June 5-6.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper “De la ‘femme’ invisible du Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” during the colloquium “Des filles d’Ève. Balzac et la ‘question femme’,” which took place at the Maison Balzac in Paris on June 15-16. The paper is the result of many Pomona College interactions: The idea came to her while teaching a Balzac session during her French 178 class on 19th-century writing and painting in the fall of 2022. During the writing process, Ken Wolf, professor of classics and John Sutton Miner Professor of History, helped her with the question of Onuphrius-Onophria, while José R. Cartagena-Calderón, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, suggested a Don Quijote reference.

Pierre Englebert, associate dean of the college and H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations, and Lina Kallel ’24 presented their paper “Understanding Variations in State Responses to Security Crises in the Sahel” at the meeting of the European Conference on African Studies in Cologne, Germany, on June 2.

Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, visiting assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented a paper titled « À la recherche de la mémoire impossible : traces des Disparus dans l'art contemporain » at the symposium “Présence des Disparus de Daniel Mendelsohn dans la création contemporaine,” held at CY Cergy Paris Université and Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Paris Saclay on June 15-16. She also chaired the panel “Penser avec les Disparus.”

On June 22, Garrigou-Kempton chaired the panel “Challenging Violence” at the American University of Paris George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention’s Conference “Violent Turns: Sources, Interpretations, Responses.”

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and Chuck Taylor, professor and chair of chemistry, along with Victor Chai ’23, Tiam Farajzadeh ’23 and Yufei Meng ’25, presented “How does C. elegans recognize the bacterial odors of its microbiome?” at the 24th International C. elegans Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, and online June 24-28.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “The Dominican Feminist Movement’s Fight for Abortion Rights through Las Causales” on June 28 at the XX World Congress of Sociology (WCS) of the International Sociological Association in Melbourne, Australia. The panel titled “Global Perspectives on the Struggle for Reproductive Justice” was organized by the Research Committee on Women, Gender and Society.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, led an hour-long workshop session titled “Developing A Social Justice Curriculum: First Steps” on June 1 as part of the City University of New York’s Innovative Teaching Academy (CITA) Summer 2023 Institute on Promoting Equitable and Inclusive STEM Teaching and Learning.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, produced and directed a Playback Theatre performance titled Sustenance with LA Playback Theatre Company at El Sereno Community Garden as the culminating event of her Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Neighborhood Artist Residency Grant. This production was also supported by funding from JKW Foundation.

Lu led a Playback Theatre workshop as an invited guest artist at Directors Lab West at Pasadena Playhouse.

Eric Melgosa, art director of Pomona College Magazine, editor Robyn Norwood and other collaborators in the Office of Communications received a 2023 Circle of Excellence Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for “Our Bird’s Beginnings,” a graphic story about the origins of Cecil Sagehen that appeared in PCM’s spring 2022 issue. Judges selected the comic for a gold award in the category of writing/profile (less than 1,000 words), praising the entry for its creativity and ingenuity.

Miriam Merrill, chair of physical education and director of athletics, served as the emcee for the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association Awards Luncheon in Orlando, Florida, on June 11.

On June 13, Merrill moderated a panel titled “The Transition: Preparation and Reflection of Change” at the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics Convention.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Born this way: thin disc, thick disc, and isotropic spheroid formation in FIRE-2 Milky-Way-mass galaxy simulations” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On June 13, Moreno participated on the “Diversity Equity Inclusion and Accessibility/Career Balance” panel for the NASA ExoExplorers Program.

On June 15, Moreno delivered a plenary talk at the 2023 Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) annual general meeting held in Penticton, British Columbia. On June 30, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “the intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the “Hiking through the unexplored universe: the raise of ultra-diffuse galaxies” in Sesto, Italy.

Robyn Norwood, assistant director of news and strategic content in the Office of Communications, appears in the ESPN E60 documentary Once Upon a Time in Anaheim about the Walt Disney Co.’s foray into professional sports with the National Hockey League team originally named the Mighty Ducks, after the 1992 Disney children’s movie. Norwood, a Los Angeles Times sportswriter for more than two decades, covered the team’s early years.

Lynn Rapaport, Henry Snyder Professor of Sociology, organized and co-chaired two panels for the XX World Congress of Sociology conference held in Melbourne, Australia, in June. The first panel was on “The Consequences of Violence,” and the second was on “Violence, Culture and Traumatic Memory.” Rapaport was also elected treasurer for a four-year term of the newly established “Violence and Society” thematic group of the International Sociological Association, making her a member of its first official board.

Nikia Robert, 2021 Fred and Dorothy Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies, accepted a tenure track position as the assistant professor of ethics and social justice at the University of Kansas. To remain in touch, please contact Robert at Nikia.robert@gmail.com.

Robert was recruited by Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to work as the director of racial and social justice at Ebenezer Baptist Church (Martin Luther King’s spiritual home). Robert will advise Warnock’s team on organizing strategies to mobilize faith communities to end mass incarceration, voter suppression and other policy areas.

Robert launched the first-ever social media platform for activists and abolitionists at abolitionistsanctuary.org. This social media and learning platform innovates a digital revolution to create a centralized online space to socialize, organize, mobilize and learn within a shared community of people committed to justice, liberation and abolition.

Robert was invited by the Fetzer Institute to consult with the Sharing Spiritual Heritage wisdom circle. This project weaves networks and helps cultivate a nascent ecosystem for BIPOC-led spiritual and intellectual innovation.

Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, co-hosted the award-winning TAGS podcast.

Rodriguez-Velez performed in the short film “Marque Dos,” which was screened at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood as part of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.

Rodriguez-Velez’s script “Chosen Family” achieved semifinalist status at the Spotlight Dorado short film competition.

Rodriguez-Velez’s play “How Did Edward Lose His Accent?” has been selected as a finalist at the Morgan-Wixon Theatre Guild New Works Festival.

Erin Runions, Nancy J. Lyon Professor of Biblical History and Literature, was a participant on a keynote panel for the first conference of the Political Theology Network on Biblical Studies, on Biblical Violence.

Runions was invited to present a paper, “Biblical Reception Criticism as Transformative Justice,” at the Biblical Reception Workshop at Lund University, Sweden.

Runions presented “Mutual Engagement and Community Building as Abolitionist Practice: Writing Inside Out” at the invited Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC) Faculty Workshop: Carceral States: Prison Writing and Liberal Arts Education, Bryn Mawr College.

Runions was nominated and elected to be vice president for 2023-24 and president for 2024-25 of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies.

Adam Sapp, assistant vice president and director of admissions, and Brandon Lau ’24 attended the Service to School Military Veterans Leadership Summit at the University of Chicago. Sapp spoke on a panel about recruiting veterans at community colleges. Lau co-presented with fellow veterans from Williams College and the University of Chicago about the academic experience and transitioning to a highly residential college.

Associate Professor of Music Gibb Schreffler’s documentary film Songs of the Windlass: Singing Chanties on Gazela premiered June 9 at the Connecticut Sea Music Festival in Essex, Connecticut. The film—produced, directed and written by Schreffler—aims to provide an accessible entry into his scholarly work on the subject of historical sailors’ work songs and shipboard technology. It features Schreffler’s performances of chanties while working on the 1901 barkentine Gazela of Philadelphia and other vessels.

Jennifer Schulz, lecturer in dance, facilitated a two-hour workshop titled “Fostering Risk and Resilience in Actor Training,” based on her recent peer-reviewed article, at the Annual Congress for the National Alliance of Acting Teachers, New York City, June 16-19.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote the lead article in the June 7 Chronicle of Higher Education “How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research,” a June 7 MarketWatch opinion piece, “Will ChatGPT and AI save money-losing tech companies from the short-sellers?” and a June 12 MindMatters opinion piece, “The LLM Deep Fake—Follow the Money.”

Smith’s book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science was reviewed by Brian Clegg in Popular Science and by Krishnendu Sarkar in Social Science Journal. He also did podcast interviews with Gregory LaBlanc on unSILOed and with Ed Fulbright on NPR affiliate WNCU.

Smith signed a contract with Springer Nature for the book, The Power of Modern Value Investing - Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha, co-authored with his wife Margaret Smith. The core argument is that most of what is taught in finance courses is wrong.

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, presented the research poster Degradation of Mesoporous Carbon Perovskite Solar Cells on research done with his students Kylie Thompson ’22, Dan Tan ’23, Bryan Hong ’20 and Adam Dvorak ’21 at the 15th International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics in London on June 13. Tanenbaum also served as chair of Session 3C1 - Perovskite PV Characterisation and Optimisation and judged the best posters competition.

Heather Williams, professor of politics, was a recipient of a Huntington Library fellowship for work on the project “Stumbling Giant: Southern California Edison’s Nuclear Nadir at San Onofre.”

Williams presented a conference paper, “Indebtedness and Political Stress: Toward a Theory of Property and Its Discontents,” at the Latin American Studies Association Congress in Vancouver, Canada.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, gave a presentation titled “Teaching Chinese Pragmatics: A Review” at the 8th International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, held at Swarthmore College.

Xiao and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University published an editorial titled “ChatGPT and Chinese Teaching” in Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching.

Xiao and Ava Tiller ’24 published a paper titled “U.S. College Students’ Decision Making on Study Abroad after the COVID-19 Pandemic” in Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published an invited book chapter, “Healthy aging and communication: The complexities of, um, fluent speech production,” co-authored with Katherine White of Rhodes College, in the second edition of The Routledge International Handbook of Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Processes.

Chelsea Ahn, assistant director of experiential learning and career advising, was invited by her alma mater, University of California, Irvine, to serve as a judge for the 30th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. The symposium featured over 500 posters ranging in topics from art and education to government and STEM. Posters were judged on articulation of research, scholarly comprehension, organization and synergy, quality of delivery, and visual presentation.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, hosted and coached a day-long workshop for SoCal Viols held at Pomona College on May 6 and informally honoring Carol Herman ’51 for her significant contributions to viola da gamba pedagogy in Southern California. On May 20, Bandy taught another day-long workshop for Cascadia Viols in Portland, Oregon, on the topic of musical-rhetorical figure and meaning-making in 16th- and 17th-century polyphonic compositions by Arcadelt, Lassus, Marenzio, Hassler and Morales.

On May 21, Bandy performed on viola da gamba, Renaissance Hümmelchen bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy with Los Angeles-based early music ensemble Ciaramella and guest soprano Jennifer Kampani in a program of English and Italian ground-bass divisions and airs. The concert was livestreamed as part of the Classical Sundays at Six series, presented by Great Music at Saint James at St. James’ in-the-City Episcopal Church in Los Angeles.

On May 28, Bandy programmed, lectured and played bass viola da gamba with Tesserae Baroque, in a concert of works by Ruffo, Morley, Byrd and Lupo, for part two of a project initiated in October 2022 at The Gamble House in Pasadena, California. The event was sponsored by The Da Camera Society, with the aim of drawing connections between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Dolmetsch family’s early music revival, scholarship and musical instrument design.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “Coriolano Transformed: The Early History of Ariosti's First Royal Academy Opera” at the conference The Politics of Opera—Handel’s Opera Academies 1719-1737 held May 30-31 in conjunction with the annual Handel Festival in Halle (Saale), Germany. On May 27 he was elected one of the three vice presidents of the International Georg-Friedrich-Haendel Gesellschaft, based in Halle.

Gayle Blankenburg, lecturer in music, performed recording sessions in New York City with cellist Caleb van der Swaagh. Their recording will appear on the New Focus CD label.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, published a review of Hicham Alaoui’s Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective in the Journal of North African Studies.

Boduszyński was recognized by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategies, Plans, and Capabilities Mara Karlin for his work on Russian accountability over the past year. In August, he will wrap up a one-year detail to the Pentagon and return to teaching at Pomona.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “(Un)known Quantities: Poetic (Il)legitimacy in Vicente Aleixandre’s ‘Número’ (1926)” at the 52nd Annual Conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from May 19-21.

Clarissa Cheney, associate professor of biology, and Cristina Negritto, associate professor of molecular biology, attended the 46th West Coast Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference (WCBSURC) at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles with six molecular biology students. Essi Logan ’24, Melissa Seecharan ’24, Schuyler DiBacco ’24 and Ayame Bluebell ’24, who did original research in the molecular biology lab class Spring 2023, presented the poster “Cloning the Drosophila Naa20 gene into pUASTattB.” Alex Morse ’23 presented a poster of her senior experimental thesis project “Translocation Formation in Yeast. Role of Rad3 Protein.”

Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, published an essay on the AMC series Lucky Hank and television’s recent infatuation with department chairs in The Atlantic on May 1.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, remotely presented the paper “D’une esthétique goncourtienne: à partir d’un portrait de Mme De Nittis” during the Paris Sorbonne conference dedicated to the portraits in Goncourt’s writings May 12.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented “The landscape of research development at primary undergraduate institutions (PUIs), Part 2” on May 9 at the annual conference of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals in Arlington, Virginia. He also cohosted conference events of the membership services committee and the affinity groups for PUIs and for creative arts, social sciences and humanities.

George Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, published an overview of his scholarship on ceremonies and the transformation of a Medieval to Renaissance city in honor of a dear friend on his retirement from the University of Genoa: “Genoa in Triumph” in Il Tempio delle Arti: Scritti per Lauro Magnani, edited by Lauro Stagno and Daniele Sanguinetti (Sagep Editrice, 2023).

Gorse published book reviews of Jacopo Da Varagine’s Chronicle of the City of Genoa, translated and annotated by Carrie E. Benes, and A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa 1600-1750, edited by Jonathan Bober, Piero Boccardo and Franco Boggero for Speculum and Renaissance Quarterly, journals of the American Medieval Academy and Renaissance Society of America.

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, presented the paper “Cities as Human Rights Advocates and Implementers” at the invited workshop “Challenges and Opportunities in Global Transnational Advocacy,” hosted by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and The Graduate Institute Geneva in Bologna, Italy.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented at the roundtable “Unpacking far right politics and the anti-feminist backlash” May 26 at the Latin American Studies Association Congress in Vancouver, Canada. The roundtable was organized by the Culture, Power and Politics section at LASA where Hernández-Medina shared her remarks on the case of the Dominican Republic and the trajectory of the current far right backlash that started with the Vatican’s reaction to the 1995 IV Conference on Women in Beijing.

On May 31, Hernández-Medina co-organized and co-moderated the seventh anniversary celebration of Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, the feminist group she co-founded and now coordinates along with Rossy Matos and Angélica Rodríguez Bencosme in the Dominican Republic. The event included a roundtable on women’s sexual and reproductive rights with oncological obstetrician Natalia Frías, birth doula and educator Leiko Hidaka and public health expert Mirna Jiménez de la Rosa.

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, associate professor of economics, was invited to be a research fellow in IZA, the leading international network of labor economists.

Huet-Vaughn received a research grant from the Haynes Foundation and appeared on NPR’s Marketplace.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, published an article titled “Whose Math and For What Purpose? A Community Seminar on Identity, Culture, and Mathematics” in PRIMUS: Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies.

Karaali published an extended book review of the book The Meaning of Proofs: Mathematics as Storytelling by Italian logician Gabriele Lolli in The American Mathematical Monthly.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor, Zora Beaty ’25 and Philip Duchild ’24 attended the Southern California Academy of Sciences meeting in Santa Barbara on May 5. Beaty presented a poster on the results of a study of Western pond turtles in a poster co-authored by Duchild, Hanna Kim ’23 and Karnovsky. Duchild presented a poster on changes in the distribution of woodrat huts at the Bernard Field Station since 2005. His poster was coauthored by Beaty, Kim and Karnovsky.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave an interview for The Economist on South Korea-Japan relations and its impact on United States alliances May 4.

On May 23, Le was interviewed for the Eurasia Group’s podcast None of the Above on Japan hosting the G7 Summit.

Le gave a book talk at the University of California, Irvine on May 18. On May 30, he gave a talk on the future of Northeast Asia at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, had his 2007 essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” cited in Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s dissenting opinion in the May 18 Andy Warhol Foundation vs. Goldsmith decision.

Sara Masland, assistant professor of psychological science, published “Effects of Group Psychotherapy for Nonsuicidal Self-Injury: A Meta Analysis” in the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. Co-authors included Ellen Finch (Harvard University graduate student) and Sophie Schnell ’22.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, published an article titled “Conservatism in Crisis” as part of a symposium on the 65th anniversary of the publication of Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided. The article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of American Political Thought.

Wallace Meyer, director of the Bernard Field Station, presented a talk and had five students from various institutions across southern California present posters at the Southern California Academy of Sciences Meeting. Presentations included “Effects of common disturbances on soil microbial assemblages in southern California,” “Restoration facilitator or obstacle: role of Acmispon glaber as a nurse shrub” and “Mulch matters: Quantifying decomposition rates and identifying primary drivers of mulch decomposition in southern California urban areas.”

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “The impact of AGN-driven winds on physical and observable galaxy sizes” in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno delivered two colloquia titled “Galaxies lacking dark matter” at Cal State Northridge and University of California, Riverside, plus two seminars on the same topic at the Flatiron Institute and Princeton University.

Moreno delivered a talk titled “The extreme lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” as part of The Olympian Symposium in Katerina, Greece.

Sarah E. Noll, visiting assistant professor of chemistry, co-authored a paper in Nature Communications, “Chemical Imaging Reveals Diverse Functions of Tricarboxylic Acid Metabolites in Root Growth and Development.” The findings of this research work were also the subject of a recent University of California, San Diego news article, “Groundbreaking Images of Root Chemicals Offer New Insights on Plant Growth.”

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, Michelle Garcia ’22 and Frances O’Leary (Purdue University ’23) published the article “Do-It-Yourself 5-Color 3D Printing of Molecular Orbitals and Electron Density Surfaces” in The Journal of Chemical Education. The work is featured on the cover of the April 11 issue.

Adam Pearson, associate professor of psychological science, was lead author of a new article in American Psychologist featuring a transdisciplinary team of social and clinical psychologists, health clinicians, and researchers in communication and behavioral medicine that explores what psychology can contribute to understanding and addressing climate-related health inequities. Their article “Climate Change and Health Equity: A Research Agenda for Psychological Science” provides a new cross-disciplinary framework for understanding climate change inequities and highlights what the behavioral sciences can contribute to advancing actionable research in this area.

Pearson was named a keynote speaker for the upcoming annual Society for Experimental Social Psychology conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October, and will be a featured speaker at the American Psychological Association convention in Washington, D.C., on August 4 for the Science Summits series “The Science that Can Save Our Planet.”

William Peterson, professor emeritus of music and College organist, and Carey Robertson, principal organist at the Claremont United Church of Christ, presented a concert, “A Celebration of Organ Traditions in Claremont,” on the Hill Memorial Organ, built by C.B. Fisk, in Bridges Hall of Music. The program included works composed between 1923 and 2023 by Joseph W. Clokey, Carl Parrish, William G. Blanchard, Wilbur Held, Orpha Ochse, Karl Kohn and Tom Flaherty.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a book review of David E. Nye’s Seven Sublimes (MIT Press) in The European Legacy online.

Alex Rodriguez, head coach of women’s water polo, and his staff were announced as the 2023 Women’s Water Polo SCIAC Coaching Staff of the Year. Rodriguez earned his third Coach of the Year Award and second straight award after also earning the distinction in 2022. His coaches are Associate Head Coach Alex La and Assistant Coaches Chris Lee and Elyssa Hawkins. The Sagehens finished the regular season unbeaten for the second consecutive season with a 12-0 record while earning a 22-10 overall record.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave a presentation, “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France,” at Pomona’s alumni weekend. On May 17, she gave the same presentation twice at Downey High School.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics, played baritone saxophone in the City of Pomona Concert Band for the band’s spring concert May 12 and Memorial Day concert May 29.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, gave a Zoom lecture to the ethnochoreology section of the International Committee on Traditional Music on Igor Moiseyev and the Igor Moiseyev Dance Company of the Russian Federation, sponsored and hosted by Christos Papakostas of the University of Ionnina in Greece on May 26.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, had podcast interviews about his latest book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, on May 1 with Keith Koo, Silicon Valley Insider; on May 2 with Moira Gunn on the NPR show Tech Nation; on May 17 with Gregory La Blanc (Stanford) on unSILOed; and on May 22 with Vasant Dhar (NYU) on Brave New World. Distrust was also reviewed by Nature: “Distrust is a veritable page-turner, and I finished it in a few sittings. On a higher level, it is a call for common sense, for scepticism, for methodological rigour and for epistemic modesty. I suspect most scientists will love it.”

Smith’s book, What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, was reviewed by the Manhattan Book Review: “What the Luck? is a valuable arrow of sobering knowledge to keep in your quiver at all times.”

Smith was interviewed for a Mashable article, “What not to share with ChatGPT if you use it for work,” and published an opinion piece: “The Death of Peer Review?” (MindMatters, May 15).

Kyle Wilson, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Acquisitions, Product Variety, and Distribution in the U.S. Craft Beer Industry” in Economic Inquiry on May 19.

Ken Wolf, John Sutton Miner Professor of History in Classics, is author of The Indiculus luminosus of Paul Alvarus (Liverpool University Press), an extended study and translation of the earliest Latin Christian effort to interpret Muhammad in terms of biblical prophecies pertaining to Antichrist. The book is essentially a follow-up volume to his The Eulogius, which appeared in 2019. Together these books provide translations and studies of all the extant texts pertaining to the so-called “Córdoban Martyrs’ Movement” (850-859), during which a number of Iberian Christians living under Islamic rule publicly denounced Muhammad in an effort to become martyrs.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, gave a talk titled “Sorry Not Sorry: Melodrama, Cancel-culture, and Spectacles of Forced Apology” at the Film Studies Association of Canada conference in Toronto on May 29.

“Second Thoughts About Confucianism in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945” by Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, will appear in a Festschrift for Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming, the chair of humanities and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. Yamashita has known Tu since 1979 and collaborated with him and four other scholars on The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought (SUNY, 1994).

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, gave an invited talk to the department of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz titled “Bilingualism, cognitive control, and humor: A holistic individual differences approach to understanding prediction in comprehension” May 26.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and chair of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a poster presentation with two Pomona cognitive science majors at the 2023 Western Psychological Association (WPA) Convention, which was held April 27-30 in Riverside, California. Majo Najas ’24 and Aysha Gsibat ’24, the lead authors and research assistants in Abrams’s PRIME (Psycholinguistic Research in Memory) laboratory, presented their research titled “Lending a Hand: How Gestures and Self-Adaptors Aid Speech Production During Emotional Storytelling.”

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, performed in Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra’s historically informed production of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on April 2 in Los Angeles, as part of the organization’s 2022/23 inaugural Bach Festival.

On April 21, Bandy presented a paper titled “The Tortoise and The Herr: Buxtehude’s Viol Consort as Paracelsian Harmonia in Membra Jesu Nostri (BuxWV 75)” at the annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, held April 20–23 at the Cleveland Museum of Art and hosted by the Department of Music and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, was invited to Grinnell College, where he delivered a campus lecture titled “Translating from Chinese: Challenges and Rewards” and a guest lecture in a course on modern Chinese literature and film April 6-7.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, published an article on “Handel and the Quadro Sonata” in the Spring 2023 issue of the Newsletter of the American Handel Society.

Kim Bruce, professor emeritus of computer science, co-authored a paper, “The Importance of Being Eelco,” for the Eelco Visser Commemorative Symposium in Delft, the Netherlands, on April 5.

Bruce’s former students and colleagues organized a workshop, BruceFest, at Pomona to celebrate his retirement. The workshop featured talks on topics related to his research in computer science and reminiscences by participants both in person and via Zoom.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave an invited virtual lecture, “Lu Xun, Translations, and Radical Art,” on April 28 sponsored by the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Chengchi University.

Bob Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, and colleagues from the Royal Ontario Museum published the first report of a new species of fossil from the Burgess Shale in the paper “First record of growth patterns in a Cambrian annelid” in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Working with colleagues, he also published the paper “Conulariid soft parts replicated in silica from the Scotch Grove Formation (lower Middle Silurian) of east-central Iowa” in the Journal of Paleontology.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gave a panel presentation as part of the virtual workshop “Mentoring Undergraduate Research in STEM” for the NSF ASCEND Postdoctoral Scholars on April 10.

Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, visiting assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, participated in the seminar Comparative Approaches to 21st-Century Anglophone Holocaust Literature held at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London (UK). She presented a paper titled “Writing the Unknown: Navigating Knowledge, Ignorance, and Forgetting in Third-generation Memoirs.”

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and Chuck Taylor, professor of chemistry, with collaborators at the University of Oregon, MIT, New York University and UCSD published “The nematode worm C. elegans chooses between bacterial foods as if maximizing economic utility” in Elife on April 25.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, joined the board of directors for the UCLA Curtis Center for Mathematics. Housed on UCLA’s campus, the Curtis Center works to provide an increasing number of K-12 students access to rigorous and engaging mathematical activity that equally emphasizes understanding, relevance and fluency.

Goins was invited to give a virtual presentation for the class Math 290: Special Topics in the History of Mathematics at Duke University on April 14. He gave a talk titled “Mentoring that Uplifts Amidst Circumstances that Destroy: Claytor, Malone-Mayes, and the True Legacy of R. L. Moore.”

Goins was the keynote speaker for the inaugural Diversity in Sciences Careers Panel at San Diego State University on April 28. The event was sponsored by SDSU’s College of Sciences Student Success Center. Goins gave a talk titled “Why You Should Consider Doctoral Education and the Professoriate” to SDSU undergraduates, mostly underrepresented and first generation, to inspire them to pursue careers in STEM.

Goins gave invited addresses at several section meetings for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). As the chair of the MAA Congress and a member of MAA’s board of directors, he was invited to give keynote addresses at the Kentucky Section (KYMAA) 2023 Annual Meeting at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky, on April 1; the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware (EPaDel) Spring 2023 Section Meeting at Penn State Brandywine in Media, Pennsylvania, on April 15; the Rocky Mountain Section Spring 2023 Meeting at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, from April 21-22; and the Maryland-District of Columbia-Virginia Spring 2023 Section Meeting at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia, on April 29. The talks varied from “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy” to “Growing MADDER: Building the ‘Mathematicians of the African Diaspora Database's Ensemble of Researchers’” to “Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience (PRiME): Reflections on a Research Learning Community.”

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, presented at the first-ever City Summit of the Americas organized by the U.S. Department of State in Denver on April 28. She presented on city-level gender equity indicators developed in her Spring 2021 experiential learning task force course. The indicators have been adopted and utilized by the City Hub and Network on Gender Equity (CHANGE)–a network of global cities (Barcelona, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Freetown, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mexico City, Tokyo) committed to actualizing gender equity at the local level.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a talk titled “Math . . . with a Conscience?” at the San Marcos Informal Mathematics In-person Colloquium, held at California State University San Marcos on April 13.

Jill Knox, lecturer in theatre, guest starred as Donna, a patient in couples therapy with very vivid dreams, in episode five of Shrinking on Apple+. She appeared opposite Jessica Williams and her real-life husband Keith Powell.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, with Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered a panel presentation titled “Corpus-informed CSL teaching and learning: The case of collocations” at the 2023 Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) Annual Conference. Lang gave an individual presentation titled “Collocations and affective valences: Teaching existential and presentative constructions” on the panel.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published the article titled "Yoon Suk-yeol’s Visits to Japan and the United States: A Japanese Perspective” with The Asan Forum on April 18.

On April 24, Le co-published an article titled “Japan-South Korea Deal on Forced Labor Leaves Many Questions Unresolved” with Hanah Park ’25 and Hina Tanabe ’23.

Le’s book Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century was reviewed in a book roundtable in The National Bureau of Asia Research's journal Asia Policy on April 26. The book also received honorable mention for the best book award from the International Studies Association’ International Security Studies Section at this year’s annual conference.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed in Washington D.C. on April 1 as one of the Pressenda Chamber Players. She played a program of piano quartets (violin, viola, cello and piano) on a chamber music series at the Washington Conservatory of Music.

Lee participated in the 2023 Hear Now Music Festival of Los Angeles Composers in mid-April, playing an electro-acoustic chamber work by Dante De Silva.

Lee played harpsichord on a Jacaranda music series concert in April, presenting a work by Gabriella Smith.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and dance and Asian American studies, published “Diversity Dancing 101” in a special volume of the Dance Studies Association’s journal Conversations Across the Field of Dance: Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence, edited by SanSan Kwan and Yutian Wong

Lu produced, co-conducted with Ricardo Pérez González and acted in two anti-bullying/bystander intervention performances presented by LAPlayback Theatre Company for fourth grade students at Pacific Elementary School in Manhattan Beach, California. These performances were supported by the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, Beach Cities Health District and the JKW Foundation.

Lu danced Panji Semirang with Gamelan Burat Wangi at the 50th anniversary celebration at CalArts World Music Festival under the direction of I Nyoman Wenten and Nanik Wenten.

Lu received a MAP Fund microgrant. Micrograntees were chosen by 2022 MAP grantees to receive an unrestricted $1,000 grant.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was an invited participant the week of April 10 at a conference on “Liberalism and Postliberalism” at the University of Texas, Austin. The conference was co-sponsored by UT Austin's Civitas Institute and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, was interviewed about his new book Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril at the San Antonio Book Festival on April 15. The book was also featured at the Los Angeles Book Festival on April 22 and was the subject of a lengthy article, “Think Like a Watershed: An Interview with Environmental Historian Char Miller,” in Boom California on April 19.

Miller’s essay “Desert” on Milford Zornes’ “Mohave,” 1940, appears in In Here: Conversations on Solitude published by Benton Museum of Art.

Miller’s insights about the spatial development of San Antonio, Texas, were the focus of a three-part series published in the San Antonio Express-News from April 14-28.

Miller’s work as an adviser and mentor appeared on the podcast College Knowledge on April 21.

Miller delivered “Crisis Management: Conflict, Controversy, and Leadership in Forest Service History” to the US Forest Service’s Middle Leadership Program in Davis, California, and Ogden, Utah.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review of a volume of essays in his field of specialization, literary olfactory interconnections. He reviewed Smell and Social Life: Aspects of English, French and German Literature, edited by Katharina Herold and Frank Krause, in Comparative Critical Studies.

Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, will have his play How did Edward Lose His Accent? done as a workshop production at Fullerton College.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics, chaired two panels and delivered papers on each at the Western Political Science Association Conference in San Francisco from April 6-8. The first panel was a roundtable on Osman Balkan’s book Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe, and the second was a memorial panel on the life and work of political theorist Tracy B. Strong.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, published a new monograph, Folk Dance and the Creation of National Identities: Staging the Folk (Palgrave Macmillan).

Shay chaired and hosted the first Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian Dance Conference that had over thirty papers, panels, keynote speeches and movement workshops from this vast area from a wide array of nations (U.S., Canada, U.K., Norway, Poland, Turkey, Morocco, Tajikistan and Brazil). Bengisu Bulur ’26, Necdet Canim ’25 and Mayra Coruh ’26 formed a panel on how Ataturk and his colleagues utilized the Anatolian dialect of Turkish to create a new standard Turkish language and promoted folk dance, music and regional folk costumes to create a new, modern Turkish Republican identity in the ashes of the former Ottoman Empire. The Music Department sponsored a concert by the UC Santa Barbara Middle Eastern Music and Dance Ensemble to perform during the conference April 15.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, chair of English and E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities, had her poem “Apologia” featured on the podcast The Slowdown, hosted by poet Major Jackson, on April 21.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published several opinion pieces: “Our misplaced faith in AI is turning the internet into a cesspool of misinformation and spam” (Salon, April 22), “A World Without Work? Here We Go Again” (MindMatters, April 24) and “ChatGPT and its ilk are still ‘fake’ intelligence” (Salon, April 30).

Smith’s book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science was reviewed by David Wineberg, The Straight Dope: “The book is great fun. It’s lovely to watch Smith demolish the fraud in every medium.” An excerpt on using data mining to predict bitcoin prices was published at RetractionWatch, and Smith was interviewed on The Silicon Valley Insider show.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, professor of English and gender and women’s studies, was a finalist for a James Beard 2023 Media Award in the category of “personal essay without recipes” for her essay “On Boba” in The LARB Quarterly of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ken Wolf, John Sutton Miner Professor of History and professor of classics, led a 90-minute seminar in the “Religion and Writing” series at Columbia University on April 25. The title of the seminar was “How not to Read the Earliest Latin Life of Muhammad.”

Wolf gave lectures on contemporary historiographical problems in medieval Spanish history in conjunction with his latest alumni travel gig in Spain (his thirteenth since 1999), this one centered in the Grazalema National Forest of southern Andalucía.

Feng Xiao, associated professor of Chinese, gave a presentation for the panel discussion titled “Corpus-informed CFL Teaching and Learning: The Case of Collocations” at the 2023 Chinese Language Teachers Association Annual Conference in Washington D.C. The panel was organized by Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese. Xiao also gave a presentation titled “Application of the N-gram Language Model in Chinese Instruction” for a panel about computer-assisted language learning at the conference. This panel was organized by colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University and Tulane University.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, gave a lecture titled “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1880–2020” at Shippensburg University and at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park. Both lectures were sponsored by the Distinguished Speakers Bureau of the Association for Asian Studies. The CIA will use Yamashita’s lecture in its Japanese concentration.

Jack Abecassis, Edwin Sexton & Edna Patrick Smith Professor of French, gave a plenary talk at Le Séminaire Houellebecq, Université Paris Nanterre, on March 15, titled “Crises, apocalypses et post-humanité dans La possibilité d’une île de Michel Houellebecq.”

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, was an invited speaker at the 2023 Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms Gordon Conference in Galveston, Texas. His talk centered on a computational collaboration between his research lab and that of Maduka Ogba (Chapman University). The work focused on how calcium activates sulfur-fluoride compounds to make sulfur-nitrogen (S–N) bonds. These bond connections used a broad set of drug targets including sulfonamides—a key class of compounds used as antibiotics and anti-seizure medications.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at Whitman College.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented a paper titled “Dismemberment and Devotion: Christ, Orpheus, and Viol Consort Mysticism in Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri (BuxWV 75)” at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, held March 2–4 at Duke University.

Bandy led two daylong workshops for regional chapters of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (VdGSA): one for Pacific Northwest Viols (March 11, Seattle) handling historical musical rhetoric and string articulation, and the other jointly for SoCal Viols and Los Angeles Baroque (March 18, South Pasadena, California) treating 17th-century German Baroque counterpoint symbolism and philosophy in works by Schelle, Kuhnau and Theile.

On March 24 and 25 in San Diego and Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, Bandy performed with Bach Collegium San Diego in San Diego County’s first historically informed, period-instrument production of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, published an article titled “From ‘Thoughts on March 8’ to ‘Gap’ and ‘The Sufferings of Liping’: Mate Choice and Marriage in the Work of Three Yan’an Authors,” in Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, gave a lecture on “Handel and Music at Cannons” for the patrons of the London Handel Festival in the Chapel of The Charterhouse in London on March 11.

On March 24, Beeks performed as a harpsichordist with his Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble colleagues—violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music and chair of music, and cellist Roger Lebow, together with guest cellist Eva Lymenstull—at a Friday Noon Concert of music by Boismortier, Handel and Locatelli in Lyman Hall at Pomona College.

Alexa Block, associate director of news and strategic content in the Office of Communications, served as a plenary speaker at the 2023 CASE Social Media and Community Conference in Denver on March 30. Her presentation, “We Are All Content Creators,” was about how to empower communications professionals to create content for social media platforms.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “A Neglected Topos in Behavioural Normative Economics: The Opportunity and Process Aspect of Freedom” in Behavioral Public Policy on March 8.

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis, gave an address at the American Association of Geographers Conference in Denver as part of the American Association of Geographers President’s Plenary–Toward More Just Geographies on March 24, where he spoke on creating a more just classroom and shared his experience through his Just! GIS class.

Douglass-Jaimes gave a talk as part of the Health Bridges health equity speaker series on March 9, where he presented on his work mapping COVID-19 cases in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in a talk titled: “#DadosSalvamVidas: a COVID dashboard case study, building a bridge across the digital divide with community mapping in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.”

Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies and chair of media studies, was honored by Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) at a Fulbright Award Recognition Ceremony in South Pasadena, California, on March 15. Chu also bestowed Friedlander a Congressional Recognition Award at the ceremony.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, gave an hour-long plenary address, “What can chicken McNuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the 39th Southeastern Analysis Meeting (SEAM) at Clemson University on March 10 and at the UC San Diego Functional Analysis Seminar on March 14.

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, published the coauthored article “Foreign agents or agents of justice? Private foundations, backlash against non-governmental organizations, and international human rights litigation” in Law & Society Review.

Haddad was an invited participant at the workshop “Global Change on a Local Stage” at Occidental College on March 2, which brought together practitioners, activists and academics working on human rights at the sub-national level.

Haddad presented the co-authored paper “Los Angeles and the UN Sustainable Development Goals” on the panel “Cities and Global Governance,” which she co-organized and co-chaired at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in Montreal from March 15-18. She also spoke on the panel honoring Wayne Sandholtz, the awardee of the distinguished scholar award for human rights.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the paper “The ‘Right to a Complete Life’: The Protracted Fight of the Dominican Feminist Movement” at the virtual Biannual Conference of the Dominican Studies Association (DSA).

Hernández-Medina participated as a panelist in a session with graduate students on “Navigating the Conflicts Around Scholar Activism” at the Winter Meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in New Orleans, co-sponsored by the SWS Student Caucus and Academic Justice Committee. She also co-organized the Feminists of Color Reception and attended the SWS first chairs planning retreat in her role as the outgoing co-chair of the women and non-binary people of color committee Sister-to-Sister.

On March 9, Hernández-Medina presented the paper “Take Your Rosaries out of Our Ovaries: The Fight for Women’s Right to Choose in the Dominican Republic” at the International Women’s Day Symposium organized by the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz.

On March 24, Hernández-Medina moderated the second panel of the conversation “Economies of Motherhood: Reproductive Justice in a Globalizing World,” co-sponsored by the Intercollegiate Feminist Center for Teaching, Research, and Engagement and the Pulitzer Center at Scripps College.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with Rachael Lund of Michigan State University, led a discussion on ChatGPT and other AI tools in the context of numeracy and numeracy education March 28. This event was organized by the National Numeracy Network.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article titled “Japan, South Korea must addressing mounting ‘debt’ of historical atrocities” with the United States Institute of Peace.

Le was interviewed for an article in the Japan Times about the recent Japan-South Korea forced laborers agreement.

Christy McCarthy, assistant director of family giving, was selected for a cohort with the Writing Workshops Organization for a six-day course in Paris in summer 2023.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, gave a talk titled “The Abolition of Democracy” on March 25 at a conference celebrating the 80th anniversary of the publication of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. The conference at Calvin University was hosted by The Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy.

On March 20, McWilliams gave a talk on partisan dealignment to the Claremont High School Democratic Club.

McWilliams’s review of You Mean It Or You Don't: James Baldwin's Radical Challenge by Adam Hollowell and Jamie McGhee was published in the journal American Political Thought.

McWilliams was invited to join the editorial search committee for the American Political Science Review. The committee is charged with selecting the next editorial team for the APSR, which is political science’s premier scholarly research journal.

Wallace Meyer, director of the Robert J. Bernard Field Station, Andre Cavalcanti, professor of biology, and collaborators in Hawaii have been awarded $1,595,518 in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation for conservation science and action supporting threatened and endangered Hawaiian land snails.

Meyer, with Jon Moore, associate professor of biology, and Savanah Bird ’18, published an article titled “An illusion of barriers to gene flow in suburban coyotes (Canis latrans): spatial and temporal population structure across a fragmented landscape in southern California” in the journal Diversity.

Thomas Moore, professor of physics, was recognized by IOP Publishing as a 2022 outstanding reviewer for European Journal of Physics. Outstanding reviewers are selected by the journal’s editors based on the quality, quantity and timeliness of their reviews.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, was awarded the Vera C. Rubin distinguished visiting professorship by UC Santa Cruz. Moreno also delivered a colloquium titled “Galaxies lacking dark matter” and facilitated a workshop titled “Decolonizing the astronomy classroom.”

Moreno published three articles: “Molecular gas and star formation in nearby starburst galaxy mergers” in the Astrophysical Journal (co-author: Angela Twum ’18); “FIREbox: Simulating galaxies at high dynamic range in a cosmological volume” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; and “Streams on FIRE: Populations of detectable stellar streams in the Milky Way and FIRE” in the Astrophysical Journal.

As part of the Wide-Field Spectroscopy vs Galaxy Formation Theory conference at the Biosphere 2 (near Tucson, Arizona), Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “Galaxies lacking dark matter,” led a discussion on “Distinguishing effects of feedback on galaxies” and facilitated an “inclusive astronomy” town hall.

Moreno delivered the Theoretical Astrophysics Colloquium on “Galaxies lacking dark matter” at the University of Arizona.

Cozy Enrique NAKADA, language resident at Oldenborg Center, gave a presentation, “Ikiga nmaritoti, inagu nmaritoti ~ Queering Okinawan language revitalisation ~” at the AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) conference, in Portland, Oregon, March 18-22.

Lina Patel, lecturer in theatre, served as a judge for Hollywood Health and Society’s Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest, which awards $20,000 to a winning TV script that envisions a future society that is sustainable, equitable and where AI-driven technology is used to benefit humanity. She was also a judge for acting auditions for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, the largest national college theatre festival in the country.

Patel is currently working with Ammunition Theatre Company and East West Players on two new full-length plays.

On television, Patel created and is developing a scripted drama series for BET+ where law enforcement meets mental health.

Adam Pearson, associate professor of psychological science, gave an invited keynote titled “Bias as a barrier to climate justice: Insights from the lab and the field” at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology Sustainability Preconference.

Pearson’s collaborator and the executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, Jonathon Schuldt, briefed Congressional staff on their research on climate change and U.S. public opinion at an event organized by the nonpartisan Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

An article on recently published op-ed writing produced in Pearson’s interdisciplinary cross-campus climate science course was featured in the Harvey Mudd College News.

Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, acted in the short film “Marque Dos” as part of the Netflix and Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Afro-Latinx Fellowship program. Rodriguez-Velez also starred in the short film “Milquetoast,” which was directed by Cesar Carmona in a collaboration with Venture Work Film and East Los Angeles College.

Rodriguez-Velez’s short film “MEGAGrindr” was chosen as an official selection in the Latino & Native American Film Festival. Rodriguez-Velez wrote/directed/acted in “Purple Heels Diary” for the OutFest Fusion QTBIPOC Film Festival One Minute Film Competition, and it was screened as part of the finalists’ films at the festival finale.

Rodriguez-Velez returned as a special co-host of the award-winning TAGS Podcast, a podcast dealing with hot topics in the LGBTQ+ communities.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, presented her co-edited book, Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood, published by Routledge, at a special online meeting of the international research group Childhood in Eastern Europe and Russia (ChEER), affiliated with the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies on March 20.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave the presentation “My Hidden Childhood and more in World War II Occupied France” on March 27 at Garey High School in Pomona, California.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had “Bird-Eye View,” a poem about the Chukar bird, appear in Orion magazine. This feature is excerpted from Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield and published by Mountaineers Books.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, was a co-author of a paper on the relationship between exercise habits and adverse outcomes from COVID infections, Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups, in American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

Smith’s book, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, was No. 10 on the Wall Street Journal’s list of top 10 best-selling eBooks and No. 1 on Amazon’s list of best-selling books in Probability & Statistics, Data Mining, and Psychology Statistics.

Smith’s book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, was endorsed by Carl T. Bergstrom, author of Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Digital World. Distrust was reviewed by Abby Ohlheiser, Washington Post (March 23); Marshal Zeringue, Campaign for the American Reader (March 23); Hillary Lamb, Engineering & Technology (March 23) and Tina Panik, Library Journal (March 23).

Smith was interviewed by Ellen Glover, “What Is the Eliza Effect?” (Builtin, March 15) and by Jane Wollman Rusoff, “ChatGPT Use Could Spell Disaster for Advisors” (ThinkAdvisor, March 31); had a podcast interview with Sam Hankin on Large Language Models (The Avid Reader, March 24) and had a podcast debate with Jeff Schatten of Washington and Lee University about the effect of ChatGPT on education (Theory of Change, March 25).

Smith wrote several opinion pieces: “Text Generators, Education, and Critical Thinking: an Update” (MindMatters, March 1); “Learning to write and speak, writing and speaking to learn” (MindMatters, March 6); “Silicon Valley Bank survived the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, but SVB met its match in Powell’s hawkish Fed” (MarketWatch, March 10); “‘Prevent defense’ may work in football, but playing it safe isn’t a game winner for retirement investors” (MarketWatch, March 13); “Don't believe the hype: why ChatGPT is not the ‘holy grail’ of AI research” (Salon, March 19); “Inside SVB’s bankruptcy: startup company losses have threatened the financial system for years” (MarketWatch, March 20); “The Page 99 Test of Distrust” (Campaign for the American Reader, March 23); “A Graph Can Tell a Story—Sometimes it’s an Illusion” (MindMatters, March 27) and “An Illusion of Emergence Part 2” (MindMatters, March 31).

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, presented a talk, “Degradation Pathways of Screen-Printed Mesoporous Carbon Perovskite Solar Cells,” on research done with his students Kylie Thompson ’22, Dan Tan ’23 and Adam Dvorak ’21 at the MATSUS23 Materials for Sustainable Development Conference held in Valencia, Spain, on March 8. The presentation closed the two-day panel on Metal Halide Perovskites: Fundamental Approaches and Technological Challenges.

Feng Xiao, associated professor of Chinese, and Kun Nie, visiting instructor of Chinese, co-authored a book chapter titled “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on American Students’ Willingness to Study Abroad” in the book Crossing Boundaries in Research, Understanding, and Improving Language Education, edited by D. Zhang & R. Miller and published by Springer: Educational Linguistics. They also published another book chapter titled “Can You Insist on Your Invitation after Being Refused?—Cross-Cultural Differences between China and U.S.” in Tradition and Transition: Teaching Chinese Culture Overseas, edited by G. Liu & H. Wang and published by Peking University Press.

Xiao gave an invited talk titled “Chinese Elements in the Western Culture” at University of Northern Georgia for the Language Flagship Program (a federally funded program).

Xiao gave an invited talk at a forum on Opportunities and Challenges Fueled by ChatGPT. The forum was co-organized by Chinese Teachers Association in the U.S. and Beijing Language and Culture University.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered a lecture titled “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1860-2020” at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Yamashita’s “Memories of the Aloha Team,” a chapter from his memoir Tigers Lost in Los Angeles, appeared on March 17 in an LAist series, “On Being American,” curated by Leslie Berestein Rojas.

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a poster presentation at the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, held March 25-28 in San Francisco. Cognitive science major Nathaniel Braswell ’23 presented his senior thesis research titled “Investigating the dynamic influences of bilingual language regulation and physiological regulation on domain-general cognitive control.”

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave two research seminars about his work with Claremont Colleges students: at the Houk-Jung Organic Symposium at UCLA and at San Diego State University. The talks featured research in the Ball lab centered around developing new reactions that add sulfur into organic molecules. These sulfur-based molecules are important targets in drug candidates, agrochemicals, molecular biology and material chemistry.

Ball was featured in an article in Cell Reports Physical Sciences titled “Conduction Research at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions.” The “Voices” article features an invited international group of principal investigators in science who conduct research with undergraduates and their comments on the opportunities and challenges of conducting research at a PUI.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, published the article “‘With the base Viall placed between my Thighes’: musical instruments and sexual subtext in Titian’s Venus with musician series” in the journal Early Music (Oxford University Press).

As a director of the early music ensemble Artifex Consort, Bandy presented a lecture-performance about symbolism and alchemical puzzle-canons titled “Mercurial Multimedia: Chasing Music and Image in Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1617)” at the Benton Museum of Art’s Captured Vision: Art/Science Colloquium on February 23.

Bandy programmed, directed and played viola da gamba in Artifex Consort’s out-of-state debut with their program “Feste Champêtre: Courtly Delicacies for Viols, Rustic and Refined” on the Taylor Johnston Early Music Series at Michigan State University on February 28. This project featured virtuosic French Baroque viol music from Marin Marais’s Pièces de Viole Livre IV (1717), including a new harpsichord transcription by Joseph Gascho (University of Michigan).

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented a paper on “The Use of Cannons Material in Handel’s Op.2 Trio Sonatas” at the American Handel Society Conference held at Indiana University in Bloomington from February 24-26.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper, “Cántaro, cuenco, hueco: Multistable Poetics and Supplementary Material in José Ángel Valente’s ‘Container’ Poems,” at the 50th Annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, held online through the University of Louisville on February 21.

Cahill was invited as a guest lecturer for the course “Spain and the Holocaust” at Technological University, Dublin, on February 27, where he presented “Witnessing Evil in Marifé Santiago Bolaños’s Nos mira la piedad desde las alambradas (2013)” online.

Karla Cordova, visiting assistant professor of economics, participated in the enCOREage workshop hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from February 16-18.

Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, published a piece on the impact of the band Blondie in The Atlantic on February 2.

Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, with colleagues at Amherst, Wellesley and Villanova, published a book, Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders, with Oxford University Press.

Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies and chair of media studies, published “Hoping Against Hope: Žižek, Jouissance, and the Impossible” in Žižek Responds! (edited by Dominik Finkelde and Todd McGowan and published by Bloomsbury). Žižek Responds! combines philosophers and theorists engaging with Žižek’s philosophy followed by responses from Žižek himself.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, published a new book, Operator Theory by Example (with Javad Mashreghi and William T. Ross), published by Oxford University Press.

Garcia gave an hour-long talk, “Undergraduate Research: Choosing Problems and Getting Published,” at the Conference on Strengthening Community in Research Mathematics at Pomona College on February 17.

Melissa Givens, assistant professor of music, performed at “Music at Noon” for Repertory Opera Company with Twyla Meyer, piano, at Trinity United Methodist Church in Pomona on February 22. Joshua Suh ’23, tenor, also performed. The recital included the local premiere of “Black: My People” from the song cycle Shades of Hues by Sylvia T. Hollifield.

Ernie González, Jr., visiting assistant professor of theatre, served as a panel judge for the summer college internship program at the Academy of Television of Arts and Sciences in the categories of directing, casting, comedy writing, and new media from February 21 to March 7. Students nationwide apply for these highly competitive and paid opportunities to receive direct mentorship and access to top studios, networks and production companies.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with colleagues Feryal Alayont and Lerna Pehlivan, published an article titled “Analysis of Calculus Textbook Problems via Bloom’s Taxonomy” in PRIMUS.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, attended the 50th Pacific Seabird Group meeting in La Jolla, California, along with five current Pomona College students. Karnovsky chaired two sessions, “Foraging” and “Plagues, Pestilence and Cats,” and served as a judge of non-Pomona student presentations and posters. Bella Ah-Moo ’25, Lucas Florsheim ’24, Eliana Prosnitz ’24 and Eli Taub ’25, along with co-authors Leilani Fowlke, Lindsay Young and Karnovsky, presented the poster, “Foraging in a Plastic Ocean: Characterization of Natural and Non-Natural Diet Items Ingested by Laysan Albatross.” Jacob Ligorria ’23 presented part of his senior thesis in the poster, “Hake, Herring or Saury? Common Terns Use Distinct Foraging Areas for Different Fish in the Gulf of Maine” with co-authors Keenan Yakola and Karnovsky. Ligorria won honorable mention for best undergraduate student poster.

Gary Kates, H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and professor of history, had his book The Books That Made the European Enlightenment reviewed by author David Wootton. The review was featured on the front page of Arts and Letters Daily, and Wootton writes: “Gary Kates’s important book….is not a history of ideas, nor book history, nor cultural history, nor a study in reception. It is, in parts, all of these, but much more than the sum of its parts….Scholars will have much to learn from this book; more importantly, it now represents the best introduction to the Enlightenment. It also (quietly) provides an effective refutation of the widespread postmodern belief that the Enlightenment stands for imperialism, patriarchy and cold-blooded, scientific rationalism.”

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was awarded the James Laughton Ken Kesey Fellowship from the University of Oregon for her current project on the 1960s counterculture.

On February 25, McWilliams Barndt spoke on a panel titled “What Can Be Done? Where do we go from here? The Case for Liberal Education on Campus, the Truly Free Exchange of Ideas, and Academic Freedom” as part of a conference on “Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American Society” at the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. The conference was also recorded for broadcast on Arizona PBS.

In February, McWilliams Barndt joined the academic council of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. The academic council works to build and sustain a leadership cadre of distinguished scholars in the fields of American political thought and history and to advise the board and staff of the Jack Miller Center on its programs and connections with rising scholars. McWilliams Barndt also joined the council of advisors for The Vital Center, a new publication that aims to promote and explore liberal ideas through commentary on politics, culture, history, philosophy, religion, foreign affairs and other topics.

Wallace Meyer, director of the Bernard Field Station, with Andre Cavalcanti, professor of biology, EJ Crane, professor of biology, Pomona students and collaborators in Hawaii, published an article titled “The trail less traveled: Envisioning a new approach to identifying key food resources for threatened Hawaiian arboreal snails.”

Meyer was invited to and attended the Hawaiian governor’s proclamation of 2023 as year of the Kāhuli (snail) because of his research contributions to protecting snail diversity in Hawaii.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, was interviewed on several podcasts. His book West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement was the subject of the New Books on the American West podcast. His book Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril was also the focus of a New Books Network podcast.

West Side Rising received a 2023 Book Award from the San Antonio Conservation Society.

Miller delivered talks on Natural Consequences to the Pomona College class of 1958; at Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Walnut Creek, California; to the Mono Basin Historical Society; and at Oregon Literary Arts. He spoke on “Why Open Access? Because.” to the 10th anniversary celebrations of Scholarship@Claremont at the Claremont Colleges Library.

Nivia Montenegro, professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, published a piece about composer Aurelio de la Vega in Diario de Cuba (digital publication) on February 12.

An opinion piece by Duanel Diaz Infante about the second, revised edition of Libro de Arenas, co-edited by Montenegro, titled “Canon Arenas,” appeared in El Estornudo.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, was selected to be the 2023-2024 IDEA Scholar at the Flatiron Institute (Simons Foundation).

Moreno delivered a talk entitled “Galaxies lacking dark matter” at the International Astronomy Union Symposium (IAUS 377) meeting on “Early disk galaxy formation from JWST to the Milky Way” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Kendra Pintor, manager of communications & digital media at the Career Development Office, had her short story “The Harvester” published by Fast Flesh Literary Journal. This was her third fiction piece to be accepted for publication.

Maddalena Poli, Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies, was invited to present her research on representations of ruler-minister interactions at the Tang Center for Early China, Columbia University. On February 10, she presented her paper “Crafting the past. The reconstitution of ‘Command to Yue’ 說命 in the Shangshu 尚書and the fashioning of the ruler-minister relationship in ancient China,” which will appear in a forthcoming volume.

Carolyn Ratteray, associate professor of theatre, is the actor, writer and director of her pilot titled “(UN)CLAIMED,” which was just accepted into the London Lesbian Film Festival in Canada. This follows a successful run of this project at Outfest, Urbanworld, Downtown LA Film Festival, Seattle Queer Film Festival, aGLIFF, Atlanta Black Pride Film Festival and the Baltimore International Film Festival.

Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, is currently presenting his original play Daddy Date at the Frida Kahlo Festival. Rodriguez-Velez also directed and acted in Daddy Date.

Rodriguez-Velez appeared as a special co-host on TAGS podcast. TAGS is an award-winning podcast that deals with topics affecting the LGBT+ culture and its intersectionalities.

Rodriguez-Velez’s short film MEGAGrindr achieved Official Selection status at the Kalakari Film Festival.

Rosalía Romero, assistant professor of art history, inaugurated the exhibitions Land of Milk & Honey and MexiCali Biennial: Art, Action, Exchanges at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California. The exhibition showcases the work of 35 contemporary artists from California and Baja California and invited artistic reflection on agricultural practices in the region. The exhibitions will be on view until May 28. Support for the project came from the Mellon Foundation, California Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Sustaining Public Engagement Grant.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, co-edited a volume of scholarly articles, Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood, published by Routledge. The volume examines Russian childhood as a philosophical, literary and visual category. Her introduction to this volume is titled “The World of Russian Childhood.”

Adolfo Rumbos, Joseph N. Fiske Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, published an article in Results in Applied Mathematics with co-authors Noah Benjamin ’23 and Leandro Recôva (Cal Poly Pomona). Rumbos presented this joint work at the Applied Mathematics Seminar at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, on February 13. The title of the presentation was “Existence and multiplicity of periodic solutions for a second-order ODE at resonance with an Ahmad–Lazer–Paul condition.”

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave a presentation, “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France,” at Mt. San Antonio Gardens in Pomona, California, on February 22.

Mark Sbertole, technical support and facilities manager of biology, led Pomona College through the successful process of becoming certified by The Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International (AAALAC). This certification establishes that the highest level of humane care is given to vertebrates used in teaching and research including lab animals, chickens at the farm and animals observed during field studies.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics, had his feature film screenplay Jone named as a quarter finalist in the 2023 Atlanta Screenwriting Competition.

Seery played baritone saxophone in the City of Pomona Concert Band Winter Concert on February 24 in Pomona, California.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published a brief report with her Claremont Mckenna College colleague Stacey N. Doan and others titled “A relational savoring intervention predicts higher levels of adherence to COVID-19 health recommendations” in Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, had his book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science published by Oxford University Press, his fourth OUP book in the past five years.

Smith was interviewed on February 8 by The Daily Beast about ChatGPT, was quoted extensively on February 9 in Yardeni Research, “Financials, Cruise Lines & AI Search,” about the limitations of GPT3 and wrote four opinion pieces: “Basic Growth Rates Are a Sign That Apple Remains a Good Long-Term Buy” (RealClearMarkets, February 9); “AI chatbots are having their ‘tulip mania’ moment” (Salon, February 21); “Let’s Take the ‘I’ Out of AI” (MindMatters, February 27) and “If you’re investing in AI stocks, watch out for these revenue and earning tricks” (MarketWatch, February 27).

Keri Wilson, visiting assistant professor of biology, published a review in the Journal of Neuroendocrinology titled “The Parental Umwelt: Effects of Parenthood on Sensory Processing in Rodents,” which details how the senses of smell, hearing and touch change as a result of becoming a parent.

Wilson was a co-author on an article in Animal Behaviour titled “Fatherhood increases attraction to sensory stimuli from unrelated pups in male California mice, Peromyscus californicus.”