Archived Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

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.”

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, published a review in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. This review highlights strategies to make sulfur(VI) fluorides–an emerging class of molecules in organic chemistry–and describes their application in molecular biology and medicinal chemistry. This was a collaboration with Pfizer research fellow Christopher am Ende and his group. The two lead authors are recent Pomona graduates: Sabrina Carneiro ’21, chemistry Ph.D. candidate at University of Michigan, and Samuel Khasnavis ’21, chemistry Ph.D. student at Stanford University.

The Ball group’s recent paper, “Facile synthesis of sulfonyl fluorides from sulfonic acids,” in Chemical Communications was featured on the journal cover.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at the University of Central Florida’s Department of Chemistry.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, was invited by On The Edge to serve as a panelist at the CEPA (Communication, Education and Public Awareness) Fair as part of the United Nations Biodiversity Convention, COP15. Chang discussed collaborative work developing a Nature Attention and Sentiment Tracker to help conservation advocates evaluate public perceptions of biodiversity at scale.

Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, had “The Art of Fostering Collegiality,” an excerpt from his book How to Chair a Department, published in Times Higher Education (London) on January 26. Another chapter was adapted and published as “Inviting Students into Your Department” in Inside Higher Ed.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, and Alexa Stanton ’20 won the 2020/2021 Mark Blaug Prize in Philosophy and Economics for their paper “I Choose for Myself, Therefore I Am: The Contours of Existentialist Behavioral Economics.”

Bob Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, with colleagues from Canada, Korea and France, published the article Interpreting Fossilized Nervous Tissues in the journal BioEssays.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, participated in a two-day virtual workshop on “Supporting Undergraduate Institutions in Technology and Entrepreneurship Development,” funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Gerstein chaired one session and served as reporter for another.

Gerstein organized a database of 19,000 external awards received from 2008 to 2022 at more than 200 of the subscribing campuses of the Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) collaboratory and presented an initial summary of the data at a CLASP virtual meeting.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, published an editorial titled “Artificial Intelligence, Basic Skills, and Quantitative Literacy” in Numeracy, the flagship journal of the National Numeracy Network.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave a presentation titled “The strong, the capable, the leftover, and the tough: Female labels reflect priorities of development in post-reform China” at the third annual Hawaii International Conference on Chinese Studies.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article titled “Commentary | A Japanese Security Sea Change? Let’s See Change First” in Critical Asian Studies on January 4.

On January 15, Le provided commentary for Vox on recent changes in Japanese defense spending.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and dance and Asian American studies, acted in a Playback Theatre Performance for Mary’s Center staff with Pangea Playback Theatre Company, directed by Hannah K. Fox for Dailey Innovations on Zoom on January 23.

Miriam Merrill, director of athletics and professor of physical education, served as a panelist at the 2023 NCAA Convention, discussing best practices for hiring and retaining administrators and coaches of color.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, participated on a panel on mentoring practices for the 21st annual National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows (AAPF) Symposium.

Moreno was a panelist for NASA’s AWESOM (Astrophysics With Equity: Surmounting Obstacles to Membership) Science Analysis Group splinter session at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, presented “La Puente Histories, Inequalities, and Resistance” to K-12 educators and other community members as part of the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District’s Intersectional Ethnic Studies Learning Partners on January 21.

Joseph C. Osborn, assistant professor of computer science, was awarded a Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities with Eric Kaltman, his collaborator at CSU Channel Islands. This award will fund the development of software tools supporting scholarship and citation of interactive software, including video games.

Alexandra Papoutsaki, assistant professor of computer science, co-authored an article titled “Webcam-based eye tracking to detect mind wandering and comprehension errors” in the Behavior Research Methods journal.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art, published the book Hmong in Transition: Kou Chang's Story by Lulu Press. Kou Chang tells his story from the time he was born in war-torn Laos, escaping across the Mekong River, living for 12 years in refugee camps in Thailand and finally moving throughout the United States trying to find stable employment.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a book review of Jehanne Dubrow’s Taste: A Book of Small Bites in The European Legacy.

Nikia Smith Robert, Fred and Dorothy Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, joined NYU’s faculty resource network in Puerto Rico at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon to teach faculty from across the country on abolitionist teaching, including decarcerating pedagogies, policies and practices. The title of the one-week-intensive was “Liberating Pedagogies: Building Abolitionist Sanctuaries in Education.” Robert worked with local faculty with experience in prison education and invited a guest speaker, Ilka Cruz-Rosario, who is a returning citizen and among the first to graduate (with honors) from University of Puerto Rico while incarcerated. The course was featured in an article in Puerto Rico’s newspaper, El Nuevo Día.

Robert joined a Henry Luce funded research cohort in New York City purposed with reimagining the study of religion through the lens of mutual aid as an abolitionist practice. The research project is devoted to identifying and fostering connections between religious and economic dimensions of human flourishing. A goal is to cultivate new directions in the study of religion and economy, while also deepening public engagement with those directions of study.

Robert’s research on a “Liberation Theology for Lockdown America” was cited in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Autumn/Winter 2022) in an article by Ashley Lipscomb titled “Abolitionist Theology Can Help Us Reimagine Schooling.”

Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, directed and produced the play “Well, That Just Happened” by Dramatist Guild award-winning playwright Sharai Bohannon.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, presented a paper, “Early Soviet Children’s Books: Speaking For or Against Nature,” at the conference “Global Ecologies of Childhood: Literature and Culture for a Precarious Age,” held at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University on January 21.

Adolfo Rumbos, Joseph N. Fiske Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, presented an invited talk at the American Mathematical Society Special Session on “Advances in Nonlinear Boundary Value Problems” at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston from January 4-7. The title of the talk was “Some semilinear boundary value problems at resonance involving the Ahmad-Lazer-Paul condition” and was based on joint work with Noah Benjamin ’23 and Leandro Recôva (Cal Poly Pomona).

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, and her coauthors were awarded the Joseph L. Bernd Award for best paper published in The Journal of Politics for their paper “Social Lobbying.”

Monique Saigal-Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave a presentation titled “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” at Morningside retirement community in Fullerton, California, on January 14.

John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics, had his feature film screenplay Jone named a quarter finalist for the Fall 2022 Santa Barbara International Screenplay Diverse Writers Outreach Awards. It also made the short list for the 2022 Barnstorm Fest Script Contest and was designated as an official selection for both the Fall 2022 Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards Diversity Initiative and the Fall 2022 Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards.

Victor Silverman, professor emeritus of history, published a book chapter, “The Fez in the Water—Exile and Return,” in Reparative Citizenship: Identity, Belonging, and Spanish and Portuguese Nationality for Sephardi Descendants, edited by Rina Benmayor and Dalia Kandiyoti and published by Berghan Books. The chapter places family stories in a broader history to unwrap the problems of identity and nationality that gaining Portuguese citizenship poses.

Silverman and Miguel Tinker Salas, Leslie Farmer Professor of Latin American Studies and professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, published an opinion piece, “Inmigrantes con recursos, bienvenidos,” in the Mexico City daily La Jornada on January 11. The article discusses the ways the Biden administration’s immigration policies continue those of past administrations, including those of Trump and Obama.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, was interviewed on January 10 by Meghna Chakrabarti for the NPR and WBUR show OnPoint about the inherent limitations of OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, which tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen has described as “pure, absolute, indescribable magic.” Smith was interviewed January 30 by Henrik Cronqvist, dean of the George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University, about the good, the bad and the ugly of Chat GPT-3.

Smith wrote four op-eds, three about the hoopla surrounding GPT-3: “An AI that can ‘write’ is feeding delusions about how smart artificial intelligence is” in Salon on January 1; “Large Language Models Can Entertain But Are They Useful?” in MindMatters on January 16; “AI chatbots learned to write before they could learn to think” in Salon on January 22; and “Goodhart’s Law and Scientific Innovation in Academia” in MindMatters on January 30.

Ken Wolf, John Sutton Miner Professor of History and professor of classics, is nearing the end of an eight-week stint as a resident at the American Academy in Rome.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, published a paper in Chemical Communications. The paper focuses on dual strategies to make sulfonyl fluorides from sulfonic acids and salts—a challenging transformation in the field. This was a collaboration with Professor Glenn M. Sammis and his graduate student Brodie Thomson at the University of British Columbia. The paper features work conducted this summer by students Emma Grigorian ’24, Kelvin Lee HMC postbac ’22, Sam Khasnavis ’22, Rohan Krishnan ’23 and Theo Hassan ’24. It the 10th paper for the Ball Lab, and the lab celebrated its 300th citation of the group’s work since its first paper in 2017.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” for Bowdoin College’s Department of Chemistry.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, organized, programmed and directed a day-long workshop in South Pasadena on December 3 on articulation and musical-rhetorical figure for SoCal Viols, the Viola da Gamba Society of America’s Southern California chapter.

Bandy was featured as a viola da gamba soloist in the soundtrack to the television series The Witcher: Blood Origin, which premiered on Netflix on December 25.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, published an English translation of the novel Chunhyang 春香 by the Korean Chinese writer Jin Renshun 金仁順. The translation, supported by the Literary Translation Institute of Korea and published by Seoul Selection, is part of a new initiative to raise the profile of literature from the Korean diaspora.

Ralph Bolton ’61, professor emeritus of anthropology, is the author of a chapter in the book Jorge A. Flores Ochoa: Notas Exegeticas y Testimonios, published by the Provincial Municipality of Cusco, Peru, in December. The chapter is titled “Jorge A. Flores Ochoa y yo, vidas paralelas, dos caminos en la etnografía andina” (“Jorge A. Flores Ochoa and I, parallel lives, two paths in Andean ethnography”).

Arlen F. Chase, visiting professor of anthropology, received a two-year grant from the Alphawood Foundation of Chicago for the archaeological investigation of neighborhoods at the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize. The first installment of the grant, in support of the 2023 field season, is $37,225.

Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English and director of The Humanities Studio, published a piece on the fiftieth anniversary of Neil Young’s Harvest and the album’s enduring appeal in The Atlantic.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a paper, “Norms on complex matrices induced by complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials,” with Assistant Professor Konrad Aguilar, Visiting Assistant Professor Ángel Chávez and Jurij Volčič of Drexel University in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society.

Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, visiting assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published an article titled “Escaping a body in pain: Language as antidote in Philippe Lançon’s Le Lambeau (2018)” in Journal of Romance Studies. She also contributed an article titled “COVID-19 as a Foreign Language: How France Learned the Language of the Pandemic,” published in The Languages of COVID-19: Translational and Multilingual Perspectives on Global Healthcare.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was a co-author of an article titled “Gendered social address in China’s convergence culture: The case of mĕinǚ (beautiful woman)” published on December 13 in China Information.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed as a member of the Redfish Piano Trio at two Oregon venues (Port Orford and North Bend) and at the Cultural Center of Crescent City, California, in early December. They presented works of Joseph Haydn, Ernest Bloch and Felix Mendelssohn.

Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton Museum, is quoted in the cover story of the November/December 2022 Harvard Business Review. Titled “What Does Your Company Really Stand For?” the article discusses the Benton’s values-based strategic planning process as part of a broader consideration of how to align business practice with collective personal and organizational values.

Wallace Meyer, director of the Bernard Field Station, published an article in the journal Diversity with students and colleagues. The article was titled “Herbivore Influence on Post-Fire California Sage Scrub Plant and Microbe Assemblages.”

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, was interviewed on KSQD about his book Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril on Be Bold America on December 4.

Miller gave two presentations: “Crisis Management: Conflict, Controversy, and Leadership in Forest Service History” for the Middle Leadership Program of USDA Forest Service on December 7 and “Public Lands Management: The Forest Service Over Time” for USDA Forest Service: Region 3 on December 20.

Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, along with archeologist colleague Lynn Robinson, published the research article “The Role of Subduction Zone Processes in the Cultural History of the Cascade Region.” It appears in an issue of Elements Magazine focused on the Cascadia Subduction Zone and has a special emphasis on the oral histories of the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest that were influenced by volcanic processes throughout the region.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Rapid disc settling and the transition from bursty to steady star formation in Milky Way-mass galaxies” in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Joanne Randa Nucho, associate professor of anthropology, co-edited the special issue “Infrastructural politics in the Middle East and North Africa” of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. She also co-authored the introduction essay in the special issue.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, co-authored with Enrique C. Ochoa, María Oropeza Fujimoto, Socorro Orozco, Bryan Coreas, Jessica Coreas, Eugene Oropeza Fujimoto, Manuel Maldonado and Veronica N. Miranda Cordero “‘Hijacking a Public Process: The School District and Community Activists in the Battle for Trustee Area Representation” in Centering Youth, Parent, and Community in School Leadership, edited by K. C. Rodela and M. Bertrand with Routledge/Taylor Francis. This chapter documents how the authors and other community activists drew on the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) in the struggle for by-area trustee elections in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District. Among the co-authors is Bryan Coreas ’11, who was a 2004-07 Pomona Academy for Youth Success student.

Sara Olson, associate professor of biology, and Matthew Sazinsky, professor of chemistry, were awarded a three-year, $156,000 grant from the Arthur & Mabel Beckman Foundation. The Beckman Scholars Program supports a 15-month mentored research experience for six Pomona students who show exceptional promise in research in chemistry, biology or interdisciplinary combinations of the two fields. Fifteen Pomona faculty across the life sciences will serve as potential mentors for the Beckman Scholars.

Olson attended the American Society for Cell Biology conference in Washington D.C. from December 3-7, where she presented two pedagogical research posters. She was accompanied by five Pomona seniors majoring in molecular biology, each of whom presented a poster on their ongoing senior thesis research project.

Alexandra Papoutsaki, assistant professor of computer science, published an article titled “Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach” in the journal Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction along with co-authors from industry, academia and non-profit organizations.

Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, was an invited discussant (with Karlos Arregi) on “the wheres and whens of affixation” at the Princeton Phonology Forum at Princeton University on December 3.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art, had two very large works acquired by the Yale University Art Museum, and her film “Intuition” will be included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition “Code” which opens in February.

Ben Radd, visiting assistant professor of politics, was interviewed on a podcast about the role of social media in the antigovernment protests in Iran.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a book review in The European Legacy of Arturo Tosi’s Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic Experiences of Travelling in Early Modern Europe, published by Cambridge University Press.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor of Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, gave an online talk, “Construction of Gender Identity in Soviet Children’s Literature in the Period of ‘Totalitarian Androgyny’” for the Russian Academy of Literature in St. Petersburg, Russia, on December 16.

Rudova published an article, “From Socialist Realism to Mash-up Fiction: The Evolution of Arkadii Gaidar’s Timur and His Team,” in Filoteknos: Children’s Literature, Cultural Mediation, Anthropology of Childhood.

Rudova published a book review of Hermynia zur Mühlen’s The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, published the article “Independent Redistricting: An Insider’s View” in the political science journal The Forum.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave a presentation titled “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” at Ganesha High School in Pomona on December 14.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, co-authored a paper, Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups, in American Journal of Preventative Medicine that is a follow-up to an earlier paper (picked up by 351 news outlets) reporting evidence that regular physical exercise prior to COVID infection substantially reduces the chances of hospitalization, admission to intensive care units and death.

Smith published a MindMatters op-ed, “Large Language Models are an Unfortunate Detour in AI.”

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, presented a talk at the 119th Annual PAMLA Conference in Los Angeles, California, titled “Performativity and Klaus Pohl’s book To Be Or Not to Be.”

Von Schwerin-High gave an invited guest lecture via Zoom in CSULB’s German studies program on Thomas Mann’s 1925 novella Disorder and Early Sorrow.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, was invited by Sight and Sound magazine to contribute to its decennial poll of the greatest films of all time. The Sight and Sound poll is a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema, and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with selected critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot. Wynter’s snippet on Taxi Driver (1976) was included.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was one of three food scholars recently interviewed about the Japanese concept of the tasting menu by Katy Osuna, co-founder of the James Beard award-winning Copper & Heat podcast. The other scholars were Beth Forrest, who teaches at the Culinary Institute of America, and Krishnendu Ray, director of the food studies program at New York University. “Tasting Menus: A Dining Experience” aired on December 15.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented a paper titled “‘Trinitatis unitas’: Stars, Alchemy, and Geometrical Unio Mystica Desire in Buxtehude’s Quemadmodum desiderat cervus(BuxWV 92)” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) on November 10, held in New Orleans as a joint meeting with the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Music Theory.

After performing with Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble as a soloist in their Friday Noon Concert (presented by Pomona College and Scripps College) on November 18 in Lyman Hall, Bandy played viola da gamba with Tesserae Baroque on November 20 in their concert “Bach Re-Constructed /De-Constructed”—a musicologically engaged program featuring new reconstructions of works by J. S. Bach surviving only in fragmented or otherwise “secondary” form.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, had a Chinese translation of his article “Jiang Yingke’s Contribution to the Gong-an School,” first published in Ming Studies, included in a book entitled Xi hai yi zhu: Ou Mei Ming Qing shi wen lun ji 西海遺珠：歐美明清詩文論集 (Pearls recovered from Western seas: essays from Europe and America on Ming and Qing poetry and prose), edited by Ye Ye 葉曄 and Yan Zinan 顏子楠 and published by Peking University Press.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, reviewed editions of two early 18th-century English manuscripts of keyboard music in the October-December 2022 issue of Fontis Artis Musicae, the journal of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres.

Ralph Bolton ’61, professor emeritus of anthropology, presented a (virtual) paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association titled “AIDS and the Social Imaginary Thirty Years Later: Contextualizing a Controversial Event in the De-Colonizing of Anthropology” on November 10. The symposium, “Invisible Contrarian: Stephen O. Murray as (Inter)disciplinary Historian,” honored the memory of Stephen Murray, a pioneering sociologist and anthropologist in gay studies and in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in academia.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published an article titled “Invisible Points and Open Windows: Picturing Representation in the Poetry of Antonio Méndez Rubio and Ana Merino” in Revista Hispánica Moderna and also presented a paper titled “Repetición, fragmentación y escritura ‘leprosa’ en la poesía de Antonio Méndez Rubio” at Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition, a virtual conference organized by the Universidade do Porto from November 23-25.

Arlen F. Chase, visiting professor of anthropology, was a co-author on an article titled “Ancient Lowland Maya neighborhoods: Average Nearest Neighbor analysis and kernel density models, environments, and urban scale” published on November 2 in PLoS ONE.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, published a paper titled “Memes from confinement: Disorientation and hindsight projection in the crisis of COVID-19” in the journal Language, Culture & Society.

Lorn Foster, professor emeritus of politics, was a presenter at the National Humanities Conference on a panel, “Black Utopia in California.” The focus of Foster’s presentation was on the role of Reverend Clayton D. Russell, the Negro Victory Committee and the Victory Markets during World War II.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, published a paper, “An effective analytic formula for the number of distinct irreducible factors of a polynomial,” with graduate student Ethan Simpson Lee, Josh Suh ’23 and Jiahui Yu ’23 in Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society.

Liz Graham, interim director of institutional research, presented “Using National Student Clearinghouse Data to Examine Alumni Outcomes” at the 47th Annual Conference of the California Association for Institutional Research in La Jolla on November 16.

Eric Grosfils, Minnie B. Cairns Memorial Professor of Geology, recently commenced a three-year elected term on the steering committee for NASA’s Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG). In addition to assisting with decadal-scale prioritization and planning, the VEXAG community regularly evaluates Venus exploration goals, scientific objectives, investigations and critical measurement requirements.

Marja Liisa Kay, program administrator for the department of theatre, has been elected vice president of the Los Angeles Finlandia Foundation, a nonprofit that works to sustain both Finnish American culture in the United States and the ancestral ties with Finland. The organization also oversees the Finnish Folk Art Museum in Pasadena, California, and maintains an artifact collection from Finland, mainly from the mid-1800s from the Pohjanmaa (Ostrobothnia) region in Western Finland.

Sohaib Khan, visiting assistant professor of religious studies, presented a paper titled “Secularizing the Shari’a? How Deobandi-Muslim Jurists Authorized the Limited Liability Corporation” at the 2022 American Academy of Religion conference, held November 19-22 in Denver.

Jade Star Lackey, associate professor of geology, presented the talk “Little plutons between big plutons: probing transitions of magma flux in the Sierra Nevada batholith” at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver. He was an author on six additional conference presentations. Current and former students presenting or co-authoring presentations included Nolan Clark ’22, Sarah Brown SC ’24, Adrian Chinen ’22, Sam Bovard ’23, Graham Brady PZ ’21 and Ryan Frazer ’09.

Professor Emeritus of Theatre Thomas Leabhart’s most recent book, Copeau/Deroux, Irving/Craig: A Search for 20th Century Mime, Mask & Marionette, was published by Routledge. He taught a three-week Zoom workshop attended by students in France, Brazil, Iceland, England and the U.S.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave a panel presentation titled “Applying usage-based linguistics in L2 Chinese teaching” at the 2022 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Convention and World Languages Expo (hybrid) on November 19.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, was certified as an instructor of tai chi for arthritis and fall prevention by the Tai Chi for Health Institute of Dr. Paul Lam.

On November 13, Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, presented a paper titled “Riding in a Gang of One: On Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas” at the annual meeting of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association in Los Angeles.

On November 15, McWilliams gave a talk on major takeaways of the 2022 midterm elections to the Central New Jersey chapter of Indivisible in Metuchen, New Jersey.

McWilliams was featured in two public events at UCLA: On November 17, she gave a lecture on “How the Counterculture Won the War: The Merry Pranksters, the Hells Angels, and the Degeneration of American Politics,” and on November 19, she led a seminar on “Rip Van Winkle and American Civic Culture.” Both events were sponsored by UCLA’s Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions.

Wallace M. Meyer III, director of the Bernard Field Station, gave an invited talk to the department of biological sciences at Cal State Fullerton titled “Using ecological information to develop a holistic approach to sustainable landscaping in southern California” on November 30.

Meyer published an article with colleagues and undergraduate researchers titled “Flower-Visiting Insect Assemblages on Fall-Blooming Native California Sage Scrub Shrubs” in the journal Diversity.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is lead author of “Pictures at an Exhibition: Rendering the Los Angeles River” in Eden: Quarterly Journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society. Written with Tilly Hinton, the essay explores how generations of photographs have shaped cultural perceptions of the Los Angeles River.

Miller’s book, West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement, was awarded third place for the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award by the Society of Environmental Journalists. He spoke about West Side Rising at the Texas Book Festival in Austin in early November.

Other recent presentations include “Environmental Justice, Urban Resilience, and Climate Change: San Antonio in the Anthropocene” to the Western Historical Association annual meeting; “Crisis Management: Conflict, Controversy, and Leadership in Forest Service History,” Middle Leadership Program: USDA-Forest Service; and he spoke about his new book, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril, at the Eastern Sierra History Conference in Bishop.

Miller appeared on Spectrum News and KPCC to discuss California’s continuing wildfire dilemmas.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “FIRE-3: Updated Stellar Evolution Models, Yields, & Microphysics and Fitting Functions for Applications in Galaxy Simulations” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno delivered a colloquium presentation titled “Galaxies lacking dark matter” at the California Institute of Technology on November 16.

Joanne Randa Nucho, associate professor of anthropology, published the chapter “Inequality and Identity: Social Class, Urban Space and Sect" in the edited volume Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon, edited by Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian and Nadya Sbaiti and published by Stanford University Press.

William Peterson, professor emeritus of music and college organist, presented a paper titled “World War I, Musical Themes and Compositions, and the Formation of Czechoslovakia” as part of a panel titled “War Clouds and the Cultural and Political Development of Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic and Slovakia” at the Virtual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art, had an exhibition at Higher Pictures Generation in New York City, where many institutions purchased her work, including MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morgan Library, New York Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as many collectors. Most recently she had an exhibition at the Solomon Rothschild Foundation in Paris and was included in exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.

Shannon Randolph, director of global social impact at the Hive, traveled to Vietnam for the launch of a book that she edited titled Herbal Recipes for Health Improvement. The book is a compilation of herbal remedies created by women in northern Vietnam and curated by Claremont Colleges students with the aim of promoting herbal alternatives to animal parts medicine. The book emerged from student design work funded by EnviroLab Asia and the Hive from 2018 to 2020.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a book review of Erica Weitzman’s At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter in Monatshefte.

The short film “Hell No,” directed/written by and starring Teddy A. Rodriguez-Velez, visiting instructor of physics and astronomy, was presented in the Isabela International Film Festival. “Hell No” was nominated for Best LGBTQ+ Film.

Rodriguez-Velez participated in the staged readings for “Wilbur’s Dream” by Carolina Xique for the Los Angeles City Arts Council and “That Must be the Entrance to Heaven …” by Franky Gonzalez for Risk Theatre in Canada.

Rodriguez-Velez’s original play “Daddy Date” has been selected for full production at the Frida Kahlo Theater for their 10-Minute Theatre Festival in 2023.

Nikia Robert, Mellon Chau postdoctoral fellow, published “Not Meant to Survive: Black Mothers Leading Beyond the Criminal Line” in the edited volume Walking Through the Valley: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon.

Robert traveled to Kansas City, Kansas, to speak at a rally she helped to organize against police corruption in partnership with Roc Nation, Until Freedom, Midwest Innocence Project and other local organizers and colleges and universities. As a result of the rally, the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department and mayor announced a full investigation of the cases filed by Roger Golupski, who is accused by the community of rape, sex trafficking, extortion and misconduct targeting Black women that led to the false convictions of several Black men who have/are serving a combined sentence of more than 100 years.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, published the paper “Quien Importa? State Legislators and their Responsiveness to Undocumented Immigrants” in the peer reviewed journal Political Research Quarterly.

Sadhwani appeared in numerous local and national media outlets discussing the recent election, including KPCC and KNX radio, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, NBC News, Spectrum News and CNN. She had an op-ed in TIME Magazine discussing Democrats’ missteps in messaging climate change with Latino voters.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, presented the paper “A Musicological Recovery of the Best and Worst Known Sea Chanty, ‘Shenandoah’” at the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology and Society for Music Theory Joint Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 13.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published two papers with Pomona College graduates: “Savoring interventions for mothers of young children: Mechanisms linking relational savoring and personal savoring to reflective functioning” in Infant Mental Health Journal and “Parental negative conditional regard and school-aged children’s physiological and subjective responses to hypothetical experiences of vulnerability” in Journal of Child and Family Studies. Smiley published the paper “Maternal and paternal emotion socialization and children’s physiological stress regulation” in Journal of Child and Family Studies with colleagues at Claremont McKenna College.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published two op-eds in MindMatters: “This time, Houston was blessed more by luck than by stolen signs” (November 8) and “Has the Bitcoin supply of greater fools finally been exhausted?” (November 16). He also published one in MarketWatch: “More risk doesn’t always mean greater reward. Just look at these imploded tech stocks.” (November 29).

A book edited by Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Aimee Bahng, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, was named as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, the premier review journal for academic titles. The journal is a publication of the American Library Association (ALA) through its Association of College & Research Libraries. Tompkins, professor of English and gender and women’s studies, was managing editor, and Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, was a member of the editorial collective. Both Bahng and Tompkins also contributed entries. The ALA bases the Outstanding Academic Titles designation on criteria including overall excellence, originality, value to undergraduate students and relative importance in the field. As a work that is noted as essential, it is recommended for inclusion in most libraries across the country.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, has been invited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive to serve as a consultant in the Black/African Diaspora area of focus for its In Frame project. Wynter will advise on language and terminology related to the representation of Black people in film and play an advisory role in In Frame, an Institute of Museum and Library Services-supported project to build an open access database of filmmakers and films across broad areas of focus related to disability, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, and social and cultural identities.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, has been invited to deliver “The Significance of the ‘Japanese Turn’ in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980-2020” at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, on March 31, 2023.

Yamashita was interviewed at length and appears in every episode of a four-part documentary on the Asia-Pacific War titled Inside Japan’s War, produced by German public television (ZDF) and currently showing on PBS stations in the United States.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, gave two conference presentations in October: “From Allies to Adversaries: Xiao Jun and Ai Qing in Yan’an” at the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in Philadelphia from October 1-2 and “Travel in Late-Ming China: Insights from the Diaries of Xu Xiake 徐霞客 (1587-1641)” at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Albuquerque from October 13-15.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, crafted a viol consort program, delivered a short lecture and played bass viola da gamba in Tesserae Baroque’s October 2 concert at the Gamble House in Pasadena, an event sponsored by The Da Camera Society, with the aim of drawing connections between the Arts & Crafts movement and the Dolmetsch family’s early music revival, scholarship and musical instrument design.

In addition to presenting a concert of 15th century and 16th century music with the Los Angeles-based ensemble Ciaramella in Little Bridges on October 23, Bandy appeared in composer Bear McCreary’s music video for the main title track in The Serpent Queen (STARZ, released October 30). The series’ larger score and soundtrack also feature Bandy on the viola da gamba and yayli tanbur.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, had his article “‘O Come, Let us Sing unto the Lord’: Performances of the Cannons Anthems during Handel’s Lifetime” included in New Perspectives on Handel's Music: Essays in Honour of Donald Burrows, edited by David Vickers and published by The Boydell Press.

Mietek Boduszynski, associate professor of politics and international relations, participated in a panel on paths toward accountability in Ukraine at the 2022 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies annual convention. Among his co-panelists was Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Centre for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, the winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “‘Dejar mis pisadas en la nieve’: Winter, Distance, and Discontent in the Poetry of Ana Merino” at The Legacy of Spain in 21st-Century Consciousness, held at the House of Spain in San Diego on October 22.

Arlen F. Chase, visiting professor of anthropology, was a co-author on a chapter titled “Reproducibility and Validity of Portable ED-XRF Instruments: A Comparison of Spectral and Quantitative Results from Belizean and Ethiopian Obsidian” in Advances in Portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry: Instrumentation, Application, and Interpretation, edited by B. Lee Drake and Brandi L. MacDonald (published by The Royal Society of Chemistry on October 19).

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian Languages and Literatures, delivered a lecture, “Through the Voices of Others,” in an online forum, “Lu Xun and World Literature: The Task of Translation,” sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and John K. Fairbank Institute of Chinese Studies, Harvard University, on October 28. The forum was convened around her new translation of Wild Grass/Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022).

Karla Cordova, visiting assistant professor of economics, presented the early-stage research, “Unemployment Insurance and Unemployment Duration in Mexico City,” at the 9th Liberal Arts Colleges Development Economics (LACDev) conference at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on October 1.

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, published “Déserts, jardins et murs chez Gide” in the Bulletin des Amis d’André Gide, Autumn 2022.

Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies and chair of media studies, published “Repetition to Revolution: Jordan Peele's Us” in Movement, Velocity, and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective, edited by Jessica Datema and Angie Voela and published by Routledge.

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, published the article, “Localizing the International Relations Classroom: Evaluation of Academic Partnerships with City Government,” in International Studies Perspectives with co-author Madeline Baer. The article assessed the learning outcomes of an experiential learning course she taught in Spring 2020 that conducted policy research for the Mayor’s Office of the City of Los Angeles and CHANGE (City Hub and Network on Gender Equity), a network of global cities working to advance gender equity locally.

Jesús Landa, cook at Frank Dining Hall, published a book, La Raya, in which he shares his experiences as a Mexican migrant.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, attended the Mansfield Luce Asia Scholars Fellowship workshop in Washington, DC, from October 12-14.

Le’s book, Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century, received Honorable Mention for the International Security Section of International Studies Association 2023 Best Book Award. In addition, the Japanese translation rights to Japan’s Aging Peace were purchased by Misuzu Shobo, and the book will be translated in 2024.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave a solo piano recital at the Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College of Northeastern University in Oakland, California, on October 7. The Mills Music Department presents an annual concert honoring Darius Milhaud’s music in programs including works by related composers.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, published a short story, “Narrowing Valley,” in the October 31 issue of The New Yorker.

Rachel Levin, associate professor of biology and neuroscience, is first author on a publication titled “Biological studies of transgender identity: A critical review” in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health. This review paper evaluates current research and suggests best practices for those conducting biological research on the origins of transgender identity. It also is intended to address concerns of transgender people, those who care for them, and clinicians treating them, when they see a scientific paper or hear of it through social and traditional media.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, participated in a roundtable conversation with other contributors to a special volume of the journal Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies highlighting Asian American voices at the Dance Studies Association Conference, held this year on the land of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. The special volume was edited by SanSan Kwan and Yutian Wong.

Lu moderated a conversation with composer and musical director Joshua Icban and public health nurse and author, Laarni San Juan, RN, PHN, MPH, at the world premiere of Nursing These Wounds, presented by KULARTS and directed by Alleluia Panis at the Brava Theater Cabaret on the land of the Ramaytush Ohlone.

Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and ballroom dance instructor, presented at the Dance Studies Association Annual Conference: Dancing Resilience in Vancouver, Canada, with Val Meneau of the University of Salzburg. Their presentation was titled Queering DanceSport—the teaching space as a site for contestation of hegemonic heteronormativity and gender binary.

Stephen Marks, Elden Smith Professor of Economics, coordinated and moderated a conversation at Rose Hills Theatre on October 6 with Distinguished Alumna Martina Vandenberg ’90 and Claremont Mayor Jed Leano on providing pro bono legal services, in “Standing Up for Human Trafficking Victims and Asylum Seekers,” sponsored by the International Relations Program.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, was appointed to the American Political Science Association’s Publication Committee, which oversees and coordinates the organization’s four leading peer-review journals, sets standards for those journals and other publications, and explores collaborations with other journals in political science. McWilliams will serve on that committee until 2025.

Miriam Merrill, professor of physical education, moderated a panel at the Women Leaders in College Athletics national convention. The conversation, “Future Proof Your Career: Staying Relevant and Impactful as Women Leaders,” included directors of athletics from the University of Kansas, University of Missouri, the commissioner from Conference USA, and the vice president of corporate partnerships for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, gave a presentation about his book, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril, at Page Against the Machine in Long Beach on October 6.

Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Investigating the Effect of Galaxy Interactions on Star Formation at 0.5<z<3.0” in The Astrophysical Journal.

Moreno delivered a faculty workshop titled “Decolonised pedagogy” at Santa Barbara City College.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, authored “A City of Puentes: Latina/o Cross-Generational Memories and Organizing in the 2016-17 Struggle for Sanctuary” in Latinx Belongings: Community Building and Resilience in the United States (University of Arizona Press 2022), co-edited by Deeb Sossa and Bickham Mendez.

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, and researchers at the University of Mosul, Imperial College London and Southampton University published “A Flow Electrochemistry-Enabled Synthesis of 2-Substituted N-(Methyl-d)piperidines” in the Journal of Labelled Compounds and Radiopharmaceuticals.

Maddalena Poli, Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies, presented a paper on how to integrate the most cutting-edge research about Chinese manuscript culture into undergraduate courses at the 50th meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies from October 1-2.

Poli participated in a workshop in New York City she co-organized with Columbia University Ph.D. candidate Chris Kim. Sponsored by the Tang Center for the Study of Early China (Columbia University), the event brought together scholars to learn and discuss the 盟書, loyalty oaths used in ancient China to forge alliances among powerful lineages. The event was led by Professor Crispin Williams, the leading expert on the subject in the U.S.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German and Russian, presented a paper titled “‘Diskurs in der Enge’—a Black Perspective on a Swiss Cultural Preoccupation: Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book” at the German Studies Association Annual Conference in Houston, Texas.

Erin Runions, Nancy J. Lyon Professor of Biblical History and Literature, published “Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell: Isaiah 66 and the Affect of Discard” in Postscripts: A Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds.

Monique Saigal Escudero, emerita professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a presentation titled “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Claremont, St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Covina, California, and Long Beach City College Foundation’s Lifetime Learning Center Senior Studies Program.

Santiago Sandi-Urena, visiting professor of chemistry, organized an international symposium at the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from October 19-22. Presenters from several countries in the Americas addressed non-formal science education efforts supported by the ACS Office of Science Outreach. In addition, he was awarded a Global Initiative Grant from the ACS to organize the Remote International Poster Session. This inclusion-driven event benefited high school through graduate school students in seven countries in the Americas who presented their work online. His undergraduate advisees presented work on the scientific and historical analyses of modern versions of the periodic table and the development and assessment of portable sustainable laboratory practicals in chemistry education.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, collaborated with Claremont Colleges students to create Songs of the Windlass, an album of historically informed performances of sailors’ work-songs, chanties. The song arrangements were built from primary sources to illustrate the style of sailors’ singing when weighing anchor on ships during the mid-19th century. The album, recorded by Music Technologist Barry Werger-Gottesman in Bridges Hall of Music, is available on SoundCloud and Spotify.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, presented a paper, “Contemporary Traditional: Is it time to name a new dance genre,” at the Dance Studies Association conference in Vancouver, BC, on October 15.

Shay wrote an article, “The Nation Dances: The politics of staged folklore,” in the volume, Staged Folklore: The National Folk Theatre of Ireland 1968-1998, edited by Susan Motherway and John O’Connell and published by Cork University Press.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities and chair of English, published “Racialized Geographies: A Conversation with Susan Gillman” in Los Angeles Review of Books.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published a paper, “Parents’ depressive symptoms and reflective functioning interact to predict proficiency in relational savoring and children’s physiological regulation,” on maternal correlates of children’s physiological regulation during a stressful task in Development and Psychopathology with Jessica Borelli, Kajung Hong ’16, Kelly Kazmierski ’12, Lucas Sohn ’16 and Yuqing Guo.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published three op-eds in MindMatters: “The Hyper-Specialization of University Researchers” (October 4), “More Hard Math Does Not Necessarily Mean More Useful Solutions” (October 17) and “What Does AI in Education Mean for Critical Thinking Skills?” (October 31).

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, co-hosted the ISOS-XIII 2022 International Summit on Organic and Hybrid Photovoltaics Stability in Sønderborg, Denmark. The conference brought together leading scientists working on improving future solar cell technologies. Tanenbaum also presented a poster, “Screen-Printed Mesoporous Carbon Perovskite Solar Cells,” at the conference, co-authored with Kylie Thompson ’22, Dan Tan ’23, Adam Dvorak ’20 and Bry Hong ’20.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered a lecture titled “Hawaii Regional Cuisine: Origins and Impact” via Zoom on October 3 at Fresno State University.