March 2025
Jack Abecassis, Edwin Sexton & Edna Patrick Smith Modern European Languages Professor, contributed a book chapter, “In Defense of the Evil Brother: An Interpretation of the Hesiod’s Works and Days” in Myths of the Golden Age in European Culture, edited by Stephen Nichols & Claudia Olk (Routelage, New York).
Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, presented a talk titled “Don’t Believe Your Eyes: Debunking Myths about Perception and Memory in Older Adulthood” as part of the Speakers’ Corner series at Mt. San Antonio Gardens in Claremont, California.
Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, had her work included in an exhibition at the Rio Hondo College Art Gallery in Whittier, California. The exhibition, titled Sticks and Stones: Materiality and Meaning in Contemporary Art, was curated by artist and educator Martin Durazo. On March 18, Avant and three other artists in the exhibition spoke about their works to an audience of students, faculty and guests. A catalog of the exhibition will be published later this year.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, performed solo viola da gamba works by Marin Marais on March 2 in Newport Beach, California, for the Corona del Mar Baroque Festival’s Winter Musicale, directed by Elizabeth Blumenstock. After a viola da gamba performance with Pomona’s own Cornucopia Baroque on March 7 in Lyman Hall, Bandy played violone with Bach Collegium San Diego in works by Jean-Féry Rebel and Ludwig van Beethoven on period instruments, with performances on March 15 and 16 in San Diego and Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.
On March 21 at the Renaissance Society of America’s 71st annual meeting in Boston, Bandy presented the paper “‘Ravished,’ ‘Soiled,’ and ‘Gushing’: Harmonizing Sweetness and Mutilation” in Membra Jesu nostri (1680) on a panel he organized, “Bloodbath: Sounding Bodily Fluids in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” which treated visceral rhetorical representation in 17th-century works by Aquilino Coppini and Buxtehude, as well as in musical, political and scientific discourse in early modern England. On March 23 at 92nd St. Y in New York City, Bandy played viola da gamba and G violone basso continuo in a complete performance of Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas (ca. 1680), organized by the music collective Wild Up, as the finale to their new-music festival Darkness Sounding (March 21–23). Then, on March 27, 28 and 29 in Palo Alto, California, San Francisco and Berkeley, California, Bandy played tenor viol in three performances of the program L’Amorosa Ero, the 2024–25 season finale of the early music ensemble Voices of Music, featuring soprano Danielle Reutter-Harrah in 16th-century works for voices and viols by Marenzio, Ferrabosco the Elder, Dowland, Ward, Byrd, Coprario and others.
Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, co-authored a new textbook, Research Methods in Politics and International Relations, published by SAGE. The textbook is designed to be a practical guide for undergraduate students through the research process from start to finish.
Boduszyński participated in a panel on “post-populism in eastern Europe” at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston. He also co-organized and moderated a one day-conference titled “Mitigating a Supply Chain Crisis” at the UCLA International Institute. The event was co-sponsored by the Korean Consulate General in Los Angeles.
Boduszyński co-led a January term traveling seminar on diplomacy and human rights for 25 undergraduate and graduate students from various universities with the Institute of American Universities/American College of the Mediterranean, with visits to Paris, The Hague, Rabat, Tangier and Madrid.
Boduszyński delivered a talk at the University of San Diego’s graduate program in international relations on next steps for U.S. policy in Ukraine.
Ralph Bolton, emeritus professor of anthropology, received the Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, the highest honor bestowed by the society, in Portland, Oregon, on March 28. The title of his Malinowski Lecture was “Applied Anthropology: A Way of Life, A Call to Action.” The speech received a standing ovation. As a recipient also of the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association, Bolton is one of only six anthropologists since the awards were created to garner both awards from the two largest anthropology organizations. The Bronislaw Malinowski Award is given each year to an outstanding individual who has dedicated their career to solving human challenges through social science and honors those who contribute to understanding and addressing global societal needs.
Amelia Bransky, visiting assistant professor of theatre, was the lead production designer for the world premiere of HBO Original series The Last of Us Season 2. The premiere closed the iconic Hollywood Boulevard and took over the historic TCL Chinese Theatre and The Hollywood Roosevelt on March 24. She led a team of designers, producers and fabricators from conceptualizing the look and design of the premiere's red-carpet experience through finalizing the scenic installation and event execution. She worked with her frequent collaborators at Freehold Group, a Los Angeles-based production company. The event also hosted New York Times photographer Sinna Nasseri, with whom Bransky collaborated on the design for a bespoke portrait studio featuring stars of The Last of Us.
Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published a journal article, “Weathering Discontent in the Poetry of Ana Merino,” in Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea.
Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught at the Northeast regional conference of the American College Dance Association (ACDA) alongside John Pennington, associate professor and chair of dance. Together they supported 13 students (12 from Pomona, 1 from Pitzer) to attend the four-day conference with two students presenting original choreography for adjudication.
Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, published a manuscript in Conservation Biology (Special Issue: Trends and Future Directions in the Conservation Social Sciences) describing new horizons and challenges for using transformer language models to analyze vast bodies of evidence for conservation and climate action. Chang’s postdoctoral mentee, Brian Erickson, was also awarded a highly competitive David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship Program. Chang will serve as Erickson’s academic mentor for analyzing public comments data using large language models to improve adaptive conservation management in the Pacific Northwest.
Karla Cordova, Chau Mellon postdoctoral fellow in economics, gave an invited talk at the Immigrants and the U.S. Economy, Spring 2025 conference organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Cordova presented the paper “Immigration Enforcement and Child Maltreatment,” co-authored with Mary F. Evans, Katherine Rittenhouse and Antonia Vazquez (all at University of Texas at Austin).
David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a talk about the Spanish translation of his book, Historias de lo no contado, at Traficantes de Sueños, a bookstore in Madrid.
Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published an article in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications titled “Individual autonomy and public deliberation in behavioral public policy.”
Jennifer Friedlander, Edgar E. and Elizabeth S. Pankey Professor of Media Studies, co-organized LACKv, a conference devoted to the promotion and development of thought in the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and German Idealism. She also presented a talk, “An Ethics of Shame: Love, Media Pleasures, and Monsters.”
Robert Gaines, acting president and Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, published the article “Fossil Lagerstätten and the enigma of anactualistic fossil preservation” in the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Paleobiology.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gave a one-hour plenary address titled “What can chicken nuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Southeastern Sectional Meeting at Clemson University on March 8.
Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics, attended the 104th Annual Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), which took place March 28-29 at Prairie View A&M University. Goins gave a keynote address on “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy.”
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, moderated the education panel “Here and Now: Where to Go from Here?” at the third Latina Leaders’ Summit on March 22 in New York City. The summit was organized by the National Dominican Women’s Caucus (NDWC) and featured the contributions of successful Latinas in politics, education, the business sector and social justice movements. The session included presentations by the new chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education Melissa Avilés-Ramos and seasoned educator Elaine Ruiz López, who founded the first charter high school in the Bronx.
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was selected as the sole recipient of the Shou-Hsin Teng Pedagogical Innovation Award by the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article titled “The Japanese Military Has a People Problem: When Depopulation Becomes a National Security Risk” in Foreign Affairs on March 28.
Le, with Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, and Emily Fang ’25 and Becca Choe ’27, released the newest episode in their podcast Prof Talk on March 28.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave four concerts with violinist Fritz Gearhart and Andrew Smith as members of the Redfish Piano Trio in the off-season Redfish Music Festival. Along the coast of southern Oregon and northern California, they performed in Port Orford, Bandon, and North Bend, Oregon; and in Crescent City, California.
Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, gave a talk about their research at the Columbia University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar titled “How Design Tools Codify Norms for Visual Artists.”
Nathan Martin, sculpture technician, shares his entrancing path to working at Pomona College in an interview and corresponding article titled “The Journey to 2000 Degrees” in The Montecito Journal.
Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, delivered a lecture on James Baldwin, titled “Wondering By Wandering,” at the National Symposium on Classical Education in Tempe, Arizona; spoke to students at Kansas’s Fort Hays State University about major ideas in American political thought; gave a talk titled “Book Banning in 2025” at the Claremont United Church of Christ; and spoke at an event on the debate over birthright citizenship as part of the “Constitutionalism, Democracy, Citizenship” series at the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.
On March 26, McWilliams’ article on “Campus Swatting on a Thursday Afternoon” appeared in Current.
Magally Miranda, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Chicana/o-Latina/o studies, published “‘Oh, you’re watching me’: Care workers’ experiences of surveillant assemblages on the platform and in the home” in the journal New Media and Society. This paper was written in collaboration with researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute.
Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, gave an invited talk for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego titled “Giant plagioclase in the Steens Basalt: Tracking the balance of magma differentiation processes in continental flood basalt evolution.”
Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, was interviewed by Chemical and Engineering News for an article titled “The Great COVID-19 Career Rethink” and described how pandemic-era online teaching prompted curricular innovations in computational chemistry and data visualization that continue to enrich his post-pandemic learning spaces.
At the Spring 2025 American Chemical Society meeting in San Diego, O’Leary gave an invited talk in a symposium titled “3D Printing in Chemistry Education: Active Learning and Engagement.” At the same meeting, his research group members Hiwot Endeshaw ’25 and Jaylyn Gonzalez ’25 presented a poster titled “Development of 3D-printed molecular orbital teaching models for advanced topics in chemistry and biologically relevant systems.”
O’Leary and Jane Liu, professor of chemistry, joined faculty and administrators at the University of La Verne and presented a workshop titled “How to Create an Introduction to Chemistry Course.” The session outlined the process they used, together with Katy Muzikar, biochemistry laboratory coordinator, for creating Chemistry 23: Discovering Chemistry, a new general chemistry course at Pomona that utilizes active learning, context-inspired content, and a course-based undergraduate research experience.
Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, had her book The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels announced as the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Finalist. The award from Columbia University’s School of Journalism recognizes nonfiction writing that exemplifies “literary grace, commitment to serious research, and original reporting.” Prickett also presented on the Arizona Daily Star’s invited author stage at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books.
Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review of William Lycan’s Perceptual Content (Oxford University Press, 2024) on March 5.
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, professor of English and interim director of college writing, published an essay titled “Style” in the Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney, edited by Catherine Bates (Oxford, 2025) and gave three papers at the Renaissance Society of America and the Shakespeare Association of America (Boston, March 20-22), titled “Supposing…” (on the panel Speculative Fiction and Early Modern Studies), “Echo Me” (on the panel Renaissance Collaborations) and “Just One Word” (on the panel Private Utterances).
Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, served as an external reviewer for Bard College’s Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Program (specifically Russian and Eurasian) on March 1-3.
John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics, gave a keynote address at the Power/Knowledge in the Corporate University Colloquium at Northwestern University on March 7.
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published two peer-reviewed research papers: “Money and inflation: a case study of the value of transparency” (the lead article in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics) and “MPT and CAPM Mismeasure Risk” (The Journal of Investing). His paper, “Don’t Trust AI for Important Things Such As Investment Decisions,” co-authored with Sam Wyatt ’26, was reprinted in Scientific American, Special Edition, AI: How the machine-learning revolution is transforming science and everyday life. Smith published three opinion pieces: “Intelligence Requires More Than Following Instructions” (MindMatters, March 3); “Why LLMs are Not Boosting Productivity” (MindMatters, March 6) and “Yes, the AI Stock Bubble is a Bubble” (MindMatters, March 31).
Smith was interviewed by Nolan Higdon for the podcast Disinfo Detox on March 6 .
David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, and Mia Amberger ’26 presented their research with Finn Cooper ’26 and Alys Korosei ’24 at the American Physical Society Global Summit in Anaheim, California, on March 19. The presentation was titled “Degradation Mechanisms in Carbon Printed Perovskite Solar Cells.”
Tanenbaum was selected as an American Scandinavian Foundation Fellow for the Spring 2026 term to support his sabbatical research project, Developing Solar Energy Technology beyond Silicon Solar Cells, at CAPE and SOLEN Research Centers, Mads Clausen Institute and University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Sønderborg, Denmark.
Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, published her essay “‘Dass ich eins und doppelt bin’. Halbierungen, Doppelungen und Kipppunkte im Theaterstück Katzen haben sieben Leben und seinem intertextuellen Nachleben in Kairos und Kein Roman” in the volume Jenny Erpenbeck, edited by Anke Biendarra and Julia Schöll, in the series Text und Kritik (March 2025). She also published a book review, “Don’t Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises by Pierre Hadot, translated by Michael Chase, Preface by Arnold I. Davidson and Daniele Lorenzini, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2023” in The European Legacy (March 5).
Kevin Wynter, associate professor of media studies, presented a paper titled “Ceci n'est pas sexuel: the Treachery of YouTube Tutorials” at LACK, a conference dedicated to thought in the tradition of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and German Idealism, held this year at Otterbein University.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, gave an invited webinar titled “Teaching Language and Culture Beyond ChatGPT” for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) on March 17. On March 18, he gave an invited talk titled “AI and the Transformation of Higher Education” for the Asia Transformation and Turnaround Association. On March 20, he presented an invited research seminar titled “Generative AI in Second Language Education: Current Trends and Future Directions” for the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. On March 25, he gave an invited talked titled “The AI Gold Rush” for students at Tulane University.
On March 27, Xiao published an editorial titled “AI-Supported Language Education Beyond ChatGPT” with colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University for Studies in Chinese Learning and Teaching.
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, served as a discussant on a roundtable titled “Teaching East Asian Indigeneities and Minority Cultures” at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference held in Columbus, Ohio. This roundtable explored issues of language, coloniality, culture, and interdisciplinary methodologies in the teaching of indigenous cultures and endangered languages of Asia.