June 2025
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, gave a pre-concert lecture and served as master of ceremonies for a concert of Lieder and instrumental chamber music by Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven and Karl Goldmark (U.S. premiere) June 1 for Le Salon De Musiques, a chamber music series in La Jolla, California, directed by Francois Chouchan.
On June 6 in Santa Monica, California, Bandy played baroque double bass with Baroque Collegium LA in their debut performance of cantatas and motets by J. S. Bach, directed by Mike Raleigh. On June 7, Bandy participated in the event Artists in Harmony and History, held at the Drucker Institute on the campus of Claremont Graduate University, in conjunction with the current exhibit Sound Formations: Artist, Musician, Instrument Maker at the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art. In the event, Bandy and duo partner Eva Lymenstull programmed, introduced and performed Renaissance works by Christopher Simpson, Tobias Hume, Orlande de Lassus and Diego Ortiz on bass and tenor viols recently built by Warren Shingleton of Shingleton Viols in Upland, California.
Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “‘Some Overtures to be plaied before the first lesson’: Old and New Candidates” on June 10 at the conference held in conjunction with the annual Handel Festival in Halle, Germany. While there, he also participated in the meetings of the editorial board of the Hallische-Haendel-Ausgabe, of which he is a member, and the Vorstand of the Georg-Friedrich-Haendel Gesellschaft, which he serves as a vice president.
Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, was selected as a 2025 Art Omi: Dance Residency Fellow from an international pool of applicants. Champi was also awarded a Professional Development Network grant by The Claremont College Faculty Development Associate Deans, taking the lead to improve disciplinary cohesion between the Pomona and Scripps Dance Departments.
Kevin Dettmar, W.M. Keck Professor of English and director of the Humanities Studio, concluded his Chronicle of Higher Education monthly advice column, “Ask the Chair,” after a three-year run. In the fall of 2026, the Johns Hopkins University Press will publish the columns in substantially revised form, along with Dettmar’s other recent occasional writing on faculty leadership, as The Department Chair’s Handbook: Practical Advice for Faculty Leaders.
Cécile Evers, assistant professor of anthropology, gave a paper titled “A seventh function? Marseille: Muslim and Arabophone city” at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology conference, held at the University of Chicago.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was awarded a research grant (as sole PI) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The $285,236 grant, titled “RUI: New Frontiers in Operators, Functions, and Matrices,” runs from 2025-2028 and is his sixth NSF research grant at Pomona College.
Garcia published a paper titled “Numerical semigroups from rational matrices II: matricial dimension does not exceed multiplicity” (with Arsh Chhabra ’12, Christopher O’Neill) in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society.
Garcia was appointed by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to chair the selection committee for the Dolciani Prize for Excellence in Research. He was the inaugural winner of the prize in 2019.
Roberto A. Garza-López, professor of physical and computational chemistry, published a paper, “Copper(II) Inhibition of the SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease,” in Natural Sciences. The paper was in collaboration with Harry B. Gray, founding director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech, Robbins Lecturer 2005 in the Chemistry Department at Pomona College and host of Garza’s sabbatical. Three Pomona students are co-authors of this publication: Liam Kwak ’26, Andrew Chung ’28 and Gabriel Lee Ancajas ’28, and the research made the cover of the journal.
Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, presented “Identification of a new odorant that is detected by the AWCOFF neuron in Caenorhabditis elegans” at the 25th International Worm Meeting, held at University of California Davis. Student co-authors were Vaughn Brown ’25, Ella Bradley ’26, Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25.
Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete ’17, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, presented his research project titled “Place-dependent stop salience among Spanish-English bilinguals: Evidence from Code-switching” at the 6th Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE 2025) linguistics conference hosted by the University of the Balearic Islands in Mallorca, Spain.
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, co-organized and co-moderated the panel “The Scholar as Insurgent: From Crisis to Future Thinking in Dominican Studies” at the Global Dominicanidades II conference in San Francisco. Hernández-Medina and Warren Day Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College April Mayes led the organizing team for the event, which took place as a pre-conference workshop for the 2025 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) annual congress and was co-sponsored by Pomona’s Latin American Studies Program. Additionally, Hernández-Medina co-organized and co-moderated the activities of the LASA Haiti-Dominican Republic section at LASA’s annual congress in her role as section co-chair alongside Sharina Maíllo-Pozo (University of Georgia). Events included the panel “Poner el cuerpo in Hispaniola and Beyond: Chapeo, Afro-Latina Womanhood, Tourism, and Medicine” and the section’s business meeting and joint reception with the Puerto Rico section.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published 日本 老いと成熟の平和, the Japanese translation with new foreword of his book Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century with Misuzu Shobo Press on June 16.
Le did an interview for ABC Australia on Japan’s declining birthrate.
Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is the editor of and a contributor to Our Forests, Our Future (Society of American Foresters, 2025), an anthology marking the society’s 125th anniversary. He delivered a June 9 webinar on the book that the Forest History Society hosted. In related work, he spoke on “The Legacy of Public Lands” on Our Public Lands.
Miller continued to address the January 2025 firestorms, including appearing in “After the inferno: Can Los Angeles rise from the ashes?” ITV-News (UK); talks at “Major Repairs,” a conference hosted by the LA Forum for Architecture and Design; “Why History Matters: LA Wildfires, past, present, future,” at UCLA Fowler Museum; and on June 18, was featured in “LA is Built to Burn – What Can We Do About It?” on the Los Angeles Times: Rebuilding LA podcast.
Miller contributed two chapters to The Seeds of Texas: An Interactive Exploration of Bexar County History, a digital project probing the 12,000-year history of San Antonio, Texas. His chapters included “Historic Overview, 1865-1918” and “San Antonio: Embracing the Twentieth Century.”
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Retours géographiques et littéraires dans Le bastion des larmes d’Abdellah Taïa” at the annual colloquium of the Conseil International d’Études Francophones (CIÉF), held in Cape Town, South Africa, from June 8-13.
Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies, presented at the Food in Chinese Religion workshop at the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies and School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University on May 31 and June 1.
Adam Pearson, professor and chair of psychological science, published the article “Extreme weather event attribution predicts climate policy support across the world” in Nature Climate Change—part of an interdisciplinary global collaboration of climate researchers and social and behavioral scientists in 68 countries, including faculty from Harvey Mudd College: Sarah Kavassalis (Hixon Center for Climate and the Environment) and Katherine Breeden (computer science). Pearson also co-authored “Psychology and the ethics of climate change” with Susan Clayton in the Handbook of Ethics and Social Psychology.
Pearson gave an invited talk at the Claremont Graduate University psychology speaker series titled “Social psychological dimensions of climate injustice: Public perceptions and social reality.”
Alexander Rodriguez, men’s and women’s water polo coach, served as an assistant coach for the USA Men’s 20U national team at the 2024 FINA Men’s Junior World Championships in Zagreb, Croatia. This tournament marked the first time in USA Water Polo history that a men’s junior or youth team advanced to the final of a world championship.
Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, presented a paper titled “Culture Three and Children’s War Literature of Resistance in Contemporary Russia” at the workshop “Surrounded by Conflict: Children’s War Literature in the Making” at Aarhus University’s Institute for Advanced Studies from June 12-13. She served as a formal discussant of the panel “Transborder Circulations, Translations, and Responses to War” at the same workshop. Rudova also gave a lecture titled “No Longer Erased: Diverse Characters in Contemporary Russian YA Literature” at the Institute of German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin on June 16.
Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had her poem “Passion of the Void” appear in The Atlantic online June 22.
Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, is a co-author on two publications with Jessica Borelli and colleagues, “Maternal emotion regulation and parenting: A physiological perspective” in Developmental Psychobiology and “Adult attachment as a predictor of savoring quality in mothers of toddlers: Results from a 4-week randomized trial” in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. These publications report that mothers’ physiological regulation predicts sensitive parenting and their childhood attachment narratives predict child-centered reflections during a relational savoring intervention.
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published an opinion piece, “No, large reasoning models do not reason” (MindMatters, June 13).
Smith was invited back to SciFoo, an annual invitation-only interdisciplinary scientific unconference at the GooglePlex. Smith was also invited to speak at the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2026.
Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting instructor of sociology, published a paper that is available online first in Social Forces: “How Public Benefits Make Citizens in Mixed Status Families: Self-Efficacy, Institutional Engagement, and Concerted Citizenship Cultivation.” Tenorio’s “Work After Lawful Status: Formerly Undocumented Immigrants’ Gendered Relational Legal Consciousness and Workplace Claims-Making” received paper awards from the American Sociological Association’s Labor & Labor Movement Section and the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section, while “Disclosure and the Evolving Legal Consciousness of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Minors” received a paper award from the American Sociological Association’s Children and Youth Section.
Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, coauthored a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports titled “Visualising solar-passive design of courtyard houses and the rhythms of life in Classical Olynthos, Greece.” The paper uses 3D computer modeling of architectural and environmental features to explore how house design affects domestic rhythms in courtyard houses.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, gave a talk titled “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” to alumni in Orange County, California, on June 28.