December 2025
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played baroque double bass with Baroque Collegium LA in a period-instrument performance of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Part I), directed by Mike Raleigh and held December 19 at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church (Santa Monica, California). On December 22, Bandy played baroque double bass in a period-instrument performance of Handel’s Messiah featuring the Long Beach Camerata Singers and Tesserae Baroque Ensemble, held at Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church (Long Beach, California) and directed by James K. Bass. On December 24, Bandy played G violone basso continuo in two period-instrument liturgical performances of Marc-Antoine Charpetier’s Messe de Minuit pour Noël (1694), directed by Bruce Neswick at St. James’ in-the-City Episcopal Church (Los Angeles).
Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave a talk titled “Xu Xiake (1587-1641) and the Cultural Discourse on Rock Shelters and Caves in Late Imperial China” at Hong Kong Baptist University on December 5 and another titled “Wenxue fanyi yu wenhua yanjiu de hucu gongsheng 文学翻译与文化研究的互促共生” (On the Complementarity of Literary Translation and Cultural Studies) at Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai on December 8.
Barr published an article, “Fanyi Xu Xiake youji de tiaozhan yu quwei 翻译〈徐霞客游记〉的挑战与趣味 (The Challenges and Pleasures of Translating Xu Xiake’s Travel Diaries),” in Zhonghua yixue 中华译学 (Chinese Translation Studies).
Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught a masterclass in commercial dance and performed in choreography by local artists as part of the DOMO Danza Festival in Morelos, Mexico, from December 15-21.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and professor of mathematics, gave a talk titled “Positivity aspects of complete homogeneous symmetric polynomials” at The Claremont Colleges Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics (ANTC) Seminar on December 2.
Wanda Gibson, assistant dean and deputy director of the Career Development Office, and Kathy Guillén Quispe, assistant director of International Student & Scholar Services, co-presented at the 2025 MPACE (Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges & Employers) Annual Conference in Las Vegas on December 11. Their session, “Raise the Stakes: Igniting Impact through Collaborative International Student Career Development,” showcased Pomona College’s successful cross-campus partnership model for supporting international students’ career development.
George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, published a review of The Art of the Genoese Colonies of the Black Sea Basin (1261-1475) by Rafal Quirini-Poplawski, Brill, Leiden, 2023 in Renaissance Quarterly.
Jill Grigsby, professor emerita of sociology, presented a lecture on “Population Fears in the 21st Century,” addressing whether population decline is inevitable and how to consider fertility decline, at Mount San Antonio Gardens in Claremont.
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, presented the seventh volume of the book series Miradas Desencadenantes: Construyendo conocimientos para la igualdad (Triggering Perspectives: Building Knowledge for Equality) on December 5 at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC). The book series is published by INTEC’s Gender Studies Center, which was founded in 1987, making it the first of its kind in the Caribbean. Hernández-Medina is also the author of one of the chapters in the volume “El Derecho a una Vida Completa: la lucha del movimiento feminista dominicano (The Right to a Complete Life: The Fight of the Dominican Feminist Movement).”
On December 19, Hernández-Medina was interviewed on the radio show Libertarias on República Radio along with Argentina Gutiérrez to examine the human rights situation in the Dominican Republic in 2025.
Gizem Karaali, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, together with Ahmed Al Fares CGU ’22, published a paper titled “On a ‘grouplike’ family of quasigroups” in Examples and Counterexamples. Karaali also published an article, “Humanistic Mathematics Humanizing Mathematics: Why Now?” in Committee for Women in Mathematics (CWM) Newsletter.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, had his book 日本老いと成熟の平和 positively reviewed by the Chugoku Shimbun on December 19 and selected as one of the top three books to leave an impression in 2025 by the Seikyo Shimbun on December 2.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed for the Helena Modjeska Festival at the Writers Guild, Los Angeles, in early December. She performed Chopin’s “Piano Trio in G Minor” with violinist Tomás Golka and cellist Clement Chow.
Sergio Maldonado, visiting assistant professor of history and Chicana/o Latina/o studies, had his paper, “Lessons in Ruin: The Veracruz Earthquake of 1973, Floods, and Disaster Politics,” accepted for the 73rd annual conference of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies. Maldonado will present his paper in March.
Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, was selected to serve on the board of directors for the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD). She will represent the North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (NASSPD) as the vice president for North America.
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published two articles in The Astrophysical Journal. The first article was titled “The shape of FIREbox galaxies and a potential tension with low-mass disks.” The second article, titled “Igniting galaxy formation in the post-reionization universe,” begins with the following text: “It has been 47 years since….”
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published the article “Advenir queer dans Viendra le temps du feu de Wendy Delorme (Queer futurity in Wendy Delorme’s Viendra le temps du feu)” in the special issue “Penser queer en français: littérature, politique, épistémologie” of the journal Fabula-LhT. He also published the chapter “Podcasting as a queer archival method for an intersectional French culture” in the edited volume Queer Realms of Memory - Archiving LGBTQ Sites and Symbols in the French National Narrative (Liverpool University Press).
Richard G. Parnell, assistant director, stewardship, successfully defended his dissertation, “The Psychoactive Imagination in Early Modern Literature,” to earn a doctorate in English from Georgia State University. His research project examined how representations of psychoactive substances in 17th-century poetry and epistolary prose both revealed and complicated emerging conceptions of embodiment, cognition and identity in early modern England.
Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, appeared on the podcast “Morbidly Curious Book Club.” Her co-authored book, The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, was selected as the club’s December pick.
Prickett was selected as a “Best of 2025” for her segment in Pomona College’s week of The Academic Minute. The segment, “America’s Rising Number of Unclaimed Deaths,” re-aired December 29 on NPR stations across the country. Additionally, Prickett was quoted in an LA Public Press article about the annual burial ceremony for LA’s unclaimed dead.
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, professor of English and interim director of College writing, published her article, “Supposing…,” in the Winter 2026 issue of Critical Inquiry. This article offers a panoptic preview of her current book manuscript, Seeing Things Otherwise in Shakespeare and Picasso.
Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, was featured in the episode “Music & Labor” of the early music webseries SalonEra, which premiered December 15.
Amani Starnes, assistant professor of theatre, presented her paper, “The Maya Rudolphication of Kamala Harris: A Performative Cruzo,” at the Performance Studies International Conference in collaboration with the Graduate Arts Program at Universidade Federal do Ceará in Fortaleza, Brazil, on December 12.
Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, co-organized and co-chaired several German studies panels and the German studies caucus at the 122nd annual PAMLA conference in San Francisco. She also presented her paper, “Memory, Oblivion, and Palimpsestic Writing in Thomas Mann’s Stories of Jaakob,” on the panel “Thomas Mann at 150.”
Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, was invited by the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi to give composition masterclasses and present a talk about her music.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered a keynote talk titled “From Pedagogy to PedAIgogy” at the 15th National Convention and Chinese Education Conference in Boston on December 13.
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, held a workshop at Pomona College for her national grant, “Resituating Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms,” which was the winner of the inaugural Luce/ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) Collaborative Grant in China Studies. Zhang invited key collaborators, including internationally renowned scholars of Chinese ethnic minority literature and renowned historians and artists, to participate. The workshop was widely covered by Chinese and Chinese American media outlets in the Greater LA Area.