Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences joining a new class of members recognized for outstanding achievements in academia, the arts, business, government and public affairs.
Starr is a highly regarded scholar of English literature whose work reaches into neuroscience and the arts. Her research looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to help get to the heart of how people respond to paintings, music and other forms of art.
She is a national voice on access to college for students of all backgrounds, the future of higher education, women in leadership and the importance of the arts. She took office as the 10th president of Pomona College in 2017.
The Academy was chartered in 1780 to “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Academy members are elected on the basis of their leadership in academics, the arts, business, or public affairs and have ranged from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to such 20th-century luminaries as Margaret Mead, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Akira Kurosawa.
For 2020, the Academy elected 276 new members. In addition to Starr, the group includes singer Joan C. Baez, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., author Ann Patchett, poet and former Pomona College professor Claudia Rankine, among others.
“To join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as part of this impressive 2020 class of new members is an honor that renders me profoundly grateful. The Academy is a venerable institution whose members are some of the individuals I most admire. It is truly a great gift to join the ranks,” says Starr.
Starr joins a number of exemplary Pomona College alumni and former faculty in the AAAS. They include scientists Jennifer Doudna ’85, J. Andrew McCammon ’69 and Tom Pollard ’64; author Louis Menand ’73; art historian Ingrid Rowland ’74; artist James Turrell ’65; journalist Joe Palca '74; genomic biologist Sarah Elgin ’67; developmental psychologist Henry Wellman ’70; and Steven Koblik, Huntington Library president and former Pomona College professor of history of more than 20 years.
“This a tremendous honor for President Starr, as it recognizes her remarkable scholarly contributions to arts and humanities as well as to the sciences,” says Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College Robert Gaines. “President Starr is holding up the highest ideals of the liberal arts in reminding us that, as intellectuals, we should not be confined by the hard boundaries of disciplines, but instead seek the new and transformative knowledge that is to be discovered in the spaces where disparate fields may be joined.”
The Academy is led by Pomona College President Emeritus David Oxtoby, who was inducted into the Academy in 2012 and was named its president in 2018. He served as president of Pomona College from 2003 until 2017.
Starr becomes the third Pomona College president to join the Academy. David Alexander, who served as president of Pomona from 1969 to 1991, was inducted into the Academy in 2006.
“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”
The Academy has elected more than 13,500 members since 1780. It conducts multidisciplinary research on major social and intellectual issues and promotes public engagement with those issues through conferences, fellowships and publications.
Starr is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and author of two books, Starr offers a compelling case for working across academic disciplines to spark intellectual discovery.
Her most recent book, “Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience,” was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2014 Christian Gauss Award, and her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship and a National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant.
Starr is a graduate of Emory University where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in women’s studies before going on to Harvard University to earn her doctorate in English and American literature.