Archived Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, had a drawing included in HYENA, a recent HEXENTEXTE publication honoring the legacy of women in surrealism. The launch occurred at 2220 Art + Archives in Los Angeles on October 3.

Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies, presented new research on “Coral Futures: Banking on Resilience” as an invited speaker to a Mellon symposium at UC Davis’s Department of Asian American Studies. The “Stars, Earth, and Coral: Pacific Entanglements and Futures Beyond the Human” roundtable was followed by a performance lecture by artist Astria Suparak: “Asian Futures, without Asians” on October 24.

Kim Bruce, emeritus Reuben C. and Eleanor Winslow Professor of Computer Science, was presented the Most Notable Paper of 2012 award for his co-authored paper “Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty” at the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery international symposium in Pasadena, California, on October 25. The prize recognizes a paper from the 2012 Onward! symposium that has had a significant impact on computing a decade after its publication.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gave a talk titled “What can chicken McNuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the Claremont Colleges Analysis Seminar on October 3.

Garcia published a paper, “What is… the Bateman-Horn conjecture?” in the November 2024 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Ernie González, Jr., lecturer in theatre, received a Best Featured Actor in a Play nomination for the 2024 Orange Curtain Review Awards for his performance of Manny/Sancho Panza in Quixote Nuevo at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California. He was also nominated for a Best Supporting Performer Los Angeles Area Broadway World Award for the same role and production.

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, associate professor of economics, co-authored a policy brief, “How did the higher minimum wage in the City of Los Angeles impact the earnings and employment of low-wage workers?”

Christine Inzer, administrative assistant for the Office of Stewardship, published her first graphic novel Halfway There on October 15. The graphic memoir is an exploration of her mixed Japanese American identity and has received starred reviews from Kirkus and the School Library Journal.

Malkiat S. Johal, professor of chemistry, gave an invited research seminar titled “Quantatative Analysis of Protein-Ligand Interactions and Lipid Bilayer Modifications using the Quartz Crystal Microbalance” at Cal State Long Beach on October 9.

Kirk Jones, professor of physical education and head athletic trainer, was honored as the 2024-25 SCIAC Distinguished Service Award recipient. Jones has developed programs for prevention and treatment of athletic injuries and conditioning and nutritional programs for 21 varsity, intramural and club sports as well as the college community.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a lecture on Japanese politics to military personnel at the Air University (Air Force) on October 1, a talk on Japan-South Korea relations and provided graduate student advising at USC on October 2, a talk at Claremont McKenna College on politics and political writing October 5, and a talk on Japanese politics to military personnel at Pacific Air Force on October 14.

Le participated in the Institute for Global Affairs Fellowship workshop October 15.

Le co-published an article titled “Russia and North Korea’s treaty exposes blind spots in the security community” in East Asia Forum with international relations students Annalise Chang ’27 and Munique Tan ’25 on October 24.

Jon Moore, lab coordinator and associate professor of biology, presented a talk titled “A Rich Long-Running Inquiry-Based Introductory Dictyostelium Chemotaxis Teaching Lab” at the 2024 International Dictyostelium Conference on October 14 in Durham, North Carolina.

Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, along with coauthors Conner Toth, Wendy Bohrson, Anita Grunder, and Nolan Clark ’23, published the research article “Giant plagioclase in the Steens Basalt, southeast Oregon, USA: Tracking the balance of differentiation processes in continental flood basalt evolution” in GSA Bulletin on October 30.

Adam Pearson, professor and chair of psychological science, was an invited keynote panelist for a discussion on challenges and future directions for climate activism and public engagement at the Society for Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology (American Psychological Association Division 34) 3rd Annual Global Conference on “Psychology for a Resilient Future: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Coping in a Changing World.” Xuwen Hua ’23 and Pearson co-authored and presented a conference talk at a plenary session titled “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Lay beliefs about life adversity impact judgments of climate vulnerability and resilience.” This work began as a senior thesis. Hua was the only non-graduate/postdoctoral-level or faculty speaker of over 30 invited conference speakers.

William Peterson, emeritus professor of music and College organist, performed music of J.S. Bach on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music. The program included Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in C Major” (BWV 545), the “Sonata in D Minor” (BWV 527) and four chorale preludes from Great Eighteen Organ Chorales.

Peterson presented a paper, “Constructing Cultural Markers of Czechoslovak Solidarity, 1918-1928,” in a panel at the 2024 Virtual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) on October 18. The panel was titled “Liberation from Uncertainty and Instability in Eastern Europe.”

Kathy Guillen Quispe, assistant director of international student & scholar services, wore a couple of hats at the 2024 NAFSA Region XII Conference in Orange County, California, on October 19-23. She began the conference by co-leading the F-1 Student Advising for Beginners workshop. She also served on the conference planning committee’s special events and local arrangements team and volunteered to mentor seven new advisors in the field of international student advising. Additionally, Quispe had a session with members of the Southern District which she will chair starting January 2025.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of Russian, delivered a guest lecture, “Disrupting the Canon of Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Meet Mikita Franko,” at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich, Germany, on October 28.

Monique Saigal-Escudero, emerita professor of French, gave a presentation titled “A Jewish Holocaust Survivor’s Remarkable and Unfolding Story of Survival though Desperate Actions and the Kindness of Strangers” in the chapel of the Claremont Center for Spiritual Living.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Helen Roberts Prize for his article “Remembering the Cotton Screwmen: Inter-racial Waterfront Labor and the Development of Sailors’ Chanties” in Journal of the Society for American Music at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology on October 26. The Roberts Prize recognizes the most significant article published by a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published a paper on p-hacking, HARKing, and the replication crisis, “Big Data and the Assault on Science,” in International Higher Education.

Smith wrote four opinion pieces: “Presidential Pundits—a P-Hacking Parable” (MindMatters, October 7), “P-Hacking: The Perils of Presidential Election Models” (MindMatters, October 8), “The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble” (MarketWatch, October 21) and “The World Series of Coin Flips” (MindMatters, October 22), with the MarketWatch piece being the most read article on MarketWatch in October.

Smith’s talk “AI Systems Are Still Faux Intelligence,” was selected for the O’Reilly AI Academy, which has 2.8 million active subscribers.

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, published two papers: “Disclosure and the Evolving Legal Consciousness of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Minors” in Law & Social Inquiry and “Work After Lawful Status: Formerly Undocumented Immigrants’ Gendered Relational Legal Consciousness and Workplace Claims-Making” in Law & Society Review.

Tenorio published the chapter “Detained Homemaking: The Liminal Homemaking of Sexual and Gender Minority Central American Unaccompanied Youth,” in the edited volume Kids in Cages: Surviving and Resisting Child Migrant Detention published with University of Arizona Press.

Valorie Diane Thomas, emerita Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies, published a chapter titled “Breath. Fugitivity. Wild Horses.: Black Ecocritical Feminist Strategies for Healing in a Predatory Empire,” in Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change, (North Atlantic Books, 2024), edited by Tessa Hicks Peterson and Hala Khouri.

Thomas delivered the keynote lecture “How to Implement Belonging in Your Organization and Curriculum” at the HERD Institute Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy and Equine Facilitated Learning retreat held at Green Chimneys in Brewster, New York.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1860-2020” in the California Society of Culinary Historians fall lecture series at the Richard J. Riordan Central Library in downtown Los Angeles on October 12. Food historian Charles Perry introduced Yamashita and moderated the post-lecture discussion.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played viola da gamba and violone basso continuo in a rare complete performance of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s cycle of 15 Rosary Sonatas (ca.1680), with violinist Andrew McIntosh, baroque harpist Maxine Eilander and keyboardist Ian Pritchard. The performance, which included 15 scordatura violin tunings on four violins (one tuning for each Mystery of the Rosary), was presented September 14 at Shigemi Matsumoto Recital Hall at Cal State University Northridge on the series ChamberMusic@CSUN, sponsored by the Colburn Foundation and the CSUN Foundation.

On September 27 in Lyman Hall, Bandy performed as a viola da gamba soloist with Cornucopia Baroque on the Friday Noon Concert Series.

Allan Barr, professor emeritus of Chinese, gave invited talks on literary translation at several Chinese universities: Shanghai Normal University on September 3; Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Normal University and Zhejiang International Studies University on September 10, 11 and 12; and Sichuan International Studies University on September 26.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, collaborated with his Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble colleagues September 27 as harpsichordist in a program of music by Johann Krieger, George Frideric Handel and Georg Philipp Telemann on the Friday Noon Concert Series. Other faculty performers were Alfred Cramer, violin, Malachai Komanoff Bandy, viola da gamba, and Jason Yoshida, theorbo, who were joined by Aki Nishiguchi, oboe and recorder, Eva Lymenstull, viola da gamba, and Roger Lebow, cello.

Shannon Burns, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, published a paper in Nature Communications about the neural dynamics underlying social interaction titled “Hyperscanning shows friends explore and strangers converge in conversation.”

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published a journal article, “‘A modo de huella’: desaparición y desafío en la poesía de Antonio Méndez Rubio,” in Perífrasis: Revista de Literatura, Teoría y Crítica and a book chapter, “Viral Variation(s): Juan Eduardo Cirlot and the Poetics of Permutation,” in Art and Biotechnology: Viral Culture from CRISPR to COVID, Bloomsbury, edited by Claire Correo Nettleton and Louise Mackenzie.

Karla Cordova, Chau Mellon postdoctoral fellow in economics, was awarded the 2024 Professional Development Grant for Emerging Scholars Studying Poverty and Economic Mobility among Latino Populations from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families.

Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music, joined in a celebration of Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th birthday September 13 with a presentation, “Klangfarbenmelodie: Phantasy for Violin & Piano, op. 47.” He argued that Schoenberg’s concept of Klangfarbenmelodie (melody of tone-color) provides an important structural and interpretive framework for his music. The presentation included a demonstration on two different violins, one strung in early-20th-century fashion. The celebration was held at the Westside Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, near the Brentwood neighborhood where Schoenberg lived for the last 16 years of his life.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Taking psychology seriously: a self-determination theory perspective on Robert Sugden’s opportunity criterion” in Journal of Economic Methodology on September 28. The article was co-authored with Elias van Emmerick ’21.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, with colleagues from Harvard, described a new species of fossil sponge, which is named for the artist James Turrell ’65. The paper “A new sponge from the Marjum Formation of Utah documents the Cambrian origin of the hexactinellid body plan” was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on September 18.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published an editorial, “A Word From…,” in the September 2024 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented a paper (virtually), “Assessing Research Culture: The Grants Development Ecosystem Inventory,” at the plenary session of Building a Sustainable Research Culture, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the NORDP MSI Consultants program, at Florida Memorial University, Miami Gardens.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, guest co-edited and wrote the introduction for the book Embodiment and Representations of Beauty along with Sharina Maíllo-Pozo. The book is volume 35 of the series Advances in Gender Research (editors Vicky Demos and Marcia Segal) and was published by Emerald on September 6.

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, presented “Chlorine concentrations in metamorphic wallrocks in the Sierra Nevada: implications for arc halogen budgets” and “How to read the oxygen isotope system in Cordilleran arcs: lessons from 190 million years of Sierran magmatism” at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America on September 22–25. Lackey was also a co-author on three other presentations with two current and two former Pomona students, and he served as a session convener.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, was a guest performer at Oakland University (Michigan) where she performed solo, four-hand and two-piano works in concert.

Piano Spheres posted Lee’s entire March solo concert on YouTube. The San Francisco Classical Voice gave her a glowing review for this recital.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, had a two-volume omnibus edition of two of his novels, Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, included in The Everyman’s Library.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, read the part of Anne in a staged reading of American Hunger by Nikhil Mahapatra in the Jean-Claude Carrière New Works Festival, produced by EnActe Arts at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, California.

Lu appeared in a public service announcement for Alzheimer’s Los Angeles.

Alessia Lupo Cecchet, visiting assistant professor in media studies, received recognition for her experimental film balaena (2023), which won second place at the juried exhibition organized in Aosta, Italy, by ArteAlta Foundation and third place at the 32nd Annual Emerald Coast National Juried Art Exhibition, organized by the Mattie Kelly Arts Center Galleries (Niceville, Florida). Watch the trailer for balaena.

Cecchet will have a two-person show with artist Jasmine Baetz at the Sprague Gallery at Harvey Mudd College in October, where her sculptural work will be displayed along with her video work.

Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and director of the ballroom dance program, successfully defended her title as the number one woman/woman Latin couple from the North American Same Sex Partner Dance Association (NASSPDA) alongside her partner Viola Ni CMC ’25 on September 21. Machin also excelled in various woman/woman salsa categories with Amy Rubinstein, art studio technician at Pitzer College.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, presented a talk, “Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Test GPM Theory and Enrich Clinical Care,” at the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD) conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

Richard Mawhorter, professor of physics and astronomy, recently received word of acceptance by Physical Review A of a manuscript with four Pomona student co-authors titled “Rotational and near-infrared spectra of PbF: Characterization of the coupled X₁ ²Π_1/2 and X₂ ²Π_3/2 states.” Sean Jackson ’23 is lead author. Also, a poster with three Pomona student co-authors titled “SrF Rotational and Hyperfine Global Fit (and YbO)” was presented at the American Physical Society DAMOP meeting in Fort Worth, Texas.

Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, delivered a keynote research webinar for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition on September 25 titled “Hidden Epidemics within Indian Boarding Schools.”

Richard McKirahan, Edwin Clarence Norton Professor of Classics and professor of philosophy, published the book The Sophists. The book is part of Routledge’s Ancient Philosophies series in which the fifth-century BCE Sophists are presented in a radically different and more positive way than the traditional view of them as subversive foreigners who took money for teaching young men how to gain political power and win lawsuits through dishonest means and misleading rhetoric.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, participated in three panels at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia during the week of September 5: as the chair of a panel on African-American political thought; as the chair of a panel titled “The Idea of Fraternity in America at 50 and Its New Generations of Readers” and as a presenter on a panel on “Liberalism, Republicanism, and Communal Freedom in American Political Thought.”

On September 10, McWilliams delivered the Constitution Day Lecture at Skidmore College, titled “A Tale of Two Liberalisms: Desegregating American Political Thought.”

McWilliams published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times on September 9, titled “Do You Remember Politics Before Trump? My Students Don’t.” On September 16, she published an article in Ms. Magazine titled “The U.S. Political Reality (Taylor’s Version).”

On September 25, McWilliams appeared on LiveNOW From FOX to discuss the upcoming American presidential election as part of the network’s You Decide 2024 series.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, organized the 2024 GalFresca conference at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, on September 19-20.

Moreno was interviewed on Astrobites and wrote an invited guest post titled “Astro sequoia: a blueprint for spaces of learning and discovery.”

Lina Patel, lecturer of theatre, was one of eight playwrights from across the country invited to The New Harmony Project’s inaugural PlayFest Indy new works festival to workshop her new play “Sick Girl or... Don't Hate Me Cuz I’m Pretty” about the intersection of immigration, misdiagnosis, chronic illness and disability. The play was helmed by director Daniel Talbott, with Lexy Leuzsler providing dramaturgical support. PlayFest Indy partners invited playwrights with local theaters and provided funding, travel, housing and casting support to work on and ultimately present their work to a public audience.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, will have two large bodies of work included in the Getty PST show Digital Capture at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, California, opening October 26. The museum enlarged one of her small works and wrapped the front of the museum with it. Also, her work will be included in the exhibition Work at the Wellcome Collection in London. This large modular piece addresses prison labor in California prisons. It is also included in the show at the University of Alabama Birmingham Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts’ Outside Lines group exhibition from their collection. It is also included in the exhibition Presidential Rogues: Satirical Posters from the 1950s to the Present at the Mercado La Paloma in Los Angeles.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, presented a paper titled “Proud or Sorry to be Neutral? Swiss Political Self-Representation in the Nebelspalter, 1930s and 1940s” at the German Studies Association 48th Annual Conference in Atlanta on September 26-29.

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, professor of English, interviewed Jonathan Kramnick (Yale University) about the art of close reading for Public Books.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, delivered a paper, “The Rise of the Detective Genre in Post-Soviet Children’s Literature: Enid Blyton and Middle-Class Values,” at the international conference “Writing a British Childhood in a Global Context? Critical Perspectives on Enid Blyton” at the University of Potsdam, Germany on September 25-27.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published a paper with colleagues at UC Irvine and the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Infant Mental Health Journal. Among other findings, undergraduate interveners from The Claremont Colleges showed higher fidelity in implementing a weekly savoring intervention than those with more education, and mothers, in turn, displayed more sensitive caregiving.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published a MarketWatch opinion piece, “AI-powered stock ETFs were hyped as superior investments. Then reality hit.” on September 11.

Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, co-authored two papers on adolescents’ social development: “Emotional engagement with close friends in adolescence predicts neural correlates of empathy in adulthood,” an fMRI study published in Social Neuroscience, and “Beyond delinquency and drug use: Links of peer pressure to long-term adolescent psychosocial development,” published in Development and Psychopathology. Working with Theresa Pfister ’13, she also published an education practice brief, “Rehumanizing Education Through Relationships,” for the American Psychological Association, Division 15: Educational Psychology.

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, published a paper, “Legal Care Work: Emotion and Care Work in Lawyering with Unaccompanied Minors,” in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Friederike von Schwerin-High, professor of German, published the essay “Lessings Naturbegriff laut den Schriften seines Bruders Karl Gotthelf Lessing” in September in the book Natur‘ in der Romantik, volume 15 in the series Schriften der internationalen Arnim-Gesellschaft, edited by Christof Wingertszahn.

Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, published an article titled “Visual affordances and social interactions at Early Iron Age Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʽAliya, Jordan” in Levant, The Journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, and Jonathan Becker ’24 led a workshop on AI-supported language learning for the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) on September 27. Founded in 1983, CALICO is a leading international organization dedicated to advancing computer-assisted language learning (CALL).

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, won the 2024 Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant in China Studies, a national grant given by the American Council of Learned Societies.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, was a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon MGM Studios), which premiered on August 29, with eight episodes being released through October 3. Bandy can be heard playing both yaylı tanbur and viola da gamba throughout the season and on the Amazon original series soundtrack.

Allan Barr, emeritus professor of Chinese, presented a paper on the topic “Exploring the Boundary between Translation and Editing: Thoughts after translating Jin Renshun’s Chunhyang” at the International Conference on Regional and National Literatures and Cultures, held at Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities, Tongliao, on August 22-23. He also gave a talk on literary translation at Northeastern Normal University in Changchun on August 26.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, attended the conference “’Endless Pleasure’: George Frideric Handel and French Musical Culture,” sponsored by the International G.F. Handel Society in Halle, Germany, where he chaired a paper session and read a paper submitted by a colleague who could not attend. In addition, he participated in the meetings of the board of directors of the society, of which he is a vice president, and the editorial board of the Hallische-Händel-Ausgabe, the ongoing edition of the composer’s complete works.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, presented at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) on a large-scale analysis of over 2 million scientific abstracts to construct an evidence map for natural climate solutions. Chang’s thesis student Rohan Gowda Thanh-Quang ’23 also presented at ESA on his research examining investment patterns for climate technology venture capital and carbon mitigation or climate adaptation potential.

Karla Cordova, Chau Mellon postdoctoral fellow in economics, was awarded the 2024-25 Lowe Faculty-Student Research Program grant from the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at Claremont McKenna College.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gave a talk titled “Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about linear algebra?” at the inauguration of the Saint Louis University Mathematics Mentoring Lab on August 23.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, convened a workshop on August 1-2 for research administrators from 15 campuses in seven states, funded by “Building A National Network of Enterprise Research Support at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions (BANNERS-PUI),” an 18-month $100,000 conference grant from the National Science Foundation, on which Gerstein is a coprincipal investigator.

Gerstein presented at the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) 66th annual meeting in Washington, DC, on August 6, at a session on “’The Write Stuff’—Writing for NCURA,” representing the editors of NCURA’s Research Management Review. He also published a brief article titled “SPy versus FRy: Grey Areas in Allocating Work and Credit at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions” in the August 2024 NCURA Magazine.

Gerstein was on a virtual panel hosted by Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs, a 500-member organization, on August 28 to discuss BANNERS and complementary awards from NSF’s GRANTED program.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) MathFest in Indianapolis from August 6-10. In his role as past chair of MAA Congress, Goins led a discussion and vote to update the congress bylaws August 7; gave a talk and participated in the Project NExT Special Session “Nurturing Mathematical Minds: Mentoring a Math Related Student Group’’ on August 7; and introduced the screening of the documentary “Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience’’ on August 9.

Goins visited Bard College from August 12-14 as part of a week-long conference titled “MathScape 2024: The Mathematics of Supersymmetry.” On August 13, he gave an hour-long address titled “Adinkras as Origami?”

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, published the book chapter (with Madeline Baer) “The City of Los Angeles and the UN Sustainable Development Goals” in Implementing Sustainable Cities (Routledge 2024).

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, associate professor of economics, published the paper “A Kinky Consistency: Experimental Evidence of Behavior under Linear and Nonlinear Budget Constraints” in the August issue of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with Lew Ludwig of Denison University, facilitated a webinar titled “No Robot Left Behind: Crafting an AI-Smart Syllabus” hosted by the Mathematical Association of America.

Karaali published a poem, “ode to the california sun,” in the online gallery The Nature of Our Times on August 26.

Talya Klein, visiting assistant professor of theatre, was the intimacy coordinator for the horror film The Surrender, which wrapped principal photography on August 16 in Los Angeles. The film is written and directed by Julia Max and stars Kate Burton and Colby Minifie.

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, saw two papers published. One in Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research focuses on development of two garnet samples in the Pomona College mineral collections as standard materials for use by the international geochronology community. A second in Geosphere titled “Revised geologic map and structural interpretation of the Mineral King pendant, southern Sierra Nevada, California (USA)” is the culmination of a 12-year collaboration between Lackey and colleagues at Denison University. Many of the new uranium-lead dating ages published in the paper were measurements in the College’s Oxtoby Environmental Isotope Laboratory.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was invited to join the editorial board of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a peer-reviewed journal published by Springer Nature.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, coached chamber music groups at the Redfish Music Festival in early August and performed with fellow faculty members at Oregon coast venues in Gold Beach, Port Orford and Langlois.

From August 17-18, Lee was a guest artist at the Garth Newel Music Center 2024 Summer Festival where she played two-piano works of Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saens and Brahms and eight-hand arrangements of works by J. S. Bach and Vivaldi. The August 17 and August 18 concerts were live streamed.

Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published an article titled “Toward Appropriating Tools for Queer Use” in the Halfway to the Future symposium.

Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, curated and organized Grand Performances’ 38th season finale with a show highlighting transnational cumbia and featuring Chucho Ponce Los Daddy's, Yeison Landero, Turbo Sonidero, DJ Chihuahua and others. She hosted this alongside her record label partner artist Gary “Ganas” Garay and recorded a radio show on Dublab with the invited musicians. Their record label Discos Rolas was mentioned in The Wire (August 2024) in Juan San Cristóbal Lizama’s “Global Ear: Monterrey.”

Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, participated at the World Congress of Environmental History conference in Oulu, Finland, on August 20 with Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, and Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History. Their roundtable “Settler colonial knowledge and practices in the United States and Siberia” included McBride’s presentation on “Boarding School Transformations of Native American Communities.”

Richard McKirahan, E.C. Norton Professor of Classics and professor of philosophy, attended the annual meeting of Aristotle scholars at a village on Mount Pelion, Greece, and for the first time for any foreigner was honored by being the first speaker. He also attended a conference on Protagoras, the fifth-century BCE Sophist, where he gave two presentations. He also attended the biennial meeting of the International Association for Presocratic Studies, of which he is president. It was held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and McKirahan participated in the organization of the event and presented an overview of his forthcoming book on the Sophists. Lastly, he sent in the final version of his book which will be published by Routledge Publishing in their series “Ancient Philosophies.”

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, participated in the “Musing with Melville” program at Arrowhead, Herman Melville's house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The program allows writers to spend time working at the desk where Melville wrote Moby-Dick, the subject of McWilliams’ fall ID1 course.

On August 28, McWilliams appeared on “Live Now With Fox” to discuss the 2024 election. On August 30, she was interviewed by Newsweek about CNN’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz.

Wallace Meyer, director of the Bernard Field Station and associate professor of biology, was an invited panelist at the Ecological Society of America Meeting. He was also an author on multiple talks at the American Malacological Conference, with his student Isabel Ramos ’24 winning best student poster. He also presented a talk and was an author on two talks at the Ecological Society of American meeting. Lastly, he was an author on three talks at the Hawaii Conservation conference.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is the editor of the just-published book Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, from Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (Oregon State University Press, 2024).

At the recently concluded World Congress for Environmental History, held in Oulu, Finland, Miller convened and moderated a roundtable on “Settler Colonial Knowledge and Practice in the United States and Siberia” and presented a paper titled “Collecting Nature, Building Nations: Botany and Settler Science in Finland and the United States.” Joining him on the panel were Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, and Preston McBride, assistant professor of history, as well as historian Tamara Polyakova of the University of Eastern Finland.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, delivered an invited talk titled “Intergalactic Pachamama: a blueprint for decolonizing astronomy,” as part of the All-Inclusive AGN session at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. Moreno also gave a public talk on galaxies with and without dark matter at Lick Observatory in Hamilton Mountain, California, as part of the Music of the Spheres series. Moreno also delivered an invited talk and participated in a panel at the Astronomers Bridging Culture, Tradition, and Research event, sponsored by NASA.

Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies, inaugurated the new Foo Hai Buddhist Seminar Series at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore on August 21. She delivered a talk titled “Using Chinese Theory of Ritual to Study Ritual: Stove or Alms Bowl? Meal Rites and Cultural Borrowing from Myanmar in Taiwanese Female Monasticism.”

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, published an article on community and activism in 1960s-1970s East San Gabriel Valley in Zócolo Public Square on August 15.

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, co-authored the review article “In Memoriam: The Life and Scientific Accomplishments of Frank A. L. Anet (1926-2024)” in the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry. A UCLA chemistry professor, Anet built some of the first high-field nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, now standard equipment in chemistry laboratories worldwide, and used the instruments to discover bedrock principles in organic chemistry and magnetic resonance.

Igor Santos, visiting assistant professor of music, premiered his large-scale music composition titled “nossas mãos” (“our hands”) at the TIME:SPANS festival in New York City. This 30-minute work, written for piano trio and video, explores the profound symbolism of hands—celebrating them as instruments of human agency, affection, protest and as technologies for music-making. The composition was commissioned by the New York City-based trio Longleash and funded by Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning Program, with generous support from The Mellon Foundation.

Santos performed his piano and video work “offering” on Louisville Public Media’s NEW LENS program. In Kentucky, he also attended a residency at the Loretto Project, where, along with workshopping new music, he mentored doctoral composition students from Columbia University and Cornell University.

John Seery, George Irving Thomson Memorial Professor of Government and professor of politics, had his full-feature screenplay Jone judged as one of 12 finalists in the 2024 Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards Diversity Initiative Competition. Seery also played baritone saxophone with the city of Pomona Concert Band in separate concerts on August 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29.

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, was named “honored fellow” by the Iranian Studies Association for his numerous writings on Iranian dance and Persian popular music on August 12 at its biennial conference in Mexico City.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote six opinion pieces: “Big Tech’s AI bubble is alive and unwell” (MarketWatch, August 1), “The Government-Debt Tipping Point Is Nonsense” (MindMatters, August 9), “What the Luck? How Luck Matters to Olympic and Major League Wins” (MindMatters, August 16), “Bad Luck Seldom Persists — But It Never Guarantees Good Luck” (MindMatters, August 21), “Don’t Trust AI for Important Things Such As Investment Decisions” (Scientific American, August 23) and “A Sloppy ‘AI Scientist’ Could Make the Science Crisis Much Worse” (MindMatters, August 29). The Scientific American piece was widely reported, including an in-depth article by Andrew Isbester, “AI Does a Fickle Investor Make,” (Finews.asia, August 27). Smith was also quoted extensively in an article by Edward Yardeni on the limitations of AI, “On AI, Payrolls, & Global Economy,” (Yardeni Research, August 22).

Jessica Stern ’12, assistant professor of psychological science, was interviewed about her research on empathy across generations of parents and children for the podcast Purposeful Empathy with Anita Nowak.

Luis Edward Tenorio, visiting assistant professor of sociology, presented a paper titled “The Intergenerational Citizenship Effects of Public Benefits for Non-Citizen Mothers and Their Citizen Children” at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Montreal, Canada.

Kevin Wynter, associate professor and chair of media studies, published an essay titled “When the woman speaks” in the peer-reviewed journal Porn Studies.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History and coordinator of Asian studies, moderated two alumni conversations with Soma Mei Sheng Frazier ’95 about her first novel Off the Books, published by Macmillan in July. The first was held on August 3 at Village Well Books in Culver City, California, and the second on August 4 at Arvida Book Co. in Tustin, California. Both events were organized by Pomona alumni.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, organized and chaired a panel on Musica Poetica at the Twenty-Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, held July 23–26 at the University of British Columbia. Bandy presented the paper “‘Through All Eternity’: Musical-Temporal Rhetoric in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Jesu dulcis memoria (BuxWV 57),” which highlighted concordances between 17th-century Lutheran orthodox and Western esoteric theologies of time and memory, toward a new understanding of North German Baroque basso ostinato (repeating bassline) works as rhetorically self-conscious measurers of human temporality.

Bandy was a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s score to Season 2 of The Serpent Queen, the STARZ historical drama about Catherine de’ Medici, which premiered on July 12 with eight episodes being released through Aug. 30. Bandy can be heard playing viola da gamba throughout the season, as well as on the official STARZ original series soundtrack.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper, “Hacia una poética de la ‘antilogía’ poética: el caso de Jorge Urrutia,” virtually at the I Congreso Internacional de Teoría de la Lírica y Poéticas Comparadas, held at the Universidad de Salamanca from July 3-5.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, co-choreographed and performed at the Fini Dance Festival in Calabria, Italy, with local dancers from July 13-20.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, was invited to present on her research to the World Resources Institute and gave a talk titled “Leveraging Large-Scale Data Mining for Socio-Environmental Impact.”

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, published “Back to Spain? Return Migration on Stage among Aging Migrants in France,” a chapter in the edited volume States of Return: Rethinking Migration and Mobility (NYU Press).

Virginie A. Duzer, professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented her work in progress on an ecocritic approach to Balzac, “Le Chef d'Oeuvre inconnu,” at the 16th edition of the annual workshop series on 19th-century French studies titled “Cultural Production in the 19th Century (Tissages et Métissages)” at the American University of Paris.

Lorn Foster, emeritus professor of politics, spent four days in Alabama along with staff from the National Trust for Historic Preservation doing a site visit to four historical African American churches: Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery; Old Ship AME Zion Church, Montgomery; Brown Chapel AME Church, Selma; and Old Sardis Baptist Church, Birmingham. Each church is on the National Registry for Historic Places and has received funding from the National Trust.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, published three articles in July. With collaborators from Australia and Colorado College, he published the article “The Emu Bay Shale: a unique early Cambrian Lagerstätte from a tectonically active basin” in the July 26 issue of Science Advances. With collaborators from the American Museum of Natural History, he published the article “Late Ordovician eurypterid preserves oldest euchelicerate musculature in pyrite” in Biology Letters on July 10. He joined an international community project on the paper “Sustained increases in atmospheric oxygen and marine productivity through the Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic Eras,” published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was appointed as a member of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Fellows Program Selection Committee for a term of three years, effective Feb. 1, 2025, through Jan. 31, 2028. The Fellows of the AMS program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.

Garcia gave a talk titled “Quotient sets, Fibonacci numbers, and related curiosities” at the 21st International Fibonacci Conference at Harvey Mudd College on July 11.

Garcia published a book chapter (with Albrecht Boettcher and Mishko Mitkovski) titled “The Reciprocal Schur Inequality” in Analysis without Borders, edited by Sergei Rogosin.

Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, associate professor of economics, published the paper “Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labour Market Concentration” in the July issue of The Review of Economic Studies.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published a book article titled “Japan’s Quiet Leadership: Between Vision and Necessity” with Asia Policy.

Le gave an invited lecture on Japan’s aging and declining population at Meiji Gakuin University in Japan. He also led a benkyoukai on the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump to the U.S.-Japan Leadership Program. Le completed the U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Fellowship with a four-day conference in Washington, D.C. where he presented his research to policymakers on Capitol Hill.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, returned as a faculty member at the Chamber Music Conference, held at Colgate University, New York. For one week in July, she coached high-level amateur musicians in chamber music groups and performed J. S. Bach’s Trio Sonata from Musical Offering with other faculty members.

As a faculty member at the Redfish Music Festival in late July, Lee performed piano quartets of Mozart and Schumann at the Cultural Center in Crescent City, California, and two venues in Oregon (Port Orford and North Bend).

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show on July 23 to discuss the question “Is Democracy on the Ballot?”

Miriam Merrill, chair of physical education, was inducted into the Tuscarawas County Sports Hall of Fame (TCSHOF). The TCSHOF is dedicated to honoring individuals prominent in the history of athletics in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Merrill’s induction class included four teams, one foundation and 19 other individual athletes.

Lynne Miyake, emerita professor of Japanese and Asian studies, published a study of Japanese comics versions of an 11th-century tale, titled The Tale of Genji Through Contemporary Manga: Challenging Gender and Sexuality in Japan on July 11.

Nikki Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology, was awarded a $198,248 grant from the National Science Foundation EMBRACE program through the Division of Earth Sciences for her research proposal titled “Magmatic Evolution and Timing of the Independence Dike Swarm.” With a host of undergraduate research assistants, she will conduct field, geochemical and geochronological work on the dikes to develop a comprehensive model for the generation and emplacement of the swarm. This grant will provide research and networking opportunities for about six Claremont Colleges students and expand the analytical capabilities of the Pomona College Oxtoby Lab.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Effects of multi-channel AGN feedback in FIRE cosmological simulations of massive galaxies” in the Astrophysical Journal.

Moreno and collaborators were awarded time to observe 450 galaxies in the local universe on the Atacama Large Millimetre/Sub-millimetre Array, under a proposal titled “Star formation efficiency and quenching patterns in and between galaxies.” Moreno is serving as theory deputy director of this collaboration with principal investigators Timothy Davis and Amelie Saintonge. Moreno is also co-investigator on a National Science Foundation award titled “Multiphase Analysis of (U)LIRG Nuclear Activity” with principal investigator Vivian U.

Moreno and postdoctoral fellow Francisco Mercado were awarded $49,990 by the National Science Foundation under a program titled “Conference: 23rd Annual Symposium of the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows.”

Moreno was selected as the first distinguished guest by the undergraduate interns enrolled in the Carnegie Astrophysics Summer Student Internship program at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. Moreno represented the American Astronomical Society on a site visit to oversee the publishing of American astronomy journals at the Institute of Physics headquarters in Bristol, UK. On July 11, Moreno delivered a research talk at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. During the week of July 23, Moreno attended and co-organized the first meeting of the Society of Indigenous Physicists in Seattle.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented a paper titled “Futurité queer dans Viendra le temps du feu de Wendy Delorme” at the 65th annual conference of the Society for French Studies on July 2.

Muzart published an article, “L'émancipation décoloniale en toutes lettres d'Abdellah Taïa,” in the special issue of Contemporary French Civilization, “Queer flight: Rethinking Maghrebi sexualities” (July 2024).

Zhiru Ng, professor of religious studies, presented “Māra as the Problem of Evil: East Asian Variants of a Global Indian Myth” at the 2024 Association of Asian Studies-in-Asia Meeting at Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yojyakarta, Indonesia.

Lina Patel, lecturer of playwriting, was invited to present her play The Ragged Claws at The Road Theater Company’s Summer Playwright’s Festival in North Hollywood, California. Also in July, Patel participated in and co-moderated Rogue Machine Theater's inaugural Playwright’s Roundtable, a culmination of a six-month workshop and new play presentations at the historic Matrix Theater in West Hollywood, California.

Larissa Rudova, professor of German and Russian, delivered a paper, “The Queering of Russian Childhood in Mikita Franko’s Fictional World,” at the workshop “Politics of Text and Image in Children’s Culture: Contemporary Eastern Europe and Beyond,” organized by the International Workshop of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and International Youth Library in Munich from July 18-19. Rudova also moderated a panel, “Politics of Memory: East and West,” at the same conference.

Santiago Sandi-Urena, visiting professor of chemistry, was an invited speaker at the 27th International Conference on Chemistry Education, the specialized event in the field organized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The conference was held in Pattaya, Thailand, from July 15-19. His talk “Cross-institutional study: Propositional instruction and competence in chemical symbolic language in college students” included valuable research contributions by Jason Xu ’26 and Nate Rubin ’26. Sandi-Urena was appointed to the Scientific Committee of the conference and organized and chaired the symposium “Emerging Educational Trends in Chemistry in the 21st Century.”

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “Fisker, Invitae and other fallen ‘unicorns’ are casualties of Silicon Valley’s broken venture capital system” (MarketWatch, July 11), “How Can Someone Who Fails be Faulted When Everyone Else is Failing? (MindMatters, July 22) and “Big Tech’s AI Bubble is Alive and Unwell” (MarketWatch, July 31).

Jessica Stern ’12, assistant professor of psychological science, co-authored a book chapter, “The Neuroscience of Social Relationships in Early Development,” for the new edition of Child Development at the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition, published by the American Psychological Association.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, gave an invited online workshop on how to address individual differences in learning with AI for a diverse group of instructors and researchers from elementary and high schools in Singapore to the Ministry of Education and National Institute of Education on July 9.

Xiao published an invited paper titled “The 80/20 Rule in the Era of Artificial Intelligence” in International Chinese Learning and Teaching Resources by Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) on July 10.

Xiao was invited to join the review team of research priorities and grants for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) on July 25.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored the introduction to the special issue of Psychology and Aging “Adult Age Differences in Language, Communication, and Learning from Text,” along with co-editor Elizabeth Stine-Morrow (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Abrams also published two research articles in this issue: “Age-Related Differences in the Evaluation of Highly Arousing Language,” co-authored with collaborators Meredith Shafto and Lori James (University of Colorado Colorado Springs) and “Do Pictures’ Emotional Valence and Arousal Affect Younger and Older Adults’ Narratives?” co-authored with cognitive science majors Benjamin Cote ’23, María José Najas ’24 and Aysha Gsibat ’24 and collaborator Katherine White (Rhodes College).

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, completed his Downing Fellowship at University of Cambridge. Hosted by Matthew Gaunt (chemistry), he learned about new high-throughput techniques for synthesis. He also gave research talks at University of Bristol, University of Oxford and University of Cambridge.

Lisa Beckett, professor of physical education, was honored with a scoreboard naming dedication at the Pauley Tennis Courts. Student-athletes, alumni, colleagues, family and friends gathered for a dedication ceremony at court 7. The evening included a formal program of speakers, the unveiling of the naming of the scoreboard, a reception and dinner.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, published an article on “Coroliano Transformed: The Early History of Ariosti's First Royal Academy Opera” in the 2024 issue of the Handel-Jahrbuch.

Amelia Bransky, visiting assistant professor of theatre, collaborated with Detroit Public Theatre on their production of Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s as the scenic designer.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, co-organized a symposium titled Text Analysis for Conservation at the 2024 North American Congress for Conservation Biology in Vancouver, Canada.

Toni Cook, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published an article with Case Miranda ’24 and Clara McGilly PZ ’24, “Innovative use of Shona ideophones within an adolescent community of practice,” in the journal Linguistics Vanguard.

Anne Dwyer, associate professor of German and Russian, was an associate at the Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in June, where she conducted research for her book manuscript Viktor Shklovsky after Russian Formalism and a related article on Soviet cultural production/propaganda around the 1939 annexation of Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine. The award was made possible by the U.S. Department of State through its Title VIII Program for Research Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union.

KJ Fagan, senior director of public programming and strategic initiatives, was appointed to the Professions Committee of the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP), a global organization dedicated to advocating for the discipline of change management, supporting the global community of change managers through educational and professional development, and maintaining a standard for the accreditation of professionals working in the field. As a board-appointed member of the Professions Committee, Fagan will be responsible for implementing ACMP’s strategic initiatives in the areas of education, partnerships and advocacy.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, and a team of international colleagues published the article “Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites” in the journal Science. This “Trilobite Pompeii” was featured on the cover of the June 28 issue of Science and was featured in news outlets including Science News and The New York Times.

Melissa Givens, assistant professor of music, was one of five Davidson College alumni selected by the alumni association to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award for “providing leadership or attaining recognition on a national or regional level in their profession or business” during the recently concluded 2024 Reunion Weekend. The citation read in part, “Because of her deep and varied contributions to the worlds of music and art; and because of her commitment to the liberal arts and preparing the next generation of leaders who will serve in the world, the Alumni Association is pleased to present Melissa Givens, class of 1989, with the Distinguished Alumni Award, on the occasion of her 35th Reunion, June 2024.” Givens also co-chaired the reunion for her class.

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, presented “Chemical Basis of Behavioral Preference for the Microbiome” at the C. elegans Topic Meeting: Neuronal Development, Synaptic Function & Behavior in Madison, Wisconsin. The co-authors were Dylan Blackett ’24, Emily Church ’23, Victor Chai ’23, Tiam Farajzadeh ’23 and Charles Taylor, chair and professor of chemistry.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, participated June 13 in the roundtable “Todavía pensamos, todavía escribimos: ¿Qué tiene para decir la academia frente a la encrucijada que vivimos?” (“We still think, we still write: What can the academy say about the crossroads we are living in?”) at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Annual Congress in Bogotá, Colombia. On June 14, she was part of the LASA book presentation session about the edited volume Women’s Rights in Movement: Dynamics of feminist change in Latin America and the Caribbean along with the editors and other authors and talked about her chapter “The Right to a Complete Life: Struggles of the Dominican Feminist Movement.” On June 15, she presented the paper “The Anti-Gender and Anti-LGTBQ Conservative Backlash in the Dominican Republic” in the LASA section panel “Presentes de odio, futuros distópicos” (Hateful presents, dystopic futures).

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, delivered a talk titled “New Practices in Chinese Courses at a Liberal Arts College: Richness, Diversity, and Timeliness” at the 2024 Forum on the Research and Teaching of Chinese Language and Culture, organized by the China-U.S. Alliance of College Teachers of Chinese at Xiamen University in China. In the presentation, she shared her recent pedagogical innovations in teaching Mandarin Chinese, including collaborative grading and creative project-based learning approaches in foreign language classrooms.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, will have a collection of his art writings Cellophane Bricks published on July 25.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, participated in a roundtable discussion titled “Leading with Performance: Interdisciplinary Arts-led Innovations Inside the Neoliberal University" at the Canadian Association of Theatre Research Conference: Staging Justice, moved from McGill University to Université de Montreal, Teesri Duniya Theatre and Concordia University.

Lu was a discussant in The Dramaturgy and Ethics Working Group and participated in the Critical Race Studies Working Group at The Performance Studies International Conference in London at Senate House and Hoxton Hall.

Denise Machin, assistant director of the Smith Campus Center and director of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, was elected as president of the College Dancesport Association, the tri-state ballroom dance circuit the Claremont Colleges belongs to. Machin was also elected as a board member of NASSPDA (North American Same-Sex Partner Dance Association).

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, spoke at the Oxford Union at the University of Oxford, where she was part of a panel titled “Intrigue & Insiders: American Politics in the Age of Trump vs. Biden” on June 3.

McWilliams gave a talk titled “The Book Banning Epidemic,” first to the residents of Pilgrim Place in Claremont and later to the members of the United Nations Association of Pomona Valley.

On June 24, McWilliams published an essay on “The End of Roe: Two Years Later” in Current.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, is the author of “Wild, Managed, and Reclaimed: The Complex Environmental History of the San Antonio River Watershed,” in Greg Gordon, ed., Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene. Miller also chaired a session devoted to the anthology at the recent meetings of the American Society for Environmental History.

Miller was featured in “A Tale of Two Rivers: Los Angeles and San Antonio,” Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation podcast.

Miller published an essay on his participation in a series of humanities Texas teacher programs in the Humanities Texas Newsletter.

Jon Moore, lab coordinator and associate professor of biology, presented a poster with co-authors Anaya Ramkumar ’24 and Bernice Sule ’26 titled “Assessing Local Ecological Genetic Diversity as an Introductory Biology CURE” at the Association for Biology Laboratory Education’s annual conference in College Park, Maryland.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “Size-Mass Relations for Simulated Low-Mass Galaxies: Mock Imaging versus Intrinsic Properties” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On June 3, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the Cosmic Signals of Dark Matter Physics: New Synergies conference held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California.

Moreno served as reviewer for the Swiss National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, presented “The Branches of Greenberry Drive: African Americans and Activism in the East San Gabriel Valley Suburbs, 1960s-1970s” at the Inland Empire People’s History Conference at California State University, San Bernardino on June 1.

Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, gave a keynote address titled “What, if anything, is ‘myopia in grammar’?” at the Workshop on Myopia in Grammar, University of Leipzig on June 13.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, delivered a plenary address at an online conference at the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College of the University of London titled “Work and Smell: Comparative Perspectives.”

Richard S. Savich, lecturer in economics, was awarded a Wig Curriculum Development grant to update ECON 131, Economics of Entrepreneurship, for possible offering during the 2025-2026 academic year. The course was last offered in 2018.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote two opinion pieces: “AI is Still a Delusion” (MindMatters, June 27) and “Why AI Can’t Replace Science” (FastCompany, June 28).

Smith signed a contract for a second edition of Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics.

Smith’s co-authored paper Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, was selected as the AJPM paper of the year.

Ken Wolf, John Sutton Miner Professor of History and professor of classics, recently returned from his 14th alumni trip May 29 to June 9, this one focused on 12th- and 13th-century papal responses to heresy in Languedoc and Catalunya. This year marked the 25th anniversary of his first such medieval-themed trip in 1999.

Patria Aziz, assistant women’s tennis coach, led the team to winning the SCIAC championships and the NCAA semifinals. 

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave a series of talks sharing the latest research from his group at University of California San Diego, Scripps Research and the University of Manchester (UK).

Ball published a paper with Natalie Schur ’24 titled “Poison to Promise: The Resurgence of Organophosphorous Fluorides” in the journal Chem. The paper is a collaboration with the Sammis (U. British Columbia) and Melvin (Bryn Mawr) labs. It is a perspective highlighting the historical challenges of these compounds as chemical weapons, their safety profile and the potential for innovation toward addressing challenges in chemical and biomolecular sciences.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played the viola da gamba on The Singularity, a rock concept album released May 3 by composer Bear McCreary and featuring artists such as Slash and Rufus Wainwright. Bandy can be heard on the track “Antikythera Mechanism (Ft. Raya Yarbrough).”

Bandy contracted, organized and played violone for the ensemble Harmonologia Pomona, a group of professional instrumentalists specializing in Baroque performance practice, which collaborated with the Pomona College Glee Club in performances of Handel’s Dixit Dominus, directed by Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music. Performances took place in Bridges Hall of Music on April 25 and 27 and May 11, followed by a West Coast tour (May 14-22), with concerts in Berkeley, Palo Alto, Portland and Seattle.

On May 10 in Orange, California, Bandy programmed and led a workshop handling musical rhetoric in works by Lassus, Morales and Marenzio for the Orange County Recorder Society, and on May 26, Bandy played violone with Tesserae Baroque in their 2023/24 season finale in Beverly Hills, California, a complete performance of Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio Cain, overo Il primo omicidio (1707).

Tatiana Basáñez, visiting assistant professor of psychological science, had a symposium titled The World of Three Cultures Model: Honor, Achievement, and Joy/Easygoingness accepted for presentation at The XXVII International Congress of International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2024 where she is scheduled to present a paper titled Psychometric Properties of Values and Behavior Measures Using the World of Three Cultures Model: Honor, Achievement, and Joy. Also, along with students from her Social Psychology and Health (SOPAH) research lab, she was awarded a grant to present two scientific posters at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention in San Francisco, May 23-26.

Colin J. Beck, professor of international relations, gave two invited talks. First, he spoke to master’s students in the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University on revolutionary waves in modern history. On May 3, he presented a paper on the role of corruption grievances in 21st century revolutions at the Wisconsin Historical Analysis Table at the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, performed as harpsichordist with his Cornucopian Baroque Ensemble colleagues—violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music; theorbist Jason Yoshida, lecturer in music; and cellist Roger Lebow—in a Friday Noon Concert of music by Handel and Telemann in Lyman Hall.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught a masterclass on Cunningham Technique at the University of Washington, Seattle, on May 24.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, co-authored a publication titled “Communication and Deliberation for Environmental Governance” in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Chang also co-authored a preprint titled “Automating the Analysis of Public Saliency and Attitudes towards Biodiversity from Digital Media” on the arXiv preprint server with two non-profits, Conservation Science Partners and On The Edge Conservation.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a talk titled “Memoria de la migración de las mujeres españolas en Francia” at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid on May 10. The talk, which was based on his recently published book Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life (Toronto, 2024), was sponsored jointly by the museum and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, was an invited speaker at a Zoom workshop co-hosted by the UC San Diego Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration on May 17. She and Peggy Levitt gave a talk based on their recently published book Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders (Oxford University Press).

Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, remotely presented the paper “Calques et Copies des amitiés tardives” during the Sorbonne nouvelle journée d’étude Goncourt dedicated to copy and double May 16.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, with colleagues from Harvard University and Freie Universitat Berlin, published the article “Benthic pterobranchs from the Cambrian (Drumian) Marjum Konservat-Lagerstätte of Utah” in Papers in Palaeontology.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, gave a talk titled “Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about linear algebra?” at the Cal State Long Beach Mathematics Colloquium on May 3.

Garcia published an article, “Norms on complex matrices induced by random vectors II: extension of weakly unitarily invariant norms,” with former Visiting Assistant Professor Ángel Chávez and Jackson Hurley ’23 in Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete ’17, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, presented his research project titled “Production Leads Perception: Linguistic Variation Effects on Speech Perception” at the Colloquium Seminar for the Linguistics Department at UCLA.

Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, participated in the invited workshop “Surfacing Social Justice Solutions in Voluntary Local Reviews” sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University/Heinz College and the Brookings Institution Center for Sustainable Development in Washington D.C. on May 1-2.

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, co-organized and moderated a panel on women’s political participation on May 31 evaluating the results of female candidacies in the Dominican presidential and congressional elections. Hernández-Medina also gave an interview on the feminist radio program Libertarias the same day to publicize the event.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with Kira Hamman of Pennsylvania State University Mon Alto and Lew Ludwig of Denison University, led a virtual four-day workshop (May 13-16) titled “Who’s Afraid of Generative AI? Promises and Challenges for the Mathematics Classroom” hosted by the 2024 OPEN MATH Workshop series of the Mathematical Association of America.

Karaali gave a talk titled “A New Elephant Enters the (Chat)Room: Why Teach Math Now?” at the 2024 FYMSiC (First-Year Mathematics and Statistics in Canada) one-day online conference Why Are We Teaching Mathematics Today? on May 9. A recording of the talk is available.

Karaali published an article titled “ChatGPT and New Ethical Considerations for the Mathematics Classroom” in the April/May 2024 issue of FOCUS, the newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America.

Jade Star Lackey, professor of geology, co-authored the study “Multi-scale, open-system magmatic and sub-solidus processes contribute to the chemical and isotopic characteristics of the Jurassic Guadalupe Igneous Complex, Sierra Nevada, California, USA,” published in Geosphere.

Lackey presented the talk “Subduction to Sequoias: How Cretaceous Magmatism Set the Vitality and Vulnerability of Sierran Forest Ecosystems” at the 2024 Sierra Nevada Science Symposium convened by the National Park Service, USGS and University of California System.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, and fellow members of the Mojave Trio were artists-in-residence at University of California, Davis, from May 15-17. They recorded and presented the premiere of graduate composer works in concert. Mojave Trio also performed a live-streamed concert of works by Nico Muhly, James Diáz, Gao Ping and Rebecca Clarke. Each member of the group coached undergraduate individuals and chamber ensembles.

Lee was invited to give a solo recital for the May meeting of the local Foothill Philharmonic Committee, a support group for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, led a qigong workshop at a Hike for Wellness in Lincoln Heights offered by Roots in Motion Bike Collective on May 11.

Lu led an online exploration in contracting and expanding for the Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA) on May 20.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, presented an invited talk, “Knowledge is Power(ful): Harnessing Education to Destigmatize Borderline Personality Disorder,” at the annual Yale-National Education Alliance for BPD conference.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published a paper titled “HI discs of Lstar galaxies as probes of the baryonic physics of galaxy evolution” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno delivered a colloquium titled The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter at Harvard University (May 8) and MIT (May 14).

Carolyn Ratteray, associate professor of theatre, received the Integrity Award from the Los Angeles Women's Theatre Festival for her outstanding work in Los Angeles theatre.

Ratteray’s one-woman show Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black) was invited to be a part of the International Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, this summer along with her episodic film (Un)Claimed. (Un)Claimed also screened at the Diva Film Festival in London this past month.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German, published a review of A Date with Language by David Crystal (Oxford, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2023) in The European Legacy.

Joti Rockwell, associate professor of music, performed in a pair of concerts at Claremont’s Folk Music Center as a member of Peter Harper’s band, playing a variety of instruments including pedal steel, banjo and theremin. On vihuela, he joined Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music, and Ursula Kleinecke, lecturer in music, in a performance as part of Claremont Colleges Faculty Mariachi, led by Cándida Jáquez. On a custom-made Balinese bamboo slide guitar, he was a guest musician with gamelan Burat Wangi at the CalArts 2024 World Music and Dance Festival, performing the new composition Fantasy by I Nyoman Wenten, lecturer in music.

Rockwell published a review of Nicholas Stoia’s book Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular in the Journal of Music Theory.

On May 18, Rockwell delivered the keynote lecture titled “Music in Motion, Music as Motion” at the joint meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis and the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, held at UC Irvine.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities and chair of English, published her edited collection The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature on May 16. The Companion assembles a coalition of expert scholars, both emergent and established, to ensure comprehensive and incisive coverage of literary texts featuring the Black body over a wide historical range and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. This book provides an invaluable guide for teachers, students and general readers interested in literary and artistic representations of Blackness and embodiment. The cover design features Wardell Milan’s The Black Male Body, one of five billboards commissioned by Pomona’s Benton Museum during the 2022-2023 academic year.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published two peer-reviewed papers: “LLMs Can’t Be Trusted for Financial Advice” in Journal of Financial Planning and “MPT and CAPM Mismeasure Risk” in Journal of Investing. He also wrote two opinion pieces: “A Man, A Boat, and a Goat—and a Chatbot!” (MindMatters, May 15) and “AI replicating human thinking is more Big Tech ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ hype” (MarketWatch, May 29).

Gary was interviewed by Derek Thompson for “How the Modern University Became a Bureaucratic Blob” in The Atlantic (May 8) and signed a contract for a traditional Chinese translation of Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, which has also been translated into Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, ITS, published an article, “Virtual Reality Based Simulated Hallucinations to Enhance Empathy Toward Individuals With Schizophrenia,” in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology, published the article “Early-life silver spoon improves survival and breeding performance of adult zebra finches” in the journal American Naturalist.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, organized a panel on AI-generated content and second language teaching at the 2024 Conference of Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) held by Carnegie Mellon University on May 23. Xiao and Jonathan Becker ’24 showcased an AI-based adaptive learning platform, “Luduan.ai,” at CALICO 2024 on May 23.

Xiao co-authored a paper titled “Effects of Lexical Properties in L2 Chinese Compound Processing: A Multivariate Approach” in Journal of Psycholinguistic Research on May 24.

Aimee Bahng, associate professor of gender and women’s studies (GWS) and program coordinator of GWS and American Studies (AMST), was nominated for the Excellence in Mentorship Award from the Association for Asian American Studies and was awarded an honorable mention at the national conference awards ceremony in Seattle on April 27.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at Portland State University.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, served on the program committee for the 32nd Annual Conference of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, held April 4–7 at Princeton University and hosted by Princeton University Department of Music, with support from the Center for Human Values, Council of the Humanities, Program in Italian Studies, Department of Art and Archaeology, Department of French and Italian and Department of Comparative Literature.

On April 11, Bandy presented a lecture-performance titled “‘Drawing’ the Bow: Process, Passaggi, and Gendered Sociality in Italian and English Viol Music, ca. 1580–1680” at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, as part of the event Gender and the Italian Arts. Bandy’s lecture-performance featured members of Artifex Consort and drew connections between 16th-century cartoon tracing, the viola da gamba as a gendered object, and the rhetorical “abundant” style of divisions (variations) practice as instrumental reworkings of Italian Renaissance vocal polyphony. The event also featured a lecture by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer (to which Bandy’s musical portion responded), curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art, in honor of the current Benton exhibition 500 Years of Italian Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum.

Gayle Blankenburg, lecturer in music, performed in a new-music concert at Symphony Space in New York City on April 20. She performed a solo piano work, a work for cello and piano, and a work for violin, piano and two dancers.

Shannon Burns, assistant professor of psychological science and neuroscience, presented a symposium talk titled “Coordinated neural states during joint decision-making” at the Annual Meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society in Toronto on April 11.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented two papers: “‘El que habla no es el que sufre’: Witnessing Testimony in Juan Carlos Mestre’s ‘Fechado en Auschwitz,’” at the 44th Cincinnati Conference on Romance & Arabic Languages and Literatures, held at the University of Cincinnati from April 4-6 and “Economic Exile and Migratory Identity in the Writings of Azahara Palomeque,” at Cal State Long Beach’s 58th Annual Comparative World Literature Conference (April 17).

On April 20, Cahill hosted the Spring Meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese at Pomona College.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures and faculty director of Oldenborg, published an annotated bibliography of sources on the modern Chinese writer “Lu Xun” in Oxford Bibliographies in Chinese Studies, edited by Tim Wright and published by Oxford University Press.

Cecilia Conrad, emerita professor of economics, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024 in recognition of her nonprofit leadership.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, was recognized by the Queer Resource Center at Lavender Graduation for his support of students and his contributions to the community.

Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, had an article, “What’s new about new destinations: Cinderella states and the comparative study of migration,” published online in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Hayekian Psychological Economics: A Preliminary Look” in Behavioural Public Policy.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the American Mathematical Society 2024 Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting from April 6-7 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. On April 6, Goins organized a special session called “GranvilleFest 100: A Celebration of the Legacy of Evelyn Boyd Granville,” celebrating the 100th birthday of the second African American to receive a doctorate in mathematics. On April 7, Goins gave a talk in the special session on Elementary Number Theory and Elliptic Curves titled “{Quasi-Critical Points of Toroidal Belyi Maps.”

Goins has been traveling around the country serving as a section visitor for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). On April 5, he attended the MAA Oklahoma-Arkansas Section 2024 Annual Meeting at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He gave a keynote address titled “Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy.” On April 12-13, Goins attended the MAA Wisconsin Section 2024 Annual Meeting at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, Wisconsin. He gave a keynote address titled “Indiana Pols Forced to Eat Humble Pi: The Curious History of an Irrational Number.”

Nicole Desjardins Gowdy, senior director of international and domestic programs, presented a session on case studies and table top scenarios with colleagues Stacey Bolton Tsantir (DIS Study Abroad in Scandinavia) and Susan Lochner Atkinson (University of Wisconsin—Madison) at the U.S. Department of State’s Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) Academia Sector Committee (ASC) Spring 2024 Seminar on Health, Safety, and Security held at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities on April 26 in St. Paul.

Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete ’17, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, presented his research project titled “Occlusive salience among Spanish-English bilinguals: Evidence from code-switching” in a Blue Room Talk for the series “Return to Pomona” for Pomona College faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Gutiérrez Topete participated in an alumni panel hosted virtually on April 7 by the Office of Graduate Diversity at UC Berkeley.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, and biology majors Philip Duchild ’24 and Teodelina Martelli ’24 presented their bird-related research at the April Pomona Valley Audubon Society meeting. Karnovsky presented her work assessing the diets of Antarctic penguins and south polar skuas from the ear bones of fish found in the “puke and poop” of those seabirds. Duchild presented results from his senior thesis in which he quantified and characterized the plastic consumed by Laysan albatross breeding at two colonies on Oahu, Hawaii. Martelli presented a RAISE (Remote Alternative Independent Summer Experience) project she did in which she translated the bird field notes of her late grandfather from Argentina and put his sightings into ebird, a citizen science app for recording birds.

Karnovsky performed in two dances choreographed by Anthony Loa in Village Dance Arts’ recital Steppin’ Out at the Haugh Performing Arts Center in Glendora, California, on April 21.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, co-authored the article “New Developments in Pomona College’s Chinese Program: Implementation of Gender-Inclusive Curriculum Practices” with Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, published in Chinese Language Globalization Studies.

Lang gave a talk titled “Chinese Language and Gender: Exploring Gender-Inclusive Pedagogy” at the 2nd Annual Gender-Inclusive Language Conference hosted by the Center for Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California.

Lang joined a panel at the 2024 Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) Annual Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, where she presented her recent pedagogical practices titled “Teaching Chinese to Gen Z: Project-based Learning.”

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article in The Diplomat on the death and impact of Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.

Le served as a discussant on a panel concerning social movements in Japan at the Associate of Asian Studies annual conference.

Le gave a talk at Soka University of America on Japan-South Korea reconciliation.

Le served on a panel, “The Future of East Asia,” at the West Coast International Relations of Asia Conference at USC.

Jonathan Lethem, Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing, won The New York City Book Award for his 2023 book Brooklyn Crime Novel.

Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, presented “‘Queen of the Favela’: Ludmilla's Queer Funk” at the Brazilian Studies Association in San Diego on April 3 in a panel on queer and trans performance, necropolitics and the Brazilian state.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, led a Playback Theatre workshop at the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama conference April 4. She also performed playback with The Living Arts Playback Theatre Ensemble as part of Armand Volkas’ plenary speech titled “Healing the Wounds of History Through Psychodrama” on April 6.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, delivered an invited talk titled “from excursion sets to today: a random walk through the history of cosmological simulations” at the 2024 April Meeting of the American Physical Society on April 4. This presentation was also featured in astrobites.

From April 15^-19, Moreno co-organized an international conference called Recipes to Regulate Star Formation at All Scales: From the Nearby Universe to the First Galaxies at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Moreno published three peer-reviewed research articles in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: “Dense stellar clump formation driven by strong quasar winds in the FIRE cosmological hydrodynamic simulations,” “Inflow and outflow properties, not total gas fractions, drive the evolution of the mass-metallicity relation” and “Hooks & Bends in the Radial Acceleration Relation: Discriminatory Tests for Dark Matter and MOND.” The third article was led by Francisco Mercado, postdoctoral fellow working under the supervision of Moreno and lecturer in physics and astronomy.

Zhiru Ng, professor and chair of religious studies and program coordinator of Asian studies, presented “To beg or to cook? Food ethics, cross-cultural borrowing, and the meal rituals of South Forest (Nanlin) Buddhist nuns in Central Taiwan” at the conference on “Buddhism and Food Ethics,” University of Oxford China Center, March 19-20. The conference was hosted by the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.

Kun Nie, visiting instructor of Asian languages and literatures, gave a presentation titled “Strengthening Cultural Roots through Community-Centric Projects for the Heritage Chinese Classes” at the 31st International Conference on Chinese Language Instruction, held at Princeton University on April 27.

Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, was an invited panelist on “Claiming Belonging and Witnessing Joy: New Directions in Latinx Studies” at the Latinx Studies Association, Arizona State University on April 19.

Ochoa co-facilitated a daylong workshop for Santa Ana Unified School District’s Ethnic Studies Steering Committee on April 24 in Santa Ana, California.

Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, had his six-year effort with the University of Washington to reconcile its role in a decades-old case of child sexual abuse at a Seattle elementary school featured on NPR affiliate KUOW.org.

Adam Pearson, associate professor and chair of psychological science, published the article “Social psychological pathways to climate justice: Emerging insights and intersecting challenges,” co-authored with Stella Favaro ’23 and Brooke Sparks ’22. The article is part of a 25th anniversary special issue of the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations focused on the role of psychology in addressing global challenges.

Pearson co-authored the article “Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries” in Science Advances with a global team of 250 behavioral scientists.

William Peterson, professor emeritus of music and College organist, performed music from the WWI era in a concert on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music. The program included a number of works that were originally published in an anthology, Les Voix de la douleur chrétienne (“The Voices of Christian Sorrow”). The concert program included music composed between 1914 and 1924 by Louis Vierne, Camille Saint-Saëns, Joseph Jongen, Jacques Ibert and others.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, has a large cyanotype work currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Alexis Reyes, director of sustainability and energy management, was featured in a case study with Patch, a carbon credit marketplace, for her work on sourcing and vetting high-quality carbon credits. Reyes worked with a subcommittee of the Pomona College Board of Trustees to establish criteria for purchasing high-quality carbon credits. The Sustainability Office launched a pilot program under which departments can purchase carbon credits to offset emissions from College-funded air travel.

Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German and Russian, published a review of Kellers Erzählen. Strukturen – Funktionen – Reflexionen. Herausgegeben von Philipp Theisohn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022); and Kellers Medien. Formen – Genres – Institutionen. Herausgegeben von Frauke Berndt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022) in Monatshefte.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave a presentation, “My Hidden Childhood in WWII in Occupied France,” during Alumni Weekend on April 27.

Bri Sérráno, assistant dean and director of the Queer Resource Center, defended and passed his dissertation defense for a doctor of philosophy in education and human resource studies degree with a specialization in higher education leadership from Colorado State University on April 29. His dissertation is titled “I Love the Work, But the Work Doesn’t Love Me: A Constructivist Study on the Lived Experiences of Transgender Staff of Color Who Report Discrimination in Higher Education.”

Anthony Shay, professor of dance, wrote his first novel Death Along the Silk Road. The novel follows Omar Khayyam through the period 1090-1092, when the Seljuq Empire of Persia fell apart. Most of the events, though fictionalized, occurred. Shay translated Khayyam’s poems anew for the novel.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote five opinion pieces: “The AI hype machine just rolls on, living on exhaust” (MindMatters, April 11), “Elon Musk: AI will be smarter than a human in 2025: Why he's wrong” (MindMatters, April 16), “Universities Should Prioritize Critical Thinking Over Large Language Models” (MindMatters, April 23); “Large Language Models are Often Wrong, Never in Doubt” (MindMatters, April 29) and “A Modest Proposal to Save Higher Education” (Washington Post, April 23).

Smith signed a contract for a Japanese translation of the book The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha, co-authored with his wife Margaret Smith.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, signed a contract with Edinburgh University Press for his second book, Feeling Absence: Horror, Memory, and Language in Cinema.

Wynter organized and hosted the Media Studies Department’s 2024 Eckstein Symposium. The theme of this year’s symposium was Expressing the Inexpressible. The symposium’s invited speakers were film scholars Aaron Kerner (San Francsico State) and Hilary Neroni (University of Vermont).

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, was appointed chair of the media and publicity committee at Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA (CLTA) on April 5. He participated in a panel discussion on the challenges and opportunities of generative AI for Chinese teaching and co-presented a paper titled “Assessing pragmatic routines in L2 Chinese: A focus on rating scale functioning and rater behavior” at the 2024 CLTA Conference on April 6.

Xiao was invited to join the international roundtable discussion on Chinese curriculum design and pedagogical practice held by Princeton University on April 26.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, discussed Professor Ch’en Shouyi, who headed Pomona College’s Asian Studies program for nearly three decades, in a short talk titled “Ch’en Shouyi and the Development of Asian Studies at Pomona College” that was part of a special program, “Remembering Professor Ch’en Shouyi’s Legacy: A Discussion,” held at The Claremont Colleges Library on April 3.

Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, was featured in The Washington Post for her research on hermeneutic labor in intimate relationships.

Anderson delivered the annual Edwards Lecture at Emory University on March 21, with a presentation titled “Feeling Myself: Self-Awareness and Objectification.” She also presented “Love and Limerence” at an invited symposium at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in Portland, Oregon, on March 23 and delivered an invited talk on “The Critical Phenomenological Turn” to the Kant and Post-Kantian Research Group at the University of Toronto on March 28.

Tricia Avant, academic coordinator and gallery manager of art, had one of her videos included in a screening event titled The Formless is What Keeps Bleeding at Heavy Manners Library in Los Angeles on March 8.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, alongside Donna M. Di Grazia, David J. Baldwin Professor of Music, and Adrien Redford ’14, programmed, prepared editions for, co-directed and played tenor viola da gamba in Musick Divine, a concert of 16th- and 17th-century English music for voices and viols, as a joint venture between Artifex Consort and PRISM Choral Ensemble (March 3, Bridges Auditorium).

On March 8, Bandy presented a paper titled “Through All Eternity: Clockwork, Memory, and Temporality in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Jesu dulcis memoria” at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, held at Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL). Bandy then presented another paper, “Instruments of ‘Torture’: Viols, Dismemberment, and Transfiguration in German Baroque Passion Meditations,” based on his research as a 2023-24 Pomona College Humanities Studio fellow, at the Spirit of Gambo: The State of Viol Research conference, held March 15–17 at UC Berkeley.

On March 22–24 at venues in Palo Alto, Berkeley and San Francisco, Bandy performed with the early music ensemble Ciaramella on viola da gamba, alto shawm and Renaissance hümmelchen bagpipes, in a program of 15th-century repertoire presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society.

Alexa Block, associate director of news and strategic content in the Office of Communications, served as a plenary speaker and faculty member for The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Social Media and Community conference in Boston from March 18-20. The plenary sessions were titled “Social Issues, Social Climate and Social Media” and “Crisis Messaging and Protocols Workshop.”

Bana Marine Dahi, visiting assistant professor of French, presented a talk titled “L’intelligence artificielle (IA) au carrefour de la didactique du FLE : L’IA en Support à l’Apprenant et l’Enseignant” in the conference organized by the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF-SoCal) at USC on March 2.

Susanne Mahoney Filback, associate director, preprofessional programs & prelaw advisor in the Career Development Office, attended a graduate school advisor workshop hosted by The University of St. Andrews in Scotland from March 18-22. Pomona College was one of only 12 U.S. colleges and universities invited to attend.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, published two papers in the March 29 issue of Science Advances. With colleagues from the U.S., Australia and Korea, he published the article “Tectonic trigger to the first major extinction of the Phanerozoic: the early Cambrian Sinsk event.” With colleagues from the U.S. and China, he published the article “Lithium isotopic constraints on the evolution of the continental clay mineral factory and marine oxygenation in the earliest Paleozoic Era.”

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, delivered the 2024 Mosaic Lecture at Grand Valley State University on March 12. His talk was titled “Prime Time Math: Little Green Men, Locust Hordes, and Cybersecurity.”

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, together with Kira Hamman of Pennsylvania State University and Mon Alto and Lew Ludwig of Denison University, facilitated a virtual discussion session titled “Revisiting Generative AI and Numeracy.” The session was hosted by the National Numeracy Network on March 21.

Karaali facilitated a virtual workshop, together with Ileana Vasu of Holyoke Community College, Geillan Aly of Compassionate Math and Jonas D’Andrea of Westminster University, titled “Equity in the Moment” on March 24. The event was hosted by NE-COMMIT (New England Community for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching).

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, co-chaired with Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, in organizing and hosting the 36th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-36), an international scholarly event at Pomona College from March 22-24. This event was sponsored by the College, Academic Dean’s Office, Asian Languages and Literatures Department, Asian Studies, Asian Library, Oldenborg Language Center, Pacific Basin Institute, and Linguistics and Cognitive Science Department. NACCL-36 at Pomona College marks the first time this international conference was held at a liberal arts college.

At NACCL-36, Lang collaborated with her students Sydney Tai ’26, Emma Tom ’26, Jenny Wey ’24 and Jessie Zhang ’26 to deliver a panel presentation titled “Incorporating Gender into Chinese Language and Linguistics Courses,” showcasing learning and teaching reflections from the two new courses Lang first offered: Introduction to Pop Culture in China in spring 2023 and Chinese Language and Gender in fall 2023.

Lang was invited to review the newly published book titled Pragmatics of Chinese as a Second Language, edited by Shuai Li. Lang's review was published in the journal Contrastive Pragmatics on March 12.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave a solo recital on the Piano Spheres series at Colburn School of Music in downtown Los Angeles. Her program featured keyboard works with speaking and singing.

With the support of a Pomona research grant, Lee commissioned and premiered two new works by Chris Castro and Livia Malossi Bottignole. San Francisco Classical Voice gave her a glowing review.

Lee was a judge for the Oakland University (Michigan) 2024 Piano Day Competition for young pianists in two age groups between 11 and 18 years old.

Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History, presented “Crisis Management: Conflict and Controversy in Forest Service History” to sessions of the USDA Forest Service Middle Leadership Program in Davis, California, Ogden, Utah, Anchorage, Alaska, and Missoula, Montana.

Miller’s essay remembering the late conservationist Estella Leopold’s passionate defense of ancient time was published by the Forest History Society.

Miller was quoted in Washington Post articles on the ephemeral Lake Manly in Death Valley National Park on March 2 and on the massive wildfires in the Texas panhandle March 5.

Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, spoke at the American Cinemathèque in Los Angeles on the anniversary of the execution of Missak Manouchian, an Armenian man who was active in the French Resistance. Saigal Escudero read a letter Manouchian wrote to his wife before being killed and additionally talked about her own situation during WWII and the women in the French Resistance whom she has interviewed.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, with co-authors from UCI, published a paper online in Family Process. The paper reports on the team’s efforts to culturally adapt their relational savoring intervention for implementation with minoritized groups.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “Big losses are pushing venture-backed startups over a cliff and taking the IPO market with it” (MarketWatch, March 4); “When it comes to critical thinking, AI flunks the test” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12) and “The Flea Market of the Internet: Breaking the Addiction” (MindMatters, March 20).

Smith signed a contract with Business Expert Press for a novel, co-authored with Margaret Smith, Reboot: A Business Novel of Money, Finance, and Life.

David M. Tanenbaum, Osler-Loucks Professor in Science and professor of physics, and his collaborators presented a talk, “Slot-die Coated and Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) Integrated Improved Semi-transparent Organic Solar Cells” at the Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS) 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages & literatures, gave an invited talk titled “AI and Adaptive Language Learning” for the course AI and Global Humanities at Carnegie Mellon University on March 18. He also gave an invited talk titled “Using ChatGPT API in Language Teaching” at the third lecture series on Chinese curriculum design. The event was organized by Beijing Language and Culture University Press and Phoenix Tree Publishing on March 22. Xiao gave a presentation titled “Facilitative and Inhibitive Factors in Processing L2 Chinese Compounds” at the 36th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics on March 23.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, delivered “Did the War Have to End in the Way It Did?” and “Understanding Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1937-1945” at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater on March 5 and the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology on March 7. The Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies funded these lectures, the fourth and fifth Yamashita has given as a member of NEAC’s Distinguished Speakers Bureau.

On March 16, Yamashita delivered a paper titled “Kaiseki Cuisine and the New Hyperlocal Cuisines” as part of a panel on “New Directions in Japanese Food Studies” that he organized for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, which was held in Seattle. On the following afternoon, Yamashita gave his “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” talk to Pomona College alumni in Seattle.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, was an organizer, chair and presenter at a panel titled “Transcultural Encounters in the Sin-Tibetan Borderlands” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference. Her scholarly panel examined cross-lingual, cross-ethnic encounters among Western missionaries, indigenous groups and Han Chinese intellectuals in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Zhang’s pedagogical essay “Visualizing Ethnic Minorities” was published in Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China (Modern Language Association). Her essay is probably the first systematic discussion of how to engage with and teach about China’s ethnic minorities in the classroom ever published in the English language.

Zhang was invited to give a special talk as part of the distinguished Tanner Talk Series at Utah State University. Her talk was titled “Understanding China from the Borders: The ‘Qiang’ and Multiethnic Chinese Literature, Cinema, and Visual Culture” and tackled ethnic minority creative expressions and diversity issues in the realm of literary and artistic productions in globalizing China and represents cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in Asian humanities.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, published the research article “Relating Tabooness to Humor and Arousal Ratings in American English: What the F*** Is so Funny?” in the journal Language and Speech, co-authored with Pengbo Hu ’21 and Genevieve Gray ’22 and collaborators Meredith Shafto and Lori James.

Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, delivered the keynote address for the 2024 Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love seminar series with a presentation titled “Hermeneutic Labor in Sexual Contexts” on Feb. 8. She also presented “On the Possibility of ‘Unrequited Love’: Limerence, Infatuation, and Crushes” at the 2024 Fagothey Conference “Problems with Love” at Santa Clara University.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented the paper “Didactics Beyond Depiction: Jesuit Dialectic in Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c.1680)” at a conference to honor 17th-century musicology pioneer Anne Schnoebelen, Mullen Professor Emerita of Musicology at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music (Houston). The conference took place Feb. 17–18 at the Brockman Hall for Opera and featured invited papers by 15 Shepherd School alumni from across the U.S. and Europe.

On Feb. 21, Bandy presented a lecture on the life and esoteric compositional practices of Dieterich Buxtehude (ca.1637–1707) at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library, at the event Playing / Play on Buxtehude, organized by the USC Collaborations in History, Art, Religion, and Music (CHARM) working group and co-sponsored by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies and the Unusual Suspects Theatre Company.

Bandy programmed and led a day-long workshop (Feb. 3, South Pasadena, California) for SoCal Viols, the local Viola da Gamba Society of America chapter, on the topic of fauxbourdon and its many symbolic meanings across sacred and secular music from the 15th through 17th centuries in Italy, Flanders and England.

Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, performed as harpsichordist with his Cornucopian Baroque Ensemble colleagues—violinist Alfred Cramer, associate professor of music; theorbist Jason Yoshida, lecturer in music; and cellist Roger Lebow—in a Friday Noon concert of music by Handel and Telemann on Feb. 16 in Lyman Hall.

Gary Champi, assistant professor of dance, taught an open-level community dance masterclass at Elite Movement Dance Studio in Cape Town, South Africa. During his time there, he worked with four local dancers on a short video project and interviewed studio owner and choreographer Densley “Deezy” Carolissen on the conversations surrounding hip hop dance today.

Champi premiered a new six-minute contemporary modern dance titled Reset with the Malashock Dance Company in San Diego, California. The work included new music by percussionist and composer Jonathan Rodriguez.

Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures and faculty director of Oldenborg Center, had a podcast interview on her translation of Lu Xun’s Wild Grass/ Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk published on Feb. 13 in New Books Network.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages & literatures, published a book titled Untold Stories: Legacies of Authoritarianism among Spanish Labour Migrants in Later Life with University of Toronto Press.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, received a research grant from the National Science Foundation to design, conduct and analyze a national sample survey on research development and research administration at U.S. colleges and universities. Pomona is the lead institution, and Gerstein is the principal investigator, with colleagues from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Seattle University and Research Triangle Institute. This three-year project is titled “Collaborative Research: RD/RA Support Networks at Diversified Research Institutions (SUNDRI),” with an overall project budget of $1,884,361.

Gerstein was appointed to the Industries of Ideas University Advisory Board at the Social Science Research Council. Industries of Ideas is a three-year collaborative pilot project funded by the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships of the National Science Foundation.

Meg Gotowski, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, Ernesto R. Gutiérrez Topete, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics and cognitive science, and Galia Bar-Sever, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, organized and hosted the Pomona Acquisition Workshop (PAW) 2024 on Feb. 23. The one-day event brought together invited speakers from UCSD, UCLA and UCI as well as graduate students from UCLA to present their most recent work on language acquisition research. Pomona faculty and students attended the event and interacted with other scholars in Southern California working on this topic.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, was elected to serve as a member-at-large of the executive committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics and began her term in Feb. 2024.

Karaali gave a talk titled “Can Zombies Do Math? OR Humanism as a Philosophy of Mathematics” on Feb. 22 at the Mathematics Department Colloquium at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

Karaali gave a talk titled “ChatGPT and New Ethical Considerations for the Mathematics Classroom” on Feb. 24 at the WiMSoCal-14 Conference held at Pomona College.

Nina Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, and biology major Philip Duchild ’24, attended the 50th annual meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group in Seattle from Feb. 20-23. Karnovsky chaired the session “Community Outreach” and presented the paper “Sowing Seeds of Futures in Seabird Conservation through Participation in Habitat Restoration Work on Anacapa Island.” In this study, Karnovsky found that participating in a field trip in her Advanced Animal Ecology classes had a lasting and large impact on the lives of Pomona students long after graduation. Duchild presented a part of his senior thesis in a poster, “Analysis of Laysan Albatross Diets from Two Colonies on Oahu, Hawaii.” Co-authors were Karnovsky and Lindsay Young of Pacific Rim Conservation. As part of the meeting there was an exhibit called “Faces of Conservation.” Kristina McOmber ’12, Jacob Ligorria ’23 and Clare Flynn ’19 were profiled in this exhibit. At the meeting, Kay Garlick-Ott ’18 won the award for best Ph.D. student talk, and Kristina McOmber ’12 won the award for best master’s student poster.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, was selected for the Institute for Global Affairs 2024 nonresident fellowship.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed at ChamberFest 2024 held at California State University, Northridge on Feb. 2. With CSUN faculty members, she played Khachaturian’s Trio for clarinet, violin and piano.

Lee was an invited guest on Global Village Thursdays with John Schneider on KPFK 90.7FM. She was asked to speak about her upcoming PianoSpheres recital at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles on March 5.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, performed with Pangea Playback Theatre under the direction of Hannah K. Fox for a presentation by Dailey Innovations, Inc. titled “Speaking Through Colors: Self-Expression Through Art (SETA) and using Playback Theater to Transform the World” on Feb. 22. This virtual event was sponsored by the School of Social Work and the Office of Professional Development and Continuing Education at Howard University.

April Mayes, professor of history and associate dean of the College, was one of three scholars featured in the podcast “Lost Women of Science” in an episode about Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser. Fraser was the daughter of Reverend Jeremiah Loguen, ex-slave, abolitionist and clergy member, and became one of the first African American women to earn a medical degree (Syracuse University). She immigrated to the Dominican Republic where she became the first woman certified to practice medicine, allowed to treat women and children.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, spoke to the Metuchen (New Jersey) Democratic Committee on Feb. 7 about the possibilities and probabilities for the 2024 election.

On Feb. 15, McWilliams published an article titled “He Took Children Seriously” as part of a retrospective forum on the historian Christopher Lasch in the journal Current.

McWilliams published an essay titled “Tradition, Transformation, and Democratic Education” in Political Science Quarterly on Feb. 28.

Wallace M. Meyer III, associate professor of biology and director of the Bernard Field Station, published an article titled “Acmispon glaber shrub canopies facilitate Bromus madritensis establishment after fire in California sage scrub” in the Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Meyer received, as a co-PI, a National Science Foundation BIORETS: REACHES grant for a project titled “Research experiences for advancing curriculum of Hawaiian ecosystem sciences.”

Meyer gave an invited talk at Cal State University San Bernardino titled “Using ecological information to develop a holistic approach to sustainable landscaping in southern California.”

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Inflow and outflow properties, not total gas fractions, drive the evolution of the mass-metallicity relation” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Moreno and collaborators obtained approval for a research proposal titled “BonFIRE: Modeling Galaxy Formation in the Early Universe” under the JWST Cycle 3 Theory Program.

Michael O’Malley, professor of art, has new work in the show “This is not a chair” currently on view at the Claremont Museum of Art until April 20, 2024.

Zvezdana Ostojic, visiting assistant professor of French, chaired the panel “Crime is their Business” and presented the paper “À tout crime son châtiment : une réécriture impossible dans Maudit soit Dostoïevski d’Atiq Rahimi” at the 2024 20th- & 21st-century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium in Philadelphia.

Adam Pearson, associate professor and chair of psychological science, was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the largest international scientific organization of psychologists. Fellow status is awarded to APS members who have made “sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology in the areas of research, teaching, service and/or application.”

Pearson gave an invited address, “Social Psychological Pathways to Climate Justice,” at the Groups Preconference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in San Diego, California.

Hans J. Rindisbacher, professor of German, was awarded a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society in support of his edited book on the 20th-century Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt (under contract with Camden House). The volume brings together 12 scholars who (re)read and interpret Dürrenmatt’s multi-perspective work in the context of contemporary social, political and cultural developments.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published a paper (co-authored with Margaret Smith), “It May be a Mistake to Delay Social Security Retirement Benefits,” in the Journal of Financial Planning and wrote three opinion pieces: “How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study” (Retraction Watch, Feb. 21); “Why chatbots ( LLMs) flunk Grade 9 math tests” (MindMatters, Feb. 21) and “Retracted paper is a compelling case for reform” (MindMatters, Feb. 23). He was also quoted extensively in Ed Yardeni’s discussion of “AI Isn’t Intelligent” in Morning Briefing (Feb. 22).

Smith gave a presentation, “Generative AI Is Still Fake Intelligence,” to 381 people working with AI in O’Reilly Media’s “GenAI Superstream: Possibilities and Pitfalls” on Feb. 28.

Valorie D. Thomas, emerita Phebe Estelle Spalding professor of English and Africana Studies, published the chapter “Who Do You Worship?: #Memesis #whodoyouworship #BeyoncétheFeminist #AprilBey,” about Los Angeles artist April Bey’s Afrofuturist work on Black femme iconography, in the collection Dis…Miss Gender? edited by Anne Bray (MIT Press). She also published “Incidents in the Life of a Black Prof.: A Speculative CV” in the book Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education edited by Shardé M. Davis (UNC Press).

Margaret Waller, professor emerita of French, won the New Yorker cartoon caption contest Feb. 5.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, served as moderator for the Evening with Joy-Ann Reid event celebrating the publication of her new book Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America. The event was held in Bridges Auditorium on Feb. 15.

Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, presented her research project titled “Indigenous Articulations: Understanding the ‘Mother Tongue Movement’ of the Qiang People of China” at the Global Asias conference held at UC Irvine. The conference gathered scholars from Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, English and other fields to explore cross-disciplinary issues and find connections beyond area studies.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored the introduction to the special issue of American Psychologist “Ethical Challenges in the Use of Digital Technologies in Psychological Science” along with co-editors Leah Light (Pitzer College), Sangeeta Panicker (Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research) and Jina Huh-Yoo (Drexel University).

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, recorded viola da gamba and tanbur solos for the soundtrack to the television series Masters of the Universe: Revolution. The show, whose score features musical themes by Bear McCreary and music by Sparks & Shadows, premiered on Netflix on January 25.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was awarded a $40,000 Korea Foundation grant to design and implement a simulation on the geopolitical and economic consequences of a supply chain disruption originating with the People’s Republic of China. His co-principal investigator for the project is Ben Radd, visiting assistant professor of politics in 2022-23.

Charlotte Chang, assistant professor of biology and environmental analysis, published an article led by Hanna Kim ’23 in the journal Conservation Science & Practice. This article compared environmental NGOs in terms of their social media strategy across multiple platforms, ranging from TikTok to Facebook, and found several organizations that were influencers, or positive deviates for public reach online. This research was the product of a RAISE award earned by Kim in the summer of 2021.

Chang co-authored two manuscripts related to conservation planning and public outreach. Chang was the lead author in an article published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution showing that after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, environmental and climate voices declined markedly. This manuscript received press attention from venues including The Guardian, Quartz, New York Times, Le Monde and Gizmodo. Chang worked with an interdisciplinary team convened as a NIMBioS working group to mathematically model how incorporating information on conservation threats improves landscape planning outcomes; this article was published in Conservation Biology.

Chang gave invited seminars to Nanyang Technological University, Asian School of the Environment; Centre for Wildlife Studies, Banglore, India; National University of Singapore, Department of Biological Sciences; and University of Nottingham, Malaysia, Sustainable Environments Research Group.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, delivered the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS) invited address “Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about linear algebra?” at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in San Francisco on January 4. This honor was recognized at the Prizes and Awards ceremony on January 3. He also gave an hour-long lecture, “A second course in linear algebra: a call for the early introduction of complex numbers,” at the AMS Special Session on Issues, Challenges, and Innovations in Instruction of Linear Algebra on January 5, also at the JMM (a meeting attended by over 5,500). Garcia also co-organized, with Konrad Aguilar, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, the ILAS Special Session on Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, and its Applications on January 4-5.

On January 11, Garcia gave a talk titled “The quaternionic structure of 2x2 matrix inner functions” at the 2024 Workshop on Schur Analysis and applications to Hypercomplex Analysis, Neural Networks, and Linear Systems held at Chapman University.

Melissa Givens, assistant professor of music, was one of nine musicians who collaborated with Southwestern University Professor of Music John Michael Cooper on a video project in conjunction with the release of three volumes of previously unpublished volumes of music by Florence B. Price on January 1. Givens and Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, gave the world-premiere performance of Price’s “Lullaby (for a Black Mother),” a setting of a Langston Hughes text. The three volumes, published by ClarNan Editions and distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints, are “Twelve Pieces for Piano Solo,” “Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Florence Price, and Melvin B. Tolson) (original keys / medium voice)” and “Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets (transposed for high voice).”

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and Charles Taylor, chair and professor of chemistry, with Victor Chai ’23, Tiam Farajzadeh ’23, Yufei Meng ’25, Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25, published the paper “Chemical basis of microbiome preference in the nematode C. elegans” in Scientific Reports in January.

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, attended the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. The annual conference is the largest meeting of mathematicians in the world. On January 3, Goins organized and moderated a panel titled “What Makes Successful Research Careers.’’ Goins brought several Claremont Colleges students with him as part of his summer program experience: Tesfa Asmara ’24, Louis Burns ’24, Matilda LaFortune SCR ’23, Eli Pregerson HMC ’24 and Melinda Yang ’23.

Goins was featured in a new documentary on African American mathematical scientists. “Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience,” directed by George Csicsery, had its world premiere at the Joint Mathematics Meetings on January 6. The hour-long film “traces the evolution of a culture of Black scholars, scientists and educators in the United States. The film follows the stories of prominent pioneers, showing how the challenges they faced and their triumphs are reflected in the experiences of today’s mid-career Black mathematicians.” Goins is credited in the film as a consulting scholar.

On January 23, Goins gave a virtual colloquium talk at Alabama A&M University 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, presented the paper “The Legacy of the Institutional Route of the 1990s on the Dominican Feminist Movement Today: NGOization, Beijing, and Collaborating with the State” on January 27 at the 2024 Winter Meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) in the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico. Hernández-Medina was also part of the panel “Queering Spaces of Social Action: Integrating Teaching, Research, and Activism for Radical Inclusion” on January 27 at the same SWS conference. She shared her remarks on her trajectory as a scholar-activist who teaches and does research about how marginalized groups are able to influence public policy in Latin America while also being a member of the Dominican feminist movement for 30 years.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a talk on January 3 titled “ChatGPT and New Ethical Considerations for the Mathematics Classroom” at the American Mathematical Society Special Session on Ethics in the Mathematics Classroom that was a part of the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2024 held in San Francisco. At the same meeting, she gave a second talk on January 6 titled “Oblique Strategies for Classroom Poetry” at the Association for Women in Mathematics Special Session on Mathematics in the Literary Arts and Pedagogy in Creative Settings. Karaali was also one of two panelists invited to present at the Project NExT Session on Fostering a Growth Mindset in the Classroom (organized by Adam Yassine, visiting assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, and held on January 5) and gave a talk titled “From Growth Mindset to (Re)humanizing Mathematics.”

Karaali participated in the Claremont Center for Teaching and Learning Teaching Tune-Up for Spring 2024 and gave a presentation January 11 titled “Using ChatGPT for Fun and for Profit” as part of the Introduction to Generative AI session organized by Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, published the article “The blurry lines between popular media and party propaganda: China’s convergence culture through a linguistic lens” with Zhuo Jing-Schmidt in PLOS One.

Lang participated in the online conference “Grading Less-Learning More through Ungrading in World Languages, Cultures and Literatures” organized by the University of Southern California and shared her pedagogical exploration of collaborative grading, focusing on “Peer Evaluation of Student Presentations” on January 26.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, performed as a member of the Redfish Piano Trio at three Oregon venues (Port Orford, North Bend and Bandon) and at the Cultural Center of Crescent City, California, in early January. They presented works of Joseph Haydn, Joaquin Turina, Jennifer Higdon and Ludwig van Beethoven. These concerts are part of the off-season events of the Redfish Music Festival.

Miriam Merrill, professor of physical education, guest lectured at Hartwick College on January 5. Merrill's session discussed the impact of emotional intelligence on leadership.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented the paper titled “Matrice nature: Repenser la crise d’un point de vue écoféministe et subsaharien avec Léonora Miano” in the panel Représentations francophones de la crise écologique organized by the International Council of Francophone Studies at the MLA 2024 Convention in Philadelphia.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, has a large mural about the history of the Tongva People exhibited at the Autry Museum beginning in January.

Carolyn Ratteray, associate professor of theatre, performed her one woman show, Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black), at the Wallis Center for Performing Arts from January 13-28.

Monique Saigal Escudero, emerita professor of French, was awarded a proclamation presentation by Pomona Unified School District on January 17.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, had her Claremont-based photograph and poem “What is Sovereignty for the Hindu Today?” appear in this most recent Places Journal, a journal focused on public scholarship on architecture, landscape and urbanism.

Sharma’s “Ode to Badminton” appeared on The Slowdown podcast on January 16.

Patricia Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, published a research paper, “Undoing mothers’ avoidant coping with children’s negative emotion: A randomized controlled trial of relational savoring” in Journal of Family Psychology in January. The work is a collaboration with colleagues and students in Claremont and at UC Irvine.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote five opinion pieces: “Let’s Dispose of Exploding Pie Charts” (MindMatters, January 2), “When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot” (MindMatters, January 8), “Computers still do not ‘understand’” (MindMatters, January 9), “Internet pollution—if you tell a lie long enough…” (MindMatters, January 15) and “Monetarist Madness” (MarketWatch, January 22).

Smith’s latest book The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha, co-authored with Margaret Smith, was published by Palgrave Macmillan on January 13. “Gary and Margaret have hit the ball out of the park. Both amateur and professional investors would be well-rewarded by reading and re-reading The Power of Modern Value Investing” (Brian Nelson, President, Valuentum Securities); “A book about investing that every investor should read” (Ed Yardeni, President & Chief Investment Strategist, Yardeni Research, Inc.).

Sharon Stranford, professor of biology and faculty co-director for the Institute for Inclusive Excellence (IIE), and Malcolm Oliver II, assistant director for academic affairs and interim assistant director for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, presented at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Annual Conference in Washington, DC (January 17-19). In their presentation they spoke about IIE programming, which emphasizes inclusive teaching, building community and sustained engagement. In particular, they highlighted the New Faculty Cohort (NFC) Program, DEI Faculty Cohorts and the new DEI Faculty Project Pairs Program.

Stef Torralba, visiting assistant professor of English, accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor of English and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at Grinnell College to begin fall 2024.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, was elected to the board of directors of Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) USA on January 4. His three-year term will commence this May, during which he will serve as the sole CLTA board member representing a liberal arts college.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, gave a talk January 7 titled “Chinese Food Along the Pacific Rim” to a group of alumni in San Francisco. It was the 21st alumni talk he has given since he arrived at the College in 1983.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, was featured in performances played on the radio show “In the Halls of Thornton,” produced by Classical California in partnership with KDFC San Francisco and aired on KUSC Los Angeles (91.5 FM) on December 3. The program excerpted viola da gamba suites by Marin Marais that Bandy self-recorded, edited and produced, as well as live performances of the USC Collegium Musicum in which Bandy played the vielle (medieval fiddle).

The television series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, with musical themes by Bear McCreary and musical score by Sparks & Shadows, premiered on Disney+ on December 19 and features Bandy as a yayli tanbur soloist as the theme for the “Lord of the Dead” in episodes 2, 3 and 7. On December 22, 20th Century Studios released the official soundtrack, also featuring Bandy’s solos, on all major streaming platforms.

On December 21, Bandy played baroque double bass in a period-instrument performance of Handel’s Messiah, a joint venture between the Long Beach Camerata Singers and Tesserae Baroque Ensemble, performed at the Beverly O’Neill Theater in Long Beach and directed by James K. Bass.

Tatiana Basáñez, visiting assistant professor of psychological science, had six research posters accepted for presentation.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, served as moderator at a December 5 closed-door event on the future of U.S. policy toward China sponsored by the UCLA International Institute and the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Los Angeles.

Boduszyński published an article titled “Can There Ever be Transitional Justice in Iraq” in the winter 2023-2024 edition of the Brown Journal of World Affairs.

Boduszyński participated as a lecturer on an American College of the Mediterranean/Institute of American Universities-organized January term on “Diplomacy and Human Rights” in Morocco and Spain. He will partner with ACM/IAU to lead the first Pomona College-sponsored Mayterm on Diplomacy and Human Rights in May and June 2024.

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, published two articles: “Queer Futurity and Conflicted Feeling(s) in the Poetry of Ariadna G. García” in Romance Quarterly and “Los árboles aquellos: Luis Cernuda en Mount Holyoke College” in Muy Verbum.

Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of history, gave a talk titled “Toward Critical Climate Histories of Eurasia” at the conference “Between the Black Sea and the Bering Strait: Environmental Histories across a Subcontinent” held at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Columbia University from December 8-9.

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Methodological Individualism in Behavioral Economics” in The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism on December 27.

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis, as part of the Latinx Geographies Collective, co-authored a publication with Madelaine Cristina Cahuas, Cristina Faiver-Serna, Yolanda González Mendoza, Diego Martinez-Lugo and Margaret Marietta Ramírez. The paper in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies is titled “Latinx Geographies: Opening Conversations.”

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, was invited to give a workshop titled “Conducting Quantitative Analysis of Chinese Construction Grammar Using R” to graduate students at Tianjin Normal University in December.

Tom Le, associate professor of politics, gave a talk titled “Political Science” to Japanese students from Wakayama, Japan, through the Stanford/e-Wakayama program.

Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, performed with Pangea Playback Theatre under the direction of Hannah K. Fox at The International Playback Theatre Network Conference: Roots and Routes of Playback Theatre in Muldersdrift, South Africa. Pangea was sponsored by Dailey Innovations, Inc. and Howard University through their Playback Theatre Artists & Students Cultural Exchange program.

Richard McKirahan, professor of classics and philosophy, was chosen to be a member of the European Society for Ancient Philosophy and to attend its annual meeting.

McKirahan attended the opening ceremony of the “Stage of Ideas” project in the National Conservatory building of Athens. He was a member of the academic committee that discussed and approved the concepts that were implemented for the first installation and will continue to serve when plans are made for future installations. He also taught a three-hour long meeting of a course on Plato at the University of Athens.

McKirahan presented two papers at the University of Venice, one on the Sophists and one on Aristotle. The Sophists paper will be a chapter in a forthcoming book of his in the Ancient Philosophies series published by Routledge, and the Aristotle paper will be published in a collection of works on concepts in ancient philosophy which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

McKirahan participated in a Ph.D. examination at the University of Geneva.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, had an article on “The Abolition of Democracy” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Religion, Culture, and Democracy, as part of a special issue on the work of C.S. Lewis.

McWilliams wrote a book chapter titled “Up in the Air: Flying the Faithless Skies” that appeared in Faith and Film: Modern Cinema and the Struggle to Believe, edited by Micah Watson and Carson Holloway and published by Lexington Books.

McWilliams’ book chapter on “James Ellroy's California” appeared in Dark Places: Crime and Politics in the Personal Noir of James Ellroy, edited by Joseph Romance and Darrell A. Hamlin and published by Lexington Books.

Nivia Montenegro, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, published a detailed article about the exploitation of gay dissident Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, “EXPEDIENTE | Reinaldo Arenas, Emmanuel Carballo y ‘El mundo alucinante’ (documentos y correspondencia) (1968-1981)” in Rialta, the premier digital journal of literary and cultural criticism in Spanish. This article, with accompanying archive of 29 documents, is the result of one year's worth of onsite research at both the Firestone Library of Princeton University and the Nettie Lee Benson Library of University of Texas, Austin. It documents the travails of Arenas with both Cuban government publishing bureaucrats and Mexican editor Carballo of publishing the first edition of El mundo alucinante, one of the most important novels of the so-called Latin American post-boom.

Thomas A. Moore, professor of physics, had a textbook, A Standard Model Workbook, published by University Science Books in December. This 591-page textbook introduces upper-level undergraduates to the Standard Model of particle physics, the accepted theoretical description of fundamental physics at the microscopic level (a subject many physicists see first only in graduate school).

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Gas morphology of Milky Way-like galaxies in the TNG50 simulation: signals of twisting and stretching” in the Astrophysical Journal.

On December 11, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “Cosmological simulations: JWST controversies and future ELT opportunities” at the ELT Science in Light of JWST conference at UCLA. Moreno was one of two theorists invited to make the case to the National Science Foundation and private donors on behalf of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program.

On December 5, Moreno delivered an invited talk titled “The intriguing lives of galaxies lacking dark matter” at the 60 Years of the Sersic Law Conference in Córdoba, Argentina. Moreno also participated in a panel discussion aimed at seeking funding for astronomers in the Global South.

Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, published the article “Queering Gay Tourism as Activism: Guy Hocquenghem’s Political Journey in the United States” in the special issue Queering the City of the academic journal Transatlantica.

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, associate professor of English, published “The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics” in Publications of the Modern Language Association.

Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages and professor of German and Russian, participated in the roundtable “Decolonizing Melodrama in Russia: Gender and Ethnicity” at the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Annual Convention in Philadelphia from November 30-December 2. Rudova also served as a formal discussant on the panel “Russian YouTube is on Fire: Dissent, Dialogue, and Division” at the same convention.

Erin Runions, Nancy J. Lyon Professor of Biblical History and Literature, published “Losing Ground: From Anti-Gang Apocalypticism to Social Dis/Repair” in Lee Edelman and the Study of Religion, edited by Kent L. Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill and Linn Tonstad and published by Routledge.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote three opinion pieces: “The Dodgers are Getting Shohei Ohtani for a Steal” (MarketWatch, December 12), “New Ideas are Out There—We just need to look for them” (Fast Company, December 15) and “Large Language Models are Still Smoke and Mirrors” (MindMatters, December 15).

Smith was invited to return to the invitation-only Sci Foo Camp, which will be held for the first time in Cambridge, UK, instead of Palo Alto.

Kyle Wilson, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Investment, Subsidies, and Universal Service: Broadband Internet in the United States” in the Review of Network Economics on December 7.

Kevin Wynter, assistant professor of media studies, was invited by the Film and Media Department at UC Berkeley to participate in a colloquium honoring the work of Linda Williams and her pathbreaking book in the field of porn studies, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Wynter delivered a talk titled “When the Man Looks,” which examined the emergence of virtual pornography and interactive sex simulators in the 1990s.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was interviewed about the “Japanese turn” in fine dining in the U.S. and related developments in the contemporary restaurant world for Minxin Pei’s Asian Experts Forum.

Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Chair of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, co-authored four poster presentations at the 64th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, which was held November 16-19 in San Francisco. Three Pomona cognitive science majors who are research assistants in Abram’s PRIME (Psycholinguistic Research in Memory) laboratory were the primary presenters of their posters: Emma Constable ’26: “A face without a name: How COVID-19 and facial characteristics affect name retrieval”; Aysha Gsibat ’24 and Majo Najas ’24: “Hands in Motion: The Role of Gestures and Self-Adaptors in Emotional Storytelling”; and her two other posters were titled “Laughter is the Best Medicine: The Relationships between Humor, Anxiety, and Working Memory” and “The Communicative Function of Gestures During Emotional Storytelling,” and these were collaborations with colleagues at the University of Florida and Rhodes College, respectively.

Seth Allen, vice president for strategy and dean of admissions and financial aid, served as a panelist for “Admissions Essays in the Age of AI” at the Council of International Schools Global Forum in Dublin on November 17.

Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, delivered a keynote address titled “In Defense of Sartre’s ‘Woman on a Date’: Erotic Ambivalence and Bad Faith” at the conference on Love and Sexuality at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen on November 13. She also gave a talk at Freie Universität, Berlin, on November 1 as part of the Practical Philosophy Colloquium series.

Nicholas Ball, associate professor of chemistry, gave a Faculty Lecture to the Pomona community titled “Activating Excellence Through Chemistry.” In this talk, Ball highlighted how his personal and family history has enabled him to facilitate a training ground that leverages students’ strengths and cultivates their identity as scientists.

Ball gave a talk titled “Synthetic Strategies toward Fluorosulfurylation of Organic Molecules and Sulfur-Fluoride Exchange (SuFEx)” at Cal Poly Pomona.

Ball received the Downing/Pomona Faculty Exchange Fellowship at Cambridge University, UK. At Cambridge, Ball will work with Matthew Gaunt to understand high-throughput reaction development.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, played Baroque double bass in Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble’s program “Bach in Leipzig: 1723–2023,” directed by Preethi de Silva. The performance, held on November 4 at the Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California, and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Consulate General of Germany, marked the 300th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s appointment as Cantor at St. Thomas in Leipzig and featured works by Bach, Telemann and Graupner.

Bandy facilitated, participated in and provided coaching for two Viola de Gamba Society of America events serving the local and national viola da gamba scholarly community: a play-in hosted by musicologists Lindsey Macchiarella (University of Texas at El Paso) and Zoe Weiss (University of Denver) held on November 10 at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (Denver, Colorado) and a day-long workshop with Lisa Terry (Parthenia Consort of Viols, New York) on November 18 (South Pasadena, California) and sponsored by SoCal Viols.

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, delivered a lecture in Chinese on the topic “Wild Grass or Weeds? Remarks on Matt Turner’s Translation of Lu Xun’s Yecao” at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou on November 8, Hangzhou Normal University on November 10 and Zhejiang Normal University in Jinhua on November 13. He also gave a talk at Yulin Normal University in Yulin, Guangxi, on the translation of Chinese literature in the United States on November 25.

Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1749-1789), 4th Bart., as a collector of Handel's music” at the Thirteenth Handel Institute Conference held November 17-19 in London.

Mietek Boduszyński, associate professor of politics and international relations, was the main guest on the Polish CNN-equivalent news channel Polsat’s daily interview show “Gość Wydarzeń” on November 2 where he offered context and insights on U.S. foreign policy challenges including the Israel-Gaza and Ukraine wars.

Ralph Bolton ’61, professor emeritus of anthropology, co-authored a publication with Daniel E. Torres, Ines Contreras, Daphne Braden, Leah Dembinski and Maren Vouga. The last three were students at Bates College when they participated in the Pomona College Study Abroad Program in Peru in 1973. The paper, in the Revista Peruana de Antropología, is titled “La antropologia aplicada en Puno – El Proyecto Taraco-Chijnaya (1963): Una entrevista con el Ing. Hugo Contreras Quevedo” (“Applied Anthropology in Peru - The Taraco-Chijnaya Project (1963): An Interview with Engineer Hugo Contreras Quevedo”).

Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Tracing Temperature in Ana Merino’s Curación (2010)” at the fall meeting of the Southern California Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), held at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles on November 4.

Gabe Chandler, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, published “Data Gap: Air Quality Networks Miss Air Pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (with Alyssa Burns, Kira Dunham and Ann Marie Carlton) in Environmental Science and Technology. The article was highlighted as the ACS (American Chemical Society) Editors’ Choice on November 30.

David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, gave a paper titled “Unmaking a mausoleum: Resignification and the material remains of Spain’s authoritarian past” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto on November 18.

Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, was an invited speaker at the Harvard University Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop on November 28. She and Peggy Levitt gave a talk on their recently published book Transnational Social Protection: Social Welfare Across National Borders (Oxford University Press).

Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, co-edited the special issue and wrote the introduction for the 2021 conference of the International Network of Economic Method (INEM).

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, assistant professor of environmental analysis, served as a panelist for “GIS in Education: A Tool to Increase Social Justice,” as part of the GIS Day Bridges to the Future conference held at Cal Poly Pomona on November 15.

Kouross Esmaeli, visiting assistant professor of media studies, who was a founding board member of AMEJA, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association, rejoined the association in the past month to help work on the various projects related to the war in Palestine/Israel. These include AMEJA’s Statement of the Treatment of Journalists Covering the War in Palestine and Israel and the ongoing work with the Committee to Protect Journalists to document the killing of (so far 57) journalists in the region.

Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, with colleagues from Northwest University (Xi’an) published the article “Thermal history of Burgess Shale-type deposits: new insights from the early Cambrian Chengjiang and Qingjiang biotas of South China” in the Journal of Earth Sciences.

Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published the book chapter “Model Spaces” in the edited volume Lectures on Analytic Function Spaces and their Applications.

Garcia gave a talk, “What can chicken nuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, random norms, and AF algebras?” at the CSU Fullerton Mathematics Colloquium on November 17 and at the Claremont Colleges Algebra / Number Theory / Combinatorics Seminar on November 28.

Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, delivered three presentations at two virtual national conferences. On November 2, at the fall meeting of the National Organization for Research Development Professionals (NORDP), he presented “The Landscape of Research Development at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs): Results from a Pilot Study” with coauthor Jennifer Glass (UMassD), based on a 2021 survey of 87 PUIs. At the 2023 Colleges of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs (CLASP) conference on November 8 and 9, he presented the “CLASP 2023 Grants Review” with Krista Campbell (Hamilton), analyzing a new database of 1800 external grants received during FY22-23 by CLASP member institutions; and “Research Development and Sponsored Programs at LACs and other PUIs,” a panel overview of research support contexts and challenges, with Susan Ferrari (Grinnell) and Amy Cuhel-Schuckers (TCNJ).

On November 7, with Pomona staff members Ha Phan and Andy Schuster, Gerstein gave a workshop on post-award grants administration to visiting staff from the Atlanta University Consortium Data Science Initiative, led by Talitha Washington (Clark Atlanta.)

Gerstein was selected to join NORDP Consultants, a collective delivering research infrastructure assistance to minority serving institutions. This initiative is funded by a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation to Kimberly Eck (Emory). Gerstein also began membership in the CLASP List Advisory Group, where he joins Claremont McKenna College’s Beth Jager.

Elizabeth Glater, associate professor of neuroscience, and her research students presented two posters at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington DC from November 10-13. Sokhna Lo ’25 and Tymmaa Asaed ’25 presented “The AWC neuron is required for attraction to 1-butanol in Caenorhabditis elegans.” Jeremy Callaway ’24, Taryn Kaneko ’24 and Catie Kaneshiro ’24 presented “Modeling a rare genetic disease in Caenorhabditis elegans.”

Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a colloquium talk at the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Irvine on November 30. The talk was titled “Quasi-Critical Points of Toroidal Belyi Maps.”

Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, published the chapter “The Right to a Complete Life: Struggles of the Dominican Feminist Movement” in the edited volume Women’s Rights in Movement: Dynamics of Feminist Change in Latin America and the Caribbean (Springer, editors Inés M. Pousadela and Simone R. Bohn) in November.

Hernández-Medina chaired the session “La crisis identitaria en República Dominicana y sus consecuencias sociopolíticas en la actualidad” (“Identity Crisis in the Dominican Republic and its Socio-political Consequences Today”) with Ruth Pión, co-founder of Junta de Prietas, the most important decolonial feminist collective in the Dominican Republic. The session took place virtually on November 18 at the conference LASA / Africa 2023: Africa and Latin America: Dialogues and Connections.

On November 28, Hernández-Medina was one of the keynote speakers at the XII Gender Studies Conference convened by the Gender Studies Center at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC) in the Dominican Republic. She presented virtually on “El Derecho a una Vida Completa: La Lucha del Movimiento Feminista Dominicano” (“The Right to a Complete Life: Struggles of the Dominican Feminist Movement”) based on the book chapter mentioned above.

Jeff Hing, assistant director for communications multimedia, and Eric Melgosa, director of creative content, collaborated on a Pomona College Magazine cover that was selected by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for the 2022-23 Best of District VII, which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. The cover of the 2022 spring issue featured Hing’s photograph of Ron Nemo, Pomona’s longtime manager of grounds and landscaping, holding coast live oak acorns in the wake of the 2022 storm that felled numerous old campus trees. In addition, Melgosa and editor Robyn Norwood led an Office of Communications effort that was recognized among the Best of District VII for alumni/general interest magazines printed twice a year by a four-year college or university (PCM typically publishes three times a year but printed two issues in 2022). The magazine earlier received a 2023 CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award in the category of writing/profile (less than 1,000 words) for the comic “Our Bird’s Beginnings,” which also earned district honors.

Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, published a joint book review of Proving It Her Way: Emmy Noether, a Life in Mathematics, by David E. Rowe and Mechthild Koreuber, and Emmy Noether: Mathematician Extraordinaire, by David E. Rowe, in the newsletter of Association for Women in Mathematics.

Karaali gave the 23rd Annual Kenneth C. Schraut Memorial Lecture on November 4 during the Undergraduate Mathematics Day 2023 at the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio. Her talk was titled “Languages, Alphabets, and Group Theory.”

Karaali ran a session titled “Developing a Social Justice STEM Curriculum: The First Steps” on November 3 at the 2023 American Association of Colleges and Universities Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference in Virginia. She also facilitated a workshop, together with Ileana Vasu of Holyoke Community College, Geillan Aly of Compassionate Math, and Jonas D’Andrea of Westminster University titled “Equity in the Moment” that same day.

Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, participated in the California Islands Symposium in Ventura, California. She was moderator of the session on education and presented the paper “Sowing Seeds of Futures in Conservation Through Participation in Restoration Work on Anacapa Island.” In this study Karnovsky evaluated the legacy of a field trip in the lives of students in her advanced animal ecology classes from 2017 and 2021.

Jun Lang, assistant professor of Chinese, organized a panel presentation titled “A usage-based constructionist approach to CSL acquisition and pedagogy” at the 2023 ACTFL Annual Convention in November. Lang delivered a talk titled “Beyond the textbook: Corpus-informed pedagogy across proficiency levels.” Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, also contributed to the panel by delivering a presentation.

Lang’s co-authored article, titled “Gendered social address in China’s convergence culture: The case of mĕinǚ (beautiful woman),” was published in the latest special issue on storytelling and counter-storytelling in China Information.

Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, and Aron Kallay, lecturer in music, are featured on the album “Flotsam and Jetsam” that dropped November 3 on Microfest Records. They present the premiere recording of Kurt Rohde’s Altromondo at one piano and play melodicas, harmonicas, triangle, Chinese paper accordions and antique cymbals.

Alexandra Lippman, visiting assistant professor of anthropology, co-curated and organized a sound works installation and performance, “Transmissions/ Transitions,” at the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meeting in Toronto from November 15-19. She exhibited her radio documentary “Cumbia on Broadway: Mexican Popular Music Industry in Los Angeles” and deejayed the post-installation reception which also featured performances by Farzaneh Hemmasi, Jay Hammond, Stefan Helmreich, Carmen Jarrín, David Novak, and the Sound Braid Collective. Lippman participated in a roundtable, “Chatting About Chat GPT,” at the AAA’s annual meeting where she spoke about the surprising uses of paper generator software in the 1990s and 2000s and the need to historicize Chat GPT and AI more broadly.

Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, published a paper titled “Corrective Experiences to Enhance Trust: Clinical Wisdom from Good (Enough) Psychiatric Management” in Journal of Personality Disorders. Co-authors included Dr. Lois Choi-Kain of Harvard Medical School (first author) and Dr. Ellen Finch of Harvard University.

Susan McWilliams Barndt, professor of politics, delivered the 2023 Vik-Bailey Lecture in American Politics at Harvard University on November 9. The title of her lecture was “A Tale of Two Liberalisms: Desegregating American Political Thought.” Earlier in the month, McWilliams delivered this lecture at Mercer University's McDonald Center for America's Founding Principles, where she also led a seminar on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

On November 15, McWilliams gave a talk titled “Party at Kesey's: The Merry Pranksters, The Hells Angels, and the Degeneration of American Politics” as part of the Special Collections Research Fellows Speaker Series at the University of Oregon.

On November 28, McWilliams led a seminar on Chita Banerjee Divakaruni’s “The Word Love” at Claremont McKenna College.

McWilliams chaired a panel at the annual meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association. The panel was held in celebration of the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of The Idea of Fraternity in America, which was written by her father, Wilson Carey McWilliams. McWilliams wrote the introduction to the book’s new edition.

Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, published an article titled “Starburst driven by central gas compaction” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Moreno also published an article titled “Modeling the orbital histories of satellites of Milky Way-mass galaxies: testing static host potentials against cosmological simulations” in the same journal.

Zvezdana Ostojic, visiting assistant professor of French, presented a paper titled “Passages de l’auteur: Victor Hugo et la (pi)œuvre destructrice” at the 48th Annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference in Baltimore on November 10.

Mary Paster, professor of linguistics and cognitive science, published an article titled “Akan morphological 'reversal' in historical context” in The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press,editors Darya Kavitskaya and Alan C.L. Yu).

Lina Patel, lecturer in theatre, received a workshop of her new play Sick Girl or, Don’t Hate Me ’Cuz I’m Pretty at Ammunition Theater on November 4. Her short play Karma opened at The Echo in Atwater Village on November 30.

William Peterson, professor emeritus of music and College organist, is a co-author of a book, Political Dreams and Musical Themes in the 1848-1922 Formation of Czechoslovakia: Interaction of National and Global Forces, by James W. Peterson and William J. Peterson, published by Lexington Books.

Sheila Pinkel, professor emerita of art and art history, currently has large artwork on prominent display at MoMA New York City.

Frances Pohl, professor emerita of art history, published the fifth edition of her textbook Framing America: A Social History of American Art. This edition has been thoroughly revised and contains a greater percentage of color plates than earlier editions.

Meranda Roberts (citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe), visiting professor of art history and guest curator at the Benton Museum of Art, has been appointed to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum inaugural committee of scholars.

Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics, gave three community talks on redistricting and good governance recommendations for the Los Angeles City Council related to her work with the LA Governance Reform Project. These include a panel discussion at the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, a presentation at Mt. San Antonio Gardens, and a conversation with City Council President Paul Krekorian for the LA Business Council.

Sadhwani provided commentary to ABC News and USA Today on the prevalence of Indian American candidates running for president and to The Guardian and The Sacramento Bee on the impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict on the California Senate race.

Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, published the article “Remembering the Cotton Screwmen: Inter-racial Waterfront Labor and the Development of Sailors’ Chanties” in the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Prageeta Sharma, Henry G. Lee ’37 Professor of English, was featured on the cover and had five poems in the November/December issue of American Poetry Review.

Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, wrote four opinion pieces: “A Modest Proposal to save MLB” (MindMatters, November 6), “LLMs are Still Faux Intelligence” (MindMatters, November 8), “Computers May Know ‘How’ But They Still Don’t Know ‘Why’” (MindMatters, November 10) and “Here’s what really matters when you buy stocks, real estate and other investments” (Marketwatch, November 28).

Smith’s book, Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, was the lead review in “New and Noteworthy Titles on our Bookshelf” in Notices of the American Mathematical Society: “Through the lenses of disinformation, data torturing, and data mining, this book leads the reader through a history of instances where the public doubts the facts….Distrust is filled to the brim with examples of those who reject scientific evidence.”

Keri Wilson, assistant professor of biology, organized the 2023 Southwestern Organismal Biology conference held at Harvey Mudd College on November 4. Participants represented over 25 colleges and universities from the southwestern region of the United States.

Kyle Wilson, assistant professor of economics, published the article “Local Competition, Multimarket Contact, and Product Quality: Evidence From Internet Service Provision” in the Review of Industrial Organization on November 17.

Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered a presentation titled “N-gram for Chinese Teaching” at the 2023 conference of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The presentation utilized Chinese as an example to illustrate the creation of a systematic, data-driven foreign language pedagogy based on N-gram language models.

Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, published “Understanding World War II Japan, 1940–1945” in the fall 2023 issue of Education About Asia. Based on his three decades of research on this topic, this article offers what the editors of this journal describe as “an accessible and fascinating article for instructors and students that draws heavily on a wide range of sources including government propaganda efforts and diaries of Japanese civilians.”

Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a poster presentation at the 64th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, along with Sarah Wang ’23 and Feiya Suo, a past Pomona College language resident. The poster, titled “Brewing bilingualism: Inducing bilingual language regulation changes via sound immersion during reading,” was an extension of Wang’s senior thesis and Suo’s independent study project in the Cognitive Science program, both aimed at understanding the effects of naturalistic language immersion on Mandarin reading in Southern California.