December 2009 @Pomona Newsletter

Dear Faculty and Staff,

The holidays are almost upon us! With barely three weeks left of 2009, here is the last edition of our @Pomona staff and faculty newsletter for the calendar year. The next newsletter will come out in early February. Happy holidays!

Best,
Laura Tiffany
Web Editor

News and Notes

Rains Center hours during the holidays will be as follows: From December 17 through 22 and January 4 through January 18, it will be open from noon to 6:30 p.m. and closed on weekends. It will be closed from December 23 through January 3.

HR has announced a new feature on the Staff portal: Construction project updates. You can find them in the HR document library.

Pomona College will be effectively closed from Wednesday, December 23, at 3 p.m. through Monday, January 4, at 8 a.m., due to a total power outage from December 26 through December 30 and the subsequent holidays. Bob Robinson, assistant VP of Facilities and Campus Services, recently sent out an e-mail with information to assist everyone in preparing for the outage. In case you missed it, here are a few highlights:

• Power down and unplug all desktop and laptop computers and peripherals.
• Remove and discard all perishable food items from campus refrigerators.
• All elevators will be shut down starting December 21.
• Departmental mail will be available for pick up and drop off at the Mailing Services Office from December 28 through December 31 from 8 a.m. through 10 a.m. Department delivery service will not be available.
• Swipe cards and other electronic locking devices will not be operational in buildings with no power. Entry must be obtained by key.
• Exterior lighting may be minimized during periods with the substation generators are not running, particularly exterior building lights.
• Staff from Campus Safety and facilities and Campus Services will be on campus 24 hours a day during the power outage project.  If you are on campus and need immediate assistance please call Campus Safety at 72000.

New Employees

Sheri Lynn Shepherd is the new Secretary III in the Office of VP and Dean of Admissions. She’s worked in education for 20 years, including teaching full time at Claremont High School, subbing for grades K-8, and teaching music. She lives in Alta Loma and has also taught Jazzercise classes for 21 years.

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Colin Beck (Sociology) gave a paper, “Class, Contagion, or Complaint? A Sociology of the Revolution of 1525,” at the Social Science History Association annual meeting, held in Long Beach in November.

Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) inaugurated the Vicuña Conservation Project in the Altiplano community of Coarita, Peru, in mid-November. In October, he celebrated his 70th birthday in Peru with a party of several hundred Peruvian villagers from several communities at an all-day celebration and party sponsored by the community of Chijnaya.

Bolton’s second volume in the series Anthropological Studies in the Andes, La Vida Familiar en Comunidades Andinas (Family Life in Andean Communities), was published by Editorial Horizonte in Lima last month.

Paul Cahill (Romance Languages & Literatures) presented a paper, “High-Fidelity Poetics: Questioning Commitment in the Poetry of José-Miguel Ullán and Jorge Urrutia,” at the “Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature: Race, Religion, and Resistance,” held at the University of Kansas, 5-7 November.

André Cavalcanti (Biology), Cristina Negritto (Molecular Biology), and Hannah Salim ’09 are coauthors of “1+1 = 3: A Fusion of 2 Enzymes in the Methionine Salvage Pathway of Tetrahymena thermophila Creates a Trifunctional Enzyme That Catalyzes 3 Steps in the Pathway,” in PLoS Genetics 5:10 (October 2009): e1000701. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000701.

Donna M. Di Grazia’s (Music) article “Funerall Teares or Dolefull Songes? Reconsidering Historical Connections and Musical Resemblances in Early English ‘Absalom’ Settings” was published in Music and Letters 90:4 (November 2009), pp. 555-98.

Anne Dwyer (German & Russian) presented a paper, “In Search of Lost Empire: Joseph Roth’s Russia,” at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies national convention, held in Boston in November.  She also served as discussant on the panel “Testing Boundaries: Writing, Motion, and Identity in Russian Literature.”

In late October, Steve Erickson (Philosophy) delivered a paper at a conference entitled “The Common Good for the 21st Century: Beyond Individualism and Collectivism – a Sino-American Dialogue” at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University. In November, he gave an invited lecture at a conference titled “Constructing Chinese Bioethics and Deepening Health-Care Reform” in Xi’an, China.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Media Studies) participated in a roundtable entitled “New Forms of the Book: Modernist Texts, Digital Editions, Virtual Libraries, Bookstores Real and Imagined” at the Modernist Studies Association meeting in Montreal, 5-8 November.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) has an article, “The Norm and Modulus of a Foguel Operator,” in the Indiana University Mathematics Journal 58:5, pp. 2305-16.

An article by Roberto Garza-López (Chemistry), John Kozak, and Jack Brzezinski, titled “Reaction Efficiency of Diffusion-Controlled Processes on Finite, Planar Arrays. II. Crystal Surfaces” and originally published in Physical Review E 80, 021116 (2009), was included in the 31 August issue of the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science and Technology, an edited compilation of links to articles from participating publishers.

With Marcello Fantoni and Malcolm Smuts, George Gorse (Art & Art History) is coeditor of The Politics of Space: European Courts, ca. 1500-1750 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2009).  The book came from a Huntington Library conference that he had co-organized and Pomona College had helped to support.

With co-authors Debra Hurwitz ’07 and Sylvan Long ’07, Eric Grosfils (Geology) has published “The Characteristics of Magma Reservoir Failure beneath a Volcanic Edifice,” in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 188:4, pp. 379-94. Grosfills notes that the paper was grounded in Hurwitz’s senior thesis research.

Caelum Moor, a sculpture by Norm Hines (Art & Art History, Emeritus), was re-established in Richard Greene Linear Park in Arlington, Texas, in October.  Originally dedicated in 1986, the sculpture had been removed thirteen years later to make room for commercial development.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) is co-author of “Climate Change and Phenological Responses of Two Seabird Species Breeding in the High-Arctic,” in Marine Ecology Progress Series 393, pp. 235-46. Also, Karnovsky’s guinea pig 'Jumbalaya' won the award for 'Best Opposite Sex of Breed' at the 86th American Rabbit Breeder Association National Convention.

As a member of the Mojave Trio, Genevieve Lee (Music) performed a program of Cowell and Dvorak on the “Sundays Live” series at the Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on 22 November.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a talk, “On the Quantization of Super Dynamical R-Matrices of Zero Weight,” in the special session on Algebraic Structures in Knot Theory at the Fall Western Sectional Conference of the American Mathematical Society, 7-8 November.

At Society for Neuroscience and Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience meetings in Chicago in October, Jonathan King (Neuroscience) presented posters with two recent alumni:  “The Modulatory Effects of Chronic Restraint Stress on Spatial Learning and Memory and Synaptic Plasticity in Rats” with Amanda Barkley-Levenson ’09 and “The Effects of Panax Ginseng Extract and Constituent Ginsenosides on Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity in Rat Hippocampal Slices” with Eric Chang ’09.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave a keynote lecture at Purdue University on 4 November; her topic was the state of Iran’s youth and social movement following the June elections and the 30th anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis. And in her capacity as an Asia Society Fellow, Mahdavi represented the U.S. and Iran at the 2009 Asia 21 Young Leaders Summit, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November. She also published an opinion piece, “On the 30th Anniversary of the Iranian Hostage Taking,” through the Woodrow Wilson Center on November 4.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) performed in a staged reading of Fernanda Coppel’s “The Leak” at the INTAR Theatre Workshop in New York City on 26 October.  In addition, she booked and shot a national commercial for AARP on November 30; attended the National Theatre Conference and its Board of Trustees Meeting on October 29; and attended the “Grotowski Conference: Focus on Performer” at UC Irvine on 23 November.

In October and November, April Mayes (History) taught a module on “Race, Gender, Racism, and Xenophobia” for the Diplomado (Certificate) in Human Rights and Interculturality at the Centro Bonó in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She also gave a lecture, “Microhistory/Atlantic History: Writing the Pre-History of De-colonization in the British Caribbean,” at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on November 3.

Robert Mezey (English, Emeritus) read some of his and Dick Barnes’s Borges poems at the convention of the American Literary Translators Association in Pasadena on November 14. He also has had has poems published in recent issues of First Things, the National Review, and Per Contra.

Denise Miller (Asian & Romance Languages and Literatures) reports that her daughter Elizabeth and her pony Miss Tattletail have competed in several horse trials over the past few months. In May, they finished in first place out of 15 starters at the Coconino Spring horse trials in Arizona. In June, they finished first at Copper Meadows HT and fifth at Sheppard HR. In July, they finished first at Coconino Summer I, second at Coconino II and won the Coconino Novice Challenge.

In August, they finished second at the Summer Event at Woodside H.T. and second at the Shepherd Ranch H.T. In September, they finished first at Copper Meadows and fifth at Twin Rivers Fall H.T. In October, they finished first at the Fall Event at Woodside, second at Ram Tap H.T., and first at the Galway Downs 3-Day H.T. Last month, they finished first at the Ram Tap Pony Club Benefit H.T. finished in 1st place.  

Works by Sandeep Mukherjee (Art & Art History) are featured in the solo show “New Work” at the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia, 6 November – 31 December; in the group exhibition “Oz: New Offerings from Angel City” at the Regional Museum of Guadalajara, Mexico, 27 November - 10 January; and in the group exhibition “In Bed Together” at the Royal/T in Los Angeles, 20 November – 30 January.  In addition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently acquired three of his 2008-09 works for its permanent collection.

Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) gave an invited lecture, “A Diachronic Solution to the ‘Duplication Problem’ in Phonology,” to the Linguistics Department at the Ohio State University on 20 November.

Bryan Penprase (Physics & Astronomy) is part of an international team of astronomers who have discovered the most distant gamma ray burst, over 10 billion light years away.  The team’s findings were reported in Nature 461 (29 October 2009), pp. 1254-57; doi:10.1038/nature08459.

Jennifer Perry (Anthropology) gave a lecture on "Landscapes, Seascapes, and Spiritscapes of the California Channel Islands" to the Titan Archaeology Club at CSU Fullerton on November 4.

With James Peterson of Valdosta State University, William Peterson (Music) presented a paper, “Musical Signposts at Political Crossroads in the Czech Lands,” at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies national convention, held in Boston, 12-15 November.

Sheila Pinkel's (Art) review of the book Dream Street by Doug McCulloh appeared in the November/December issue of AfterImage.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages & Literatures) gave a talk, “Tech-Tools for Literature in the French Language Class,” at the 107th annual meeting of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, held in San Francisco, 6-7 November.

William Ransom (Art & Art History) has artwork in a group show, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” at Whittier College, 24 November through 15 January.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) cofacilitated part of a workshop, “Pedagogies for Civic Engagement,” at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Montreal, 9-10 November. At the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in New Orleans, 21-24 November, she presented a paper, “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect”; was on a review panel for Postcolonial Interventions: Essays in Honor of R. S. Sugirtharajah; and was a panelist for a session entitled “Student Learning Outcomes in the Liberal Arts.” 

Monique Saigal-Escudero (Romance Languages & Literatures) gave a talk about her book, Héroïnes Françaises 1940-1945, in Chicago on 24 October in connection with its being named the 2009 “One Book – One Federation” book by the Federation of Alliances Françaises, USA. She also gave a talk to Pomona alumni at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois, on 25 October; gave presentations and discussed her book with students and faculty of Duke University as part of the Duke Conversations program, 29-30 October; chaired a session, “Les femmes et la lecture,” and gave a paper, “Le bon marché Yesterday (1856) and Today (2009),” at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco, 6-7 November; and gave talks about her book to the Union des Français de l’Etranger and the French Embassy in Washington, DC, on 12 November.

Jason Smith (ITS) competed in the Nevada Silverman half-ironman distance triathlon in Henderson, Nevada, on November 9. The race, billed as the toughest course in North America, includes a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run. Smith finished third in his division and had the fifth-fastest overall swim that day.

A report by Michael Steinberger (Economics) titled “Federal Estate Tax Disadvantages for Same-Sex Couples [pdf] ” was published by UCLA’s Williams Institute in November.  The report has already received press in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Advisor Magazine, among other sources.

James Taylor (Theatre & Dance) designed the lighting for a theatrical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at A Noise Within Theatre in Glendale in October.

Nancy Treser-Osgood (Alumni Relations) spoke on best practices in alumni relations at a plenary session at the Network of California Community College Foundations at their conference in Manhattan Beach on October 29. She also spoke at the New Advancement Professionals Workshop at the CASE District VII Conference in San Francisco on November 14, and is chairing the CASE District VII Awards & Recognition Committee this year.

Richard Worthington (Politics) gave a talk, “Megaprojects and Democracy: Challenges and Prospects in Nanotech Legislation,” as part of a panel at the conference “Emerging Technologies/Emerging Economies: (Nano)Technology for Equitable Development” in Washington, DC, on 5 November.  He gave a talk entitled “Climate, Copenhagen and Citizens” to alumni there on 7 November. 

Jianhsin Wu (Asian Languages & Literatures) presented a paper, “Learning Chinese Characters in a New, Efficient, and Academic Way,” at the 2009 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages conference in San Diego on 21 November.