March 2010 @Pomona Newsletter

News & Notes

• Spring recess for students runs from Monday, March 15, though Friday, March 19. Hour changes to note are:
  • Only Frary Dining Hall will be open Monday-Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. for lunch and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. for dinner. They will be accepting Claremont Cash, Board Plus and cash.
  • The Coop Fountain will close at 1:30 p.m. next Friday, March 12. Sagehen Café will be closing at 2 p.m. and the Coop Store will be closing at 3 p.m. that same day. The Sagehen Café will reopen on Monday, March 22, at 7:30 a.m., and the Fountain and the Store will be open at 9 a.m., all resuming regular business hours.
  • Rains Center will be open from noon to 6:30 p.m. from Monday, March 15, through Friday, March 19. Both gyms may be closed for repairs for a few days of that week.
• Upcoming staff holiday: Cesar Chavez Day on Friday, March 26
• Save the date for the upcoming Staff Appreciation Lunch: Tuesday, March 16, at 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., in Edmunds Ballroom
• Did you pick up your tickets for the Sandra Day O'Connor lecture yet? Tickets are available at the Bridges box office.
• Want to get frequent news updates and event reminders? Follow our Twitter or Facebook.

Recent News

• Men's Basketball Finishes Season in 2nd Place
• Women's Swim Finishes in Tie for Third Place in SCIAC
• Pomona's New Web Site Launched Feb. 22; Here's a Guide to the Changes
• Professor Tomas F. Summers Sandoval Chosen as New Faculty Coordinator for the Draper Center
• "Says You!" Radio Show Taped at Pomona Airing on Saturday
• Pomona Student Who Experienced Haiti Quake Now Devoting Time to Fundraising and Awareness

Faculty & Staff Accomplishments

Lisa Anne Auerbach (Art & Art History) received a $20,000 award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Allan Barr (Asian Languages & Literatures) published an article in Chinese, "Qingren bixia de Zhuang shi shi'an" (The Ming History Inquisition through Qing Writers' Eyes), in the 2010 issue of the Beijing journal Qing shi luncong, pp. 49-85.

Paul Cahill (Romance Languages & Literatures) is the author of “Pedagogy, Discipline, and Resistance in Intervalo (1972) by Eduardo Hervás,” in Letras Peninsulares 21:2-3 (2008-09), pp. 345-66.

Kim Bruce (Computer Science) shares that five Pomona and Pitzer faculty and staff members rode bikes in the Pasadena Marathon on 21 February. The riders were Bruce, Pomona President David Oxtoby, Rudi Volti (Pitzer, Sociology emeritus), Jim Lehman (Pitzer, Economics), and Michael Kuehlwein (Pomona, Economics). In spite of a fierce downpour at the end, all finished in fine spirits.

Susana Chávez- Silverman (Romance Languages & Literatures) was the lead invitee at the 2010 Delta Mouth Literary Festival, hosted by the New Delta Review at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, on 12 February. She read and discussed selections from her books Killer Crónicas and Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters.

In February, Kevin Dettmar (English) gave invited lectures at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia on the topic “Wilde to Dedalus to Hewson: The ‘Double Play’ of Irony in the Irish Tradition” and at the University of Pennsylvania on the topic “Forging American Roots.”

Pierre Englebert (Politics) participated in a conference, Managing Fault Lines, Building Nations, in Jerusalem, 1-3 February.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Media Studies) gave an invited lecture focused on her book project, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, at the University of Michigan on 18 February. She participated in a roundtable discussion, “Digital Media and Learning as a Post-Academic Field,” at the MacArthur-sponsored Digital Media + Learning conference at the University of California, San Diego, on 20 February.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) is the author, with James Pommersheim and Tim Marks, of Number Theory: A Lively Introduction with Proofs, Applications, and Stories (Wiley, 2010). She also received the 2010 Distinguished Teaching award from the Southern California-Nevada Section of the Mathematics Association of America.

With Levon Balayan ’09, Stephan Garcia (Mathematics) published “Unitary Equivalence to a Complex Symmetric Matrix: Geometric Criteria” in Operators and Matrices 4:1 (2010), pp. 53-76. He also published “Hermitian-Symmetric Inequalities in Hilbert Space” in Complex Analysis and Operator Theory 3:4 (2009), pp. 835-46.

With Casey Davis-Van Atta ’10 and Kira Watson ’10, Fred Grieman (Chemistry) presented a poster, “Study of the HO2 Acetone Reaction Approaching Tropospheric Temperatures Using Infrared Kinetic Spectroscopy,” at the 57th Western Spectroscopy Conference, held 3-5 February in Pacific Grove, California. He also chaired a conference session.

With Candida Jaquez of Scripps, Katherine Hagedorn (Music and Dean of the College’s Office) hosted the 44th annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Southern California and Hawai’i chapter. She also chaired a conference panel entitled “Images, Pipe Dreams, (Re)Inventions: Reflections on Post-Coloniality.”

Laura Hoopes (Biology) has an article, “Joan Argetsinger Steitz: Pathfinder for Women in Molecular Biology,” in AWIS Magazine 41:1 (Winter 2010), pp. 18-19.

Glenn Hueckel (Economics) is the author of “‘In the Heat of Writing’: Polemics and the ‘Error of Adam Smith’ in the Matter of the Corn Bounty,” in Elgar Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Jeffrey Young (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009), pp. 229-60.

With Bruce Yoshiwara, Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) is the author of "Life after Wolfram|Alpha: What You (and Your Students) Need to Know," in Loci (January 2010), DOI: 10.4169/loci003365. Karaali was also elected to the executive committee of the Special Interest Group on Quantitative Literacy of the Mathematical Association of America and will serve as secretary/treasurer for a three-year term.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) chaired a session on the behavioral ecology of seabirds and presented a paper, “In Pursuit of Plankton: The Foraging Behavior of Cassin’s Auklets in the Gulf of the Farallones,” at the 37th annual Pacific Seabird Group meeting, held in Long Beach, 17-20 February. The paper’s co-authors included Eleanor Caves ’11 and Charlotte Chang ’10. Professor Karnovsky co-authored papers and posters by other students and alumni as well, including Nell Baldwin ’10, Amy Briggs ’10, Zachary Brown ’07, Derek Buchner ’08, Julia Gleichman ’10, and Augie Lagemann ’10, Elizabeth Ng ’10, and Derek Young ’09, who won the Best Student Poster Award. Kristen Boysen ’10, received an honorable mention for her paper based on her senior thesis work.

With scholar Mary Beard, Andrew Lear (Classics) led a discussion of his book, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty, at Cambridge University on 1 February. He also gave a talk, “The Idealization of Paiderastia in Athenian Vase-Painting,” at University College London’s Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and spoke informally at the bookstore Gay’s the Word on 2 February.

Genevieve Lee (Music) recently performed György Ligeti’s Continuum for harpsichord with the ballet company Morphoses at Stanford University, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Mondavi Center at the University of California, Davis, and the Granada Theater in Santa Barbara. She was mentioned in the L.A. Times review of the Santa Barbara performance.

Sherry Linnell (Theatre & Dance) designed the costumes for the world premiere of Ann Noble’s play SIDHE at the Road Theatre in the NoHo Arts District of Los Angeles, 29 January to 20 March.

On 4 February, Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) spoke to alumni in Washington, DC, about her research on sexuality in Iran. On 18 February, she gave an invited lecture, “Trafficking the Trafficking Debate: Orientalism, Race, Gender and Sexuality in Trafficking Discourse on the Middle East,” at Georgetown University.

Alma Martinez (Theatre and Dance) participated in the panel “Expressive Cultures and the Poetics of Crossing” at the TransCalifornia conference held at the University of California, San Diego, on 13 February. Her presentation was titled “Esos Pachucos: The Contentious Interstice of Chicano and Mexican Performance in Zoot Suit as Performed by the National Theatre Company of Mexico, February 2010.” With playwright Luis Valdez, she gave a talk, “Performance Perspectives in Mummified Deer,” to actors from Teatro de Movimiento in Mexico City on 22 February.

Martinez was also booked on a print job for "Tekturna", 29 -30 January, and organized and convened the first Claremont Colleges Alumni chapter in Mexico City at the Intercontinental Hotel in Mexico City on 6 February.

Robert Mezey (English, Emeritus) read his poetry at Kenyon College, where he holds the Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing, on 11 February. Mezey was also interviewed by scholar and poet Colonel Tom McGuire for a recent issue of War, Literature & the Arts, the literary journal of the Air Force Academy.

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) has recently given several talks: “What Do We Have to Believe? Climate Change and Environmental Activism,” at the Sage and Sea Audubon Society-Irvine chapter on 15 January; “Running Dry: Water and Development in the American West,” at the 2010 Water Symposium, Trinity University, on 14 February; and the plenary address “Streetscape Environmentalism: Floods Control and Social Justice in the American Southwest” as well as “Making Book: Gifford Pinchot and the Historian’s Craft,” at the Natures 2010 Conference, La Sierra University, on 19 February.

Miller is also the author of “Forestry Done Right: Precious Woods and the Future of the Amazon,” in Pinchot Letter (Winter 2010), pp. 17-19; and “Roots of Forestry: ‘Light Burning versus Forest Management in Northern California,’” in Journal of Forestry (January/February 2010), pp. 45-46.

Nivia Montenegro (Romance Languages & Literatures) is co-editor of the first critical edition of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s novel Tres tristes tigres (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2010). Montenegro and co-editor Enrico Santi participated in a presentation about the book at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida.

Works by Sandeep Mukherjee (Art & Art History) were exhibited as part of “FAX” at the Torrance Art Museum from 16 January through 20 February and “Panorama: Los Angeles” at ARCOmadrid in Madrid, Spain, from 16 through 21 February.

Daniel O’Leary (Chemistry) led a discussion about hydrogen transfer reactions at the Gordon Research Conference on Isotopes in the Biological and Chemical Sciences held in Galveston, Texas, in February.

Kaye Pereida (Business Office) received her Bachelors of Science in Business from Kaplan University on 30 January, thanks in part to Pomona College’s Tuition Remission program.

William Peterson (Music) played a concert of organ works as part of the Littlefield Organ Series at the University of Washington in Seattle on 21 February. The program, which included works by Sweelinck, Scheidt, Scheidemann, Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, and J.S. Bach, was designed especially for the Baroque-style organ built by Paul Fritts in 1990.

Laura Perini (Philosophy) published an article, “Scientific Representation and the Semiotics of Pictures,” in New Waves in Philosophy of Science, ed. P.D. Magnus and Jacob Busch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She also gave an invited talk, “Form and Function: Figures in Biology Textbooks,” at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science on 5 February.

Sheila Pinkel (Art & Art History) reviewed Douglas McCulloh’s book Dream Street in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 37:3. Her book X-Ray Photograms was recently self-published via Lulu.com. Her artwork is also featured in the invitational group exhibition “Mything in Action” at the Grand Central Art Gallery of California State University, Fullerton, from 6 February through 11 April.

Frances Pohl (Art & Art History) gave a talk, “From Union Hall to Museum Hall: Creating a Working-Class Public for the Fine Arts,” and participated in a panel on American art history textbooks at the College Art Association annual meeting held in Chicago, 10-13 February.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) published a review essay, “Religion, Identity and Political Engagement,” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16:1-2 (2010), pp. 297-307.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages & Literatures) spoke about women in the French Resistance to a Hadassah group in Woodland Hills on 18 February.

Princeton’s University Center for Human Values has named John Seery (Politics) as its Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor of Distinguished Teaching for 2010-11.

Slavi Slavov’s (Economics) “Structural Current Account Imbalances: Fixed versus Flexible Exchange Rates?” was published in November 2009 as Discussion Paper 76 [pdf] of the Bulgarian National Bank.

Jason Smith (ITS) presented a poster session titled "Video47: Design and Implementation of an Open Source Video-On-Demand System" at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting held in Austin, Texas, 19-21 January.

David Tanenbaum (Physics & Astronomy), Bryan Penprase (Physics & Astronomy), and Maria Tucker (Draper Center) gave talks at “Signals and Waves,” the 8th annual Pomona College Physics Teachers Workshop, held in conjunction with the Cornell Institute for Physics Teachers, on 20 February. Benjamin Pollard ’11 and Paul McCormack ’12 assisted with the workshop.

Samuel Yamashita (History) moderated a session on the Japanese postwar social scientist Maruyama Masao at the International House of Japan in Tokyo on 27 January.

Faculty/Staff Fitness and Wellness Program: Fit and Well Holiday Health Challenge

From November 30 - January 24, 71 faculty and staff participated in the Fit and Well Holiday Challenge. The participants were asked to incorporate eight healthful activities into their daily lives. Progress was then tracked, evaluated and reported. Activities included:

• Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables and 3 servings of whole grains
• Limiting discretionary calories to 300
• Sleeping at least 7 hours
• Engaging in cardio, strength training and flexibility exercises
• Incorporating activity in daily life

For information on all FSFW programs, please contact Lisa Beckett.

Congratulations to all participants!

Elisa Alban
Judy Arriola
Ellie Ash
Anna Asker
Elaine Baker
Lisa Beckett
Jennifer A Bicknell
Mary A Booker
Jessica Borelli
Patience Boudreaux
Pamela Bromley
Elizabeth Champion
Tzu-Yi Chen
Toni Clark
Bowen Close
Jasa Cocke
Andrew Crawford
Debra Dearinure
Hilda Dinolfo
Sandra Fenton
Jillian Fontaine
Luz D Forero
Catherine Gallant
Wanda Gibson
Juan Pedro Giner-Martinez
Donna Henry
Cristhiane Hernandez
Laura L. Hoopes
Beth Hubbard
Lucy Huff
Steven Hurtado
Abril Rivas Iniguez
Angela Johnson
Donna Lane
Carla Jackson
Julie Journitz
Nita Kansara
Christina Liao
Beverly Lopez
Sandra Lundergan-Price
Mary McMahon
Patricia Maine
Natalie Marmolejo
Kerry Martin
Jonathan Matsui
Richard Mawhorter
Christine Maynard
Sara Mitchell
Anita Miller
Carlos Morales
Erica Mooyman
Phuong Musgrave
Kaye Donna Pandy
Cathy Paolozzi
Kaye Pereida
Cynthia Peters
Denis Recendez
Wendy Rios
Mike Riskas
Brenda Rushforth
Brenda Schmit
Rita Shaw
Gary Smith
Jason Smith
Carol Stearns
Carol Thompson
Nancy Treser-Osgood
Liane Veenema
Brett Watts
Barry Werger
Anne Yu
Alma Zook