January-February 2011 @Pomona Newsletter

News & Notes

• Peter W. Stanley Distinguished Staff Award Nominations: You can still nominate a co-worker for this annual honor. Nominees must have reached five years of service prior to the 2010-2011 fiscal year, meaning they must have been hired before July 1, 2005. Previous recipients and members of this year's selection committee are not eligible. Please see this list for eligible staff members and complete this form and send it via email or campus mail to Steve Comba to nominate a co-worker. February 25 is the deadline for nomination.
• Staff Forum: Save the date! The next Staff Forum will be on Tuesday, March 8, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. in Rose Hills Theatre. We will be joined by President Oxtoby, Vice President and Treasurer Karen Sisson, Assistant VP and Director of Facilities and Campus Services Bob Robinson, and Assistant VP of HR Brenda Rushforth. You can submit questions to the Staff Council at StaffCouncil@pomona.edu or any individual Staff Council member. Questions should be submitted by February 28 to have the best chance of getting answered at the forum.
• Staff Recognition Luncheon: Another save the date! This year's Staff Recognition Luncheon will be held on Tuesday, March 15, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Edmunds Ballroom.
• Ally Training: The QRC is holding another Faculty and Staff Ally Training session on Wednesday, February 23, from 1:15 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. The primary mission of Ally Training is to create a safer, more welcoming and inclusive campus environment for LGBTQ people, to strengthen ally community, and encourage networking among faculty, staff and students toward the goal of supporting the well-being of LBGTQ people. Send RSVPs to Marina Wood (Marinawood2@gmail.com) by February 21 (today!).
• New Websites: We're happy to announce two new websites that have gone online in the past month. The first is the Teaching and Learning Committee website at http://tlc.pomona.edu, where faculty can find a series of discussions/blogs about teaching, as well as announcements of upcoming events and many new resources for faculty at all levels. The second website is our new Dining Services web at http://www.pomona.edu/dining. Here you can find menus, hours, catering information, and other items about Dining Services at Pomona.
• Charitable Giving Campaign Results: 142 donors (68 faculty and 74 staff) gave a total of $30,526 to the organizations supported by the Campaign! To view the Honor Roll for the Campaign and which charities received the donations, visit the Charitable Giving Campaign website.

Follow Us!

Recently, we've put up the Van Jones lecture up on Vimeo and we'll be adding other lectures soon. No better time to stay connected with Pomona via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo and Youtube!

Catching Up With ... Smith Campus Center

This month, Neil Gerard, associate dean of students and the director of the Smith Campus Center and student programs, shares news about recent updates to Edmunds Ballroom. Do you have department news you'd like to share? Email Laura Tiffany to participate in our "Catching Up With" segment!

Eleven years after the Smith Campus Center opened, Edmunds Ballroom has received its long awaited upgrades and improvements. During the winter break, contractors installed theatrical lighting, a fully integrated sound system, and video projection. Although the original plans 11 years ago for the Ballroom included sound and lighting, those items were value engineered out to bring the project within budget. Earlier this year, with the full support of the Executive Staff, those items were included and rear-screen video projection was added.

The IT Media Support Services, led by Joe Brennan, collaborated with the staff of Smith Campus Center to design and install a fully integrated system to support lectures, panel discussions and video presentations for the hundreds of programs that occur in Edmunds throughout the year. The memorial celebration for Kevin Unck was the first event to use the video projection and the Van Jones lecture was the first use of the sound system and lighting. Neil Gerard, director of the Campus Center, reported that the new equipment worked flawlessly for both occasions.

Users of Edmunds can now rely on high quality sound, lighting and video for their events.

New Employees

• Carmen Brown, Administrative Assistant, Dean of Students
• Glenn Graziano, General Manager, Dining Services
• Justin McGruder, Executive Sous Chef, Dining Services
• Jorge Peraza, Sous Chef/Manager, Dining Services
• Ralph Zavala, Executive Chef, Dining Services

Recent News

• Video: Watch Van Jones Deliver the 2010-11 Distinguished Lecture
• Pomona College Museum of Art Features Documentary Photography in "China: Insights" Exhibition
• Bill Gates to Visit Pomona College on March 10
• Video: The Milton Marathon, a One-Day Reading of "Paradise Lost"
• Pomona College Wins the Claremont Colleges Power Down Challenge
• Under New Management: Pomona Dining Halls Move to Self-Operation
• Annual Sustainability Film Festival Features Two Academy-Award Nominees
• Pomona College Ranked High Among Liberal Arts Colleges With Best Graduation Rates
• Video: Professor Jonathan Lethem Discusses "They Live"
• Martha Graham Dance Company to Perform at Pomona With Students on March 1
• Pomona College Magazine Winter 2011 Issue Now Available

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Jack Abecassis (Romance Languages & Literatures) has a review essay, "Pierre Bayard and the Death of the Reader," in MLN: Modern Language Notes 125:4 (September 2010), pp. 961-79.

David Arase (Politics) is author of an essay, “Korea, ASEAN, and East Asian Regionalism,” in Tomorrow’s Northeast Asia: Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies 21 (2011), pp. 33-52.

No Somos Iguales (We Are Not Alike), the third volume in a series of collected writings by Ralph Bolton (Anthropology), has been published in Spanish by Editorial Horizonte in Peru.

Tony Boston (Physical Education) was the director of a USA Track and Field Coaching Education School held at Pitzer College, 14-16 January. The school includes 21 hours of instruction and, for those who pass a 200-question exam, leads to a nationally recognized certification. Forty-eight current or aspiring coaches attended.

With Kara Northway and Eliana Schonberg, Pamela Bromley (College Writing) published an article, "Bridging Institutions to Cross the Quantitative/Qualitative Divide," in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal 8:1 (fall 2010). Part of a special issue on Quantitative and Qualitative Visions of the Writing Center, the article is available online here.

José Cartagena-Calderón (Romance Languages & Literatures) was elected to a five-year term on the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee of the Division on Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Drama. He will serve as secretary of the division in his third year and as chair in his fourth year. Cartagena-Calderón gave a talk, “La masculinidad del martirio y el martirio de la masculinidad: San Sebastián en el imaginario colonial," as part of a panel, "Colonial Masculinities,” at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles on 6 January. He also published a review article on Francisco Vivar's book Don Quijote frente a los caballeros de los tiempos modernos (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2009) in Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos 7 (2011), pp. 289-94.

Ludwig Chincarini (Economics) published “No Chills or Burns from Temperature Surprises: An Empirical Analysis of the Weather Derivatives Market” in Journal of Futures Markets (January 2011), pp. 1-33.

Ed Copeland (English, Emeritus) and Juliet McMaster are the editors of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2010), second edition revised. Copeland also presented the plenary lecture, “Jane Austen—The Mayfair Legacy,” at this year’s general meeting of the Jane Austen Society, UK, on 18 July.

Anne Dwyer (German & Russian) gave a talk, "Between 'National Enthusiasm' and 'Cultural Cosmopolitanism': Russian Formalist Treatments of Empire," at the Junior Visiting Fellows' Conference of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, on 16 December.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) gave a talk, “Topological Symmetries of Molecules,” for the Mathematics Department Colloquium at Arizona State University on 20 January.

Hillary Gravendyk (English) presented a paper, "The Undigestable Phrase: Lorine Niedecker's Language Games," at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Victoria, BC, in November. She gave another paper, "From This Distance Thinking Toward You: George Oppen's Intersubjective Poetics," at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles in January.

Jonathan Hall (Media Studies) translated Mizoguchi Akiko’s "Felix Gonzalez-Torres" for the exhibition catalogue Love’s Body: Art in the Age of AIDS, ed. Kasahara Michiko (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2010), pp. 143-45, 178-79. Subtitles by Hall brought the Japanese film Sleep (Nemuri Yusurika) to its world premiere at the 2011 International Film Festival Rotterdam, 26 January-6 February.

Laura L. Mays Hoopes (Biology) is the author of Breaking through the Spiral Ceiling: An American Woman Becomes a DNA Scientist (Lulu Publishing, 2010). Her recent shorter pieces include “Gender-Specific Brain: Fact or Fiction?” in AWIS Magazine 41 (fall 2010), pp. 22-24; “Robert Full” in CBE-Life Sciences Education 9 (winter 2010), pp. 390-91; and “The Art of Science Writing, Natalie Angier” in AWIS Magazine 41 (spring 2010), pp. 15-16.

Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies) presented a paper titled, "Neoplatonism and Interconnectedness in Medieval Islamic Thought" at the Seventh Conference on Current Pagan Studies in a panel on "Neo-Platonism and Other Paganisms" held 22-23 January at CGU.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) organized and chaired, together with Mark Huber (CMC) and Dagan Karp (HMC), a Mathematical Association of America Contributed Paper Session on Humanistic Mathematics, held as part of the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, 8-9 January. With Huber, she is coeditor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, whose first issue appeared last month and is available at http://journal-of-humanistic-mathematics.org.

Karaali also gave an invited address, “Humanistic Mathematics: A Journal, a Philosophy, a Community,” at the Fields Institute in Toronto on 27 November. At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans in January, she participated in an American Mathematical Society panel titled "Proving Hardy Wrong: Mathematics Research with Social Justice Applications" and in a Mathematical Association of America panel titled “Mathematical Lives and Mathematical Culture”; she also gave a research talk titled “On Multigraded Combinatorial Hopf Algebras.”

Jade Star Lackey (Geology) presented the study "Magma, Magma, Quite Contaminated, How Does Your Garnet Grow?" and co-authored two other presentations at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held in San Francisco, 5-9 December. Gabriel Romero '12 and Adam Curry '10 were researchers on these studies.

Ann Lebedeff (Physical Education) presented “Mentoring: A Coaches’ Forum” at the Intercollegiate Tennis Association National Coaches' Convention in Naples, FL, on 18 December.

Sherry Linnell (Theatre) recently designed the costumes for the West Coast premiere of SMUDGE with the Syzygy Theatre Group in Burbank.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave a talk on "Women's Rights as Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran" as a keynote for the American Academy of University Women in Oxnard, CA, on 15 January, and she spoke on "Feminizing and Masculinizing the War on Terror" at Honnold Library on 26 January.

Carl Martellino (Career Development Office) was presented with an award in recognition of outstanding contributions to the Mountain Pacific Association of Colleges and Employers (MPACE) at the annual conference in December.

Alma Martinez (Theatre & Dance) presented “The Big Picture: Media, Identity and Education” at the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) Student Diversity Leadership and People of Color conference in San Diego on 3 December. She was also interviewed for an NAIS podcast on media representations of people of color in the United States.

An interview with Robert Mezey (English, Emeritus) appeared in the “Bookmark” section of the Claremont Courier on 8 January.

Lynne Miyake (Asian Languages & Literatures) was an interviewed speaker in “Invitation to World Literature: The Tale of Genji,” posted on the Annenberg Media website in October. She also gave a talk in Japanese, “The Tale of Genji: From Tale to Novel, from Nation Building to Soft Power,” at Hirosaki University of 13 November.

Nivia Montenegro (Spanish and Latin American Studies) organized and chaired “Memorializing Cuba: Revisions of History,” a special session at the Modern Language Association annual conference in Los Angeles on 6-9 January.

Artwork by Sandeep Mukherjee (Art & Art History) has been featured in several recent exhibitions: “In Side Out” at the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York City, 9 December - 29 January; “Form and Phenomenon” at Project 88 in Mumbai, India, 15 December – 30 January; and “The Archaic Revival” at Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles, 29 January - 26 February.

Tina Negritto (Molecular Biology) presented a research talk, “The Rad3 Protein, a Subunit of the TFIIH Factor, and Its Role in the Repair of Double Strand Breaks,” at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 13 December.

Laura Perini (Philosophy) gave a talk, “Scientific Models and Visual Representations: Some Perspectives,” at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science on 18 January.

Sheila Pinkel (Art & Art History) published a book, Manifestations of a Cube (Turover, 2010), about the creative process.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) is the author of "Le Surréalisme en 1947: Scénographie" in L'Oeuvre en scène, ou ce que l'art doit à la scénographie, ed. Claire Lahuerta (Publications de l'Université de Pau, 2010), pp. 61-75. She gave a guest lecture on "Le surréalisme cannibale" at the Facultés de Philosophie et Lettres des FUNDP, auditoire Meganck, Université de Namur, Belgium, on 26 November; and she gave an invited talk, "Echos de vie et miroitements créatifs d'Unica Zürn et d'Hans Bellmer: la poupée, le tigre et la fuite," to the transdisciplinary FNRS research group "Clinique de la Création" at the Université de Namur on 27 November. In addition, she gave a paper titled "Writing the 'Femme-Enfant' " while participating in a special session, "The Young Side of the Femme-Fatale," that she had organized at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles on 8 January.

Lynn Rapaport (Sociology) chaired a session on "Cross-Disciplinary Areas of Arts and Humanities” and gave a talk, “Superman Fights the Nazis,” at the 9th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, held in Honolulu in January.

On 9 January, Dara Regaignon (College Writing and English) presented a paper, “Maternal Forms, Fictive Maternities,” at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles, and on 15 January, she chaired a session, “Articulating and Assessing Varieties of First-Year Writing,” at the Small Liberal Arts College Writing Program Administrators conference at Denison University. While at Denison, Dara also met with their Writing Task Force, presenting on the variety of writing requirements at small liberal arts colleges nationwide.

Hans Rindisbacher (German & Russian) was interviewed by Erica Marat on Voice of America – Russian Service about “Smells of the Soviet Union.” The interview can be read on the VoA news site.

On 2 December, Colleen Rosenfeld (English), Jacqueline Wernimont of Scripps, and Carrie Marsh and Gale Burrow of the Claremont Colleges Library organized a collaborative marathon reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The event was kicked off with a talk by scholar Jeff Dolven and included an exhibit of rare books in the Library. Rosenfeld also delivered a paper, “Reading Spenser’s Similes,” at the Spenser Round Table held at the Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles in January.

Larissa Rudova (German & Russian) presented a paper, "'Fairest of Them All': Beauty Pageants in Children's Literature and the Media," and chaired a panel, "The Other Face of the War: Women and Children as Soldiers, Victims, and Survivors," at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies National Convention in Los Angeles, 18-21 November. Rudova’s and Marina Balina’s co-edited book, Russian Children's Literature and Culture (2008), was re-released in paperback by Routledge.

Translated by Anna Krasnovsky-Quinard ’97 and including a new introduction, Monique Saigal-Escudero’s (Romance Languages & Literatures) book has been published in English as French Heroines, 1940-1945: Courage, Strength, and Ingenuity (2010; available from the author). Saigal reports the book contains a new longer introduction not present in the French version and the cover photo is of her grandmother who died at Auschwitz.

John Seery (Politics) is the editor of A Political Companion to Walt Whitman (University Press of Kentucky, 2010).

Tomás Summers Sandoval (History and Chicano/a-Latino/a Studies) served as program co-chair for “Times of Crisis, Times of Change: Human Stories on the Edge of Transformation,” the Oral History Association annual meeting held in Atlanta in October. He also organized a plenary session titled “A Nation of Immigrants: Human Rights, Labor Rights, and Migration Politics in the 21st Century.”

David Tanenbaum (Physics & Astronomy) co-authored "Roll-to-Roll Processing of Inverted Polymer Solar Cells Using Hydrated Vanadium(V)Oxide as a PEDOT:PSS Replacement" in Materials 4:1 (January 2011), pp. 169-83.

Nancy Treser-Osgood (Alumni Relations) was recently appointed to the Claremont Educational Foundation Board of Directors, which solicits support for public education in Claremont through community involvement. Treser-Osgood was also quoted in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Currents magazine February 2011 issue. The article was titled "Sour Notes: When Fight Songs and Alma Maters Spark Controversy" and she addressed alumni reactions to "Hail, Pomona, Hail" and offered advice for others who might be facing similar challenges.

Dwight Whitaker (Physics & Astronomy) and colleagues’ research on exploding plants was featured in the 25 December issue of New Scientist magazine, and their research on exploding moss was featured in the winter 2010 issue of Kew Magazine as well as in “Loh Down on Science” on National Public Radio.