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December 2012 @Pomona Newsletter

Table of Contents

News & Notes

  • Holiday Luncheon: The annual holiday buffet luncheon will take place on Tuesday, December 18, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in Edmunds Ballroom. Send regrets only to ssn04747@pomona.edu or x18131. 
  • Staff Council Winter Donation Drive: Coinciding with the Holiday Luncheon, Staff Council will host its annual Winter Donation Drive. Bring your donations of toys and games for children ages 8-16 to the lunch. Inland Valley Hope Partners will be distributing the gifts to children whose families are underemployed this season.
  • Upcoming Staff Holidays: The winter staff holidays begin at 3 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 21, with the campus closed for the entire week of Dec. 24-28. New Year's holidays include Monday, Dec. 31, and Tuesday, Jan. 1. 

Charitable Giving Campaign Update

The Charitable Giving Campaign is still underway, and already 89 donors have given $22,609 to organizations supported by the campaign! This year, the charities supported are Claremont After-School Programs (CLASP), Claremont Educational Foundation, Foothill AIDS Project, Fremont Academy of Engineering and Design, House of Ruth, Inland Empire United Way, Inland Hospice Association, Inland Valley Humane Society, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Pomona Valley Habitat for Humanity, Shoes That Fit, and The Be Perfect Foundation. You may designate which charity your donation goes to or choose to have it split among the 10 organizations.

You can give online, or donate via check or payroll deduction [pdf]  by sending the PDF form to:

Pomona College Charitable Giving Campaign
c/o Robin Flynn, Alexander Hall, Rm. 134

The deadline for donations is December 21.

New Studio Art Building Now Under Construction

The construction of the new Studio Art Hall began on Monday, December 10, and will continue through the Spring of 2014.  The first few weeks of activities will be centered around contractor mobilization/preparation as well as site demolition and grading. The operating hours for the project will be Monday through Friday beginning at 7:00 am through 5:00 pm with some weekend activities from time to time depending on the requirements of the project. Bob Robinson of Facilities and Campus Services reports that they anticipate that vehicular access on Columbia Road will be available for the duration of the project, but there may be some instance where temporary delays may occur. Pedestrian access to Haldeman Pool and athletic facilities at the east end of campus will be available via the walkway between Merritt Field and the baseball diamond. Access to the Sontag Greek Theater will be available via the walkway along the north side of Seaver Theater.

For more information on the new Studio Art Center, visit this fall 2012 Pomona College Magazine article. 

ITS Downtime During the Holidays

ITS is planning a major downtime for the campus network on December 28 and 29. During this time, ITS will be replacing the core network equipment, as well as other critical pieces of the campus network infrastructure, as part of the College’s Disaster Recovery efforts for IT and to install new switches with significantly faster transmission speeds.

On Friday, December 28, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., the work will affect network access from all buildings south of Bonita and also the offices that are located in the various campus “houses.”  On Saturday, December 29, 10 a.m. to midnight, work will take place on buildings north of Bonita, as well as to personal and department spaces on the campus network. During each downtime, there will be no access to the campus network from those locations. On both days, access from off-campus will also be affected.

New Ombuds Office at Pomona College

Conchita Franco Serri is the new Pomona College Ombuds. The Ombuds Office at Pomona College is a neutral place where students, faculty and staff can bring questions and concerns that can be discussed confidentially in a safe environment. The Office offers informal and impartial dispute resolution services, provides resources and referrals, and helps visitors consider options available to them.

The Office operates independently as a supplement to existing administrative and formal dispute resolution processes and has no formal decision–making authority. It is not an office of notice to Pomona College. If a visitor wishes to file a complaint, the Ombuds will refer the visitor to the appropriate office. The Ombuds Office is not an advocate for either side in a dispute. Instead, it is an advocate for fair and consistent treatment. The Office reports administratively to the President.

The Office is located at:  201 W. 4th Street, Suite 103, Harvard Building, Claremont, CA 91711 – across from the Hahn Building in the village. For more information, visit the office’s new website at www.pomona.edu/ombuds.

Sustainability Tips

Some tips on reducing waste around the holidays: 

  • Send electronic greeting cards! There are many cute, personal ones out there. If you must buy paper holiday cards, make sure they are constructed from recycled paper. And don't forget to recycle the cards that you receive as well!
  • Bring reusable cloth bags while doing your holiday gift shopping instead of using plastic bags.
  • Save wrapping paper and ribbons for reuse. Wrap gifts in recycled wrapping paper or newspaper.
  • Buy rechargeable batteries and a charger to accompany your electronic gifts. Using rechargeable batteries reduces the amount of electronic waste generated, and saves money in the long run!
  • Turn off or unplug holiday lights during the day. If possible, put them on a timer.
  • Rather than sending your Christmas tree to a landfill, check with your community solid waste department and find out if they collect and mulch trees.
  • Give gifts that don't require wrapping or generate waste, like lessons for a new hobby, a massage, or tickets to a sporting event, play, or concert. Other options include homemade edible gifts or craft gifts, or making a donation to a charity in someone's name. Oftentimes, these types of gifts can feel more personal than a store-bought item.

Recent News

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

Colin Beck (Sociology) gave two conference presentations in November: "The Arab Spring in Comparative-Historical Perspective" at the California Sociological Association in Riverside, California, and "2011 and a New Generation of Revolutionary Theory" at the Social Science History Association in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Graydon Beeks (Music) presented a paper titled "Handel at Cannons" at the Handel at Court conference, sponsored by The Handel Institute and held in London during Thanksgiving weekend. While there, he attended an editorial board meeting of the Hallische Haendel Ausgabe.

Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) presented a paper titled "Shifting Borders and Fuzzy Boundaries on the Altiplano of the Central Andes" in the "Symposium on Borderline Cultures: The Challenge of Living Between Societies" at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco on 17 November.

Gabe Chandler (Mathematics) gave a talk, "Testing for volatility clusters in time series," in a UC Irvine statistics seminar on 4 November.

Hillary Gravendyk (English) presented a paper, “uses of the useless: against the division of poetry and scholarship," at the Convergence on Poetics in Bothell, Washington, on 1 October. She also presented the paper "Oppen's Ethical Intersubjectivity" at the Modernist Studies Association in Las Vegas in October.

Jesse A. Harris (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) presented the poster "Alternatives on demand: Processing d-linked phrases in sluice structures" at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) in Riva del Garda, Italy, which took place 6-8 September. He presented an invited tutorial titled "Fast, cheap, but totally in control" on recruiting subjects on Amazon's Mechanical Turk for psycholinguistics experiments, at USC’s Department of Linguistics on 5 October, and a workshop paper titled "A semantics for interjective what" at The 5th California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP), held at the UC San Diego on 27-28 October, where he was also a session chair. Finally, he presented "Voltaire was More Easily Duped than Forged: Structural Cues in Processing Polysemy" with Joel Fishbein ’12 at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference (ERP) in Madrid, Spain, held 7-9 November.

Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies) was a respondent for a panel on “New Contexts for Liberal Theology” held at the American Academy of Religion National Meetings in Chicago on 17 November.

Jade Star Lackey (Geology) presented a talk titled "Low-?18O granites of the Sierran arc-recycling of altered volcanic rocks" at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, 3-7 November. He was also a co-author on four other posters and talks presented by current and former students, including studies of sedimentary rocks deposited in a Pleistocene lake filling Long Valley caldera, CA (Ben Murphy ‘13); magmatism in the southern Mojave Desert (Alexa Zilberfarb SC '14), and Cretaceous hydrothermal activity in the central Sierra Nevada (Callie Sendek SC '12).

Thomas Moore (Physics and Astronomy) gave an invited talk titled "Six Ideas That Shaped Physics: A Different Approach to Introductory Physics" to the American Association of Physics Teachers' New Faculty Reunion Workshop in College Park, Maryland, 2-4 November.

On 17 November, William Peterson (Music) presented a paper, "Crossing the Boundary into the Twentieth Century: Czech Music and Politics, 1881-1914," co-authored by James W. Peterson (Valdosta State University), at the National Meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans.

Joti Rockwell (Music) presented an invited paper titled "Rhythm, Gesture, and Syncopation in Appalachian Fiddling" at Grinnell College in October, and a related paper, "Analyzing Gestural Rhythm in Appalachian Fiddle Music: A Study of Bowing and Syncopation in the Music of Clark Kessinger," at the joint conference of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology in November.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) gave a presentation titled "Hidden Child, Hidden Women in WWII" to a book club in Claremont on 12 November and to Pilgrim Place on 13 November.

Anthony Shay (Theatre & Dance) gave a lecture, "Igor Moiseyev and the Invented Tradition of Russian Folk Dance," for the Oldenborg Luncheon Colloquium Lecture Series on 2 November. He delivered the paper “Tradition, Revivalism, or Invented Tradition? Iranian 'National Dance' in the Twentieth Century" at the Congress on Research in Dance conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 11 November.

Michael Steinberger (Economics) presented two talks at the 2012 California and Nevada Credit Union League annual meeting in Las Vegas on 14-15 November: "Rising US Income Inequality and Credit Unions," and "The Winds of (Demographic) Change.”

Publications

David Arase (Politics) published in “The impact of 3.11 on Japan” in East Asia: An International Quarterly 29:4.

Gabe Chandler (Mathematics) published, with Guy Stevens '13, "An Exploratory Study of Minor League Baseball Statistics" in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports8:4.

Virginie Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) published "Benjamin Péret et Remedios Varo dans l'interstice de 'la pluie d'encre'" in the first issue of the Cahiers Benjamin Péret, pp. 92-98.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) published "On the norm closure problem for complex symmetric operators," with Daniel E. Poore '11, in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 141, p. 549. He also co-authored, with W. T. Ross, “Recent progress on truncated Toeplitz operators,” in Fields Institute Communications65, pp. 275-319. Poore was the recipient of the Stauffer Prize in 2011 in part based on his work on the first paper above.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) was co-author of the paper “Interannual changes in zooplankton on the West Spitsbergen Shelf in relation to hydrography and their consequences for the diet of planktivorous seabirds” in the ICES Journal of Marine Science 69:5, pp. 890-901.

Working with colleagues at UC Merced, Dan O'Leary (Chemistry) has published "Stereoselection in the Corey-Bakshi-Shibata Reduction: Insight from Kinetic Isotope Effects and Transition-Structure Modeling" in the 47th issue of this year's Angewandte Chemie.

William Peterson’s (Music) article, "Saint-Saëns's Improvisations on the Organ (1862)," appeared in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World (Princeton University Press, 2012), ed. by Jann Pasler, pp. 102-108.

Sheila Pinkel’s (Art and Art History) article and photographs, "Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) and the Aftermath of War in Laos," were published in the fall 2012 issue of the online journal Trans Asian Photography" Review (TAP) 3:1.

Joti Rockwell (Music) published an article, "What is bluegrass anyway? Category formation, debate and the framing of musical genre," in Popular Music 31:3, pp. 363-381.

Monique Saigal (Romance Languages and Literatures) published a book review of Elsa Flageul’s Madame Tabard n'est pas une femme in The French Review 86.2.

Exhibitions and Performances

Gayle Blankenburg (Music) went on a 10-day concert tour in China in October. She presented concerts and taught piano master classes at the Youth Palace in Jinan, the Zhejiang Art College in Hangzhou, and the Xiamen University Art College in Xiamen.

Work by Sheila Pinkel (Art and Art History) is included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition "Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection" from 25 November to 24 February.

Joti Rockwell (Music) performed a concert of Zimbabwean and Appalachian music with Tony Perman (Music) at Grinnell College in October.

Honors and Awards

Neil Gerard (Student Affairs) received the Capstone Award from NASPA -  Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, which recognizes practitioners and scholars whose careers have been spent in Higher Education. Gerard spent 43 years in various areas in student affairs in four institutions. He retired from his position as associate dean of students/director, Smith Campus Center and student programs in 2011, but is working part time to help the College improve disaster preparedness.

Other

Gabe Chandler (Mathematics)was featured, with Guy Stevens '13, in When Scouting the Minor Leagues, It’s Data That’s the Clincher,” a 13 December Wired.com article.

Art Horowitz (Theatre and Dance) created the international "Shakespeare in Performance Syllabus," a prototype for courses in international Shakespeare, launched in November on the Folger Shakespeare Library website. This was the culmination of a Summer 2011 Folger Institute for Shakespeare Studies National Endowment for the Humanities Institute Project, "Shakespeare From the Globe to the Global.

@Pomona Newsletter