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January-February 2013 @Pomona Newsletter

Table of Contents

News & Notes

  • Upcoming staff event dates: The Staff Appreciation luncheon is on Wednesday, March 20. The Spring Staff Forum will be held on Wednesday, March 27, 1:30 - 3 p.m.
  • Family Weekend: Family Weekend is almost here! This weekend, many parents and family members will be joining their students on campus for classes and events. For a full schedule of events, visit the Family Weekend web page.
  • Upcoming holiday: Cesar Chavez Day will be observed on Friday, March 29.

Charitable Giving Campaign - Final Results

At the close of the 2012-13 Charitable Giving Campaign, 117 donors gave a total of $32,134 to organizations supported by the campaign! This year, the charities supported were 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. 

Staff Council Website and Call for for Distinguished Staff Award Nominations

Staff Council has a new website! On the site, you can learn who is on Staff Council and how to contact them, and find an anonymous form for contributing questions to Staff Forums, dates for upcoming events like the Staff Appreciation Lunch, and information on the Distinguished Staff Award, including past winners.

Speaking of the Distinguished Staff Award, it's time for nominations: Download the nomination form to nominate a staff member who has distinguished themselves through their outstanding services and efforts beyond what is required of their daily job. Nominees must have worked for Pomona for at least five years, cannot be a member of the Distinguished Staff Award Selection Committee, and cannot be a past awardee. The deadline for nominations is Tuesday, February 26.

Your Password

Have you changed your password lately? When the time comes, you can change or reset your password online without having to speak to an ITS staff person. Visit https://mypassword.pomona.edu to set up your security questions. Once you have done so, you will be able to reset and/or change your password on your own by returning to that site.

New Employees

  • Devan Anderson, dining lead, Dining Services
  • Travis Brown, director, Quantitative Skills Center
  • Michelle Johnston, administrative assistant, Physical Education/Athletics
  • Robert Little, web database integrator/programmer, ITS

Recent News

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

Allan Barr (Asian Languages and Literatures) gave a talk in Chinese titled "Contemporary Chinese Literature in the West: Issues in Translation and Reception" at the Gediao Bookstore in Chengdu, China, on 13 January. 

Kim Bruce (Computer Science) presented two papers at the Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) conference in Tucson in October. "Patterns as Objects in Grace" was presented in the Dynamic Languages Symposium, while "Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty" was presented as part of Onward! 2012. He also gave another presentation on the first topic at the Southern California Programming Languages Symposium at UC Riverside on 30 November, 2012. Both papers were based on work with colleagues in Portland, Oregon, and in New Zealand. In December 2012, he made a presentation, "The semantics of inheritance, revisited -- Gracefully," at the meeting of the IFIP Working Group on Programming Language Design in Austin, Texas.

On 2 February, Susana Chávez-Silverman (Romance Languages and Literatures) read from new work at the “Metamorphosis” event at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave three talks at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego: "C*-algebras generated by truncated Toeplitz operators" on 10 January; "Recent progress on complex symmetric operators" on 11 January; and "Supercharacter theory and Ramanujan's sum" on 12 January. He gave the talk "Supercharacters on abelian groups" on 29 January at the Claremont Colleges Algebra/Number Theory/Combinatorics seminar.

Hillary Gravendyk (English) convened a roundtable on the Poet-Scholar at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference in Boston on 6 January. On 16 January, she gave a poetry reading at UC San Diego for their new writing series. 

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave two talks at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (9-12 January, San Diego): "A Humanistic Reading Component for an Introduction to Proofs Course" at the MAA Contributed Paper Session on Bridging The Gap: Designing an Introduction to Proofs Course, and "The Brave New World of Open Access and Creative Commons: A Humanistic Experiment in Mathematical Publishing" at the AMS Special Session on Topics and Issues in Electronic Publishing.

On 13 January, Thomas Leabhart (Theatre and Dance) gave a lecture-demonstration at Theatre de la Terre in Paris, sponsored by Pas de Dieux and Association Hippocampe.

Ann Lebedeff (Physical Education) presented "My Mentor: San Diego Tennis" at the annual meeting and awards banquet for the San Diego District Tennis Association in La Jolla, California, on 18 January, and "How to Coach with your Leadership Strengths" the Intercollegiate Tennis Coaches' National Convention in Naples, Florida, on 17 December, 2012.

Jonathan Lethem (English) led a Q&A with contemporary photographer Gregory Crewdson at a Los Angeles County Museum of Art on 24 January.

On 30 November, Alma Martinez (Theatre and Dance) gave the invited lecture "Performing Trauma: Theatre Performance in Times of Crisis" at Whittier College. 

Cameron Munter (International Relations) finished his stay as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School with a series of presentations. He discussed U.S.-Pakistani relations to the Council on Foreign Relations and foreign policy issues in the next administration to Columbia Law alumni in December, and prospects for the Balkans to the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation in January.

Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) gave an invited poster presentation, “Collaborative linguistic research in a refugee community: Challenges and prospects” (with Christopher Leon PI ‘14 and Aleksandra Bril PI '13), at the special session on Methodology and Practice in Collaborative Endangered Language Research at the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Boston on 6 January.

At the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in New Orleans, 16-20 January, Adam Pearson (Psychology) presented the paper "Anxiety appraisal in intergroup interaction: The good, the bad, and the ugly" and was an invited panelist for two roundtable mentoring sessions on navigating the academic job market for graduate students and postdocs, sponsored by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. 

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) presented a paper, "Déserts, jardins et murs chez Gide," in the session “The Symbolism of Nature in André Gide's Work” at the 128th MLA Annual Convention in Boston on 4 January. 

Dara Rossman Regaignon (College Writing, English) presented "Defining Value: The Problem of Best Practices and Managerialism in Higher Education" at the annual meeting of Small Liberal Arts College Writing Program Administrators at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, on 11-12 January.

John Seery (Politics) gave a plenary address on 14 December, 2012, titled "Job Was Right" at the Welch Symposium on Death, sponsored by the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.

Hung Cam Thai (Sociology, Asian American Studies) gave an invited lecture in January at Tel Aviv University titled “Financial Debts in Transnational Families.” 

Publications

David Arase (Politics) wrote the op-ed “How can China peacefully lead Asia?” for The Financial Times China website, published on 16 January.

David Divita (Romance Languages and Literature) published "Online in Later Life: Age as a Chronological Fact and a Dynamic Social Category in an Internet Class for Retirees" in the Journal of Sociolinguistics 16:5 (2012), pp. 585-612.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) wrote, with Daniel Poore '11, "On the closure of the complex symmetric operators: Compact operators and weighted shifts" in Journal of Functional Analysis 264:3, pp. 691-712. He also published, with Amy Shoemaker '14, “On the matrix equation XA+AX^T=0" in Linear Algebra and its Applications 438:6, pp. 2740-2746.

Eric Grosfils (Geology) published "Heirarchical clustering of pit crater chains" with Carleton University colleagues Sarah Davey, Richard Ernst and Claire Samson in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 50:1, an issue devoted to recognizing Canadian contributions to planetary science. The analysis covers several areas of Venus, including the Ganiki Planitia (V-14) quadrangle region mapped previously with the aid of Pomona College students and colleagues.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) published “Epigenetics in Eukaryotic Microbes” in Microbe 7, pp. 555-560.

Stanleigh Jones (Asian Languages and Literatures) had his translations of four 400-year-old Bunraku puppet theatre plays published as a book: The Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Japan: Honor, Vengeance, and Love in Four Plays of the 18th and 19th Centuries (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). 

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) is co-author of the 2012 Arctic Report Card, contributing a section on seabirds to the peer-reviewed source on the current state of the Arctic relative to historical records. 

Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies) published a review of Phil Race’s book Making Learning Happen: A Guide for Post-Compulsory Education (Sage, 2010) in Teaching Theology and Religion 16:1, pp. 102-104; "Islam, Gender, and Peace," a chapter in Terrorism, Religion, and Global Peace: From Conception to Praxis (Gorgias Press, 2012), ed. K. Kuriakose; and "Whom Shall I Kill?,” a chapter in Encountering the Stranger: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Trialogue (University of Washington Press, 2012), ed. by John Roth and Leonard Grob.

Jade Star Lackey (Geology) co-authored "Continent-island arc fluctuations, growth of crustal carbonates, and long-term climate change," in Geosphere 9, pp. 21-36.

Joyce Lu (Theater and Dance, Asian American Studies) had her poem "Reunion Song" published in the anthology, Namjai: A Tribute to Bay Area API Poets (ReWrite, 2013).

An article co-written by April Mayes (History), "Transnational Hispaniola: Toward New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies," was published in Radical History Review 115, pp. 26-32.

Char Miller (Environmental Analysis) co-edited Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) with Daniel Orenstein (Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology) and Alon Tal (Ben-Gurion University).

Dan O'Leary (Chemistry), Biochemistry Laboratory Coordinator Katy Muzikar, Will Evenson '14 and Lauren Boden '14 have co-authored "1H and 13C NMR Assignments for the Cyanine Dyes SYBR Safe and Thiazole Orange,” a paper in the Journal of Organic Chemistry 77:23, pp. 10967-10971, describing a research project done in an upper-division chemistry course. 

Hans Rindisbacher (German and Russian) was guest editor of Редактор раздела Култура, “Запахи,” a five-article section in Russian on the history of hygiene and cosmetics in Fashion Theory 26, pp. 243-364. He also published a review essay on Friedmar Apel’s Das Auge liest mit: Zur Visualität der Literatur (Hanser, 2010) in Kulturpoetik 12:2, pp. 281-284, and a book review of German Colonialism and National Identity (Routledge, 2011) in The European Legacy 17:7, pp. 958-960.

Honors and Awards

Claudia Rankine (English) was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

Alex Rodriguez (Physical Education) earned USA Water Polo's 2012 Monte Nitzkowski Distinguished Coaching Award, given in recognition of a coach's exemplary work with his or her collegiate programs, as well as for commitment and dedication to furthering USA Water Polo's mission. During the 2001-12 academic year, Rodriguez was named the Division III Coach of the Year in the fall for Men's Water Polo, and in the spring for Women's Water Polo, while guiding Pomona-Pitzer to SCIAC titles in both sports. He was honored at the USA Water Polo National Awards Dinner on 19 January in Los Angeles.

Other

Alan Blumenfeld (Theatre and Dance) was recently made a resident artist at A Noise Within, an Equity theater in Los Angeles. In January, he taught Acting for Classical Comedy at Los Angeles Valley College, as part of his work as a company member, master teacher and board member of Theatricum Botanicum, another Equity theater in Los Angeles.

Tony Boston (Physical Education) served as the director and a lead instructor for a USA Track & Field Coaching Education Program from 18-20 January, hosting 41 current and aspiring track and field coaches for a three-day, 21-hour instructional program. In addition to hosting, Boston delivered presentations on “Endurance Training,” “Training Theory,” “BioMotor Abilities of the Power Events” and “Physiology.”

From 1-3 February, Martin Crawford (Outdoor Education Center), along with a dozen students, attended the Western Regional Outdoor Leadership Conference (WROLC) at UC San Diego. In January, the OEC offered a 72-hour/eight-day Wilderness First Responder course to 18 Pomona students and 16 Pitzer students.

Avi Chomsky (History) participated as an international observer during negotiations in Bogota, Colombia, on 2-3 February between the Cerrejon Coal mine and the Afro-Colombian village of Roche.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) organized, with Julie Beier, the AMS Special Session on Algebraic Combinatorics and Representation Theory during the Joint Mathematics Meetings, 9-12 January, in San Diego. She also co-organized, with Sue VanHattum, a poetry reading on 12 January where approximately fifteen poets presented their work and more than 60 attended. 

Thomas Leabhart (Theatre and Dance) taught a week-long workshop from 17 - 21 December in Paris for Pas de Dieux. 

Alma Martinez (Theatre and Dance) was invited by Mrs. Gene Autry to attend the book signing and private reception at the Autry Museum for television actor Henry Darrow on the occasion of the publishing of his autobiography, Lightning in the Bottle, and his 80th birthday, on 22 August. She acted with Darrow in the 1980 PBS American Playhouse drama Seguin. 

@Pomona Newsletter