May/ June 2007




















SUMMER SCHOLARS: 90 local high-school students went through this year's Summer Scholars Enrichment Program, which ended in late July. The program offers promising high-school students the chance to live on campus for a month and delve into a challenging academic curriculum.

Pomona People in action:

Graydon Beeks (music) attended the annual Handel Festival in Halle (Saale), Germany in early June. He read a paper on "Handel's 1757 Triumph of Time and Truth as a Career Retrospective," and participated in meetings of the editorial board of the Hallische-Haendel-Ausgabe and the Vorstand of the Georg-Friedrich-Haendel- Gesellschaft.

Ralph Bolton (anthropology) was the invited discussant at a Seminar on Andean Kinship at the National University of the Altiplano in Puno, Peru in June. That same week, Bolton was a guest of honor at the 20th anniversary celebration of the founding of the community of Tuni Requena. Also in June, the Mayor of Pucara, Peru and Bolton jointly inaugurated the weaving workshop of the Adult Education Center in the town of Pucara. During May and June, Bolton coordinated a volunteer program in Peru involving 17 students from the Claremont Colleges (Pomona, 15; Scripps, 1; CMC, 1) who are living with families in rural communities in the Andean highlands.

Laurie Cameron (Dance) was one of 12 featured artists in this year's Joyce Soho Presents in New York City in May. Chosen from a pool of 100 applicants, Laurie Cameron & Company performed "We are John Doe", with performances by Daniel Senning and Ashanti Smalls '00, Brendan Behan (CMC '03) and Yo Smith Kwon.

Jose R. Cartagena-Calderon (Romance Languages and Literatures) presented a paper, "Masculinidad, Imperio y otredad femenina en el Arauco domado de Lope de Vega" at the XVI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas at The University of Paris-Sorbonne in July.

Susana Chávez-Silverman, gave an invited authors talk, drawing from her upcoming book, "Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles," at UC Davis in May. She also was invited to speak at Writes of Spring: A Celebration of Writers and Writing at Rio Hondo College in Whittier in April. Recent publications include “Currawong Crónica” in the spring issue of CHROMA: Island and “Tecolote Crónica” reprinted by permission in Revista de Literatura Contemporánea's April-June issue.

Maria Donapetry (romance languages and literatures) gave a paper titled "Cuerpo, destino y bisturi" (about Almodovar's women) at the XII Forum for Iberian Studies, University of Oxford, in June.

John Eldevik (History) delivered a talk, "The Past and Future of Medieval History," at the Claremont Rotary Club in May. Recent publications include:
-- "Medieval Germany: Research and Resources," German Historical Institute Reference Guide 21 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2007)
-- "Driving the Chariot of the Lord: Siegfried I of Mainz (1060-1084) and Episcopal Identity in an Age of Transition" in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. John Ott & Anna Trumbore (Aldershot, UK & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).

Judson Emerick (Art and Art History), studying on sabbatical in Rome this spring, gave three invited talks in the UK -- at the University of St. Andrews on April 26, and at Cambridge University on April 30, speaking on "The Liturgical Turn: How the Papal Stational Liturgy Transformed the Idea of a Church in Rome between the Fourth and the Eighth Century," and on May 2 at the School of World Art and Museology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, speaking on "Conjuring with the Cult of the Saints in Early Medieval Rome: Settings for the Papal Stational Liturgy."

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (English and Media Studies) gave an invited, informal presentation about the MediaCommons project at "New Structures, New Texts," a summit meeting of digital publishing representatives from a number of university presses and libraries, in Oakland in June.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics), gave the plenary address,"A topological look at molecular symmetries," at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, South Eastern Atlantic Section at the University of Memphis in May. Flapan also gave an invited presentation, "A Model of DNA Knotting and Linking: Topological Argument," at a workshop on the mathematics of knotting and linking in polymer physics and molecular biology, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery in Banff, Canada in May.

Neil Gerard (associate dean of students & director of Smith Campus Center & Student Programs) and Sarah Visser (associate director of Smith Campus Center & Student Programs) presented at the National Conference of the Association of College Unions International in Atlanta in March. Their session, "Creating a Common Space: Fostering a Safe and Inclusive Campus Climate Through the Development of Late-Night Programming Alternatives" spotlighted budgets, marketing, scheduling and staffing strategies used by small colleges to create inclusive programming for students who choose not to participate in alcoholic events on campus. Gerard also teamed with Mark Maves and Mark McVey of the Smith Group architectural firm to present a session, "Extreme Make-over - Campus Center Edition." The session highlighted the process used in the recent renovation and emphasized the significant components of the process, which could be used by large and small institutions in both renovation and new construction projects. The session included a powerpoint presentation of the campus assessment, traffic surveys and massing studies and included an animated "fly-through" of all of the renovated spaces, both indoors and outdoors. The conference brought together over 1,200 colleagues from colleges and universities around the world.

Jill Grigsby (Sociology) and Laura Kaneko '07 presented "Racial and Economic Segregation in California" at the International Conference on Social Sciences in Honolulu in May.

Laura Hoopes (Biology) recently had a trio of articles published. "Walls in the Holy Land" appeared in the Claremont Courier July 11. "Today's Industrial Giants Welcome Women Scientists" ran in the spring issue of AWIS Magazine. Hoopes was one of 10 co-authors on "Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT): Meeting the Goals of BIO2010," which appeared online in Cell Biology Education in June.

Meg Jolley (Dance) presented a workshop on Developmental Movement Patterning drawn from the Mind in Motion class she teaches at Pomona at the Annual General Meeting of American Society for the Alexander Technique at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in early June. In July she taught the Alexander Technique on the island of Alonissos in Greece, as part of a teaching workshop there.

Annie Johnson (Human Resources) was honored in June by the College and University Professional Association in Human Resources (CUPA-HR) with the Southwest Regional Lifetime Membership Award "for outstanding contributions to CUPA-HR and the HR Profession". Johnson is one of the founders and a former chair of the Southern California Chapter of CUPA-HR. She is also a recipient of the CUPA-HR regional Roadrunner Award, given "to human resources professionals who are positive role models and who have made significant contributions to the profession, their campuses and CUPA-HR."

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a talk, "On Hopf algebras and their Generalizations," in June at LT-7: the Seventh International Workshop on Lie Theory and Its Applications in Physics at Varna, Bulgaria.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology), along with co-authors David Ainley and Peter Lee, published a book chapter, "The impact and importance of production in polynyas to top-trophic predators: three case histories" in the book Polynyas: Wndows to the World's Oceans published by Elsevier Oceanography Series vol. 74, edited by W.O. Smith and D. Barber.

Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies) gave a lecture, "The Changing Roles of Women in Religion: Muslim Women," at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles in June.She also gave a four-part lecture series on Islam at the First Christian Church in Ontario, May 20th to June 10th. On May 11th, she presented a lecture titled “Rituals We Live By: Islam” to The Shakespeare Club in the city of Ontario. Along with Rita Bashaw and Mary Boyington at the Oldenborg International Center, Zayn was part of the planning team in facilitating a National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education week-long workshop on Teaching Islams at the Pomona College campus, June 14 to June 20.

Felix Kronenberg (German/FLRC) gave a paper titled "Panem Et Circenses: Language Learning and Computer Games" at the 2007 Computer Assisted Language Learning Consortium conference at Texas State University in May. Other recent papers include: "Comic and Manga Creation," "Machinima and Language Learning" and "Teaching Language and Culture With Computer Games" at the 2007 International Association of Language Learning & Technology conference in Boston, MA, in June. At that same IALLT conference, Kronenberg was a panelist for "The Next Revolution in Language Centers: New Paradigms for the New Millennium."

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) gave a talk titled "Cyber-connections: Gendered uses of Cyber-space for Urban Iranian Women" at the Iranian Women's Studies Foundation annual conference at the University of Maryland in June. Last month, Mahdavi's article, "Meeting, Mating and Cheating Online in Iran" appeared in the ISIM Review, the publication for the Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World.

Michael McGaha (Romance Languages) had an essay, "Reading 'Don Quixote' in Istanbul," published in the volume "Framing the 'Quixote'", ed. Alvin F. Sherman, Jr. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young UP, 2007).

Jonathan Miller (Music) composed music for two short films premiering at the Cannes Film Festival Film Market - "We Never Existed" and "Someone To Love." He is currently composing music for "Flip That House" season 3, airing on TLC starting on June 2.

Dan O'Leary (Chemistry) has published an article, "Facile and E-Selective Ring-Closing Metathesis Reactions in 310-Helical Peptides: a 3D-Structural Study" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper describes an investigation of chemically modified peptides, conducted by Amie Boal '02 and Erica Lanni '06 and collaborators at Caltech and the University of Padova.

Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) presented a conference paper, "Phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy: Cross-linguistic results and theoretical consequences" at the 15th Manchester Phonology Meeting, University of Manchester.

Frank Pericolosi (Physical Education) was the assistant coach for the Swedish National Baseball Team when it participated in Prague Baseball Week from June 25 through June 30 in the Czech Republic.

Sheila Pinkel (Art and Art History) gave a presentation titled "First World/Third World/Same World?" at the Global Photographies conference, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in June. She also will be chairing a session and making a presentation on "Sustainability and Art" at SIGGRAPH in San Diego in August.

Cynthia Peters (Office of Communications) was one of two featured speakers on "Publicizing Undergraduate Faculty" at the national conference on "How Colleges Can Obtain National and Regional Publicity" sponsored by Keith Moore Associates. The conference was held in Baltimore, MD. In March, she was one of four panelists discussing "How to Measure the Effectiveness of your Media Relations Staff and Program" at the CASE Annual Conference for Media Relations Professionals, held in Los Angeles.

Dara Rossman Regaignon (English) presented "Writing Program Assessment and Small College Culture" at the annual meeting of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in Tempe, AZ in July.

Monique Saigal (romance languages) participated in a discussion about "Les Justes" (the righteous ones who saved Jews during WWII) with two former Resistants, Liliane Klein-Lieber and George Lounger, in June at La maison de la photographie in Paris after the showing of a documentary that Saigal appears in. Later that month, was interviewed with the woman who saved her during the war; Mme Baleste-de Saint-Quentin, by a journalist from France Presse.

Bill Swartz (Physical Education/Athletics) was included on the Under 20 coaching staff for the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, London, England for The Eurovoetbal Tournament in Groningen, Holland in May.

James Taylor (Theatre) designed the lighting for a production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, at A Noise Within Theatre Company in Glendale in October. In April, he designed the lighting for a production of Joe Orton's Loot, also at A Noise Within.

Rick Worthington (Politics) gave several invited lectures in the spring: "Science with and for the people...is that possible?", University of Twente (Netherlands), April 23; "Science in Response to the Needs of Civil Society", University of Barcelona, April 27; "Mainstreaming Participation: Northern and Southern Perspectives and Challenges", Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, May 4.

Friederike von Schwerin-High (German and Russian) in May gave two guest lectures on Turkish-German literature in two courses in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside, taught by Jennifer Hoyer. In June, Felix Kronenberg and von Schwerin-High jointly led a discussion of the film "Head-On" and of teaching with Media at the NITLE workshop on teaching Islams at Pomona College's Oldenborg Center.



May/ June 2007

Class of 2007: Pomona's first outdoor
Commencement in three decades brought excited grads and their proud families to grassy Marston Quad, and the green theme carried on in President Oxtoby's remarks praising students for their environmental initiatives.
See the online photo gallery.



Pomona People in action:

Jack Abecassis (Romance languages and literatures) gave a Faculty Lecture, "Méditations Pascaliennes: Pascal's Machine/Automate and Bourdieu's Habitus," at Johns Hopkins University on March 27.

Tahir Andrabi (economics) gave a paper titled "A Dime a Day: Possibilities and Limitations of Private Schools in Pakistan" at the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society in Baltimore on February 26. He also spoke at the Pacific Coast Development Economics Conference at the University of California, Davis, on March 17. His paper was titled "Railways and Market Integration in British India."

Graydon Beeks (music) presented an invited paper, "Some Thoughts on the Composition of Attilio Ariosti's opera 'Cajo Marzio Coriolano,'" at a symposium sponsored by the UC Berkeley Music Department to honor the retirements of Professors John Roberts and H. Wye Allenbrook on April 28.

Noell Birondo (philosophy) gave a commentary on Professor Kenneth Shockley's paper, "The Peculiar Practice of Promising," at the American Philosophical Association meeting in San Francisco April 3-8.

Susana Chavez Silverman (romance languages) read and performed from her new book manuscript, Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles, at UC Davis May 16. She also was featured in a column in the Sacramento Bee, one of Northern California's largest newspapers.

Cecilia Conrad (economics) was recently appointed to the US Census Bureau's Race and Ethnic Advisory Committee.

Justin Crowe (politics) did not wait to start his new position at Pomona before publishing his article "The Forging of Judicial Autonomy: Political Entrepreneurship and the Reforms of William Howard Taft" in the Journal of Politics 69 (2007).

Humans and horses crowded Dean Of Students Ann Quinley's retirement bash. See more photos.

Suheir Daoud (politics) is the author of "Palestinian Women in Suicide Bombings: Causes and Motives," al-Adab (Beirut) 3\4 (2007), 12-23.

Donna Di Grazia (music) sang as a member of the new Los Angeles-based professional choir, the Millennium Consort, conducted by Martin Neary. The debut concert, which featured the choral music of the English Renaissance composer John Taverner (1490-1545) and the contemporary British composer John Tavener (b. 1944), was presented under the auspices of the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary's College as part of their highly acclaimed music series "Chamber Music in Historical Sites." The concert was given at St. Sophia's Greek Orthodox Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (English/media studies) has published a networked article titled "MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet," the first such networked, open peer review article to be published by MediaCommons. Fitzpatrick also gave the keynote lecture during a symposium on “The Future of the Book” at the University of Rochester on March 30, and was an invited participant in a roundtable discussion on the future of the digital humanities at Electronic Techtonics at the first international HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference held at Duke University on April 20.

Erica Flapan (mathematics) is co-author, with D. Buck, of the chapter "A model of DNA Knotting and Linking" in Knot Theory for Scientific Objects, ed. A. Kawauchi, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Knot Theory for Scientific Objects, OCAMI (Osaka City University Advanced Mathematics Institute) Studies 1:1 (2007), 75-83.

Jennifer Friedlander (media studies and art history) presented a paper titled, "Politics, Art, Identity: The Disruption of Christoph Schlingensief's 'Please Love Austria'" at the Cultural Studies Association in Portland, Oregon. She will give two talks in Austria in May: "Nothing to See: Film Theory, the Phallus, and Sexual Indifference" at Linz University for Art and Design; and "No Business like Schmo Business: Reality TV and the Fetishistic Inversion" at the University of Klagenfurt.

Stephan Garcia (mathematics) is, along with Mihai Putinar, the co-author of an article titled “Complex symmetric operators and applications II” published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 359 (2007), 3913-3931.

Dru Gladney (Pacific Basin Institute/anthropology) discussed "China's Uyghur Problem" as part of the China Focus Lecture Series at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego on May 10.

Jill Grigsby (sociology) and Katherine Mathews '07 presented "The Personal Is More Political: Abortion Attitudes in 1984 and 2004" at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America in New York City on March 30.

Eric Grosfils (geology) traveled over April 18-19 to the University of Central Missouri where he delivered two invited lectures, the first on impact cratering hazards and the second on the use of computational science as a tool for enhancing undergraduate education in geoscience. On April 6 he presented aspects of the cratering hazards talk to the Pomona Valley Amateur Astronomers group.

	Some 1,300 Sagehens returned to campus in late April for Alumni Weekend. See photos.

Laura Hoopes (biology) won second prize in a travel writing contest. Her story, “A Crane Quest Behind the Scenes in China,” was published in Writers' Journal 28:3 (2007), 28, 34-35.

Malkiat Johal (chemistry) published the article "A QCM Study of the Immobilization of beta-Galactosidase on Polyelectrolyte Surfaces: Effect of the Terminal Polyion on Enzymatic Surface Activity" in the journal Langmuir of the American Chemical Society. The paper describes the fabrication of novel biological (enzymatic) surfaces. It was co-authored with Rebecca Hamlin '10 and Lewis Johnson '07.

Johal also gave an invited seminar at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Physical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Division) on April 24. His talk, titled "Quartz Crystal Microbalance Studies at the Solid-Aqueous Interface,” summarized research done in his laboratory by Pomona College undergraduates during over the course of this year.

Nina Karnovsky (biology) gave a lecture titled "Asking the Auks about Arctic Oscillations and Oceanography" at the Claremont Manor Retirement Community on April 5.

Felix Kronenberg (FLRC/German) "Multimedia Projects: New Approaches to Teaching Culture and Literature With Technology" at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference April 21.

Thomas Leabhart (theatre & dance) taught and gave a lecture and demonstration for the Theatre Program at Colgate University April 2-4.

Genevieve Lee (Music) and the other members of the Mojave Trio presented a concert at Occidental College on April 12. They also performed as part of the Restoration Concerts series at the South Pasadena Library on April 22. At both of these venues they played a new work by Philippe Bodin that the Mojave Trio had been responsible for premiering (on the West Coast) at Pomona College.

Sherry Linnell (theatre & dance) is currently involved in designing the costumes for two professional theatre productions of new plays in the Los Angeles area. “The Boarding House” is currently running at the Write Act Company Theatre in Hollywood. It has received very favorable reviews and is on the recommended list of the Los Angeles Times. “Missouri Waltz” will open in May at the Blank Theatre, also in Hollywood.

Pardis Mahdavi (anthropology) gave a talk at the University of California, San Diego on April 16 titled "Changing Times, Changing Identities: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity." On April 28 she spoke at the “Iranian Alliances Across Borders” annual international conference hosted by New York University. The title of the talk was "Cyberspace and Cyber-sex in the Iranian Diaspora."

Robert Mezey (English, emeritus) was at Wooster College from April 2 to April 7, giving readings, visiting classes and meeting with students. He also read at Ashland University on April 10 and at Ohio State University on April 11.

Jonathan Miller (music) composed music for two short films premiering at the Cannes Film Festival Film Market: We Never Existed and Someone To Love. He is currently composing music for Flip That House season 3, airing on TLC starting on June 2.

Dan O'Leary (chemistry) gave a seminar titled "New Methods for Stereochemical Assignments in Organic Molecules" on April 13 at the Eisai Research Institute in Andover, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Perry (anthropology) has been elected to serve as the southern vice president of the Society for California Archaeology for 2007-2009. At the society's 41st annual meeting, held in San Jose, she presented a paper titled "On the Coast and in the Interior: Central Place Foraging in the Middle Holocene on Santa Cruz Island, California." Perry and Kristin Hoppa (Pitzer '06) co-presented at paper titled "Middle Holocene Shellfish Exploitation on Eastern Santa Cruz Island, California" At that same meeting, was the invited discussant for the symposium, "Inland, Interior, and Interface III: Expanding Research in South-Central California." Meanwhile, Perry also presented a paper titled "Middle Holocene Resource Use in Interior and Coastal Contexts on Santa Cruz Island, California" at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Austin, Texas.

William Peterson (music) played a concert of music by Buxtehude, Bruhns, and Bach on the Flentrop organ at the Duke University Chapel on February 25. The large Flentrop organ -- which has more than 5,000 pipes -- was built in 1976 in the style of early 18th-century Dutch and French organs. The instrument is ideal for this repertoire composed in the late 17th century and first half of the 18th century.

Sheila Pinkel (art & art history) will participate in the exhibition "Women Artists, Then and Now," at Track 16 Gallery in June. The exhibition juxtaposes the work of women artists done in the 1970s with the work they are doing today.

Frances Pohl (art history) gave a presentation, "The Museum as a Site of Intervention," at the symposium "Art as Intervention" at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio in May.

Leonard Pronko (Theatre & Dance) presented a DVD-illustrated lecture on Kabuki make-up to the University Club of Claremont on April 10. The DVDs contained footage of Pronko and Takao Tomono putting on make-up for the lecture-demonstration “Benkei at the Bridge,” which they performed over two hundred times between 1971 and 1996. Leonard also gave a lecture under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on April 19. Sponsored by the Performance Studies Research Group, Pronko spoke on the aesthetics and history of Kabuki and personally demonstrated movement and scenes.

Lynn Rapaport (sociology) gave a invited lecture, "Hang Hitler!: The Three Stooges Take Potshots at Nazis," for the Jewish Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach, on April 17.

Monique Saigal (romance languages) gave a lecture titled “Femmes extraordinaires sous l’Occupation en France” at Whittier College on April 25. She received the Barnard Fellowship and will be going to France to supervise the translation of her book which is to be published in January 2008, in English.

Patricia Smiley (psychology) presented research on parent use of self-reference words ("I", "Mommy," "Daddy") and children's acquisition of the personal pronoun system at the Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, in Boston, on March 30. SURP-funded students, Adam Conner-Simons, Sarah Davies and Damata Kaleem, were instrumental in gathering the data for the presentation, "'Deviant' Input Supports Young Children's Acquisition of I and You."

Vin de Silva (mathematics) has published a paper with co-author Robert Ghrist (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) titled "Coverage in sensor networks via persistent homology" in Algebraic and Geometric Topology 7 (2007).

Wayne E. Steinmetz (chemistry) reports that, with financial support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he modified the Chemistry Department’s NMR spectrometer so that it can function as a MRI imager. He and Cyrus Maher '06 developed a MRI experiment which has been used in Chemistry 162 and Physics 174. In this experiment, students use professional medical imaging software and obtain high-resolution images of biological specimens that fit inside an NMR tube. An illustrative image is attached. This work will appear in a paper: W. E. Steinmetz and C. R. Maher, “Magnetic resonance imaging on an NMR spectrometer. An experiment for the physical chemistry laboratory”, Concepts in Magnetic Resonance, 30A, 133-139 (2007). The publisher, Wiley-VCH, has highlighted the article in its Web newsletter SpectroscopyNOW. Aspects of the work will also appear in an accompanying article that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Education.

Tomás Summers Sandoval (history and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies) presented a paper titled "Disobedient Bodies: Racialization, Resistance, and the Mass (Re)Articulation of the Mexican Immigrant Body" at the annual meeting of the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies held April 4-7 in San Jose, California.

Kyla Tompkins (English and women's studies) presented at three conferences this spring, The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association conference at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, the American Association of Geography, and the Cultural Studies Association. Her article, “Everything ‘Cept Eat Us: Antebellum Black Body as Edible Body” will be coming out in a month from Callaloo, the premier African Diaspora literary journal. Next year she will be a visiting fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

Nancy Treser-Osgood '80 (alumni relations) has been selected to serve on the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Commission on Alumni Relations. Only 24 alumni professionals worldwide are chosen for the commission which frames and directs research to examine and evaluate professional practices. The group also develops and monitors programs and services in alumni relations, to ensure that they reflect current knowledge, emerging issues and trends and the highest ethical and professional standards. Her three-year term begins in October.

Heather Williams (politics) received a $195,000 New Directions Grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. This will enable her to deepen her work in the Peruvian and Bolivian Altiplano on a project analyzing village-level management of soil and water resources. It will also help her study watershed science to better understand the impact of human activity on water and soil resources.

Meg Worley (English) has been accepted as a participant in the National Humanities Center Summer Seminar.


April 2007




ENVIRONMENTAL EVENT: People and polar bears perform with a taiko drum during the National Day of Climate Action event on campus earlier this month.

Pomona People in action:

Tahir Andrabi (Economics) presented a paper titled "A Dime a Day: Possibilities and Limitations of Private Schools in Pakistan" for the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society in Baltimore on February 26. He gave another paper titled "Railways and market Integration in British India" at the Pacific Coast Development Economics Conference at UC Davis on March 17.

Betty Bernhard (Theatre & Dance) is the author of an essay on her experiences researching Bhavai folk theater in India that has appeared in Beyond Boundaries: Reflections of Indian and U.S. Scholars, edited by Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani and Nibir K. Ghosh (iUniverse, Inc: March 16, 2007).

Noell Birondo (philosophy) presented a commentary at the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, on University of Buffalo Professor Kenneth Shockley's paper, "The Peculiar Practice of Promising."

Ralph Bolton (Anthropology) presented “Changes in an Alpaca Herding Community in Peru: Paratia 1964-2007" at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology last month in Tampa, Florida. He also gave talks in two roundtable sessions
titled "Experiential Education: Pedagogical Strategies for Anthropologists Who Teach Human Sexuality" and "Experiential Education: Sexual Sensitivity and Awareness Training for Anthropologists Who Teach Sex."

Eleanor Brown (Economics) has co-authored, along with James M. Ferris, "Social Capital and Philanthropy: An Analysis of the Impact of Social Capital on Individual Giving and Volunteering," Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 36:1 (March 2007),
85-99.

Raye Calderon (groundskeeping) and Kathy Sheldon (mathematics) received this year's Peter W. Stanley Distinguished Staff Award. Calderon has 26 years with the College, and was described in nominations as “exceptionally responsible,” and always volunteering to “jump in and help with any task from the mundane to the challenging.” Sheldon, department coordinator for mathematics and 14-year veteran of the College, was lauded for her “immense dedication…initiative…good humor…technical knowledge, grace under pressure and commitment.”

José R. Cartagena-Calderón (Romance Languages & Literatures) is organizing the 19th Annual Cervantes Symposium of California, sponsored by The Cervantes Society of America, the Latin American Studies Draper Fund, and the Department of Romance
Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. The topic of this year's symposium will be "Cervantes and Cultural Studies." The one-day event will take place on Saturday, April 21, at the Smith Campus Center.

Steve Comba (Assistant Director, Museum of Art) is contributing his paintings to an exhibition titled "Terra Incognito" at Cal State Dominguez Hills, April 4 to April 25.

E. J. Crane (Chemistry) has received a three-year research grant from the Petroleum Fund.

Stephan Garcia (Mathematics) gave a colloquium on February 14 titled "Real complex functions" at the Claremont Mathematics Colloquium. He also gave a talk titled "Adjoint of Beurling's Theorem" at the Claremont Analysis Seminar on March 5. He
presented another paper titled "Remarks on complex symmetric operators" at the Southeastern Analysis Meeting (SEAM) at the University of Richmond on March 10.

Jill Grigsby (sociology) and Katherine Mathews '07 presented "The Personal Is More Political: Abortion Attitudes in 1984 and 2004" at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America in New York City on March 30.

Eric Grosfils (Geology) last month attended the 38th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, with two Pomona students, Debra Hurwitz '07 and Sylvan Long '07. Along with a colleague from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, they presented two volcanology papers titled "A Revised Simple Elastic Model of Magma Reservoir Failure Beneath a Volcanic Edifice" and "Reproducing Volcanic Events on Venus Using Magma Reservoir Failure Models." In addition, Grosfils co-authored a third paper titled "Modeling Martian Thermokarst Subsidence with Magmatic Melting of Permafrost" with a student and colleague from Notre Dame. As a Distinguished Lecturer for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, he traveled to Miami last month to deliver a colloquium titled "Computational Science: An Emerging Tool for Undergraduate Exploration of Complex Geoscience Problems" at Florida International University.

Art Horowitz (Theatre & Dance) served as guest scholar-in-residence at “A Noise Within” theatre in Glendale, presenting a paper, "Romeo and Juliet: The Specter of the Comic in Hamlet's Shadow," to its subscriber audience on March 28.

Mal Johal (Chemistry) and former Pomona College student Peter Chiarelli ’03 have authored a review article titled "Polymer-Surfactant Complexation in Polyelectrolyte Multilayer Assemblies" in the January 2007 issue of the journal Soft Matter, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. This article captures a decade of progress made in using polymer/surfactant mixtures for developing novel nano-scale materials with interesting chemical and optical properties. Most of the article summarizes work done by Mal's students over the last five years. Meanwhile, Johal also was issued a patent
(February 20, 2007) by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "Fabrication of Multilayered Thin Films via Spin-Assembly" (patent number 7,179,679). The invention, which describes a method of controlling the assembly of materials at the nanoscale,
resulted from work done in collaboration with former Pomona College student Peter Chiarelli ‘03 and scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory (Hsing-Lin Wang, Dr. Jeanne M. Robinson, and Joanna Casson).

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) was a speaker at the Gordon Research Conference on Polar Marine Science held in Ventura from March 25 to March 30. She presented the paper "From phytoplankton to predators: Foraging for patchy prey in Polar Seas."

Tom Leabhart (Theatre & Dance) is the author of a new book, Etienne Decroux,  published by Routledge, London and New York, in March. It is part of the “Performance Practitioners” series. Pomona seniors Ben Acland '07 and Kate Goodwillie '07 created line drawings for one of the chapters.

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed as a member of the Garth Newel Piano Quartet in two March concerts, one as part of the Timmins-Gentry Music Society series at Virginia Military Institute and the other as part of the Musical Evening Series at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) is the author of an article titled "Fashion and the Meaning of Tehrani Style" that recently was published in Anthropology Now. Mahdavi gave a lecture titled "Rethinking the Ethno in Ethnoepidemiology" at Hunter College on
Feb. 28. On March 1, she gave a talk titled "Qualitative Research Strategies for Studying Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East" at New York University. On March 8, she gave a talk titled "A 'Lipstick Jihad?': Gender and Sexuality in Modern Iran"
at International Place at Claremont McKenna College in honor of International Women's Day. Finally, on March 29 she gave a talk titled "Structural Barriers to Women's Access to Harm Reduction in the Islamic Republic of Iran" at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting in Tampa, Florida.

Stephen Marks (Economics) was invited to give a paper on economic reform issues at a two-day workshop on "Indonesia's Reformasi: Reflections on the Habibie Era" at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., March 26-27.

Catalin Mitescu (Physics & Astronomy) was invited to speak on March 2 at the ESPCI (Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles). His paper was called "Le filet de Miel: ou la Caténoïde Visqueuse."

Ian Moyer (Classics and History) has won an NEH Summer Stipend to complete revisions on a book manuscript titled, “At the Limits of Hellenism: Egyptian Priests and the Greek World.”

Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) presented a paper titled "A Grammatical Sketch of Maay," co-authored with Jade Comfort, at the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at the University of Florida in Gainesville on March 23.

Bill Peterson (Music) played a concert of music by Buxtehude, Bruhns, and Bach on the Flentrop organ at the Duke University Chapel on Feb. 25. The large Flentrop organ -- which has more than 5,000 pipes -- was built in 1976 in the style of early 18-century Dutch and French organs, and the instrument was ideal for this repertoire composed in the late 17th century and in the first half of the 18th century.

Frances Pohl (Art & Art History) presented a talk at the Columbus Museum of Art on April 14 titled "Writing Around Rockwell: Researching the Life and Work of Rockwell Kent."

Lynn Rapaport (Sociology) gave an invited lecture, "Hollywood's Holocaust: Schindler's List and the Construction of Memory," at Occidental College on March 26. She also chaired a panel on "Holocaust Narratives" at the Western Jewish Studies
Association Conference in Portland, Oregon, on March 18.

Erin Runions (Religious Studies) participated in an after-production panel discussion of the Boston Court Theater presentation of “Gilgamesh,” in Pasadena on March 29. She also presented a paper, "Ms. Job and the Problem of God," at a conference convened by the Luce Program for Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University, March 11-13.

Slavi Slavov (Economics) is the author of a review of Guillermo Calvo's book Emerging Capital Markets in Turmoil: Bad Luck or Bad Policy?, which has been just published in the journal Comparative Economic Studies (March 2007). Slavov also presented a
paper titled "Do common currencies reduce exchange rate pass-through?" on March 24 at the annual meeting of the Midwest Economics Association in Minneapolis.

Gary Smith (Economics) is the co-author, along with Don Gould '79, of the article "Measuring and Controlling Shortfall Risk in Retirement," Journal of Investing (Spring 2007).

Cynthia Selassie (Chemistry) is proud to report that Pomona College is one of 15 colleges and universities across the country whose proposals were selected for funding by the Merck/American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Undergraduate Science Research Program (USRP). It provides summer funding for twelve students over three years to pursue research at the interface of chemistry and biology.

Meg Worley (English) has been named the Huntington Library's exchange fellow with the British Academy for 2007-2008.

Jianhsin Wu (Asian Languages & Literatures) has a book, The Way of Chinese Characters, set to be published by Cheng & Tsui Company in May.


March 2007




FAMILY WEEKEND: Maggie Fick '07 gets a visit as hundreds of parents came to Pomona's sun-soaked campus for Family Weekend in February. See more photos.

Pomona People in action:

Tahir Andrabi (Economics) won a major grant from the Pakistan-U.S. Cooperative Program in Earthquake-Related Research. His proposal was titled "Education and Learning after the Pakistan Earthquake: Can the Children Recover?," submitted in
cooperation with Ali Cheema of the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Laurie Cameron (theatre & dance) and company presented their original choreography "At the Joshua Tree" with music by Pomona's Thomas Flaherty at the REDCAT Winter Studio Series at Disney Hall in Los Angeles in February.

José R. Cartagena-Calderón (Romance Languages and Literatures) will be presenting two papers during the month of March. The first, "'Es adamado don Diego': Empire, Queer Sexualities and Anxious Masculinities in El lindo don Diego," is part of the panel "Beautiful Courtiers: Sprezzatura, Masculinity, and Lindura in Early Modern Spain" that he has organized for the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Miami, March 22. The second, "Witchcraft, Magic and the Subject of Masculinities in
María de Zaya's Fictional World and Early Modern Spanish Culture," will be given at the 42nd Annual Comparative Literature Conference: Women, Sexuality, and Early Modern Studies, at California State University, Long Beach, March 16.

Susana Chavez-Silverman (romance languages and literatures) gave a reading from Killer Cronicas, sponsored by the California Writers Series, at Cal State Bakersfield in February. Then she did another reading at USC earlier this month.

Cris Cheney (Biology) and Dan O’Leary (Chemistry) were awarded a 2007 Beckman Scholars Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to support undergraduate research. This is the third year in a row that Pomona has benefited from this award.

Cecilia Conrad (Associate Dean/Economics) has been selected as one of the San Gabriel Valley YWCA’s annual “Women of Achievement.” She will be honored at a ceremony on June 1 in the City of Industry.

Alfred Cramer (Music) explores connections between music and 19th-century information technologies in his article "Of Serpentina and Stenography: Shapes of Handwriting in Romantic Melody," which has just appeared in 19th-Century Music 30
(2006), pp. 133-65. Cramer also appeared as a violinist with the acclaimed soprano Julianne Baird and the ensemble con Gioia in a performance of music from Jane Austen's notebooks at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena on Feb. 4.

Suheir Daoud (Politics) presented the paper "The Palestinian Minority in Israel" on Feb. 11 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Vin de Silva (Mathematics) is the co-author, along with Robert Ghrist, of two articles that have recently appeared: "Coordinate-free coverage in sensor networks with controlled boundaries via homology" in International Journal of Robotics Research (Dec. 2006); and "Homological sensor networks" in Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Jan. 2007).

Tom Flaherty (Music) wrote "A Heckuva Job" (for baritone, guitar, and percussion), which was performed for the first time on Jan. 29 by Speculum Musicae in Merkin Hall, New York. The text consists of excerpts from Calvin Trillin's book A Heckuva
Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme. Tom’s "While goin' the road to sweet Athy" (for two pianos, 8 players, and electronics) premiered in the 15th Annual Ussachevsky Festival, Lyman Hall, on Feb. 3. The performers were internal
pianists Garwen Chen '09, Cynthia Fogg, Rachel Glassberg '07, Christian Heath '09, Genevieve Lee, and Lucie Mcgee '07, and external pianists Victoria Brown '07, Megan Kaes '08, and Elisha Nuchi '09.

Erica Flapan (Mathematics) gave a colloquium titled "Rigid and non-rigid molecular symmetries” that was jointly sponsored by the Mathematics and Chemistry departments at San Jose State University on Feb. 23. On Feb. 24 she gave an invited address at the Mathematical Association of America (Northern California, Nevada, and Hawaii section meeting) titled "Intrinsic properties of embeddings of graphs in R3."

Stephan Ramon Garcia (mathematics) gave a talk, "Adjoint of Beurling's Theorem," at the Claremont Analysis Seminar in early March. In February, he gave a colloquium, "Real complex functions," to the same group.

George L. Gorse (Art & Art History) is giving a paper on "Court Space and Common Space in Renaissance Genoa" at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Miami on March 24.

Fred J. Grieman (Chemistry), along with chemistry major Anna Mebust ‘08, attended the 54th Western Spectroscopy Association Conference at Asilomar, California. Fred presented a poster titled "Vibrational Analysis of A-X Band in Dimethylzinc and
Perdeutero-Dimethylzinc Cations Produced in a Free-Jet Expansion." Co-authors on the poster include two former students, Steve Cotton ‘96 and Michael Grass ‘02, and a former Pomona College Robbins Teacher/Scholar, Timothy Brewer.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a talk at the Claremont Algebra/Combinatorics Seminar on Feb. 28 titled "A beginner's guide to Hopf algebras." Together with colleague Robert Baker of University Senior High School (Los Angeles), she will be
hosting a workshop on mathematics digital libraries at the Spring 2007 meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (Southern California/Nevada Section) at Pomona College on March 3.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) and Allison Bailey '07 attended the annual Pacific Seabird Group meeting at Asilomar in Monterey from Feb. 7 to 11. Karnovsky presented the paper "Partitioning pelagic paella; the feeding strategies and diets of avifauna of
the Eastern Tropical Pacific” with co-authors Spear and Ainley. She also co-authored the posters "Sources of variation in the diet of dovekies evaluated through stable-isotope analysis: Implications for assessing marine ecosystem change in the High
Arctic” and "At-sea distribution of foraging little auks (Alle alle) along the West Coast of Spitsbergen: Do they avoid warm water?” Bailey presented the paper "Foraging dynamics of little auks (Alle alle) in the Greenland Sea,” with co-authors Karnovsky, Harding, Gremillet, Wiktor, Routti, Walkusz, Goszczo and fellow students Laurel McFadden '06, Scott Zimmerman '09 and Jessica Kang Lee '09. Bailey also presented a poster titled "The effect of climate fluctuations on the chick diets and foraging trip durations of an Arctic seabird, the little auk (Alle alle)" with co-authors Karnovsky, Wojczulanis-Jakubas, Jakubas, Harding and Walkusz. Bailey was one of the only undergraduate students in attendance and was given an honorable mention in the student poster and paper competition for her excellent presentations. Karnovsky also hosted a meeting of “The Little Auk Working Group” here at Pomona from Feb. 12 to 18. This meeting was attended by Karnovsky and Bailey (U.S.), Berg (Germany), Seifert (Germany), Wojczulanis-Jakubas (Poland), Jakubas (Poland) and Harding (Britain via Alaska).

Felix Kronenberg (German & Russian/FLRC) conducted a day-long workshop, "Technologie im Deutschunterricht," for the American Association of Teachers of German (Southern California section) meeting that was hosted by Pomona College on Feb. 24.

Thomas Leabhart (Theatre & Dance) taught for the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism program, attended by theatre critics from all parts of the United States. This is the third consecutive year that he has taught in this program.

Jonathan Miller (Electronic Music Technician/Music) composed music for the feature horror film Killhouse, which will premiere at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on March 7. His music continues to be heard on TLC's Flip That House, now in
its third season. His piece for Piano Trio and Electronics will be premiered in April at Heidelberg College by the Eastman New Music Ensemble.

Catalin Mitescu (physics) gave an invited talk at ESPCI (Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles) titled "Le filet de Miel: ou la Caténoïde Visqueuse" in Paris in early March.

Victoria Koenig (theatre & dance) directed the Inland Pacific Ballet in a production of Giselle in February at Big Bridges that received high praise in the Los Angeles Times. "It's not every regional troupe that can render this masterpiece with such liquid grace, but Koenig and company have made the trip to the Inland Empire worthwhile," wrote Victoria Looseleaf. Lead Dancer Sarah Spradlin, who teaches advanced ballet in Pomona's dance program, "triumphs" in the role of Giselle.

Dan O'Leary (Chemistry) has published an article titled "NMR Detection of Intramolecular OH/OH Hydrogen Bond Networks: An Approach Using Isotopic Perturbation and Hydrogen Bond Mediated OH---OH J-Coupling" in the journal Heterocycles. The paper chronicles a ten-year effort to understand cooperative hydrogen bonding interactions in molecules designed to mimic biologically active natural products. The work was carried out by Dreyfus Postdoctoral Fellow Carolyn Anderson, Alex Pickrell '05, Sarah Sperry '05, Tom Vasquez, Jr. '02, Tom Custer '97, Matt Fierman, '00, Daniel Lazar '07, Zach Brown '07, Wendy Iskenderian '04, and Dan Hickstein '07.

Genevieve Lee (Music) played with the Angeli Duo on the "Sundays Live" series at the Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum, broadcast live on K-MZT (105.1 FM). This broadcast on February 11 included the first American performance of a Rebecca Clarke piece for two violins and piano. Genevieve’s piano trio, the Mojave Trio, gave a concert on Feb. 2 as part of the Bach Lunch Series at Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan Beach.

Kerry Martin (Career Development Office) co-presented a workshop on Alumni Career Service models with a colleague from USC at the CASE Regional Conference in Los Angeles.

John Pennington (theatre & dance) has been nominated for an L.A. Weekly Theatre Award for his choreography for "A Picture of Dorian Gray", performed at the Theatre at Boston Court, Pasadena, CA, February-April, 2006.

Christelle Rolland (Romance Languages and Literatures) will give a talk titled "Representation of Violence and Violence of Representation in the French Media" in Colorado Springs at a conference called "The Image of Violence in Literature, Media,
and Society," sponsored by the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery and Colorado State University, Pueblo, March 8-10.

Michael D. Steinberger (Economics) will present his paper "Sexual Orientation, Earnings, and Occupational Choice" at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America in New York on March 30. The presentation is part of a special
session focused on same-sex unions. Joint authors of the paper: Heather Antecol of Claremont McKenna and Anneke Jong, a former student.

Margaret Waller (Romance Languages and Literatures) gave an invited lecture at the Maison Française of New York University called "Napoleon's Closet: Display, Cover-up and Exposure in Modern Masculinity” on Feb. 15.



February 2007

The Pomona College Charitable Giving Campaign for 2006-2007

This year's campaign raised $30,997 from staff and faculty, a $4,000 increase over last year. Spearheaded by Susan Dollar and Monique Saigal, the campaign invited employees to contribute to United Way, to the Pomona College Community Assistance Fund, or to one of the organizations that make up the Fund -- the Claremont Wildlands Conservancy, Fremont Middle School, House of Ruth, Planned Parenthood and the Pomona Valley Habitat for Humanity (seen at right.) Thanks to all who gave. Special thanks also go to Leah Fuller and Karen Lamb for their administrative help.




Pomona people in action:

Tahir Andrabi (Economics) won the George Bereday Award for outstanding article published in the Comparative Education Review for the year 2006 for the article that he co-authored with Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Tristan Zajonc ’03: "Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at Data," Comparative Education Review 50:3 (2006), 446-477.

Jon Bailey (Emeritus, Music) was elected chair of the Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission of the City of West Hollywood, California. Bailey also recently conducted the premier performance of his newly composed motet Nunc Dimittis in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Toni Clark (Associate Dean of Students/ English) will present the paper "More than Meets the Eye: Women Writers on the Environment" as part of the “Engendering the Environment: History, Culture, Practice” seminar at the Huntington Library on Feb. 3.

Alfred Cramer (Music) explores connections between music and 19th-century information technologies in "Of Serpentina and Stenography: Shapes of Handwriting in Romantic Melody," an article which has just appeared in 19th-Century Music, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 133-65.

María Donapetry (Romance Languages and Literatures) is the author of a book titled Imaginación: la feminización de la nación en el cine español y latinoamericano (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2006); and a chapter, "Greta Garbo: el enigma de la esfinge," in Diosas del celuloide. Arquetipos de género en el cine clásico, edited by M. Carmen Rodríguez (Madrid: Ediciones Jaguar, 2007), 25-45.

Home to departments such as Geology and Psychology, the new Lincoln and Edmunds (pictured) buildings will be dedicated March 2.

Steve Erickson (Philosophy) presented his paper "Hegel and Heidegger: The Underlying Conversation" at the Hegel Society of America meeting, held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association meetings, Washington DC, Dec. 27-30.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (English and Media Studies) gave a talk on her MediaCommons project at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena on Dec. 8.

Johanna Hardin (Mathematics), along with Laura Hoopes and Ryan Murphy, is the author of “Analyzing DNA Microarrays with Undergraduate Statisticians,” ICOTS (International Conference on Teaching Statistics) 7 (2006) 3E (Multivariate Statistics), 1-5. She also collaborated with Laura Hoopes and Alison Wise to write “Yeast through the Ages: A Statistical Analysis of Genetic Changes in Yeast Aging,” Chance (Publication of the American Statistical Association) 19 (2006), 39-44.

Barbara Hoeling (Physics & Astronomy) presented a paper titled "Period-Speed Analysis of a Pendulum,” which was co-authored by Pomona College students Yavor Kostov and Ragib Morshed, and by Peter Siegel of Cal Poly Pomona, at the winter meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Seattle on Jan. 7. On Jan. 23, at the SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) Photonics West meeting in San Jose, she presented a poster titled "Motion-Sensitive 3-D Optical Coherence Microscope Operating at 1300 nm for the Visualization of Early Frog Development,” which she co-authored with Stephanie S. Feldman, Daniel T. Strenge, Aaron Bernard, Emily R. Hogan, Daniel C. Petersen, Scott E. Fraser, Yun Kee, J. Michael Tyszka, and Richard C. Haskell. The corresponding manuscript will appear in the SPIE proceedings.

Kathleen Stewart Howe (Director, Museum of Art/Art & Art History) gave a lecture titled “Photography and the National Geographic” on January 18 at the Ontario Museum of Art and History. On Feb. 6, she will give another lecture on "Image and Text: Magritte and His Impact" as a part of the “Evenings for Educators” program in conjunction with the exhibition "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images,” at LACMA.

Laura Hoopes (Biology), along with Johanna Hardin and Ryan Murphy, is the author of “Analyzing DNA Microarrays with Undergraduate Statisticians,” ICOTS (International Conference on Teaching Statistics) 7 (2006) 3E (Multivariate Statistics), 1-5. She also collaborated with Johanna Hardin and Alison Wise to write “Yeast through the Ages: A Statistical Analysis of Genetic Changes in Yeast Aging,” Chance (Publication of the American Statistical Association) 19 (2006), 39-44. In addition, she is the author of "My Genomics Sabbatical,” which appeared in the Goucher Quarterly 82 (2006), 34-38.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a talk titled "Algebra for the Quantum World" at the Mathematics Department colloquium of California State University, Los Angeles, on Jan. 31.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) gave a talk, “Asking the Auks about Climate Change,” to the Pomona Valley Audubon Society on Nov.  2. Two students working in Nina Karnovsky's lab presented the results of their summer research at the annual Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research (SCCUR). Sonia Fang '08 presented a poster titled “How Old Are Spawning Grunion (Leuresthes tenuis)?” and Allison Bailey '07 presented another on “Responses of an Arctic Seabird to Prey Availability.”

Felix Kronenberg (German & Russian/FLRC) gave a three-day intensive lecture/seminar at the University of Regensburg, Germany, on the topic "Technologieeinsatz im DaF-Unterricht," Jan. 3-5.

Alfred Kwok (Physics & Astronomy) received an NIH (National Institutes of Health) Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award senior fellowship. The fellowship will help support the second half of his sabbatical at the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at the University of Virginia Medical School.

Thomas Leabhart (Theatre & Dance) taught a two-week workshop in Paris in December for the Association Pas de Dieux and presented lecture-demonstrations at Studio Phillippe Genty (Dec. 11) and University of Paris III (Dec. 19).

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed two programs of chamber music as a pianist and harpsichordist at the Garth Newel Music Center in Virginia on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. She also performed as a member of the Garth Newel Piano Quartet in two concerts in January: one as part of the Staunton Community Concert Association series in Staunton, Virginia, and the other as part of the Feldman Chamber Music Society series at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk.

Michael McGaha (Romance Languages and Literatures) is the translator of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's play, Los empeños de una casa (Pawns of a House), which has just been published by Bilingual Press, Tempe, Arizona (2006).

Ken Miller (Psychology) is the author of three recently published papers: “The Afghan Symptom Checklist: A Culturally Grounded Approach to Mental Health Assessment in a Conflict Zone,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 76 (2006), 423-433; “Trauma-focused Psychiatric Epidemiology: Bridging Research and Practice with War-Affected Populations,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 76 (2006), 409-422; and “Addressing the Psychosocial Wellbeing of Women in Afghanistan,” Critical Half 4 (2006), 16-21.

Mary Paster (Linguistics & Cognitive Science) is the author of the article “Aspects of Maay phonology and morphology” in Studies in African Linguistics 35 (2007), 73-120.

Bryan Penprase (Physics & Astronomy) is part of a team of gamma ray researchers, based at Caltech, that had a paper published in the Dec. 21 issue of Nature. The paper, on which Penprase is one of the co-authors, describes a very unusual Gamma Ray Burst, which appears from the outset to be a supernova of a massive star, but then with follow-up observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, lacks the signature optical "afterglow" that such a supernova would produce. This presents the team with a very unusual object that challenges the traditional model of gamma ray bursts, and could represent an entirely new class of gamma ray burst objects. The paper is titled "The ? -ray burst GRB060614 requires a novel explosive process."

William Peterson (Music) performed organ works by Ibert and Quignard at the conference "The Organ and Its Music in France Between the Two World Wars (1918-1940)” on Nov. 23 at the church of Saint-Honoré-d'Eylau in Paris. Peterson also presented a paper titled "Organ Works in France Inspired by the Great War" in Paris  at the conference.

Frances Pohl (Art & Art History) will be presenting a paper, "Teaching American Art in Canada," at the College Art Association Annual Meeting in New York on Feb. 16.

Leonard Pronko (Theatre & Dance) will be presenting a paper on Feb. 12 to the Shakespeare Club of Pomona titled “Revenge East and West: England, Spain, Japan in the Seventeenth Century.” He's also working with the theatre group at Caltech, introducing them to Kabuki techniques, for a production of Winter's Tale.

Jack Sanders (Music) performed seven concerts on baroque and classic guitar in Central and Southern Florida, Jan. 4-10, under the auspices of the Piatigorsky Foundation. He also completed a copy of a 1830 Rene Lacote 10-string guitar for a  faculty member at Mississippi State University.

Slavi Slavov (Economics) just completed a 2-month stint as a visiting researcher at the Bulgarian National Bank, where he wrote a paper titled "Do Common Currencies Reduce Exchange Rate Pass-through?" and presented it at an internal seminar at the BNB (Nov. 8) in Sofia as well as at a workshop organized by the Bulgarian Macroeconomic Association on Dec. 5.

David Tanenbaum (Physics & Astronomy) is the co-author, along with Pomona student Ian W. Frank '08 and Cornell University collaborators J. Scott Bunch, Arend M. van der Zande, Scott S. Verbridge, Jeevak M. Parpia, Harold G. Craighead, and Paul L. McEuen, of “Electromechanical Resonators from Graphene Sheets,” a paper published in the Jan. 26 issue of Science.

Nancy Treser-Osgood (director of Alumni Relations) spoke at the CASE District VII Conference in Los Angeles in December. She led the Senior Colloquia in alumni relations and delivered the financial report to the membership. She is completing her term as Treasurer for District VII and will be retiring from the Board of Directors next June after nine years of service.


December 2006/ January 2007



SAGEHEN CELEBRATION: The Pomona-Pitzer football team has some fun after defeating cross-campus rivals Claremont-Mudd-Scripps last month, 31-14.
Photo by Carlos Puma

Pomona people in action:

Allan Barr, professor of Chinese, wrote a book chapter, "Liaozhai zhiyi and Chinese Vernacular Fiction," published in Reading China: Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse-Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006).

David Becker, associate professor of biology, and Noah Rosenberg '08 presented their work on photosynthesis improvements in transgenic tobacco at the Southern California Council on Undergraduate Research (SSCUR) meeting at Occidental College in November.

Ralph Bolton, professor of anthropology, received the Distinguished Service Award from the AIDS & Anthropology Research Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology. The citation read: "In recognition of his outstanding scholarly and personal response to the AIDS crisis from its very beginning and his meritorious contributions in educating colleagues and communities on HIV/AIDS issues." Professor Bolton also presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose in November, titled "Changes in Chijnaya (1963-2006): From Hacienda to Centro Poblado, An Experiment in Agrarian Reform on the Peruvian Altiplano." This paper was included in a two-part symposium on applied anthropology in the Andes, co-organized and co-chaired by Bolton and Tom Greaves. Bolton also has been designated as the "registered agent" for Amigos de Bolivia & Peru, Inc., an organization of Peace Corps volunteers who have served in these Andean countries.

Michael J. Burin, visiting assistant professor, had a paper, "Hydrodynamic Turbulence Cannot Transport Angular Momentum Effectively in Astrophysical Disks," published in the journal Nature in November.

Laurie Cameron, adjunct associate professor of dance, toured northern New England in October, teaching workshops and performing at Bates College, Bowdoin College, Portland Academy of Performing Arts and the New Dance Studio in Portland. She performed "At the Joshua Tree", her new piece with music by Thomas Flaherty.

Angelina Chin, Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in history, had a paper, "Labor Stratification and Gendered Subjectivities in the Service Industries of South China in 1920s and 1930s: The Case of Nu Zhaodai," published in Research on Women in Modern Chinese History (v. 14), December 2006, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Suheir Daoud, professor of politics, gave a presentation on "Palestinian Women 'Suicide Bombers' and the Second Intifada" at the Middle East Studies Association in Boston in November.

Maria Donapetry, adjunct professsor of romance languages and literatures, gave a paper, "Las chicanas y el tríptico posmoderno en el cine Latino: Luminarias" at Memories of Modernity, an International Conference on Hispanic Cinemas at Stony Brook University in New York in November.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, associate professor of English and Media Studies, gave three talks in Claremont during the month of November: "Blogging in and out of the Classroom," with Meg Worley, as part of ITS' ongoing series on emerging pedagogical technologies on Nov. 2; "Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet," as part of the Fall Faculty Lecture Series on Nov. 15; and "MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet" as part of the Intercollegiate Media Studies conference, on Nov. 18. She also launched a new Website, titled "Making MediaCommons" as a planning site for a developing scholarly publishing network in media studies.

Peter Flueckiger, assistant professor of Japanese, gave a talk titled "Poetry and Empathy in Tokugawa Literary Thought" at the Stanford Japan Luncheon Series in October.

Joseph Girandola, Art Department safety technician, had a visual art exhibition open Dec. 2 at the r3 gallery in San Diego.

George L. Gorse, professor of art history, is co-sponsoring an international conference on "The Politics of Court Space in Europe and the Mediterranean, ca. 1500-1750" at the Huntington Library on Jan. 25-27. His co-organizer is Malcolm Smuts, history professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Stephanie Harves, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, gave an invited lecture in linguistics titled, "Non-Agreeing T in Russian: Default or Defective?" at Queen Mary, University of London in October.

Barbara Hoeling, visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy, co-authored a  paper, "Role of beat noise in limiting the sensitivity of optical coherence tomography" in the Journal of the Optical Society of America in November. Co-authors: Richard C. Haskell, Tera Bell, Brendan R. Haberle, David Liao, Adam E. Pivonka, Barbara M. Hoeling, and Daniel C. Petersen. The  also was  selected for the Nov. 1, 2006 issue of Virtual Journal of Biological Physics Research. The Virtual Journal, which is published by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics in cooperation with numerous other societies and publishers, is an edited compilation of links to articles from participating publishers covering a focused area of frontier research.

Vita G. Markman, visiting assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, presented on "Cyclic linearization, remnant movement, and a typology of OV(S) constructions" at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) in Fresno in October.

Alma Martinez, assistant professor in the Theatre and Dance Department, just returned from a four-month Fulbright Grant in Peru where she conducted research on Peruvian indigenous representations in work of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, one of the leading theater companies in Latin America. She presented her research findings at a public lecture sponsored by the US Embassy, UNESCO-International Theater Institute, the Peruvian-North American Cultural Institute and the Peruvian Fulbright Commission. The title of the public presentation was "Movimientos y Corrientes de Teatro en los EEUU y Latinoamerica." Martinez also was invited to join the Honorary Advisory Board of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC). The organization is a consortium of leading Chicano/Latino theaters, cultural centers and artists in the U.S.

In November, Martinez performed in the workshop production of "Sweet 15: Quinceanera" by Rick Najera at San Diego Repertory Theater, running 12 preview performances to sold-out houses. The play is slated to premiere at San Diego Repertory Theater in its regular 2007 season. Martinez also presented lectures at the University of Houston, Texas and Pella College, Iowa. Her lecture, "Spitfires, Bandidos and Maids: The Evolution of the Latina/o Stereotype in Film," traces the history of Latina/o stereotypes in film and how these continue to influence contemporary cinema.

Robert Mezey, professor emeritus of English, is going to Colorado in January, to give readings and talks at Colorado College, Colorado State University in Pueblo and at the Air Force Academy.

Catalin D. Mitescu, professor of physics, presented a paper "The Viscous Catenary: Experiments and Simple Theory" with co-authors, John Koulakis '06, Françoise Brochard, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, and Etienne Guyon, at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, attended by over 2,000 scientists active in the field, in Tampa in November. The paper was based significantly on Koulakis' April 2006 senior thesis. In addition, a poster "The Viscous Catenary" by Koulakis and Mitescu, entered in the "Gallery of Fluid Motion" competition, was selected as one of the six prize-winning entries, from among 68 submitted. The six prize-winning posters, selected by a panel of referees, were honored during the meeting, and will be placed on display at the Annual APS Meeting in Denver in March of 2007, and appear in the annual "Gallery of Fluid Motion" article in the September 2007 issue of Physics of Fluids.

Dan O'Leary, associate professor of chemistry, wrote a paper titled "Qualitative and Quantitative Measurements of Hydrogen Bond-Mediated Scalar Couplings in Acyclic 1,3-Diols" published in Organic Letters. The paper describes a new method for establishing the detailed structure of a class of organic molecules that often exhibit useful biological activity. The research was conducted by Carolyn Anderson (Dreyfus Post-Doctoral Fellow), Wendy Iskenderian '04, and chemists at UC Irvine,  University of Arizona, and Lewis and Clark College.

David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, has been awarded the distinction Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Fellows are selected based on their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Oxtoby was recognized by the AAAS Chemistry Section “for career-long contributions to understanding dynamics of liquids and gases, and for energetic leadership in strengthening undergraduate education.”

Mary Paster, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, presented a talk, "The Phonology and Morphology of Yucunany Mixtepec Mixtec" at the UCLA American Indian languages seminar in November.

Bryan Penprase, associate professor of physics and astronomy, reports that Carrol (Max) Wainwright '07 had his paper accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, the leading journal of astrophysics. Max did a summer research project at Carnegie Observatory in 2005 and at Caltech in 2006 in collaboration with Penprase and Carnegie astronomer Edo Berger. The paper, "A Morphological Study of Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxies," will appear in the coming months in the Astrophysical Journal.

Frances Pohl, professor of humanities and art history, will be giving a lecture at the San Diego Museum of Art titled “’Primitive’ or ‘Modern’?: Changing Interpretations of Images of Native Americans in Early 20th Century American Art” on Jan. 5.

Leonard Pronko, professor of theatre, gave an illustrated lecture on Kabuki makeup for the docents of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena in November. That same month, he also held a Kabuki movement workshop for the Asian Studies Department at the University of Redlands. Over December and early January, Pronko and Takao Tomono will spend two weeks in Tokyo working with the author of a book on Kabuki Dance that they are translating, and, of course, seeing kabuki; and two weeks in South India, chiefly at archeological sites or at performances of Indian theatre and dance.

Lynn Rapaport co-organized (with John Roth and Jonathan Petropoulos) the Lessons and Legacies IX International Conference on the Holocaust: Memory, History, and Responsibility: Reassessments of the Holocaust, Implications for the Future. At the conference she presented a paper, "Superman Fights the Nazis," and chaired one of the major roundtables on "Complexities of the Aftermath: Postwar Ramifications of the Holocaust." The conference took place at Claremont McKenna College and was attended by over 200 scholars from around the world.

Christelle Rolland, French lecturer, gave a presentation titled "Les nouvelles formes de résistance chez la jeunesse française" ("The New Forms of Resistance among the French Youth") at the Pacific Ancient and Moderne Language Association 104th annual conference held in Riverside in November.

Erin Runions, assistant professor of religious studies, presented two papers at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Studies in Washington D.C. One was titled "Queering the (anti)Christ"; the second was a response to a panel focused around her book, How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (Palgrave, 2003).

Monique Saigal, professor of French, gave a presentation to alumni in Pasadena in November about her research on women in the French Resistance. That same month,  she spoke about the role of women in the film Sugar Cane Alley at the PAMLA in Riverside and was also presiding officer Nov. 9-10 for a session on Resistance and Holocaust.

Rick Worthington, professor of politics, presented "Sustaining Community Partnerships? Reflections on the Community-Based Research Movement" at the Debrecen University (Hungary) conference on "University - Community - Active Citizenship" in September. This was the first national conference on campus-community partnerships in Hungary. He also presented "Research, Policy and Social Change: The Role of Community-Based Research" at the Society for Social Studies of Science in Vancouver, B.C. in November.

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