Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Students, Faculty, and Staff: 
Please sign up using the “Register for this event” button. This will register you for the reception and meal. 

Alumni and Parents:
Please visit the alumni and parent engagement website to register. 

 

Mon, April 1, 2024
Dinner Program
Ambassador Dennis Ross and Ghaith al-Omari

Join two experts who have both been involved in peace negotiations in the Israel-Palestine conflict for a conversation about the current war in the Middle East. Ambassador Dennis Ross has played an important role in shaping US foreign policy towards the Middle East under multiple presidential administrations, and Ghaith al-Omari has served in a variety of positions within the Palestinian Authority, including as advisor to the negotiating team during the 1999-2001 permanent status talks. Together, they will share their insight on how we got to the current war, what comes next, what peace between Israelis and Palestinians might look like, and what needs to happen to reach that point.

This is the third and final event in the Athenaeum's three-part series, "Perspectives on Israel and Palestine." We encourage attendees to remain open to listening and seeking to understand multiple viewpoints by registering for all three events. The other events are: the Yousef Munayyer talk on Monday, March 18, "Israel's Genocide in Gaza and Our Complicity," and the CMC faculty panel on Tuesday, March 26, "Talking About Israel and Palestine: Faculty Perspectives." 

**ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED TO ATTEND THIS TALK – This is a "flipped Ath" event, in conjunction with the Open Academy: the reception will be held at 5:30 PM as usual, followed directly by the presentation at 6:00 PM. Dinner (and conversation!) will follow at 6:45 PM, and then Q&A at 7:30 PM.** Dates and water will be provided for those observing iftar. Those breaking their fast may also request a boxed vegetarian dinner to be provided - please reply to your registration confirmation with this request.

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Ambassador Dennis Ross is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He also teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. For more than twelve years, Ambassador Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He served two and half years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, spending the first 6 months of the Administration as the special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Ghaith al-Omari, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Senior Fellow in The Washington Institute's Irwin Levy Family Program on the U.S.-Israel Strategic Relationship, is the former executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine. He served as advisor to the negotiating team during the 1999–2001 permanent-status talks in addition to holding various other positions within the Palestinian Authority.

Ambassador Ross and Mr. al-Omari's visit to the Athenaeum is co-sponsored by Hillel International.

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Tue, April 2, 2024
Lunch Program
Anoush Tamar Suni

Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people who live among them and shape their historical understandings and relationships with the local history and geography. In this talk, Dr. Suni interrogates the afterlives of one abandoned monastery and examines how local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past and the present through that space of material ruin.

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Anoush Tamar Suni is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Promise Armenian Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to coming to UCLA, she was the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, and a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Her research was recently published in the journals Comparative Studies in Society and History and Anthropological Quarterly.

Dr. Suni's visit to the Athenaeum is co-sponsored by the History Department at CMC, the Anthropology Department at Pomona, and the Anthropology Department and MENA Studies Program at Scripps.

 

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Tue, April 2, 2024
Dinner Program
Shaun Harper, Aya Waller-Bey, and Devon Westhill, panelists
Ken Miller, moderator

In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (and 6-3 in its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina) that the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions decisions was unconstitutional. This ruling effectively overturned the 2003 decision Grutter v. Bollinger, which had previously permitted the consideration of race in admissions decisions. Both supporters and critics of the ruling believe that it will have far-reaching implications within American higher education and beyond, even as colleges and universities attempt to maintain racially diverse student bodies without explicitly considering race. Join a panel of experts on higher education, race, and admissions, for a discussion of the impact of the decision, how it may affect the content of admissions essays, and the broader implications for American higher education and society.

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Shaun Harper is one of the nation’s most highly respected racial equity experts. He is a Provost Professor in the Rossier School of Education, Marshall School of Business, and Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Dr. Harper also is the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership, founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, and a Forbes contributor. He served as the 2020-21 American Educational Research Association president and the 2016-17 Association for the Study of Higher Education president. He was inducted into the National Academy of Education in 2021. Professor Harper has published 12 books and over 100 academic papers. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and several thousand other news outlets have quoted Dr. Harper and featured his research. He has interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, ESPN, and NPR. He also has testified twice to the U.S. House of Representatives.

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Aya M. Waller-Bey is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, examining trauma narratives in college essays. A researcher, writer, and storyteller, Aya’s work critically informs growing discourse about the commodification of racialized trauma by postsecondary institutions, non-profits, and foundations, and a growing concern about how institutions of higher education entice minoritized groups to place their trauma and struggle on display for access and rewards. She's authored op-eds for Forbes and the Atlantic on trauma in college essays and affirmative action, with interviews and citations in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, MarketWatch, and Slate. She’s also given dozens of local and national invited talks, including Aspen Center for Physics, TEDxDetroit, The New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the National Association of Fellowship Advisors and SXSW EDU. She is a decorated scholar selected as a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation Fellowship awardee—a prestigious fellowship awarded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine aimed to increase the diversity of the national college and university professoriate. Aya holds a B.A. in Sociology from Georgetown University and earned the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship in 2015, completing her Master of Philosophy in Education at the University of Cambridge. She also holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Aya is a proud Detroiter, first-generation college student, and member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.

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Devon Westhill is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and is an attorney focused on matters of constitutional and civil rights. He researches, speaks, and writes about civil rights, civil liberties, and related issues such as race relations, social change, and equal opportunity.

Mr. Westhill's writing has been published in numerous outlets including Newsweek, National Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken hundreds of times at college campuses, conferences, and on radio programs, and has appeared on cable television channels including Fox News, Newsmax, and CSPAN. Mr. Westhill has also provided expert testimony to both houses of the U.S. Congress, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Mr. Westhill led the civil rights office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. He has also worked at the U.S. Department of Labor, Federalist Society, and as a criminal trial lawyer in private practice. Mr. Westhill is a U.S. Navy veteran with degrees from UNC at Chapel Hill and the University of Florida.

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This panel will be moderated by Ken Miller, the Rose Professor of State and Local Government and Director of the Rose Institute at CMC.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jerome H. Garris Dialogue Series at CMC with additional support from the Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America, all at CMC.

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Wed, April 3, 2024
Dinner Program
Fabrice Guerrier

How do we imagine the future in the context of addressing, navigating, and transforming environmental, social, and cultural challenges, seeking innovative ways to create inclusive and sustainable futures? Join sci-fi and fantasy publishing visionary Fabrice Guerrier on an exploration of worldbuilding in fiction and imagination. By embracing the notion of 'creolization,' Guerrier will investigate how the blending of diverse cultural, intellectual, and social elements can forge new, resilient pathways for humanity.

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Fabrice j. Guerrier is the award-winning founder of Syllble Studios, a pioneering sci-fi and fantasy production and publishing house that develops diverse writing talent through collaborative worldbuilding. At Syllble, Guerrier leads a radically new process of creating unique fictional worlds by connecting underrepresented creative writers, visual artists and inspired creators from different countries, backgrounds, and cultures through artist collectives. Drawing from his cultural heritage and his interests in syncretism, creolization, Haitian futurism, African spiritual traditions, and worldbuilding, Guerrier's science-fantasy shared-world "Ayitiverse" aims to unraveled the universal history of the world’s first modern Black nation, Haiti.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1991, Guerrier moved to the United States at the young age of 13 in 2004. He holds a Bachelor’s in International Affairs and a Leadership Studies Certificate from Florida State University, as well as a Master’s in Conflict Transformation at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). While at CJP, he helped found a local chapter of Coming to the Table (CTTT), a national racial reconciliation organization founded by descendants of the enslaved and enslavers from the same plantation in the United States. He then went on to become the youngest national president of CTTT's board of directors.

Guerrier’s TED Talk, “Gone are the days of the lone genius,” illuminates future transformation and the need for collective thinking. He is the author of No More Vagabonds, No More Obscure Wars: Poems (2023), Medusa’s Descendant (2023), Breaking Free From Mass-Produced Consciousness: A Little Book for Artists, Entrepreneurs, and the Leaders of Tomorrow (2021) and Golden Veins: A Collection Of Stories (2019). He was selected as a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow finalist and a PEN Haiti Fellow by PEN America. Guerrier was inducted into Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Art & Style and named to The Root Magazine‘s 100 Most Influential African-Americans. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. 

Guerrier will deliver the 2024 Golo Mann Lecture, sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

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Thu, April 4, 2024
Dinner Program
Cate Taylor

“The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives”, wrote three Supreme Court Justices in 1992. Cate Taylor's research investigates the degree to which this is true. In summer of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a nearly fifty-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, which mandated the constitutional right to abortion, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Consequently, abortion is now illegal, or very difficult to access, in at least twenty-four states. Taylor will share her new research showing the consequences of millions of people losing access to abortion since summer of 2022. Such consequences include negative impacts on women’s ability to get an education and keep themselves and their families out of financial precarity. Losing access to abortion also means that pregnant people lose access important medical care during pregnancy—even during wanted pregnancies.
 

Read more about the speaker

Cate Taylor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCSB, in Santa Barbara, CA. Formerly, she was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana with a joint appointment in the Department of Gender Studies and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University. She earned her PhD at Cornell University. Her main research and teaching areas are gender, work, health, reproduction, social psychology, and social inequality.

Professor Taylor's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Individual and Social Development at CMC.

 

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

Contact

Phone: (909) 621-8244 
Fax: (909) 621-8579 
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