Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Balakian is the author of eight books of poems, four books of prose, and two translations. His poems have been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad for over four decades and his memoir was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly. Working from a form of poetics he calls “writing horizontal,” Balakian’s poetry engages a wide range of realities including genocide, war, terrorism, climate change, AIDS epidemic, historical trauma and memory as well as the personal domains of love, death, art, and culture. His is a sensuous language: personal and cosmopolitan, elliptical and cadence-jolted, sharp and textured, such that the language itself becomes its own force of discovery and meaning. 

Balakian’s work has appeared widely in American magazines and journals such as The Nation, The New Republic, Antaeus, Partisan Review, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review and his essays on poetry, culture, art, and social thought have appeared in many publications including the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, LA Times, Art in America, American Poetry Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Poetry. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response received the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times and National Bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book.  As well, his translation with Aris Sevag of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year.

In 2016, the Republic of Armenia awarded Balakian with the 2016 Presidential Medal and, in 2007 the Movses Khorenatsi Medal. Other prizes and awards and civic citations include a Guggenheim Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Virginia Quarterly Review; PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir; the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best book in English on the subject of genocide and human rights’ and the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter).

Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck, New Jersey where he attended Tenafly public schools and graduated from Englewood School for Boys (now Dwight-Englewood School) before earning his B.A. from Bucknell University, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. from Brown University in American Civilization. He has taught at Colgate University since 1980 where he is currently Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English, and Director of Creative Writing.

Dr. Balakian’s presentation is supported by the Mgrublian Center’s Annual Lecture on Armenian Studies.

Jennifer M. Morton is Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy with a secondary appointment at the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Morton is interested in how poverty and social class affect our agency. She is currently working on a book on striving in the face of adversity with Sarah Paul (NYU Abu Dhabi) and a series of papers on precarity and poverty. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press, 2019) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education and the Frederic W. Ness Book Award by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Her work has been featured in The Nation, The Atlantic, Vox, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the podcast Hidden Brain. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellowship at the Princeton Center for Human Values.

Julio Garín, the Peter K. Barker ’70 P’01 Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, joined the CMC faculty in 2017. He holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Universidad ORT, Uruguay. 

Professor Garín has been widely published in academic journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics; the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics; Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; and European Economic Review, and has been a visiting scholar of several central banks, including the Federal Reserve.

He is particularly interested in understanding the role of frictions and market imperfections, measuring well-being, and the extent to which policy interventions may help to ameliorate undesirable outcomes.  “In terms of labels, I have worked in the areas of monetary and fiscal policy, financial frictions, labor markets, and identifying the role of expectations on a variety of economic outcomes. Digging deeper, I am interested in the elusive task of understanding human behavior.”

Professor Garín grew up Cuaró, a neighborhood of Rivera, a city split between Uruguay and Brazil. “That place and their people, together with the parents I had and the ones I did not, gave me both roots and wings,” he shared.

“The role of an economist may not seem like a romantic task—or the role of a social scientist for that matter—but I argue that, when honestly pursued, provides extraordinary tools for creating a meaningful chronicle of human behavior and is crucial for piercing the veil of ignorance that conceals true understanding and prevents genuine empathy,” he said.