Marian Miner Cook
AthenaeumA distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC
Welcome to The Athenaeum
Welcome to Athenaeum and the spring 2019 speaker program.
Unique in American higher education, the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum (the “Ath”) is a signature program of Claremont McKenna College. Four nights a week during the school year, the Ath brings scholars, public figures, thought leaders, artists, and innovators to engage with the CMC and Claremont College community in the Eggert Dining Room. In addition, the Ath also hosts lunch speakers, roundtables, and smaller presentations in its two auxiliary dining rooms.
For decades, the Ath has hosted a spectrum of luminaries with expertise and insight on a wide range of topics, both historical and contemporary. In the Ath’s intimate yet stimulating setting, students, faculty, staff, and other community members gather to hear the speaker, pose questions, and also to build community and exchange ideas over a shared meal.
At the core of the Ath is a longstanding commitment to student growth and learning. Central to the Ath are its two student Fellows, selected annually to host, introduce, and moderate discussion with the featured speaker. Priority is given to students in attendance during the question-and-answer session following every presentation. Moreover, speakers often take extra time to visit a class, meet with student interest groups, or give an interview to the student press and podcast team.
We look forward to seeing you at the Ath.
Priya Junnar
Director
Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will discuss how portraiture has also always been about the melding the humanities with the sciences. A heathy spirit of inquiry into the history of innovation posits portraiture as a model for talking about politics, religion, philosophy, psychology, geography, and of course great design. Always political in nature, a historical portrait cannot illustrate the “truth” of someone’s appearance, let alone their accomplishments. Particularly in terms of selfie-culture and the endless forms of narcissism it promotes, all portraiture empowers individuals to attain a broad knowledge of the wider world as well as a healthy dose of skepticism about their surroundings. To paraphrase Picasso, “portraiture is a lie that illustrates the truth.”
As the first woman to serve as director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet (pronounced Say-et) has been exploring new ways to place personal experience and creativity at the center of learning and civic awareness. Not just a place to see famous Americans, the museum explores identity as a social construct that has been shaped in equal measure by opportunity and ability, prejudice and fear. By taking a cross-disciplinary approach that merges the traditional forms of painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking with poetry, installation art, video and performance, Sajet aims to bring history alive.
Ms. Sajet is the featured speaker for CMC’s 2019 Family Weekend.
Photo credit: Wenndy Concannan
William Schindler is an experimental archeologist and primitive technologist. His research and teaching revolve around a comprehensive understanding of prehistoric technologies including lithic (stone tool) technologies, prehistoric ceramic technologies, projectile technologies, hunting, foraging, hide working, fiber technologies and all aspects of prehistoric food acquisition, processing, storage, and consumption.
An advocate of traditional foodways, Schindler is constantly seeking new ways to incorporate lessons learned from his research into modern diets. His outlook on food has revolutionized the way in which he and his family eat and he attributes much of the health his wife and three children enjoy to the hunted, gathered, and fermented foods that comprise a significant portion of their diets.
The recipient of multiple awards and featured in many television and media outlets, Schindler is equally at home in the middle of the forest armed with a hand-made bow stalking a deer or in a college classroom delivering a lecture to a group of students. Schindler lives what he teaches and teaches what he lives.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. At one point in his career, at age 22, he was the nation’s youngest daily newspaper editor.
He joined The Sacramento Union’s Capitol bureau in 1975, just as Jerry Brown began his governorship, and later became the Union’s Capitol bureau chief. In 1981. Walters began writing the state’s only daily newspaper column devoted to California politics, economics, and social events.
In 1984, he and the column moved to The Sacramento Bee and in 2017, Walters and his column shifted to CALmatters.org. He has written more than 9,000 articles and his column appears in dozens of California newspapers.
Walters has written about California and its politics for a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, and in 1986, his book, "The New California: Facing the 21st Century," was published in its first edition. The book later underwent revisions and became a widely-used college textbook about socioeconomic and political trends in the state.
He is the founding editor of the California Political Almanac and the co-author of "The Third House: Lobbyists, Money and Power in Sacramento". Walters frequently appears on CNN, Fox, and other networks, commenting about political developments in California.
Mr. Walters's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.
Rana Mitter is director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford, where he is a professor of the history and politics of modern China.
He is the author of several books, including the award-winning “A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World” (Oxford, 2004). His most recent book “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II” was named as a 2013 Book of the Year in the Financial Times and the Economist, won the 2014 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was a finalist for the Bernard Schwartz prize of the Asia Society of New York.
In the UK he is a regular presenter of the arts and ideas program Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3. He comments regularly on contemporary Chinese politics and society in media around the world and has spoken at forums including the World Economic Forum at Davos. His reviews and essays have appeared in newspapers including the Financial Times, International New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Caijing, and South China Morning Post. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.
Professor Mitter’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Corey Brettschneider is professor of political science at Brown University, where he teaches constitutional law and politics. He has also been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School.
Brettschneider will draw from his recent book, “The Oath and The Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents” which has garnered significant national attention and which Kirkus calls “vital reading for all Americans,” as a jumping off point to reflect on the presidency in an age of deep controversy. While President Trump generates plenty of controversies worthy of study, this lecture—like the book—will use these salient contemporary issues for deeper reflection about the president’s constitutional role.
His recent writing has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post and he is frequently interviewed about constitutional issues on BBC, Sirius XM, and MSNBC. He is also the author of two books about constitutional law and civil liberties and numerous articles that appear in top academic journals and law reviews. His constitutional law casebook is widely used in classrooms throughout the United States.
Brettschneider holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.
Professor Brettshneider’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.
Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College, where he is also a professor of politics and history. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. He also studied at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill.
From 1985 to 2000, he served as president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. In 1996, he was the founding chairman of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and admissions. Arnn is on the board of directors of The Heritage Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Center of Claremont McKenna College, the Philadelphia Society, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Claremont Institute. He served on the U.S. Army War College Board of Visitors for two years, for which he earned the Department of the Army’s Outstanding Civilian Service Medal. In 2015, he received the Bradley Prize from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
Dr. Arnn is the author of three books: “Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education”; “The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It”; and “Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.”
President Arn’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.
Joyce Carol Oates has penned bestselling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, a memoir, "A Widow's Story", and an unlikely bestseller, "On Boxing." Her remarkable literary industry—which includes work as an editor and anthologist—spans forms, themes, topics, and genres. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, "A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America." In 2010, reflecting the widespread esteem in which her work is held, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal.
Best known for her fiction, Oates' novels include "them", which won the National Book Award; "Blonde", a bold reimagining of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe; "The Falls", which won the France's Prix Femina; "The Gravedigger’s Daughter" and "Little Bird of Heaven", each set in upstate New York; and "We Were the Mulvaneys", which follows the disintegration of an American family and which became a bestseller after being selected by Oprah's Book Club. In 2019 she will release a novel, "My Life as a Rat" (Ecco Press, June 4, 2019), and a children’s book "The New Kitten" (HarperCollins, June 25, 2019).
Since 1963, forty of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Among her many honors are two O. Henry Prizes and two Bram Stoker Awards, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, World Fantasy Award, and M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2009, Oates was given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2012, she was awarded both the Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. In March 2014 she was awarded the Poets & Writers Distinguished Lifetime Award, and in 2017 the Bilbao BBK Ja! Prize.
Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and since 1978, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ms. Oates’ will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2019 Quinones Lecture.
Photo credit: Dustin Cohen
Henri Cole, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published nine collections of poetry, including MIDDLE EARTH, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Cole was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2017. Cole's most recent collection is NOTHING TO DECLARE, and a memoir, ORPHIC PARIS, was published by New York Review Books last spring.
Professor Cole's Athenaeum presentation and reading celebrates his installation as Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Literature at CMC.
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist and author who specializes in public health, global health and food policy. She is a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and the author of the 2017 bestseller “Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats” (National Geographic Books, Sept. 2017), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that accolade. Big Chicken was named a Best Book of 2017 by Amazon, Science News, Smithsonian Magazine, Civil Eats, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Toronto Globe and Mail; an Essential Science Read by WIRED; and a 2018 Book All Georgians Should Read. Her 2015 TED Talk, "What do we do when antibiotics don't work anymore?", has been viewed more than 1.6 million times and translated into 33 languages.
McKenna has reported from epidemics and disasters, and farms and food production sites, on most of the continents, including a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a Thai village erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a bird-testing unit on the front lines of West Nile virus, an Arctic graveyard of the victims of the 1918 flu, an AIDS treatment center in Yunnan, a polio-eradication team in India, breweries in France, a “Matrix for chickens” in the Netherlands, and Midwestern farms devastated by the 2015 epidemic of avian flu.
She received the 2014 Leadership Award from the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics and the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences. Her piece for Modern Farmer on the beyond-organic farm White Oak Pastures received a first-place award from the Association of Food Journalists, and her essay for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future," was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Media Award and has been republished in Russian, Norwegian and French. She also shared the 2015 AH Boerma Award from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as one of the writers for National Geographic’s food-writing site The Plate, part of the magazine’s year-long Future of Food project.
She is one of the stars of the 2014 documentary Resistance, has presented at the United Nations, U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control about the need to curb antibiotic misuse in medicine and agriculture, and is a frequent public speaker and radio, podcast and television guest. She is also the Journalism Advisor to the Logan Science Journalism Program at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, a member of the program committee for the 2019 World Conference of Science Journalists in Lausanne, and a five-term member of the board of the Association of Health Care Journalists.
Her earlier books are Superbug (Free Press/Simon & Schuster 2010), on the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph in hospitals, families and farms, which won the 2013 June Roth Memorial Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the 2011 Science in Society Award given by the National Association of Science Writers; and Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service(Free Press/S&S 2004), the first history of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, for which she embedded with the corps for a year. BEATING BACK THE DEVIL was named one of the Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon.com and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
As a newspaper reporter, she worked for 10 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only US journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She reported from the Indian Ocean tsunami and from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Arctic, and embedded with CDC teams on Capitol Hill during the 2001 anthrax attacks and with a World Health Organization polio-eradication team in India.
Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald, where stories she co-wrote on illnesses among veterans of the first Persian Gulf War led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her stories on the association between local cancer clusters and contamination escaping a federal nuclear weapons plant contributed to a successful nuclear-harm lawsuit by residents. She was also previously a staff member at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota.
In 2013-14, she was the inaugural Project Fellow in the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT. She also has been an Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University; a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation; and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She has also served short fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. In 2006, she was an inaugural Health Journalism Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and subsequently taught other journalists in its programs in Asia. She has been a journalist in residence at the University of Florida, University of Wisconsin, and Texas A&M University, adjunct faculty at the University of Georgia, and faculty at the Santa Fe Science Writing Seminar. In 2018, she was a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale.
She is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, has a master’s degree with highest honors from Northwestern University, and is the recipient of numerous journalism awards.
Photo credit: David Tulis
Marc Gopin is the James H. Laue Professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and founder and director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution (CRDC). Gopin has trained thousands of people worldwide in conflict resolution strategies for complex conflicts, and has consulted on conflicts inside major companies, as well as between adversaries in destructive conflicts domestically and globally. He has published seven books, and has appeared on global media outlets, such as CNN and the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and has published in the International Herald Tribune among others. His book “Healing the Heart of Conflict: Eight Crucial Steps to Making Peace with Yourself and with Others,” has become the basis of conflict resolution training in several countries.
A frequent speaker at universities, corporations, and other institutions, he was the recipient of the 2008 Andrew Thomas Peacebuilder Award from the New York State Dispute Resolution Association (NYSDRA), and his book, “Holy War, Holy Peace,” was cited as one of four noteworthy books of 2002 chosen by the Christian Science Monitor.
Gopin received his Ph.D. in ethics from Brandeis University in 1993.
Professor Gopin’s Athenaeum lecture is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Sudha Pai taught political science at the Centre for Political Studies and served as rector from 2011 to 2015 at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Currently, she is president of PRAMAN (Policy Research and Management Network) a research institute that undertakes research on areas such as health, agriculture, foreign policy, and education for the government, NGOs, and in collaboration with university departments. She is also a visiting fellow at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi. She was a national fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi in 2016 to 2017 and senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Teen Murti, New Delhi from 2006 to 2009 where she wrote “Developmental State and the Dalit Question in Madhya Pradesh: Congress Response” (Routledge, 2010).
Pai was awarded the faculty research fellowship, Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Canada, in 1996. She has been a member of many projects including SIDA and UNIRISD. Based on her extensive research on Uttar Pradesh, she has also served on the governing body of the Govind Vallabh Pant Institute, Allahabad, and the Giri Institute of Development Studies, Lucknow.
Pai joined the Centre for Political Studies in 1980 as assistant professor where she taught courses and guided research in the field of Indian politics, public policy and comparative politics. Her graduation and post-graduation was from the University of Delhi and her M/Phil and Ph.D. from the Centre for Political Studies. She was assistant professor from 1972 to 1975 at Gargi College for Women, Delhi University.
Her books include “Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The BSP in Uttar Pradesh” (Sage 2002); “Indian Parliament: A Critical Appraisal” (ed. with Avinash Kumar, Orient Blackswan, 2014, 2016); “Handbook on Politics in the Indian States Regions, Political Parties and Economic Reforms” (ed. Oxford University Press, 2013, 2015); “Revisiting 1956 B.R. Ambedkar and States Reorganization” (co-authored, Orient Blackswan, 2014, 2015) and more recently “Everyday Communalism: Riots in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh” (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also a regular contributor to thewire.in and other media.
Pai has been selected to receive the South Asian Studies Association's (SASA) 2019 Exemplar Award for Academic Achievement and will be speaking at the SASA's spring conference to be held at CMC in early March 2019.
Professor Pai’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
(Parents Dining Room)
Jamil Anderlini was appointed the Financial Times’ (FT) Asia editor in 2015. He oversees the FT’s coverage of the Asia region from Afghanistan to Antarctica, including China, India, Indonesia, and Japan.
In addition to directing the work of regional correspondents and overseeing the editing and commissioning team in Hong Kong, Anderlini is an award-winning journalist. He is fluent in spoken and written Mandarin Chinese. After a decade and a half working as an editor and journalist in China, he has cultivated a deep knowledge of the political and economic situation in that country. He regularly contributes commentary for other media, including CNN, BBC, CNBC, ABC and Al-Jazeera.
Anderlini joined the FT in 2007 and worked as Beijing correspondent and deputy Beijing bureau chief before he was named Beijing bureau chief in 2011, with overall responsible for FT’s China coverage. He has won numerous reporting prizes, both individually and as part of FT teams.
In 2010, he was named Journalist of the Year at the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Editorial Excellence Awards and won the Best Digital Award at the Amnesty International Media Awards. Other prizes include a UK Foreign Press Association Award in 2008, several individual SOPA awards, including best feature of the year 2017, and the inaugural Jones-Mauthner Award in 2012, which recognizes outstanding reporting of international affairs by a young reporter at the Financial Times. In 2013, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and short-listed for both Foreign Reporter of the Year at the Press Awards in the UK and also the Orwell Prize, the UK's most prestigious prize for political writing.
Anderlini was awarded a certificate of completion for the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century Programme, April 2016, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Executive Education. In November 2018, he was invited to Yale University as a Poynter Fellow and Cowles Visitor to participate in public conversations with professors and Yale president Peter Salovey. He is a member of the advisory board for the Edward R Murrow Center for a Digital World at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Prior to joining the FT, he was Beijing business correspondent for the South China Morning Post for two years. Before that, he was chief editor of the China Economic Review.
He is the author of the e-book “The Bo Xilai Scandal”, published by Penguin and Financial Times in 2012.
Mr. Anderlini's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
Follow the Athenaeum
Unless otherwise noted, lunch begins at 11:45 a.m.; speaker presentations begin at 12:15 p.m.
Evening receptions begin at 5:30 p.m.; dinner is served at 6 p.m.; speaker presentations begin at 6:45 p.m.
The Athenaeum facilitates dynamic interactions and dialogue that underscore
the essence of a liberal arts education.