Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Elizabeth Farfán-Santos has a Ph.D. and M.A. in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. An accomplished researcher and scholar, Farfán-Santos is the author of two books, Black Bodies, Black Rights: The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil and Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing, both published by the University of Texas Press. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals including Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Latino Studies, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Recently, Farfán-Santos moved on from her position as associate professor with tenure at the University of Houston. Since then, she has collaborated with public health leaders within the Houston public health system, directed sessions on cultural humility for researchers in neurocognitive disorders, and is currently teaching sessions on medical anthropology and barriers to health access for marginalized and underserved communities at the UH College of Medicine.

Despite her long history of research and teaching, Farfán-Santos identifies primarily as a writer passionate about nonfiction and creative prose that blends multiple genres, including ethnography, memoir, essay, and poetry. She has published creative essays and poetry and brings together the researcher-anthropologist and creative writer in her new book, Undocumented Motherhood.

Angela Vossmeyer is an associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Her research interests include: econometrics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), simulation-based inference, financial economics, financial crises, and economic history. She was recently a visiting scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the Division of Monetary Affairs.

Mark Skousen holds the Doti-Spogli Endowed Chair of Free Enterprise at Chapman University. He earned his Ph.D. in monetary economics at George Washington University. In 2018, he was awarded the Triple Crown in Economics for his work in theory, history, and education, after receiving "My Favorite Professor Award" at Chapman. He has taught at Columbia Business School, worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE), and been a consultant to IBM.

He has written for the Wall Street Journal and a regular column for Forbes magazine. He is the author of over 25 books, including The Making of Modern Economics and The Maxims of Wall Street. He has been editor in chief of an award-winning investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, since 1980. He produces “FreedomFest, the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” every July in Las Vegas.

Influenced by his work, the federal government began publishing Gross Output (GO) every quarter along with GDP. It is the first macro statistic of the economy to be published quarterly since GDP was invented in the 1940s.

Mia Mask is the Mary Riepma Ross Professor of Film at Vassar College. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film. 

Mask edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema, published by Routledge. She also published the jointly edited collection Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age (Bloomsbury). Her newest book is Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western.

Her cultural commentary has been featured on National Public Radio programs “Tell Me More,” “Marketplace” and “Morning Edition;” on Soledad O'Brien’s “Matter of Fact,” and in documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, the Criterion Channel and CNN’s The Movies.

Professor Mask's Athenaeum presentation is supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.

Kyla Easting '18 is an assistant staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. At CMC, Eastling majored in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics with a Legal Studies sequence. After graduation, she enrolled in Yale Law School, where she was part of the Veterans Legal Services Clinic, with a focus on gender and racial equity in the military service academies and on securing benefits for veterans who served on Guam. She graduated from Yale Law School in 2021. Last year, she served as a Gruber Fellow in Global Justice and Women's Rights at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project.

Ms. Eastling's CMC presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). Her novel Dominicana was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book, and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. 

Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, and has been published in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She's the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix). An associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin, Italy.

Ms. Cruz’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.

Photo credit: Erika Morillo

Lingling Wei is the award-winning chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown. She covers China's political economy, focusing on the intersection of business and politics. Born and raised in China, she has a M.A. in journalism from N.Y.U., got her start covering U.S. real estate, and has won many awards for her China coverage. In 2021, she's among a team of reporters and editors whose work was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Ms. Wei's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

David E. Tolchinsky P'20 is a filmmaker and professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He co-founded and directed NU's MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage program, was chair of RTVF for 11 years, and recently co-founded and now directs the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts at Northwestern. 

His work, which spans comedy and darker fare, often involves trauma, memory, and mental illness. His short Cassandra, available on Alter, Apple, and Amazon, has won over 11 awards internationally and is currently being developed into a feature. He produced and scored the NYTimes Op-Doc Contaminated Memories, directed by Debra Tolchinsky, produced Creature Companion, directed by Melika Bass, and recently produced Shudder/AMC's feature Night's End, directed by Jennifer Reeder. He was recently invited by Psychology Today to start a blog, Screenology: pondering mental health and media. He's written screenplays for various Hollywood studios and has written and directed plays performed in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He graduated from Yale (BA) and the USC School of Cinematic Arts (MFA).

Photo credit: Stephen Lewis

Isabel Vincent, award-winning investigative journalist for the New York Post, is the author of the bestselling memoir, Dinner with Edward, the biography Gilded Lily: The making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows, the sex trafficking exposé Bodies and Souls, and See No Evil, an investigation into Latin America’s biggest kidnapping case. Her account of the Swiss bank accounts left dormant after the Nazi era, Hitler’s Silent Partners, won the Yad Vashem Award for Holocaust History. A native of Canada, Vincent covered South American drug cartels for the Globe and the Mail and later reported on conflicts in Kosovo and the civil war in Angola. For many years, she has reported on the madness, mayhem, and corruption of the New York City for the Post and a host of other publications.

Ms. Vincent's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Photo credit: Zandy Mangold

Richard Sander, holds the Jesse Dukeminier Professorship in Law at UCLA. An economist and law professor, he has taught at UCLA since 1989 and also serves at the director of the UCLA-RAND Center for Law and Public Policy.

Most of Sander's work draws on both law and social science to understand problems of social inequality and evaluate social policies. He is the author of two books: Moving Toward Integration (Harvard, 2018), which attempts to explain the complex evolution of housing segregation in America, the effects of fair housing laws, and the paths to desegregation; and Mismatch (Basic Books, 2012), which examines the paradoxical and often counterproductive effects of many current affirmative action policies in higher education, suggests a better path to diversity, and describes the barriers to reform.

An unpaid, informal advisor to the plaintiffs in the Harvard/UNC cases during the early stages of those cases, Sander also collaborates with judges and scholars to study innovative ways to simplify litigation and to evaluate the results of reforms —an approach that has gained a good deal of traction in recent years.

(This event was originally scheduled for March 21, 2023.)