Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with creating a new form of theater and is applauded for her one-woman shows. Her most recent original work, "Notes from the Field," looks at the vulnerability of youth, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism. The New York Times named the stage version among The Best Theater of 2016 and TIME Magazine called it one of the Top 10 Plays of the Year. HBO premiered the film version in February 2018. It was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award.

By looking at current events from multiple points of view, Smith’s theater combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. Plays include Fires In the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, House Arrest, and Let Me Down Easy. Twilight: Los Angeles was nominated for two Tony Awards. Fires in the Mirror was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 2012, President Obama awarded Smith the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. She is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Other awards include the prestigious 2013 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, and the Ridenhour Courage Award. In 2015, she was named the Jefferson Lecturer, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities. She has been given several honorary degrees including those from Yale, Juilliard, University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, and Spelman.

Smith is also a television and film actress. Credits include such shows as Shonda Rhimes’s new “untitled project”, ABC’s series For the People and Blackish. She also co-starred on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie and was featured on the long running series, The West Wing. Films include The American President, Rachel Getting Married, Philadelphia, Dave, Rent, and Human Stain.

Smith is a Full Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she founded the former Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.

Reproduced from https://www.annadeaveresmith.org/

A corporate strategist, executive coach, and leading expert in the intersection of humor and business, Naomi Bagdonas '09 is the coauthor of the national bestseller "Humor, Seriously" and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Bagdonas facilitates interactive sessions for boards and leadership teams of Fortune 100 companies and nonprofits, and helps leaders create cultures of levity, creativity, and inclusivity within their organizations. She advises executives and celebrities for events ranging from Saturday Night Live and The Today Show appearances to company all-hands meetings and political campaign speeches. 

Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Financial Times, Good Morning America, and on her mother's fridge.

In her spare time, Bagdonas runs a program teaching improv comedy in San Francisco's county jail, backpacks in the Sierras, and fosters a revolving door of rescue dogs whom she adores and who systematically destroy everything she owns.

She's a proud Claremont McKenna College grad where she studied economics and psychology as a Robert Day Scholar and whose time here set her on a trajectory for a nontraditional and very fun career (she says, "Thanks, CMC!"). She also holds a MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Ilan Wurman '09 is an associate professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He writes on administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism, and his academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Texas Law Review among other journals. He is also the author of "A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism" (Cambridge 2017), and "The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment" (Cambridge 2020). 

Prior to entering academia, Wurman clerked for the Honorable Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced law for three-and-a-half years at Winston & Strawn in Washington, D.C. He also served as deputy general counsel on Rand Paul's U.S. presidential campaign in 2015 and as associate counsel on Tom Cotton's U.S. Senate campaign in 2014. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Claremont McKenna College.

Professor Wurman will deliver the Salvatori Center's 2021 Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism. 

Ryan Cirz is the CEO/CSO of Revagenix, Inc., a preclinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of life-changing and life-saving medicines. Previously, he was founder and vice president of research at Achaogen where he oversaw the early-stage (pre-investigational new drug) pipeline and provided intellectual insight/support to all things related to infectious diseases, including late-stage development, commercialization, and medical affairs. Achaogen focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing innovative antibacterials to treat multi-drug resistant infections.

Cirz earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Scripps Research Institute and his Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and molecular biology from Penn State University.

Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. In the fall of 2021, Jones is a William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC.  Jones is best known for his work in the field of comparative genocide studies and is the author or editor of numerous books on genocide and crimes against humanity including "Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction;" "The Scourge of Genocide: Essays and Reflection; Genocide, War Crimes and the West;" and "Gendercide and Genocide." He has also published two books on the media and political transition. His writings on gender and international politics have appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research, Review of International Studies, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Caribbean Studies, and other publications.

Throughout his career, Jones has developed a distinctive approach to the study of gender and international relations. In 1999, he co-founded the Web-based NGO Gendercide Watch with Carla Bergman and Nart Villeneuve, aimed at "confront[ing] gender-selective atrocities against men and women worldwide." He has also worked as an expert consultant with the United Nations Special Adviser on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. His essays on gender, violence, and international politics are compiled in "Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations" (Routledge, 2009). 

Jones was a postdoctoral fellow (2005-07) in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of British Columbia. 

Adam Jones' talk is co-sponsored  by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her books include “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation,” “How to Become A Scandal,” and “Against Love: A Polemic;” among others. Her most recent book is “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” from HarperCollins. Her next book, “Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis,” will be published in February 2022 by Pantheon.

Kipnis is a professor emerita in the department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking. She has taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan, and has been a visiting professor at NYU, Columbia University School of the Arts, the University of British Columbia, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo; and has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and New Left Review. Her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” was included in "The Best American Essays 2016", edited by Jonathan Franzen; “Domestic Gulags” (from Against Love) is included in "The Contemporary American Essay," edited by Phillip Lopate. 

Kipnis has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and she has attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program. 

Professor Kipnis's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Adapted from http://laurakipnis.com/about/

Steven Pinker, award- winning experimental psychologist and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, asks the big questions about human progress and sets out to answer them. A provocative speaker, much in demand, Pinker is a cognitive scientist who has been named by TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. His keynotes have helped millions demystify the science behind human language, thought, and action. A professor, a TED speaker, and a bestselling author, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, he is highly respected in the scientific community, his work and opinions are extensively covered in the mainstream media, and he has won a wide general audience.

In his upcoming book, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” Pinker argues that we fail to take advantage of the most powerful tools of reasoning discovered by some of our best thinkers: Logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation. Specifically he explores why—when humanity is reaching new heights of scientific reasoning—there appears to be more fake news, conspiracy theorizing, and medical quackery than ever before. Rejecting the cynicism that humans are inherently irrational, Pinker offers an insightful, hopeful analysis of what rationality really is, why it can feel like it’s scarce, and how we can use it to drive better choices in our personal lives and in the public sphere.

In his earlier book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” Pinker argued that, despite fear-mongering and political upheaval, the world is getting better: Peace, prosperity, knowledge and happiness are on the rise. "Enlightenment Now" was the follow-up to "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Had Declined", which was a #1 Amazon bestseller. 

Pinker’s other bestselling books include “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" and “How The Mind Works.” Pinker’s acclaimed “language” series includes “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language,” “Words and Rules,” “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature,” as well as “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.”

A native of Montreal, Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Previously, he taught at Stanford and at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has won several teaching prizes, and his research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has received numerous awards, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences.