Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Aslı Ü. Bâli is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her teaching and scholarship focus on public international law, particularly human rights law, and comparative constitutional law, with a regional focus on the Middle East.

Before joining Yale, Bâli was a professor of law at UCLA, where she was the founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and director of the university-wide Center for Near Eastern Studies. She has published widely in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed social science journals and is co-editor of two volumes on comparative law published by Cambridge University Press. She has also written essays and op-eds for such venues as The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Nation, Jadaliyya, MERIP, and The Law and Political Economy Blog. 

Bâli served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America from 2023 to 2025. She is co-chair of the advisory board for the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law.

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

Jud Campbell became a Stanford Law faculty in 2023. He is a legal historian whose scholarship explores American constitutional thought, with particular attention to the history of rights. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty in 2023, Campbell was a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, and the University of Chicago Law School. Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

He earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School and subsequently clerked for Judge Diane S. Sykes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Judge Jose A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and two master's degrees from the London School of Economics, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.

Campbell's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by The Salvatori Center's Lofgren Program on American Constitutionalism and the Jack Miller Center.

Ryan Patel is a Global Business Executive, Board Director, and Host and Executive Producer of Yahoo's original series “How They Run with Ryan Patel”. A globally recognized expert on business, innovation, and the future of industries, he has advised startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governments. Patel is a LinkedIn Top Voice and frequent national media commentator on business, technology, and the global economy.

Nicole Turner, M.S. is the Senior Vice President and Head of Workplace Experience at Mastercard. A seasoned corporate executive with a 20-year tenure at the global payments company, Nicole spearheads the strategic operations, engagement, and employee infrastructure across Mastercard's corporate headquarters and its primary global Technology Hubs—spanning major epicenters like London, Singapore, New York, and Atlanta.

Ryan Patel and Nicole Turner’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economic Institute at CMC.

Dr. Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir (JAM) is an Associate Professor and Antimicrobial Resistance Researcher at the University of California, San Diego, with appointments in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences as well as the Division of the Black Diaspora and African American Studies.

She uses a translational research approach, integrating laboratory and clinical methods to investigate the syndemic relationship between noncommunicable diseases and antimicrobial-resistant infections and to develop community-based interventions that improve treatment outcomes. She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and scientific abstracts that present her findings. Her contributions have influenced national and international policies to mitigate inequities in antimicrobial resistance. She was invited to present at the 25th Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (PACCARB) Public Meeting and now serves on the council as the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) designated representative. She also served as an inaugural member of the CVS Health Equity National Advisory Board and, in 2026, was the first PharmD elected to the Infectious Diseases Society of America Executive Board. 

Dr. Abdul-Mutakabbir has earned both national and international recognition for her work in antimicrobial resistance research and health equity. In 2020, she was recognized as a Top Scientist Under 30 by the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. She received the 2021 Gita Patel Best Practice Award from the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists, the 2023 Clinical Practice Innovation Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the 2024 New Clinical Practitioner Award from the American College of Clinical Pharmacy. In 2026, she was named a finalist for the Nancy Jamison Fund for Social Justice Award, presented by Catalyst of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and elected as a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Dr. Abdul-Mutakabbir's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Individual and Social Development and the Women and Leadership Alliance, both at CMC.

He will then turn to his other Claremont McKenna connection: the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, where he worked as a student and now serves on its Board of Governors. The Rose’s 2023 report on San Francisco's government design diagnosed a City Hall structurally unable to govern itself. Elsbernd traces how that diagnosis shaped SPUR’s 2025 report, “Charter for Change,” and how both reports converged in Mayor Daniel Lurie's three charter reform measures now before San Francisco voters.

Sean Elsbernd '97 is the President and CEO of SPUR, where he leads the organization’s efforts to advance equity-centered, data-driven public policy across San Francisco, San José, and Oakland. He brings more than 25 years of public service experience at the local, regional, and federal levels. Before joining SPUR, he served as chief of staff to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, where he oversaw citywide operations, regional partnerships, and state legislative affairs.

Sean previously served as state director for U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where he represented District 7. He has also held key regional transit leadership roles, including as chair of the Caltrain Board of Directors and director of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, he and his wife are raising the fifth generation. Sean is passionate about building a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient Bay Area. He holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College and a JD from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings).

Sean’s talk is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

James Anderson is the director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND. He has been the principal investigator on a wide range of projects, ranging from policy implications of autonomous vehicle technology to understanding the effects of indigent defense systems. He is widely published and has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, the National Institutes of Health, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the State of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Civil Justice, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation. 

Anderson's work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Oxford University Press, and in numerous RAND publications. He has presented to a wide variety of academic and professional audiences. He is a member of the American Law Institute. Before joining RAND, Anderson clerked for the Honorable Morton Greenberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and practiced law for ten years as an assistant federal defender representing death-sentenced prisoners. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.A. in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University. 

James Anderson's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC.

A senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Henry Olsen '83 is a scholar of American politics. Focusing on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges from the left and the right, he will provide commentary on American political trends in 2026 and beyond.

Henry Olsen '83 was previously columnist at the Washington Post and currently pens a weekly Post newsletter on the midterm elections, Margin of Victory. His work has been featured in many other prominent publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. He is the author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism (Broadside Books, 2017).

His predictions of American elections since 2010 have been praised for their remarkable accuracy. In the 2016 campaign, he accurately identified the factors fueling the rise of Donald Trump early in the race, and his election-eve predictions were among the most accurate of any major analyst or commentator. In 2024, he accurately predicted that President Trump would win and noted he could even win the popular vote. Olsen regularly speaks about American political trends and global populism in the United State, Europe, and Australia.

Olsen has worked in senior executive positions at many center-right think tanks. Including as Vice President and Director, National Research Initiative, at the American Enterprise Institute, Vice President of Programs at the Manhattan Institute, and President of the Commonwealth Foundation.

Olsen has a B.A. in government from Claremont McKenna College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government. 

Mr. Olsen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy and Rose Institute of State and Local Government, both at CMC.

Tripp will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2026-27 Lerner Lecture on Hinge Moments in History.

Steven Powell is president and CEO of Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, serving more than 15 million people across Central, Coastal and Southern California. In over 25 years with SCE, he has held leadership roles spanning operations, strategy, resource planning, energy procurement and electric transportation. Prior to becoming CEO, he served as executive vice president of Operations, overseeing transmission and distribution, customer service, safety, security, business resiliency and operational services. Powell serves on the board of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), chairs EPRI’s Climate READi Committee, and co-chairs the Edison Electric Institute Wildfire Task Force. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and an MBA from UCLA.

Powell’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center at CMC.

Anoush Baghdassarian ’17 is a human rights lawyer, litigation associate at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP in New York, and co-founder of Rerooted, a nonprofit oral-history and advocacy organization dedicated to preserving Armenian stories and advancing identity and justice. What began as her 2017 Projects for Peace initiative at Claremont McKenna College has grown into a global archive containing more than 500 testimonies from Armenian communities around the world. In 2026, Baghdassarian became the first CMC graduate to receive the Projects for Peace Alumni Award. 

Baghdassarian earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and a master’s degree in human rights studies from Columbia University. She has litigated civil and criminal matters involving atrocity crimes and terrorism in the United States and internationally, including at the International Criminal Court and before the International Court of Justice. At CMC, she studied Psychology and Spanish and completed a sequence in Human Rights, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies. Her connection to the Athenaeum began during her first year, when it hosted Found, a play she wrote about the Armenian Genocide. She now proudly serves on the advisory board of CMC’s Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and credits much of what she's accomplished today to the strong foundation CMC helped her lay.

John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for forty years. He is the author or editor of more than sixty books, including most recently Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times. 

During his CMC tenure, he joined Gordon Bjork and the late Ward Elliott to found the College’s PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) Program. The founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights), Roth was named the 1988 US National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Roth’s CMC honors include the George C. S. Benson Distinguished Service Award, the highest bestowed by the Claremont McKenna College Alumni Association; the Donald C. McKenna Humanitarian Award; and induction into the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Athletics Hall of Fame. 

Professor Roth’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Musa al-Gharbi's research explores how people talk about, think about, and produce a shared understanding of contested social phenomena to include race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests and more.

Al-Gharbi's second book, Those People, is slated for publication by Princeton University Press in late 2026 and will explore the causes and consequences of the growing social distance between the symbolic professions and growing swaths of the broader societies they are embedded in.

Musa al-Gharbi is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at the Stony Brook University. In addition to his scholarly work, Professor al-Gharbi is a columnist for The Guardian. His journalistic essays have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, The Atlantic, New Republic, The Nation, and many other outlets. He is also regularly tapped by other journalists to contextualize current events, including spots with NPR, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, CNN, USA Today, Voice of America, and beyond. And independent of his own direct participation, his work is regularly discussed in mass media outlets.

Professor al-Gharbi’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy, Salvatori Center, and Dreier Roundtable, all at CMC.

Her first novel, Adèle (Dans le jardin de l’ogre), was published in 2014 and examines female sexual addiction and self-destruction within a societal context of repression and shame. This debut work garnered critical attention and was nominated for the Prix de Flore and won the La Mamounia Prize, marking her arrival on the French literary scene.

Slimani’s second novel, The Perfect Nanny (Chanson douce), published in 2016, became her international breakthrough. The psychological thriller about a nanny who murders the children in her care won the Prix Goncourt — France’s most prestigious literary award — in 2016, making Slimani the first Moroccan woman to receive it. The novel was later adapted into film and translated into multiple languages, and was recognized as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018.

Following this success, Slimani published works that expanded her literary range: the essay Sex and Lies (2017), a series of intimate testimonies from women in the Arab world that highlights sexual politics and gendered silences; In the Country of Others (2020), the first in a family-history trilogy set in post-World War II Morocco; Watch Us Dance; and I’ll Take the Fire (Penguin, June 9, 2026).

Beyond her books, Slimani has been honored for her advocacy and cultural impact. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed her as his personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. For her activism in women’s rights and freedom of expression, she was awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom in 2020. Themes across her work consistently probe power dynamics, sexual politics, motherhood, identity, and the social structures that shape personal freedom.

Slimani's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by The Open Academy, The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, The Center for Writing and Public Discourse, The Department of Literature (CMC),The Department of Modern Languages (CMC), and President's Office, all at CMC.

Years later as an adult, Narayan turned research skills acquired as an anthropologist and folklorist towards these intriguing family stories. Though her father was no longer alive, his elderly cousin shared materials relating to Vishwakarma and Ellora gathered across seven decades. Circles of extended relatives shared a complex mythology about the transmission of artisans’ skills and tools at Ellora. 

While family stories may lay claim to a place, other perspectives offer different frames. Narayan's quest took her through libraries, archives and museums around the world, and across the borders of scholarly disciplines. In this talk she shares the making of her book, Cave of My Ancestors. 

Kirin Narayan is the author of seven books, scholarly works on South Asian anthropology and folklore as well as a family memoir, a novel, and a “how about” book on ethnographic writing with exercises and prompts. Her first book, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Pennsylvania, 1989) won the inaugural Victor Turner Prize for ethnographic writing. Her most recent book, Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora (Chicago, 2024), a “questography” recounts the quest to understand a family legend through the multidisciplinary tools of scholarship. 

Having earned a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, Narayan has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Australian National University. Her research has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Australian Research Council. 

Kirin Narayan's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies and Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, both at CMC.