Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Marjorie H. Charlop, Ph.D., BCBA, has enjoyed a long career helping children with autism and their families. She is a professor of psychology at CMC and director of The Claremont Autism Center, her renowned research and treatment center for children with ASD and their families. As a licensed psychologist, she also maintains a private practice and consultation services.

Charlop has hundreds of professional conference presentations and publications in the field of autism and has done keynote addresses, workshops, and lectures around the globe. A dedicator contributor to the field, her most recent book is “Play and Social Skills for Children with ASD”. She is also the author of “Naturalistic and Incidental Teaching,” now in second addition.

Her research areas focus on communication, motivation, social skills, behavior problems and parent collaboration and education She has crafted several well used treatment protocols such as video modeling and used everyday technology to enhance learning. 

Professor Charlop is the recipient of the 2018-19 CMC Faculty Scholarship Award.

View Video: YouTube with Marjorie Charlop

Judith Grisel, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized behavioral neuroscientist and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bucknell University with expertise in pharmacology and genetics. Her research focuses on determining root causes of drug addiction. She is recognized as a distinguished mentor by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for her collaboration in this research with undergraduate students, has been the recipient of numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health, and is the author of a New York Times Bestseller and NB Book of the Month.

Matt Grossmann '01 is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is also senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and contributor at FiveThirtyEight. He is the author of Red State Blues (2019), Asymmetric Politics (with David A. Hopkins, 2016), Artists of the Possible (2014), and The Not-So-Special Interests (2012). He has published research in eighteen scholarly journals and political analysis in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico. He hosts The Science of Politics podcast. 

Grossman received his Ph.D. and M.A., both in political science, from the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated magna cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in 2001 where he majored in government.

Professor Grossman’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Tal Schneider covers the Israeli political scene, Israeli foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, and the Jewish world. Between 2004 and 2009, she served as Ma’ariv’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. Her political blogs have won her the 2012 Google Digital Excellence in Journalism Award and the 2015 Ometz Award for courage in the public sphere. Before embarking on her career in journalism, Schneider worked as a media lawyer in Israel’s leading media law firm, where she was responsible for censorship cases, gag-orders, and libel court litigation. She is a founder and board member of Israel’s Journalism Association, a founding member of Israel Women Reporters Society, and a frequent commentator on Israeli radio and television. She is also a frequent visitor to the United States and will be covering the 2020 presidential campaign (including primaries and both national conventions).

Ms. Schneider’s talk is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Sequence, the department of Religious Studies, the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, and Hillel of the Claremont Colleges.

(Parents Dining Room)

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an assistant professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he is starting a Comics Studies program. He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Titled Unflattening, it argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Humanities, the Lynd Ward Prize for best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work. To date, Unflattening has been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Italian, and Chinese.

Before coming to New York City, he was immersed in Detroit’s arts community, where he co-founded the arts and culture site thedetroiter.com and became the biographer of legendary Detroit artist Charles McGee. He developed and taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools at Teachers College and Parsons in NYC, and Comics as a Way of Thinking at the University of Calgary in Fall of 2015. Since fall 2016, he has been an assistant professor at San Francisco State University.

Sousanis’s work has been featured with reviews and interviews in such places as The Paris Review, The New York Times, the LA Review of Books, PrintMag, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Publishers Weekly, Microsoft’s Daily Edventures, and Russia’s Theory & Practice for the new possibilities for scholarship that it represents. He’s been invited to speak on comics, education, and alternative scholarship at such places as the National Gallery of Art (DC), Stanford University, Harvard’s MetaLab, Microsoft Research (which also hosted an exhibition of the work), and more, along with keynote addresses at the annual conferences of the Visitor Studies Association and the International Visual Literacy Association. His work has been on display in Moscow, the Netherlands, Microsoft Research, and more.

Recent comics include “Against the Flow” and “Upwards” in The Boston Globe, “The Fragile Framework” for Nature in conjunction with the 2015 Paris Climate Accord co-authored with Rich Monastersky, and “A Life in Comics” for Columbia University Magazine – for which he received an Eisner Award for Best Short Story in 2018.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Nick Sousanis

Rokhaya Diallo is a French journalist, writer, filmmaker, and activist for racial, gender, and religious equality. TV host and a pundit on several French and international networks, Diallo is also a contributor to several newspapers and magazines. She has produced and/or has directed TV and radio programs and documentaries including the award-winning Steps to Liberty. She has published Racism: a guide; France Belongs to Us; France: One and Multicultural, How to talk to kids about racism, Afro!; and a graphic novel Pari(s) d'Amies.

Ms. Diallo's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the department of Modern Languages and Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies.

Photo credit: Mario Epanya

(Freeberg Dining)

Jonathan Rosenberg ’83 P ’14 first met Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2000 and finally accepted a job at their company the third time they offered it, more than two years later. He served as senior vice president at Google and ran the Google product team until April 2011. In that expansive role, he oversaw the design, development, and evolution of Google’s products for consumers, advertisers, and partners. He helped develop the company’s hiring processes and was influential in setting its communications and marketing practices. Rosenberg is now an advisor to Alphabet management. Along with the recently released “Trillion Dollar Coach," he is the author, along with Eric Schmidt, of the New York Times best-selling book “How Google Works.”

Prior to joining Google, Rosenberg ran products and services at Excite@Home, managed the eWorld product line for Apple Computer, and directed product marketing for Knight Ridder Information Services.

Rosenberg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics from Claremont McKenna College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.


View Video: You Tube with Jonathan Rosenberg '83 P'14

Trained as a lawyer, Robert Dry served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in the Middle East, East, and Southeast Asia. He teaches international relations at New York University and is at Claremont McKenna College this fall as a Podlich Distinguished Fellow. His research interests include diplomatic studies (the study of diplomacy as an institution of international society), the Persian Gulf, and U.S. foreign policy in that region, and both public and private international law.

Dry began his career at the U.S. Department of State as the judicial assistance officer (practitioner of private international law) and participated in the claims process against Iran following the 1979 Iranian revolution. He implemented aspects of the then just enacted Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. In his first overseas assignment in the Foreign Service, he was posted in the U.S. Interests Section of the Belgium Embassy in Baghdad to serve as consul during the Iran/Iraq war. Subsequent foreign assignments included including Muscat, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Riyadh, Hanoi, Muscat, and Paris, among other postings including in the U.S.at the State Department.

Dry holds a Master of Arts degree in British legal history and classical Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and a J.D. from George Washington University’s National Law Center. In the Foreign Service, Dry studied economics, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian area studies, and successfully tested in Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese.

 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Robert Dry

 

James Kynge is global China editor at the Financial Times, based in Hong Kong. He writes about China's growing global footprint in business, finance and politics. He spent more than 25 years reporting from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as other countries in Asia. 

His bestselling 2009 book, China Shakes the World, forecast that China and the US-led west would be unable to co-exist because of fundamental differences in their political and economic systems and that confrontation was inevitable. 

The recipient of several awards for his work, Kynge recently won the Wincott Foundation's top prize for journalism.

Mr. Kynge's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the International Journalism Program at the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Micheline Ishay is a political scientist known for her work in political theory, international relations, human rights, foreign policy, and the Middle East. She is Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Human Rights at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she serves as director of the International Human Rights Program. She is an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Middle East Studies, was executive director of the Center on Rights Development, and in 2008 was named University of Denver Distinguished Scholar.​

Ishay received a Ph.D. in political science and international studies from Rutgers University. She was a fellow at the Center for Critical Culture and Contemporary Analysis, Rutgers University; assistant professor at Hobart and William Smith College; senior fellow at the Center for Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland (2004); Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University (2006); and visiting professor, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (2010-2013). She was resident fellow at the Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, Italy, Fall 2015. 

Often interviewed in the international press, Ishay frequently contributes to international forums in Europe and the Middle East and lectures on international issues in the U.S. Her books, The History of Human Rights and The Human Rights Reader have been translated into multiple languages. Her latest book, The Levant Express: The Arab Uprisings, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East, was released in August 2019 by Yale University Press. From 2010 to 2013, Ishay worked in the Gulf region from a unique vantage point, as female American scholar in human rights including teaching the first human rights courses in the Arab world just before and throughout the tumultuous events starting in late 2010.

Professor Ishlay’s Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College and the Siam Family Foundation.

​

Heather Ferguson is an associate professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History at Claremont McKenna College. She received an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas-Austin and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. She joined the faculty at CMC in 2011 after completing a two-year postdoctoral position at Stanford University with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and History Departments.

Ferguson is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, 2014-2015, for her book project entitled The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses published by Stanford University Press in June 2018. Currently she is working on a second monograph that explores Sovereign Valedictions: “Last Acts” in Ottoman and Habsburg Courts supported by an NEH Summer Research Stipend. Her research focuses broadly on comparative early modern empires, documentary genres and discourses of power, linkages between archives and state governance, as well as on legal and urban transformations around the Mediterranean. She serves as editor of the Review of Middle East Studies, associate editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and was an inaugural member of the Claremont Faculty Leadership Program.

Brian Collins is department chair and associate professor of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University. His publications include The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2014), The Other Rāma: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Paraśurāma (Forthcoming from SUNY), and the co-edited volume Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic).

Professor Collins's Athenaeum lecture is sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.

(Parents Dining Room)

Directed by Brian Luna '20, the cast includes Diya Courty-Stephens '23 as Pearl & Louis, Sadie Fisher '20 as Melanie, Matthew Hines '22 -as Brandon & Mark, Max Jackman '23 as Tod, Hannah Lak SC '23 as Linda & Mimi, Drew Liptrot PC '22 as Guy, Nandini Mittal '22 as Mary & Sophie, and Alessia Zanobini '23 as Girl. The tech crew includes Amari Huang '23, Grace Soleil Lyde SC' 23.

This special production will be performed on two consecutive nights. Seating is limited to 90 people, in the round, around the stage. 

Ivan Kurilla, Doctor of Sciences, is professor of international relations at European University in St. Petersburg. Kurilla’s major research area is the history of U.S. – Russian relations; he has also conducted research on the problems in the use of history, historical memory, historical politics, and role of historians in contemporary Russia.

Kurilla has authored five books including most recently History: Past in the Present (EU Press, 2017) and Frenemies: History of Opinions, Fantasies, Contacts, Mutual (Mis)understanding between Russia and the USA (NLO, 2018). He has also published numerous articles in leading Russian and international journals, including Journal of American History, Nationalities Papers, Demokratizatsiya, Journal of the Cold War Studies, and Problems of Post-Communism. 

Professor Kurilla’s Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Directed by Brian Luna '20, the cast includes Diya Courty-Stephens '23 as Pearl & Louis, Sadie Fisher '20 as Melanie, Matthew Hines '22 -as Brandon & Mark, Max Jackman '23 as Tod, Hannah Lak SC '23 as Linda & Mimi, Drew Liptrot PC '22 as Guy, Nandini Mittal '22 as Mary & Sophie, and Alessia Zanobini '23 as Girl. The tech crew includes Amari Huang '23, Grace Soleil Lyde SC' 23.

This special production will be performed on two consecutive nights. Seating is limited to 90 people, in the round, around the stage.