Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Kimberly West-Faulcon is a professor of law and holds the James P. Bradley Chair professorship in Constitutional Law at Loyola Law School where she teaches constitutional law and advanced topics in constitutional law on topics such as originalism, the Second Amendment, equal protection, abortion regulations, and LGBTQIA rights. She is a scholar of constitutional and antidiscrimination law as well as a pioneer in interdisciplinary research of law and standardized testing.

A national expert on structural anti-discrimination civil rights litigation, West-Faulcon began her legal career as a Skadden Fellow and directed the Western Regional Office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). As an LDF attorney, she represented racially diverse classes of clients in innovative and multi-million dollar civil rights cases that challenged practices of defendants such as the University of California at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Police Department, and international clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch.

A graduate of Yale Law School, West-Faulcon was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Stephen R. Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.  

Eugene Volokh is professor of law at UCLA Law School where he teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic; he has also often taught criminal law, copyright law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. In addition to his academic work, he has also filed briefs in about 75 appellate cases throughout the country, has argued in over 20 federal and state appellate cases, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (6th ed. 2016) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 75 widely published and frequently cited law review articles. He is a member of The American Law Institute; a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel; and the founder and co-author of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that was hosted by the Washington Post and is now at Reason Magazine.

A graduate of UCLA Law School, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

This Athenaeum event is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Kimberly West-Faulcon and Eugene Volokh

A two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Tyehimba Jess's first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent." Jess's second book Olio (2016) received the Pulitzer Prize.

A Detroit native, Jess was Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Soulfires: Young Black Men in Love and Violence (1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (2004). He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (2003).

In addition to the Pulitzer, his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. A former artist-in-residence with Cave Canem, Jess has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, as well as a Lannan Writing Residency.

A graduate of the University of Chicago (B.A.) and New York University (MFA), Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the College of Staten Island in New York City.

Mr. Jess's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the literature department, the Africana Studies department, and the President's Leadership Fund. 

(Adapted from the Poetry Foundation)

Food for Thought: Podcast with Tyehimba Jess

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. 

Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time's 100 must-read books for 2020.  Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay. 

A public historian, she also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.) 

Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. 

Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.

View Video: YouTube with Martha S. Jones

Food for Thought: Podcast with Martha S. Jones

Ran “RON” Libeskind-Hadas is the Founding Chair of the Department of Integrated Sciences. Prior to joining CMC in July 2021, he was on the faculty at Harvey Mudd College for 28 years where he served as the chair of the department of computer science and associate dean of faculty. Libeskind-Hadas works, teaches, and writes in the field of computational biology and has developed a number of algorithms and software tools that are widely-used by other researchers in the life sciences. 

When he’s not teaching and doing research, he enjoys cooking and walking with his wife, Laura, mountain biking with his son, Noah, and talking politics with his son, Ben.

View Video: YouTube with Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Ani Hovannisian has been a reporter and anchor on Armenian television for over a decade and is actively involved with the Armenian community in California and worldwide. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Television Academy, and International Documentary Association. 

Over the course of four trips and seven years, Hovannisian completed this documentary born of her daring journeys through the forbidden lands of her ancestral past. While documenting evidence of thousands of years of Armenian creation and ultimate decimation in modern-day Turkey, she met a Scottish explorer who had discovered these mysterious lands 30 years earlier. Ani returned with a tiny team, and together the duo dug beneath the surface, uncovering buried secrets, sacred relics, silenced voices, and the hidden map.

Directed, produced, written, and narrated by Hovannisian, The Hidden Map debuted nationwide on NBCLX the weekend of April 24, 2021 to coincide with Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Several encore presentations followed, including multiple popular PBS SoCal broadcasts. 

Ms. Hovannisian's Athenaeum presentation is the annual Mgrublian Lecture on Armenian Studies and will highlight the history and the journey of her family and the Armenian people – those who survived the genocide and those who did not—and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. 

View Video: YouTube with Ani Hovannisian

Jared Diamond is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author of five best-selling books, translated into 38 languages, about human societies and human evolution: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee, The World until Yesterday, and Upheaval. As a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, he is known for his breadth of interests, which includes conducting research and teaching in three other fields: the biology of New Guinea birds, digestive physiology, and conservation biology. His prizes and honors include the U.S. National Medal of Science (America's highest civilian award in science), the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Science, the MacArthur Genius Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a director of World Wildlife Fund/U.S. and of Conservation International. As a biological explorer, his most widely publicized finding was his rediscovery, at the top of New Guinea’s remote Foja Mountains, of the long-lost Golden-fronted Bowerbird, previously known only from four specimens found in a Paris feather shop in 1895.

Michael Alvarez's research focuses on public opinion and voting behavior, election technology and administration, electoral politics, political campaigns, and statistical and computational modeling. He has long been interested in empirically testing formal models of elections and voting behavior.

Alvarez is the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He is a fellow of the Society for Political Methodology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been recognized for his mentoring work, both at Caltech by the Graduate Student Council (twice) and by the Society for Political Methodology. He also received the Emerging Scholar Award in the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association in 2001.

Alvarez has a BA from Carleton College and a MA and PhD from Duke University.

Andrew Sinclair's research focuses on American politics, with a particular emphasis on political reform.  He is a coauthor, along with Michael Alvarez, of Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Recent work has continued to examine electoral reforms and political behavior, including a paper co-authored with Betsy

Sinclair: "Primaries and Populism: Voter Efficacy, Champions, and Election Rules" (Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2(3) 2021:  365-388).  In addition, he has continued to examine the democratic aspects of reform in public administration, co-authoring with Maya Love and María Gutiérrez-Vera "Federalism, Defunding the Police, and Democratic Values: A Functional Accountability Framework for Analyzing Police Reform Proposals" (Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3) 2021: 484-511). 

A graduate of Claremont McKenna College's class of 2008, before returning CMC as a member of the faculty, Sinclair earned his Ph.D. at Caltech and was clinical assistant professor at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.