Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Mark Juergensmeyer is the William F Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the founding director of global studies and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is a pioneer in the global studies field, focusing on global religion, religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics. He has published more than three hundred articles and twenty books, including the revised and expanded fourth edition of the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (Oxford University Press, 2014). His most recent books are God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford University Press 2020) and When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (University of California Press 2022).
 

Author of nine poetry books including The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection Ledger.

Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The California Book Award, Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. 

In fall 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In March 2019 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages and set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass; her TED-ED animated introduction to metaphor has received over 875,000 views. An intimate and profound master of her art, her frequent appearances at universities, writers’ conferences and festivals in this country and abroad are highly acclaimed. 

Photo credit: Curt Richter

(This event was originally scheduled for March 30, 2020.)

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Mastro is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve as a strategic planner at United States Indo-Pacific Command.

Mastro holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Dr. Mastro’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies and the Salvatori Center, both at CMC.

Aditya Pai ’13
Aditya Pai ’13 is a trial attorney at Rutan & Tucker, LLP., where he represents owners, general contractors, and subcontractors in the construction industry as well as non-profits. He is an Urban Land Institute (ULI) under 35 Young Leader and serves in board advisory roles at Dev/Mission, a youth workforce development non-profit, and Habitat for Humanity Orange County. Prior to entering law practice, Pai interned for Montana Governor Steve Bullock and U.S. Senator Mark Warner. He earned a J.D. from Harvard, M. Phil. from Cambridge, and B.A. from Claremont McKenna College, where he served as manager of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government and student body president. 

Ilan Wurman '09
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.

This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable whose mission it is to inspire public service with additional support from the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Ilan Wurnman '09, Aditya Pai '13, Nohl Patterson '22

Elizabeth Ito has been working as a creator, writer, director, and storyboard artist in the animation industry since 2004 on TV, feature, and commercial projects. She has received an Emmy for her directing work on Adventure Time, and is the co-creator of the award-winning short, Welcome to My Life, the second-most viewed short in Cartoon Network History.

Her first series, City of Ghosts for Netflix premiered in 2021 and won a Peabody Award in 2022. She recently directed a music video for The Linda Linda's and is on an overall deal with Apple TV.

Currently, she is living in Los Angeles, working from home, and trying to stay hydrated.

Ms. Ito’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Elizabeth Ito

Bari Weiss is an opinion writer and editor. She is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award and a Natan Notable Book Award.

In 2021, Bari launched the Common Sense with Bari Weiss Substack newsletter and Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss Bari was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

Weiss has won several awards, including the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times's "star opinion writer" and The Jerusalem Post named her the seventh most influential Jew in the world.

A Pittsburgh native, Weiss ia a graduate of Columbia University. 

Ms. Weiss’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist from Ukraine. She was named Media Freedom Ambassador of Ukraine for her human rights and media work and is one of the winners of the European Institute of Mediterranean literary contest for her reporting.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Anna started writing about the situation in her home country. She has written stories about survivors of Russian-made massacres in Northern Ukraine, the drama of internally displaced people and refugees forced to flee their homes, and volunteers helping others in times of need. She is a part of an investigative team collecting data on human rights violations and crimes against humanity during the Russo-Ukrainian war. 

Interested in audio storytelling and long-reads, Romandash enjoys working on feature stories and reportages which embed and localize the readers in the reality told through the eyes of the protagonists. She is the laureate of the Literary Reportages Award “Samovydets” from the Tempora Publishing House as her stories were named among the best reportages in Ukrainian in 2020 and 2021.

Ms. Romandash’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, both at CMC.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

(Source: http://www.ishionhutchinson.com/)

Mr. Hutchinson’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Photo credit: Neil Watson

Stephanie Muravchik
Stephanie Muravchik is coauthor, with Jon A. Shields, of Trump’s Democrats, which was published in September 2020 by the Brookings Institution Press. It is a political ethnography of three blue strongholds that flipped Republican in the 2016 election. Her research explores the intersections of politics with class, family, and religion. Her first book was American Protestantism in an Age of Psychology (Cambridge, 2011). She teaches government at Claremont McKenna College.

Jon Shields
Jon Shields is a professor of American politics and chair of the government department at Claremont McKenna College. Shields is the author or co-author of three books on the American right, including Trump’s Democrats (with Stephanie Muravchik)(Brookings, 2020) and Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University (Oxford 2016). His writings have also appeared in a wide range of popular outlets, including the Bulwark, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times.

Previously, he taught at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and Cornell University, and he is also a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. 

His latest book on Liz Cheney , on which this talk is based, is co-authored with Stephanie Muravchik.

Joe Soss is the inaugural Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota, where he holds faculty positions in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the department of political science, and the department of sociology. His research and teaching explore the interplay of politics, inequalities, and public policy.

Soss’s work has focused primarily on how various forms of social welfare and criminal justice governance in the U.S. have intersected with class, race, and gender as intersecting axes of oppression and predation. Soss's co-authored book, Disciplining the Poor (2011), was selected for the 2012 Michael Harrington Award (APSA, New Political Science), the 2012 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award (ASA, Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities), the 2012 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award (American Library Association), and the 2015 Herbert Simon Award (APSA, Section on Public Administration).

In 2016, Soss was honored with the University of Minnesota's campus-wide award for outstanding contributions to graduate education, named a Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and inducted into the UMN Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Soss's current book project, co-authored with Joshua Page, is Preying on the Poor: Criminal Justice as Revenue Racket.

PProfessor Soss's Athenaeum presentation is part of the "Race Across Disciplines" series which explores how different academic disciplines approach research, insights, and findings around race and is supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Joe Soss

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and professor of political science at Columbia University.      

Frye worked on a cultural exchange program for the United States Information Agency in six cities in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and advised the Russian Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1990s. He directed the Harriman Institute at Columbia from 2009 to 2015 and co-directed a research laboratory at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2011-2022.

Frye is the editor of Post-Soviet Affairs and the author of four books, most recently Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Pushkin House Prize for best non-fiction book about Russia. He will hold the Library of Congress Chair on US-Russian Relations beginning in January 2023.

Frye earned a B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Middlebury College, an M.A. in International Affairs and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. He taught at The Ohio State University for 8 years before he returned to Columbia University in 2006

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

Food for Thought: Podacast with Timothy Frye

Mark Baldassare is president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California ("PPIC"), where he holds the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Public Policy. He is a leading expert on public opinion and survey methodology, and has directed the PPIC Statewide Survey since 1998. He is an authority on elections, voter behavior, and political and fiscal reform, authoring ten books and numerous reports on these topics. He often provides testimony before legislative committees and state commissions, and regularly hosts PPIC’s Speaker Series, a public forum featuring in-depth interviews with state and national leaders. Previously, he served as PPIC’s director of research. Before joining PPIC, he was a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the Johnson Chair in Civic Governance. He has conducted surveys for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the California Business Roundtable. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Baldassare's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC. 

John Fund
John Fund is national affairs columnist for National Review magazine, a contributor to Fox News.com, and an on-air analyst for Newsmax TV. He is an often-quoted expert on the interconnections between politics and economics.

He previously served as a columnist and editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. for 27 years.  

He is the author or co-author of several books, including Our Broken Elections: How The Left Changed The Way You Vote (2021), Obama's Enforcer: Eric Holder (2014), Who's Counting(2012); and Cleaning House: America's Campaign For Term Limits (1994).

Born in Tucson, Arizona, he worked as a research analyst for the California Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. He has reported on foreign affairs from over 40 countries. 

Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, called him "the Tom Paine of the modern Congressional reform movement." He has won awards from the Institute for Justice, The Competitive Enterprise Institute and The Fund for American Studies. 

Gowri Ramachandran
Gowri Ramachandran serves as senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy program. Her work focuses on election security, election administration, and combatting election disinformation.

Before joining the Brennan Center, she was professor of law at Southwestern Law School, in Los Angeles where she taught courses in constitutional law, employment discrimination, critical race theory, and the Ninth Circuit Appellate Litigation Clinic. Her work has been published in Election Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, and Yale Law Journal online, among others.

She serves on the Ninth Circuit’s Fairness Committee, which considers racial, religious, gender, and other disparities in the administration of justice.

Ramachandran received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Yale College and a master’s degree in statistics from Harvard University. While in law school, she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from law school in 2003, Ramachandran served as law clerk to Judge Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Billings, Montana.

(Source: https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/gowri-ramachandran)

This event is co-sponsored by the Jerome H. Garris Dialogue Series at CMC with additional support from the Open Academy and the Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America, all at CMC.

Jesse Washington is a journalist and documentary filmmaker for ESPN’s Andscape, a Black-led media platform dedicated to creating, highlighting, and uplifting the diverse stories of Black identity. He is the co-author of I Came as a Shadow which details the life of the late and legendary Georgetown basketball coach, John Thompson; he is author of the novel Black Will Shoot. Washington is currently writing the autobiography of the sports agent Rich Paul.

With a long career in journalism and writing, Washington has been, since 2015, a senior writer for ESPN's The Undefeated, a platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports, and culture that created the basis for Andscape. He has won a National Journalism Award from the Asian-American Journalists Association, Journalist of the Year award from the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, two feature awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, and a 2019 Associated Press Sports Editors Top 10 award for column writing.

Washington has a B.A. in English from Yale University. A lifelong member of the Baha'i Faith, he notes that he still gets buckets.

Mr. Washington’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Alex Ehrlich, CEO of startup financial services company Percapita Group, is building an institution that aims to confront the historic lack of diversity in financial services, and to serve well the consumers across America whose economic needs are greatest. 

Ehrlich spent forty years on Wall Street: Starting at Goldman Sachs (1979-2003), he then moved to UBS (2003-09), and finally to Morgan Stanley (2009-20). He served as a managing director of all three companies and led or co-headed numerous large and highly successful businesses. At Morgan Stanley, he chaired the Diversity Council of that firm’s Investment Bank; it was this work that led him to retire from traditional banking, and seek the business model, partners, and capital that would enable Percapita to launch in early 2023.

Ehrlich also serves on the national boards of iMentor and ThanksUSA, and is a Non-Executive Director of Sharegain PLC. He has for many years been a frequent lecturer on culture, leadership, and diversity.

Mr. Ehrlich's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.