Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist voices. An award winning author, Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent. In 2020-2021, he is the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Kendi’s book The Black Campus Movement, won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Kendi is also the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers, How to be An Antiracist, an international bestseller that has been translated in several languages; Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored with Jason Reynolds; and Antiracist Baby, a picture book for children and care-givers, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. How to be An Antiracist made several best books of 2019 lists and was described by the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”

Kendi has published fourteen academic essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. He has published op-eds in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, London Review, Time, Salon, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Paris Review, Black Perspectives, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He comments on multiple international, national, and local media outlets, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeerah, PBS, BBC, Democracy Now, OWN, and Sirius XM. A sought-after public speaker, Kendi has delivered hundreds of addresses over the years at colleges and universities, bookstores, festivals, conferences, libraries, churches, and other institutions in the United States and abroad.

Recipient of many national awards and international accolades, Kendi has taught at universities around the country. Kendi majored in journalism and African American Studies at Florida A & M University; he earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University.  

Professor Kendi’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President’s Leadership Fund.

Photo credit: Stephen Voss

Text adapted from https://www.ibramxkendi.com/about

Sonja Lyubomirsky is Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Psychology at U.C. Riverside and author of “The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness” (published in 36 countries). Lyubomirsky and her research on the science of happiness have been the recipients of many grants and honors, including the Diener Award for Outstanding Midcareer Contributions in Personality Psychology, the Christopher Peterson Gold Medal, and a Positive Psychology Prize.

The majority of her research career has been devoted to studying human happiness. Lyubomirsky asserts that human happiness is an important area of scientific study because most people believe that happiness is meaningful, desirable, and an important, worthy goal; that happiness is one of the most salient and significant dimensions of human experience and emotional life; that happiness yields numerous rewards for the individual; and that happiness makes for a better, healthier, stronger society. Along these lines, her current research addresses three critical questions: 1) What makes people happy? 2) Is happiness a good thing? and 3) How and why can people learn to lead happier and more flourishing lives?

Lyubomirsky is a graduate of Harvard College; she earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University.

Professor Lyubomirsky's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute at CMC.

Photo credit: Josh Blanchard

Jud Brewer, M.D. Ph.D., is an associate professor and the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health; he also serves as a research affiliate at MIT.

A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed clinically proven app-based mindfulness trainings including to help people quit smoking, stop overeating, and reduce anxiety. He is the author of “The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love–Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.”

Brewer is a thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery,” having combined over 20 years of experience with mindfulness training with his own scientific research therein. He has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained U.S. Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED, the New York Times, Time magazine, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, Businessweek and others. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, among others.

Dr. Brewer founded MindSciences to move his discoveries of clinical evidence behind mindfulness for anxiety, eating, smoking and other behavior change into the hands of consumers.

Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is an associate professor of logic and philosophy of science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. O’Connor’s specialties include the philosophy of science, game theory and evolutionary game theory, and agent based modeling.

She is co-administering the NSF Grant Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science. Her book "The Misinformation Age," co-authored with James Owen Weatherall, was published in 2019 with Yale Press, and her book "The Origins of Unfairness" was also published in 2019 with Oxford University Press.

Professor O'Connor's Athenaeum's presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

Henri Cole, the Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, including "Middle Earth," a finalist for the Pulitzer, and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Berlin Prize, the Rome Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Cole was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. He has also published a memoir, Orphic Paris.  His most recent book is Blizzard, was published in summer 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Elizabeth Wydra ’98 is president of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). From 2008-2016, she served as CAC’s chief counsel. Throughout her tenure she has filed more than 200 briefs on behalf of CAC and clients, which include preeminent constitutional scholars and historians, state and local government organizations, groups such as the League of Women Voters and the AARP, and members of Congress.

Wydra has also argued several important cases in the federal courts of appeals on a range of issues, including immigration law, habeas corpus, and sovereign immunity. She joined CAC from private practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco, where she was an attorney working with former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan in the firm’s Supreme Court/appellate practice. Previously, Wydra was a supervising attorney and teaching fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center appellate litigation clinic, a law clerk for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and a lawyer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a law firm in Washington.

Wydra has appeared as a legal expert on multiple television and radio stations and has been frequently quoted in the print media. Her writings have also appeared in many print and online outlets and on numerous political and legal blogs, such as Huffington Post, SCOTUSblog, and ACSblog. She has also published in the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Syracuse Law Review, The Cato Institute’s Supreme Court Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law.

Wyrda received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College.

Elizabeth Beaumont PO '93 is an associate professor of politics and director of Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on constitutionalism and democracy, as well as civic engagement and education. She is particularly interested in problems of unequal citizenship, the relation between citizenship, democracy, and education, and how civic actors seek to shape rights, law, and political power and policy. Beaumont teaches and advises students in the areas of public law and legal studies, political theory, and American political and constitutional development.

Her book, “The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy” (Oxford University Press, 2014), focuses on the role of several major civic groups and social movements in shaping American constitutional creation and change. She examines groups such as 18th century revolutionaries, anti-Federalists, abolitionists, and woman suffragists as "civic founders" who profoundly influenced the Constitution's text, allocations of power, definitions of citizenship, and the meanings of rights. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, the Stanford Law Review, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.

From 2000-2005, Beaumont was a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she helped lead the foundation's work on civic education and engagement, including serving as co-principal investigator and director of the national Political Engagement Project. These interdisciplinary, multi-method research projects are the basis of two co-authored books: “Educating for Democracy” (Wiley 2007) and “Educating Citizens” (Jossey-Bass 2003). The books are resource texts for the American Democracy Project, an AASCU partnership including more than 240 state college campuses, and helped inform the national report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012). Her current research project is titled: Unruly Citizens and the Rule of Law: Civic Dissent, Disobedience, and Protest.

Beaumont is a graduate of Pomona College; she earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Diana Selig, Kingsley Croul Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, will moderate the conversation.

Ms. Wydra and Professor Beaumont’s Athenaeum conversation is sponsored by the Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Program in American Constitutionalism.

Jennifer Anju Grossman, a former senior vice-president at Dole Food Company, has served as CEO of the Atlas Society since March 1, 2016. She has spent much of her career trying to help people to live freer, healthier lives. She launched the Dole Nutrition Institute—a research and education organization—at the behest of Dole Chairman David H. Murdock. She continued this agenda as Health Editor of Laura Ingraham's new lifestyle site, LifeZette. Previously Grossman served as director of education at the Cato Institute, and worked closely with the late philanthropist Theodore J. Forstmann to launch the Children's Scholarship Fund. A speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush, Grossman has written for both national and local publications.

She believes that "the principles of Objectivism, the philosophy rooted in reality, reason, and individualism, has never been more needed — nor more neglected,” and that “this is the perfect moment to help the public rediscover the moral vision of Ayn Rand."

Ms. Grossman's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

(Note: This event had previously been scheduled for Spring 2020.)

John J. Pitney, Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American History and Politics at Claremont McKenna College where he teaches courses on Congress, interest groups, political parties, and mass media. A leading expert on the structure and practice of American politics, Pitney is a widely published author or co-author of six books on American politics, including "The Art of Political Warfare" (2001), "The Politics of Autism: Navigating The Contested Spectrum" (2015), and "After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election" (2019). With Professor Andrew Busch, also of CMC, he is currently writing a book on the 2020 election. In addition to his books, Pitney has published numerous scholarly articles and short essays, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. He is routinely featured on NPR and other television and radio programs. 

Pitney has not only shaped the study of government at Claremont McKenna College for nearly 30 years, he has also helped shape government itself through his many roles, including as the acting director for the Research Department of the Republican National Committee (1990-1991) and as the Senior Domestic Policy Analyst for the US House Republican Research Committee, among other important appointments. 

Pitney holds a B.A. in political science from Union College, where he was co-valedictorian, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. He received the CMC Presidential Award in 2013 and was named one of the 300 best professors in the United States by the Princeton Review in 2012. 

Professor Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow, chair of the government department, and former director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. In addition, he is an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C, where he has worked since 1999 and served as director of the China Program from 2004 to 2008. His research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations. The author of “From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union” (1994), “China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy” (2006), and most recently, “China’s Crony Capitalism” (2016), his work has also been published in magazines and journals such as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly and The Journal of Democracy. He is is frequently heard on BBC News and National Public Radio.