Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum
A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC
Current Semester Schedule
Unless otherwise noted, lunch begins at 11:45 a.m.; speaker presentations begin at 12:15 p.m. Evening receptions begin at 5:30 p.m; dinner is served at 6 p.m; speaker presentations begin at 6:45 p.m.
Councilmember Lindsey P. Horvath was elected to the West Hollywood City Council on March 3, 2015. She previously served as a councilmember for two years from 2009-2011, and as mayor from April 2015 to April 2016.
Horvath is widely known for her leadership on women’s issues. As an elected official, she led West Hollywood to create its first-ever community response team to domestic violence and to be the first city in California to take action in recent efforts on sexual harassment best practices and reporting procedures. She also serves as a global coordinator for One Billion Rising, a global campaign of the V-Day movement to end violence against women and girls. She is an advocate for A Window Between Worlds, UN Foundation, Running Start, and CARE.
Horvath was first appointed to the West Hollywood Women's Advisory Board in 2007, focusing on the issues facing women and families in West Hollywood, and has collaborated with community leaders and organizations in successfully advocating for the full funding of the backlog of untested rape kit evidence in the city and county of Los Angeles. She previously served in leadership for a variety of organizations, including as president of the Hollywood Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) LA-Westside as well as Young Feminist VP of California NOW.
In addition to her service as an elected official, Horvath works as an entertainment advertising executive, and has created award-winning campaigns for movies and television. She graduated cum laude with a B.A. in political science and gender studies from the University of Notre Dame.
Councilmember Horvath is the keynote speaker for the inaugural Elect Her workshop sponsored by a grant from the Women and Gender Leadership Fund at CMC.
Jelani Cobb, staff writer at the New Yorker and professor of journalism at Columbia University, writes about the enormous complexity of race in America. In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns for combining “the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian." He is also the recipient of the 2017 Walter Bernstein Award from the Writer’s Guild of America for his investigative series Policing the Police, which aired on PBS Frontline in 2016.
Cobb was formerly associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Africana Studies Institute. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations. He is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. His forthcoming book is Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931.
Mr. Cobb is CMC's 2018 MLK Commemorative Speaker and his talk is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Lars Schoultz, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science, received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His area of special interest is inter‑American relations.
Schoultz has held a Fulbright‑Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Buenos Aires to study Argentine electoral behavior, two postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council to study United States policy toward Latin America, and a Ford Foundation grant to study U.S. immigration policy. He has been a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and held residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the National Humanities Center. Schoultz is the recipient of the Tanner Award (1982), the Class of 1994 Award (1994), and the William Friday Award (2006), all for teaching excellence, and he is a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Grail/Valkyries, both student honoraries.
A prolific author, his books include Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1981), The Populist Challenge: Argentine Electoral Behavior in the Postwar Era (1983), National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America (1987), Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (1998), That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (2009), and In Their Own Best Interests: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (forthcoming 2018). Other scholarly writings have appeared in The American Political Science Review, The American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Latin American Research Review, and Political Science Quarterly.
Amal Kassir is a Syrian-American spoken word poet and artist. Born in Denver, Colorado, she comes from a "dinner table of tabouleh and meat loaf, Syrian father and Iowan-German mother, best meals of both worlds."
As a university student, Kassir designed her own undergraduate degree called ‘Community Programming in Social Psychology’ which combines child psychology, writing, and education to develop curricula for refugee children with trauma. A strong proponent for education, she is dedicated to building individual agency particularly in under-served and vulnerable populations by emphasizing the power of writing.
Kassir has performed in 10 countries and over 45 cities and has conducted workshops, given lectures, and recited her poetry in venues ranging from youth prisons to orphanages, from refugee camps to universities, from churches to community spaces. She hopes to take part in the global effort for literacy in war-struck areas and refugee camps and runs a project called More than Metaphors that focuses on the education initiative for displaced Syrian children.
Recipient of multiple awards including as winner of the Grand Slam at the Brave New Voices International Youth Competition, Kassir has performed on the TED stage and been featured on the PBS NewsHour.
When she is not studying or performing, she waitresses at her family’s Syrian restaurant in Denver.
A senior analyst for CNN and staff writer for The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin is noted as one of the country’s most esteemed experts on politics, media, and the law. The author of critically acclaimed best sellers, Toobin delved into the historical, political and personal inner workings of the Supreme Court and its justices in his books The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court and The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. His recent book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, was released in August 2016, and examines the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst.
After a six-year tenure at ABC News, where he covered the country’s highest-profile cases and received a 2000 Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elian Gonzales custody saga, Toobin joined CNN as a legal analyst in 2002 where he now serves as the senior legal analyst. Also a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1993, he has written articles on such subjects as the Bernie Madoff scandal, the case of Roman Polanski, and penned profiles of Justices Clarence Thomas, Steve Breyer, John Paul Stevens, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Prior to joining The New Yorker, Toobin served as an assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn, New York. He also served as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh.
Toobin received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Mr. Toobin is the Spring 2018 speaker for the Res Publica Society Speaker Series.
Photo credit: Great Talent Network
Jack Glaser is a social psychologist who studies racial bias in criminal justice. His research on implicit bias, motivation to control prejudice, and racial profiling reside at the nexus of psychological science and policing. In particular, he investigates the unconscious operation of stereotypes and prejudice using computerized reaction time methods, and is investigating the implications of such subtle forms of bias in law enforcement and he is interested in racial profiling, especially as it relates to the psychology of stereotyping, and the self-fulfilling effects of such stereotype-based discrimination.
Glaser received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1999 and joined the faculty of UC.. Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy in 2000. In addition to teaching and research, he is currently serving as the associate dean at the Goldman School. He is also a principal investigator on the National Justice Database, funded by NSF and Google.org and the author of Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling (Oxford, 2015).
Jo Scott-Coe is an associate professor of English composition, literature, and creative writing at Riverside City College. She is also an independent researcher on themes of gender, sexuality, and violence–in education and elsewhere. Her writing about an 8-year legal case of student-on-teacher sexual bullying and harassment appears in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press).
Scott-Coe is also the author of Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute) and MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest (forthcoming in April 2018). Her first-ever portrait of Kathy Leissner Whitman, “Listening to Kathy” (Catapult), received a Notable listing in Best American Essays. Scott-Coe's nonfiction has appeared in American Studies Journal, Pacific Coast Philology, Tahoma Literary Review, Talking Writing, Cultural Weekly, Superstition Review, Fourth Genre, Salon, and many other publications.
Professor Scott-Coe's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Lynn Novick is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. For nearly 30 years, she has been producing and directing films about American history and culture, among them some of the most acclaimed and top-rated documentaries to have aired on PBS. Her works include Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright and The War, a seven part, 15-hour exploration of ordinary Americans’ experiences in World War II.
The Vietnam War, Novick’s newest project co-directed by long-time partner Ken Burns, first aired on PBS in September 2017. An immersive, 10-part, 18-hour epic, it is the first major documentary assessment in a generation of one of the most divisive and consequential events in American history. A groundbreaking 360-degree exploration of the war, the series features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from all sides of the issue.
Novick is currently working on a two-part biography of Ernest Hemingway, co-directed by Burns and slated for completion in 2020, and College Behind Bars, a feature length documentary produced by Sarah Botstein, about a group of men and women imprisoned in New York State for serious crimes, struggling to earn degrees in a rigorous liberal arts college program, the Bard Prison Initiative. College Behind Bars asks several essential questions: What is prison for? Who in America has access to educational opportunity? Can we have justice without redemption? The film will air on PBS in 2018.
Ms. Novick's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' Lerner Lectureship in 1960s' Culture Fund.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Walt previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and deputy dean of Social Sciences. He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and serves as co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.
Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007). He is currently working on a book about why U.S. foreign policy keeps failing.
Professor Walt is the 2018 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and his Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Lauren Faber O’Connor is the chief sustainability officer for the City of Los Angeles. In this role, she is driving the implementation of LA’s landmark Sustainable City pLAn, released in April 2015, which puts forth an actionable vision for transforming LA's environment, economy, and equity. Working with every city department and outside stakeholders, O'Connor focuses on strategic integration of the pLAn's pillars in order to achieve the city's short and long-term goals, ensure benefits accrue to all communities in LA, and pursue regional and international collaborations including Climate Mayors, a coalition of nearly 400 US mayors committed to US leadership on climate change.
Prior to joining the Garcetti Administration, O'Connor served for four years as the West Coast political director for the Environmental Defense Fund ("EDF") in San Francisco. At EDF, she worked on building successful strategies and constructive partnerships to win support on innovative approaches to protecting and promoting climate, clean energy, land, water, and wildlife. In 2010 O'Connor was appointed to assistant secretary for Climate Change Programs at the California Environmental Protection Agency, where she was dedicated to the design and implementation of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32. Prior to her work at CalEPA, she served as senior director for Lighthouse Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., where she advised on comprehensive national climate change and energy strategies for domestic and international companies, and non-government organizations, and in particular, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. From 2005-2009, she served at the British Embassy as senior policy advisor for climate change and energy.
O'Connor serves on the Board of the California League of Conservation Voters and the U.S. Department of Energy State Energy Advisory Board. She is a member of the Catto Fellowship for environmental leadership at the Aspen Institute and of the Truman National Security Project. She holds a bachelor’s degree in earth systems and economics from Stanford University, and master’s degree in Climate and Society from Columbia University.
Ms. O'Connor is the keynote speaker for CMC's fourth annual Green Careers Conference sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center.
A prominent dissident during the communist period in Poland, Adam Michnik spent six years as a political prisoner. In the 1970s, he was a founding member of the Committee for the Defense of Workers, and of the Flying University, an underground network that brought together intellectuals and worker activists. Michnik was a key Solidarity activist throughout the 1980s and a negotiator for the Solidarity team during the Roundtable Talks in 1989 that brought communist rule in Poland to a peaceful end. Between 1989 and 1991, he served in the Sejm, Poland's Parliament.
Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's first post-socialist independent daily. He is the author of many books, including Letters from Freedom: Post Cold War Realities and Perspectives (UC Press, 1998), The Church and the Left (1991), Letters from Prison and Other Essays (UC Press, 1986), and, most recently of In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe (2011).
Mr. Michnik's will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2018 Golo Mann Lecture.
Miry Whitehill started Miry's List in July, 2016 when she accidentally met a family of newly arrived Syrian refugees through a friend. Until then, she was a stay-at-home mom and community activist with over 10 years of experience in digital marketing.
As of December 2017, Miry's List has helped more than 250 families resettling from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Kurdistan. In 2018, Miry's List plans to enroll an additional 500 families into the program and launch an app in partnership with Microsoft to streamline and automate the model and roll out Miry's List programming to every refugee resettlement city in America.
Ms. Whitehill's Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Berger Institute and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Sequence.
Photo credit: Christopher Patey
Join current CMC sophomores, juniors, and seniors for an engaging and thoughtful evening of dining and dialogue. The Great Conversation is a program designed to foster discussion by engaging people in the topics that matter most to them. Each table will feature a different topic, chosen by a student, who will facilitate the conversation. The format allows all attendees to be active participants. Topics may draw from any area of life, from arts and literature, history, religion, and public policy, to popular culture or campus life.
For more information and to sign up, please go to https://online.cmc.edu/the-great-conversation
Anoush Baghdassarian is a 2017 CMC graduate who dual majored in psychology and Spanish with a sequence in Holocaust and human rights studies. While at CMC, she made the most of the opportunities at the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, working with asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking, holocaust survivors, and scholars on genocide and crimes against humanity. She was invited to international conferences like Poland's Model International Criminal Court, and presented her research at UCLA's Undergraduate Colloquium in Armenian Studies. With the help of the Mgrublian Center, Anoush has interned at various human rights organizations throughout her undergraduate career including the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.
In addition to these experiences, Anoush is a published author of a historical fiction play about the Armenian Genocide entitled FOUND which has been presented at book events in California, New York, Uruguay, and Argentina, as well as has been produced for stage productions in New York and California (including at the Athenaeum). She has also written a play in Spanish about Argentina's last military dictatorship, and is in the beginning stages of writing a play about the experience of Syrian-Armenians as her Action Project for the Humanity in Action fellowship based on the testimonies she collected this summer through a Davis Projects for Peace Grant.
Next month, Anoush will return to Armenia to intern with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and continue to document the testimonies of Syrian-Armenian refugees. With the goal of working on international cases of genocide, forced migration, and crimes against humanity, Anoush plans to continue her education. She will pursue a Masters in Human Rights Studies in September of 2018 before attending law school the following year to study human rights law.
Anoush is extremely humbled to have received this unique and invaluable opportunity to return to speak at the Athenaeum and give back to the institution that helped to shape her interests and make this research possible.
Anoush's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Peter Maier '49 GP'21 GP'21 received a B.A. with honors in economics from Claremont McKenna College, a Juris Doctor degree from UC Berkeley, and a Masters of Law in Taxation from NYU.
From 1965, Peter Maier was a senior partner of Winokur, Maier & Zang, a San Francisco tax law firm, and chairman and founder of Property Resources, Inc., now a division of Franklin Resources. Maier was also professor of law at the Hastings College of the Law from 1967 to 1995.
In 1981, he was co-founder of Wood Island Associates, an SEC-registered investment advisory firm. This company was purchased in 1998 by U.S. Trust Company and he became a managing director of U.S. Trust. Maier also co-founded a real estate investment advisory firm in 1981 that eventually also became a division of U.S. Trust Company. In 2005, Peter reacquired the securities firm from U.S. Trust and renamed the company “Private Wealth Partners, LLC.” Maier now serves as it chairman.
Maier is active in various charitable organizations: he is chairman of the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco and is president of the John B. Huntington Foundation. In addition, he serves as a trustee of the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Fund, the University of San Francisco and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco.
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and senior advisor to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. He is executive editor of the widely-read New Geography website and writes the weekly “New Geographer” column for Forbes.com. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Beast and Real Clear Politics. The author of seven books, Kotkin has been described by the New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.”
Mr. Kotkin’s talk is sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.
Candace Adelberg ‘10 graduated from CMC in 2010 where she studied economics and did research at the Lowe Institute of Political Economy. After graduation, Adelberg moved to Washington D.C., where she worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, focusing on quantitative methods for macroeconomic forecasting. In 2013, she started working as a researcher at Google, applying statistical methods to keep “bad guys” off of Google products (think of spam bots, phishing attacks, etc.). In 2017, she moved to X, Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory”, and joined Project Loon. Project Loon aims to provide high-speed internet to the roughly 50% of the world who still lack basic coverage. To do this, they deploy and steer a fleet of stratospheric balloons that provide LTE service to rural areas or areas where networks have been taken out by natural disasters.
Alicia Rockmore ’87 is the founder & CEO of Spark Actions which she launched after the November 2016 elections as a way to make a difference. Rockmore has over 20 years of experience in marketing and brand management both in traditional CPG companies and in startups. Before starting Spark Actions, she was the senior vice president of marketing at Divy, a startup in Fin Tech for millennials, the head of innovation for Jackson (a subsidiary of Prudential plc) and the senior vice president of marketing UberMedia (an idea lab company). She also has significant consumer packaged goods management experience at Unilever (in US and Europe) and at General Mills. She was responsible for launching the first packaged goods website ever and was named by Ad Age as a Top 100 Marketer. She also co-founded Buttoned Up Inc, an organizational products company, named as one of the best small companies to work for by Working Women’s Magazine. A graduate of CMC and received her MBA from the University of Michigan.
Faye Sahai ’90 is recognized as an innovation leader and catalyst for strategic initiatives across multiple companies such as AIG, Blue Shield, Deloitte, Charles Schwab, and Kaiser Permanente. She currently serves as the global head of advanced technology & innovation and employee experience at AIG, one of the world’s largest insurance companies. In addition, she serves as the AIG executive advisor of Global Women in Technology and UP Upward Professionals and Women Executive Leaders Initiative, and global inclusion and diversity task force. She serves on AIG’s global extended leadership team and is also part of the Conference Board’s applied innovation group. Sahai has been an innovation adviser to companies, start-ups and accelerators and serves on the many boards. She was named as Insurance Business Hot 100 in 2017, Elite Women in Insurance Business America in 2017, Ascend Leadership Award in 2017, and Computer World’s Top Premier IT Leaders in 2015 and she received Innovation Enterprise Best Ideation award in 2014. She received her BA in economics and psychology from Claremont McKenna College and her MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America.
Before joining Harvard, she was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the first African American faculty member to be appointed to the Institute that was Einstein’s home for two decades. She is also a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.
Allen is the author of six books, including Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, which won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and CUZ :The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017)
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a 2001 winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Professor Allen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Photo credit: Laura Rose
Panel I: 9 am-10:15 am
Is Free Speech Central to Higher Education?
Damon Linker, The Week/University of Pennsylvania
Lily Geismer, CMC
Peter Schuck, Yale Law School
Steven Hayward, Berkeley
Panel 2: 10:25 am-11:40 am
Contemporary Challenges
Diana Selig, CMC
John Tomasi, Brown University
Peter Eliasberg, ACLU
Daniel Farber, Berkeley Law
Lunch/Student Panel: 12:35 pm-1:35 pm
Student Presentation of Campus Survey on Free Speech
Romi Ferder, CMC ‘20
Charles Harris, CMC ‘19
Sophia Helland, CMC ‘20
Joseph Noss, CMC ‘20
Panel 3: 2:30 pm-3:45 pm
Liberal Education and Free Speech
Mark Blitz, CMC
Aurelian Craiutu, Indiana University
Roosevelt Montas, Columbia University
Susan McWilliams, Pomona College
The Free Speech on Campus conference is sponsored by the Salvatori Center in collaboration with Berkeley Law.
To sign up for the lunch please visit the Salvatori Center event page.
Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons
Yve-Alain Bois, professor of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is a specialist in twentieth-century European and American art. Bois is recognized as an expert on a wide range of artists, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly. Bois is currently working on several long-term projects, foremost among them the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, the second volume out of a planned five volumes.
Professor Bois' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his research and teaching focus on colonial North America and on Native American history before 1800. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia, and he has been a visiting professor at Columbia University. He served as acting chair of Penn's History Department in 2013-2014. A prolific writer, Richter is currently researching English colonization during the Restoration era, for a book tentatively titled The Lords Proprietors: Feudal Dreams in English America, 1660-1689, under contract with Harvard University Press.
John A. Pérez is the current vicechair of the University of California Board of Regents. He was elected to the California Assembly in November 2008, representing downtown Los Angeles and communities of East Los Angeles. In January 2010, his colleagues elected him California's 68th Assembly Speaker. He was subsequently reelected in 2010 and 2012, making him one of the longest serving Speakers in the era of term limits. Prior to his service in the Assembly, Pérez was a lifetime member of the labor movement.
Mr. Pérez's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.
Robert Malley P'20 is CEO and president at the International Crisis Group based in Washington, D.C.
Malley has served in multiple capacities for two presidential administrations. He was the Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region in 2015-2016; prior to that he was Senior Director for the Gulf Region and Syria. As the most senior White House official focused on the Middle East, he advised the President, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, coordinated government-wide efforts to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and was the lead White House negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal as well as for international talks on the Syrian civil war, including negotiations with the Russian Federation. He also oversaw the National Security Council staff's work on the broad range of Middle East issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to relations with Gulf states. He earned the State Department's Distinguished Service Award in 2016.
Before joining the National Security Council staff in February 2014, Malley founded and directed the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program from January 2002. Prior to that, he was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Until January 2001, Malley was special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. In this capacity, he served as a principal advisor to the President and the National Security Advisor at the White House on the Middle East peace process.
Malley first joined the National Security Council staff in August 1994 as Director for Democracy. He helped coordinate U.S. refugee policy and efforts to promote democracy and human rights abroad. He also played a leading role in U.S. policy toward Cuba. In July 1997, he became Executive Assistant to the National Security Advisor from July 1997 to September 1998, acting as an informal chief of staff for Samuel R. Berger. Malley served as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court in 1991-1992.
Malley is a graduate of Yale University, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of “The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam” and, with Hussein Agha, of several articles, including “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” “The Last Negotiation”, “Three Men in a Boat” and “Hamas – The Perils of Power”, "The Arab Counter-Revolution." He has published articles in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, and several other publications.
Mr. Malley's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund and the Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC.
Multiple private corporate entities vie for our attention and serve as catalysts both for powerful grassroots movements and for debilitating echo chambers. With more and more Americans receiving their news from these sites, private companies have amassed the ability to algorithmically alter our moods, opinions, and even conceptions of the world around us.
The Claremont Radius along with The Student Life and The Claremont Independent will explore the ethics and potential of this new era of information and human communication. Through a collaborative effort, these student groups aim to provide a comprehensive discussion of the issues relevant not only to markets, politics, and livelihoods, but also to personal lives, at the mercy of tweets.
The panelists will cover many related topics including the importance of face to face communication, the potential and danger of online politics, the role of corporations in influencing both social and political movements through these channels, and the changing nature of information, politics, and our daily lives.
At ConsenSys Ventures, Kavita Gupta heads a unique VC-Hedge Fund, investing in next-generation Ethereum Blockchain technologies revolutionizing current systems. Gupta is a recipient of the UN Social Finance Innovator Award in 2015 for being an integral part of the founding Green Bond team at The World Bank. Over her 16 year career, she has set up innovative investment funds across East Africa, Middle East, South Asia, and most recently in the US through World Bank, IFC, McKinsey, and The Schmidt Family Office. Previously she ran a $250M fund aligned with UN SDGs, infusing capital into projects that would provide first-time or low-cost access to technologies around the world. She also founded and headed the World Bank's first innovation fund in 2010, and led mission investing for the family foundation of Alphabet Inc.'s executive chairman Eric Schmidt. She sits on the board of advisors of various accelerators and foundations across the world including Google's Social Track accelerator, MIT Solve, Vatican's Right Now Foundation for Impact Investments, the Mandela Foundation and others.
She is an MIT and Media Lab alum.
Ms. Gupta’s Athenaeum event is hosted by the CMC Student Investment Fund and co-sponsored by Financial Economics Institute at CMC.
Ronald Klain has devoted many years to public service, most recently as White House Ebola Response Coordinator (2014-15). Earlier, Klain served as a senior White House aide to President Obama responsible for implementing the Recovery Act, and as chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2011. He has also served as chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore, chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno, staff director of the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee, and chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Klain was also associate counsel to President Clinton in charge of judicial selection.Through his work on the Judiciary Committee and in the Executive Branch, Klain has played a role in the selection or confirmation of eight Supreme Court Justices. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Justice Byron White, for the Supreme Court’s 1987 and 1988 terms.
Klain gained national notice as general counsel for the Gore Recount Committee in 2000, in recognition of which he was selected as one of National Law Journal's "Lawyers of the Year," and featured in HBO's film "RECOUNT." He has worked on seven presidential campaigns, serving as a top debate preparation advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton, and Democratic Presidential nominees Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.
Klain now serves as executive vice president and general counsel of Revolution LLC, an investment firm launched by AOL Co-Founder Steve Case in 2005. Prior to joining Revolution, Klain spent four years as a partner and National Practice Group Chair at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where his practice focused on constitutional and commercial litigation, competition-related litigation in the technology sector, redistricting and election law, and corporate transactions.
Klain is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, won the Sears Prize for highest grade average in 1985, and serves as al lecturer in law. He was a summa cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, where has served since 2011 as an adjunct professor.
Mr. Klain is the featured speaker for CMC’s 2018 Family Weekend.
Founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and presidential fellow at Chapman University, Michael Shermer, Ph.D., is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things,The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, and The Moral Arc.
Shermer regularly contributes opinion editorials, essays, and reviews to: the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, and other publications. He appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Oprah, and Larry King Live. He has been interviewed in numerous documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. His two TED talks, seen by millions, were voted in the top 100.
Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979, also teaching at Occidental College, Glendale College, and Claremont Graduate University, where he taught a transdisciplinary course for Ph.D. students on evolution, economics, and the brain.
Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and became the magazine’s music critic in 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the downtown avant-garde, and has also contributed essays on pop music, literature, twentieth-century history, and gay life. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Mr. Ross's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Photo credit: David Michalek
Thomas Miller is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC where he studies health care policy, including regulatory barriers to choice and competition, market-based alternatives to the Affordable Care Act, health care litigation, and the political economy of health care reform. As a former senior health economist for the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, Miller was previously a trial attorney and a journalist. Miller has testified before Congress on the uninsured, health care costs, Medicare cost sharing, high-risk pools, health care competition, health insurance tax credits, and the individual mandate.
N. Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. As a student, he studied economics at Princeton University and MIT. As a teacher, he has taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics, and principles of economics. He even spent one summer long ago as a sailing instructor on Long Beach Island.
Mankiw is a prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. His published articles have appeared in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and in more widely accessible forums, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
He has written two popular textbooks—the intermediate-level textbook Macroeconomics (Worth Publishers) and the introductory textbook Principles of Economics (Cengage Learning); the latter has sold over two million copies and has been translated into twenty languages.
In addition to his teaching, research, and writing, Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and a member of the ETS test development committee for the advanced placement exam in economics. From 2003 to 2005 he served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
Professor Mankiw's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute (FEI) at CMC.
Archana Sahgal '99 is a former Obama White House official and CMC alumna. She works at the intersection of politics and movement building to create social change. Sahgal’s network has helped her navigate the opportunities and challenges along the way.
Sahgal has spent two decades designing and executing strategies for achieving policy reform and social change within the philanthropic, nonprofit, and public sectors. She served in the Obama White House as senior associate director for public engagement where she led stakeholder engagement with organized labor and progressive advocates around President Obama's policy priorities. She also served at the U.S. Department of Commerce as director of advisory committees and industry outreach where she oversaw the President's Export Council, President's Advisory Committee on Doing Business in Africa, U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board, and over a dozen other advisory committees. Most recently she served as senior advisor at the Democracy Alliance, one of the country’s largest drivers of activist progressive philanthropy where she led the investment strategy to protect democratic norms and principles in this new political era.
Sahgal also worked with other foundations and philanthropic efforts across the country including The San Francisco Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, Proteus Fund, The Progressive Era Project, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations directing over $15 million in resources to push for immigration reform. Sahgal also built The Civic Engagement Fund, the first ever fund supporting Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities. Her work has also been profiled in the New York Times, Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, and WNYC. She served on the board of directors of the Korematsu Institute, Californians for Justice, and South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (SAALT).
Sahgal received her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College (’99) and J.D. from University of California Davis School of Law. She is a member of the State Bar of California.
Ms. Sahgal's talk is co-sponsored by Women's Leadership Alliance, Kravis Leadership Institute, Berger Institute, and Robert Day Scholars and is part of the "Behind the Veil: Women, Race, Leadership, and Social Change in the Nonprofit Sector” (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first-person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the front lines of social change. To register for the Women and Leadership Workshop, including the lunch keynote, please visit the online registration page
Sean Hagan P'20 is general counsel and director of the legal department at the International Monetary Fund. In this capacity, Hagan advises the Fund’s management, executive board, and membership on all legal aspects of the Fund’s operations, including its regulatory, advisory and lending functions. Hagan has published extensively on both the law of the Fund and a broad range of legal issues relating to the prevention and resolution of financial crisis, with a particular emphasis on insolvency and the restructuring of debt, including sovereign debt.
Prior to his tenure at the IMF, Hagan was in private practice, first in New York and subsequently in Tokyo. He received his Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center and also received a Masters of Science in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Coming of age as the son of a Baptist pastor in rural Arkansas, Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted by his sexuality; he had never even met another gay person. At age nineteen, his worst fear came true when he was outed to his parents. They gave him an ultimatum: he could either be shipped to a “conversion therapy” facility in a hope to “cure” him of his homosexuality, or he would lose his family, his friends, and his God. He chose the facility, a decision that would lead him through a brutally institutional Twelve-Step Program. He was supposed to emerge cleansed of impure urges, stronger in his Christian faith, and—most importantly—heterosexual. Instead, Conley developed the strength to search for his true identity and to forgive his family.
Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, traces the complex relationships between identity, faith, and community. A humane, poetic glimpse at a world hidden to many, Conley shows all sides of his family—good and bad—with courage and compassion, even as he depicts his own story of survival.
Boy Erased thrust Conley onto the national stage as the public gained increasing awareness of conversion therapy facilities. It is currently being adapted as a film by Focus Features with Joel Edgerton directing. A popular speaker, he lectures at schools and venues across the country on radical compassion, writing through trauma, and what it means to grow up gay in the South. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Writers’ Conferences and has facilitated classes for Catapult, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. He is also currently the memoir instructor for GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program. His work can be found in TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Huffington Post, among other places, and he was recently named a Lambda Award Finalist for memoir/autobiography.
Photo credit: Colin Boyd Shafer
Marianne Haver Hill supervises a team that works with more than 500 stakeholder groups in the implementation of Propel LA which includes seven large goals around investing in people and workforce development, promoting trade and industry clusters, accelerating innovation, creating a business-friendly environment, supporting infrastructure development, enhancing global connectedness, and supporting livable communities.
Previously, Hill served from 1987 - 2016 as the President and CEO of MEND—Meet Each Need with Dignity, the largest and most comprehensive poverty relief agency in the San Fernando Valley. Under her leadership, MEND grew from serving an average of 2,000 needy clients each month to helping an average of 37,000 applicants monthly, utilizing a volunteer work force of more than 5,000 and a staff team of 34 individuals. In July 2012, MEND was named the California Nonprofit of the Year by the Governor’s Office for Volunteering and Service.
Hill is the recipient of the 2017 Valley Economic Alliance Valley of the Stars Leadership Award, the 2013 Center for Nonprofit Management Leadership Impact Award, the 2008 California Association of Nonprofits Excellence in Leadership Award, and several other commendations. She has been an adjunct instructor in nonprofit management at the USC Price School of Public Policy.
B. Cole holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and has worked as a community facilitator and strategist for more than 15 years. Drawing on her experience as a consultant, Cole launched the Brown Boi Project in 2010. Cole introduced the term “masculine of center,” which is now being used to forward understanding of the incredible breadth of masculinity within the queer community. A Black Male Achievement Echoing Green Fellow, Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar, and recipient of the Spirit of Delores Huerta Award, Cole has worked across the U.S. and internationally on issues of leadership development and building social capital for young people of color.
B. Cole's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the Kravis Leadership Institute, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Ben Tumin is a filmmaker and comedian born, raised, and based in New York. He worked at Amnesty International in Morocco and the community building platform Meetup before forging an independent career in political comedy and filmmaking. His work has been featured in The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera, and The Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC). Tumin is a 2012 graduate of Pomona College where he majored in history.
Mixing information about the refugee crisis with clips from interviews conducted with Scott Cooper, a retired marine working in human rights advocacy, and five young Syrians living in Germany, Tumin takes a different look at the impact of refugee resettlement, particularly from the perspective of national security. Through anecdotes about his grandfather — himself once a refugee — Tumin weaves in his connection to the cause and pieces together what he has learned about himself, his country, and the questions that remain.
Mr. Tumin's talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Cheryl L. Dorsey is the president of Echoing Green, a global organization seeding and unleashing next-generation talent to solve the world’s biggest problems. Prior to leading this social impact organization, Dorsey was herself a social entrepreneur and received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1992 to help launch The Family Van, a community-based mobile health unit in Boston. She later became the first Echoing Green Fellow to head the social venture fund in 2002.
An accomplished leader and entrepreneur, she has served in two presidential administrations as a White House Fellow and special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor (1997-98); special assistant to the director of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department (1998-99); and vice-chair for the President's Commission on White House Fellowships (2009-16). Dorsey serves on several boards including the SEED Foundation, The Bridgespan Group, and, previously, the Harvard Board of Overseers.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, Dorsey received a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School.
Ms. Dorsey will deliver the opening keynote address for the 2018 Kravis-de Roulet (KDR) Conference.
Judy Belk, is president and CEO of The California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness), a private independent foundation created in 1992 with a mission to improve the health of the people of California by making grants for health promotion, wellness education, and disease prevention. A seasoned leader with more than 25 years of senior management experience in philanthropic, government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors, Belk is a frequent writer and speaker on organizational ethics, race and social change, and her work has been recognized with several state and national awards.
Belk's pieces have aired on National Public Radio and appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. In her day job as president and CEO of Cal Wellness, she leads the Foundation in pursuing its mission to improve the health of the people of California. Belk uses her vision and her voice to help Cal Wellness “level the playing field” so that everyone has access to good-paying jobs, safe neighborhoods, and quality health care services.
Before joining Cal Wellness in April of 2014, she served as senior vice president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a position she held since 2002. Belk has been inspired and humbled with two Hedgebrook residences in 2000 and 2013.
Ms. Belk will deliver the keynote address for the first annual Women of Color, Power, and Purpose Forum sponsored by the Berger Institute, CARE Center, and the Kravis Leadership Institute, with additional support from Global Slack and is part of the "Behind the Veil: Women, Race, Leadership, and Social Change in the Nonprofit Sector” (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first-person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the front lines of social change.
David J. Frum is a Canadian-American neoconservative political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later became the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and also a CNN contributor.
Over the years, Frum has worked for Canadian publications as well as American ones, including the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. He worked at the American Enterprise Institute after leaving the Bush White House, and also counseled Rudy Giuliani on his presidential bid.
Frum received his B.A. and M.A. from Yale University in 1982. He graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1987, where he served as president of the Federalist Society. His first book, Dead Right, was published in 1994 and was hailed by the conservative right as an important piece of ideological literature for the conservative movement.
Mr. Frum's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Tal Becker, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he leads educational initiatives on Israel and the Jewish world. In this capacity, he is a leading member of the Institute's "Engaging Israel" series which is the premier educational program on Israel engagement in North America that is working to strengthen and re-imagine the relationship between Israel and World Jewry.
Becker also serves as the Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been a senior member of the Israeli peace negotiation team in successive rounds of peace negotiations. He has many years of experience as a veteran negotiator on the front lines of many of Israel's most pressing diplomatic, legal, and policy challenges and has also played key roles in behind the scenes for Israel in a wide variety of contexts.
Among numerous previous positions, Becker has been a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, senior policy advisor to Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs, a lead negotiator and drafter in the Annapolis peace talks, director of the International Law Department at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, counsel to Israel's UN Mission in New York, and an international law expert for the Israel Defense Forces.
Becker earned his doctorate from Columbia University and, among numerous scholarly awards, is the winner of the Rabin Peace Prize and the 2007 Guggenheim Prize for best international law book for his book "Terrorism and the State.”
Dr. Becker's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund and the Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC.
Omar M. Dajani is professor of law and co-director of the Global Center at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, in Sacramento, California, where he teaches public international law, constitutional law, contracts, international negotiations, and other courses.
Dajani has written extensively about legal questions raised by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and about how law functions in the context of efforts to resolve it. Previously, he served as legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace talks with Israel (1999-2001) and as a political officer in the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO). He has continued since that time to work as a consultant on a variety of legal infrastructure development and conflict resolution projects in the Middle East and elsewhere – for institutions including the U.S. Department of State, the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center (NOREF), the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Dajani received his J.D. from Yale Law School and his B.A. from Northwestern University.
Mr. Dajani's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund and the Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC and part of the "Peace in the Middle East" series.
Michael Zuckert is the Nancy R. Dreux Professor of Political Science at University of Notre Dame. Before that, he was Kenan Professor of Political Science at Carleton College. His main scholarly work has been in the areas of early modern political philosophy, and constitutional law and history; he has written widely in these areas. His books include Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, The Natural Rights Republic, Launching Liberalism, and Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy. He is now completing a book titled A Nation so Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Democratic Sovereignty.
Professor Zuckert's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Local Government at CMC.
Yukon Huang is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington D.C. He was formerly the World Bank’s Country Director for China.
Huang's research focuses on China’s economy and its regional and global impact. Huang has published widely on development issues in professional journals and the public media. He is a featured commentator for the Financial Times on China and his articles are seen frequently in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, National Interest and Caixin. His recent books include East Asia Visions, Reshaping Economic Geography in East Asia and International Migration, and Development in East Asia and the Pacific. His latest book Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Is Wisdom Is Wrong was published by Oxford University Press (2017).
Huang earned his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and holds a B.A. from Yale University.
Dr. Huang's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist whose research focuses on morality—its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance, but then moved on to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation.
Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his B. A. from Yale University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. After post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India, he was a professor at the University of Virginia from 1995 until 2011, when he joined the Stern School of Business.
He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations Theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of people with whom they disagree. He won three teaching awards from the University of Virginia and one from the governor of Virginia. His four TED talks—on political psychology, on religion, on the causes of America’s political polarization, and on how America can heal after the bitter 2016 election—have been viewed more than 6 million times.
Haidt was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine. He is the author of more than 90 academic articles and two books: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and The New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Professor Haidt's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Photo credit: Philip Howard
Amitabh Chandra is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and Director of Health Policy Research at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He teaches undergraduates in Harvard College, graduate students at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and in Harvard's executive education programs.
Chandra is a member of the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) Panel of Health Advisors, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research focuses on innovation and cost-growth in healthcare, medical malpractice, and racial disparities in healthcare. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. He is the chair editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics.
Chandra has testified to the United States Senate and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, and on National Public Radio. He has been a consultant to the RAND Corporation, Microsoft Research, the Institute of Medicine and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts. In 2011, he served as Massachusetts' Special Commissioner on provider price reform.
Chandra is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's Dissertation Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research. In 2012, he was awarded American Society of Health Economists (ASHE) medal. The ASHE Medal is awarded biennially to the economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics.
Professor Chandra’s Athenaeum presentation is the keynote for the 2018 Southern California Conference in Applied Microeconomics (SoCCAM), hosted by the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC.
Amanda Vickery is professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, and has held academic posts at Royal Holloway, University of London and Churchill College, Cambridge. She has been visiting professor at Stanford, Munich, and the California Institute of Technology. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala. She is winner of the Longman History Today prize, the Whitfield Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. Her academic interests encompass the late modern period from the seventeenth century to the present with a strong emphasis on the Georgian period in England.
Vickery is a regular contributor to arts, history, and cultural review programs broadcast by BBC Radio and television and has written extensively on social history, literature, the history of romance and the home, politics, law and crime with an emphasis on women's studies and feminism.
Directed by Max Fine '21, the cast includes Mimi Thompson '21 (Claudia), Claudia Taylor ' 21 (Athena), Henry Minervini ' 19 (Pippet), Shanil Verjee ' 21 (Murphy), Namrata Dev (Ninu)' 19 (Dora), Maureen Gill POM' 18 (Mrs. Osgood), Brian Williams ' 21 (Dunlap), Timothy Song '19 (Otis), and Evan Boyer '19 (Francis).
Directed by Max Fine '21, the cast includes Mimi Thompson '21 (Claudia), Claudia Taylor ' 21 (Athena), Henry Minervini ' 19 (Pippet), Shanil Verjee ' 21 (Murphy), Namrata Dev (Ninu)' 19 (Dora), Maureen Gill POM' 18 (Mrs. Osgood), Brian Williams ' 21 (Dunlap), Timothy Song '19 (Otis), and Evan Boyer '19 (Francis).
Directed by Max Fine '21, the cast includes Mimi Thompson '21 (Claudia), Claudia Taylor ' 21 (Athena), Henry Minervini ' 19 (Pippet), Shanil Verjee ' 21 (Murphy), Namrata Dev (Ninu)' 19 (Dora), Maureen Gill POM' 18 (Mrs. Osgood), Brian Williams ' 21 (Dunlap), Timothy Song '19 (Otis), and Evan Boyer '19 (Francis).
Laura Jiménez is the executive director of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ) based in Los Angeles, California. After obtaining a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. San Diego, Jiménez began her career with the National Latina Health Organization in Oakland, California where she led a girls’ mentorship program and initiated a collaboration between the organization and U.C. Berkeley to offer a class entitled, “Redefining Latina Health: Body, Mind and Spirit,” as well as an Intergenerational Conference on Latinas, Sex and Sexuality. Jiménez completed her Master’s degree in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and then established the same college course and conference at Hunter College in New York City. Jiménez has enjoyed a long and distinguished career with several leading women’s groups, including the Dominican Women’s Development Center in Washington Heights, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and most recently CLRJ. Since joining CLRJ, she has been engaged in Reproductive Justice policy advocacy, community engagement and community informed research efforts.
Aurea Montes-Rodriguez is the executive vice president at Community Coalition, a social justice non-profit based in South Los Angeles. Born in Mexico but raised in South LA, Montes-Rodriguez has been a key leader in ensuring unity with the black and brown community around shared concerns such as the economy, child welfare, law enforcement issues, and education. She has worked at Community Coalition for over 20 years, where she has been responsible for building the organization’s youth programs to fight for educational equity, leading efforts to keep children in family care and out of the foster care system, helping to build organizing capacity in South Los Angeles, and leading a capital campaign to transform the organization’s headquarters in to a state of the art community hub for community organizing. Montes-Rodriguez is a co-founder of Partners for Children South LA, a multiagency initiative that seeks to improve children’s development and reduce the risk of involvement with the child welfare system. She is also a member of the Building Movement Project working to build capacity within the non-profit sector to promote social justice at the national level.
Since Eveline Shen's leadership began in 1999, Forward Together has become widely recognized for its innovative role in the Reproductive Justice Movement—working with grassroots communities; providing thought leadership; developing effective tools and resources for evaluation, training, and documentation; and organizing for long-term systemic change. In 2010 Shen and other leaders launched the Strong Families Initiative, which now works with over 220 organizations to change the way people think, feel and act in support of families. Shen served as principal investigator for two National Institutes of Health grants that explore the intersection between environmental justice and reproductive justice. She is a recipient of the Gerbode Fellowship, was named one of Women's eNews' 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, was awarded the 2015 San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award, and was awarded the Lani Shaw Award for Courage and Compassion in the Pursuit of Reproductive Justice by the Funders for Reproductive Equity in 2017. Shen holds a Master’s in Public Health from UC Berkeley in Community Health.
This conversation is part of the Behind the Veil: Women, Race, and Leadership in the Social Change Nonprofit Sector (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the frontlines of social change.
KDavid E. Tolchinsky P'20 is a screenwriter/playwright/director and the chair of Northwestern University's Department of Radio-TV-Film and Founder/Director of Northwestern's MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage.
Tolchinsky's work often centers on teen subcultures, psychological horror, mental illness, and the figure of the psychiatrist. Increasingly, he’s been interested in health and illness in the modern world, especially illnesses that are not easily explainable. He has been commissioned by such studios as Touchstone/Disney, MGM, Ivan Reitman's Montecito Pictures, USA Networks, among others, to write feature screenplays.
He was the recipient of a 2014 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Literature (Poetry, Prose, Scriptworks) and was voted best director for the New York production of his play, an adaptation of his essay, Where's the Rest of Me? Recently, he co-curated Sick by Seven (seven plays/films about mental illness) at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago, wrote and co-produced The Coming of Age, which received a Silver Medal from the Los Angeles Film Review, and he was number 7 on New City's Film 50 2017: Chicago Screen Gems. Currently, he is directing a psychological thriller, Cassandra, about the memory recovery movement in the '90s, and is working on a play about the rogue 1940’s psychologist Wilhelm Reich.
Tolchinsky received his undergraduate degree from Yale College and an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Photo credit: Joe Mazza/Bravelux.com
Ambassador William J. Burns is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States. Burns retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. He holds the highest rank in the Foreign Service, career ambassador, and is only the second serving career diplomat in history to become deputy secretary of state.
Prior to his tenure as deputy secretary, Burns served from 2008 to 2011 as under secretary for political affairs. He was ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 to 2005, and ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001. His other posts in the Foreign Service include executive secretary of the State Department and special assistant to former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, minister-counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, acting director and principal deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and special assistant to the President and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council.
Burns speaks Russian, Arabic, and French, and he has been the recipient of three Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and a number of Department of State awards, including three Secretary’s Distinguished Service Awards, two Distinguished Honor Awards, the 2006 Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Ambassadorial Award for Initiative and Success in Trade Development, the 2005 Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking, and the James Clement Dunn Award for exemplary performance at the mid-career level. He has also received the highest civilian honors from the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community. In 2013, Foreign Policy named him “Diplomat of the Year”.
Burns earned a bachelor’s in history from LaSalle University and master’s and doctoral degrees in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He is a recipient of four honorary doctoral degrees and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Burns is the author of Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt, 1955-1981 (State University of New York Press, 1985). In 1994, he was named to Time magazine’s list of the “50 Most Promising American Leaders Under Age 40” and to its list of “100 Young Global Leaders.”
Ambassador Burns' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
Gaurav Saini is an actor, director, film maker, and theatre instructor. He conducts workshops in theatre and theatre therapy for individuals and institutions. He started his journey in theatre with Barry John, first as a student of acting and then as an assistant teacher. He has explored many forms and approaches to theatre, including highly physical and rigorous forms of training in traditional Indian dance and martial arts forms and Western theatre. He is also a martial artist, with a black belt in Thang-Ta, and training in Aikido, Kalarippayattu, Tai-Chi, and Judo. He is affiliated with NIRMAN, a non-profit organization based in Varanasi, India.
Matthew J. Garcia is professor of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies and History at Dartmouth College. He previously taught at Arizona State University, Brown University, University of Oregon, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His book, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 won the award for the best book in oral history by the Oral History Association in 2003. His most recent book, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement, won the Philip Taft Award for the Best Book in Labor History, 2013. He is the co-editor of Food Across Borders with Melanie DuPuis and Don Mitchell published by Rutgers University Press in 2017. Garcia also served as the outreach director and co-primary investigator for the Bracero Archive Project, which received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in 2008, and was the recipient of the Best Public History Award by the National Council for Public History in 2009-2010.
He was born in Upland, California and graduated from Damien High School in La Verne. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the Claremont Graduate University in 1997.
Professor Garcia's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the history department at CMC.
Vanessa Daniel is the founder and executive director of Groundswell Fund, the largest funder of the U.S. reproductive justice movement and of Groundswell Action Fund. This is the largest fund in the country focusing its giving to women of color-led 501c4 organizations. Under Daniel’s leadership, Groundswell has moved nearly $40 million to the field, with a focus on grassroots organizing led by women of color, low income women and transgender people. In 2017, Groundswell received the National Committee of Responsible Philanthropy’s “Impact Award” for challenging issue silos and Daniel was featured in the Chronicle of Philanthropy as one of 15 “Influencers” who are changing the non-profit world. She is also the recipient of a 2012 Gerbode Foundation Fellowship, and the 2017 National Network of Abortion Funds’ Abortion Action Vanguard Award. Prior to Groundswell, Vanessa supported LGBT rights, economic and environmental justice grant-making at Tides Foundation; organized homecare workers with SEIU; helped win a landmark living wage law with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE); and conducted research to support the organizing efforts of welfare mothers with the Applied Research Center (now Race Forward). Daniel currently serves on the board of directors of Common Counsel Foundation. She has a B.A. in American Ethnic Studies from Smith College and is a graduate of the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program.
Isela Gracian is president of East LA Community Corporation (ELACC), a social and economic justice community development organization on LA’s Eastside. Growing up, her immigrant parents inculcated strong roots and links to their cultural traditions, which is now a hallmark of her leadership, infusing ELACC’s organizational principles with her cultural practices to forge staff unity and celebrate what binds them to their community. The skills she honed as a young mujer served as a foundation that was further developed through her time at U.C. Davis where she received her B.A. and embarked on her path to working alongside residents for equity in immigrant communities. Recognized for her work at ELACC as a distinguished authority among Southern California community development leadership, Gracian serves on various boards, including Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Political Education (SCOPE) and the California Reinvestment Coalition. She is also a National Advisory Board member to the Strong, Prosperous, and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC).
Yin Ling Leung is the chief strategy officer and the co-founder of Applied Research Works, a Palo Alto-based health technology company, where she works on her passion creating actionable metrics for addressing Whole Person Care (WPC) a framework for addressing health disparities. Her life’s work has spanned organizing for better working conditions for sweatshop workers, preventing toxic exposure for vulnerable communities, reproductive health and justice and advocating for more democratic philanthropy. Leung held key leadership roles at Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). She was one of the original organizers and founding sisters of NAPAWF, the first national organization of its kind born out of the 1995 United Nations’ Women’s Conference in Beijing. In the past, Leung has also served as a strategist to the New World Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Justice Fund Northwest, Women’s Funding Alliance, Communities for a Better Environment, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy and the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was recently appointed to the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women. Leung spent her childhood in Hawai’i and is a graduate of Oberlin College and Stanford University.
This conversation is part of the Behind the Veil: Women, Race, and Leadership in the Social Change Nonprofit Sector (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the frontlines of social change.
Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. She has written, taught, and advocated extensively in the areas of constitutional law and civil liberties, including through frequent media interviews. From 1991 through 2008, she served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Strossen is currently a member of the ACLU’s National Advisory Council, as well as the advisory boards of EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), and Heterodox Academy. When she stepped down as ACLU President in 2008, three Supreme Court Justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter) participated in her farewell and tribute luncheon.
Strossen is also a prolific author. Her latest book, HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship, will be published in 2018. Her first two books are Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights and Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In addition, Strossen has written dozens of articles and book chapters.
Strossen is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
Professor Strossen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Local Government.
Dr. Anthony D. Ong holds appointments at Weill Cornell Medical College and at Cornell University, where he is professor of human development and director of the Human Health Labs.
He received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Southern California and completed his postdoctoral training in adult development and aging at the University of Notre Dame.
He is an elected fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, an Outstanding Educator and a Merrill Presidential Scholar. Ong is the author of Emotion, Aging and Health, and the Oxford Handbook of Methods in Positive Psychology. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Aging and the Templeton Foundation among others.
Dr. Ong's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Work, Family & Children at CMC.
Despite its dark subjects of rape, child murder, and the dissolution of families, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones was one of the best-reviewed novels of the '00s. The book, which was later adapted for cinema, quickly became an unprecedented international bestseller, with translations in over 45 languages with American sales alone of over five million copies. Three months after the publication of The Lovely Bones, Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky, an account of her rape at the age of 18 and the trial that followed, also rose to number one on The New York Times bestseller list.
The Almost Moon, Sebold's 2007 controversial second novel, another #1 bestseller, generated more critical discord—both laudatory and negative—as Sebold plunged into taboo territories of matricide, mental illness, and profound ambivalence about mother/daughter relationships.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Sebold grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Syracuse University as well as the University of Houston and UC Irvine. She has contributed to numerous anthologies and edited The Best American Short Stories 2009.
Ms. Sebold's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Photo credit: Becky Sapp
The Republican Congress and President Donald Trump have fitfully forged a new direction for American fiscal policy. Republicans made a big bet that lowering corporate taxes will grow the economy and raise tax revenues. President Trump recently signed into law a $1.3 trillion federal omnibus spending bill that abandons Republican fiscal restraint in favor of increased deficit spending. President Trump has also recently begun to use tariffs to reshape U.S. trade policy, spooking markets and unnerving America’s trade partners. What do these actions on the budget, taxes, spending, deficits, and tariffs add up to?
Join members of CMC’s economics department for a panel discussion of the fiscal policy the Trump administration, moderated by Dreier Roundtable co-director Eric Helland.
Eve Brank is an associate professor of psychology and courtesy professor of law at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she is the director of the Center on Children, Families, and the Law. She teaches classes on psychology and law, elder law, and the psychology of family law. Her research primarily focuses on the way the law intervenes (and sometimes interferes) in family and personal decision making. In particular, she studies the public support, implementation, and effectiveness of parental responsibility laws within the context of the juvenile justice system and the legal requirements of elder care giving. Brank also studies issues related to decision making in the context of government searches and plea negotiations.
Brank received her J.D. (2000) and Ph.D (2001) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Law-Psychology Program. She joined the UNL faculty in 2008 and is part of the law/psychology and social programs. Prior to joining the Nebraska faculty, Brank was on the faculty in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of Florida.
Scott Mauvais '90 is the director Microsoft Cities where he works with local leaders to infuse technology into existing real-world systems to make cities better places to live, learn, work, and innovate.
Mauvais has been at Microsoft for 18 years. Most recently, he was the director of the Microsoft Technology Center, an innovation lab where Microsoft’s top architects work hand-in-hand with Fortune 500 companies to envision, architect, and prove out solutions based on Microsoft’s newest technologies. Prior to that, he worked for Microsoft Consulting Services where he ran early stage projects for customers in Microsoft's Early Adopter Program. He has written extensively for Microsoft Press and Ziff-Davis.
He serves on the national boards of Upwardly Global, City Innovate Foundation, and the Urban Age Institute and co-owns of The WELL, the ground breaking online community founded in 1985. When not working, Scott enjoys skiing in the winter, backpacking in the summer, and seeing—and photographing—as much live music as possible year-round.
A 1990 graduate of CMC, Mauvais majored in economics and government.
Mr. Mauvais' Athenauem talk is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government and the Lowe Institute of Political Economy, both at CMC.
Grace Anderson is an outdoor educator and a freelancer for outdoor non-profits and business. Anderson, who currently calls Lander, Wyoming, home discovered the awe of nature on a college spring break trip with the Student Conservation Association to Joshua Tree National Park. Since then she’s been chasing wide-open spaces from Patagonia to the Yukon Territories to Wyoming.
Previously as the program manager for Sierra Club Outdoors’ Inspiring Connections Outdoors Program, she worked to connect communities with limited access to the outdoors. She currently works mostly in the field for National Outdoor Leadership Schools (NOLS) getting young people of color into the great outdoors and GirlVentures to empower adolescent girls to develop and express their strengths through outdoor adventure programs.
Tamika L. Butler serves as the executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, a non-profit organization that addresses social and racial equity, and wellness, by building parks and gardens in park-poor communities across greater Los Angeles. Butler has a diverse background in law, community organizing and nonprofit leadership. Recently she served as the executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Prior to leading LACBC, Butler was the director of social change strategies at Liberty Hill Foundation and worked at Young Invincibles as the California director. She transitioned to policy work after litigating for three years as an employment lawyer at Legal Aid at Work in San Francisco (formerly Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center). Bulter previously served as the co-chair of the National Center for Lesbian Rights Board of Directors and served on the board of an affordable housing land trust, T.R.U.S.T. South LA. She currently serves on the boards of the New Leaders Council - Los Angeles and Lambda Literary Foundation and is an advisory board member for Legal Aid at Work’s Fair Play for Girls in Sports program. Butler received her J.D. from Stanford Law School and received her B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Sociology in her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska.
Connie Archbold Malloy serves as portfolio director at The James Irvine Foundation, where she developed the Fair Work initiative to ensure that fairness and opportunity are afforded to all of California’s workers. She leads grant-making in the areas of immigration, voter and civic engagement, elections policies and practices, and social impact bonds. Malloy is currently appointed to the first-ever California Citizens Redistricting Commission for a 10-year term until 2020. As rotating commission chair Malloy has overseen the creation and implementation of fair political districts for the first time in the nation’s history, redesigning California’s citizen representation across the Assembly, Senate, Congressional, and Board of Equalization maps. Her impact in urban planning, public and corporate policy innovation, and grassroots leadership development spans across the United States and Latin America. She is co-chair on the national Funders Committee for Civic Participation. She earned her master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree from La Sierra University in Riverside, CA. A native of San Andres Island, Colombia, she is a founding member of AFAAD: Adopted & Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora.
This conversation is part of the Behind the Veil: Women, Race, and Leadership in the Social Change Nonprofit Sector (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the frontlines of social change.
Whitson is the executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division and oversees the work of the division in 19 countries, with staff located in 10 countries. She has led dozens of advocacy and investigative missions throughout the region, focusing on issues of armed conflict, accountability, legal reform, migrant workers, and political rights. She has published widely on human rights issues in the Middle East in international and regional media, including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, and CNN. She appears regularly on Al-Jazeera, BBC, NPR, and CNN. Before joining Human Rights Watch, Whitson worked in New York for Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Whitson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She speaks Armenian and Arabic.
Showcasing her current work in the Middle East, Whitson will discuss the region and the role of US foreign policy and will highlight the particular ways in which these modern day conflict situations tie directly to Armenian Genocide remembrance.
Whitson graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Law School.
Ms. Whitson will deliver the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights’ Fourth Annual Lecture on Armenian Studies.
Academic freedom is often thought of as something that depends upon and is protected by law—the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, and freedom of thought are understood to be core civil and political rights protected under the international human rights regime and the right to science is similarly seen as a fundamental economic, social, and cultural right. The centrality of the marketplace of ideas to the freedoms tied to self-government is a well-worn trope of liberal democratic practice. It is therefore unsurprising—though remarkably under-appreciated—that the rising tide of authoritarianism has been accompanied by global campaigns of repression targeting academics and universities. Nowhere is this more true than in the Middle East, where social scientific research and other forms of inquiry are increasingly heavily regulated and even prohibited by the state.
Bâli is faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and professor of law at the UCLA School of Law where she teaches in the International and Comparative Law Program. Bâli’s scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of International Law Unbound, International Journal of Constitutional Law, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, as well as numerous edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Her edited volume,Constitution Writing, Religion and Democracy, was published by Cambridge in 2017. She also currently serves as co-chair of the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch-Middle East.
Professor Bâli's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Thomas Crow is Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first book, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Yale University Press), won a number of awards. His most recent books are The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design 1930–1995 (Yale University Press, 2015) and No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (University of Washington Press, 2017). Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art (Princeton University Press), based on the 2015 Andrew Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, will appear this fall.
Crow earned his doctorate at UCLA, and his first teaching position was at CalArts. Subsequent posts included the University of Michigan, the University of Sussex, Yale, and USC. In the 2000's, he brought the study of California art to the Getty Research Institute as its director. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Pomona College and the University of London. Last year, he delivered the 2017 Paul Mellon Lectures at Yale and the London National Gallery: "Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Style, Music, and Art in London 1956-1969."
Professor Crow's Athenaeum presentation is the Ricardo J. Quinones Lecture co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Amy Kind is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where she has been on the faculty since 1997. Her research interests lie broadly in the philosophy of mind, but most of her work centers on issues relating to imagination and to phenomenal consciousness.
In addition to authoring the introductory textbook Persons and Personal Identity (Polity, 2015), she has edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (Routledge, 2016) and she has co-edited Knowledge Through Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her edited volume Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21th Centuries, volume six of a six volume series on the history of philosophy, will be published by Routledge in 2018. She has previously served as president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and as a member of the board of officers of the American Philosophical Association.
Professor Kind's Athenaeum presentation celebrates her installation ceremony as the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at CMC.
Leah Litman is assistant professor of law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law where she teaches and writes on constitutional law with a particular focus on federalism and federal post-conviction review. Her publications have appeared or will appear in leading law reviews around the country. She is an active blogger at Take Care, and a guest host on First Mondays, a podcast about the Supreme Court. She also maintains an active pro bono practice and has served as counsel in several recent cases including as counsel to the family of Jesus Hernandez in Hernandez v. Mesa, a case involving a cross-border shooting and Whole Woman’s Health in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a successful challenge to two Texas restrictions on abortion. She also regularly files amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and the courts of appeal.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Law School, she clerked first for Judge Sutton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and then Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty at UCI, she was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School and practiced for two years at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr.
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; the founder and co-author of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that was hosted by the Washington Post and is now at Reason Magazine; and an academic affiliate for the Mayer Brown LLP law firm.
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.
Funding for this Athenaeum panel is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Mark Valer is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Valeri’s areas of specialization include religion and social thought, especially economics, in America; Reformation theology and the political history of Calvinism; Puritanism; and enlightenment moral philosophy. Valeri came to Washington University from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where he served as the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History since 1996. His prior appointment was in the Religious Studies department at Lewis and Clark College.
His latest book, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion and selected as one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010. The book analyzes social transformations in the American economy from the early 1600's, when Puritans argued that personal profit should be subordinate to the common welfare, to the 1740's, when Christians increasingly celebrated commerce as an unqualified good.
Valeri has received several fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies grant, and a Lilly Endowment faculty fellowship. Valeri earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University, his M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Whitworth College.
He is currently working on religious persuasion, evangelicalism, and secularism in the eighteenth century.
Barbara Koremenos, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Koremenos has published in both political science and law journals, including American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Legal Studies, and Law and Contemporary Problems. Koremenos received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her research—the first such winner to study international law.
In her new book, The Continent of International Law: Explaining Agreement Design (Cambridge University Press 2016), Koremenos demonstrates theoretically and empirically how international law’s detailed design provisions help states cooperate despite harsh international political realities.
Professor Koremenos' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
Irfana Majumdar is the artistic director of the NIRMAN Theatre Studio in Varanasi, India. She is also a theatre director, performer, and filmmaker. Her main interest is ensemble-based devising and creation, physical and vocal training practices, collaborative creation, and solo performance. She studied directing and performance at the University of Chicago, and has also trained in corporeal mime, Suzuki and Viewpoints, clowning, and many forms of body work. She has trained in classical Hindustani music since childhood.
Roderic Camp is the Philip McKenna Professor of the Pacific Rim at Claremont Mckenna College. He serves as a member of the Advisory Board, Mexico Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author thirty books on Mexico, six of which have been designated by Choice as outstanding academic books, and five books on Latin America. His most recent publications include: Mexico, What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017); Politics in Mexico, Democratic Consolidation or Decline? (Oxford University Press, 2014); The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012); Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-2009 (University of Texas Press, 2011); The Metamorphosis of Leadership in a Democratic Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2010.
He is the recipient of the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government, the highest honor it can bestow on a foreigner, for his contributions to Mexico.
Professor Camp's Athenaeum presentation is a celebration of his 2017 CMC Faculty Scholarship Award.
Gregory D. Hess is in his fifth year as the 16th president of Wabash College.
Prior to his tenure at Wabash, Hess was dean of the faculty and vice-president of academic affairs at Claremont McKenna College and the James G. Boswell Professor of Economics.
A native of San Francisco, he earned his bachelor’s degree with high honors from the University of California-Davis, and his master’s degree and Ph.D. in economics from The Johns Hopkins University.
The senior thesis requirement at CMC is challenging and rewarding and seniors endeavor to produce innovative, thoughtful, comprehensive, and well written work. In this second annual Senior Thesis Showcase, seniors across the disciplines will present 5 to 7-minute synopses of their capstone project. Come hear about their research, motivation, and findings, as well as their overall thesis journey. Most importantly come support and celebrate your CMC peers!
Brian Chmelik, Michael Choi, Tarah Gilbreth, Mohammed Kaamil Hussain, Siqi “Audrey” Liu, Madison Lodge, Shivani Pandya, Larissa Peltola, and Campbell Streator, all members of CMC's Class of 2018, will present their findings.
A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Adam Zagajewski is the author of Unseen Hand; Eternal Enemies; and Without End: New and Selected Poems, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Zagajewski’s other collections of poetry include Mysticism for Beginners, Canvas, and Tremor: Selected Poems. His most recent publication Slight Exaggerations, a collection of essays, was published in early 2017. He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination, and of Solidarity, Solitude: Essays.
The New York Review of Books states “Zagajewski is now one of the most familiar and highly regarded names in poetry both in Europe and in this country.”
Mr. Zagajewski's Athenaeum reading is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
David Lesher is co-founder, editor, and CEO of CALmatters, a non-profit media organization launched in 2015 to cover state policy and politics. Today, CALmatters has the largest news staff in Sacramento and its work is shared with more than 100 media, including all of the state’s major newspapers and radio stations.
Lesher has worked with top state leaders and major California issues for more than 35 years as a journalist and policy analyst. He was in the newspaper business for more than 25 years, largely at the Los Angeles Times where he was a political writer, state Capitol reporter and assistant national editor for the White House campaign. He also served as editor of California Journal magazine, California director for the DC-based New America Foundation, and government affairs director for the Public Policy Institute of California.
Mr. Lesher's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Government at CMC.
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Follow the Athenaeum
Unless otherwise noted, lunch begins at 11:45 a.m.; speaker presentations begin at 12:15 p.m.
Evening receptions begin at 5:30 p.m.; dinner is served at 6 p.m.; speaker presentations begin at 6:45 p.m.