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.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is a photographer and video artist who uses visual autobiographies to capture social inequality and historical change in the postindustrial age. Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. It was the crumbling landscape of her own home town, Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, that forms the backdrop of her images and—capturing the attention of the McArthur Foundation—make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live amongst it.
Frazier received a B.F.A. from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. She held artist residencies at the Lower Manhattan Culture Council and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin before assuming her current position as assistant professor in the department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Frazier’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, including solo shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. The Notion of Family, Frazier’s first book, was published in 2014.
Ms. Frazier's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Photo: Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and was an assistant professor there for seven years. He has won two teaching awards and written (or co-authored) more than eighty academic papers and thirteen books. His book Standard Deviation: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics was a London Times Book of the Week and debunks a variety of dubious and misleading statistical practices. His most recent book, The AI Delusion, extols the value of human judgment in a world where big decisions are more and more frequently left to computers. His statistical and financial research has been featured in various media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, WYNC, WBBR Bloomberg Radio, Motley Fool, Scientific American, Forbes, MarketWatch, MoneyCentral.msn, NewsWeek and BusinessWeek.
Smith’s research interests lie in financial markets, especially the stock market, and the application of statistical analysis to finance and sports.
View Video: YouTube with Gary Smith
Adia Harvey Wingfield is professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines racial and gender inequality in professional occupations. A graduate of Spelman College, Wingfield earned both her masters and doctorate in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.
Wingfield has lectured internationally on her research and she has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Social Problems, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Gender & Society, and American Behavioral Scientist. She is currently serving as president of Sociologists for Women in Society, a national organization that encourages feminist sociology in research, teaching, and activism. Wingfield is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, The Atlantic, and other popular outlets. Her most recent book is the award-winning No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men's Work. She is the recipient of the 2018 Public Understanding of Sociology award from the American Sociological Association.
Professor Wingfield’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Work and Family.
View Video: YouTube with Adia Wingfield
Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and is considered one of Yale’s most-renowned teachers, known for both his award-winning lectures to large audiences — as in his 500-person course "Introduction to Psychology" — and his more intimate seminars, such as his first-year class on the seven deadly sins.
Bloom is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the major journals in the field. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author or editor of seven books, including his most recent book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, in which he argues that empathy is a bad thing—that it makes the world worse. While we've been taught that putting yourself in another's shoes cultivates compassion, it actually blinds you to the long-term consequences of your actions.
Professor Bloom’s Athenaeum lecture is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Photo Credit: Sigrid Estrada
Selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco is the youngest and the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. His inaugural poem “One Today” was later published as a children’s book.
Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his four collections of poetry: How to Love a Country; City of a Hundred Fires, which received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Directions to The Beach of the Dead, recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center; and Looking for The Gulf Motel, recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, winner of the Lambda Literary Prize.
His latest book, Boundaries, a collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler, challenges the physical and psychological dividing lines that shadow the United States. Blanco has written occasional poems for the re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, Freedom to Marry, the Tech Awards of Silicon Valley, and the Boston Strong benefit concert following the Boston Marathon bombings. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary doctorates. He has taught at Georgetown University, American University, and Wesleyan University. He serves as the first Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets.
Mr. Blanco’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the Chicano-Latino Student Affairs, and the CARE Center.
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Previously, he spent more than a decade as a business reporter and editor at the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. He is a graduate of Duke University and has a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mr. Mecia will be the first speaker in a series on the public policy implications of marijuana legalization sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow and Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes about political and cultural issues. He is concurrently a senior editor at National Review. A bestselling author, he writes a nationally syndicated column that appears regularly in more than 100 newspapers across the United States. He is also a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a member of the board of contributors to USA Today, a Fox News contributor, and a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, "The Tyranny of Clichés” (Sentinel HC, 2012) and “Liberal Fascism” (Doubleday, 2008).
The founding editor of National Review Online, Goldberg is the recipient of many awards. He was named by The Atlantic magazine as one of the top 50 political commentators in America. In 2011, he was chosen as the Robert J. Novak Journalist of the Year at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Jerrold E. Hogle, won the Howard Mumford Jones Thesis Prize at Harvard University from where he received his Ph.D. After teaching in the English department at the University of Arizona for 44 years, he is now professor emeritus and University Distinguished Professor at Arizona. The winner of Guggenheim, Mellon, and other fellowships for research including the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats—Shelley Association of America, he has published extensively on English Romantic literature, literary and cultural theory, and the many different forms of the Gothic.
His books include, among others, Shelley’s Process from the Oxford University Press, The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera from Palgrave Macmillan, and The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction from the Cambridge University Press, which has recently been succeeded by a follow-up volume, The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. A dedicated public servant to the University of Arizona, he has served in many diverse administrative roles at the university while also earning multiple teaching awards for his classroom work, advising, and mentoring of students, both undergraduate and graduate.
Currently, Hogle is a Reader at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and just completed co-chairing a conference on the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein."
Professor Hogle’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.
Jolly L.L.B. tells the story of a small-town lawyer, Jolly, who files a public interest litigation against a rich young man who seems to have gotten away with murder. Defending the young man is Tejinder Rajpal, the most prominent advocate of the city, able to reduce Jolly to dust in the court. Yet, Jolly works hard, gathers evidence, and—learns to argue. In charge of the proceedings is Justice Tripathi, a curious, familiar mix of self-aggrandizement, idiosyncrasy, and—commitment to justice.
For those new to Bollywood, Jolly L.L.B. offers an introduction to the genre without the stereotypical slapstick, violence, and melodrama.
For those familiar with the genre, Jolly L.L.B. offers solid direction, casting, script, comedy, and a serious plot line.
Movie screening will begin promptly at 5:30 pm.
(Parents Dining Room)
Tina Nguyen ‘11 is a staff reporter at The Hive, Vanity Fair's news vertical covering the power players of Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street. She covers American politics, the conservative movement, and the media.
Prior to Vanity Fair, Nguyen worked at Mediaite, The Daily Caller, and The Braiser, where she was nominated for a James Beard Award. Nguyen graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 2011, with an honors degree in government. While at CMC, she was the news editor for the Claremont Independent, a fellow at the Salvatori Center, and occasional cartoonist/columnist for The Forum.
Ms. Nguyen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.
Joël Dubois received masters and doctorate degrees in Comparative Religion from the Harvard Divinity School. The book documenting his research in South India, Hidden Lives of Brahman, was published in 2013 by State University of New York Press. He is currently a professor of Asian religions and cultures at California State University in Sacramento, California.
Professor Dubois' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.
(Parents Dining Room)
Robert Pearl, M.D., is the former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (1999-2017), the nation’s largest medical group, and former president of The Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group (2009-2017). In these roles he led 10,000 physicians, 38,000 staff and was responsible for the nationally recognized medical care of 5 million Kaiser Permanente members on the west and east coasts. Recently named one of Modern Healthcare’s 50 most influential physician leaders, Pearl is an advocate for the power of integrated, prepaid, technologically advanced and physician-led healthcare delivery.
Pearl serves as a clinical professor of plastic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and is on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on strategy and leadership, and lectures on information technology and health care policy.
In 2017 he authored “Mistreated: Why We think We’re Getting Good Healthcare—And Why We’re Usually Wrong” a Washington Post bestseller that offers a roadmap for transforming American healthcare. All proceeds from the book go to Doctors Without Borders.
As a regular contributor to Forbes, Pearl covers the business of healthcare and the culture of medicine. He’s the host of a new podcast called “Fixing Healthcare,” which debuted in the iTunes top 100 list of science and medicine programs. He has been featured on CBS This Morning, CNBC, NPR, and in TIME, USA Today and Bloomberg News. He has published more than 100 articles in various medical journals and contributed to numerous books. He is a frequent keynote speaker at healthcare and medical technology conferences. Pearl has addressed the Commonwealth Club, the World Healthcare Congress, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s National Quality Forum.
Board certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, Pearl received his medical degree from the Yale University School of Medicine, followed by a residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University. From 2012 to 2017, Pearl served as chairman of the Council of Accountable Physician Practices (CAPP), which includes the nation’s largest and best multispecialty medical groups, and participated in the Bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Delivery System Reform and Health IT in Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey S. Kopstein is professor and chair of political science at University of California, Irvine. His books include The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989 and Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the 21st Century. His newest book, co-authored with Jason Wittenberg,Intimate Violence is a novel social-scientific explanation of ethnic violence and the Holocaust. It locates the roots of violence in efforts to maintain Polish and Ukrainian dominance rather than in anti-Semitic hatred or revenge for communism. In doing so, it cuts through painful debates about relative victim-hood that are driven more by metaphysical beliefs in Jewish culpability than empirical evidence of perpetrators and victims. Along with his co-author, Kopstein concludes that pogroms were difficult to start, and local conditions in most places prevented their outbreak despite general anti-Semitism and the collapse of the central state. In fact, fewer than 10 percent of communities saw pogroms in 1941, and most ordinary gentiles never attacked Jews.Kopstein and Wittenberg shed new light on the sources of mass ethnic violence and the ways in which such gruesome acts might be avoided.
Professor Kopstein's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Eduardo Garcia represents California's 56th Assembly District, which includes cities and unincorporated communities in eastern Riverside County and Imperial County. Elected in 2014, Garcia is the current chair of Water, Parks and Wildlife. In this capacity he oversees some of the state’s most pressing issues, such as drought conditions, and the implementation of the multi-billion dollar Proposition 1, Water Bond passed by voters in 2014. He also serves on the Assembly Committees on Appropriations, Communications and Conveyance, Governmental Organization and Utilities and Energy.
In March of 2015 Garcia was appointed to chair the Select Committee on Renewable Energy Development and Restoration of the Salton Sea to examine the opportunities and challenges surrounding development of renewable energy projects and the implementation of environmental restoration plans of the Salton Sea area.
A graduate of local public schools, Garcia attended Coachella Valley High School and the University of California, Riverside. He also completed the "Senior Executives in State and Local Government" Public Administration program from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and earned a master’s Degree from the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning and Development.
A life-long resident of the Coachella Valley, Garcia was first elected to the Coachella City Council in November 2004. In 2006, at the age of 29, he became Coachella's first elected Mayor.
David Dreier was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980, where he served until January 2013. In Congress, he served as the youngest—and the first from California—chairman of the Rules Committee, playing a pivotal role in fashioning all legislation for debate in the House. Dreier has had many leadership roles in California and national politics, such as chairing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's transition team in 2003, and serving as parliamentarian at the 2004 Republican National Convention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the International Republican Institute. Dreier is the founding chairman of the bipartisan House Democracy Partnership, which works directly with legislatures in seventeen countries around the globe, helping to build institutions in new and re-emerging democracies. Dreier is a trustee and alum of Claremont McKenna College. He received his B.A. from CMC in 1975 and his M.A. in American government from Claremont Graduate University the following year.
Mike Murphy is one of the Republican Party’s most successful political consultants. Murphy led more than 20 statewide campaigns to victory, including gubernatorial races for Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christine Todd Whitman, John Engler, and Tommy Thompson, as well as dozens of congressional races. He has worked on six Republican presidential campaigns and is widely known for his work in the 2000 GOP primaries as a senior strategist for John McCain. He has advised leaders in Canada, Central America and the former Soviet Union. He is a widely known political pundit, appearing frequently on NBC, CNN and NPR. He co-directs the Center for the Political Future at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Robert Shrum holds the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics at USC Dornsife and serves as director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. Shrum has a storied career as an author and television commentator and as a campaign adviser to Democratic candidates in nearly 40 winning U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns and for the mayoralty of many of America’s major cities. His numerous clients included Edward Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Glenn, and Barbara Mikulski in their Senate campaigns, and John Kerry and Al Gore in their presidential races. Overseas, his clients included Ehud Barak in his successful 1999 campaign for prime minister of Israel, the British Labour Party in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the prime minister of Ireland and the president of Colombia.
Rebecca Erbelding is the author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, April 2018). She has worked as a historian, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for fifteen years, and served as a historian for the Museum's newest exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from George Mason University.
Her book describes the creativity of the War Refugee Board which laundered money into Sweden, participated in ransom negotiations with Nazis, opened a refugee camp in upstate New York, sent rescuer Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest, helped 8,000 Jews escape to Palestine by boat, and approved $11 million in relief for Nazi-occupied Europe in the final year of the World War II.
Dr. Erbelding’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School. He teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, Federal Courts, Criminal Procedure, and Appellate Litigation.
He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court, published by Viking in 2014, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He writes a weekly column for the Sacramento Bee, monthly columns for the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.
In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. He received his B.S. from Northwestern University in 1975 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1978.
Dean Chemerinsky will deliver the 2018 Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism.
Amanda Renteria has had a unique and diverse career starting out in the financial industry, moving to education as a teacher in her small hometown community, and finally spending the majority of her career in public service. She has served as the chief of operations at the California Department of Justice, national political director for Secretary Clinton’s presidential run, and as a chief of staff in the United States Senate. She was named one of the most influential staffers by Roll Call and received a number of awards as the first Latina chief of staff in the history of the U.S. Senate. In addition to her policy work, she has also run for Congressional office in 2014 and governor of California in 2018 believing that empowering others is at the heart of public service.
Ms. Renteria's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the CARE Center and the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, both at CMC.
Mark Huber is the Fletcher Jones Foundation Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and George R. Roberts Fellow. He joined the faculty community at Claremont McKenna College in 2009.
Huber’s specialty is computational probability. He enjoys developing new algorithms for drawing random variates from complex distributions quickly, which has applications in statistics, machine learning, numerical integration, and physics. Huber’s unique background in mathematics, computing, and statistics allows him to work in a variety of areas. Outside of the classroom, he has served as chair of the CMC Mathematical Sciences since 2016. Huber also serves as associate editor for the Journal of American Statistical Association Reviews and editor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He regularly participates as a guest lecture at conferences and institutions around the world, and his research has appeared in such journals as Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, the Journal of Applied Probability, and the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science among others.
Huber earned a B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University.
Professor Huber’s Athenaeum presentation celebrates his installation ceremony as the Fletcher Jones Foundation Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC.
Michael Weinberg has 25 years of experience investing directly at the security level and indirectly as an asset allocator in traditional and alternative assets. He is the chief investment officer and a senior managing director of MOV37 and Protégé Partners. His portfolio management experience includes Soros Fund Management LLC, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Financial Risk Management (FRM). Previously he was a research analyst at Dean Witter, currently Morgan Stanley.
Weinberg is a board member of AIMA, on the management advisory council for the Michael Price Student Investment Fund, former-chair of value investing at CFANY, where he has received multiple awards, and a member of the Economic Club of New York. He is published author, has been interviewed by top financial newspapers and is often a keynote speaker at conferences and universities.
Weinberg received an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, where he is now an adjunct professor of finance and economics, and a B.S. in economics from New York University.
Mr. Weinberg’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Soll Center for Student Opportunity.
Ted Scheinman is senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine, where he directs special projects and climate coverage. Among other duties, he reported from the United Nations climate summits in Paris and Marrakech in 2015 and 2016. A graduate of Yale University, with an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (2018), and his essays and reporting have appeared in the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Playboy, Slate, and elsewhere. He is also a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Mr. Scheinman’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.
Chaun Webster is a poet, publisher and graphic designer whose poetry finds its influences in the intersections of the Black Arts Movement and Jazz, the Concrete Poetry Tradition and Grafitti. Webster’s first book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published in April 2018 by Noemi Press.
Mr. Webster's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the CARE Center, and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, all at CMC.
A much-awarded Hindi movie of 2014 including best story, actress, script, editing, in National and Filmfare awards, QUEEN is the story about an ordinary girl from New Delhi who, left by her fiancé on the eve of her wedding, decides to console herself by going alone on their planned honeymoon to Paris and Amsterdam. Then we, the audience, gets instruction on how to imagine her future. She holds her own with interesting people and learns a lesson at every step. A familiar-seeming story of the girl-next-door, Rani, played by Kangna Ranaut, charms and entertains in unexpected ways while understating the most important message possible, “Be yourself.”
Movie screening will begin promptly at 5:30 pm.
(Freeberg Dining Room)
Liz Thomas ’07 is a professional hiker, adventure conservationist, and outdoor writer who held the women’s unsupported speed record on the 2,181-mile long Appalachian Trail. A guest editor and regular contributor to Backpacker Magazine, Thomas has been featured on Good Morning America and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Yahoo!News, Men's Journal, Women's Health, Outside, among other publications. Her book Long Trails: Mastering the Art of the Thru-Hikereceived the 2017 National Outdoor Book Award for Best Instructional book. Thomas serves as the vice president of the American Long Distance Hiking Association and ambassador to American Hiking Society. A former staff writer at Wirecutter/New York Times, Thomas is a currently editor in chief at Treeline Review, an outdoor web magazine and is writing a guidebook to Southern California waterfall hikes.
A 2007 graduate of Claremont McKenna College where she majored in EEP (Environment, Economics, and Politics) and was the Athenaeum student manager, Thomas holds a masters in Environmental Science from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she held a Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship for her research on trails, conservation, and trail-side communities. She currently is on the board of the Robert Environmental Center at CMC.
Since graduating from CMC, Thomas has hiked over 17,000 miles on more than 20 long distance hiking paths around the world!
Judge Andrew Gordon ’84 was appointed as a judge of United States District Court for Nevada in 2013. Before that, he was a partner at McDonald Carano Wilson LLP, where his practice focused on commercial litigation and he served as a private arbitrator and mediator. Gordon studied political science at CMC and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Jerome Haig ’84 P'22 is a private practice defense attorney and a long-time senior trial lawyer in the public defender’s office. He specializes in complex felonies in state and federal court. Haig studied mathematics and political science at CMC and received his J.D. from Loyola University School of Law in Los Angeles.
Greg Koltun ’84 P'21 is a litigation partner at Morrison Foerster, with a particular focus on complex commercial litigation and antitrust matters. He has experience litigating cases in state and federal courts and before arbitration tribunals throughout the country in a variety of industries and fields. Koltun studied economics at CMC and received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Judge Suzanne Segal ’82 P'18 was appointed as a Magistrate Judge in California in 2002. Before that, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney, Civil Division, and Chief of Civil Appeals in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Segal studied history and political science at CMC and received her J.D. from Cornell Law School.
Born in York, England, Emma Dench grew up near Stratford-Upon-Avon, and studied at Wadham College, Oxford and at St. Hugh's College, Oxford earning a DPhil in ancient history in 1993. Before taking up a joint appointment in the departments of the classics and of history at Harvard in January 2007, she taught classics and ancient history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a Craven Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Rome Scholar and a Hugh Last Fellow at the British School of Rome, a Cotton Fellow, a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting professor of the classics and of history at Harvard, and a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellow.
Dench is the author of From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) and Romulus' Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is currently completing Imperialism and Culture in the Roman World for the Cambridge University Press series Key Themes in Ancient History. Other current projects include a study of the retrospective writing of the Roman Republican past in classical antiquity.
At Harvard, Emma Dench has been the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for 2010–15 (recognizing "outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching, mentoring and advising"), a Marquand Award for Excellent Advising and Counseling, and an Everett Mendelsohn Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students. In 2015–16, she also co- taught (with Frances Frei) an elective MBA course "All Roads Lead to Rome: Leadership Lessons from Antiquity," at the Harvard Business School.
Photo credit: Kathleen Dooher
Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, representing California's 58th Assembly District has served in the state Assembly since first being elected in 2012. She represents the cities of Artesia, Bellflower, Bell Gardens, Cerritos, Commerce, Downey, Montebello, Pico Rivera and Norwalk. A dynamic community organizer and civic activist, she represents a new generation of leaders in the California State Legislature.
Cristina lives in the in the Southeast Los Angeles community of Bell Gardens, where she was raised and attended local public schools. She went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Pomona College, a master's degree and a secondary teaching credential from Claremont Graduate University, and is presently a doctoral candidate at USC.
Assemblymember Garcia's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute for Work and Family.
David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.
Boaz is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. He is the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.
Boaz's articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate, and he wrote the entry on libertarianism for Encyclopedia Britannica. He is a frequent guest on national television and radio shows, and has appeared on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, CNN’s Crossfire, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, The McLaughlin Group, Stossel, The Independents, Fox News Channel, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.
Mr. Boaz's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.
Joshua T. White is associate professor of the Practice of South Asia Studies and fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a nonresident fellow in the foreign policy program at The Brookings Institution. He previously served at the White House as senior advisor & director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he focused on issues pertaining to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent, and led efforts to integrate U.S. government policy planning across South and East Asia.
Involved in many policy intensive positions in and out of the government including the Pentagon, White has spent extensive time in Asia, and has written on a wide range of issues including defense policy, electoral politics, Islamic movements, and nuclear deterrence. He has held short-term visiting research fellowships at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s National Defence University, and the Institute for Defence and Strategic Analyses in Delhi; testified before Congress; and served on U.S.-sponsored election observer delegations to both Pakistan and Bangladesh.
He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College with a double major in history and mathematics and received his Ph.D. with distinction from Johns Hopkins SAIS.
Professor White’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Institute for Strategic and International Studies.
Julie Sze is a professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism
Sze has published two books and over 45 journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, primarily in the fields of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She works in collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists and community-based organizers on a wide range of research projects in California, New York, and China.
Sze has received a number of grants for her individual research, from the UC Humanities Institute, the American Studies Association, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). As founding director of the Environmental Justice Institute, she received two large grants to support the project from the Ford Foundation and smaller grants related to specific research projects which have had public policy impact in the State of California.
Professor Sze's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by CMC's Crown Special Events Fund, CMC's Women and Gender Leadership Fund, CMC's Roberts Environmental Center, Pitzer's Robert Redford Conservancy, and Pomona's Office of Sustainability.
John J. Pitney, Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American History and Politics at Claremont McKenna College where he teaches courses on Congress, interest groups, political parties, and mass media. A leading expert on the structure and practice of American politics, Pitney is a widely published author or co-author of six books on American politics, including The Art of Political Warfare (2001) and The Politics of Autism: Navigating The Contested Spectrum (2015). He is currently writing a book on the 1988 presidential campaign. In addition to his books, Pitney has published numerous scholarly articles and short essays, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. He is routinely featured on NPR and other television and radio programs.
Pitney has not only shaped the study of government at Claremont McKenna College for nearly 30 years, he has also helped shape government itself through his many roles, including as the acting director for the Research Department of the Republican National Committee (1990-1991) and as the Senior Domestic Policy Analyst for the US House Republican Research Committee, among other important appointments.
Pitney holds a B.A. in political science from Union College, where he was co-valedictorian, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. He received the CMC Presidential Award in 2013 and was named one of the 300 best professors in the United States by the Princeton Review in 2012.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy at Rutgers University. He has also been a professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). He earned his Ph.D in 1995 from the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, and he received his B.A. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990.
Stanley has two forthcoming books: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, September 11, 2018) and The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Stanley has four previously published books including Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press won the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize and How Propaganda Works, published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015, was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy.
Professor Stanley's Athenaeum presentation is the 2018 Golo Mann Lecture and is sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.
Charles Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at CMC, and for almost two decades served as director of the College's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. He is the editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. In 2017, he was named to the POLITICO 50, Politico magazine’s annual list of the fifty most influential “dreamers, doers, and thinkers who are reshaping American politics.” In May, Kesler was awarded a 2018 Bradley Prize by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. His edition of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling one in the country. His most recent book is I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of American Liberalism.
Susana Loza teaches cultural studies, critical race theory, film and media studies, popular music, feminist theory, and ethnic studies at Hampshire College in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Her most recent book, Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times, explores the resurgence of ethnic simulation in science fiction and fantasy in a putatively post-colonial era. Her next project, Settler Colonial Gothic, excavates the (settler) colonial ideologies and gothic elements of contemporary US horror television and film.
Loza received her B.A. degrees in political science and psychology from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests include the social construction of race and sex in speculative media; power, privilege and cultural appropriation; gender and ethnic performativity in digital spaces; the politics of sampling and remixing; colonial cosplay in steampunk; the activist potential of social media; and the post-racial turn in popular culture.
A prolific writer, Loza’s writings include Vampires, Queers, and Other Monsters: Against the Homonormativity of True Blood, Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture, Samples of the Past: Performative Nostalgia, Illicit Sounds, and Cultural Transformation in Latin House Music, Sampling (Hetero)sexuality: Diva-ness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music, and Orientalism and Film Noir: Subjective Sins and Othered Desires.”
Bob Stern is the co-founder and former president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a California think tank focused on political reform. Stern has been called “the godfather of modern political reform in California.” He began drafting and analyzing political reform laws as a staff attorney for the California Legislature’s Assembly Elections Committee; he then served as the Elections Counsel to the California Secretary of State’s office. He has drafted numerous state initiatives, and was a principal drafter of the City of Los Angeles’ Ethics and Public Campaign Financing laws in 1990. Stern is a graduate of Pomona College and Stanford Law.
Ken Miller is a member of the Government Department at CMC and is the Associate Director of the Rose Institute. His research focuses on state government institutions, with emphasis on direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall) and the interaction between.
A winner of the Bradley Prize in 2017, Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he is a member of the Military History/Contemporary Conflict Working Group. In addition, he serves as dean of students for the Hertog Political Studies Program and for The Public Interest Fellowship and teaches for the Tikvah Fund in the United States and in Israel.
He studies and writes about, among other things, constitutional government, conservatism and progressivism in the United States, liberal education, national security and law, and Middle East politics.
A prolific writer and editor of books, articles, essays, and reviews, he is the author of, among many other publications, Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995). He is also a contributor at RealClearPolitics.
In addition to teaching regularly in the United States and Israel, Berkowitz has led seminars on the principles of freedom and the American constitutional tradition for students from Burma at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and for Korean students at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.
Berkowitz taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006, and political philosophy in the department of government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999.
He holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University, an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.
Professor Berkowitz is the featured speaker for the formal dedication of the Eggert Dining Room at the Athenaeum.
Photo credit: Anne Mandelbaum
As the director of state policies at the Marijuana Policy Project, Karen O’Keefe manages grassroots and direct lobbying efforts in state legislatures for the largest nonprofit that is focused solely on marijuana policy reform. In her 15-year career at MPP, O’Keefe and her team have played a leading role in more than a dozen successful advocacy campaigns, including the first legalization law to pass a state legislature.
O'Keefe earned her J.D. from Loyola School of Law, New Orleans.
Ms. O'Keefe's talk is the second in a series hosted by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government on the topic of the public policy implications of marijuana legalization.
Valerie Sperling teaches a variety of courses in comparative politics, including Russian politics; revolution and political violence; mass murder and genocide under communism; transitions to democracy; globalization and democracy; and introduction to women’s studies. Her research interests include globalization and accountability, social movements, gender politics, patriotism and militarism, and state-building in the post-communist region.
Among several other publications, Sperling's most recent book, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press) won the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Davis Center Book Prize for the "outstanding monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology or geography," as well as the Association for Women in Slavic Studies' Heldt Prize for the "Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies." Sex, Politics and Putin was also included in Top 10 books on Russia for 2014.
Sperling is a graduate of Yale College; she subsequently received her M.A. from Georgetown, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997
Professor Sperling’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
The Athenaeum will host 2018 midterms' election night coverage, where students and professors will analyze returns in real time, offer commentary on issues and possible outcomes, and project what this election means for Trump's presidency, Republican control of Congress, and Democratic aspirations.
Dhruva Jaishankar is a fellow in foreign policy studies at Brookings India in New Delhi and the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. He is also a non-resident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Australia. His research examines India’s role in the international system and the effects of global developments on India’s politics, economics, and society, with a particular focus on India’s relations with the United States, the Indo-Pacific, and Europe.
Jaishankar was previously a Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund (GMF) in Washington DC from 2012 until 2016, where he managed the India Trilateral Forum, a regular policy dialogue involving participants from India, Europe, and the United States. From 2009 to 2012, he was a program officer for Asia with GMF. Prior to that, he worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington and as a news writer and reporter for CNN-IBN television in New Delhi. In 2015-2016, he was a visiting fellow with the South Asia Programme of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has been a David Rockefeller Fellow with the Trilateral Commission and an IISS-SAIS Merrill Center Young Strategist.
Jaishankar holds a bachelor's degree in history and classics from Macalester College, and a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown University.
Mr. Jaishankar’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Keck Institute for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
C. Dixon Osburn has more than 20 years of legal and political advocacy experience. He was co-founder and executive director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a national security and human rights organization that spearheaded the effort to repeal “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and end sexual orientation discrimination in the armed forces. Most recently, Osburn served as the director of the Law & Security program for Human Rights First where he led efforts to align U.S. counterterrorism policies with the rule of law, achieving significant changes in policy and practice regarding Guantanamo, torture, and armed drones.
Osburn has published extensively and served as a national spokesperson in print, on radio and on television. He currently serves as an adjunct fellow at the American Security Project, on the Working Group for the Halifax International Security Forum and is a member of the Campaign Board for the Victory Fund.
Osburn received his JD/MBA from Georgetown University and his AB with distinction from Stanford University.
Mr. Osburn's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will is one of the country’s most widely read political columnist, as well as a foremost conservative voice. His popular twice-weekly column for The Washington Post syndicate reaches nearly 475 newspapers throughout the United States and Europe. He is a prolific author with books ranging from The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America’s Fabric to Bunts to One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation. An avid baseball pan, in 1990, Will published Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball, which topped The New York Times best-seller list for two months. His latest book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, was released March 25, 2014. Will currently serves as a contributor for MSNBC and NBC News.
Mr. Will is the Fall 2018 speaker for the Res Publica Society Speaker Series.
Karen Donfried is president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening transatlantic cooperation through policy analysis, fellowships for next generation leaders, and support for civil society. Headquartered in Washington, DC, GMF has seven offices in Europe.
Before assuming her current role in April 2014, Donfried was the special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council at the White House. In that capacity, she was the president’s principal advisor on Europe and led the interagency process on the development and implementation of the president’s European policies. Prior to the White House, Donfried served as the national intelligence officer (NIO) for Europe on the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s center for strategic thinking. As NIO, she directed and drafted strategic analysis to advance senior policymakers’ understanding of Europe.
Donfried first joined GMF in 2001 after having served for ten years as a European specialist at the Congressional Research Service. From 2003 to 2005, she was responsible for the Europe portfolio on the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff. She returned to GMF from 2005 to 2010, first as senior director of policy programs and then as executive vice president.
Donfried is a member of the board of trustees of Wesleyan University, her undergraduate alma mater. She serves as a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Council on Germany. From 2014 to 2016, Donfried served as vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the United States; in 2017, she became a member of WEF’s Europe Policy Group. Donfried is a member of the team of external advisors to the president of the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly. She was a member of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board from 2015 to 2017.
Donfried has a Ph.D. and MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a Magister from the University of Munich, Germany. She holds a bachelor’s in government and German from Wesleyan University. She received the Cross of the Order of Merit from the German Government in 2011, became an officer of the Order of the Crown of Belgium in 2010, and received a Superior Honor Award from the U.S. Department of State in 2005 for her contribution to revitalizing the transatlantic partnership.
President Donfried's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Keck Institute for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.
David Makovsky, the Ziegler distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute and director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process, is also lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and adjunct professor in Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Makovsky has not only been a close observer of the conflict as former executive editor of the Jerusalem Post, and diplomatic correspondent for Israel's leading daily, Haaretz, he also has participated in negotiations themselves as senior advisor to the State Department’s Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations in 2013-2014. He is author of numerous monographs and essays on issues related to the Middle East Peace Process and the Arab-Israeli conflict and is also coauthor, with Dennis Ross, of the 2009 Washington Post bestseller Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East.
(Parents Dining Room)
Zachary Courser is a visiting professor of government and research director of the Dreier Roundtable at CMC. He has published articles on populist political movements, American political parties, and American democracy. Courser has experience working in policy and government, both on Capitol Hill and as the director of CMC’s Washington Program, and co-directs CMC’s policy lab. He currently has an edited volume in review on the rise of populism in Europe and the United States with University of Pennsylvania Press.
Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College. Author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society & the Conservative Counterrevolution, Hollis-Brusky’s work focuses on the dynamics of constitutional change and the role “support structures”—networks of lawyers and academics, nongovernmental institutions, and ideas—play in that process. Her second book project, on the rise and efficacy of the support structure for conservative Christian legal mobilization, is currently titled Higher Counsel: Training the Conservative Christian Legal Movement, co-authored with Joshua C. Wilson of University of Denver and under advance contract with Oxford University Press.
Kenneth P. Miller is an associate professor of government and associate director of the Rose Institute for Local Government at CMC. Miller’s primary research focuses on state government institutions, with emphasis on direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall) and the interaction between law and politics. His publications include Direct Democracy and the Courts, and he is currently working on a book comparing Texas and California as models of red and blue state politics and policy.
George Thomas is a professor of government and director of the Salvatori Center at CMC. Author of The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind and The Madisonian Constitution, Thomas’s research focuses on the American constitutional order, constitutional law, and American political thought
Benn Steil is senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is the author, most recently, of The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War and The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.
Steil is also the founding editor of International Finance, a scholarly economics journal; lead writer of the Council’s Geo-Graphics economics blog; and creator of four web-based interactives tracking Global Monetary Policy, Global Imbalances, Sovereign Risk, and Central Bank Currency Swaps. Prior to joining the Council in 1999, he was director of the International Economics Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He came to the Institute in 1992 from a Lloyd’s of London Tercentenary Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he received his MPhil and DPhil (PhD) in economics. He also holds a BSc in economics summa cum laude from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Steil will deliver the 2018-19 Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan.
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.