Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician, educator, author, public speaker, columnist, concert pianist, artist, and composer. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 20 million times to date. She is the author of popular math books including "Unequal" and "How to Bake Pi" and she wrote the "Everyday Math" column for the Wall Street Journal for over seven years. 

Cheng is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won tenure in Pure Mathematics at the University in Sheffield, and holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Photo credit: Brian McConkey

David Dreier ’75 served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 2013, becoming the youngest—and the first Californian—chair of the powerful Rules Committee, where he helped shape legislation for floor debate. A former chair of Tribune Publishing and a long-time advocate of press freedom, he founded the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to honor slain journalists on the National Mall. Dreier is a trustee of Claremont McKenna College.

John W. Dean III served as White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon (1970–73) and became a central witness in the Watergate investigation, pleading guilty to a felony as part of the cover-up before turning state’s evidence. Disbarred after Watergate, Dean went on to write widely on law, politics, and presidential power, and has been a prominent commentator and critic of excessive executive authority in the George W. Bush and Donald Trump eras.

This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at CMC. 
 

The first biography of the writer-composer-actor-director, Lin-Manuel Miranda draws on more than one hundred fifty interviews with Miranda’s family, friends, partners, and mentors—from his elementary school music teacher to Andrew Lloyd Webber—as well as Miranda himself. Examining Miranda’s development from his early musicals in high school and college through the genesis of his professional masterworks, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reveals the sources of creativity—not in immutable genius, but in exceptional openness, curiosity, and collaboration.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner teaches English and theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities. As a cultural historian and theater critic, his articles about playwrights from Shakespeare to Quiara Alegría Hudes have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. His pandemic spoof, What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague, was adapted into an Emmy-winning broadcast for PBS, and his New Yorker profile of Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle is being adapted into a feature documentary. He is the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project and a frequent guest lecturer at theaters around the country.

Born and raised in Oregon, Pollack-Pelzer received his B.A. in History from Yale and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard.

The Dr. Jules K. Whitehill Professor of Humanism & Ethics and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, Nicholas Buccola specializes in American political thought. His previous books include The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York University Press, 2012). He is the editor of The Essential Douglass: Writings and Speeches (Hackett, 2016) and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2016).

His essays have appeared in scholarly journals including The Review of Politics and American Political Thought as well as popular outlets such as The New York Times, Salon, The Baltimore Sun, and Dissent.

Desirée J. Garcia is professor and chair of the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth College. She has published widely on the overlapping dynamics of race, gender and film genres, including the books The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film (RUP, 2025), The Movie Musical (RUP, 2021), and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (RUP, 2014). Garcia has also authored videographic essays, including What Happened in the Dressing Room ([in]Transition, 2024) and The Bijou Room (ASAP/Journal, 2025). 

She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University and a BA in History from Wellesley College. 

For three decades, William Kristol has been a leading participant in American political debates and a widely respected analyst of American political developments. Having served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Kristol understands government from the inside and as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, he has studied American politics and society from the outside. 

After serving in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Kristol founded the Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential magazine for over two decades. Now, as founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, Kristol is in the midst of the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the future of the Republican Party and the meaning of American conservatism.

Kristol frequently appears on all the major television talk shows, and also is the host of the highly regarded video series and podcast, Conversations with Bill Kristol. 

Kristol received his undergraduate degree and his Ph. D. from Harvard University.

Mr. Kristol's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

(Text adapted by the Washington Speakers Bureau profile.)

Diana Williams is a professor of neuroscience in the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”).  Her research examines the neural and endocrine control of motivated behaviors, with a focus on eating behavior. Many of her studies explore how the gut communicates with the brain about nutrients coming into the gastrointestinal tract during meals, and how the brain integrates this information with the taste of food, desire and pleasure, cues in the environment, and learned habits that can affect eating. This work helps reveal the biological underpinnings of our everyday eating experiences and sheds light on pathological states including eating disorders.

Williams received her B.A. in Psychology from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She earned her M.A. and subsequently her Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shaun Lee is an associate professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”). His research broadly involves the study of host-microbe (human to bacteria) and microbe-microbe (bacteria to bacteria) interactions that govern human health, wellness, and disease states. Modern antibiotics have served as powerful weapons in the fight against pathogenic bacteria which have plagued humans for centuries. A little-known fact however is that that bacteria have been fighting each other well before humans even evolved. Studying the processes of how bacteria fight and compete might lead researchers to uncover new strategies to fight harmful bacteria and to help overcome the surge of antibiotics resistant bacteria.

Lee received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley where he majored in both architecture and molecular cell biology, with an emphasis in neurobiology. His earned his Ph.D. from Oregon Health and Science University in molecular microbiology and immunology.

Rui Cheng is an assistant professor of the physics of climate, energy, and the environment at the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”). She will elaborate upon her research which aims to see the unseeable changes in the surrounding environment and in evaluating the global ecosystem-climate feedback, such as carbon, water, and energy fluxes between land and atmosphere targeted specifically in regions with limited direct measurements, including the Arctic, tropics, and mountainous regions.

Cheng received her B.S. from Sun Yat-Sen University in China where she studied atmospheric science. She has a M.S. in earth and environmental science from Lehigh University and a Ph.D. from Cal Tech in Environmental Science and Engineering.

Theresa Delgadillo is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies at UW-Madison. Delgadillo is a noted authority on U.S. Latinx spirituality and religion, the African diaspora, Latinidad, and Latinxs in the Midwest. Her book publications include Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (2024), Latina Lives in Milwaukee (2015), Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (2011), and she is co-editor and contributor of Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (2022). She is the founder of Mujeres Talk (2010-2017) and co-founder and current board member of Latinx Talk (2017 to present), an interdisciplinary academic open access publication specializing in short-form research.

Professor Delgadillo is the keynote conference speaker for The Futures of Comparative Racialization Conference.

Susan McWilliams Barndt is the 2025-2026 William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow in Government at Claremont McKenna College.

McWilliams Barndt is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018) and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (2014), the editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017), and a co-editor of several books, including The Best Kind of College (2015). 

Her writing and commentary have appeared in media such as The Atlantic, Business Insider, KPCC's AirTalk, LiveNOW From FOX, The Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Today in LA on KNBC.

For her work, McWilliams Barndt has received the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Jack Miller Center's Teaching Excellence Award. Since 2006, McWilliams Barndt has taught at Pomona College, where she has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching four times.

McWilliams holds a B.A. in political science and Russian from Amherst, an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton, and a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from Harvard.

William Carl Menard '09 graduated from CMC in 2009 with a degree in government and received in J.D. from St. John’s Law School in 2012. Since then, he has worked as an immigration attorney representing clients in deportation defense and both employment and family-based immigration matters in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California. Menard has represented clients before multiple Federal Courts of Appeals, as well as before immigration courts across the country in both detained and non-detained cases. He has been interviewed and quoted in the Washington Post, NPR, and other news stations on immigration issues. He has also served on multiple advisory boards, including the Latino Advisory Council at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Jersey.



 

Seth Lerer taught for over 45 years at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on children's literature, the history of the English language, and medieval and Renaissance literature. His books include Children's Literature: A Reader's History form Aesop to Harry Potter, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism. He is also the author of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and most recently Introducing the History of the English Language. He is currently visiting professor of literature a CMC.

Aislinn Bohren is an associate professor in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies various topics in microeconomics with a focus on information and discrimination. Her work on discrimination has both theoretical and empirical components, and builds on her research on model misspecification and biased beliefs.

Bohren received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California San Diego and her B.S. from the University of Richmond. She is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, a co-editor at Games and Economic Behavior, and an associate editor at the American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Literature.

Professor Bohren’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty at CMC.

Scott Ellsworth P’24 has been described by Booklist as “a historian with the soul of a poet.” A New York Times bestselling author, he has written about a wide range of subjects, including civil rights, race relations, mountaineering, and basketball. 

Ellsworth published his first book, Death in a Promised Land, about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, while he was a graduate student at Duke. He returned to that subject in 2021 with The Ground Breaking, which was long-listed for both the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. His newest book, Midnight on the Potomac, is a revealing new interpretation of the last months of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Ellsworth has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on the TODAY Show, PBS’s The American Experience, NPR, MSNB, Fox, CNN, the BBC, and other news outlets. He teaches in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Professor Ellsworth will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2025-26 Lerner Lecture on Hinge Moments in History.

Photo credit: Jared Lazaraus

General Vincent K. Brooks served in the U.S. Army for over 42 years from his entry into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point until his retirement from active duty in 2019 as a four-star general. Brooks spent his final 17 years of service in the general officer ranks and for nearly all those years in command of large, complex military organizations in challenging situations. His final active-duty assignment was commanding all US, South Korean, and international UN forces in the Republic of Korea. 

In his ongoing post-military career, he is a fellow at the University of Texas, a fellow at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board director, and a consultant.

General Brooks will deliver the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies’ 2025-26 Lecture in Honor of General Crouch.

Victor Nani Agbeli is a world-renowned musician, dancer, and cultural historian, celebrated for his mastery of traditional Ghanaian and West African arts. Born into a family of distinguished artists from Ghana’s Volta region, he continues the legacy of his late father, Godwin K. Agbeli, a legendary drummer, dancer, and historian who chaired Ghana’s Folklore Music Council. 

Acclaimed for performances that electrify audiences with precision, energy, and athleticism, Agbeli is also a dedicated cultural ambassador and educator, committed to preserving and sharing Ghanaian heritage globally. He has led the award-winning Sankofa Roots II troupe, served as principal instructor at the Dagbe Cultural Center, and taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, CalArts, and the Edna Marley School of Dance, Theater, and Textile, among others. 

A multi-disciplinary artist, Agbeli bridges traditional Ghanaian music and dance with contemporary creative practices in percussion, choreography, history, and healing, inspiring audiences worldwide and shaping the next generation of cultural practitioners. 

Agbeli teaches Intro/Tech to traditional Ghanaian West African music, dance, song, arts, and history at Pomona College.

Mr. Agbeli's Athenaeum performance is part of a 4-part musical series for this academic year: Devotional and Spiritual World Music featuring Ghanian, South Asian, American Gospel, and Brazilian traditions.