Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Richard Sander, holds the Jesse Dukeminier Professorship in Law at UCLA. An economist and law professor, he has taught at UCLA since 1989 and also serves at the director of the UCLA-RAND Center for Law and Public Policy.

Most of Sander's work draws on both law and social science to understand problems of social inequality and evaluate social policies. He is the author of two books: Moving Toward Integration (Harvard, 2018), which attempts to explain the complex evolution of housing segregation in America, the effects of fair housing laws, and the paths to desegregation; and Mismatch (Basic Books, 2012), which examines the paradoxical and often counterproductive effects of many current affirmative action policies in higher education, suggests a better path to diversity, and describes the barriers to reform.

An unpaid, informal advisor to the plaintiffs in the Harvard/UNC cases during the early stages of those cases, Sander also collaborates with judges and scholars to study innovative ways to simplify litigation and to evaluate the results of reforms —an approach that has gained a good deal of traction in recent years.

Bruce G. Carruthers is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a long-term Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. At Northwestern, Carruthers is involved in the graduate Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS) program and the Kellogg-Sociology Joint-PhD program. 

His current research projects include a study of the historical evolution of credit as a problem in the sociology of trust, regulatory arbitrage, what modern derivatives markets reveal about the relationship between law and capitalism, the adoption of “for-profit” features by U.S. museums, and the regulation of credit for poor people in early 20th-century America. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Library of Congress, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over. Northwestern is Carruthers’ first teaching position. 

Carruthers has authored or co-authored five books, City of Capital: Politics and  Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and  Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000), Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford, 2009), and Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010).   

Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of  Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including (but by no means limited to) the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard  University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.  West graduated  Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton.  

He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at  nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies. 

This program is co-sponsored by the Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Sylvain Catherine is assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches courses on corporate finance, venture capital, and finance of technological innovation.

Professor Catherine's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC.

Michele Renee Salzman is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, where she has taught since 1995. Her research focuses on the religious, political and social history of Ancient Rome, with a strong emphasis on the use of material evidence to explain the past. She has published four books, including her most recent, The Falls of Rome, published by Cambridge University Press. She has co-edited three others, including serving as the general editor of The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World, also published by Cambridge University Press. 

Salzman has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at The American Academy in Rome; the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem; a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Grant; and Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa. 

Salzman was elected vice president for Programs for the Society of Classical Studies (2015-2018); and trustee for the Council of the School of Classical Studies to the American Academy in Rome (2016-2019). In addition to her other professional activities, she is currently an associate editor for Studies in Late Antiquity.

Phia S. Salter is associate professor of psychology at Davidson College. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Kansas in 2010. In her research, she uses cultural-psychological and critical race perspectives to inform her work on collective memory, racial identity, and systemic racism. Her research lab, the Culture in Mind Research Collaboratory, conducts research that addresses social inequalities and injustice in different facets of American society. She is also dedicated to social justice initiatives for teaching and learning. In 2018, she was awarded an Outstanding Teaching & Mentoring Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) in recognition of her efforts and contributions.

Professor Salter's Athenaeum presentation is supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.

Eric Schwitzgebel is professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and author of four books and over a hundred research articles spanning widely across philosophy and psychology. He is especially drawn to interdisciplinary topics where standard research methodologies fall apart.

Schwitzgebel is probably best known for his skepticism about self-knowledge and theories of consciousness (for example in his book Perplexities of Consciousness, his work on the tenuous relationship between ethical theorizing and real-world moral choice (for example in his book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures), and his work on A.I. ethics (for example in his forthcoming book The Weirdness of the World).

Elizabeth Farfán-Santos has a Ph.D. and M.A. in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. An accomplished researcher and scholar, Farfán-Santos is the author of two books, Black Bodies, Black Rights: The Politics of Quilombolismo in Contemporary Brazil and Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing, both published by the University of Texas Press. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals including Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Latino Studies, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Recently, Farfán-Santos moved on from her position as associate professor with tenure at the University of Houston. Since then, she has collaborated with public health leaders within the Houston public health system, directed sessions on cultural humility for researchers in neurocognitive disorders, and is currently teaching sessions on medical anthropology and barriers to health access for marginalized and underserved communities at the UH College of Medicine.

Despite her long history of research and teaching, Farfán-Santos identifies primarily as a writer passionate about nonfiction and creative prose that blends multiple genres, including ethnography, memoir, essay, and poetry. She has published creative essays and poetry and brings together the researcher-anthropologist and creative writer in her new book, Undocumented Motherhood.

Angela Vossmeyer is an associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Her research interests include: econometrics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), simulation-based inference, financial economics, financial crises, and economic history. She was recently a visiting scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the Division of Monetary Affairs.

Mark Skousen holds the Doti-Spogli Endowed Chair of Free Enterprise at Chapman University. He earned his Ph.D. in monetary economics at George Washington University. In 2018, he was awarded the Triple Crown in Economics for his work in theory, history, and education, after receiving "My Favorite Professor Award" at Chapman. He has taught at Columbia Business School, worked for the government (CIA), non-profits (president of FEE), and been a consultant to IBM.

He has written for the Wall Street Journal and a regular column for Forbes magazine. He is the author of over 25 books, including The Making of Modern Economics and The Maxims of Wall Street. He has been editor in chief of an award-winning investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, since 1980. He produces “FreedomFest, the world’s largest gathering of free minds,” every July in Las Vegas.

Influenced by his work, the federal government began publishing Gross Output (GO) every quarter along with GDP. It is the first macro statistic of the economy to be published quarterly since GDP was invented in the 1940s.

Mia Mask is the Mary Riepma Ross Professor of Film at Vassar College. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film. 

Mask edited the anthology Contemporary Black American Cinema, published by Routledge. She also published the jointly edited collection Poitier Revisited: Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age (Bloomsbury). Her newest book is Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western.

Her cultural commentary has been featured on National Public Radio programs “Tell Me More,” “Marketplace” and “Morning Edition;” on Soledad O'Brien’s “Matter of Fact,” and in documentaries for the Smithsonian Channel, the Criterion Channel and CNN’s The Movies.

Professor Mask's Athenaeum presentation is supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.

Kyla Easting '18 is an assistant staff attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. At CMC, Eastling majored in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics with a Legal Studies sequence. After graduation, she enrolled in Yale Law School, where she was part of the Veterans Legal Services Clinic, with a focus on gender and racial equity in the military service academies and on securing benefits for veterans who served on Guam. She graduated from Yale Law School in 2021. Last year, she served as a Gruber Fellow in Global Justice and Women's Rights at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project.

Ms. Eastling's CMC presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). Her novel Dominicana was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book, and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. 

Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, and has been published in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She's the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix). An associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin, Italy.

Ms. Cruz’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.

Photo credit: Erika Morillo

Lingling Wei is the award-winning chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown. She covers China's political economy, focusing on the intersection of business and politics. Born and raised in China, she has a M.A. in journalism from N.Y.U., got her start covering U.S. real estate, and has won many awards for her China coverage. In 2021, she's among a team of reporters and editors whose work was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Ms. Wei's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

David E. Tolchinsky P'20 is a filmmaker and professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He co-founded and directed NU's MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage program, was chair of RTVF for 11 years, and recently co-founded and now directs the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts at Northwestern. 

His work, which spans comedy and darker fare, often involves trauma, memory, and mental illness. His short Cassandra, available on Alter, Apple, and Amazon, has won over 11 awards internationally and is currently being developed into a feature. He produced and scored the NYTimes Op-Doc Contaminated Memories, directed by Debra Tolchinsky, produced Creature Companion, directed by Melika Bass, and recently produced Shudder/AMC's feature Night's End, directed by Jennifer Reeder. He was recently invited by Psychology Today to start a blog, Screenology: pondering mental health and media. He's written screenplays for various Hollywood studios and has written and directed plays performed in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He graduated from Yale (BA) and the USC School of Cinematic Arts (MFA).

Photo credit: Stephen Lewis