Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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.

Morgan Gillette is a multi-instrumentalist and Marine Corps veteran based in Los Angeles. Growing up in a family with generations of both performing arts and military experience, he performed with various school, city, and state orchestras on viola and cello, while focusing on the guitar with family and friends. During nine years of active-duty service, Gillette’s passion for music never wavered. After his service, he continued his studies in the Applied Music Program at San Diego Mesa College, where he was exposed for the first time to traditional Ghanaian music, igniting his passion for drumming and percussion. Later, while at California Institute of the Arts, he began his collaboration with Nani Agbeli joining Agbeli’s West African Music and Dance department and performing with African music ensembles for two years at CalArts. Gillette’s love of Ghanaian song, dance, and drums persisted even through a year classical guitar training at the Traditional Music program at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In 2019, Gillette joined Agbeli’s Volta Drum Dance, where he remains an active member and performer.

Monique Thompson’s dance journey began at the age of six when she started learning Nigerian-style dance under her first instructor, Baba Onochie Chukwurah. For the last four years, she has been training with Nani Agbeli, and has deepened her skills in Ghanaian drumming, dance, and singing. A life-long Pasadena resident, Thompson holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Cal State Northridge and a Master’s degree with a Multiple Subject Credential from The Alder Graduate School of Education. Thompson is an active member of Agbeli’s Volta Drum Dance and performs regularly throughout greater Los Angeles area.

This 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.

 

Hannah Chazin is an archaeologist whose work investigates the history of human-animal relations, and explores how new scientific techniques like isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis are re-shaping how archaeologists learn about life in the past. 

Currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Chazin’s book, Live Stock and Dead Things, was released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Yannis Hamilakis, professor of archaeology and of modern Greek studies at Brown University, states "We have been waiting for a book like this for many years... this is a rare bird of a book that pays our dues to the mundane beings that lived and labored with and alongside humans, but which were instrumentalized and objectified in scholarship for far too long." 

Chazin's scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Archaeometry, and the Journal of Field Archaeology. In support of her scholarship, she has received fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, she has done archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Russia, Chile, Cambodia, and the western United States.

Chazin received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is exploring, using cutting-edge scientific analyses, the lives of the animals buried in an ancient necropolis in Armenia.

Gastón Enrique Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.  He is a graduate of Princeton (M.Div.), Harvard (M.Ed.), and UC Santa Barbara (Ph.D.) and did postdoctoral work at the UCLA School of Film and Television. 

Espinosa has held visiting fellow appointments at Dartmouth College, NHC National Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Münster, Germany, and Princeton University. He has directed nine major surveys on Latino religions, politics, and activism from 1998-2022. 

Espinosa is the author or co-author of nine books, fifty refereed articles, book chapters, and reviews, sixty encyclopedia entries, 200 scholarly keynotes and presentations around the world, has made numerous television, radio, and media appearances, and has served as the director of eight major conferences. 

In 2002, he spoke at the National Hispanic Presidential Prayer Breakfast with President George Bush and Senator Joseph Lieberman and he currently is the co-director of the Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics.

Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind is an international figure in architecture and urban design. Informed by a deep commitment to music, philosophy, and literature, Libeskind aims to create architecture that is resonant, original, and sustainable.

Libeskind established his architectural studio, Studio Libeskind, in Berlin, Germany, in 1989 after winning the competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In February 2003, Studio Libeskind moved its headquarters from Berlin to New York City to oversee the master plan for the World Trade Center redevelopment, which is being realized in Lower Manhattan.

Libeskind’s practice is involved in designing and realizing a diverse array of urban, cultural, and commercial projects around the globe. The Studio has completed buildings that range from museums and concert halls to convention centers, university buildings, hotels, shopping centers, and residential towers. As Principal Design Architect for Studio Libeskind, Libeskind speaks widely on the art of architecture in universities and professional summits. His architecture and ideas have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions, influencing the field of architecture and the development of cities and culture.

Libeskind has won dozens of awards for his work including the Goethe Medal, the Hiroshima Peace Prize, the Dresden Peace Prize, and the European Union Prize for Civil Rights.

Mr. Libeskind's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Office and the President's Leadership Fund.

Photo credit: Stefan Ruiz

Robert Twomey is an artist and engineer studying the ways we share space with machines—creative, perceptual, emotional—and how emerging technologies transform sites of intimate life. He houses this work in the Machine Cohabitation Lab. His projects have been presented at SIGGRAPH (Best Paper Award), CVPR, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He has been an artist-in-residence with Nokia Bell Labs’ Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Carnegie Mellon’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a NYC Media Lab x Bertelsmann fellow. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, California Arts Council, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, and NVIDIA. Twomey holds a BS from Yale with majors in Art and Biomedical Engineering, an MFA from UC San Diego, and a PhD from the University of Washington. He is a professor of Computing in the Arts and a researcher with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Professor Twomey's Athenaeum presentation is the keynote for Third Annual Meeting of the World Imagination Network.