Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

M. Gessen is a journalist and bestselling author who has covered political subjects from Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Gessen's latest book is Surviving Autocracy, a bracing overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the Trump administration. As The New York Times Book Review noted in their review, “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” Their understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. Winner of the National Book Award, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy, against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all. Gessen’s other books include the New York Times bestseller, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. An opinion writer at The New York Times, Gessen is the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism. They live in New York City. 

Gessen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the Women and Leadership Alliance at CMC.

Michelle Dowd is a contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, The LA Review of Books, LA Parent Mag, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to navigate by the stars and forage for edible plants. Her memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.
 

Miriam Farah '23 graduated cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a dual major in public policy and history with departmental honors and a minor in gender and sexuality studies. During her senior year, Farah wrote a year-long history thesis titled "The Criminalization of Girls' Mental Illness: Race, Gender, and Class in Juvenile Collaborative Courts," which won the best thesis in history and gender studies. On campus, she was heavily involved with the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and worked for Claremont Canopy, a nonprofit organization aimed to help resettle immigrants in Southern California. In high school, Farah explored her interest in the legal field by interning for McGregor Law Corp., a criminal defense law firm for three summers, and Teen Court. Her college coursework and previous experience in criminal law inspired her passion for civil rights law, leading her to work for Haysbert & Moultrie LLP, the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Constitutional Accountability Center. Since graduation, she has been working as a civil rights paralegal at Relman Colfax, a private public interest firm in Washington, DC focused on fair housing and fair lending. In her free time, Farah likes spending time with her family and friends, exploring D.C., and being outdoors. 

Valentina Gonzalez '23 is the Media Coordinator in the communications and external affairs department at the Vera Institute of Justice. In her role, Gonzalez tracks and distributes earned media, manages media inquiries, pitches Vera products to various news outlets, and manages administrative operations, supporting efforts to deliver messaging that advances the Institute's mission to reform the criminal legal and immigration systems. Before joining Vera in 2024, Gonzalez worked as an Elbaz Fellow in the communications division at Human Rights Watch (HRW). At HRW, she supported media strategy for research products on international human rights issues and contributed to large-scale media coverage and postproduction analytics of various products. During her fellowship, she directly worked on projects about Israel/Palestine, immigration in the U.S., the United Nations’ annual Climate Change Conference (COP28), and HRW’s 2024 World Report. Gonzalez earned a BA in International Relations with a sequence in Human Rights, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies from Claremont McKenna College in 2023. 

Michelle Ramirez '23 graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in Public Policy and a Human Rights Sequence and has since been working as an impact litigation paralegal at Children's Rights. While at Claremont McKenna, Ramirez completed her senior thesis on “Examining the Equity of California’s School Funding Formula,” which aimed to measure the impact of equity-oriented school finance reforms in California on student achievement. Before joining Children’s Rights, she interned for the Learning Rights Law Center, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the Department for the Execution of Judgments at the Council of Europe. In her free time, Ramirez likes going to yoga, exploring new cuisines in New York City, and spending time with friends.  

Yi Shun Lai '96 is the author, most recently, of the young adult historical novel A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Her memoir, Pin Ups, was published in 2020, and her debut novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, was published in 2016. She has delivered inclusivity workshops to everyone from AAA video-game studios to international nonprofits, and also teaches in an MFA program for Creative Nonfiction. She graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1996 and recently returned to campus as CMC's Assistant Director of Fellowships Advising. When she's not on campus or writing, she can be found teaching her intractable dog useless tricks.

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Elbaz Family Post-Graduate Fellowship Program.

Kenneth P. Miller is the Don H. and Edessa Rose Professor of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, where he serves as Director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government. Miller’s scholarship focuses on state and local politics, constitutional law, and political polarization. His publications include Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America (Oxford 2020), Direct Democracy and the Courts (Cambridge 2009), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on topics including the initiative process, political geography, state constitutionalism, state supreme courts, and voting rights.

The Rose Institute of State and Local Government, located at CMC, was founded in 1973. An unmatched resource for information on California state and local government, the Institute maintains extensive demographic, economic, and political databases on the Southern California region. Under the direction of nationally recognized faculty and staff, the best and brightest students from Claremont McKenna College play a significant role in researching, interpreting, and presenting data. 

This Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and writes the “American Affairs” column for The New Statesman. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. Ahmari’s books include Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It (2023) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021), both published by Penguin Random House.

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Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where he has published opinion pieces for more than 20 years. Topics include politics, economics, education, immigration, social inequality and race. He’s also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets.

After joining the Journal in 1994, he was named a senior editorial page writer in 2000 and a member of the Editorial Board in 2005. He joined the Manhattan Institute, a public policy think tank focused on urban issues, in 2015. In 2008 he published Let Them In, which argues for a more free-market oriented U.S. immigration system. His second book, Please Stop Helping Us, which is about government efforts to help the black underclass, was published in 2014. In 2017, he published False Black Power?, an assessment of why black political success has not translated into more economic advancement. In 2021, he published  Maverick, a biography of the iconic economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, and narrated the documentary film Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World. Riley’s most recent book is The Black Boom, an analysis of black economic progress prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Riley earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has also worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He lives in suburban New York City.

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Aditya Pai '13 is a public servant and practicing attorney for entrepreneurs, workers, and low-income tenants in need of pro bono help.

Pai was a Democratic candidate for United States Representative for CA-45 (Artesia, Cerritos, north Orange County), with the platform of Service Over Politics: anti-corruption, pro-choice, with a focus on helping working families afford the American Dream.

He earned a B.A. from Claremont McKenna, J.D. from Harvard, M.Phil. from Cambridge. At 22, he managed a California policy think tank. From 24-27, his supervisor was Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Pai joined the California Bar at 26.

Pai was born in Bombay, India and raised in Orange County, CA where he grew up speaking Hindi and Marathi at home and Spanish and English at school. He loves language, ideas, and most of all, people.

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This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at CMC, whose mission it is to inspire public service.

Civitas Sessions is organized by the Kravis Lab and moderated by Executive Director Vernon C. Grigg III, JD. A lawyer by training, Grigg holds degrees from Yale Law School (J.D.), the London School of Economics (G.SC.), and the University of Michigan (BA).  Vernon comes to the Kravis Lab from his role as CEO & President of Up with People, a fifty-five-year-old international nonprofit education and arts organization. He managed a global team of 50 employees across three continents as he led the nonprofit to sustainability and health despite the challenges of the worldwide pandemic.

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 (2000), The Politics of Autism (2015) and Un-American: The Fake Patriotism of Donald J. Trump (2020). 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. 

Juliet Johnson is Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2023), and former Director of the international research network Between the EU and Russia: Domains of Diversity and Contestation (2015-2023). Her research focuses on the politics of money and on memory politics, particularly in post-communist Europe. Her publications include Developments in Russian Politics (Duke 2024), Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell 2016), A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), and numerous scholarly and policy-oriented articles.

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

Professor Amit Ahuja is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organization, intercaste marriage, and skin color preferences in South Asia.

Professor Ahuja’s book, Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements published by Oxford University Press was the winner of the 2020 New India Foundation Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize. He has coedited a volume with Devesh Kapur, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a book-length project titled, Building National Armies in Multiethnic States. In 2022-23, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC. Professor Ahuja was awarded The Margret T. Getman Service to Students Award in 2015.

Professor Ahuja’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

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

Judge John Owens has been a federal judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 2014. Prior to joining the court, Judge Owens was litigation partner in the Los Angeles office of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and a federal prosecutor for more than a decade. He earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he graduated first in his class.  He served as a law clerk for the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Laura Craft is a Senior Vice President, Heitman’s Global Head of Portfolio Sustainability Strategies, and an equity owner of the firm. She leads the firm’s sustainability platform and interacts across business lines and regions to establish systematic approaches to incorporate sustainability into investment decision-making and management of investments with the goal of creating value, reducing risk, and enhancing investment returns. Currently, Craft is the co-chair of the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) Innovation Affinity Group and is a member of Urban Land Institute (ULI) Greenprint’s Performance Committee. Prior to joining Heitman, she spent 10 years at LaSalle Investment Management, where she began in LaSalle’s valuation and asset management groups and transitioned to develop the firm’s Global Sustainability Platform. Craft's early career experience includes market data coverage at Grubb & Ellis | Barkley Fraser, a real estate brokerage company, as well as Building Information Modeling (BIM) research and development at SmartBIM. Laura’s past industry involvement has included advising ULI Greenprint Center, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), and the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) on their reporting frameworks and environmental data platforms.

Craft received a double BA in Real Estate and Business Management from the University of Georgia, where she was one of 30 UGA students to earn a Leonard Leadership Scholar Certification. She is also a graduate of the Urban Land Institute’s Center for Leadership program and is a LEED Accredited Professional, having overseen over 100 LEED, IREM, Energy Star, and Green Globes designations.

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Ryan Patel is a globally recognized futurist and go-to authority on global business, political economy, and corporate governance. Currently the William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC, Patel is an expert in scaling businesses, he's served startups and publicly traded firms. Listed as one of the “Creators to Follow” by LinkedIn Editor in Chief Daniel Roth and recognized as a “Top Voice” on Linkedin, Patel is a sought-after TV news commentator and Board Director. Patel also hosts "The Moment with Ryan Patel," featuring conversations with top innovators and executives filmed at the iconic HP Garage, the birthplace of Silicon Valley. He complements his literary talents with domestic and international keynote appearances, leading campaigns with corporations and universities such as the World Economic Forum, Davos, Mastercard, HP, Adobe, The Economist, Reuters, and more.

This Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.

Richard Ross is an artist, activist and distinguished research professor of art based at UC Santa Barbara. Ross has been the recipient of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Ross is both Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow.

His most recent work, the In-Justice series, turns a lens on the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. Four published books and traveling exhibitions of the work continue to see great success while Ross collaborates with juvenile justice stakeholders, using the images as a catalyst for change.

Professor Ross' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Ganesha Rasiah is a seasoned Fortune 100 senior technology executive with deep experience in driving a shift to recurring revenue business models and operations, emerging markets expansion and incubations, AI and software. He currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer and member of the Executive Leadership Team at HP Inc., where he leads a global team across corporate strategy and corporate planning, business unit strategy and planning across all businesses ($53b in revenue), growth market incubations, market analysis and insights, corporate development, GTM strategy, and the office of the CEO. 

Prior to HP, Rasiah was the head of transformation at Cisco where he led the company’s shift to $23b in ARR and 44% recurring revenue. As part of this shift, he ran the P&L for Cisco’s enterprise agreement software business, growing the business by $700m YoY. Prior to Cisco, Rasiah was a partner at Deloitte where he led digital transformation and online channel development and acceleration at telco and tech clients in the US, Europe and Asia. During his tenure at Deloitte, he worked in 11 countries across 25+ different companies and ran a $300m global services P&L for the firm. Prior to Deloitte, he was a systems engineer responsible for designing and developing programmable ASICS for network processors.

Rasiah serves on the board of an early-stage mental health B2B SaaS startup called PeakMind, in support of a diverse CEO. He is a native of Malaysia and spent the first 20 years of his life there, prior to college. He speaks multiple languages and considers himself a global citizen. Ganesha holds a graduate degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in NY, and an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from McGill University in Montreal.

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Ryan Patel is a globally recognized futurist and go-to authority on global business, political economy, and corporate governance. Currently the William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC, Patel is an expert in scaling businesses, he's served startups and publicly traded firms. Listed as one of the “Creators to Follow” by LinkedIn Editor in Chief Daniel Roth and recognized as a “Top Voice” on Linkedin, Patel is a sought-after TV news commentator and Board Director. Patel also hosts "The Moment with Ryan Patel," featuring conversations with top innovators and executives filmed at the iconic HP Garage, the birthplace of Silicon Valley. He complements his literary talents with domestic and international keynote appearances, leading campaigns with corporations and universities such as the World Economic Forum, Davos, Mastercard, HP, Adobe, The Economist, Reuters, and more.

This Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.

Faris Cassell, award-winning investigative journalist, earned her M.S. in journalism with honors from the University of Oregon and her B.A. in History from Mt. Holyoke College. She is the author of Inseparable: The Hess Twins' Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America (2023). Her first book, The Unanswered Letter, won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award. She lives with her husband in Eugene, Oregon.

Marion Ein Lewin (née Hess) and her twin brother, Steven Hess, were only six years old when they were taken by the Nazis from Holland to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they endured brutal conditions and lived in a state of perpetual fear. The twins and their parents were imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen for approximately one year, after narrowly escaping being sent to Auschwitz. They ultimately were liberated and moved to the United States in 1947.

This special Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Stuart E. Eizenstat has served six U.S. presidential administrations in a number of key senior positions, including Chief White House Domestic Policy Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981); U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration (1993-2001). During the Obama administration, he served as Special Adviser on Holocaust-Era Issues to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry (2009-2017), during which he negotiated significant Holocaust-related agreements with the governments of Lithuania and France. During the Trump administration, he was appointed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as Expert Adviser to the State Department on Holocaust-Era Issues, and in the Biden administration, he is currently serving as Special Adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Holocaust Issues. His newest book is The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World (2024). He is also the author of President Carter: The White House Years (2018), The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States (2012), and Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (2003). He is an international lawyer in Washington, DC.

Amabssador Eizenstat's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights (where Eizenstat serves as an honorary advisory board member) and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, both at CMC.

Professor Robbie Shilliam is Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, He is a leading scholar of postcolonial politics and racial politics in the field of International Relations. He has authored numerous books including Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (2018); Decolonizing Politics (2021), The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (2015), and German Thought and International Relations (2009) and co-edited multiple volumes including Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014). He is co-editor of the Manchester University Press book series Postcolonial International Studies. Professor Shilliam is a long-standing active member of the Global Development section of the International Studies Association, having served as the association's Vice President. Professor Shilliam works with community and academic intellectuals and elders of the Rastafari movement to examine its impact on global affairs. Based on original, primary research, he helped to co-curate a history of the Rastafari movement in Britain, which was exhibited in Ethiopia, Jamaica and Britain.

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