Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist from Ukraine. She was named Media Freedom Ambassador of Ukraine for her human rights and media work and is one of the winners of the European Institute of Mediterranean literary contest for her reporting.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Anna started writing about the situation in her home country. She has written stories about survivors of Russian-made massacres in Northern Ukraine, the drama of internally displaced people and refugees forced to flee their homes, and volunteers helping others in times of need. She is a part of an investigative team collecting data on human rights violations and crimes against humanity during the Russo-Ukrainian war. 

Interested in audio storytelling and long-reads, Romandash enjoys working on feature stories and reportages which embed and localize the readers in the reality told through the eyes of the protagonists. She is the laureate of the Literary Reportages Award “Samovydets” from the Tempora Publishing House as her stories were named among the best reportages in Ukrainian in 2020 and 2021.

Ms. Romandash’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, both at CMC.

Bari Weiss is an opinion writer and editor. She is the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award and a Natan Notable Book Award.

In 2021, Bari launched the Common Sense with Bari Weiss Substack newsletter and Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss Bari was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

Weiss has won several awards, including the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times's "star opinion writer" and The Jerusalem Post named her the seventh most influential Jew in the world.

A Pittsburgh native, Weiss ia a graduate of Columbia University. 

Ms. Weiss’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Elizabeth Ito has been working as a creator, writer, director, and storyboard artist in the animation industry since 2004 on TV, feature, and commercial projects. She has received an Emmy for her directing work on Adventure Time, and is the co-creator of the award-winning short, Welcome to My Life, the second-most viewed short in Cartoon Network History.

Her first series, City of Ghosts for Netflix premiered in 2021 and won a Peabody Award in 2022. She recently directed a music video for The Linda Linda's and is on an overall deal with Apple TV.

Currently, she is living in Los Angeles, working from home, and trying to stay hydrated.

Ms. Ito’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Elizabeth Ito

Aditya Pai ’13
Aditya Pai ’13 is a trial attorney at Rutan & Tucker, LLP., where he represents owners, general contractors, and subcontractors in the construction industry as well as non-profits. He is an Urban Land Institute (ULI) under 35 Young Leader and serves in board advisory roles at Dev/Mission, a youth workforce development non-profit, and Habitat for Humanity Orange County. Prior to entering law practice, Pai interned for Montana Governor Steve Bullock and U.S. Senator Mark Warner. He earned a J.D. from Harvard, M. Phil. from Cambridge, and B.A. from Claremont McKenna College, where he served as manager of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government and student body president. 

Ilan Wurman '09
Ilan Wurman '09 is an associate professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, where he teaches administrative law and constitutional law. He writes on administrative law, separation of powers, and constitutionalism, and his academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Texas Law Review among other journals. He is also the author of A Debt Against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism (Cambridge 2017), and The Second Founding: An Introduction to the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge 2020). 

Prior to entering academia, Wurman clerked for the Honorable Jerry E. Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced law for three-and-a-half years at Winston & Strawn in Washington, D.C. He also served as deputy general counsel on Rand Paul's U.S. presidential campaign in 2015 and as associate counsel on Tom Cotton's U.S. Senate campaign in 2014. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Claremont McKenna College.

This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable whose mission it is to inspire public service with additional support from the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Ilan Wurnman '09, Aditya Pai '13, Nohl Patterson '22

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Mastro is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve as a strategic planner at United States Indo-Pacific Command.

Mastro holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Dr. Mastro’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies and the Salvatori Center, both at CMC.

Author of nine poetry books including The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection Ledger.

Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The California Book Award, Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. 

In fall 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In March 2019 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages and set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass; her TED-ED animated introduction to metaphor has received over 875,000 views. An intimate and profound master of her art, her frequent appearances at universities, writers’ conferences and festivals in this country and abroad are highly acclaimed. 

Photo credit: Curt Richter

(This event was originally scheduled for March 30, 2020.)

Mark Juergensmeyer is the William F Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the founding director of global studies and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is a pioneer in the global studies field, focusing on global religion, religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics. He has published more than three hundred articles and twenty books, including the revised and expanded fourth edition of the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (Oxford University Press, 2014). His most recent books are God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford University Press 2020) and When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (University of California Press 2022).
 

Connie Chiang
Connie Chiang is the director of Environmental Studies Program and professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast and has published articles in many journals, including the Journal of American History and Environmental History. Her latest book, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration, explores how the environment shaped the confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. 

Ashanti Shih
Ashanti Shih is an assistant professor of history at Vassar College. She earned a B.A. in history and art practice at the University of California, Berkeley (2011) and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University (2019). Her research focuses on Asian American environmental knowledges, Asian settler colonialism, and the history of environmental sciences in the twentieth-century Pacific and American West. She is the author of  "'The Most Perfect Natural Laboratory in the World’: Making and Knowing Hawaii National Park," History of Science (May 2019) and forthcoming book on the same topic.

Tamara Venit-Shelton
Tamara Venit-Shelton is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College where she teaches classes on race/ethnicity, environment, and health. She is the author of two books including the award-winning Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace. She has also published research in both scholarly and popular journals and newspapers.

Sarah Wald
Sarah Wald is associate professor of environmental Studies and English at University of Oregon. She is the author of  The Nature of California; Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl and co-editor of  Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. Her current research focuses on the Outdoor Equity Movement. 

This panel discussion is a featured program of the Gould Center and EnviroLab Asia's mini-conference on Asian American Environmental Visions and Activism.

Michelle Tusan is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) with expertise in the areas of modern British history, the British Empire, and women’s history. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. Before coming to UNLV in 2001, she was a Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford. A British historian by training, her teaching and scholarship broadly engage the relationship between geopolitics, culture, and human rights.

Her current book project, The Last Treaty: The Middle Eastern Front and the End of the First World War, is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition, she is the author of The British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill (2017/2019); Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the Middle East (2012); Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (2005), and articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Modern History and Past and Present. She also has published a co-authored textbook, Britain Since 1688: A Nation in the World. She is the vice president/president elect of the North American Conference on British Studies. 

Professor Tusan’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.  

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michelle Tusan

Linda Sue Park is the author of many books for young readers, including the 2002 Newbery Medal winner,  A Single Shard, and the NYTimes bestseller, A Long Walk to Water. Her most recent title is The One Thing You’d Save, a collection of linked poems.

Park is the founder and curator of Allida Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. She serves on the advisory boards of We Need Diverse Books and the Rabbit hOle museum project, and created the kiBooka website to highlight children’s books created by the Korean diaspora. 

In addition to writing essays for numerous publications, Park has served as a panelist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the PEN Naylor grant, and the SCBWI Golden Kite Award. In her travels to promote reading and writing, she has visited more than 30 countries and 49 states. She knows very well that she will never be able to read every great book ever written, but she keeps trying anyway. 

Ms. Park's Athenaeum event is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, and the history department, all at CMC.

Former Washington Post columnist Donna Britt is the author of Brothers (and Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving. Britt began her career as a city desk reporter and fashion writer at the Detroit Free Press. A stint as Los Angeles bureau chief and backup movie critic for USA Today led to her joining the Washington Post as a writer for the Style section.

After several powerful first-person pieces, including an award-winning essay on her older brother's killing by police, she was given a twice-weekly column in the paper's Metro section. Within weeks, Britt was getting sacks of mail, flowers, and hundreds of phone calls from readers applauding her courage, conviction and knack for addressing subjects no one else had touched. Her column, which was syndicated in more than 60 cities, won awards from organizations including the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Award for commentary, and the National Association of Black Journalists.

Britt's 2011 memoir about the aftermath of her brother's killing, Brothers (& me): a Memoir of Loving and Giving, was honored by O: The Oprah Magazine as one of January 2012's "Ten Titles to Pick Up Now," and excerpted that same month by Essence magazine. More recently, she has written about a White man's obsession with saving a Black Lives Matter banner, what people got wrong in their judgments about Will Smith and The Slap, and finding gratitude during pandemic times.

A native of Gary, Indiana, Britt is a graduate of Hampton University and The University of Michigan.

Ms. Britt's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Nicolas Heidorn '06
Nicolas Heidorn '06 is the founder of Heidorn Consulting, a firm that specializes in state and local policy and advocacy. He was formerly the policy director for California Common Cause, where he led the organization’s legislative advocacy in Sacramento. He was also the founder and director of the California Local Redistricting Project, which was a joint Common Cause-McGeorge School of Law effort to promote local redistricting best practices. With over a decade of experience advocating for voting and governance reforms, particularly in local government, Heidorn drafted Senate Bill 1108 (Allen, 2016), which for the first time authorized all California general law cities and counties to adopt independent citizens redistricting commissions. He has assisted several jurisdictions in setting up their own local commissions. Representing Common Cause, he was also part of the coalition that passed Assembly Bill 849 (Bonta, 2019), which adopted new criteria and public engagement requirements for city and county redistricting. 

Prior to joining Common Cause, Heidorn served as assistant general counsel at the California Environmental Protection Agency, a position he was appointed to by Governor Brown in 2013. Before that, he worked in the State Legislature for State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas and on the Proposition 11 campaign, which established California’s state Citizens Redistricting Commission. 

A former fellow with New America California, Heidorn received his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Ken Miller
Ken Miller is the Don H. and Edessa Rose Professor of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College and director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government. Miller’s research focuses on state government institutions, with an emphasis on direct democracy and the interaction between law and politics. His publications include Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America (Oxford University Press, 2020), Direct Democracy and the Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and co-edited volumes Parchment Barriers: Political Polarization and the Limits of Constitutional Order (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and The New Political Geography of California (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2008). 

Miller was the Ann and Herbert Vaughan Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (2011-2012) and a visiting scholar at the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University (2017-2018). 

Professor Miller and Mr. Heidorn's Athenaeum event is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

Miller is a graduate of Pomona College, Harvard Law School, and University of California, Berkeley.

Raised both in United States and Europe with her military family, Mary Ruefle has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and the work of fiction The Most of It (2008). A Little White Shadow (2006), her book of erasures uses found texts in which all but a few words have been erased from the page.

Ruefle earned a BA from Bennington College. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).

Ruefle has taught at Vermont College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Ms. Ruefle’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Source: https://poets.org/poet/mary-ruefle)

Photo credit: Matt Valentine and the Poetry Foundation

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as "among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated." Barry is widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic, and emotional range of American comics, namely her seminal comic strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” which ran in weekly alternative newspapers for two decades.

Barry has authored 21 books and an album-length spoken-word collection, been a commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), had a regular monthly feature in magazines such as Esquire and Mother Jones, and appeared as a frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. She adapted her first novel, The Good Times are Killing Me, into a long running, award-winning play. Her book, Making Comics, was awarded the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book + Best Publication Design. 

Her 2022 books are reissues of Come Over, Come Over (Drawn & Quarterly, January 4, 2022), My Perfect Life (Drawn & Quarterly, July 5, 2022), and It's So Magic (Drawn & Quarterly, September 20, 2022).

Barry is an associate professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including lifetime achievement awards from both the Museum of Wisconsin Arts and the National Cartoonists Society. In 2019, Lynda Barry was honored as a MacArthur Fellow for “enabling artists and non-artists alike to take creative risks,” in her professorship, workshops, and public talks.

Barry earned a degree from Evergreen State College during its early experimental period (1974-78), studying with painter and writing teacher Marilyn Frasca.

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

Photo credit: Lynda Barry

Food for Thought: Podcast with Lynda Barry

Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes
Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes is an assistant professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. His research focuses on the social and spatial determinants of health with special attention to place and neighborhood effects on health. Douglass-Jaimes uses geospatial analysis and qualitative research methods to highlight localized health disparities often masked when narrow constructions of place are considered. His work is situated in global health equity and is driven by an interest and inquiry in how conceptions of place and identity can be products of social marginalization as well as sources for community resilience. He has collaborated with environmental health scientists, social scientists, and epidemiologists as well as community-based organizations working on environmental health and environmental justice issues.

Joana Grande
Joana Grande is a Fulbright language teaching assistant. She graduated from the Federal Technological University of Paraná, in Letras (Literature and Linguistics of the Portuguese and English languages) in 2020.

Sarah Sarzynski
Sarah Sarzynski is an associate professor of history, an associate professor of Latin American history, and co-faculty advisor of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Sequence at Claremont McKenna College. Author of Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil (Stanford University Press, May 2018), which examines how entrenched beliefs about Brazil’s Northeast region as backwards, barbaric, and violent influenced the trajectory of projects intended to solve the problem of rural poverty during the Cold War. She is currently conducting research on a book tentatively titled, The Spaces Between Genocide and Ecocide: Amazonian Borderlands, 1922-1970, focusing on how indigenous and borderlands peoples engaged in the process of creating borderlands spaces in the three borders region of Peru, Colombia and Brazil.  

Norman Valencia
Norman Valencia is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Claremont McKenna College. Valencia is a Colombian professor whose work has focused on comparative approaches between Brazilian and Hispanic American literatures and cultures. He is interested in the relationships between literature, culture, and politics in Latin America. He is author of Retóricas del poder y nombres del padre en la literatura latinoamericana paternalismo, política y forma literaria en Graciliano Ramos, Juan Rulfo, João Guimarães Rosa y José Lezama Lima, co-author of Pensar el Brasil hoy: Teorías literarias y crítica cultural en el Brasil contemporáneo, and translator of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.