Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

U.C. Davis Law faculty member Professor Mary Ziegler, one of the world’s leading historians of the U.S. abortion debate, has weighed in for many national and international media outlets since a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade came to light in early May 2022.

Ziegler is the author of four books on social movement struggles around reproduction, autonomy, and the law, including Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2018), the award-winning After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2015), which won the Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline, and Reproduction and the Constitution (Routledge, 2022). Her new book, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, is appearing with Yale University Press in 2022.  

Ziegler is currently working on a history of the nation’s fixation with Roe v. Wade for Yale University Press and editing a comparative volume on the laws of abortion around the world for Elgar Press. 

Ziegler is a graduate of Harvard College (2004) and Harvard Law School (2007). Before coming to U.C. Davis, she was a professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she won several teaching awards. She also was the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.

Professor Ziegler will deliver the Salvatori Center's 2022-23 Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism. 

Ran “RON” Libeskind-Hadas is the Founding Chair of the Department of Integrated Sciences. Prior to joining CMC in July 2021, he was on the faculty at Harvey Mudd College for 28 years where he served as the chair of the department of computer science and associate dean of faculty. Libeskind-Hadas works, teaches, and writes in the field of computational biology and has developed a number of algorithms and software tools that are widely-used by other researchers in the life sciences. 

When he’s not teaching and doing research, he enjoys cooking and walking with his wife, Laura, mountain biking with his son, Noah, and talking politics with his son, Ben.

View Video: YouTube with Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jazz Studies.

She is the author of six books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry and Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) which was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and an author of creative nonfiction. Her writing and scholarship primarily focuses on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political, and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.

She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Yale College in Literature and American Studies.

Professor Perry will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2022-23 Golo Mann Lecture; her Athenaeum presentation is also supported by CMC's Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.

Photo credit: Sameer Khan

Sanjib Kalita is CEO of Guppy—the Web3 credit bureau—and editor in chief of Money20/20—the world’s leading fintech event series. A leader in fintech for over two decades, Kalita has also worked at large organizations like Google, Intel, and Citi as well several startups with successful exits.

In his early career, Kalita was at Citi where he launched several products and led the turnaround of a multibillion-dollar credit card business. He worked at Intel, where he was one of the founding engineers of Intel’s graphics accelerator business and helped drive the fastest new business ramp at Intel at the time. He designed a programming language that is still used at Intel, over 25 years later. 

Kalita is an independent board member of Gigworks, a publicly listed technology development company. He also serves as an advisor to the following diverse entities: TripleBlind, a privacy-preserving data sharing technology; American Pacific Bancorp; MPOWER Financing, an alternative lender providing student loans for international students; Impact Analytics, a data science consulting company; and SXSW Accelerator.

Kalita has an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University.

Mr. Kalita's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Sanjib Kalita

Jared Diamond is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author of five best-selling books, translated into 38 languages, about human societies and human evolution: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee, The World until Yesterday, and Upheaval.

As a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, he is known for his breadth of interests, which includes conducting research and teaching in three other fields: the biology of New Guinea birds, digestive physiology, and conservation biology.

He is a director of World Wildlife Fund/U.S. and of Conservation International. As a biological explorer, his most widely publicized finding was his rediscovery, at the top of New Guinea’s remote Foja Mountains, of the long-lost Golden-fronted Bowerbird, previously known only from four specimens found in a Paris feather shop in 1895.

His prizes and honors include the U.S. National Medal of Science (America's highest civilian award in science), the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Science, the MacArthur Genius Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

As one of CMC’s 75th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers, Professor Diamond will highlight issues in "Civilization and Commerce” one of the three academic collaboration themes of our special 75th Anniversary celebration. (This event was previously scheduled for the spring semester of 2022.)

Professor Diamond's Athenaeum Presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Jared Diamond
 

Sahil Kapur ’09
Sahil Kapur ’09 is a senior national political reporter for NBC News covering Capitol Hill, elections, and Washington, DC. Having reported on American politics and public policy for more than a decade, he appears regularly on MSNBC and NBC News Now.

He has broken stories on a range of topics from the Obama-era health care legislation and the Trump tax cuts to the major Biden-era economic bills. He uncovered a rare Supreme Court error that led to a correction, covered the January 6 attack and its aftermath, delved deep into the politics and internal machinations of the Senate filibuster, and reported on strategy and stakes of countless campaigns for Congress and the presidency.

He previously worked for Bloomberg News, TPM Media, and Inside Washington Publishers, with beats ranging from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, PBS and NPR to discuss his reporting.

Kapur has a B.A. in economics and government from Claremont McKenna College.

Michael Shear ’90
Michael Shear ’90 is a New York Times’ White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in the Washington bureau, where he covers President Biden, with a focus on domestic policy, the regulatory state, and life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A veteran political correspondent, he has covered the White House for 13 years, including the Trump and Obama presidencies. As with the Presidents Obama and Trump, Shear travels the world with President Biden.

Shear joined The Times in 2010 and has written extensively about national politics and policymaking in Washington. During 2020, Shear worked with investigative teams at New York Times to document the Trump administration's response to the Covid crisis. He was a leading member of the team that won the Pulitzer Public Service prize for the paper's coverage of the pandemic and its health and economic consequences.

Before coming to The Times, Shear spent 18 years at The Washington Post, writing about local communities, school districts, state politics, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the White House. A member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, Shear is a 1990 graduate of Claremont McKenna College and has a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Elise Viebeck ‘10
Elise Viebeck '10 is a former Washington Post investigative reporter whose work chronicled the movements and controversies that shaped American democracy during the Trump presidency. Covering the nexus of the administration, Capitol Hill, and the electoral system, Viebeck helped lead the Post’s efforts as the #MeToo movement hit the political world, including vetting and reporting on dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct against government leaders. She has written extensively about Donald Trump’s legal battles and first impeachment trial, as well as the legacy of Joe Biden’s Senate record. In her final, groundbreaking work for the Post, she directed a team monitoring hundreds of changes to voting rules during the Covid-19 pandemic and documented the unprecedented effort by Trump and his allies to restrict ballot access and overturn his election loss.

Viebeck majored in government at CMC and previously covered Congress and health care policy for The Hill newspaper. She now writes and consults independently from San Francisco.

This panel discussion is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Sahil Kapur '09, Michael 'Shear '90, Elise Viebeck '10

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Shear '90
 

Amanda Little is a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University and a columnist for Bloomberg, where she writes about the environment, agriculture and innovation. Professing a particular fondness for far-flung and hard-to-stomach reporting that takes her to ultradeep oil rigs, down manholes, into sewage plants, and inside monsoon clouds, Little spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to the what we will eat in a bigger and hotter world.

Her recent TED Talk, based on the book, has more than one million views. She also wrote the book Power Trip: The Story of America's Love Affair With Energy. Little has published her reporting and commentary in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York Magazine, NewYorker.com, and elsewhere.

A former columnist for Outside magazine and Grist.org, she is a recipient of the Nautilus Book Award, a Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society for Environmental Journalists, and the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in environmental journalism. 

A graduate of Brown University, Little is the founder and director of Kidizenship, a non-partisan youth civics platform for teens and tweens.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Amanda Little

Michael Alvarez's research focuses on public opinion and voting behavior, election technology and administration, electoral politics, political campaigns, and statistical and computational modeling. He has long been interested in empirically testing formal models of elections and voting behavior.

Alvarez is the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He is a fellow of the Society for Political Methodology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been recognized for his mentoring work, both at Caltech by the Graduate Student Council (twice) and by the Society for Political Methodology. He also received the Emerging Scholar Award in the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association in 2001.

Alvarez has a BA from Carleton College and a MA and PhD from Duke University.

Andrew Sinclair's research focuses on American politics, with a particular emphasis on political reform.  He is a coauthor, along with Michael Alvarez, of Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Recent work has continued to examine electoral reforms and political behavior, including a paper co-authored with Betsy

Sinclair: "Primaries and Populism: Voter Efficacy, Champions, and Election Rules" (Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2(3) 2021:  365-388).  In addition, he has continued to examine the democratic aspects of reform in public administration, co-authoring with Maya Love and María Gutiérrez-Vera "Federalism, Defunding the Police, and Democratic Values: A Functional Accountability Framework for Analyzing Police Reform Proposals" (Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 51(3) 2021: 484-511). 

A graduate of Claremont McKenna College's class of 2008, before returning CMC as a member of the faculty, Sinclair earned his Ph.D. at Caltech and was clinical assistant professor at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.  

Jared Diamond is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author of five best-selling books, translated into 38 languages, about human societies and human evolution: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee, The World until Yesterday, and Upheaval. As a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, he is known for his breadth of interests, which includes conducting research and teaching in three other fields: the biology of New Guinea birds, digestive physiology, and conservation biology. His prizes and honors include the U.S. National Medal of Science (America's highest civilian award in science), the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Science, the MacArthur Genius Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a director of World Wildlife Fund/U.S. and of Conservation International. As a biological explorer, his most widely publicized finding was his rediscovery, at the top of New Guinea’s remote Foja Mountains, of the long-lost Golden-fronted Bowerbird, previously known only from four specimens found in a Paris feather shop in 1895.

Ani Hovannisian has been a reporter and anchor on Armenian television for over a decade and is actively involved with the Armenian community in California and worldwide. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America, Television Academy, and International Documentary Association. 

Over the course of four trips and seven years, Hovannisian completed this documentary born of her daring journeys through the forbidden lands of her ancestral past. While documenting evidence of thousands of years of Armenian creation and ultimate decimation in modern-day Turkey, she met a Scottish explorer who had discovered these mysterious lands 30 years earlier. Ani returned with a tiny team, and together the duo dug beneath the surface, uncovering buried secrets, sacred relics, silenced voices, and the hidden map.

Directed, produced, written, and narrated by Hovannisian, The Hidden Map debuted nationwide on NBCLX the weekend of April 24, 2021 to coincide with Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Several encore presentations followed, including multiple popular PBS SoCal broadcasts. 

Ms. Hovannisian's Athenaeum presentation is the annual Mgrublian Lecture on Armenian Studies and will highlight the history and the journey of her family and the Armenian people – those who survived the genocide and those who did not—and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. 

View Video: YouTube with Ani Hovannisian

Ran “RON” Libeskind-Hadas is the Founding Chair of the Department of Integrated Sciences. Prior to joining CMC in July 2021, he was on the faculty at Harvey Mudd College for 28 years where he served as the chair of the department of computer science and associate dean of faculty. Libeskind-Hadas works, teaches, and writes in the field of computational biology and has developed a number of algorithms and software tools that are widely-used by other researchers in the life sciences. 

When he’s not teaching and doing research, he enjoys cooking and walking with his wife, Laura, mountain biking with his son, Noah, and talking politics with his son, Ben.

View Video: YouTube with Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. 

Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), selected as one of Time's 100 must-read books for 2020.  Her 2018 book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), was winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award (best book in civil rights history), the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize (best book in American legal history), the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award (best book in Anglo-American legal history) and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many articles and essay. 

A public historian, she also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, Talking Points Memo, Politico, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time. She is an exhibition curator for “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” at the William L. Clements Library, and an expert consultant for museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.) 

Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law which bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa in 2019. Prior to her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. 

Jones is an immediate past co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and today serves on the boards of the Society of American Historians, the National Women's History Museum, the US Capitol Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Journal of African American History and Slavery & Abolition.

View Video: YouTube with Martha S. Jones

Food for Thought: Podcast with Martha S. Jones

A two-time member of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Tyehimba Jess's first collection, leadbelly (2005), an exploration of the blues musician Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s life, was chosen for the National Poetry Series and was voted one of the top three poetry books of the year by Black Issues Book Review. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that “the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent." Jess's second book Olio (2016) received the Pulitzer Prize.

A Detroit native, Jess was Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador to Accra, Ghana. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Soulfires: Young Black Men in Love and Violence (1996), Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), and Dark Matter 2: Reading the Bones (2004). He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (2003).

In addition to the Pulitzer, his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award. A former artist-in-residence with Cave Canem, Jess has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, as well as a Lannan Writing Residency.

A graduate of the University of Chicago (B.A.) and New York University (MFA), Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at the College of Staten Island in New York City.

Mr. Jess's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the literature department, the Africana Studies department, and the President's Leadership Fund. 

(Adapted from the Poetry Foundation)

Food for Thought: Podcast with Tyehimba Jess

Kimberly West-Faulcon is a professor of law and holds the James P. Bradley Chair professorship in Constitutional Law at Loyola Law School where she teaches constitutional law and advanced topics in constitutional law on topics such as originalism, the Second Amendment, equal protection, abortion regulations, and LGBTQIA rights. She is a scholar of constitutional and antidiscrimination law as well as a pioneer in interdisciplinary research of law and standardized testing.

A national expert on structural anti-discrimination civil rights litigation, West-Faulcon began her legal career as a Skadden Fellow and directed the Western Regional Office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). As an LDF attorney, she represented racially diverse classes of clients in innovative and multi-million dollar civil rights cases that challenged practices of defendants such as the University of California at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Police Department, and international clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch.

A graduate of Yale Law School, West-Faulcon was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Stephen R. Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.  

Eugene Volokh is professor of law at UCLA Law School where he teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic; he has also often taught criminal law, copyright law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. In addition to his academic work, he has also filed briefs in about 75 appellate cases throughout the country, has argued in over 20 federal and state appellate cases, and has filed briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (6th ed. 2016) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2016), as well as over 75 widely published and frequently cited law review articles. He is a member of The American Law Institute; a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel; and the founder and co-author of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that was hosted by the Washington Post and is now at Reason Magazine.

A graduate of UCLA Law School, he clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

This Athenaeum event is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Kimberly West-Faulcon and Eugene Volokh

The youngest of 13 children from a farm in rural Oklahoma, Anita Hill received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980. She began her career in private practice in Washington, D.C. Before becoming a law professor, she worked at the U. S. Education Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1989, Hill became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Oklahoma, College of Law, where she taught contracts and commercial law. She has made presentations to hundreds of business, professional, academic and civic organizations in the United States and abroad. As counsel to Cohen Milstein, Hill advises on class action workplace discrimination cases. 

Hill's previous book is Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home. She has also written an autobiography, Speaking Truth to Power. With Professor Emma Coleman Jordan she co-edited, Race, Gender and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings. 

Hill’s commentary has been published in TIME, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Ms. Magazine. She has appeared on national television programs including Good Morning America, Meet the Press, The Today Show, The Tavis Smiley Show and Larry King Live. 

She has received numerous honorary degrees and civic awards. She has chaired the Human Rights Law Committee of the International Bar Association. In addition, she is on the Board of Governors of the Tufts Medical Center and the Board of Directors of the National Women’s Law Center and the Boston Area Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. 

She currently serves as senior advisor to the provost at Brandeis University where is also a professor of law, public policy, and women's studies. 

Professor Hill's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Photo credit: Celeste Sloman