Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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" (2001), "The Politics of Autism: Navigating The Contested Spectrum" (2015), and "After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election" (2019). With Professor Andrew Busch, also of CMC, he is currently writing a book on the 2020 election. 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. 

Pitney has not only shaped the study of government at Claremont McKenna College for nearly 30 years, he has also helped shape government itself through his many roles, including as the acting director for the Research Department of the Republican National Committee (1990-1991) and as the Senior Domestic Policy Analyst for the US House Republican Research Committee, among other important appointments. 

Pitney holds a B.A. in political science from Union College, where he was co-valedictorian, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. He received the CMC Presidential Award in 2013 and was named one of the 300 best professors in the United States by the Princeton Review in 2012. 

View Video: YouTube with John J. Pitney, Jr.

Lily Geismer, associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, focuses her research and teaching on 20th century political and urban history in the United States, especially liberalism. Her book "Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party" (Princeton University Press, 2015) traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs by focusing on the Route 128 corridor around Boston.

Geismer is currently working on a book project entitled "Doing Good: The Democrats and Neoliberalism from the War on Poverty to the Clinton Foundation," which explores the Democratic Party’s promotion of market-based solutions to problems of social inequality. She is also co-editor of "Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century" (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In 2018, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Foundation. Her work has also been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University.

View Video: YouTube with Lily Geismer

Jennifer Anju Grossman, a former senior vice-president at Dole Food Company, has served as CEO of the Atlas Society since March 1, 2016. She has spent much of her career trying to help people to live freer, healthier lives. She launched the Dole Nutrition Institute—a research and education organization—at the behest of Dole Chairman David H. Murdock. She continued this agenda as Health Editor of Laura Ingraham's new lifestyle site, LifeZette. Previously Grossman served as director of education at the Cato Institute, and worked closely with the late philanthropist Theodore J. Forstmann to launch the Children's Scholarship Fund. A speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush, Grossman has written for both national and local publications.

She believes that "the principles of Objectivism, the philosophy rooted in reality, reason, and individualism, has never been more needed — nor more neglected,” and that “this is the perfect moment to help the public rediscover the moral vision of Ayn Rand."

Ms. Grossman's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

(Note: This event had previously been scheduled for February 6, 2020.)

View Video: YouTube with Jennifer Grossman

Dan Crowley is the Global Head of Trust & Safety and Data Protection at Quizlet, an online learning platform serving over 50 million students and teachers around the world each month. In his role, he oversees all public policy, privacy, data protection, compliance, user safety and content moderation programs. Mr. Crowley develops tools, policies and processes that maintain Quizlet as an appropriate platform for all audiences and works to ensure the responsible use of data across all of Quizlet’s products and throughout engineering, product development, design and other business processes.

A government major at CMC, Crowley graduated in 2010. Before joining Quizlet, he spent almost seven years at Google and Facebook. He joined Google directly after graduation, and spent almost three years there as part of a team managing global law enforcement compliance and 3rd party requests in civil matters. He also served as Privacy Program Manager at Google for three years before joining Facebook in the same capacity.

Elizabeth Wydra ’98 is president of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). From 2008-2016, she served as CAC’s chief counsel. Throughout her tenure she has filed more than 200 briefs on behalf of CAC and clients, which include preeminent constitutional scholars and historians, state and local government organizations, groups such as the League of Women Voters and the AARP, and members of Congress.

Wydra has also argued several important cases in the federal courts of appeals on a range of issues, including immigration law, habeas corpus, and sovereign immunity. She joined CAC from private practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco, where she was an attorney working with former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan in the firm’s Supreme Court/appellate practice. Previously, Wydra was a supervising attorney and teaching fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center appellate litigation clinic, a law clerk for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and a lawyer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a law firm in Washington.

Wydra has appeared as a legal expert on multiple television and radio stations and has been frequently quoted in the print media. Her writings have also appeared in many print and online outlets and on numerous political and legal blogs, such as Huffington Post, SCOTUSblog, and ACSblog. She has also published in the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Syracuse Law Review, The Cato Institute’s Supreme Court Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law.

Wyrda received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College.

Elizabeth Beaumont PO '93 is an associate professor of politics and director of Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on constitutionalism and democracy, as well as civic engagement and education. She is particularly interested in problems of unequal citizenship, the relation between citizenship, democracy, and education, and how civic actors seek to shape rights, law, and political power and policy. Beaumont teaches and advises students in the areas of public law and legal studies, political theory, and American political and constitutional development.

Her book, “The Civic Constitution: Civic Visions and Struggles in the Path Toward Constitutional Democracy” (Oxford University Press, 2014), focuses on the role of several major civic groups and social movements in shaping American constitutional creation and change. She examines groups such as 18th century revolutionaries, anti-Federalists, abolitionists, and woman suffragists as "civic founders" who profoundly influenced the Constitution's text, allocations of power, definitions of citizenship, and the meanings of rights. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including The Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, the Stanford Law Review, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.

From 2000-2005, Beaumont was a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she helped lead the foundation's work on civic education and engagement, including serving as co-principal investigator and director of the national Political Engagement Project. These interdisciplinary, multi-method research projects are the basis of two co-authored books: “Educating for Democracy” (Wiley 2007) and “Educating Citizens” (Jossey-Bass 2003). The books are resource texts for the American Democracy Project, an AASCU partnership including more than 240 state college campuses, and helped inform the national report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012). Her current research project is titled: Unruly Citizens and the Rule of Law: Civic Dissent, Disobedience, and Protest.

Beaumont is a graduate of Pomona College; she earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Diana Selig, Kingsley Croul Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, will moderate the conversation.

Ms. Wydra and Professor Beaumont’s Athenaeum conversation is sponsored by the Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Program in American Constitutionalism.

View Video: YouTube with Elizabeth Wydra '98 and Elizabeth Beaumont

Cary Aspinwall is a Dallas-based staff writer for The Marshall Project. Previously, she was an investigative reporter at The Dallas Morning News, where she reported on the impact of the criminal justice system on women and children, and deaths in police custody. She won the Gerald Loeb Award for reporting on a Texas company's history of deadly natural gas explosions and is a past Pulitzer finalist for her work exposing flaws in Oklahoma's execution process. She is a co-founder of The Frontier, a nonprofit devoted to investigative journalism in Oklahoma.

View Video: YouTube with Cary Aspinwall

Food for Thought: Podcast with Cary Aspinwall

Ambassador Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and now teaches at Stanford University, “visited” Professor Hilary Appel’s comparative politics class on October 13, 2020. Along with students in the class, Professor Appel, who teaches in the government department and serves as director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC, engaged Ambassador McFaul in a range of critical issues about the state of Russian politics today and contemporary U.S.-Russia relations.

This incisive program with Ambassador McFaul is viewable. Access is limited to CMC students, faculty, and staff and requires sign-in.

Ambassador McFaul’s program was sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Henri Cole, the Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, including "Middle Earth," a finalist for the Pulitzer, and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Berlin Prize, the Rome Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Cole was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017. He has also published a memoir, Orphic Paris.  His most recent book is Blizzard, was published in summer 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

View Video: YouTube with Henri Cole

Ana Lucia Araujo is a full professor of history at the historically black Howard University in Washington D.C. She has authored seven books, including “Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), “Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), “Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics” (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), “Shadows of the Slave Past: Heritage, Memory, and Slavery” (Routledge, 2014), and “Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic” (Cambria Press, 2010). She has also edited or coedited five books and published dozens of refereed articles in journals and chapters in edited books on topics related to the history and memory of slavery. In 2017, she joined the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. She also serves on the board of editors of the American Historical Review (the journal of the American Historical Association) and the editorial board of the British journal Slavery and Abolition. In addition, she is a member of the executive board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide Diaspora (ASWAD), the editorial review board of the African Studies Review, and the board of the blog Black Perspectives maintained by the African American Intellectual History Society. 

Cynthia Culver Prescott, associate professor of history at the University of North Dakota, is a historian of gender in the American West and the author of "Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Gita Chaudhuri Prize. She is also building a companion website for this book, Pioneer Monuments in the American West, that features interactive maps and timelines, and provides images and information about the 200 monuments included in her study. 

Daniela Blei is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. She is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The Smithsonian Magazine, and New York Magazine among other magazines and newspapers. Blei holds a Ph.D. in German history from Stanford University. Her recent research on Nazi and Communist Monuments in post-World War II Berlin has appeared in both German and English-language publications.

Sarah Sarzynski and Tamara Venit-Shelton, professors of history at Claremont McKenna College will moderate the panel.

View Video: Ana Lucia Araujo, Cynthia Culver Prescott, and Daniela Blei

Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is an associate professor of logic and philosophy of science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. O’Connor’s specialties include the philosophy of science, game theory and evolutionary game theory, and agent based modeling.

She is co-administering the NSF Grant Consensus, Democracy, and the Public Understanding of Science. Her book "The Misinformation Age," co-authored with James Owen Weatherall, was published in 2019 with Yale Press, and her book "The Origins of Unfairness" was also published in 2019 with Oxford University Press.

Professor O'Connor's Athenaeum's presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Cailin O'Connor

Katherine Mangu-Ward is Editor in Chief of Reason, the magazine of “free minds and free markets.” She started as Reason intern in 2000 and has worked at The Weekly Standard and The New York Times. Mangu-Ward is a graduate of Yale University, where she received a B.A. in philosophy and political science.

At Reason, she leads a publication that covers issues important to libertarian values. Her writing has included commentary on the ethics of (non-)voting, job automation, and plastic bag bans. She is a co-host of “The Reason Roundtable” podcast.

Mangu-Ward’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and numerous other publications. She is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. She is a Future Tense Fellow at New America.

Ms. Mangu-Ward's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Katherine Mangu-Ward

Jud Brewer, M.D. Ph.D., is an associate professor and the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health; he also serves as a research affiliate at MIT.

A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed clinically proven app-based mindfulness trainings including to help people quit smoking, stop overeating, and reduce anxiety. He is the author of “The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love–Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.”

Brewer is a thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery,” having combined over 20 years of experience with mindfulness training with his own scientific research therein. He has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained U.S. Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED, the New York Times, Time magazine, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, Businessweek and others. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, among others.

Dr. Brewer founded MindSciences to move his discoveries of clinical evidence behind mindfulness for anxiety, eating, smoking and other behavior change into the hands of consumers.

View Video: YouTube with Jud Brewer

Peter Rice, chairman of Walt Disney Television, oversees The ABC Network, Disney Television Studios, the Disney Channel, Freeform, FX Networks, National Geographic Partners and Hulu Originals. During his tenure, Walt Disney Television has produced, “Devs”, “Dave,” “Little Fires Everywhere,” “Mrs. America,” “The Great”, The Owl House,” and “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.” Rice also oversees The Walt Disney Company’s equity interest in A+E Networks.

Prior to his current role, Rice served as president of 21st Century Fox, and chairman and CEO of Fox Networks Group (FNG), where he was instrumental in driving the growth of FNG’s television business across linear and digital platforms. During his tenure, FNG’s revenue doubled as its portfolio was reorganized and aligned around four key brands reaching more than 2 billion subscribers worldwide. At FNG, Rice oversaw long-term sports rights deals with the NFL, MLB, the UFC, FIFA, WWE and dozens of professional sports leagues and teams. He was a driving force in the formation of National Geographic Partners and the launch of FS1 and FS2. He was responsible for realigning its international channels business in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and integrating the company’s advertising divisions into a single, data-driven enterprise. He oversaw the launch of its Digital Consumer Group; its participation in Hulu; and the establishment of FoxNext Games. Under Rice’s leadership, FNG was home to shows including “The Simpsons,” “American Idol,” “Glee,” “The Americans,” “Genius,” “Modern Family,” “Homeland,” “This Is Us” and “Empire,” the World Series, the World Cup and the Super Bowl. During his tenure, FNG earned more than 600 Primetime Emmy® nominations, 68 Golden Globe® nominations and more than 200 Sports Emmy nominations.

In 2010, Rice served for two years as chairman, Entertainment, for FNG. He also served as chairman, Entertainment for Fox Broadcasting Company, helping to lead FOX to three seasons as the No. 1 network and extend its streak to eight seasons as the top-rated broadcaster. Before transitioning to Fox’s television business, Rice served as president, Fox Searchlight Pictures. During his tenure, Fox Searchlight generated 51 Academy Award® and 42 Golden Globe Award nominations. The films released under his leadership include “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Juno,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “The Last King of Scotland” and “Sideways.” Prior to leading Fox Searchlight, Rice was executive vice president of Production for Twentieth Century Fox, where he worked with director Baz Luhrmann in the development and production of Oscar® Best Picture nominee “Moulin Rouge” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.” He also served as the supervising creative executive on “X-Men.”

Rice serves on the board of directors for National Geographic Partners and Southern California Public Radio. He also sits on the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Board of Governors.

Rice began his career in the marketing department at Twentieth Century Fox in 1989 after graduating from the University of Nottingham.

Source: The Walt Disney Company

Sonja Lyubomirsky is Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Psychology at U.C. Riverside and author of “The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness” (published in 36 countries). Lyubomirsky and her research on the science of happiness have been the recipients of many grants and honors, including the Diener Award for Outstanding Midcareer Contributions in Personality Psychology, the Christopher Peterson Gold Medal, and a Positive Psychology Prize.

The majority of her research career has been devoted to studying human happiness. Lyubomirsky asserts that human happiness is an important area of scientific study because most people believe that happiness is meaningful, desirable, and an important, worthy goal; that happiness is one of the most salient and significant dimensions of human experience and emotional life; that happiness yields numerous rewards for the individual; and that happiness makes for a better, healthier, stronger society. Along these lines, her current research addresses three critical questions: 1) What makes people happy? 2) Is happiness a good thing? and 3) How and why can people learn to lead happier and more flourishing lives?

Lyubomirsky is a graduate of Harvard College; she earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University.

Professor Lyubomirsky's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute at CMC.

Photo credit: Josh Blanchard

View Video: YouTube with Sonja Lyubomirsky

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale College, summa cum laude, in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for then Judge (now Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than three dozen cases. He regularly testifies before Congress at the invitation of both parties and ranks among America’s five most-cited mid-career legal scholars. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award. A frequent contributor to news outlets, both printed and televised, he is the author of dozens of law review articles and several books, including among other award winning books, “America’s Unwritten Constitution” (2012—named one of the year’s 100 best nonfiction books by The Washington Post), “The Law of the Land” (2015), and “The Constitution Today” (2016—named one of the year’s top ten nonfiction books by Time magazine). He is Yale’s only currently active professor to have won the University’s unofficial triple crown—the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service. (Source: Yale Law School)

Steven G. Calabresi is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.  He is also a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Fall 2013-2016; a Visiting Professor of Political Theory at Brown University for 2016-2017; and the Chairman since 1986 of the Federalist Society's Board of Directors. Professor worked in the West Wing of President Ronald Reagan’s White House; was a special assistant for Attorney General Edwin Meese III; and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and for Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter on the federal courts of appeals. Calabresi has written over seventy law review articles and essays.  He is a co-author on three books: “The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush;” “The Constitution of the United States” (3rd edition); and “The U.S. Constitution and Comparative Constitutional Law: Texts, Cases and Materials.” Calabresi has taught constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, administrative law, state constitutional law, and the separation of powers. He is a graduate of both Yale College and Yale Law School. (Source: Northwestern Pritzker School of Law)

George Thomas, Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College and director of the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, will moderate the conversation.

Professors Amar and Calabresi's Athenaeum conversation is sponsored by the Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Program in American Constitutionalism.

View Video: YouTube with Akhil Reed Amar and Steven Calabresi