Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Julie Sze is a professor of American Studies at UC Davis. She is also the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’ John Muir Institute for the Environment. Sze's research investigates environmental justice and environmental inequality; culture and environment; race, gender and power; and urban/community health and activism 

Sze has published two books and over 45 journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, primarily in the fields of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, geography, and public policy. She works in collaboration with environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, humanists and community-based organizers on a wide range of research projects in California, New York, and China.

Sze has received a number of grants for her individual research, from the UC Humanities Institute, the American Studies Association, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW)​. As founding director of the Environmental Justice Institute, she received two large grants to support the project from the Ford Foundation and smaller grants related to specific research projects which have had public policy impact in the State of California.

Professor Sze's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by CMC's Crown Special Events Fund, CMC's Women and Gender Leadership Fund, CMC's Roberts Environmental Center, Pitzer's Robert Redford Conservancy, and Pomona's Office of Sustainability. 
 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Julie Sze

Joshua White is associate professor of the Practice of South Asia Studies and fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is also a nonresident fellow in the foreign policy program at The Brookings Institution. He previously served at the White House as senior advisor & director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he focused on issues pertaining to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent, and led efforts to integrate U.S. government policy planning across South and East Asia. 

Involved in many policy intensive positions in and out of the government including the Pentagon, White has spent extensive time in Asia, and has written on a wide range of issues including defense policy, electoral politics, Islamic movements, and nuclear deterrence. He has held short-term visiting research fellowships at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan’s National Defence University, and the Institute for Defence and Strategic Analyses in Delhi; testified before Congress; and served on U.S.-sponsored election observer delegations to both Pakistan and Bangladesh.

He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College with a double major in history and mathematics and received his Ph.D. with distinction from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Professor White’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Institute for Strategic and International Studies.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Joshua White

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

Boaz is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. He is the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

Boaz's articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate, and he wrote the entry on libertarianism for Encyclopedia Britannica. He is a frequent guest on national television and radio shows, and has appeared on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, CNN’s Crossfire, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, The McLaughlin Group, Stossel, The Independents, Fox News Channel, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.

Mr. Boaz's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.

View Video: YouTube with David Boaz

Born in York, England, Emma Dench grew up near Stratford-Upon-Avon, and studied at Wadham College, Oxford and at St. Hugh's College, Oxford earning a DPhil in ancient history in 1993. Before taking up a joint appointment in the departments of the classics and of history at Harvard in January 2007, she taught classics and ancient history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a Craven Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Rome Scholar and a Hugh Last Fellow at the British School of Rome, a Cotton Fellow, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting professor of the classics and of history at Harvard, and a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellow.

Dench is the author of From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) and Romulus' Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is currently completing Imperialism and Culture in the Roman World for the Cambridge University Press series Key Themes in Ancient History. Other current projects include a study of the retrospective writing of the Roman Republican past in classical antiquity.

At Harvard, Dench has been the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for 2010–15 (recognizing "outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching, mentoring and advising"), a Marquand Award for Excellent Advising and Counseling, and an Everett Mendelsohn Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students. In 2015–16, she also co- taught (with Frances Frei) an elective MBA course "All Roads Lead to Rome: Leadership Lessons from Antiquity," at the Harvard Business School. 

Photo credit: Kathleen Dooher

View Video: YouTube with Emma Dench

Food for Thought: Podcast with Emma Dench

Judge Andrew Gordon ’84 was appointed as a judge of United States District Court for Nevada in 2013. Before that, he was a partner at McDonald Carano Wilson LLP, where his practice focused on commercial litigation and he served as a private arbitrator and mediator. Gordon studied political science at CMC and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Jerome Haig ’84 P'22 is a private practice defense attorney and a long-time senior trial lawyer in the public defender’s office. He specializes in complex felonies in state and federal court. Haig studied mathematics and political science at CMC and received his J.D. from Loyola University School of Law in Los Angeles. 

Greg Koltun ’84 P'21 is a litigation partner at Morrison Foerster, with a particular focus on complex commercial litigation and antitrust matters. He has experience litigating cases in state and federal courts and before arbitration tribunals throughout the country in a variety of industries and fields. Koltun studied economics at CMC and received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Judge Suzanne Segal ’82 P'18 was appointed as a Magistrate Judge in California in 2002. Before that, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney, Civil Division, and Chief of Civil Appeals in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Segal studied history and political science at CMC and received her J.D. from Cornell Law School.

 

A much-awarded Hindi movie of 2014 including best story, actress, script, editing, in National and Filmfare awards, QUEEN is the story about an ordinary girl from New Delhi who, left by her fiancé on the eve of her wedding, decides to console herself by going alone on their planned honeymoon to Paris and Amsterdam. Then we, the audience, gets instruction on how to imagine her future. She holds her own with interesting people and learns a lesson at every step. A familiar-seeming story of the girl-next-door, Rani, played by Kangna Ranaut, charms and entertains in unexpected ways while understating the most important message possible, “Be yourself.” 

Movie screening will begin promptly at 5:30 pm.

(Freeberg Dining Room)

Liz Thomas ’07 is a professional hiker, adventure conservationist, and outdoor writer who held the women’s unsupported speed record on the 2,181-mile long Appalachian Trail. A guest editor and regular contributor to Backpacker Magazine, Thomas has been featured on Good Morning America and has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Yahoo!News, Men's Journal, Women's Health, Outside, among other publications. Her book Long Trails: Mastering the Art of the Thru-Hikereceived the 2017 National Outdoor Book Award for Best Instructional book. Thomas serves as the vice president of the American Long Distance Hiking Association and ambassador to American Hiking Society. A former staff writer at Wirecutter/New York Times, Thomas is a currently editor in chief at Treeline Review, an outdoor web magazine and is writing a guidebook to Southern California waterfall hikes.

A 2007 graduate of Claremont McKenna College where she majored in EEP (Environment, Economics, and Politics) and was the Athenaeum student manager, Thomas holds a masters in Environmental Science from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she held a Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship for her research on trails, conservation, and trail-side communities. She currently is on the board of the Robert Environmental Center at CMC.

Since graduating from CMC, Thomas has hiked over 17,000 miles on more than 20 long distance hiking paths around the world!


Food for Thought: Podcast with Elizabeth Thomas

Chaun Webster is a poet, publisher and graphic designer whose poetry finds its influences in the intersections of the Black Arts Movement and Jazz, the Concrete Poetry Tradition and Grafitti. Webster’s first book, Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime, was published in April 2018 by Noemi Press. 

Mr. Webster's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the CARE Center, and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, all at CMC.

Ted Scheinman is senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine, where he directs special projects and climate coverage. Among other duties, he reported from the United Nations climate summits in Paris and Marrakech in 2015 and 2016. A graduate of Yale University, with an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (2018), and his essays and reporting have appeared in the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Playboy, Slate, and elsewhere. He is also a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Mr. Scheinman’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Ted Scheinman

Food for Thought: Podcast with Ted Scheinman

Michael Weinberg has 25 years of experience investing directly at the security level and indirectly as an asset allocator in traditional and alternative assets. He is the chief investment officer and partner of MOV37 and Protégé Partners. His portfolio management experience includes Soros Fund Management LLC, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Financial Risk Management (FRM). Previously he was a research analyst at Dean Witter, currently Morgan Stanley. 

Weinberg is a board member of AIMA, on the management advisory council for the Michael Price Student Investment Fund, former-chair of value investing at CFANY, where he has received multiple awards, and a member of the Economic Club of New York.  He is published author, has been interviewed by top financial newspapers and is often a keynote speaker at conferences and universities. 

Weinberg received an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, where he is now an adjunct professor of finance and economics, and a B.S. in economics from New York University. 

Mr. Weinberg’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Soll Center for Student Opportunity.

View Video: YouTube with Michael Weinberg

Mark Huber is the Fletcher Jones Foundation Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and George R. Roberts Fellow. He joined the faculty community at Claremont McKenna College in 2009. 

Huber’s specialty is computational probability. He enjoys developing new algorithms for drawing random variates from complex distributions quickly, which has applications in statistics, machine learning, numerical integration, and physics. Huber’s unique background in mathematics, computing, and statistics allows him to work in a variety of areas. Outside of the classroom, he has served as chair of the CMC Mathematical Sciences since 2016. Huber also serves as associate editor for the Journal of American Statistical Association Reviews and editor of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He regularly participates as a guest lecture at conferences and institutions around the world, and his research has appeared in such journals as Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, the Journal of Applied Probability, and the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science among others.

Huber earned a B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University.

Professor Huber’s Athenaeum presentation celebrates his installation ceremony as the Fletcher Jones Foundation Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Mark Huber

Amanda Renteria has had a unique and diverse career starting out in the financial industry, moving to education as a teacher in her small hometown community, and finally spending the majority of her career in public service. She has served as the chief of operations at the California Department of Justice, national political director for Secretary Clinton’s presidential run, and as a chief of staff in the United States Senate. She was named one of the most influential staffers by Roll Call and received a number of awards as the first Latina chief of staff in the history of the U.S. Senate. In addition to her policy work, she has also run for Congressional office in 2014 and governor of California in 2018 believing that empowering others is at the heart of public service.

Ms. Renteria's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the CARE Center and the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, both at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Amanda Renteria

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science.  Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He also has taught at DePaul College of Law and UCLA Law School.  He teaches Constitutional Law, First Amendment Law, Federal Courts, Criminal Procedure, and Appellate Litigation.

He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court, published by Viking in 2014, and two books published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman). He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He writes a weekly column for the Sacramento Bee, monthly columns for the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court. 

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In January 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. He received his B.S. from Northwestern University in 1975 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School  in 1978.

Dean Chemerinsky will deliver the 2018 Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism.

View Video: YouTube with Erwin Chemerinsky

Food for Thought: Podcast with Erwin Chemerisky

Rebecca Erbelding is the author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, April 2018). She has worked as a historian, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for fifteen years, and served as a historian for the Museum's newest exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from George Mason University.

Her book describes the creativity of the War Refugee Board which laundered money into Sweden, participated in ransom negotiations with Nazis, opened a refugee camp in upstate New York, sent rescuer Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest, helped 8,000 Jews escape to Palestine by boat, and approved $11 million in relief for Nazi-occupied Europe in the final year of the World War II.

Dr. Erbelding’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Rebecca Erbelding

David Dreier was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980, where he served until January 2013. In Congress, he served as the youngest—and the first from California—chairman of the Rules Committee, playing a pivotal role in fashioning all legislation for debate in the House. Dreier has had many leadership roles in California and national politics, such as chairing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's transition team in 2003, and serving as parliamentarian at the 2004 Republican National Convention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the International Republican Institute. Dreier is the founding chairman of the bipartisan House Democracy Partnership, which works directly with legislatures in seventeen countries around the globe, helping to build institutions in new and re-emerging democracies. Dreier is a trustee and alum of Claremont McKenna College. He received his B.A. from CMC in 1975 and his M.A. in American government from Claremont Graduate University the following year.

Mike Murphy is one of the Republican Party’s most successful political consultants. Murphy led more than 20 statewide campaigns to victory, including gubernatorial races for Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christine Todd Whitman, John Engler, and Tommy Thompson, as well as dozens of congressional races. He has worked on six Republican presidential campaigns and is widely known for his work in the 2000 GOP primaries as a senior strategist for John McCain. He has advised leaders in Canada, Central America and the former Soviet Union. He is a widely known political pundit, appearing frequently on NBC, CNN and NPR. He co-directs the Center for the Political Future at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Robert Shrum holds the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics at USC Dornsife and serves as director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. Shrum has a storied career as an author and television commentator and as a campaign adviser to Democratic candidates in nearly 40 winning U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns and for the mayoralty of many of America’s major cities. His numerous clients included Edward Kennedy, Joe Biden, John Glenn, and Barbara Mikulski in their Senate campaigns, and John Kerry and Al Gore in their presidential races. Overseas, his clients included Ehud Barak in his successful 1999 campaign for prime minister of Israel, the British Labour Party in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the prime minister of Ireland and the president of Colombia.

View Video: YouTube with Mike Murphy, Zachary Courser '99, and Robert Shrum