Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Gastón Enrique Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.  He is a graduate of Princeton (M.Div.), Harvard (M.Ed.), and UC Santa Barbara (Ph.D.) and did postdoctoral work at the UCLA School of Film and Television. 

Espinosa has held visiting fellow appointments at Dartmouth College, NHC National Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Münster, Germany, and Princeton University. He has directed nine major surveys on Latino religions, politics, and activism from 1998-2022. 

Espinosa is the author or co-author of nine books, fifty refereed articles, book chapters, and reviews, sixty encyclopedia entries, 200 scholarly keynotes and presentations around the world, has made numerous television, radio, and media appearances, and has served as the director of eight major conferences. 

In 2002, he spoke at the National Hispanic Presidential Prayer Breakfast with President George Bush and Senator Joseph Lieberman and he currently is the co-director of the Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics.

Hannah Chazin is an archaeologist whose work investigates the history of human-animal relations, and explores how new scientific techniques like isotope analysis and ancient DNA analysis are re-shaping how archaeologists learn about life in the past. 

Currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Chazin’s book, Live Stock and Dead Things, was released in 2024 to critical acclaim. Yannis Hamilakis, professor of archaeology and of modern Greek studies at Brown University, states "We have been waiting for a book like this for many years... this is a rare bird of a book that pays our dues to the mundane beings that lived and labored with and alongside humans, but which were instrumentalized and objectified in scholarship for far too long." 

Chazin's scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Archaeometry, and the Journal of Field Archaeology. In support of her scholarship, she has received fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study. Previously, she has done archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Russia, Chile, Cambodia, and the western United States.

Chazin received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently the co-director of the Karashamb Animals Project, which is exploring, using cutting-edge scientific analyses, the lives of the animals buried in an ancient necropolis in Armenia.

Victor Nani Agbeli is a world-renowned musician, dancer, and cultural historian, celebrated for his mastery of traditional Ghanaian and West African arts. Born into a family of distinguished artists from Ghana’s Volta region, he continues the legacy of his late father, Godwin K. Agbeli, a legendary drummer, dancer, and historian who chaired Ghana’s Folklore Music Council. Acclaimed for performances that electrify audiences with precision, energy, and athleticism, Agbeli is also a dedicated cultural ambassador and educator, committed to preserving and sharing Ghanaian heritage globally. He has led the award-winning Sankofa Roots II troupe, served as principal instructor at the Dagbe Cultural Center, and taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, CalArts, and the Edna Marley School of Dance, Theater, and Textile, among others. A multi-disciplinary artist, Agbeli bridges traditional Ghanaian music and dance with contemporary creative practices in percussion, choreography, history, and healing, inspiring audiences worldwide and shaping the next generation of cultural practitioners. Agbeli teaches Intro/Tech to traditional Ghanaian West African music, dance, song, arts, and history at Pomona College.

Morgan Gillette is a multi-instrumentalist and Marine Corps veteran based in Los Angeles. Growing up in a family with generations of both performing arts and military experience, he performed with various school, city, and state orchestras on viola and cello, while focusing on the guitar with family and friends. During nine years of active-duty service, Gillette’s passion for music never wavered. After his service, he continued his studies in the Applied Music Program at San Diego Mesa College, where he was exposed for the first time to traditional Ghanaian music, igniting his passion for drumming and percussion. Later, while at California Institute of the Arts, he began his collaboration with Nani Agbeli joining Agbeli’s West African Music and Dance department and performing with African music ensembles for two years at CalArts. Gillette’s love of Ghanaian song, dance, and drums persisted even through a year classical guitar training at the Traditional Music program at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In 2019, Gillette joined Agbeli’s Volta Drum Dance, where he remains an active member and performer.

Monique Thompson’s dance journey began at the age of six when she started learning Nigerian-style dance under her first instructor, Baba Onochie Chukwurah. For the last four years, she has been training with Nani Agbeli, and has deepened her skills in Ghanaian drumming, dance, and singing. A life-long Pasadena resident, Thompson holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Cal State Northridge and a Master’s degree with a Multiple Subject Credential from The Alder Graduate School of Education. Thompson is an active member of Agbeli’s Volta Drum Dance and performs regularly throughout greater Los Angeles area.

This Athenaeum performance is part of a 4-part musical series for this academic year: Devotional and Spiritual World Music featuring Ghanian, South Asian, American Gospel, and Brazilian traditions.

 

General Vincent K. Brooks served in the U.S. Army for over 42 years from his entry into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point until his retirement from active duty in 2019 as a four-star general. Brooks spent his final 17 years of service in the general officer ranks and for nearly all those years in command of large, complex military organizations in challenging situations. His final active-duty assignment was commanding all US, South Korean, and international UN forces in the Republic of Korea. 

In his ongoing post-military career, he is a fellow at the University of Texas, a fellow at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board director, and a consultant.

General Brooks will deliver the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies’ 2025-26 Lecture in Honor of General Crouch.

Scott Ellsworth P’24 has been described by Booklist as “a historian with the soul of a poet.” A New York Times bestselling author, he has written about a wide range of subjects, including civil rights, race relations, mountaineering, and basketball. 

Ellsworth published his first book, Death in a Promised Land, about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, while he was a graduate student at Duke. He returned to that subject in 2021 with The Ground Breaking, which was long-listed for both the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. His newest book, Midnight on the Potomac, is a revealing new interpretation of the last months of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Ellsworth has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on the TODAY Show, PBS’s The American Experience, NPR, MSNB, Fox, CNN, the BBC, and other news outlets. He teaches in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Professor Ellsworth will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2025-26 Lerner Lecture on Hinge Moments in History.

Photo credit: Jared Lazaraus

Aislinn Bohren is an associate professor in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies various topics in microeconomics with a focus on information and discrimination. Her work on discrimination has both theoretical and empirical components, and builds on her research on model misspecification and biased beliefs.

Bohren received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California San Diego and her B.S. from the University of Richmond. She is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, a co-editor at Games and Economic Behavior, and an associate editor at the American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Literature.

Professor Bohren’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Faculty at CMC.

Seth Lerer taught for over 45 years at Princeton, Stanford, and the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on children's literature, the history of the English language, and medieval and Renaissance literature. His books include Children's Literature: A Reader's History form Aesop to Harry Potter, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Literary Criticism. He is also the author of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and most recently Introducing the History of the English Language. He is currently visiting professor of literature a CMC.

Jon A. Shields is a professor of American politics in the government department at Claremont McKenna College, where he received the G. David Huntoon Senior Teaching Award as well as the Distinguished Service Award. 

Shields is the author or co-author of four books on the American right: "The Republican Civil War: What Liz Cheney's Wyoming Tells Us About a Divided American Right" (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), "Trump’s Democrats" (Brookings, 2020), "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University" (Oxford University Press, 2016), and "The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right" (Princeton University Press, 2009). 

His work has also been published in a number of academic journals, including The Journal of Policy History, Political Science Quarterly, Critical Review, Contemporary Sociology, and the Journal of Church and State.  In addition, his opinion has appeared in the pages of the Atlantic, Bulwark, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times.

Vernon C. Grigg III is a seasoned trial lawyer and educator with a deep commitment to education, and public service. Holding degrees from Yale Law School (J.D.), the London School of Economics (G.S.C.), and the University of Michigan (BA), Vernon has served as CEO & President of Up with People, an international educational program where he built leadership programs and led a global team through the challenges of a worldwide pandemic. His legal career includes representing diverse clients, from government officials to Fortune 100 companies, and significant pro bono work in civil rights. Vernon has taught at Golden Gate University School of Law and has international experience, including groundbreaking roles in South Africa and Israel. As theExecutive Director of the Kravis Lab, Vernon aims to advance CMC’s mission in civic engagement and civic leadership by bringing students knowledge, skills and inspiration.

William Carl Menard '09 graduated from CMC in 2009 with a degree in government and received in J.D. from St. John’s Law School in 2012. Since then, he has worked as an immigration attorney representing clients in deportation defense and both employment and family-based immigration matters in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California. Menard has represented clients before multiple Federal Courts of Appeals, as well as before immigration courts across the country in both detained and non-detained cases. He has been interviewed and quoted in the Washington Post, NPR, and other news stations on immigration issues. He has also served on multiple advisory boards, including the Latino Advisory Council at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Jersey.



 

Susan McWilliams Barndt is the 2025-2026 William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow in Government at Claremont McKenna College.

McWilliams Barndt is the author of The American Road Trip and American Political Thought (2018) and Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory (2014), the editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin (2017), and a co-editor of several books, including The Best Kind of College (2015). 

Her writing and commentary have appeared in media such as The Atlantic, Business Insider, KPCC's AirTalk, LiveNOW From FOX, The Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Today in LA on KNBC.

For her work, McWilliams Barndt has received the Graves Award in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Jack Miller Center's Teaching Excellence Award. Since 2006, McWilliams Barndt has taught at Pomona College, where she has won the Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching four times.

McWilliams holds a B.A. in political science and Russian from Amherst, an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton, and a Certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from Harvard.

Theresa Delgadillo is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies at UW-Madison. Delgadillo is a noted authority on U.S. Latinx spirituality and religion, the African diaspora, Latinidad, and Latinxs in the Midwest. Her book publications include Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (2024), Latina Lives in Milwaukee (2015), Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (2011), and she is co-editor and contributor of Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (2022). She is the founder of Mujeres Talk (2010-2017) and co-founder and current board member of Latinx Talk (2017 to present), an interdisciplinary academic open access publication specializing in short-form research.

Professor Delgadillo is the keynote conference speaker for The Futures of Comparative Racialization Conference.

Diana Williams is a professor of neuroscience in the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”).  Her research examines the neural and endocrine control of motivated behaviors, with a focus on eating behavior. Many of her studies explore how the gut communicates with the brain about nutrients coming into the gastrointestinal tract during meals, and how the brain integrates this information with the taste of food, desire and pleasure, cues in the environment, and learned habits that can affect eating. This work helps reveal the biological underpinnings of our everyday eating experiences and sheds light on pathological states including eating disorders.

Williams received her B.A. in Psychology from Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She earned her M.A. and subsequently her Ph.D. in psychology with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shaun Lee is an associate professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”). His research broadly involves the study of host-microbe (human to bacteria) and microbe-microbe (bacteria to bacteria) interactions that govern human health, wellness, and disease states. Modern antibiotics have served as powerful weapons in the fight against pathogenic bacteria which have plagued humans for centuries. A little-known fact however is that that bacteria have been fighting each other well before humans even evolved. Studying the processes of how bacteria fight and compete might lead researchers to uncover new strategies to fight harmful bacteria and to help overcome the surge of antibiotics resistant bacteria.

Lee received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley where he majored in both architecture and molecular cell biology, with an emphasis in neurobiology. His earned his Ph.D. from Oregon Health and Science University in molecular microbiology and immunology.

Rui Cheng is an assistant professor of the physics of climate, energy, and the environment at the Kravis Department of Integrated Science (“KDIS”). She will elaborate upon her research which aims to see the unseeable changes in the surrounding environment and in evaluating the global ecosystem-climate feedback, such as carbon, water, and energy fluxes between land and atmosphere targeted specifically in regions with limited direct measurements, including the Arctic, tropics, and mountainous regions.

Cheng received her B.S. from Sun Yat-Sen University in China where she studied atmospheric science. She has a M.S. in earth and environmental science from Lehigh University and a Ph.D. from Cal Tech in Environmental Science and Engineering.

Jodie P. Filkins served on the first California Citizens Redistricting Commission from 2010 until July 2020. Following certification of the district maps in 2011, Filkins traveled throughout the United States to speak and advocate for independent redistricting. She has participated as signatory to three Amicus Curiae briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme court in favor of independent redistricting.

Filkins has been a licensed California attorney for the last 30 years practicing in areas of complex civil litigation defense, and currently owns her own practice defending private employers and public entities in the defense of Worker’s Compensation litigated matters. She secured application and preservation of the attorney-client privilege in Workers’ Compensation in a published Court of Appeal decision in 2014.

Filkins has served her local community of Norco, California as a volunteer for various organizations as well as the City of Norco on Ad Hoc Committees regarding Sales Tax initiatives and City Districts.  She has served for the last 10 years on the Lake Norconian Club Foundation, a nonprofit foundation charged with the preservation of the Lake Norconian Club Supreme and other historic buildings in the City of Norco.

For three decades, William Kristol has been a leading participant in American political debates and a widely respected analyst of American political developments. Having served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Kristol understands government from the inside and as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, he has studied American politics and society from the outside. 

After serving in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Kristol founded the Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential magazine for over two decades. Now, as founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, Kristol is in the midst of the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the future of the Republican Party and the meaning of American conservatism.

Kristol frequently appears on all the major television talk shows, and also is the host of the highly regarded video series and podcast, Conversations with Bill Kristol. 

Kristol received his undergraduate degree and his Ph. D. from Harvard University.

Mr. Kristol's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center and the Open Academy, both at CMC.

(Text adapted by the Washington Speakers Bureau profile.)