Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Christian Rudder is one of the founders of OKCupid, one of the largest dating sites in the world, which was sold to IAC in 2011. He still runs it day-to-day, while also heading a small data-mining team that scours the digital universe for meaningful trends on important sites. The original outlet for Rudder’s research took place on OKCupid’s blog, OKTrends, which was not only read by millions of people, but also changed the way companies approach data as a media-relations strategy. His research and findings have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and were the subject of a New Yorker feature.  

A native of Arkansas, Rudder graduated from Little Rock High School and attended Harvard College where he majored in mathematics. Rudder joined SparkNotes in October 1999, a few months after its founding. Rudder was the creative voice of TheSpark.com, which was the viral content arm of SparkNotes during the site's early rise to popularity. He became TheSpark's creative director in March 2001. Soon after the site's sale to Barnes & Noble, Rudder and the SparkNotes founders left and began working on OkCupid, which launched in February 2004.

Photo credit: Victor G. Jeffreys II

John “Jack” Stratton Hawley is the Claire Tow Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent books on India’s bhakti traditions are A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), Sur’s Ocean (with Kenneth Bryant, Harvard, 2015), and a poem-by-poem commentary called Into Sur’s Ocean (Harvard Oriental Series, 2016). A Storm of Songs received the Coomaraswamy Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2017.

Hawley has directed Columbia University’s South Asia Institute and has received multiple awards from NEH, the Smithsonian, and the AIIS. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016-17 he was in India as a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow, working on a project called “The New Vrindavan.”

Professor Hawley’s Athenaeum presentation is part of the Devotion in South Asia series co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.

Harry Markowitz, adjunct professor at the Rady School of Management at UCSD, shared the 1990 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on portfolio theory. He also is the recipient of the John von Neumann Award from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques, and SIMSCRIPT. 

In an article published in 1952 and a subsequent book in 1959, he presented what is now referred to as MPT, “modern portfolio theory.”  This has become a standard topic in college courses and texts on investments, and is widely used by institutional investors and financial advisors for asset allocation, risk control, and attribution analysis. In other areas, Markowitz developed “sparse matrix” techniques for solving very large mathematical optimization problems. These techniques are now standard in production software for optimization programs. He also designed and supervised the development of the SIMSCRIPT programming language which has been widely used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation systems, and communication networks.

Professor Markowitz's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Soll Center for Student Opportunities.

Lee Alan Dugatkin, professor and University Scholar in the department of biology at the University of Louisville, will tell a story of adventure, science, politics, and love that has propelled scientists isolated in Siberia to tame foxes and will take us inside this path-breaking experiment amid the brutal winters of Siberia to reveal how scientific history is made and continues to be made today.

Dugatkin has written several popular books, including How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog (co-authored with Lyudmila Trut) (2017), Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose (2009), and The Altruism Equation (2006). He has also authored many technical books, text books, and other scholarly articles.

Dugatkin’s main areas of research interest are the evolution of social behavior and the history of science.

View Video: YouTube with Lee Alan Dugatkin

Food for Thought: Podcast with Lee Alan Dugatkin
 

The 7C Committee on Inclusive Excellence is a project-driven committee that seeks to engage the Claremont Colleges and the Consortium on topics of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. The committee provides space for its members to share work being done around these issues and to strategize effective methods of advocacy and support for underserved populations. Convened as the Diversity Practitioners Committee in 2015, the name changed to the Committee on Inclusive Excellence to better describe the group’s goals and aspirations around its work, and the conversations it aims to encourage on the campuses across the 7Cs and CUC.

Mike Forsythe is a reporter for the New York Times. In February 2017, he joined the newspaper's investigative team in New York after working for three years in Hong Kong. For many years, Forsythe has been focused on reporting on the confluence of money and politics in China, first for Bloomberg News, where he worked in Beijing and Washington, and then with the New York Times. 

Forsythe was the lead reporter for Bloomberg News for its groundbreaking investigation in 2012 that documented the vast wealth accumulated by relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Bloomberg's website has been blocked in China since then and Bloomberg has removed the article from its own website. That article was part of a series that won the George Polk Award for international reporting as well as many other honors. Since joining the New York Times, Forsythe has continued to write about the wealth of China's princelings and their financial ties to some of China's biggest companies.

Forsythe is a veteran of the United States Navy, serving on ships in the Pacific Ocean and making two tours to the Persian Gulf area. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard University.

Mr. Forsythe's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Institute for International and Strategic Studies.

Valentino Achack Deng was born in southern Sudan (now South Sudan), in the village of Marial Bai. He fled in the late 1980s during the second Sudanese civil war, when his village was destroyed by murahaleen—the same type of militia that currently terrorize the Darfur region of Sudan. Deng spent nine years in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, where he worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a social advocate and reproductive health educator. In 2001, he resettled in Atlanta, Georgia. Deng has toured the United States speaking about his life in South Sudan, his experience as a refugee, and his collaboration with author Dave Eggers on What Is the What, the novelized version of Deng’s life story.

As a leader in the South Sudanese diaspora, Deng advocates for the universal right to education. In 2006, Deng and Eggers established the VAD Foundation to help rebuild South Sudanese communities by increasing educational access, including vocational training, to promote youth economic empowerment. In 2015, he was appointed the minister of education for Northern Bahr el Ghazal, one of the ten states in South Sudan which gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, and now oversees more than 800 state run schools in addition to the VAD Foundation private secondary schools.

Mr. Deng's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Photo credit: By Stoolhog - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18561894

Food for Thought: Podcast with Valentino Deng

Ben Hamlin is a recovering finance professional turned entrepreneur. He is the founder & CEO of Localwise, a venture-backed startup bringing relationship-based hiring online for the uncollared workforce. 

From 2010 to 2015, Ben served on the board of directors for NYPACE, a non-profit that provides pro-bono consulting services to local business owners. He is now an Advisor to NYPACE and LiftEd, a startup that improves learning outcomes for students with disabilities.

Hamlin holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with Honors from Claremont McKenna College ('07) and an MBA from Berkeley-Haas (’14).

Mr. Hamlin's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Soll Center for Student Opportunities.

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. She was previously a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011-2013. As an undergraduate student at her hometown university, University of Melbourne, she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science. Manne now works in moral (especially metaethics and moral psychology), social, and feminist philosophy. She frequently writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews. Her book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press) will be published in October 2017.

Gaslighting, according to Manne, may make a woman willing and able not only to disbelieve her former testimony, but even reject the very questions or concerns on which it was premised. Raising the sorts of issues to which a woman's story provided answers (e.g., “Was he abusive?”) is effectively billed as a symptom of rational breakdown (e.g., paranoia, being delusional) or, just as importantly, morally bad character (e.g., ingratitude, being insufficiently forgiving, or self-pityingly “playing the victim.”) Concepts and phrases like “playing the victim” and “fishing for sympathy” make merely raising the specter of moral wrongdoing done to oneself suspect and fraught. Manne will further interrogate, break down, and resist these concepts and beliefs.

Professor Manne’s Athenaeum presentation is one of two keynote addresses for the Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice Conference organized by CMC’s philosophy department with support from the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Lori Kozlowski ’00 is a journalist, editor, producer, and media executive, exploring storytelling in all of its forms. 

She serves as producer for Project Empathy—a virtual reality series that combines reporting, documentary, and VR to explore social justice issues in the United States. 

Previously, she served as editorial director at entertainment company Atom Factory, leading the company’s news media division. She founded Smashd, a publication about culture and technology. She was a digital editor and columnist for Forbes, covering entrepreneurs and startups. Prior to Forbes, she served as senior editor at the Los Angeles Times. She has written for numerous national publications, has worked with MIT Media Lab startups on the merger of technology and story, and has served as adjunct faculty at Chapman University and at USC.

Kozlowski graduated with a dual major in government and literature from Claremont McKenna College in 2000. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California.

Ms. Kozlowski's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse (CWPD) at CMC.

Barry Schwartz’s research and writings address morality, decision-making, and the complex relationships between science and society and are applicable to not only individuals but diverse industries and organizations. A prolific author and speaker, Schwartz has published a dozen books and over 200 articles in scientific, professional, and academic publications. A frequent guest on television and radio, Schwartz has also spoken at TED multiple times. His TED talks have been viewed by over 12 million times.

Schwartz’s 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less was named one of the top business books of that year by both Business Week and Forbes Magazine. It has since been translated into twenty-five languages. Schwartz’s also wrote Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, with colleague Ken Sharpe. Most recently, Schwartz published Why We Work.

Schwartz is emeritus professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and is currently a visiting professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

View Video: YouTube with Barry Schwartz

Food for Thought: Podcast with Barry Schwartz

Tracy Westen founded and directed the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) and taught communications law and policy at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and UCLA Law School for over 30 years. He created four Blue Ribbon Commissions; built award-winning model websites to enhance civic education including The Democracy Network, Video Voter, California Channel, Digital Democracy and PolicyArchive.org; litigated test cases on media in the federal courts; and authored or edited over 75 books and reports on media, democracy and judicial reforms. He was deputy director for consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission and legal assistant to an FCC Commissioner.

He received degrees with high honors from U.C. Berkeley Law School (J.D.), University of Oxford (M.A.) and Pomona College (B.A.).

Professor Westen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

View Video: YouTube with Tracy Westen

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Nonzero; The Moral Animal; and Three Scientists and Their Gods, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton, where he also created the popular online course “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.”

In 2009, Foreign Policy named him one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers alongside Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Anne-Marie Slaughter. He has written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, and The New Republic.

Mr. Wright’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Photo credit: Barry Munger

Michael J. Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, where he joined the faculty in 2008. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1983, and his D. Phil. in legal history from the University of Oxford in 1988, where he was a Marshall Scholar. After law school, Klarman clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 and served there until 2008 as the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History.

Klarman’s most recent book, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the US Constitution (2016), was a finalist for both the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. His first book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004), received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History. He is also the author of From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage​ (2012), Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (2007), and Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History (2002), which is part of Oxford University Press’s Inalienable Rights series. 

Klarman has won numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship, which are primarily in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional history. In 2009, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Professor Klarman will deliver the 2017 Salvatori Center’s Lofgren Lecture on American Constitutionalism. 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Klarman

Born in Washington DC, Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Since then, she has lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and New York. And she has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Worlds that are still in her and inform her writings.

She ponders: What does it mean to confess the self—in all its quandaries and questions—inside a piece of reportage? How does a piece work differently when it includes reported material alongside deeply personal reflections—when we sense the reporter as a deeply emotional presence with a story. And what obligations might a writer might feel towards her subjects—the interplay between guilt and the affection, between care and skepticism. 

Author of the novel, The Gin Closet, and a collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, her work has appeared in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and an assistant professor at Columbia University.

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

Photo credit: Michael Stenerson

View Video: YouTube with Leslie Jamison

Food for Thought: Podcast with Leslie Jamison