Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Loren J. Samons is professor of classical studies at Boston University, where he has taught ancient history, Greek, Latin, and humanities for almost 25 years. Samons' focus rests in the history of Greece in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., with particular interests in Athenian politics and imperialism. His current research is concerned in particular with the figures of Pericles and Kimon, Athenian foreign policy, and the composition of Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ histories. He also has interests in the later Roman empire, ancient warfare, and the classical tradition. 

Much of his work, especially the book What's Wrong with Democracy? (2004), focuses on the intersection of democracy and imperialism and on the relationship between ancient and modern government. His most recent book, Pericles and the Conquest of History (2016), continues to trace these themes and to offer potential lessons for contemporary society.

View Video: YouTube with Loren Samons

Rukmini Callimachi joined The New York Times in 2014. Her series of articles, “Underwriting Jihad,” showing how ransoms paid by European governments had become one of the main sources of financing for Al Qaeda, won the George Polk Award in International Reporting. She is also a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of the Michael Kelly award, and the first journalist in the 75-year history of the Overseas Press Club to win both the Hal Boyle and the Bob Considine awards the same year.

Earlier this spring, she wrote an extensive feature piece on ISIS’s use of birth control to maintain a steady supply of sex slaves. Last summer, she wrote of the lonely young American woman from rural Washington state lured by ISIS. Her insights come not only from dangerous work in the field, but also from meticulous trolling online.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Callimachi spent ten years at the Associated Press before joining the Times. From 2006 to 2014, she was based in Dakar, Senegal, covering 20 countries as the AP correspondent and West Africa bureau chief.

Ms. Callimachi’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.

View Video: You Tube with Rukmini Callimachi

Jane Chang Mi utilizes art to augment her science and engineering background and to work through multi-layered and complex subjects. Mi believes that this approach reduces the constraints of linguistic signifiers, enabling communication across cultures and barriers and permits contact with a greater community. 

An avid and advanced deep sea diver whose experiences in the ocean inform her art, commitments, and vision, Mi's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art in London and the Honolulu Museum of Art. She has been a visiting artist at the National Gallery in Amman, Jordan sponsored by Art Dubai, a scientist on the Arctic Circle Program departing Spitsbergen, and a fellow at the East West Center at the University of Hawaii.

She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Pepperdine University where she teaches digital arts. 

More information about Mi is available at http://www.janecmi.com 

Join the Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy for a presidential debate held between students. The student debaters will argue questions of policy, platforms, and the role of the executive in the 2016 Presidential Election. Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton will be backed by the student debaters, with the goal of answering the key question 'Why vote for each candidate?'"

View Video: YouTube with Presidential Dialogues

Panelists include: Andrew Busch, Crown Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC; Zachary Courser '99, visiting assistant professor of government and research director for the Dreier Roundtable; Charles Kesler, the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at CMC, senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and host of The American Mind video series; and ​William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a visiting scholar at CMC's Salvatori Center. 

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

View Video: YouTube with Trump Phenomenon Panel

Brandi Hoffine '06 has worked in both the public and private sectors in Washington, D.C. for ten years and has expertise on political communications and strategic messaging. Since August 2014, Hoffine has served as assistant press secretary and spokesperson for the White House where she handles a range of domestic and international policy issues.

Prior to the White House, she was a domestic finance spokesperson for the United States Treasury. She also served as Senator Tim Kaine's communication's director on his successful 2012 campaign for the United States Senate in Virginia. She has also worked in communications and research at the Democratic National Committee, including serving as the deputy national press secretary for the Democratic Party, and in the private sector for Deloitte Consulting.

Originally from Sacramento, Hoffine is a 2006 graduate of Claremont McKenna College.

Michael Shear '90 is the White House correspondent for The New York Times’ Washington bureau where he has worked for the last six years. In this role, he also covered the 2012 presidential campaign. Prior to that, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where he spent 18 years covering local communities, school districts, state politics, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the first two years of the Obama White House.

A member of the Pulitzer Prize winning team that documented the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, Shear is a 1990 graduate of Claremont McKenna College and has a masters in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

View Video: YouTube with Michael Shear '90 and Brandi Hoffine '06

Food for Thought: Podcast with Brandi Hoffine '06

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Shear '90

As the Mao era fades in popular memory, its history has fallen out of focus and has been infused with myth. Drawing on his recent book, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard 2015), Andrew Walder will take up two related questions. First, what were Mao's intentions and what were the actual outcomes of his radical initiatives? Second, why did these outcomes occur? Mao emerges from the historical record as a radical revolutionary whose initiatives frequently had consequences that he had not intended and that frustrated his designs.

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. A political sociologist, Walder specializes on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in contemporary China. He received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Columbia, Harvard, and also headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

His recent publications include China Under Mao (Harvard University Press, 2015); and Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Walder’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by CMC’s Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.

John Prendergast is the founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also the co-founder of the Sentry, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. Prendergast has worked for the Clinton administration, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. During his time in the US state department, Prendergast was an instrumental part of a team which mediated, and ended, the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the deadliest war in the world at the time. Since then, Prendergast has made it his mission to combat mass atrocities in Africa.

He is the author or co-author of ten books.  His latest book, Unlikely Brothers: Our Story of Adventure, Loss, and Redemption (2012), is a dual memoir co-authored with his first little brother in the Big Brother program—a program in which he has been involved for over 25 years. His previous two books were co-authored with Don Cheadle, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (2007), a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes (2010). He is also beginning a book project on the Congo with Ryan Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh.

The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and awards, Prendergast has taught at many American and foreign colleges and universities and is a board member and strategic advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt that advocates in support of global human rights. He appears in the Warner Brothers' motion picture "The Good Lie" (2014), starring Reese Witherspoon and is a primary subject of the book by Jane Bussman, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil (2014).

John Prendergast’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Food for Thought: Podcast with John Prendergast

A long-time resident of Santa Barbara, Congresswoman Lois Capps represents California’s 24th District, which includes San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, and a portion of Ventura county. She has served in Congress since 1998. 

A nurse and educator by training, Capps’ extensive healthcare background informs her work in Congress where she is a respected and effective leader, especially on issues related to public health. She has successfully spearheaded and passed legislation specifically to address the national nursing shortage, detect and prevent domestic violence against women, curb underage drinking, improve mental health services, provide emergency defibrillators to local communities, improve research on pediatric rare diseases, support greater diversity in clinical trials for more effective treatments, bring CPR instruction to schools, identify and link newborns with hearing loss to services, strengthen Medicare coverage for patients suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, expand TRICARE health coverage for military mothers, and improve rental car safety to protect consumers.

Capps has also been at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment and promote clean energy and green technology. She has led efforts to prevent new oil and gas drilling off our coast and on the public’s lands, strengthen oil pipeline safety and spill response, protect consumers from shouldering the financial burden of cleaning up water pollution in their water supplies, and conserve wildlife and rare species native to the Central Coast. She has also authored laws to establish a national system for ocean monitoring, expand conservation efforts for our public lands and strengthen labeling standards for organic foods.

Among other commitments, she serves on the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce where she sits on the Health, Energy & Power, and Environment & the Economy subcommittees and also serves on the Natural Resources Committee where she sits on the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Her work on this committee is focused on energy production, fisheries and wildlife, public lands, oceans, and Native Americans.

Capps graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington with a B.S. in Nursing with honors and worked as a nursing instructor in Portland, Oregon. She earned an M.A. in Religion from Yale University while working as Head Nurse at Yale New Haven Hospital and an M.A. in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has received honorary doctorates from Pacific Lutheran University and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. 

Representative Capps’ Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

Pat Crowley '02 is founder and CEO of Chapul Inc., a company revolutionizing the food industry with their award winning cricket bars. Fueled with a passion for a more sustainable future, Crowley has broken down cultural barriers and introduced edible insects into western cuisine. From hand-making energy bars in a small kitchen, to a crowd-funded start-up, then on to winning an investment from Mark Cuban on the hit TV show, Shark Tank, Pat has created an international presence and ignited a revolution that is challenging the boundaries of food. Pat has been interviewed by CNN, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, and has spoken from TEDx, University, and International stages.

After graduating CMC in 2002, Crowley hitchhiked and surfed his way through Central America, witnessing first-hand the global water crisis. He returned to the U.S. to receive his M.S. in hydrology and dedicated his career to ensuring a more sustainable water future. Diving into the the largest consumer of global water supply, agriculture, it became evident that our food system is in need of a massive revolution.

Eating insects is his attempt at such a revolution.

View Video: YouTube with Pat Crowley '02

Join us as we commemorate the life and legacy of Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winning author, professor, and renowned humanitarian. Elie Wiesel worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust led him to use his talents as an author, teacher, and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.

A native of Sighet, Transylvania (Romania), Wiesel and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz when he was fifteen years old. His mother and younger sister perished there; his two older sisters survived. Wiesel and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died. After the war, Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist in that city; yet, he remained silent about what he had endured as an inmate in the death camps. During an interview with French writer Francois Mauriac, Wiesel was persuaded to end that silence and he subsequently wrote Night. Since its publication in 1958, it has been translated into twenty-five languages and millions of copies have been sold.  In his lifetime, Wiesel received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of Liberty, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor and went on to author more than 60 books.

Co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Geoffrey Giles received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. After completing a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, he taught German and European history at the University of Florida for 35 years, before retiring as an emeritus professor in 2013.

Beginning in the 1990s, Giles led several traveling study seminars for college faculty to meet with museum staff at death camps and other Holocaust sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Foundation. Giles also served for many years on the State of Florida Education Commissioner’s Task Force on Holocaust Education. He continues to speak on the Holocaust at nationwide workshops targeted in particular for educators.

In 2000, he spent a year as the senior scholar-in-residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. conducting research on the treatment and victimization of homosexuals during the Third Reich. He continued this research as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich in 2003-2004, and has published numerous essays and articles on this subject in both English and German. In November 2015 he delivered a keynote address at the Sorbonne in Paris on Nazi concepts of masculinity and attitudes toward homosexuality. A book on the topic is forthcoming.

Professor Giles’ Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

View Video: YouTube with Geoffrey Giles

Following a two hour conference in the Kravis Center Freeberg Forum from 10am-12noon, we will have a lunch and roundtable discussion with three distinguished speakers including Frank Bean, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Research on International Migration at the University of California, Irvine; Lanhee Chen, the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, former Policy Director for the Mitt Romney for President 2012 campaign, and advisor to the Marco Rubio for President 2016 campaign; and Giovanni Peri, professor and department chair of economics at the University of California, Davis, director of the UC Davis Temporary Migration Cluster, and research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

William Lincoln, assistant professor in the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at CMC will moderate. 

The roundtable promises to be a lively and important discussion on an issue central to the choices facing voters in November and the direction of the country going forward.

View Video: YouTube with Immigration Panel

Kelly Tsai is an award-winning writer, performer, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work as a spoken word poet has been featured at over 700 venues including the White House, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Apollo Theater, BAM, MTV Iggy, HBO's "East of Main Street: Asians Aloud" and three seasons of HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry," among others.

In 2016, Tsai was honored as a Woman of Distinction by the American Association for University Women. She was recognized in 2015 by Americorps Alums' National Leader Award, New York Historical Society’s "Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion" exhibit, and NBC's News' "Asian American Poets to Watch." Previously, Tsai has been noted as one of the "30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30" by AngryAsianMan.com and one of the "Top 40 New Yorkers Who Create Positive Social Change" by Idealist.org in NYC.

Tsai graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a double major and high honors in urban planning and comparative literature. 

Read more about Kelly Tsai.

Photo credit: Kyle D. Reinford

View Video: YouTube with Kelly Tsai

Michael Wilner ‘11 is the Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, and coordinates coverage of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East from the White House, State Department, Pentagon and Congress. He was formerly the New York and United Nations correspondent also for The Jerusalem Post.

Wilner leads coverage of the Iran nuclear deal, the US-Israel relationship, and the rise of Islamic State. A native New Yorker, he has reported from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East on business, cultural, and international affairs.

At the age of 23, Wilner joined the White House press corps as its youngest member and as the only representative of an Israeli news organization in its foreign corps. He traveled with the U.S. delegation negotiating with Iran through Switzerland and Austria, and has filed from the field on the 2016 US presidential campaign, on the Syrian refugee crisis, and on the Gaza war during Operation Protective Edge.

In 2011, Wilner earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) from Claremont McKenna College as a McKenna Scholar; he then attended Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism as a Hindery Fellow, graduating in 2012.

Michael Wilner's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by CMC's Student Opportunity Center.