February 2025
Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, delivered the keynote presentation “Hermeneutic Labor in Sexual Contexts” at the Toronto Symposium for Sex and Sexuality at the University of Toronto’s Sexual Education Center.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, curated and co-directed a program of 16th- and 17th-century music by Thomas Morley, John Jenkins, Thomas Lupo, Vincenzo Ruffo and Riccardo Rognoni for the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra’s community concert series. The performance, held February 1 at the Los Altos Neighborhood Library (Long Beach, California), featured Artifex Consort members Eva Lymenstull and Leif Woodward, alongside whom Bandy played bass and tenor violas da gamba and presented a lecture.
On February 22 in Pomona College’s Bridges Hall of Music, Bandy supplied program notes and played viola da gamba and G violone in a complete performance of the Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Biber (c.1680), featuring baroque violinist Andrew McIntosh, baroque harpist Maxine Eilander and historical keyboardist Ian Pritchard. To demonstrate ties between this repertoire and physical artifacts of 17th-century Jesuit multisensory discourse, Bandy designed miniature historically informed devotional booklets for the performance and prepared projected Rosary images from scans of Biber’s 17th-century manuscript.
Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, presented the paper “Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, 4th Bart., as Collector of Handel’s Music” at the American Handel Society Conference in Boston on February 8. As president of the society, he also introduced the Howard Serwer Memorial Lecture and chaired a meeting of the board of directors.
Mietek Boduszynski, associate professor of politics, co-authored three public-facing pieces: “Models for Transitional Justice in Syria” in Lawfare with Sabina Henneberg; “What Syrians Can Learn from Libya’s Revolution” in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Emissary and “Values and U.S. Foreign Policy in a New Age of Strategic Competition” in Pacific Council Magazine with Holden Tsai ’27.
Eileen J. Cheng, professor of Asian languages and literatures, published the chapter “Beyond Oneself: Writing and Effacement in Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk” in the volume Lu Xun and World Literature (Hong Kong University Press), 2025.
David Divita, professor of Romance languages and literatures, published a Spanish-language version of his book, Historias de lo no contado: Legados del autoritarismo entre los emigrantes españoles mayores en Francia (Madrid: Postmetropolis). The book was released in English last year by University of Toronto Press.
Stephan Ramon Garcia, W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published a paper titled “Symmetric and antisymmetric tensor products for the function-theoretic operator theorist” with Ryan O’Loughlin and Jiahui Yu ’23 in Canadian Journal of Mathematics. He also published a paper titled “Numerical semigroups from rational matrices I: power-integral matrices and nilpotent representations” with Arsh Chhabra ’25, Fangqian “Chris” Zhang ’24 and Hechun Zhang in the journal Communications in Algebra.
Garcia gave a Faculty-Student Lecture titled “Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about symmetric functions, positive polynomials, and linear algebra?” and the Gordon Lecture titled “Prime Time Math: Little Green Men, Locust Hordes, and Cybersecurity” at Denison University on February 24.
Heidi Nichols Haddad, associate professor of politics, participated in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development delegation visit to Los Angeles on “Cities and Universities Working Together for Sustainable Development.” She discussed her experiential learning course, Cities, Rights, and Development, which conducted research on local implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of International Affairs of the City of Los Angeles.
Beth A. Hubbard, assistant director, Pomona Plan, was part of the inaugural Impact Philanthropy Advisor cohort through Daylight Advisors and met all requirements to successfully earn the Impact Philanthropy Advisor (IPA) certification by completing a 20-week program. Daylight is a global professional development community committed to cultivating a thriving philanthropic advising field through learning, practice and research while supporting advisors in their professional and personal growth.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, published an article titled “Technology, Innovation, and Governance: How Toyama City, Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town (SST), and Tsuchiyu Onsen are Building Climate-Resilient Cities and Addressing Demographics Crises” in the journal Asia Pacific Tech-Monitor with Masahiko Haraguchi, Sebastian Maslow, Paul Midford and Kunihiro Nishimura.
Le gave a talk titled “Japan’s Antimilitarism Ecosystem” at Yale University.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, was featured on the chamber music series Village Concerts, performing works by Beethoven, Brahms and Gina Gillie, with artistic director Tomasz Golka, violin, and Preston Shepard, horn. Additionally, the Mojave Trio (with Sara Parkins, violin, and Maggie Parkins, cello) was invited back to appear on the chamber music series Restoration Concerts at South Pasadena Public Library. They performed works of Beethoven, Gao Ping and Rebecca Clarke.
Lee created a new YouTube channel which features a steadily growing number of videos of solo and collaborative performances at Bridges Hall of Music.
Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, conducted a Playback Theatre debrief for the online symposium, Transforming the Power of Culture with Love and Compassion: Standards and Practices for Creating Anti-Oppressive Spaces. This event was organized by the Sociatry and Social Justice Committee of the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama (ASGPP) with support from Tele’drama International on February 8.
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics of astronomy, published a paper titled “Effects of galactic environment on size and dark matter content in low-mass galaxies” in Astrophysical Journal. This manuscript was led by Francisco Mercado, postdoctoral fellow, and is an extension of a senior thesis titled “Fluffiness of low-mass galaxies in the FIREbox simulation,” written by Marckie Zeender ’23, who is also a co-author.
On February 8, Moreno participated in a panel titled “Mutualista; towards a new cosmic methodology” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California.
Moreno chaired a panel on extragalactic ecosystems and participated in an executive telescope time allocation chairs panel for a major space telescope operated by a well-known space agency.
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented his latest research on Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa in a paper titled “Le palimpseste littéraire comme praxis décoloniale dans le bastion des larmes d’Abdellah Taïa” at the symposium on exile and migration in the Arab and Amazigh worlds, held at Florida Atlantic University on February 20-21.
William Peterson, emeritus professor of music and College organist, had his recording of the “Souvenir” of John Cage—recorded on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall of Music—included in the second hour of the Pipedreams program #2507 American Originals, broadcast on American Public Media on February 17.
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published three opinion pieces: “Big Tech’s AI dream demands real money—but even more wishing and hoping” (MarketWatch, February 12); “Why LLMs (Chatbots) Won’t Lead to Artificial General Intelligence” (MindMatters, February 20); and “The Large Language Model (LLM) ‘Superpower’ Illusion Dies Hard” (MindMatters, February 24).
Smith was invited back to SciFoo, an annual invitation-only interdisciplinary scientific unconference at the GooglePlex.
Jessica Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, gave an invited talk on positive developmental outcomes in Black children and adolescents at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Denver. Her talk was part of an invited session, “Insight in inclusivity: DEI in wellbeing research.”
Kevin Wynter, associate professor of media studies, was interviewed by the Why is Amy in the Bathtub podcast to discuss why bathtub scenes are pervasive in horror films.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, had his paper “The ‘Japanese Turn’ in the Art, Architecture and Cuisine of Europe and the United States, 1860-2020” published in the Journal of Japanese Studies.
Yanshuo Zhang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, completed an invited review of a scholarly article for positions: asia critique (Duke University Press), a top journal with theoretical innovations in the area of Asian studies.
Zhang was invited to speak at the 2025 Harvard University 6th International Conference on Chinese Pedagogy for her pedagogical project, “Stimulating Discussions of Race and Ethnicity in Chinese Language Teaching.”