Winter Residency: Sinatra Artist-in-Residence Rhiannon Giddens returns with Francesco Turrisi on January 19-25.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

On January 1st, I expected our first College Notes of 2021 to contain best wishes for the new year and a fervent hope that the winter break was safe and restorative for you and your families. I still wish you a happy new year, but last week's events made for a very different start to the new year and the new academic quarter than I had imagined, so these College Notes feel different.

First, let me acknowledge the fear and hurt we experienced seeing a violent mob disrupt our democracy at the very heart of our federal government. Like many of you, I am rattled and worried. So please reach out for any help navigating this stress and disruption.

I also find it important to appreciate the work of College faculty, staff and students, precisely for how you nurture, defend, and teach the civic values that make a democracy work. A Jesuit education now, more than ever, can serve as a healing tonic for a wounded society.

And on that point, several highlights in this week’s College Notes demonstrate our community’s commitment to care, justice and democracy. First, there is Professor Terri Peretti’s new book Partisan Supremacy: How the GOP Enlisted Courts to Rig America’s Election Rules (University Press of Kansas) – it doesn’t get more timely than that! And see also Professor Birgit Koopmann-Holm’s new research grant to study compassion across cultures.

Turning to faculty and undergraduate collaboration, kudos to the History Department’s undergraduate research journal, Historical Perspectives, which took second place in the 2020 Phi Alpha Theta Gerald D. Nash Journal competition in the undergraduate category—the fourth consecutive year they’ve placed in the top three.

Persevering through this difficult winter, I wish a big helping of cura personalis for each of you as well as our body politic!

Daniel

Highlights

Election law litigation has dramatically increased in recent years, with challenges to the 2020 election serving as a potent reminder. In her new book, Partisan Supremacy: How the GOP Enlisted Courts to Rig America’s Election Rules, Terri Peretti (Political Science) assesses recent Republican efforts to advance the party’s election reform agenda in the courts and finds considerable evidence of “friendly” judicial review. The GOP has largely succeeded in securing judicial assistance in weakening the Voting Rights Act, requiring voter identification, permitting partisan gerrymandering, and ending limits on corporate campaign spending. Such partisan collaboration across the branches on critical election law issues poses a serious threat to minority voting rights, the legitimacy of courts, and democracy itself.

Two of Miah Jeffra's (English) essays from their recent collection, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!—"The Being of Such an Unlikely Thing" and "A Fiction More Real"—have been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize, respectively.

Christopher Bacon (Environmental Studies & Sciences) and Gabriella Ballardo ‘21 (Environmental Studies and Italian Studies) presented the poster “Assessing Diversification, Food Security, and Dietary Diversity with Organized Smallholders in Nicaragua” at the Fourth International (Online) Conference on Global Food Security based in Montpellier, France. Co-authors of this research include Maria Eugenia Flores Gomez (Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative), Skyler Kriese '20 (Environmental Studies), Erica Martinez '20 (Biology, Public Health and Spanish Studies), Emma McCurry '21 (Bioengineering), Gabriela Hamm '20 (Environmental Studies), and Annalicia Anaya '20 (Sociology) as well as colleagues from the National Agricultural University and the PRODECOOP Cooperative in Nicaragua. Although increasing evidence suggests that agroecology-based farm diversification can generate multiple benefits little is known about what types of diversification work for whom and how it correlates with key livelihood outcomes. The poster summarized four years of community-based participatory action research and identified diversification as a key strategy for improving household dietary diversity with the potential to also support gender equity and climate resilience.

For those of us in California, it was a lively 6:30 am conversation with participants from different parts of the world and diverse backgrounds.

Tom Plante (Psychology) recently published two book chapters in Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse World, edited by Amy L. Ai, Paul Wink, Raymond F. Paloutzian, and Kevin A. Harris, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG. 

• "The Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire (SCSRFQ): A brief, nondenominational, and multicultural assessment tool." (pp. 445-466).
  
  
• "Spiritual modeling self-efficacy: A stand-alone measure" with co-authors Doug Oman, Eric P. Boorman, and Kevin A. Harris (pp. 521-552).

Lindsay Halladay (Psychology and Neuroscience) published an article in the journal eLife, "A prefrontal-bed nucleus of the stria terminalis circuit limits fear to uncertain threat," work identifying a neural circuit crucial for regulating fear responses to potentially dangerous stimuli, with translational implications for understanding the neural basis of trauma-related disorders. This work was done as a collaboration between the Halladay Lab and researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and was co-authored by two SCU undergraduates - Max Bjorni '21 (Neuroscience and Biology) and Natalie Rovero '21 (Psychology and Neuroscience).

Birgit Koopmann-Holm (Psychology) received a Small Research Grant from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This grant will fund her research on what compassionate facial expressions look like in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural contexts.

Little is known about what is considered compassionate across cultures. As an extension of Birgit’s work on U.S. American-German differences, with the help of this grant, Birgit will examine notions of compassionate facial expressions in Latin America and Asia. Participants select images that most resemble a compassionate face using a reverse correlation task. She and her students predict that compassionate expressions in Asia mirror distress more than in Latin America, partly because of cultural differences in how much people want to avoid negative emotions. This research has implications for cultural sensitivity training for therapists.

The memoir, 1988:NY-LA (Cronica de un Viaje a America) by Juan Velasco-Moreno (English) was released December 29th, 2020, through Facebook Live, and connected critics from Mexico, El Salvador, Germany, Spain and the U.S. In the release of the book some critics compared this book to Jean Baudrillard's America. It's a truthful, but also a poetic reflection on America.

Photo: Cover and picture announcing the release of the book

Peter Minowitz (Political Science) published a short, campus-focused essay in RealClear Education: "Reconciliation Begins at Home: Two Pleas for Post-Trump Academic Life."

The History Department's undergraduate research journal, Historical Perspectives vol. 24 (2019), was awarded second place in the 2020 Phi Alpha Theta Gerald D. Nash Journal competition in the undergraduate category. Congratulations to student co-editors, Haley Butler '20 (History) and Maggie Oys '20 (Political Science and History), and faculty advisors, Naomi Andrews and Matthew Newsom Kerr. This is the 4th year in a row that Historical Perspectives has won second or third place in this national competition!

Amy E. Randall's (History) article, "Soviet and Russian Masculinities: Rethinking Soviet Fatherhood after Stalin and Renewing Virility in the Russian Nation under Putin," was recently published in the Journal of Modern History 92:4 (2020): 859-898. The Journal of Modern History is the leading journal worldwide for the study of European history.

Shortened abstract: President Vladimir Putin’s macho image and deployment of masculinized nationalism, in conjunction with his use of patriarchy and gender essentialism as tools of authority building, have fascinated Russians and non-Russians alike, generating considerable public and scholarly analysis. This article argues that the appeal of Putin as a powerful and hypermasculine leader over the last twenty years is best understood not just in the larger geopolitical context of Russia’s national and economic decline in the 1990s but also in terms of Soviet and post-Soviet discourses of failed manhood, including the widespread critique of Soviet fatherhood in the 1950s and 1960s.

Image: Illustration by Iurii Fedorov in L. G. Nebratenko, “Podumaite o detiiakh,” Zdorov’e 12 (1967): 20. This image, titled "Think about the children" was published in the popular Soviet journal, Health, and on p. 885 of the Journal of Modern History article.

REAL Program applications for summer 2021 placements are now open. The REAL Program—which stands for Real Experience, Applied Learning—supports exploration of purpose and careers by providing paid summer internship and research opportunities to students in the College of Arts and Sciences. More than 300 students across all majors have been funded since the program's inception in 2018. Placements range from non-profit and community service organizations to research labs, governmental organizations, and more. Please help us spread the word by encouraging your students to apply! Applications are due in March.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar