Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Happy March, folks! It is hard to believe that we are nearly a full year into our remote work, but it is encouraging that the vaccine is now available to those in the education sector. I recently got my first shot and know of a number of our colleagues already have as well.

I’m delighted to share that two of our students are finalists for prestigious awards—Abby Alvarez ’22 (Political Science and Spanish) is a finalist for the Truman Scholarship, and Jasmyn Brudsall ’20 (Psychology) is a finalist for the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program. Both of these outstanding women embody our Jesuit values and continuously strive to employ their talents and passion to serve those most in need. Final interviews for both awards are currently taking place, and selections will be announced later this spring. 

This month, we have a number of application deadlines for student opportunities. The ALZA and Beckman scholarship applications as well as De Novo Fellow applications are all due on Monday, March 15. REAL Program applications are being considered on a rolling basis pending the availability of funds. Please continue to encourage your students to apply for these opportunities!

Meanwhile, spring is around the corner and the soils are warming up, so it’s time to get those flower and vegetable starts going!

Daniel

Highlights

The revised and updated paperback edition of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young (Communication) was released by the University of California Press in February. It details Gordon's attempt to reconnect with his hometown of Flint, Michigan, after living in San Francisco for more than two decades. Filled with nostalgia and compelled to help the struggling city where four generations of his family lived, Young hatches a plan to buy a house in Flint. He embarks on a tragi-comic odyssey to rediscover the city that once supplied the country with shiny Buicks and boasted one of the highest per capita income levels in the world, but now endures a real unemployment rate pushing 40 percent. Along the way, he confronts the misguided policies, flawed leadership, and unforgiving economic trends that lead to disasters like the Flint water crisis. Filmmaker Michael Moore calls Teardown "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city."

Frank Farris (Mathematics & Computer Science) gave an invited talk remotely for GEAR (Geometry, Education, Art, and Research) 2021 at the Banff International Research Station on February 21. The subject was "Wallpaper Patterns from Looping Strands: The Layer Groups." The layer groups, which extend the concept of wallpaper patterns to 3D structures, are known to crystallographers, but less well known among mathematicians. This work provides an accessible bridge. (Funny story: The Wikipedia page about Layer Groups sites some work of Frank's from 1998, which does not contain the term "Layer group." It is nonetheless surprisingly relevant.)

Image: A pattern invariant under one of the layer groups, created by Frank Farris in Rhino with Grasshopper.

Chris Weber (Physics) published a perspective in the Journal of Applied Physics that was selected as an Editor's Pick. The article, "Ultrafast investigation and control of Dirac and Weyl semimetals," summarizes the state of research on the sub-picosecond properties of these novel electronic materials, emphasizing important open questions. It describes the most important challenges and opportunities confronting research in this rapidly-evolving field.

Students in Claudia Monpere McIsaac’s (English) Creative Writing and Social Justice course (ENGL 176, an ELSJ course) meet on Zoom weekly with 6th graders at a low-income school, Hoover Middle School. Together, they’ve read and discussed A Long Walk to Water, a novel set in Southern Sudan during the civil war, based on the true story of Salva Dut. They’re now creating projects to highlight the book’s two narrative threads: a young girl’s arduous, daily trek to a pond for her family’s water and a young boy’s flight from his war-torn village and harrowing journey on foot to reach a refugee camp in Ethiopia.

The 6th graders love games and images, so the projects they’re creating with the SCU students include writing and illustrating a graphic novel, creating a Kahoot game, and developing a video game using SCRATCH, a free programming language created by MIT. Attacks by soldiers, lions, crocodiles; an agonizing journey through the Akobo desert; mind-numbing grief at the loss of family; moments of tenderness and generosity; and an unforgettable ending— Salva Dut got an education and founded Water for Sudan, which builds wells and trains villagers to maintain them. The novel’s events and characters have the 6th graders and the SCU students passionate about the issue of clean, accessible water and fully immersed in their projects.

Lee Panich (Anthropology) received an Honorable Mention for the G. Wesley Johnson Award from the National Council on Public History. This award recognizes the most outstanding article appearing in the NCPH journal, The Public Historian, during the previous volume year. With Tsim Schneider and Khal Schneider, Lee co-authored the paper "Scaling Invisible Walls: Reasserting Indigenous Persistence in Mission-Era California." Their paper advocates for the use of multiple lines of evidence in making Indigenous persistence and resilient relationships to meaningful landscapes the cardinal priorities, not secondary attributes, in the study of Indigenous responses to colonization.

Image: Native Californian artifacts from Missions Santa Clara and San José.

Baltimore/DC-based chamber ensemble Bridge premiered America, You’re Beautiful, a short film conceived in response to the Black Lives Matter movement made in collaboration with The Poet Life and poet Nina Brewton. The film was released on Thursday, February 25th and features a new score by Scot Hanna-Weir (Music), written for and performed by Bridge, and a poem, written and performed by Virginia-based poet Nina Brewton. Baltimore-based cinematographer Tyler W. Davis, fresh off a Sundance Festival debut (Baltimore’s own Strawberry Mansion), captured the film on location at the National Mall and Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. this winter.

In June of 2020, during the weeks of national outcry and mourning following the death of George Floyd, Bridge reached out to a previous collaborator, Christoph Jenkins (The Poet Life), to brainstorm a project that would respectfully respond to this tragedy, contribute meaningfully to the movement to protect black lives, and help to amplify the voice of a black artist.

Bridge, courtesy of The Poet Life, commissioned poet Nina Brewton to write a poem in response to these events. Scot Hanna-Weir composed a wordless soundtrack designed solely to support Brewton’s poetry, which Bridge recorded remotely from home studios. The poem and underlying musical score both draw inspiration from “America, the Beautiful”.

Tom Plante (Psychology) published an article in Spirituality in Clinical Practice, "The integration of Roman Catholic traditions and evidence-based psychological services."

On Feb. 23, the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures hosted the 6th SCU Latin American Studies Speaker event. This speaker series, founded by Alma García (Sociology), aims to bring to campus prominent speakers in the field of Latin American Studies and artists from Latin America. This year’s speaker was Carolina Valdivia, Ph.D., UC President Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and prominent immigration advocate. Her website “My Undocumented Life” is the foremost source of information and resources for undocumented students from high school to graduate school. Her talk, “A Piece of Me was Taken Away: The Consequences of Immigration Enforcement on Young Adults,” focused on the impact of immigration enforcement on undocumented students and their families and was followed by an extensive and lively Q&A.

Last year the Latin American Studies speaker series presented to the SCU community the documentarian Melissa Elizondo, whose multiple award-winning documentary El sembrador follows the work of a rural schoolteacher in Chiapas, and Prof. Amanda Petersen from the University of San Diego, who studies online activism and public protests against violence against women in Mexico.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar