Dear College Faculty and Staff,

As you read this, finals will be just about over and it will be time to submit grades. There will also surely be more work wrapping up the quarter, including helping students finish up and get home for a much-needed break. You all worked so hard! I heard from many of you how profoundly meaningful it was to see our students back in person. At the same time, could returning to campus have been more fraught and sorrowful, especially in the last couple of weeks?

Thank you for all the courage and compassion you showed our students and each other. None of this should ever be taken for granted; all acts of care, patience, and understanding are gifts.

As we acknowledge our struggles and difficulties, it is still important to recognize our wins—something that College Notes was created for. Thank you to everyone who has submitted notes this past year. I encourage you all to continue contributing next year and sharing in the recognition of all that we do as part of Santa Clara University.

Please enjoy time with family and friends this winter break and use it as a time to rest and recharge – that too is a gift!

Wishing you a holiday season filled with the blessings of hope and joy.

Daniel

Highlights

Alma M. García (Sociology) attended the virtual Latino Book & Family Festival held in San Diego. She discussed her award-winning memoir, Club Oasis: Childhood Memories. During the question and answer period Alma discussed her transition from academic to creative writing and the role of memory and autoethnography. The event audience brought together over one hundred educators and librarians.

Ana María Pineda (Religious Studies) was recognized for her accomplishments and contributions to U.S. Latinx theology. She was presented with the 2021 La Comunidad Lifetime Achievement Award on the weekend of November 20-23 in San Antonio, Texas during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL). La Comunidad is a group of Ecumenical Latinx theologians who advance the interests and scholarship of Latinas and Latinos in biblical, theological and religious studies.

Amelia Fuller (Chemistry & Biochemistry) and Ian Carter-O'Connell (Chemistry & Biochemistry) both gave presentations at the Rocky Mountain Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Tucson, Arizona on October 21. Amelia organized the session on Peptide Chemistry at the meeting and presented her talk on "Peptidomimetic Macrocycle Synthesis and Structural Evaluation." Ian's presentation focused on his recently published work "TLC-MALDI-TOF as a platform for identifying novel, site-specific, peptide- based poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitors." In addition to presenting in the scientific session, Amelia was also invited to be on a panel of faculty addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Colleges and Universities.

Poster: Exploring Conceptualizations of Compassion in Chinese and U.S. American Contexts

Last week, Jia Seow ’22 (Psychology) presented the research she has been working on together with Eleanore Carper ’22 (Psychology) and mentor Birgit Koopmann-Holm (Psychology) at the Harvard Women in Psychology's Annual Trends in Psychology Summit (TiPS). Past research has examined compassionate facial expressions mainly in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultural contexts. What does a compassionate face look like to people in a non-WEIRD cultural context such as to people from China? Their work is starting to explore this question and suggests that while people in the U.S. conceptualize a compassionate face as one with a slight smile, people in China regard faces as compassionate that mirror other people’s distress. This work has important implications for cross-cultural counseling.

Aparajita Nanda's (Ethnic Studies, English) chapter entitled, "Teaching Butler in a Course on Colonialism and Science Fiction," is included in the collection that won the 2021 Teaching Literature Book Award - Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler (MLA 2021).

Emily Dang and Isabel Wu (left). Shelby Surdyk and students in Juneau, Alaska (right).

Emily Dang '20 (Computer Science and Engineering) and Isabel Wu '21 (Studio Arts and Marketing) presented their Virtual Reality (VR) project, AdvocaSea, to high school students attending an Oceanography class in Juneau, Alaska. They discussed the topics in sustainability and activism that inspired their game, their game design process, their art and visual development, and the lessons they learned from making that project and from the VR class they were taking at the time, ARTS 185. The project was Emily's senior project; she is now pursuing her Master of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering at SCU and serving as the Lab Manager of the WAVE+Imaginarium Lab in Heafey. Isabel is currently working in marketing at Hitachi Ventara.

Image: Westland author line-up at the Katha Literary Festival, Ashoka University, November 12-14, featuring SCU's Rohit Chopra

Rohit Chopra was invited to speak at a panel titled "Scripting the Grey" at the Katha Literature Festival, organized by Ashoka University, India, on November 14, 2021. The focus of the panel was on what literature might tell us about the complexity of lived existence and ethical and political ambiguity in times of duress. Rohit's contribution presented a theorization and genealogy of "greyness," weaving through a range of themes from various literary and artistic texts, including: the politics of complicity in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz; Picasso's critique of war in his masterpiece Guernica; the Marxist notion of alienation as estrangement from the self; and the ironic absence of plenitude in the book Fifty Shades of Grey. Rohit also drew on his recent book, The Gita for a Global World (Westland, 2021), to highlight the themes ambiguity and contradiction in the ancient Indian text.

Rohit was also interviewed about his book, The Gita for a Global World: Ethical Action in an Age of Flux, by Dr. Justin Laterell, Director of Academic Programs at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

Kirstyn Leuner (English) published an article titled "Particularly Red, by a Woman: Anne B. Poyntz and the Printing and Digitization of Her Je ne sçai quoi" in European Romantic Review 32.5-6. The article recovers Poyntz’s book Je ne sçai quoi (1769), a collection of letters and odes, to identify junctures during printing and digitization where the author’s stated vision for her work is compromised. An understanding of how Poyntz’s book was printed in the eighteenth century combined with its digital histories reveals that the author's initial loss of control at the proposal stage was the first of several that ultimately produced an inconsistent plurality of print and digital surrogates that do not reflect Poyntz’s original vision for her book, which she clearly states in the book.Those desired features include a dedication printed in red ink and the by-line "By a Woman" on the title page. Read the article to learn how she lost both of them.

Dan Ostrov

MMI/Barron's 2021 award for Disruption was given to Franklin Templeton Investment's new Goals Optimization Engine (GOE). GOE was created by Dan Ostrov (Mathematics & Computer Science) and Sanjiv Das (Finance) in conjunction with Franklin Templeton. The Disruption award honors "a groundbreaking new product, technology, or process that will fundamentally alter the future delivery of [financial advising] solutions." (Dan's previous reputation for disruption has been more campus based.)

The award describes GOE as "enabl[ing] advisors and financial services firms to deliver personalized, high-value services to end-investors at greater scale. Based on proprietary research that won the prestigious Harry M. Markowitz Award in 2018, GOE combines Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions’ portfolio construction expertise with dynamic programming to deliver individualized portfolio pathways based upon an individual's unique goals. With the ability to handle and optimize between multiple investor goals, GOE uses probability of success as the driver for the initial asset allocation and each reallocation in order to maximize likelihood of achieving the goal. Portfolio paths further adapt to client changes and portfolio performance."

Mythri Jegathesan (Anthropology) was awarded the Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize for her book, Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka. The book prize, awarded every two years by the Association for Feminist Anthropology, recognizes a first book by a scholar that draws on and makes a significant contribution to feminist anthropology. Tea and Solidarity was published in 2019 by University of Washington Press in the Decolonizing Feminisms series edited by Piya Chatterjee, and the book was awarded the Diana Forsythe Book Prize in 2020.

Chad Raphael (Communication) published the article, "Moving from Dialogue to Deliberation about Campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," in the journal Experiential Learning & Teaching in Higher Education.

The article describes the design, outcomes, and implications of a course project in which students consulted their peers to form recommendations for strengthening and integrating DEI learning in the co-curriculum and curriculum. The article was part of a special issue on experiential education and justice, edited by Patrick M. Green of Loyola University Chicago.

David Jeong (Communication) co-authored an article published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, titled "AcousNet: A Deep Learning based Approach to Dynamic 3D Holographic Acoustic Field Generation from Phased Transducer Array."

Eugene R. Schlesinger (Religious Studies) published the article "Overcoming the 'Distance': Robert Doran as a Bridge Between the Trinitarian Analogies of Bernard Lonergan and Hans Urs von Balthasar" in Theological Studies. This article utilizes the work of the late Robert Doran to facilitate a rapprochement between two apparently incommensurable theological proposals and to call for a renewed boldness in speculative theology. It is the first of a planned trio of exploratory articles that will lead into a monograph project.

He also presented the paper "Opus Dei, Opus Hominum: The Trinity, the Four-Point Hypothesis, and the Eucharist" at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. This paper develops the core theological conceptuality from the Theological Studies article by putting it into conversation with a theology of eucharistic sacrifice, in order to explore the role of liturgical action in recruiting human activity into participation in the mission of God. It will eventually be the second of three exploratory articles leading into the book.

Tim Myers (English) has an essay with artwork out from the magazine America. He also has a poem, "To Follow Baldur," with Exterminating Angel Press Magazine. His artpiece "Midnight Meditation" was just accepted by Stone Canoe magazine.

Image: "Midnight Meditation" - Tim J. Myers

Sreela Sarkar’s (Communication) chapter Skills Will Not Set You Free appears in the volume Your Computer is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) which has been selected as the "Best Business Book 2021" by Strategy+Business. The citation states, “A collaborative manifesto by academics urgently calling for change is the most provocative technology book of the year.” The volume is the result of a few years of collaboration and labor by several STS scholars who address the dangerous and harmful consequences of “techno-optimism” in different ways. The recognition of this book which is deeply critical in its approach by the “mainstream” is a testament to its value and timeliness. As Strategy + Business states, “How can companies maximize the positive impacts of technology while minimizing all the bad ones? That’s the next great challenge facing corporate leaders and our system as a whole. And that’s why Your Computer Is On Fire, which is critical reading for business leaders seeking to tackle this question head-on, is the best technology book of 2021."

The Water Project, a collaboratively created multi-media performance that engaged with 21st century water issues, premiered in Mayer Theatre October 1-3, 2021. Over three days 427 people saw the live performance and approximately 300 more have since watched the live stream.
    
The response to the live performance integrating dance, choral music, storytelling, scientific analysis, animation and projected imagery was extremely positive with many expressing intentions to take personal and civic action on water issues. Intending to inspire a renewed respect, awareness and engagement with water The Water Project both celebrated and critiqued our relationship to water. As the storyteller said, “it’s complicated.” This performance culminated over three years of collaboration between SCU artist faculty: David Popalisky (Theatre & Dance), Scot Hanna-Weir (Music), Kathy Aoki (Art & Art History), Derek Duarte (Theatre & Dance), Jeff Bracco (Theatre & Dance), Barbara Murray (Theatre & Dance) and Jerry Enos (Theatre & Dance) and consulting water science faculty Iris Stewart-Frey (Environmental Studies & Sciences) and Ed Maurer (Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering).
   
On Saturday Ed Maurer and Iris Stewart-Frey presented "Water Justice in the 21st Century - Near and Far" for the community. A blog post inspired by the performance “Water is a Project,” is on the Center for the Arts and Humanities website.
   
Nat Gilmore '22 (Communication) is making a documentary film about The Water Project and its social justice implications.