Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Apparently, spring comes early in Santa Clara! We need more rain, but it’s wonderful to see students out and about on campus enjoying the sunshine and each other's company.

We have a busy week ahead of us—Sinatra Artist-in-Residence BD Wong will be on campus attending classes and engaging with our community for his Winter Residency starting on Monday. I do hope you’ll have a chance to meet him, or at the very least, attend one of the three public performances we’ve got planned.

• A Seat at the Table: Student Play and Talkback: A stage reading and conversation about a play written by current student Vicky Pham ’23 (Communication) and directed by BD Wong.
• Take Me to the World: A Recital of Songs by Stephen Sondheim: Performed by students in Music and Theatre & Dance with musical direction by Scot Hanna-Weir (Music), stage direction by Jeff Bracco (Theatre & Dance), and featuring special Sinatra guest Wayne Barker, musical arrangement and pianist.
• Songs from An Unmade Bed: A screening of BD Wong and Richard Schnorr’s recent adaptation followed by a conversation around creative collaboration.

All of these will be available to watch both in-person and virtually, and are shaping up to be meaningful events for both our students and those in our community!

We’ve got some great updates in this week’s issue - our own students meeting the Pope! That’s pretty tremendous. Please keep submitting to College Notes—for yourself, your colleagues (with permission) or your students—so we can continue acknowledging and celebrating the wonderful work that our community is engaging in!

All the best,

Daniel

Student Advisory Council

Luke Paulson is a senior studying Anthropology from Los Altos, California. He joined the council in hopes to build upon and improve student life at SCU. He notes that there is a uniqueness to being a student at Santa Clara University and how that stems from the strength of the community. While on council Luke hopes to see this community bond not only in the academic community but also into the social scene. In addition to this, Luke also hopes to create a new major that is composed of course flexibility and student design. A fun fact about Luke is that he has three sisters!

The Student Advisory Council was started during Fall 2021 and is made up of 10 students from across the College. They meet twice a quarter with Dean Press to discuss their aspirations, suggestions for new initiatives, and their responses to issues of the day.

Highlights

Ana María Pineda (Religious Studies), personally witnessed the beatification ceremony of martyred Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande of El Salvador, following fellow Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero towards recognition as a Roman Catholic saint. The ceremony took place on Saturday, January 22, in San Salvador. Father Grande was murdered in 1977. He was working with poor campesinos in the countryside near El Paisnal, El Salvador, when assassins from Salvadoran security forces murdered him and two of his traveling companions, Manuel Solórzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 15. All three will be beatified, as well as Cosma Spessotto, an Italian priest, who was also murdered while he was saying Mass in El Salvador in 1980.

In anticipation of the Beatification event, “4 lessons from Rutilio Grande, priest, prophet and martyr,” was published in America on January 14, 2022. In addition to her America article Ana María participated in America Media’s project to tell the story of Rutilio Grande and El Salvador on the occasion of Grande’s beatification. She is one of the participants in a podcast episode, “Deep Dive: Who is Rutilio Grande, and what does his beatification mean for the people of El Salvador?” and she also participated in another interview: “Who was Rutilio Grande, S.J., priest and martyr? (Behind the Story).” Her new book Rutilio Grande: Memory and Legacy (Lectio Publishing) was published to coincide with the January 22nd Beatification event.

On January 27, Kirstyn Leuner (English) gave an invited lecture in the Animating Text Speaker Series, sponsored by Newcastle University. Her lecture, “Color Matters: How will 18th-century Color Print Survive Mass Digitization?”, draws attention to overlooked 18th century texts with page-spreads printed in color—there are more of these than one might think. She shows that mass digitization projects, including the Google Library Project and Eighteenth Century Collections Online—have failed to preserve these colorful literary print jobs where a loss of color is not simply aesthetic damage, but a significant loss of meaning and, at times, even a loss of the author’s identity imprinted on the page. So, if you see black type on a white background in a digitized PDF, wonder: was it actually printed in black ink? And if not, what else, besides the color, has been lost? To watch the full recorded lecture, visit this page.

The department of Chemistry and Biochemistry hosted the first poster session since SCU's return to in-person learning on January 31, and the event was a big success! Over 40 students attended to learn more about research projects from seven of the department's esteemed faculty.

Image: Dr. Ian Carter-O'Connell shares his research with SCU students.

Tom Plante (Psychology) published a book chapter on compassion assessment, "Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale (SCBCS)," in Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research, Medvedev, O.N., Krägeloh, C.U., Siegert, R.J., Singh, N.N. (Eds), Springer, Cham. 

Compassion seems to be in very short supply in our deeply troubled world. Yet efforts have been underway to develop and nurture compassion for both self and others by researchers, clinicians, clerics, both private and public organizations and institutions, among others in recent years. A more compassionate world would be a better world for everyone. Research has also suggested that contemplative and meditative techniques, such as mindfulness, can increase compassion for self and for others as well. Interest in compassion means that quality assessment techniques must be readily available and accessible for researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and experts in many diverse fields. Measures need to be reliable, valid, and easy to use, score, and interpret. They also need to be affordable and ideally free to use. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale (SCBCS) published in 2008. An introduction to the scale, information about reliability, validity, and utility, and a brief summary of some of the global research conducted using the scale is provided..

With co-editor Rob Halpern (EMU), Robin Tremblay-McGaw (English) edited a special issue on New Narrative for the Journal of Narrative Theory. Her essay "Sounding Out: Nathaniel Mackey's Ontological Archive in Fugitive Run" appears in the issue along with work by Adam Mitts, David Grundy, Earl Jackson Jr., Mary Burger, Camille Roy, Kay Gabriel, and Miranda Mellis. You can find the entire journal in SCU's Project Muse here. Robin's article locates Mackey's work within the context of the San Francisco Bay Area writing ecologies and contestations, between the emergence of Language Writing and the parataxis of the New Sentence and the set of performative, narrative, and other practices elaborated by gay and lesbian New Narrative writers. She argues that Mackey improvises a unique and asymptotic course through these and many other territories; in fact, his poetics resists an American romance with place and identity, conjuring instead an ensembled present and possible future (not without 'rub') by way of an ontological archive in "fugitive run." Mackey's texts and we, his readers, are headed out far beyond the borders of the U.S. and Europe, where western categorical fantasies of sovereign subjectivity are left for elsewhere, nowhere, everywhere (Paracritical Hinge 212).

Earlier this month, Katy Bruchmann (Psychology) and alumna Liya LaPierre '20 (Psychology) published a new article in a special issue of Frontiers in Psychology about Social Cognition in the time of COVID-19. Their paper, titled "Moral Foundations Predict Perceptions of Moral Permissibility of COVID-19 Public Health Guideline Violations in United States University Students" suggests that one explanation for partisan differences in attitudes towards COVID-19 prevention behaviors (e.g., masking, social distancing, and getting vaccinated) is that liberals and conservatives in the U.S. endorse different types of morals. For example, liberals are more likely to endorse individualizing morals such as promoting care for others which in part explains why liberals are more likely to wear masks and socially distance than conservatives. But, conservatives are more likely to endorse binding morals such as loyalty to their ingroup which in part explains why conservatives might be less likely to report or call out others for COVID-19 guideline violations than liberals. This research has important implications for understanding the partisan divide on pandemic-related issues in this country.

Ana Maria Pineda (Religious Studies) and Pearl Maria Barros (Religious Studies) are pleased to share the good news that Santa Clara University is an invited participant in the Building Bridges project, led by the Vatican Pontifical Commission for Latin America and Loyola Chicago, which brings together university students from North, Central, and South America. The students will be connecting with one another for four weeks to discuss issues facing the Church and our world, including communion, migration, and care for our planet. We are very excited that two of our students are participating in the historic “Building Bridges: A Synodal Encounter Between Pope Francis and University Students” initiative. The students are:

• Senior Lorena Delgado-Márquez, who is majoring in sociology, religious studies, ethnic studies, and Spanish, and minoring in Latin American studies and women’s and gender studies
• Junior Antonio Amore Rojas, who is majoring in management and environmental studies.

These students will take part in a live-streamed, direct conversation with Pope Francis being held on February 24 at noon Central Time (10 a.m. Pacific Time). Then, on February 24, they will participate in a conversation with Pope Francis to share the fruits of their discussions. It will be translated live in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. To watch the live stream, viewers can register at the website of Loyola University Chicago. We are extremely proud of our students.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar