^{W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz presented a workshop based on their book Do the Work! An Antiracist Activity Book. This event was sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities. Photo by Britt Cain.}

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

What a week – from High Holidays to Bronco Boardwalk to Julie Sullivan’s inauguration, all the way to Grand Reunion! Looking at all the banners, festive lights and tents, it's easy to think fall quarter is just one big party (a GREAT party, I might add), but I know how hard the College community is working. 

In fact, Fall is very much a workhorse academic quarter (well, they all are, I know…), with an especially forward-looking orientation. It is when we launch our tenure track searches, when the campus begins budget planning, students take introductory courses that will prepare them for advanced study later in the year, and we hold open houses to pique the interests of prospective students.

Throughout all of this “advance work,” our brilliant faculty and staff continue the work of the College, teaching our new and returning students, running the campus with their dedicated service, and keeping up their vibrant intellectual and creative activities. As this College Notes shows, so much of your work deeply engages students in fruitful collaboration.

In this new academic year, full of promise and return, I reflect on our single-minded pursuit of achievements – publications, courses taught, grants gained. These are the wondrous gems of academic life; enjoy them, to be sure, but revel in the journey also. Here to convey that sentiment is an excerpt from a poem by the Greek poet, C.P. Cavafy (Ithaka, Edmund Keeley, translation):

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Onward!

Daniel

Highlights

Bachana Lomsadze (Physics) along with undergraduate students Skyler Weight ’23 (Engineering Physics) and Peter Hovland ’23 (Physics) published an article, “Effects of phase accumulation in frequency-comb-based multidimensional coherent spectroscopy” in Physical Review A.

^{Erica Svendahl '23 with her Outstanding Presentation Award for her poster at the International Conference on the Environmental Effects of Nanoparticles and Nanomaterials.}

In August, Korin Wheeler (Chemistry & Biochemistry) and undergraduate researcher Erica Svendahl '23 (Environmental Science, Chemistry) attended the 15th International Conference on the Environmental Effects of Nanoparticles and Nanomaterials (ICEENN 2022) in Montreal, Canada. Korin was a session chair and also gave a talk on emerging methods to monitor biomolecular interactions of nanomaterials. Erica, one of SCU's current Beckman Scholars, presented a poster entitled "Insights into protein corona formation across organisms and environmentally relevant conditions", which is a project in collaboration with the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Erica earned an Outstanding Presentation Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Environmental Science: Nano.

^{Students preparing to perform scenes from Sophocles' Antigone. More than 100 students participated in this collaborative and improvisational work.}

In July, Robin Tremblay-McGaw (English) with Dumaine Williams, Vice President for Student Affairs at Bard College, co-facilitated a week-long workshop "Writing-Based Teaching and Anti-Racist Pedagogies" for teachers from across the country at Bard College's Institute for Writing & Thinking, and in August she was a faculty associate for the Language & Thinking Program at Bard. The latter program is interdisciplinary and was oriented around the question, “What begins with translation?” Through readings, writing, lectures, performances and group work, the program asks students to "reimagine the work of translation as a practice that takes many strange turns: between languages and cultures, but also between genres of art and music, scientific disciplines, political movements, social identities, and even forms of life."

^{The Great Hall at the Old Heidelberg University.}

Dennis Smolarski, S.J. (Mathematics & Computer Science) participated in the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, held at the Heidelberg University in Heidelberg, Germany, Sept 6-9.. He presented a paper that was accepted at the conference based on his sabbatical research, entitled "Performance of an Astrophysical Radiation Hydrodynamics Code under Scalable Vector Extension Optimization."

^{Sonja enjoying tea at Granchester Meadows in Cambridge with members of ReproSoc and the Changing Infertilities Research Group led by Professor Sarah Franklin.}

Sonja Mackenzie (Public Health) published a chapter in Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse: Expanding Reproductive Studies (Victoria Boydell & Katherine Dow, eds), entitled "Bio-Genetics and/at the Border: The Structural Intimacies of LGBTQ Transnational Kinship.” The book presents a dialogue between scholars on different aspects of reproductive technologies. Spanning the sociological study of reproduction, critical race theory, and queer and trans migration studies, Mackenzie’s analysis considers ‘the border’ and its state-driven bio-regulations as a reproductive technology that produces LGBTQ, racial/ethnic and social class inequities through the consolidation of heteronormative, bio-genetic kinship institutions and ideations of family. The paper theorizes ‘structural intimacies’ as a conceptual tool useful for studies of reproduction across the life course. Considering moments of encounter between state institutions with the most intimate components of a person's life and identity - in this case amplified by the bio-politics of the border – this analysis illuminates the social and structural contexts in which reproductive technologies render meaning, as well as produce families. This paper is based on Mackenzie’s sabbatical research while a visiting faculty member with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group and Sociology Department at Cambridge University in the UK.

Tim Myers (English) has a new poem with accompanying photography out in Clerestory Magazine. In addition, Tim was interviewed on writing, music, art, and the artist's life on the "Lit With Lloyd" show from KCAT Media.

Jessie King '25 (Philosophy, Religious Studies), Harrison Bui '23 (Computer Science & Engineering), Trisha Nguyen '23 (Computer Science & Engineering), Andrea Perng '22 (Communication), Jerry Wang '24 (Management Information Systems, Communication), Marielle Arnold '24 (Communication), Noe Serafio '23 (Psychology), Lauren Xie '23 (Web Design and Engineering), Lizzie McCarthy '23 (Communication), Ashley Pace '24 (Philosophy, Communication), and Maddy Javier '23 (Communication) completed a 6-week internship with the SCU Media Lab. Students completed research projects and received feedback from Professors Melissa Brown (Communication) and David Coad (English).
 

Justin Boren (Communication) published an article in Behavioral Sciences, an open-access journal from MDPI, co-authored with Alice Veksler (Christopher Newport University). The article, "Communicatively Restricted Organizational Stress (CROS) on Campus: An Exploratory Investigation of Stress and Support among Predominantly White University Faculty" extends their work on Communicatively Restricted Organizational Stress (CROS), the stress of not being able to communicate about stressors with others at work, by evaluating a population of university faculty members.

David Jeong (Communication) published a chapter titled “Civic engagement in China against misinformation using danmu during the initial COVID-19 outbreak” in The Routledge Handbook of Media Education Futures Post-Pandemic.

David also hosted a data science (Python) workshop with local startup MakinaRocks, attended by Casey Nguyen '23 (Computer Science and Engineering), Harrison Bui '23 (Computer Science and Engineering), Elliot Lee '23 (Computer Science), Trisha Nguyen '23 (Computer Science and Engineering), Saunder Salazar '23 (Mechanical Engineering), Raghav Kapoor '22 (Computer Science and Engineering), and Jerry Wang '24 (Management Information Systems, Communication).

Rohit Chopra (Communication) published an article, "Secularism, Religion, and the State in a Time of Global Crisis: Theoretical Reflections on the Work of Abdullahi An-Na'im" in the latest issue of The Emory International Law Review (36 (4): 2022, pp. 647-657), a festschrift honoring the work of Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim.

The essay describes how critical aspects of An-Na’im’s work speak powerfully to the current historical moment of what Chopra has termed “crisis globalization,” a normative condition characterized by the global rise of authoritarianism, erosion of democracy, and backlash against minorities, as well as by a general sense of existential uncertainty stemming from climate change, terrorism, and the risk of pandemics. Chopra shows how An-Na’im’s theorization and reconceptualization of the relationship between the secular and the religious, and his elaboration of the role of state and society in mediating that relationship, help us think through the resurgences of authoritarianism and religious majoritarianism. An-Naim's work also illuminates a path for countering these trends, as elaborated in his articulation of the necessity and challenge of endowing the relationship of the state and religion, and a corresponding idea of the secular, with cultural legitimacy. The essay also examine these ideas with reference to recent developments in India, the distinct character of whose secularism seems increasingly under threat.

^{Amelia Fuller gave the keynote presentation at Frontiers in Soft Matter Conference in San Diego.}

Amelia Fuller (Chemistry & Biochemistry) was the keynote speaker at the in-person Frontiers in Soft Matter and Macromolecular Networks conference held at the University of San Diego on Friday, September 16. Her audience included physics and chemistry graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs, and professors from across the U.S.  She shared the amazing work she does with Santa Clara University students. Two undergraduate students, Mary Xiang '25 (Public Health Science, Biology) and Elliott Anderson '22 (Chemistry) presented research posters about the experiments they did over the summer in Grace Stokes' (Chemistry & Biochemistry) physical chemistry lab.

This fall, OLLI@SCU will welcome Santa Clara University Adjunct Lecturer Michael Brillman (History), who will teach about the momentous year of 1968. The course was developed at Santa Clara University in 2020 and has become very popular with students. Professor Brillman, an undergraduate favorite, explains his motivations behind teaching the course: "I am interested in this course because it takes us back to a particular time, yet there exist myriad commonalities between 1968 and 2022 in terms of culture wars, political divisions, and competing philosophies of how to live.” He aims to delve into the social, political, and cultural ramifications of 1968, in the United States and elsewhere worldwide.
   
OLLI@SCU will be featuring SCU instructors periodically in the College Notes. The average course ranges from 4 to 10 hours of instruction per quarter. We hope this will inspire you to stay updated on OLLI news and possibly teach a class for our members. To learn more about the joy of teaching adult learners, contact olliatscu@gmail.com.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar