Dear College Faculty and Staff,

I hope you are all enjoying the sunshine after the past few weeks of rain that we’ve had!

We are in a big season of interviews at the moment with provost candidates visiting campus and the tenure track and lecturer searches taking place in the College. I’ve had lots of meetings with candidates this week and have more on the schedule in the upcoming weeks. This year, we are hiring 13 tenure track faculty and 2 lecturers across 10 departments, including Anthropology, English, Environmental Studies and Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science, Public Health, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, and Theatre and Dance.

I will meet with about 40 candidates in widely varying fields that represent a great cross section of the College. It’s awe-inspiring to interact with so many talented people…who want to be your colleagues! Indeed, I hear from so many of them that, our terrific campus notwithstanding, it’s the warm welcome from their (possible) future colleagues that makes the biggest, most positive impression.

We also have another cluster hire in Race, Social Justice, and Inequality that we are particularly excited about. Faculty from English (two positions), Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, and Religious Studies will make up this second cluster as we look to build upon the hires we made last year.

Thank you all for bringing such talented new scholars and artists to campus; what an auspicious way to start the new calendar year!

Sincerely,

Daniel

Highlights

Abel Cruz (Modern Languages & Literatures) published an article entitled "Linguistic factors modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech" in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. The paper studies how Spanish–English bilingual speakers alternate their two languages in a bilingual context. More specifically, the study examines a particular linguistic property of the two languages involved in language mixing (i.e., the fact that Spanish words, but not English words, are sorted out into masculine and feminine gender categories). The results reveal that both linguistic and language community norms determine how speakers combine two words from separate languages into a mixed linguistic unit.

Professor Emeritus Robert (Bob) Senkewicz (History) will be starting the OLLI@SCU Winter quarter off with two courses on the roots of contemporary societal, political, and economic issues in the United States from the 1960s to the present. A long time OLLI@SCU instructor, these will be his 21st and 22nd courses for our program. The first class will consider inclusion and exclusion in the U.S., while the second class will discuss consensus, division, and societal polarization.
   
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.

Eugene R. Schlesinger (Religious Studies) published "Opus Dei, Opus Hominum: The Trinity, the Four-Point Hypothesis, and the Eucharist" in the Irish Theological Quarterly.
   
This is the second in a trio of exploratory articles aimed at refining the conceptual framework for a book project currently in progress.

Maggie Hunter (Sociology, Dean's Office) just published a chapter titled, "Educational Ecosystems for Equity" in the new Resource Handbook for Academic Deans: The Essential Guide for College and University Leaders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). Her chapter outlines how the changing national landscape of higher education has led to an increasing need for universities to partner with educational institutions in their communities. She also describes several strategies for creating mutually beneficial partnerships. Her chapter is based on her work leading collaborations between K-12 public school districts, community colleges and four-year universities in California.

Jesica S. Fernández (Ethnic Studies) participated in the "Decolonial Approaches to the Psychological Study of Social Issues" webinar series, hosted by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) Webinar Series, and organized by the Readsura Decolonial Editorial Collective. The webinar series features a selection of 15 featured presenters (organized into 5 installments) based on contributions to two special issues of the Journal of Social Issues (JSI) devoted to decolonial perspectives in/on psychology. The webinar recording can be viewed on YouTube. The collection of articles featured in the JSI special issue are accessible via the journal's online library.
Jesica's co-authored paper is the following: Silva, J.M., Fernández, J.S., Nguyen, A. (2022). “And now we resist”: Three testimonios on the importance of decoloniality within psychology. Journal of Social Issues, 78: 388– 412.

Lindsay Halladay (Psychology, Neuroscience) published an invited manuscript in the journal Neuropharmacology, "Lasting impact of postnatal maternal separation on the developing BNST: Lifelong socioemotional consequences." One of the main projects in the Halladay Lab is determining how exposure to early life stressors alters neural development to incite lifelong behavioral and emotional deficits. Thus far, the Halladay Lab has identified a key neural substrate for some of the social behavior deficits observed following inadequate maternal care during the postnatal period, which has implications for individuals afflicted with social behavior disorders stemming from childhood neglect. This publication provides a comprehensive look at how inadequate care during early development may interrupt maturation of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, a neural hub that modulates anxiety, reward, and social behavior, in part through direct connections with the body's stress response system, the HPA axis.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar