Harry Odamtten (History) and Dean Daniel Press celebrate the new Black Justice Studies Collaborative for which Harry will serve as inaugural director.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

We kicked off this week with an event celebrating the launch of the Black Justice Studies Collaborative. It was really well attended with faculty, staff and students from the College, Law School and School of Engineering. We had inspiring remarks from Aldo Billingslea, Maggie Hunter, Daniel Summerhill, Harry Odamtten and Law School Dean Michael Kaufman. Big thanks go out to Maggie Hunter who has been instrumental in getting this new initiative off the ground, and to Noreen Golden for making sure the launch was festive with good treats!

We also hosted another successful DeNardo Lectureship this week, moderated by Associate Professor Erick Ramirez (Philosophy). Dr. Nita A. Farahany’s talk, The Battle for Your Brain, based off her book of the same title, focused on an area of neuroscience tech and artificial intelligence that we haven’t really been talking about on campus—that of technology that can interpret brain signals! This lecture was provocative and immediate in the way DeNardo lectures usually are. It is striking how each lecture conveys the immediacy of the topic, whether it’s focused around medicine, technology, and / or big ethical issues. Dr. Farahany challenged the audiences' thinking on the application and impact of AI and new neurotechnologies. And of course, many thanks to Marie Brancati, here in the Dean’s Office, for another great DeNardo Scholars and Lecture week!

Sincerely,

Daniel

DEI Update

Image credit: John Hain from Pixabay.

There is so much amazing work happening across the College and University to make SCU a more equitable and diverse place.

• The HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution) Task Force is sharing this slide deck with all members of the SCU community. As you learn more about the initiative, please share your feedback with Maggie Hunter who serves on the Task Force.
• Lots of work is happening with the $22,000 grant from the Inclusive Excellence Division: the Anthropology Department is hiring external research mentors for its junior faculty, the Department of Public Health is paying for DEI training for its peer educators, and there will be opportunities for equity leadership training for staff in the College, among many other projects. Email Maggie Hunter with your funding requests.
• The women and nonbinary faculty of color network met last month for a book club discussion of Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color by Lorgia García Peña. It is a short read. Check it out and learn more about how many women of color experience the academy.
• It is faculty hiring season again. Check out the new book Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It. It is a sociological study about racial dynamics in the workplace. Check out Chapter 1 which describes the experience of a Black university professor in a mostly white department.
• Stay tuned for a new and more detailed DEI webpage on the CAS main website highlighting all of the great equity work happening across the College.

Highlights

Tom Plante (Psychology) published an invited book review in Politics, Religion, & Ideology: "Work is religion and religion is work in Silicon Valley," a review of Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley by Carolyn Chen.

Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley is an important book that addresses critical societal issues of our time. Professor Carolyn Chen shines a much needed spotlight on the real life of Silicon Valley workers highlighting both the advantages and disadvantages to signing onto the Valley’s way of living, working, and being. She offers a thoughtful deep dive, reflection, and an enlightened view written in a compelling, engaging, and readable manner with memorable stories of how people find themselves letting work become religion and religion becoming work. Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley should be required reading for anyone working and living in Silicon Valley and for those who are envious of the Silicon Valley way.

A little art and some words to live by found in Philadelphia.

Tim Urdan (Psychology/Child Studies) traveled to Philadelphia last month to participate in the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. While there he presented an interactive poster and "Lightening e-TED-Talk" about his recent research examining the relationship between teachers' identities and teacher-student relationships in Germany and Greece. He also served as a discussant in a symposium on the relationship between identity and motivation and watched his co-author (a Ph.D. student from Germany named Johanna Ott) deliver her first conference paper ever! She was nervous but got through it well.

Matthew Newsom Kerr giving his talk, "Faces from the Past: Smallpox, Vaccination, and Visualizing Disappearance."

On April 24, SCU History students presented History Day from noon until 5 PM. The afternoon included a series of short lectures from History faculty, Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, Marwan Hanania, Amy Randall, Matthew Newsom Kerr, Naomi Andrews, and Barbara Molony, on a range of topics.

Student leadership team for the SPS Zone 18 Conference hosted by SCU Physics on April 19-20, 2024. (L-R): Ivar Rydstrom '24 (Engineering Physics), Leo Illing '25 (Physics, Mathematics), Isa Camacho '26 (Physics), Renee Chapla '26 (Engineering Physics), Andrew Cates '26 (Physics).

The SCU Society of Physics Students (SPS) chapter hosted the annual Zone 18 SPS meeting on April 19-20, 2024 for more than 45 registered participants and eight guest speakers and panel members. Highlights included an evening talk given by Dr. Geoff Fox, co-sponsor of the Geoff and Josie Fox Summer Research Fellowship Program at SCU, and presentations by recent SCU Physics graduates Grace Chesmore '17 (Physics), Rob Stallman '21 (Engineering Physics) and Weston Tierney '22 (Physics).

Francisco Jiménez's (Modern Languages and Literatures, emeritus) book, The Circuit Graphic Novel, published by HarperCollins in 2024, was chosen by the Junior Library Guild as a Golden Standard Book Selection and has received Starred Reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. In addition, "En Solidaridad", a chapter from his book, Más allá de mí, is included in the 7th edition of"¡Arriba!: comunicación y cultura" by Zayas-Bazán, Bacon. New York: Lengro Learning, 2024.

Art History minor Riva Mikhlin ’25 (Economics) presented her paper “Papal Politics and the Portrait of a Samurai: Hasekura Tsunenaga in Rome” at the Bay Area Undergraduate Art History Symposium. Riva argued that, by presenting the samurai in the European visual language of power while also including identifiably Japanese elements, the portrait appears familiar enough to be intelligible to a European audience, and foreign enough to impress on the viewer the far reach of the Pope’s authority. The symposium was held at the University of San Francisco (USF). Riva was joined by representatives from USF, San Jose and Sonoma State Universities, Stanford University, Saint Mary’s College, University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts.

Tim Myers (English) has four visual artpieces in the recent edition of Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of the Greater Southwest from the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at the University of New Mexico. His work starts on page 175.

Image: "Desert Corral" by Tim J. Myers.

tUrn headliner speakers & performers graced the tenth tUrn Climate Crisis Awareness & Action week stage at Santa Clara University and around the world April 22-26 and deserve our applause!

Indigenous Keynote speaker Shannon Rivers, speakers Pedro Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Mohan Gurunathan, Amos White, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (Modern Languages and Literatures), Gary White, Dana Nuccitelli, Maria Judnick (English, Center for Sustainability), Michael Mascarenhas, poets Daniel B. Summerhill (English), Ashia Ajani, and James Cagney, musicians/callers Kelsey Hartman, Ben Jackson, and Will Wheeler, our partners at Environmental Protection Trainings and Development Organization (EPTDO) in Afghanistan, 18 readers of the 6-hour marathon presentation of Laudato Si' by Pope Francis, ten student environmental and cultural clubs, nine Bay Area climate organizations, seven cast members of Shōshitsu by playwright Emma Hokoda '20 (Environmental Studies), directed by Brian Thorstenson and Kristin Kusanovich (Theatre and Dance), and multiple schools and universities all took part.

Big thanks to the faculty and staff who created curricular engagements with the project and the 15-person tUrn student and alum crew who served in a multitude of capacities, from planning the week's immersive interdisciplinary, intercultural and international events, to managing all the moving parts of this 1000+ person conference.

Special thanks to artist Maliha Abidi who gave us permission to use her rendition of Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate for the tUrn¹⁰ flier.

Image: Painting of Vanessa Nakate holding sign saying "We cannot eat Coal. We cannot drink Oil." for tUrn climate action week.

At the Yale event. Muzaffar Alam (center back); Daniel Morgan is sitting directly in front of him.

Daniel Morgan (Religious Studies) participated in a conference at Yale held to honor the great (and now-retiring) historian of Mughal India, Muzaffar Alam (the conference was titled “Muzaffar Alam & The New Mughal Historiography”). Daniel’s paper, entitled “The Rohillas, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of Najīb al‑Dawla’s Dispensation” uses completely unstudied Persian-language correspondence from the 1750s-1770s to understand the dynamics of religious leadership at a time when the Mughal Empire was visibly fragmenting. It shows how the major Naqshbandi Sufis of Delhi, including those who were personally close to the Mughal Emperors, navigated this treacherous period by engaging with various Indo-Afghan rulers who were then forming new principalities in the former imperial heartlands.

Omar Davila Jr. (Child Studies) presented a paper entitled, "Fighting for Crumbs: Access and Exclusion at Elite High Schools in the US," at the 2024 American Educational Research Association Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This research examines recent efforts to move away from "merit-based admission" at Lowell High School and Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—two of the highest-ranking schools in the country. Using the lenses of critical discourse analysis and critical studies of race, Davila examines the racial tensions between Asian American families on one end and Black and Latinx families on the other.

Installation of photo exhibition.

Takeshi Moro (Art and Art History) opened his solo exhibition at Shionoe Museum of Art, Takamatsu, Japan.

茂呂毅 写真展 Benign Neglect　－ジャパニーズ　アメリカン　ボンサイー　features seventy bonsai photographs that were cultivated by Issei (first generation) and Kibei (born in the U.S., educated in Japan, and later returned to the U.S.) Japanese Americans. These bonsai were started after the Japanese Americans returned from WWII American concentration camps. Some of the plants were likely started from seeds.

Dennis Makishima, a bonsai and aesthetic pruning master, inherited the bonsai after the initial creators of the bonsai passed away. He took care of them for over thirty years, trying to honor the style envisioned by the original practitioners. In 2022, Dennis retired and donated his entire bonsai collection. The bonsai have likely dispersed all over the state and country, flourishing, just like so many other aspects of Japanese American culture. Moro photographed the bonsai before they dispersed and published a book to go along with the exhibition.

Marwan D. Hanania (History) is teaching on the recent resurgence of the conflict in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The conflict in Israel has been a point of contention around the world, with protesters representing both sides lining the streets to voice their opinions. Given the incorrect information that is floating on the internet, the general public is left wondering what is true and what is a myth. Marwan D. Hanania will help to explain modern Israeli and Palestinian history and present key events that define Arab-Jewish relations.

OLLI@SCU will be featuring notable 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. OLLI instructors are compensated for their time and knowledge; to learn more about the joy of teaching adult learners, contact olli@scu.edu.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar