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| May 17, 2024 | Submit a Note |
 Santa Clara University ceramic sculpture students recently exhibited their artwork at the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts in Davis, California. The conference featured 30 student exhibitions by university and college students as well as demonstrations, talks, and exhibits by professional artists. Image: Charlie DiNapoli '24 (Studio Art) stands next to his sculpture titled "Be home by 5." Read more about Charlie.
At this point, we are busy preparing for the end of year, as I’m sure you all are as well! In addition to commencement, we in the Dean’s Office are planning for Transfer Admit Day on May 31 and our first in-person New Student Orientation since 2019, which will take place in July. I wanted to give a big shoutout to all of our colleagues and students who have been involved in this quarter’s mainstage production of 42nd Street, which opens next week. This is a big production for the department! It taps into all the muscles and tools of the performing arts here at Santa Clara. It’s got dancing, singing, and acting, galore! Not to mention a large cast—many of whom are majoring in disciplines outside of the performing arts. A number of cast members also joined the department on the spring break trip to New York City. What a cool experience for them to visit 42nd Street in New York…and then perform the musical that carries the famous name! Sincerely, Daniel Highlights
SCU’s Environmental Justice and Common Good Initiative (EJ & CGI) Food & Climate Justice Program lead Chris Bacon (Environmental Studies and Sciences) collaborated with Veggielution to develop a $217,000 project funded by the County of Santa Clara. The project aims to create a more diverse, equitable, and resilient regional food economy, and foster food justice through education and action to address inequities in East San Jose. As the key partner in this project, Chris will work with student researchers, EJ & CGI’s research coordinator, and Veggielution staff to conduct a feasibility study and policy analysis about the potential to link small-scale food entrepreneurs to values-based purchasing efforts, such as the Good Food Purchasing Program, which is partnering with Santa Clara County Hospitals to offer more nutritions, lower-carbon, and sustainable meals. The SCU team will also co-produce an agroecology, urban agriculture, and food policy summer short-course and help design a food systems dashboard with collaboration from C.J. Gabbe (Environmental Studies and Sciences). To collect the data student researchers will help conduct interviews, surveys, and focus groups as well as compile, analyze, and display demographic and food systems data. Veggielution recently hired SCU food justice lab alumnus, Antonio Amore Rojas '23 (Environmental Studies, Management), to work as the cooperative manager for a new enterprise they will be developing as part of this project.
Lisa Kealhofer (Anthropology, Environmental Studies and Sciences) attended the Society for American Archaeology conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is co-author on the paper “Place-Making, Fire, and the Praxis of Becoming Angkor,” presented in part by Mitch Hendrickson in a session trying to re-envision the way ancient large-scale societies are understood. The larger multi-authored paper brings together an international team of archaeologists working at different Angkor period sites on the dynamics of power, ideology, and economy across the Angkorian Empire. This work is part of a larger collaborative project on which Kealhofer is co-PI, Kings of the World: the Dynamics of Khmer Centralization 900-1500 CE funded by the Australian Research Council, which is using stoneware ceramic production as one proxy for studying the domestic Angkorian economy.
Rohit Chopra (Communication) signed a contract for his book manuscript, A Global Cultural History of Disability, with Westland Books, India, with a US and/or UK based edition to be published simultaneously. An updated edition of Rohit's 2019 book, The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media, with additional material based on political developments and new media use in India over the last few years, is planned for publication in late 2024 or early 2025. Rohit also presented his research at two roundtable conferences in recent weeks. He shared his presentation, “Hindu Nationalism as Global Political and Cultural Identity: Hard and Soft Hindu Power in Indian Foreign Policy in the Modi Era,” on February 27, 2024, at a panel at the Geopolitics of Religion & Culture in Asia conference, Singapore, jointly organized by the National University of Singapore, Georgetown University, and the United States Institute of Peace, February 26-27, 2024. During the visit, Rohit also met with scholars from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University. Rohit was an invited speaker for a panel, “Religious Nationalism and Media,” at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, on April 26, 2024. He also delivered a lecture, “Hindu Nationalism and Media Globalization’” to Prof. Lisa McLaughlin’s upper-division “Media Globalization” class at Miami University on April 25.
Theatre and Dance professors Aldo Billingslea and Kimberly Mohne Hill hosted a weekend Presentation Skills workshop with exonerated folks from across the country. Incorporating Theatre training for the purpose of developing public speaking skills, these workshops help support speakers as they take their incredible stories to multiple venues – including media interviews, motivational speaking engagements, and legislative advocacy presentations. Aldo and Kim began these workshops through the Northern California Innocence Project in 2012 and, as the Speakers Bureau has grown, the newly formed Pruno Fund took over the management and facilitation of these events. This year’s speakers came from as far away as Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Southern California. Student Theatre artist-scholars Christian Barnard '26 (Political Science, Theatre Arts), Kennedy Dawson '25 (Theatre Arts), Kristin Hill '25 (Theatre Arts, Communication), Alexander Jordan '25 (Philosophy, Theatre Arts), and Ariana Chavez-Magana '24 (Psychology, Child Studies, Theatre Arts) joined the cohort to demonstrate and help speakers engage in the exercises. The culminating event of the Workshop was the speakers sharing their individual stories and receiving personal coaching and feedback.
Students and faculty from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry traveled north to the University of San Francisco on Saturday, April 27 to attend the annual American Chemical Society Northern California Undergraduate Research Symposium (NCURS). The event this year attracted 160 students and faculty from 12 Universities in the region. SCU students gave 14 oral and poster presentations of their work in the laboratories of Linda Brunauer, Steven Suljak, Benjamin Stokes, Paul Abbyad, Meaghan Deegan, Grace Stokes, and Amelia Fuller.
Students working in research labs in the Psychology Department presented at the 105th Western Psychological Association annual conference in San Francisco, April 24-28. They are: Meghan Abate ’25 (Neuroscience), Emma Braswell ’24 (Psychology), Chelsea Ebisuya ’24 (Psychology), Mackenzie Fredericks ’25 (Neuroscience), Hannah Lucas Giarrusso ’24 (Psychology, Spanish, Child Studies), Tlakaelel Gonzalez ’24 (Psychology), Naomi Hernandez ’26 (Psychology, Philosophy), Srita Kothuri ’25 (Neuroscience), Tiffany Lam ’24 (Psychology, Child Studies), Liam Llerena ’24 (Psychology), Tatyana Lum ’24 (Biology, Neuroscience), Julia Poremba ’24 (Psychology), Emily Rios ’24 (Biology, Neuroscience), Jovanna Solomon ’24 (Neuroscience, Psychology), Lucas Tan ’24 (Psychology), Xijing Wang ’25 (Computer Science), Dani Yabut ’24 (Psychology, Child Studies), and Xiuming Zhang ’25 (Psychology). Their Psychology faculty mentors are Jui Bhagwat, Katy Bruchmann, Lang Chen, Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Patti Simone, Tim Urdan, and Lisa Whitfield. Congratulations to these amazing students!
Gordon Young (Communication) recently covered the demise of the long-running student newspaper at the University of Michigan-Flint for East Village Magazine. He followed up with another story on the AI content farm that snatched the student paper's domain name and began operating a new publication that misrepresents its ties to the university and repurposes the work of other media outlets without attribution. He discussed the proliferation of these shadowy publications and the implications for legitimate journalism on Michigan Public, the NPR affiliate at the University of Michigan.
Francisco Jiménez (Modern Languages and Literatures, Emeritus) received the 2024 Icon Award from the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival. At the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors meeting on March 16, he was invited to accept the Proclamation of National Farmworker Awareness Week and a Commendation dedicated in his honor for his "dedication to telling the inspiring story of migrant workers and their families." In addition, as part of its 40th anniversary celebration, Teatro Vision, in collaboration with SCU●Presents Arts for Social Justice, brought two of his books, La Mariposa and Breaking Through to the stage as a bilingual youth production at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San José, April 11-14.
Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library invited Andrea Pappas (Art and Art History) to give the inaugural lecture in their new series, "Research@Winterthur." Her talk was on May 2. The series showcases scholarship by former Research Fellows (Pappas held an NEH-funded fellowship there in 2015). Winterthur's collection of over 90,000 objects along with its library's holdings in rare books and manuscripts make it the premier destination for research in American decorative arts. Pappas discussed the impact that the combined museum and library's unique research environment had on the making of her recent book, Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770. "The book was born here," she noted in her talk; "at Winterthur I could recursively open or revisit lines of investigation based on my work with the objects and the library, going back and forth between them. For an art historian, this is ideal." Her talk also included highlights from her book, exploring specific features of women's knowledge of nature, particularly as manifested in their needlework images of garden plants and trees, in the context of colonist-originated environmental change, concerns around food security, and the emerging sciences of botany, entomology, and agronomy.
Erin Bradfield (Philosophy) gave a talk entitled, “‘Maybe I’m Sick, But I Want to See That Again’: David Lynch, Negative Aesthetics, and Community” as an invited presentation for the Philosophy Department and wider university community at Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN) on May 10. In this work, she explores two main lines of inquiry. The first regards negative aesthetics, and specifically, aesthetic evaluation regarding ugliness and disgust. While experiences and responses involving disgust have historically been treated as “aesthetically discountable,” Bradfield argues from a Kantian standpoint that disgust’s aversive-attractive quality can actually be productive with respect to community formation. The second regards David Lynch and the aesthetic communities that his work has inspired. With special attention to the various incarnations of Twin Peaks, she argues that his oeuvre has generated a dual response in the form of a popular cult and an isolationist cult based in negative aesthetics. As a coda, Bradfield considers the community spurred by the David Lynch Weather Report.
Andrew Ishak (Communication) has published Episode 1 of Abouna, a film series about a young priest attempting to make positive change in a traditional church. Abouna ("our father" in Arabic) is based on interviews with a number of clergy members in the Coptic Orthodox (Egyptian Christian) church, as well as their wives, and other congregants. The story explores the intersection of culture and religiosity, as well as the role of clergy in the Coptic community. The online premiere of Abouna comes after a number of in person screenings, including at the Davis Film Festival, Riverside International Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, and the Mosaic World Film Festival at the Canadian Museum of Immigration. Andrew also screened the film at theaters and churches in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, DC, and Orange County, among other locations. This is an extension of Andrew's work on organizational culture and communication, and he would be happy to discuss the project and its themes anytime. Watch Episode 1 on YouTube.
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.
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Collaborative Innovative for Food Justice Panel - April 10, 2024 to Kick-off the project.
Pruno Fund Exoneree Speakers Bureau Workshop 2024.
Chemistry students and faculty pose for a group photo following a wonderful day of scientific presentations on the University of San Francisco campus.
Seniors Dani Yabut (left) and Tiffany Lam (right) from the Early Cognitive Development Lab, led by Jui Bhagwat (center).
Santa Clara Board of Supervisor's Commendation for Francisco Jiménez.
Andrew (center) meets members and clergy of the Coptic church in Staten Island, New York in April 2024.
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