Preview Day - Top: CAS Student Ambassadors, Neuroscience Program, Bottom: Anthropology Department, Political Science Department.

Dear Colleagues,

We had a great Preview Day last Saturday. Many, many thanks for all who participated! Turnout was great. We welcomed 713 admitted students and their guests to campus for a total of 1,676 attendees! We know from experience that students who come to Preview Day are often inspired to commit to SCU, so it’s an important day—thank you to so many who participated and a special thanks to Denise Ho, Katy Korsmeyer, Britt Cain, and the CAS student ambassadors!

Among our many wonderful faculty featured in College Notes, this week I want to highlight Assistant Professor of History, Sonia Gomez, whose work is garnering multiple accolades. First, Sonia has been awarded a research fellowship at the Huntington Library in Pasadena and will spend a good portion of spring 2026 there. And we just learned that her first book, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024) has won the 2024 Organization of American Historians Mary Nickliss Prize for Women's and Gender History. Bravo, Sonia!

For this week’s poem, I offer you a piece published in 1998 by the poet, author and sustainable agriculture activist, Wendell Berry.

Wishing you a lovely day of reflection, prayer or rest on this Good Friday,

Daniel

CAS JEDI Council Call for Applications

The CAS JEDI Council is looking for at least two new members, one faculty and one staff.

The CAS JEDI Council advises the dean on policies and issues related to Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Past projects include:

• Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Program
• Faculty Cluster Hiring in Race and Social Inequality
• Diversifying the Core Curriculum
• Advocating for HSI status for the University
• Creating opportunities for staff equity-oriented leadership development

To be eligible, members should have demonstrated excellence in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion work at the organizational level. The work of this committee must be strategic and efficient so prior depth of knowledge is required.

For faculty, evidence of the level of required expertise would include leading equity committees and/or major equity initiatives at the college/university. This may also include multiple publications or creative work on issues of equity and justice, and/or leadership in anti-racist, feminist and/or other inclusive pedagogies.

For staff, evidence would include leadership and/or participation in DEI committees and initiatives at the department/college/university level or externally.

Continuing members of the JEDI Council in 2025-26 will be Cory Gong, Maggie Hunter, Sharmila Lodhia, Amy Randall, Kai Harris and Anna Sampaio.

If you are interested or would like to nominate a colleague for a three-year term, please fill out the application form by April 25.

Please feel free to contact Maggie Hunter with any questions you have.

Highlights

Sonia Gomez's (History) book, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America, has won the 2025 Organization of American Historians Mary Nickliss Prize for Women's and/or Gender History. The prize is given annually to the most original book in women's and/or gender history.

In The Abusable Past, the digital platform for the Radical History Review, Sonia reflects on the similarities between Luigi Mangione and Giuseppe Zangara—the man who attempted to assassinate FDR during the Great Depression—and the long, but almost forgotten, history of Italian American radicalism.

Jeff Steele (Philosophy) presented his paper "Anselm's Boethian Account of Individuating Persons: Human and Divine" at The Eighth Saint Anselm Conference: Saint Anselm and the Teaching of Nicaea on April 4. Jeff argues that Boethius offers at least three distinguishable accounts of individuation—two based upon accidents, and one constructed on the notion of an unsharable form. In the case of divine persons, however, Boethius appeals to none of these accounts of individuation, utilizing instead the notion of ‘relations’ to account for Trinitarian individuality. Anselm, however, develops and applies Boethius’ formal account of individuation, extending it not only to individuating human persons, as Boethius used it, but divine persons as well. In doing so, on the one hand, Anselm provides a uniform account of individuation applicable to all persons—whether human or divine. Yet on the other hand, Anselm’s uniform account of individuation may in fact be the inspiration for Roscelin of Compiègne’s charge that Anselm also held his heretical view of the Trinity: that either there are three gods—like three men or angels—or the Father and Spirit became incarnate along with the Son. Scholars have long puzzled about which aspect of Anselm’s thought might have led Roscelin to believe that Anselm was in his camp. Jeff suggests that Anselm’s uniform account of individuation rests on a similarity between human and divine persons and so may be the impetus for Roscelin’s claim about Anselm.

Public Health students and faculty at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

SCU’s Department of Public Health had a strong presence at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine held in San Francisco, California, from March 26-29. Congratulations to our outstanding seniors for presenting their research findings, conducted in collaboration with their Public Health faculty mentors! Amazing work!

Students: Saron Asfaw ’25 (Public Health Science), Hydeia Wysinger ’25 (Psychology, Public Health Science), Roberto Mercado ’25 (Public Health Science), Cecelia Brown ’25 (Public Health Science), Jamie Son ’25 (Public Health Science), Bianca Duarte ’25 (Psychology, Public Health Science), Alexa Andrews ’25 (Biology, Public Health Science), Jill Morimoto ’25 (Public Health Science), Angela Dimaano ’25 (Public Health Science). Not pictured: Brianna McDaniel ’25 (Public Health Science) and Darryllyn Do ’25 (Public Health Science).

Faculty Mentors: Kat Saxton, Sonja McKenzie, Alice Villatoro, Vanessa Errisuriz, and Micah Lattanner.

Evelyn Ferraro (Modern Languages and Literatures) and Agustin Pace ’25 (Italian Studies, Economics) presented “Italian Studies Reimagined: Integrating Curriculum, Research, and Community Engagement” at the biennial conference of The California Interdisciplinary Consortium for Italian Studies at UC Berkeley on March 1. Their talk introduced innovative initiatives in Italian Studies at SCU that prepare students to apply linguistic and cultural expertise in real-world contexts. Agustin shared how his journey began in Italian 1 and evolved through coursework, study abroad in Milan, internships in Italy and the Bay Area (supported by Vari Italian Studies Fellowships), and a faculty-mentored Provost Research Fellowship on 1930s fascist and antifascist media. He has pursued academic and experiential opportunities that organically connect classroom learning with community engagement and service. Ferraro highlighted the role of digital humanities in connecting research and teaching in ways that actively involve students in the production of knowledge, as explored in her recent article “Curriculum, Archives, and The Digital Turn: The Italian American Experience and the Transnational Approach to Community-Based Learning” that was recently published in Italian American Review 14.2 (2024).

These initiatives show that languages and cultural studies open doors to diverse opportunities, empowering students as global thinkers and cultural mediators.

Image: Evelyn Ferraro and Agustin Pace at UC Berkeley.

Tyler van Wulven (Philosophy) presented his paper, "Hegel, Baseball, and the Nature of Reality" at the Metaphysical Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia (March 20-22). The paper challenges two contemporary social pathologies—an impoverished notion of individualism, and a scientific optimism that exalts efficiency above all else—both of which capture an aspect of reality without recognizing its most salient feature. The paper argues that the most important feature of reality is the interplay between self-conscious subjects and a collective historical subject, i.e. a social and institutional like-mindedness, which Hegel refers to as "spirit," and that the most important feature of reality is that it is fundamentally open. Reality as open means that human beings both inherit and contribute to their spiritual reality such that it is always a result of self-conscious, collective human action, and thus always subject to reflection and revision. To defend this thesis and combat the two pathologies, the paper makes use of an analogy to baseball. In short, while baseball is played by individuals, there are no players without the game, the team, the institution, the collective achievement that is baseball, all of which precede and succeed any individual player. And while statistics provide insight into the inner workings of the game, data or efficiency is always secondary to the version of baseball that we want to watch, just as no state of affairs, no political era, is beyond reflection and revision.

Tom Plante (Psychology) gave an invited continuing education half-day workshop at the Idaho Psychological Association's annual convention on April 4, entitled, "Spirituality Informed Therapy (SIT): Wisdom and Evidence Based Strategies that Work."

Abstract: The purpose of this presentation is to offer spiritual and religious tools common among the major spiritual and religious traditions (with highlights from Jesuit/Ignatian spirituality in particular) that can be used by contemporary psychologists regardless of their spiritual or religious affiliation (or lack of) to enhance their professional services. Examples include the benefits of meditation, charitable works, ethical values, and approaching others with compassion. Examples of integrated services, ethical issues, new research, and best practices will be discussed.

Simone Billings (English) has been awarded one of the nine spots allocated for members of Sigma Tau Delta (the International English Honor Society) for their inaugural year of a partnership with Girton College, Cambridge University, UK, for the Girton Lifelong Learning Summer Program. She is humbled and thrilled once again to be a student and to discuss literature and to learn about the architecture and art of Cambridge University in the country of her intellectual home. For two weeks, she will be a student and live in student housing at the first Cambridge College to admit women and, in fact, at a college founded by a woman. Originally, Sigma Tau Delta had planned to offer two guaranteed slots for attending the program, one for a faculty sponsor (even a former one like Simone—she checked) and the other for a student alumnus/a, and planned to award each person a partial scholarship toward the cost of either the one-week or the two-week programme. But there were so many applications and such interest that Sigma Tau Delta contacted Girton College to ask about the possibility of more spots, and they were given nine! Sigma Tau Delta still had only two partial scholarships to provide, and Simone is lucky enough to have received the one for the faculty member!

Image: Simone Billings teaching an SCU class. Photo by Chuck Barry

Tripp Strawbridge (Modern Languages and Literatures) recently presented his research at the annual conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Denver, Colorado. The presentation, titled "Conversations abroad: The effect of interlocutor profile and relationship quality on interaction in naturalistic settings," described the language learning experience of university students spending a semester studying abroad in Spain. The study analyzed 13 hours of conversational recordings made by students on their smartphones, and showed how students' interactions in Spanish differed according to who they were in conversation with. For example, students spoke for far less time, per 15-minute conversation segment, when interacting with host family members, compared to when they spoke with American peers from their program. However, students received much more corrective feedback when speaking with host family members and native Spanish speaker peers, compared to when they spoke with American peers. The results of the study highlight the unique characteristics of different interaction environments in study abroad, and the respective contributions of each to the language learning process.

Anna Cooper (Art History), Nicole Clarke (Art History, Child Studies), Andrea Hu (Art History, French and Francophone Studies), Kelsey Popeo (Art History), Ingrid Kindel (Art History, Studio Art), Riva Mihklin (Economics).

Art History students from the Class of '25 have been given a singular opportunity for their capstone seminar project: curate an exhibition at the de Saisset Museum featuring a European Renaissance painting. The exhibition "The Tax Collectors: 500 Years and Counting ..." focuses on the history and meaning of a 16th-century Flemish oil painting. The painting and the exhibition will be open to the public throughout the spring quarter at the de Saisset Museum. Every aspect of this exhibition is the result of their collaborative efforts.

In preparation for the opening, the student curators held a panel discussion about their experiences. During this forum, they shared just some of their findings, including the early history of the painting in Antwerp to its transport from Dresden, Germany to the U.S. on the eve of WWII.

Micah Lattanner (Public Health) published the article, "State of the Science of Structural Stigma and LGBTQ+ Health: Meta-Analytic Evidence, Research Gaps, and Future Directions" in the 2025 issue of Annual Review of Public Health.

Abstract: While public health practitioners and scholars have long theorized that structural forms of stigma shape the health of disadvantaged groups, they have frequently bemoaned the lack of research on this topic. A unique opportunity to address this gap occurred in the past two decades, with the advent of dramatic changes in laws, social attitudes, and other structural manifestations of stigma surrounding LGBTQ+ individuals. In a review of this literature, we conducted a meta-analysis of LGBTQ+ structural stigma and health, finding an effect size comparable to several other well-established macrolevel risk factors for poor health (e.g., income inequality, racial residential segregation, neighborhood socioeconomic status). In addition, we enumerated a range of established methodological strategies that studies have used to strengthen inferences; these strategies include documenting result specificity (i.e., structural stigma is unrelated to the health of cisgender heterosexuals) and triangulating evidence across multiple methods, measures, and health outcomes. We offer suggestions for future research to advance this expanding field and discuss implications for public health interventions and policies to reduce LGBTQ+ health disparities.

In his course, Matthew Harrigan (Political Science) surveys issues at the intersections of sports and politics in the United States. Topics include the role of sports in society, discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality, nationalism, globalization, and protest, and antitrust and labor issues in college and professional sports. The core purpose of this course is to see the political in something we normally view as recreational and to understand the importance that sports have in both shaping and reflecting the ways we view the roles of individuals, groups, and government in our society.

OLLI@SCU will be featuring notable instructors periodically in the College Notes. The average course ranges from 4-10 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

Got IT Questions or Issues?

Stop by the virtual IT drop-in sessions with Charles Deleon! These sessions are designed to provide faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences a friendly and casual setting for addressing general IT questions and concerns. Feel free to drop in and out at any time during the scheduled session, whether you have a quick question, need assistance with something and don't know where to start, or simply want to learn more about our IT resources.

Biweekly. Next session: Friday, April 25, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Zoom link