Orientation has begun! The College of Arts and Sciences Student Engagement Team, led by Assistant Dean Denise Ho, has started welcoming and advising the Class of 2029!  Top: Calvin Miller with the summer peer advisors. Bottom: Departments at the Resource Fair.

Dear Colleagues,

I hope you are enjoying a wonderful summer. During this much-needed break between academic years, College Notes has shifted to a monthly rather than biweekly cadence. Our next issue will be released on Aug. 8.

Last spring the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD) asked me to reflect on the work of a dean and the life of the mind. Alongside colleagues from three other universities—Heidi Bostic, dean of the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University; Donna LaVoie, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Louis University; and Brad Elliott Stone, associate dean of Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University—I shared my thoughts in the May issue of the ACAD newsletter. Perhaps not surprisingly, our perspectives vary as do our strategies for nourishing our scholarly minds. I encourage you to read all of the essays; I think you will discover some valuable insights. But, I am sharing my essay in particular with the hope that it will shed some light on how I approach my role as dean.

Since our last issue of College Notes on June 6, two exciting developments have taken place. Jaime Van Wormer has joined University Relations as Senior Director of Development supporting CAS. Jamie, who served most recently as the Director of Advancement at Walla Walla Catholic Schools in Washington, comes to us with a robust fundraising background and we are excited to work with her.

It is also my great pleasure to announce our 2025-27 Frank Sinatra Chair in the Performing Arts, Kristin Kusanovich! Kristin will be collaborating with members of an international dance company during her two-year term as Sinatra Chair. Please keep an eye out for a full press release with more details later this summer.

Finally, as we are approaching the midpoint of our summer pause, I leave you with a summer poem by Arthur Sze, who was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a professor emeritus of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Tiger swallowtails hover over Russian sage—
I smell eucalyptus where there is no
eucalyptus and locate summer in rain.
Like bats emerging out of a cave at dusk,
a thread of grief unfurls in the sky.
Neither you nor I can stop the planting
of mines in a field or the next detonation.
I unclog a drip line along a fence;
in May, lilacs arced over the road in a cascade
of purple blossoms. Now, stilled in a minute
of darkness, I listen to bamboo leaves
unfurl above into sunshine. Untangling
a necklace composed of interlocking
gold chains, then lifting it, I trace
joy, fear, bewilderment, bliss, a this
resplendent in my fingertips. I slip inside
a strawberry runner that extends root, leaf,
then stand in morning starlight and inhabit a song.

Highlights

The JEDI Council of the College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce its membership for the 2025-26 academic year. After reviewing many wonderful applications from faculty and staff in the College who believe deeply in this work, we are pleased to share our new roster of members: Jimia Boutouba (Modern Languages and Literatures), Linda Burks (Math Learning Center, Mathematics and Computer Science), Cory Gong (Public Health, Environmental Studies and Sciences), Kai Harris (English), Maggie Hunter (Sociology, Dean's Office), Sharmila Lodhia (Gender and Sexuality Studies), Alison Lucas (Dean's Office), and Anna Sampaio (Ethnic Studies). Feel free to communicate with the JEDI Council through our new email address jedicouncil@scu.edu or by contacting individual members. We look forward to serving the College in the upcoming academic year. We want to offer a huge thank you to outgoing members Sandy Boyer, Julia Voss, Christelle Sabatier, and Amy Randall for their great ideas and tireless advocacy.

 

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Kelly Detweiler (Art and Art History) was awarded a commendation by the Triton Museum and the City of Santa Clara as an educator and as an advocate for the Arts in Santa Clara. The Triton Museum of Art celebrated their 60th Diamond Anniversary year with three Triton Honorees who have made significant contributions to the arts in Santa Clara. Kelly is one of those three honorees for "education" as an artist and educator.

He has taught thousands of students at Santa Clara University over his 43-year career as a professor of art and guided many into successful careers in the arts. Kelly has worked to bring diverse local and international communities together by advocating for, planning, and facilitating international exhibitions and artist exchanges from countries including Japan, Korea, and others. He has represented the City of Santa Clara well in his many artistic forays into museums and galleries throughout the country and abroad.

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Kirstyn Leuner (English) presented on teaching letterpress printing at SCU during the Building Book Labs Symposium, hosted by Skeuomorph Press at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, May 20-21. The symposium, the first of its kind, connected scholars and teachers at universities and colleges across the country who work with presses or "book labs" to teach and conduct research. Printer- and maker-scholars at the event remarked that we are experiencing an exciting interdisciplinary surge and movement in higher education—in the US and abroad—in the development of "book lab" spaces where students learn experientially about book history, and researchers create scholarship, through letterpress printing, book binding, paper making, zine making, ink making, and other book arts.

SCU acquired a platen letterpress and a collection of type in 2018 thanks primarily to the generous donation of local printer Tom Davis. Since then, we have added supplies to the studio to support teaching. If you are interested in learning more about our presses or even scheduling a class or event printing experience (we have a mobile press), email Kirstyn, kleuner@scu.edu.

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Daniel Morgan's (Religious Studies) article "Toward the Formation of a Waliullahi Public in Eighteenth-Century India: The Trials and Tribulations of Nurullah Budhanwi" was published in the May issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The article reconstructs the life of Nur Allah Budhanwi, an eighteenth-century legal scholar and Sufi, to suggest the limitations of current models of Islamic reform in South Asia. Generally speaking, Islamic reform is studied in a sociological mode (through network analysis) or through the analysis of technical treatises largely removed from social context. Instead, he shows how micro-historical methods—reconstructing as far as possible the intellectual and social lifeworld of an individual by reading textual fragments against the grain—allow us to perceive the contestations and hesitations that accompanied the process of early modern Islamic reform. For those interested, the article is free to read for the next couple of months.

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Danielle Morgan (English) edited and wrote the introduction for a Post45 Contemporaries Cluster on the 1995 TV series My So-Called Life and its 30th anniversary. Post45 Contemporaries is an open-access website where academics write essays "clustered" around a theme as a form of scholarly inquiry and critical conversations. The cluster also features a brilliant essay by SCU colleague Mythri Jegathesan (Anthropology).

 

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Vivien Leung (Political Science) published "Race in a Pandemic: Asian American Perceptions of Discrimination and Political Preferences in the 2020 Election" with Natalie Masuoka (UCLA) in Public Opinion Quarterly. Using an original three-wave study of Asian American respondents collected over 2020, we find that perceptions of discrimination were relatively stable over 2020. At the same time, we find that a respondent’s preexisting attitudes about racial discrimination held prior to the pandemic informed their assessment of discrimination during the pandemic. We also find that a respondent’s preexisting discrimination beliefs moderate the relationship between their assessment about discrimination during the pandemic and 2020 presidential candidate choice. This study offers new interventions into existing assumptions about the link between discrimination, political behavior, and attitude stability.

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Juan Velasco-Moreno (English) gave three presentations at the IV MUROS Conference on Latinx Literature, May 29-31, at the Universidad Pontificia, Astorga, Spain. He presented two books, Our Little Life (a critical edition of Latinx writer Jose Antonio Villarreal's unpublished novel) and a new collection of his poetry, Noche oscura del Oeste (Dark Night of the West). On June 2, he also presented Noche oscura del Oeste at one of the most emblematic places for poetry in Spain, the Cafe Comercial, in Madrid. It was a celebration of poetry and community. Both books and presentations were the result of the support of the Dean's office.

Image: Juan Velasco-Moreno in Spain at the presentation of the two books at the IV Muros Conference.

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Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (Modern Languages and Literatures) published the volume Otras iluminaciones: Narrativa, cultura y psicodélicos, co-edited with Ana Luengo (San Francisco State University) with Almenara Press. This peer-reviewed volume contains 13 academic essays and two non-fiction pieces focusing on discourses about the psychedelic/entheogenic experience in contemporary discourse and reception in Spanish-speaking territories, and also a critical perspective from the humanities to what has been called (or hyped as) a “psychedelic renaissance” in the global North. The volume contains Alberto’s contributions, “A Lucid Stream: Notes towards a Psychoactive Critique of Literature and Culture,” co-authored with Ana Luengo, and “Latin American Studies versus the Psychedelic Renaissance.” The latter chapter originated as a talk first given at SCU in May 2024, as a joint event of the tUrn and the Brown Bag Humanities initiatives. Alberto was also invited to deliver a revised and updated version of this talk before an audience of students and faculty at UC Santa Barbara on May 29.

Alberto presented Otras iluminaciones at the LASA conference in San Francisco, where he also chaired the panel “Experiencing Pleasure, Exploring the Unsayable, Visualizing the Unimaginable: The Psychedelic Experience in 21st-Century Latin American Literature," where he also delivered his talk “Towards a Latin American Focus in the Psychedelic Humanities.”

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Tim Myers’ (English) video commentary on W. B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is now live on "The Greatest Lines of All Time," a short-form podcast from The International Poetry Forum. Other videos in the series feature Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, Mary Oliver, Tennessee Williams, Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, Kurt Vonnegut, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Tim’s poem “Intersection” also appeared in Caesura Magazine, along with an art piece called "Evening City."

Image: "Evening City" by Tim J. Myers.

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The interdisciplinary faculty and student team for the Thámien Ohlone AR Tour.

Amy Lueck (English), Kai Lukoff (Computer Science and Engineering), Lee Panich (Anthropology), Danielle Heitmuller (Art and Art History), Ohlone community members, and an interdisciplinary team of students led by Madi Nguyen '25 (Web Design and Engineering) and Isabella Gomez '27 (Philosophy), have received a $100,000 Digital Justice Development grant from the Association of Colleges and Learned Societies (ACLS) to support further development of the Thámien Ohlone AR Tour that illuminates Ohlone heritage at SCU. You can view the existing tour stops by downloading the tour from the Apple Store (Android to be released soon!). This project has received generous internal support from the Whitham Family Collaborative Scholarship Grant, and is now receiving recognition at the national level.

The ACLS Digital Justice Grants Program funds digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. For 2025, eight start-up projects have been awarded ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants of up to $25,000, and seven established projects were awarded ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants of up to $100,000.

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On May 18, at the Santa Clara University Board of Regents meeting in Paso Robles, Francisco Jiménez (Modern Languages and Literatures, Emeritus) presented the historical and literary context for the screening of The Unbroken Sky, an award-winning short dramatic film adapted from his memoirs, which portrays his family’s migration from Mexico to California as farmworkers.

In conjunction with receiving the Jorge Escobar Achievement in Education Award from the Latino Education Advancement Foundation, he was also honored with a commendation from the County of Santa Clara Board of Supervisors. The commendation recognizes “his transformative impact on education and the community, exemplifying the values of the Latino Education Advancement Foundation Jorge Escobar Achievement in Education Award.”

Francisco also made a virtual visit to a class of students at Frank Ledesma Elementary School in Soledad, California, who had read The Circuit with their teacher.

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Iris Stewart-Frey (Environmental Studies and Sciences), Jake Dialesandro (ESS) and the Water and Climate Justice Lab collaborated with the Community Water Center, the California Rural Legal Assistance, the Environmental Law Foundation, Clean Water Action, the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, Monterey Waterkeepers, the California Coastkeeper Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council to organize a 1-Day bi-lingual conference at SCU. Representatives from environmental organizations, community committees, and academia heard community testimony, shared information, and developed strategic goals for nitrate regulatory programs (such as CV-SALTS, Ag 4.0, and the Dairy Order) and clean water advocacy. Iris and Jake presented new findings on how nitrate in groundwater varies in space and time, especially near Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Student lab members Elyse Kenyon '25 (Environmental Science), Stephanie Davis '25 (Environmental Studies), and Samantha Lei '26 (Environmental Science) contributed to the presentation; Victory Chika-Okafor '27 (Environmental Science), Sophia Toribo '27 (Political Science, Environmental Science), and Briana Guingona '25 (Environmental Studies) supported the logistics. 

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Faculty and students at the Northern California Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Students mentored by faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry presented oral presentations and research posters at San Jose State University on Saturday, May 3 at the annual American Chemical Society Northern California Undergraduate Research Symposium (NCURS). The event this year featured 89 posters and 18 oral presentations. A number of research students from the laboratories of Linda Brunauer, Korin Wheeler, Robin Grotjahn, Ben Stokes, Paul Abbyad, Meaghan Deegan, Grace Stokes, and Amelia Fuller attended the symposium. Three SCU students gave oral presentations and eight research posters were presented.

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Iris Stewart-Frey (Environmental Studies and Sciences) in collaboration with Irina Raicu (Markkula Center for Applied Ethics) received a $50,000 grant from the Next10 Foundation to study how water use by AI data centers intersects with water availability and distribution in California. Freshwater scarcity and access to safe and sufficient drinking water are already an urgent global concern, and are expected to rise. The increasing carbon footprint of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted significant attention, yet AI’s equally important, and growing, water footprint has received relatively less attention. Specifically, the project seeks to understand the impact of data centers on the water resources of nearby environmental justice communities in the Central and Silicon Valleys.

Image: Iris Stewart-Frey (top) and Irina Raicu (bottom).

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Kimberly Dill's (Philosophy) article, "A Fork on the Road to Knowledge at Mauna Kea: the Thirty Meter Telescope, Perspectivalism, and Epistemic Injustice" was accepted for publication at Ethics, Policy & Environment.

In this piece, Kimberly argues that the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the Big Island of Hawaii's Mauna Kea materially signals and further enshrines the ongoing epistemic inequality that still obtains between Native Hawaiian and scientific (e.g., astronomical) communities. Though the proposed, astronomical questions towards which the TMT is aimed are fascinating, she maintains that the nonconsensual construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope constitutes both a structural ethical and epistemic—that is, knowledge-based—harm. It is epistemically problematic, for its mandated construction is a public declaration of the primacy given to Western scientific inquiry and analysis over Traditional (Hawaiian) Ways of Knowing. It is a matter of ethics and social justice, for its construction further perpetuates an ongoing set of harms to Native Hawaiians (Kānaka 'Ōiwi)—culturally, techno-materially, relationally, politically, and through the destructive law enforcement practices that have been employed contra front-line protestors bravely standing in defense of that which they revere. Lastly, the construction of the TMT precludes and undermines fruitful, pluralistic collaborations (e.g., epistemic synthesis) between Kānaka 'Ōiwi and astronomical communities.

Image: Kimberly Dill at the Lick Observatory, by Jim Gensheimer for the Santa Clara Magazine.

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John Hawley (English, Emeritus) presented a paper, "Animal Voices, Writing Back, and the Decolonized Mind: NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory, and Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf," at the Listening to Africa: Englishes in the Global South conference at the University of Bern.

 

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Tom Plante (Psychology) recently published an article, "Psychotherapeutic Strategies to Cope with the Dark Side of Religious Engagement," in Integratus: The Journal of the Catholic Psychotherapy Association.

Abstract: Although spiritual and religious engagement that includes beliefs, practices, and community involvement has been found to offer numerous physical and mental health benefits, it can also be associated with problematic and dysfunctional perspectives and behaviors. Tragically, many people suffer from obsessive scrupulosity, guilt, anxiety, and depression, as well as discrimination, racism, and violence associated with their religious traditions and engagement or those of others. Mental health professionals must be mindful of both the upsides and the downsides of religiosity and find a way to secure appropriate consultation, embrace professional ethical principles, and support health and wellness for clients. This clinical reflection provides examples of religion getting in the way of health and wellness and offers several strategies for therapists to use to better address these issues in their clinical work.

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Michelle Rivers (Psychology) recently had an article published in Educational Psychology Review entitled, “Does Retrieval Demand Moderate the Effectiveness of Covert Retrieval Practice? Comparing Covert and Overt Retrieval Practice for Learning Key Terms and Definitions.”

This study compared two common study strategies: overt retrieval (actively saying or writing down an answer) and covert retrieval (silently thinking of the answer). College students learned key terms and definitions from cognitive psychology and then practiced them using one of three methods: overt retrieval, covert retrieval, or simple restudy. The study found that students remembered more when they used overt retrieval, especially for complex material like full definitions. This supports the idea that when information is harder to recall, physically producing an answer (typing it) helps solidify learning more than just thinking about it. However, covert retrieval was faster and still better than just re-reading—making it a more efficient strategy when time is limited.

Key takeaway for educators: Encourage students to quiz themselves by writing or saying answers aloud, especially when learning complex material. But when time is short, even silently recalling information can be better than re-reading notes.

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Maggie Wander (Art and Art History) attended the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Before joining SCU, Maggie was a part of the curatorial team responsible for reinstalling the Met’s iconic Oceanic Art collection. The updated galleries feature new labels that prioritize Indigenous Pacific epistemologies embedded in the artworks and re-organized displays that allow audiences to better appreciate the mastery of Oceanic artistic production. The wing, which also houses the Sub-Saharan African and Ancient American collections, opened to the public on May 31 and will continue to be on permanent display.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar