Check out Occidental faculty members’ scholarly accomplishments from 2021!
- Articles, Essays & Chapters
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In a new article in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Assistant Professor of Spanish and French Studies Mariška Bolyanatz Brown and a coauthor examine the production of the 's' sound in Spanish. “Acoustic differences between Chilean and Salvadoran Spanish /s/” finds that the ‘s’ sound differs along seven acoustic measures. These distinctions suggest a cross-dialectal difference in strengthening of the consonant, offering experimental acoustic evidence of a frequent phonological process.
As German Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to step down after 16 years as Chancellor, Associate Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs Phillip Ayoub and co-authors (Sabine Lang and Petra Ahrens) have published a new special issue in German Politics. The contributions in “Leading from Behind? Gender Equality in Germany During the Merkel Era” assess Merkel’s legacy and conservative party women leaders' complicated relationship with furthering gender equality policy. Professor Ayoub’s coauthored introduction explains how Merkel ‘led from behind’ to implement innovative public policies during her time as Chancellor. A shorter version of their research appeared in their coauthored piece in The Washington Post.
In a new article in Nebraska Law Review Bulletin, Professor of Politics Thalia González and her co-author map current health-centered carceral reforms and draw attention to the lack of race-conscious and health-promoting interventions upstream of confinement. To do so, they examine four social structural pipelines: poverty, homelessness, punitive school discipline, and policing. “Race, Public Health, and the Epidemic of Mass Incarceration” urges more expansive public health law interventions that recognize how mass incarceration poses a racial health crisis. Did women leaders really have better pandemic outcomes? In a flagship report for UN Women, Associate Professor of Politics Jennifer M. Piscopo and coauthor examine how women chief executives, legislators, and health officials governed during COVID-19. “Effective, decisive, and inclusive: Women’s leadership in COVID-19 response and recovery” shows that women leaders across the globe developed a distinctive style that emphasized clear communication, prompt action, and attention to the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on marginalized social groups, including women and girls.
How has the distribution of eldercare facilities in major California cities evolved over space and time? In a new article in The Canadian Geographer / Le Geographe Canadien, Assistant Professor of UEP Seva Rodnyansky and co-authors find that despite additions in facilities and beds, the older adult population in California continues to outgrow capacity. “Residential care in California: Spatial and temporal trends in facility development and care capacity” can help local agencies and jurisdictions in the United States make critical policy decisions about long-term care.
Do we intuitively view minds as separable from bodies-- meaning, are we intuitive dualists? In a new paper at Psychological Review, Professor Andrew Shtulman (Psychology) and his co-author review evidence from infant cognition and religious cognition. “Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?“ finds that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages. As a result, they find scant support for the widespread claim that people are intuitive dualists. Rather, dualism appears to be a counterintuitive idea that requires cultural learning and conceptual change.Senior Instructor of Chemistry Anne Yu and Science Librarian Lilly Eluvathingal Linden have published “Environmental and Social Injustices of the Flint MI Water Crisis: A General Chemistry Exercise” in the Journal of Chemical Education. This article describes an exercise on the Flint, MI water crisis, which incorporates environmental and social injustice issues into the general chemistry curriculum for high school and undergraduate students. Students reported appreciating chemistry’s real-life applications.
As part of a large collaborative team, Professor Carmel Levitan explored the influence of brief interventions on emotions. Their new paper in Nature Human Behaviour, “A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic,” starts with the fact that the pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions. Can reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation, reduce negative emotions? They find that participants who experienced interventions related to rethinking (finding new ways of thinking about a situation) or repurposing (finding something good in a situation) reported significantly fewer negative emotions and increased positive emotions relative to those who only reflected.
In a new article, “Learning Evolution by Collaboration,” Professor of Psychology Andrew Shtulman and his co-author Andrew G. Young ask whether peer collaboration can help teach evolution by natural selection, a topic on which students often have divergent reviews. Their study shows that peer collaboration is a particularly powerful means of learning, yielding long-term improvements in understanding across several topics and tasks. Students who hold different views of evolution are able to collaborate effectively, and such collaboration yields long-term learning gains for partners with lower levels of understanding.
In a new article in the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, Associate Professor of English Ross Lerner unearths the history of the legal and religious doctrine of civil death (mors civilis), meaning the loss of citizenship privileges for convicted criminals. Lerner looks at how civil death in medieval and early modern Europe shaped the literary depiction of imprisonment, bondage, and criminality in seventeenth-century England and its emerging colonial system. “Civil Death in Early Modern England” shows that civil death renders criminals inanimate, but also can become an instrument of revolutionary resistance.
An article by Associate Professor Martha Matsuoka and community activist, artist/photographer John Urquiza, “Building Community Knowledge, Resilience and Resistance through Research,” documents community experiences of gentrification in LA. The article, published in GeoJournal, incorporates community knowledge into understanding gentrification, displacement, and neighborhood change. Students in UEP 303 (Sustainable Development) and SOC-UEP 395 (Visualizing Gentrification) contributed to the research, as did Matthew Gonzalez, Jaquelyne Rodriguez and Occidental Students United Against Gentrification and Jessica Blickley and Lilly Eluvanthingal Linden at Oxy’s Center for the Digital Liberal Arts. The work was also supported by a grant from the California Endowment to the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Oxy. Community partners like the Northeast Los Angeles Alliance, El Sereno Against Gentrification, and Chinatown Communities also participated in research and data gathering.Professor of Cognitive Science Carmel Levitan has two new articles! First, Levitan been supporting local restaurants during the pandemic by getting a lot of takeout. This inspired her to co-author a narrative review paper looking at some of the emerging trends in the food industry and how people might maximize the experiential components of dining at home. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, “Delivering the Multisensory Experience of Dining-Out, for Those Dining-In, During the Covid Pandemic” asks how diners can--or cannot-- reproduce the dining-out experience from the comfort of their own homes. Second, in a review paper published in Summer 2021, Carmel Levitan and a co-author explore the associations between colors and basic tastes. “Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Between Colours and Tastes,” published in i-Perception, looks at how people associate the basic tastes (e.g., sweet, bitter, salty, and sour) with specific colors. The article offers a historical overview, covers some of the key empirical findings in the field, and explores how these translate to an applied context.
Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Politics, Bhavna Shamasunder has two new articles out! First, her new study on women and personal care products appeared in The Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. “Personal Care Product Use Among Diverse Women in California: Taking Stock Study” surveyed 357 women living in California about their use of personal care products, focusing on women of reproductive age. Women in the study reported using on average eight products a day, with some using up to 30 products daily. 70 percent of women preferred scented products, a concern given links between scent and hormone disruption. They also presented their findings in a fun infographic. econd, her piece in Environmental Research examines the effects of living near urban oil and gas development sites. Los Angeles, California is home to the largest urban oil field in the country with thousands of active oil and gas wells in very close proximity to homes, schools and parks. In “Respiratory Health, Pulmonary Function and Local Engagement in Urban Communities Near Oil Development,” Shamasunder and coauthors find that residents living near wells report lower lung function, which may contribute to environmental health disparities. Her research was reported in the news (via The Conversation) and shared in another fun infographic. Professor Peter Dreier in Urban and Environmental Politics examines Jackie Robinson’s predecessors and legacy in two recent publications. In the book chapter, “Jackie Robinson: The First Famous Jock for Justice” (From 42 Today: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, New York University Press), Dreier discusses how Robinson was the first post-WW2 pro athlete to use his celebrity to push for social justice. The recent upsurge of activism by pro athletes is part of Robinson's legacy. In "Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball's Civil Rights Movement” (From Jackie: Perspectives on 42, Society for American Baseball Research), Dreier looks back in time: before Jackie Robinson came on the scene, a coalition of civil rights groups, progressive politicians and other leftists waged a long campaign to integrate major league baseball starting in the 1930s. They laid the groundwork for Robinson, who integrated baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.Professor of Urban and Environmental Politics, Peter Dreier, wrote about the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, one of the nation's most successful community-labor-environmental coalitions. "LAANE Brain: Understanding the Model and Future of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy” (In, Seeking Social Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities, Routledge Press) looks at how progressive organizations can make change in Los Angeles.
In his new article "'I’m sick of doing nothing:' how boredom shapes rape crisis center volunteers’ social movement participation," Sociology Prof. Ben Weiss shows that political action -- here, volunteering for a rape crisis center -- can be boring. The consequences of boredom, however, vary between volunteers. For some volunteers, boredom leads to decreased social movement participation, while for others boredom is just part of the experience. Weiss uses these findings to argue that particular emotions, like boredom, do not necessarily either increase or decrease people’s social movement participation. Instead, how people make sense of their emotions better predicts their political action. Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People provides a fictional account of the 1984 Union Carbide toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India. Animal, who is severely injured in the disaster, guides the reader through both the post-apocalyptic social landscape, as well as the community's failed efforts to hold the 'Kampani' accountable for the consequences of the leak. In a new article, English Prof. Leila Neti reads Animal's story through the lens of what she identifies as its historical precedent. She traces the continuities between the Union Carbide Corporation and the East India Company in order to reveal in both moments a shared substitution of the corporation for the human. Bringing Animal's People into dialogue with this broader legal history, Neti argues that the terms of humanity set forth in the British colonial era rationalize the portrait of disposable humanity that Sinha paints. The guiding question of the paper is how does the legal realm shape and guide the imaginative possibilities of the human as represented in literature? Economics Prof. Andrew Jalil’s study, "Changing Hearts and Plates: The Effect of Animal-Advocacy Pamphlets on Meat Consumption," was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Using a randomized controlled trial and dataset spanning 200,000 meal purchases, the study examines the effects of animal-welfare pamphlets on meat consumption at a college campus. Their baseline regression results, covering two academic years, indicate that the pamphlet had no statistically significant long-term aggregate effects. However, as they disaggregate and merge with survey data, they find small statistically significant effects within the semester of the intervention for subsamples of participants. Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as “more impossible” than others. When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by causal considerations that should be irrelevant given the spell’s primary causal violation, judging, for instance, that it would be more difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is no longer necessary for support. In a new study, "The plausible impossible," Psychology Prof. Andrew Shtulman and co-authors sought to test the generalizability of these effects in a non-Western context—China—where magical events are represented differently in popular fiction and where reasoning styles are often more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese adults (n = 466) showed the same tendency as American adults to honor implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they are a byproduct of causal knowledge.In their contribution to the anthology Cases on Applied and Therapeutic Humor, Philosophy Prof. Clair Morrissey and Kayla Heinze '22 explore how humor, as a kind of play, can be used by medical providers to recognize and connect with their patients as the individual people they are. In this way, the use of humor can demonstrate a kind of "respect for persons" that goes beyond "respect for autonomy."
Black Studies Prof. Erica L. Ball's newly published chapter, “Performing Politics, Creating Community: Antebellum Black Conventions as Political Rituals,” examines the alternative state conventions organized by northern free Black Americans who were barred from participation in electoral politics in the decades preceding the Civil War. Focusing on the rites and rituals of these proceedings, this chapter argues that "Colored Conventions" required careful attention to structure, presentation, and form, elements that elevated the gatherings from simple meetings to recognizable political rituals. Organized around a set of familiar procedures, customs, and rhetorical strategies, and relying on the active participation and public performances of spectators and delegates alike, conventions served as civic rituals for the northern free Black population, events that simultaneously situated people of African descent within the political culture of the United States and as the vanguard of a diasporic Black nation. The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. A new paper, “Whitewashing Nature: Sanitized Depictions of Biology in Children’s Books and Parent–Child Conversation,” by Psychology Prof. Andrew Shtulman and co-authors (Andrea Villalobos, '14 and Devin Ziel '14) ask: Do children’s books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children’s nature books (Study 1), they found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and reading levels. When parents encountered negative information in books (Studies 2–3), they did not omit it but rather elaborated on it, adding their own comments and questions, and their children (ages 3–11) were more likely to remember the negative information but less likely to generalize that information beyond the animal in the book. These findings suggest that early input relevant to biological competition may hamper children’s developing understanding of ecology and evolution.In Politics Prof. Jennifer Piscopo's new article, Chile’s Constitutional Moment, she discusses an October 2020 referendum in which nearly 80 percent of Chileans voted for a new constitution. A special assembly with equal representation of men and women will now attempt to replace the 1980 dictatorship-era constitution. Getting to this point was a major win for workers, students, leftists, feminists, Indigenous peoples, and the poor, all of whom were involved in leading 2019’s widespread protests over social and economic inequality. Chile now embarks on the fraught process of writing a new constitution that must satisfy diverse stakeholders while reforming the political and economic systems that, until now, preserved the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship
Through a stepwise multi-method and controlled evaluation of a large-scale playground greening project at a Title I Los Angeles elementary school, Kinesiology Prof. Marci Raney and co-authors (Abbie Bowers '18 and Amanda Rissberger '18) were able to determine the long-term impacts of playground greening on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels and social interactions at an individual and population-level during unstructured recess periods. Specifically, their paper, "Recess behaviors of urban children 16-months after a green schoolyard renovation" presents the 16-month observation and accelerometer follow-up data from Eagle Rock and Buchanan Elementary schools in Northeast Los Angeles. Eagle Rock Elementary underwent a green renovation while Buchanan remained an asphalt schoolyard. Ultimately, results suggest that replacing large areas of asphalt with quality green space results in persistent positive changes in recess behavior that are characteristic of a more collaborative community and counteract age-related declines in physical activity, particularly for girls. In his recently-published article, “‘When you’re here, you’re not a militant feminist’: volunteer professionalization in a rape crisis center,” Sociology Prof. Ben Weiss tracks volunteers’ identification with competing “institutional logics” — or patterned sets of beliefs, rules, and norms — in a rape crisis center (RCC). Activist-identified RCC volunteers understand sexual violence as a problem of patriarchy and envision broad, structural change. Professional-identified volunteers, conversely, commit themselves to supporting individual victims in collaboration with law enforcement and medical professional partners. Weiss shows that logic-identification is temporally patterned. Volunteers enter the organization activist-identified but, through training, become professional-identified. Because volunteers’ professionalism strengthens the RCC’s relationships with its organization partners, this article shows that low-level organization members bear responsibility for long-term organizational success. English Prof. Ross Lerner’s new article, “Racialization and Allegorization in The Faerie Queene (1590/1596),” is part of a special issue focused on the topic of race in the works of the Elizabethan poet and colonial bureaucrat Edmund Spenser. Examining the complex presence of Irish and Muslim rebels in Spenser’s works, the article traces the connections between race making, colonial violence, and the poem’s experiments with genre, especially personification allegory. - Books & Edited Volumes
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The new book by Associate Professor Brandon Lehr of Economics will be released on August 11! Behavioral Economics: Evidence, Theory, and Welfare provides an engaging and accessible introduction to the motivating questions, real-world evidence, theoretical models, and welfare implications of behavioral economics concepts.
Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies, and postcolonialism, English Prof. Leila Neti's new book, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relational ways in which the shared cultural logic of law and literature inflect colonial sociality. The book approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction, and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure. Reading the case summaries as literary texts reveals the common turns of imagination that motivate both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is a different political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony.
Mathematics Prof. Ron Buckmire is co-editor (with Jessica Libertini) of a newly published book, Improving Applied Mathematics Education. The edited volume is a collection of articles presented at a symposium Prof. Buckmire co-organized at the at the 2019 International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians (ICIAM) in Valencia, Spain on applied mathematics education. The chapters focus on a diverse set of contemporary topics in applied mathematics education of interest to instructors and researchers in undergraduate mathematics education. Prof. Buckmire’s lead chapter, "Who Does The Math?" has hard-to-find data and important analysis of the profound nature of the underrepresentation by race and gender in the U.S. mathematics community to highlight an important issue in applied mathematics education.
The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Politics Prof. Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to Indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy. - Grants & Fellowships
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Associate Professor of History Jane Hong has been named a Public Fellow in the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)'s Religion and Renewing Democracy Initiative, funded by The Henry Luce and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundations. Professor Hong is part of the immigration and migration cohort and will generate public scholarship at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. The fellowship supports Professor Hong's ability to make her research on how post-1965 immigrants have changed US religious institutions and politics accessible to an audience beyond the academy.
Associate Professor of Chemistry Emmanuelle Despagnet-Ayoub was awarded a three-year research grant from the National Science Foundation on new materials for non-aqueous flow batteries. “Development of Organometallic Complexes for the Next-Generation of Non-Aqueous Redox Flow Batteries” focuses on the development of more efficient energy storage devices for renewable power sources. The project will help mitigate the intermittent behavior of these power sources. The award includes funding for six students to work in Professor Despagnet-Ayoub’s lab this summer via Occidental’s Summer Research Program.Assistant Professor of Biology Amber Stubler has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to study how sponges contribute to the breakdown of oyster reefs under climate change scenarios. “Understanding Bioerosion from Individuals to Ecosystems: the Impacts of Biotic and Abiotic Stressors on Sponge Erosion of Oyster Reefs” is a three-year project that uses experimental investigations, transcriptome sequencing, and mathematical modeling to evaluate the responses of bioeroding sponges to abiotic and biotic stressors. This project strategically links undergraduate students at Oxy with collaborators at an R1 institution (Louisiana State University) and an R2 Hispanic-Serving Institution (University of California Merced), and will incorporate over ~40 undergraduate students in various aspects of the project, including intensive field and lab experiences, bioinformatics workshops, and classroom-based projects.
Biology Pr
of. Shana Goffredi recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to examine the role of deep-sea organisms--large and small--in determining the fate and footprint of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, on Pacific continental margins, including deep waters off of Alaska. She, along with 3 other principal investigators, will take the human occupied submersible Alvin to it’s deepest limits ~5500 meters (or 3.5 miles). They propose to evaluate the deep ocean methanosphere defined by the microbial communities that consume methane, the animals that directly feed on or form symbioses with methane-consuming microbes, and the transitional animal communities that gain energy indirectly from methane or take advantage of the carbonate rocks produced from methane consumption in seafloor sediments. By applying diverse chemical, isotopic, microscopy, and DNA-based analyses to the seep microbes and fauna, they hope to enhance our understanding of the contribution of methane to deep-sea diversity and ecosystem function, information that can inform management and conservation actions in US waters. For the past several years, Kinesiology Prof. Marci Raney has been collaborating with non-profits to secure funding for large-scale greening renovations at Title I elementary schools in Los Angeles County. In April, the California Natural Resources Agency awarded a $764,852 urban greening grant to Amigos de Los Rios for the "Emerald Necklace Jackson Watershed Discovery Campus" project, a project Prof. Raney has been collaborating on in the Pasadena Unified School District. She serves as the research partner for the grant and will be assessing the impact of the greening project on elementary school student recess behaviors, student motor skill development, and use of the outdoor space for teacher-led instruction in all subject areas.UEP Prof. Seva Rodnyansky's project "Early Measures of COVID-19’s Impact on Municipal Fiscal Health in the Los Angeles Region" was awarded a 2021 Haynes Faculty Fellowship. His research will examine the fiscal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on local governments in Southern California, including cities, counties, and school districts. Read more here!
Prof. Hong was also awarded a Visiting Scholar Fellowship (in residence) at UCLA's Institute of American Cultures (IAC) for the 2021-2022 academic year. She will be housed at the IAC's Asian American Studies Center. As a Visiting Scholar, Prof. Hong will work on her second book project exploring intersections of race, religion, and politics after 1965, present talks from her original research, and participate in IAC events.
Sociology Prof. Mai Thai's project's "Youth Outcomes at the Intersection of Criminal Justice and Education" was awarded a 2021 Haynes Faculty Fellowship. Her research will examine the educational and occupational trajectories of youth who have participated in junior police programs. Read more here! - Exhibits, Performances, Films, Scripts & Compositions
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Assistant Professor of Theater Will Power will have his award winning play, "Seize the King," transferred to the Skirball Center in New York City. Dates are March 3-13, 2022. The New York Times mentioned Professor Power’s play in their roundup of high-profile Shakespeare productions, describing the play as “a 95-minute, hip-hop infused reinterpretation of Shakespeare” and reminding readers of Times critic Laura Collins-Hughes's praise for the play’s humorous reimagining of the classic characters. Collins-Hughes wrote the production “contained multitudes of beauty.”
Art and Art History Prof. Kenturah Davis opens (a)Float, (a)Fall, (a)Dance, (a)Death on view from May 8–June 19, 2021 at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. This project began with a very open-ended question about how the apparatus of language might function as choreography. Prof. Davis initially began with identifying pragmatic ways that language structures our movements. In the way that architecture can guide how one moves through space, language that constructs the fabric of a given society similarly tries to choreograph our activities. Embedded in this is Prof. Davis’ interest in thinking about how we negotiate that choreography (conforming, resisting and improvising) to pursue freedom. This new work is an effort to consider how language produces conditions of contingency, blurring the personal and the political. Large-scale drawings show figures shifting and drifting against a backdrop of texts embedded in the paper. They suggest that the structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language. The implications of this language are activated through our bodies
Theater Prof. Will Power Wylie's new play, Seize the King (a new crazy adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III) will have its NY premiere this summer in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem. Produced by Classical Theater of Harlem and directed by the ever-innovative Carl Cofield, the play will run for 4 weeks in July-and the price? Free to all! We hope to see you there!
Music Prof. Jongnic Bontemps was featured in March 10th's issue of Variety for his work scoring projects around the Black Lives Matter Movement.
- Awards, Appointments & Other Accomplishments
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Associate Professor of History Jane Hong was interviewed by the National Journal about the potential success of Republican Party efforts to reach Asian-American and Latino voters in states with large and growing nonwhite electorates ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Carmel Levitan, Professor of Cognitive Science, was interviewed for the Color Authority Podcast about how color connects to other senses such as taste and smell.
Viviana Mac Manus, Assistant Professor of Spanish and French Studies, received Honorable Mention from the National Women’s Studies Association for her book, Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America's Dirty Wars. The 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize recognzies groundbreaking scholarship in women's studies that makes significant feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship. Her book also has been recognized by the publication division of the Association of College and Research Libraries (Choice), as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2021, a prestigious recognition from the academic library community.
Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Politics Mijin Cha was invited to present to the Economic, Social, and Labor Council of the Republic of Korea. Professor Cha presented her work on just energy transitions to an international audience that included several cabinet Ministers and UN officials. Professor Cha highlighted why justice must be at the center of the energy transition away from fossil fuels and emphasized the need for decent job creation in low carbon centers. Assistant Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs Phillip Ayoub published a co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post tracing German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mixed record on gender-equality policy. Ayoub and coauthors wrote that Merkel “passively and indirectly facilitated gender equality efforts by not blocking policy proposals and by quietly allowing civil society groups and rival parties to push forward gender-equal policies.”
For World Politics Review, Associate Professor of Politics Jennifer M. Piscopo wrote an in-depth analysis on women’s absence from COVID-19 response and recovery plans across the globe. “To Build Back Better: Listen to Women” argues that women have been on the frontlines of fighting the pandemic, but governments’ responses largely ignore the care crisis and continue to rely on women’s volunteer or underpaid labor to fight the virus.
Professor of Politics Thalia González’s work has been featured in several outlets. First, Profesor González was interviewed for the Los Angeles Times about her research in restorative justice practices across the United States. She discusses how the growth of dialogues between victim and offender addresses the over-reliance on incarceration. Second, her blog for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy at Harvard Law School explores how school policing and discipline fit into the broader antiracist health equity agenda.
Professor Peter Dreier in Urban and Environmental Politics has been writing about President Biden’s infrastructure plan. In The American Prospect, Professor Dreir examines how the media distorts the debate over Biden's infrastructure and social safety net legislation, allowing Senators Manchin and Sinema to appear as pragmatic rather than explaining that their opposition is due to corporate ties. And in Talking Points Memo, Professor Dreier critiques the media for framing the Democrats in Congress as "deeply divided" and "at war with each other" over Biden's Built Back Better legislation, even though 96% of Democrats support it. Assistant Professor of Economics Jorgen Harris and Professor of Economics Mary Lopez have been awarded a Major Research Grant by the Haynes Foundation. This grant will support research examining the effect of a recent expansion of college courses offered in prison on the lives of incarcerated students. In their award letter, the Haynes Foundation found that “Evaluating the Impact of College-in-Prison Programs on the Behavior and Rehabilitation of Incarcerated Individuals” has great importance and will merit broad dissemination.
Moore Lab of Zoology Director John McCormack was featured in a 4-minute video from Scientific American on the Moore Lab's effort to create 3D models from the bird specimens. Occidental College has a unique collection of bird specimens from North America and beyond. Watch Professor McCormack show off the Moore Lab’s beautiful, colorful birds and walk through the process of digitizing the specimens. Professor McCormack’s lab was also featured in a recent Los Angeles Times article, alerting readers about “where to find L.A.'s little-known stash of vintage birds.” Associate Professor of Politics Jennifer Piscopo was quoted in two recent articles about women’s political representation in Latin America. In The Washington Post, she highlights recent gains in Mexico, especially Mexico’s recent constitutional reform requiring gender parity in all branches of government. In Bloomberg, she highlights where gender gaps still persist, talking about her recent research showing that women still lack equal access to campaign funds.Professor Peter Dreier in Urban and Environmental Politics has written several pieces about American baseball. First, he wrote about Joe Black for the Society for American Baseball Research’s biography project. The first African American pitcher to win a World Series game and the National League's Rookie of the Year in 1952, Black went on to become a civil rights activist when his playing days were over. Then, he wrote about how among the more than 20,000 men who have played major league baseball, not one has publicly come out of the closet while still in uniform. His commentary for The Conversation looks at the likelihood that an openly gay player will be on a big league team in the near future.
Assistant Professor of UEP Seva Rodnyansky’s research was featured in The Los Angeles Times. COVID-19 has transformed where people live in California, with more people moving inland--but Professor Rodnyanksy’s research shows that their arrival transforms local communities, heightening fire risk. Occidental students Jada Jo, Ina Mortan, Ellie McKinney, and Emilio Pardi worked on research for this project. In 2020-2021, DWA Prof. Lan Chu was appointed as an inaugural member of the Western Political Science Association's Publications Committee for the 2019-2020 year by chairing the committee in Spring 2020. The Association has two official journals: Political Research Quarterly (PRQ) and Politics, Groups, and Identities (PGI). In Fall 2020, Chu was invited to join the Editorial Board of PGI. In May 2021, she was then invited to join the journal's Best Article Award Committee to help determine the best article published during the prior calendar year. History Prof. Jane Hong was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of American History, the flagship journal for historians of the United States across all subfields and time periods. As a board member, In this capacity, Prof. Hong will help shape the direction of scholarship in the field. History Prof. Marla Stone has been appointed the next Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome. “As the Mellon Humanities Professor, I envision fulfilling three critical roles,” Stone said. “First, as a mentor to the Academy’s community of scholars; second, as an ambassador between the community and the wonders of the Roman past and present; and third, as a member of a leadership team that ensures effective administration, engaging programming, an environment of intellectual and artistic exchange, and a flourishing creative community. I look forward to returning to the Academy in this new position." Religious Studies Prof. Kristi Upson-Saia is a founding member of the editorial board for a new book series, Religon, Medicine, and Health in Late Antiquity (Routledge Press).
History Prof. Jane Hong published an op-ed in the Washington Post tracing how the Republican Party has made inroads among women and voters of color. The piece focused on California's Orange County and the GOP's historical efforts to court Asian American voters, who today make up more than 20 percent of the county's electorate. Post-1965 immigration, U.S. Cold Wars in Asia, religion, and Southern California's multiracial demographics and history have all played a part. Although American conservatism remains largely White, it has slowly but surely become less so. New York Stage and Film, one of the preeminent incubators for theater and film in the country, invited MAC Prof. Aleem Hossain to join their new NEXUS Initiative that brings together 20 multi-hyphenate artists to explore the question “Where does story exist at the intersection of stage and film?” Through this inaugural program, NYSAF will offer direct support to these artists – each participant receives $5,000 and will take part in a series of conversations focused on the needs of new and expanded forms of storytelling that resonate with our time. Participants were recommended by 14 leading artists of stage and film for their accomplishments in exploring new forms of storytelling. The leading artists selection committee includes Ayad Akhtar, César Alvarez, Luis Castro, Elsie Choi, Marcus Gardley, Zach Helm, Beth Henley, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Patricia McGregor, Lila Neugebauer, Madeline Sayat, Shelby Stone, Regina Taylor, and Chay Yew. The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies hosted a book launch for the new book Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents (Brill, December 2020), co-edited by History Prof. Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli. Watch a video of the book launch here! Following a brief presentation of the book, its aims, stakes, and contents by the co-editors and contributor Bronwen Wilson, there will be an open discussion.
The Vantuna Research Group (PI: Biology Prof. Dan Pondella) has been planning and designing an artificial reef off of Palos Verdes Peninsula for more than a decade. This last summer it was finally built using 58,000 tons of quarry rock over a 4 month span. This project was funded primarily by money from the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program, a program that was created to restore marine ecosystems and species damaged by DDT contamination from the 1940's to 1970's. The reef has received national attention--Prof. Jonathan Williams was interviewed about the new reef during a segment about DDT contamination on "CBS This Morning." And recently, the VRG commissioned a short film about the project, "Rebirth of a Reef."In an episode of CBS This Morning, Esquire Chef of the Year Omar Tate presents a cuisine inspired by Black history. His dessert, "antebellum hoodo," is an homage to an enslaved woman healer named Elsey, which he created after reading a book about healing in enslaved communities: that is, History Prof. Sharla Fett's book Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations!
Computer Science Prof. Kathryn Leonard is serving as co-Editor-in-Chief of a new mathematics journal, La Matematica, that publishes high quality research in computational areas. The editors have instituted an equitable review process with a short review period. Accepted papers will be at least in part understandable to a wide range of mathematicians, and computational results will be reproducible when appropriate. Black Studies & History Prof. Erica L. Ball was elected to a second term as the Far West Regional Director of the Association of Black Women Historians.