Class Acts

New Knowledge

February 4, 2019 by Staff Comments Off

Fossils on the Cover

Professor Robert Gaines (left) in Kootenay National Park with recent Claremont Colleges graduates Iris Holzer (Scripps ’17) and Ellie Ellis (Pitzer ’18 )

The alien-looking fossils unearthed by a team of scientists co-led by Pomona College Professor of Geology Robert Gaines were the subject of the cover story in the November 2018 issue of Science.

November 2018 issue of Science The article, “Cracking the Cambrian,” takes readers to Kootenay National Park in Canada and the fossil-rich sites that Gaines and the team discovered in 2012. The sites are home to Burgess Shale fossil beds where more than 10,000 specimens, including unfamiliar and new animals, have already been found by the team. The animal fossils are from the Cambrian period, which saw a sudden explosion of animal life, and offer an increased understanding of early animal evolution on Earth.

“More than 80 percent of diversity of life leaves no fossil record, but here we have fossils that offer a remarkably complete picture during this ‘pop’ in evolutionary history,” says Gaines. The fossils, which show soft tissues, including eyes, muscle bands and gills, have been found along a 10-mile swath of what was once sea floor, now located high in the Canadian Rockies.

Among the unique finds this past year were new fossils that the researchers nicknamed “spaceships” because of their sleek shape. The largest of these was dubbed “the mothership” (naturally). “These animals were relatively giant predators of the Cambrian seas, ranging up to one meter,” Gaines says. “They were swimmers with giant raptorial claws at the front of the head, just in front of the mouth.”

Gaines began working in the area in 2008 and has been back every year since, with the exception of 2011. Though the weather is volatile, the terrain steep and rugged, the grizzly and black bears abundant and the living conditions primitive, he plans to keep going back.

“I’m living my 5-year-old self’s dream,” he says. “My mother brought me a trilobite from a trip when I was a boy, and immediately my enthusiasm for dinosaurs faded. I was intrigued by the idea of this much deeper past and the early history of complex life on Earth.

“The Burgess Shale is perhaps the most important fossil site in the world and is on every paleontologist’s bucket list. I still can’t believe that I am actually working here. And the opportunity to make paradigm-shifting contributions through the discovery of this entirely new fossil area in the Rockies, rich with new and unexpected animal forms, is incredibly rewarding.”

Pakistani Schools Reimagined

Pakistani children on their way to school.

For more than a decade, Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics Tahir Andrabi and a team of researchers have been conducting economic surveys on education in Pakistan’s Punjab province. They’ve tested about 35,000 primary schoolchildren in math, language, civics and other subjects and distributed report cards to families. For illiterate parents, they’ve explained the results at village gatherings and town meetings.

The results have echoed throughout the educational system in the region.

“Giving Pakistani families information improved their welfare as consumers of education,” says Andrabi. “It lowered the fees private schools charge and induced lower-quality private schools to improve their test scores. Public schools responded to this information by raising their quality and increasing their enrollment. We are also finding that these effects persist in these villages even after eight years.”

The surveys also exposed some problems, including the difficulty of retaining teachers and the need for better training and better resources.

For Andrabi, education is a “kind of ecosystem. It has teachers, textbook providers, policymakers, regulators. I can name 20 different actors,” he says. “Our job as researchers is to identify the frictions in all these relationships and to think about the barriers to innovation, so people can think about their solutions to their own problems.”

The initial problem for policymakers, says Andrabi, “had been how to get kids in school, particularly girls and the rural poor. As more children entered schools, construction increased and researchers started to notice that it was not enough. The demand for education, for women, for girls, the aspirations parents have for their children are very high. So the question now is how to respond to that need.”

Andrabi has been part of that response, traveling around the world and collaborating with colleagues in education and economics to “reimagine” a school of education. Invited by Pakistan’s leading philanthropist and a founding trustee of its largest private university to work on the project, Andrabi initially intended to lay the groundwork for the new school.

Instead, he is taking a sabbatical to become the inaugural dean of the Lahore University of Management Sciences School of Education, working with eight faculty members and 40 students in a master of philosophy program on educational leadership.

“Any problem that you can think of in the world,” he says, “improving education is going to help.”

Sacrifice & Survival

Tomás Sandoval Sr. (second from left) in a scene from Ring of Red: A Barrio Story.

Stories of patriotism, sacrifice and survival are important themes in the lives of many Chicanos who served in the Vietnam War. And bringing some of those stories to the public through theatre has been a multiyear project for Professor of History and Chicano Studies Tomás Summers Sandoval, who recently staged a new play at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles based on the experiences of Chicano veterans.

Adding a personal note to the work was Summers Sandoval’s father, Tomás Sandoval Sr., who joined the production as an actor.

Based on oral histories collected by Summers Sandoval and his students over a period of five years and written as interwoven testimonios—testimonial monologues—Ring of Red: A Barrio Story features stories of post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, family love and friction—and what it has meant for this generation of Chicanos to live with the scars of war.

The play was directed by Pomona College lecturer and alumna Rose Portillo ’75.

“Chicanos are generally misunderstood as a people,” says Summers Sandoval. “The media often portrays us as a threat, but Chicanos have been interwoven into the U.S. story for a long time, and we have given a lot to this country.”

History and the Court

A copy of the United States Bill of Rights

For Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the 2008 Supreme Court decision about an individual’s right to own a gun is a story about the lawyers, activists and law students who laid the groundwork for a radical new interpretation of the Second Amendment.

“For 150 years, courts interpreted that first part of the clause, the well-regulated militia, as limiting the scope of the right to keep and bear arms,” says Hollis-Brusky, associate professor of politics and author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. “Until the 1970s and 1980s, scholars who were for a robust Second Amendment were lamenting the fact that courts had limited the right and had accepted a lot of regulation because they were putting too much emphasis on the collective, the militia.”

The District of Columbia vs. Heller, a case challenging strict handgun regulations in Washington, D.C., initiated what Hollis-Brusky describes as a two-step process necessary for the court to change a law. “The first thing you need is at least five justices who agree with you. It’s a necessary condition, but it’s not sufficient,” she says. “Those five justices need to have the legitimacy of outside legal scholarship that justifies their opinion.”

The scaffolding for the 2008 case, says Hollis-Brusky, was provided by the Federalist Society, home to conservative and libertarian legal scholars.

“Long before the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment, the Federalist Society had created a robust academic network to support that idea,” she says. Hollis-Brusky is skeptical that the most recent interpretation of the Second Amendment is the last.

“We talk about constitutional principles, but I think very few on the left or the right adhere so steadfastly to those principles,” says Hollis-Brusky. “The terms of the debate— ‘Are you an originalist or are you a living constitutionalist?’—have shifted. You still need to look to history, but how do you use that history and how do you take into account contemporary circumstances? Those are the big driving questions.”

In the classroom and in her work with students on research, Hollis-Brusky says she sees the next generation of activists. “There is less cynicism and more interest in being strategic in how they engage with the system. One of the things I like to tell them in the post-2016 world is that this is a time of great political possibility, for better or for worse. Things we never imagined would happen are now happening. You have to throw out all the rules about what we ought to expect, and that opens up a lot of possibilities for people who want to reimagine the way we are.”

The Shape of the City

Cranes above a Los Angeles skyline.

The drive into Los Angeles reveals a stark contrast. In some areas, towering cranes mark construction sites where office towers, hotels and apartments are being built. Elsewhere, dilapidated buildings, warehouses and parking lots remain, images of urban blight.

Why are some areas redeveloped, while others are not? What roles do zoning and density regulations play? These are some of the questions Associate Professor of Economics Bowman Cutter is trying to answer by combining zoning and property data with Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to create redevelopment maps of parts of Los Angeles County.

“People haven’t linked the property records over time like this before,” says Cutter, an environmental economist and an expert on urban land use. Funded by a Haynes Foundation faculty fellowship, his work will generate a dynamic map to help policymakers and stakeholders visualize redevelopment patterns over time.

“I’d like to look in a much more detailed way than anybody’s done, property by property, on how these density restrictions affect what you build and when you build,” Cutter says. “What I’m trying to say is, if we had different regulations, would the shape of the city be different?”

A Shale’s Tale

September 5, 2018 by Carla Guerrero Comments Off

Professor Jade Star Lackey Shale, a fine-grained sedimentary rock formed from silt or clay particles, holds chemical clues to one of Earth’s most dramatic geological events – when continents first bobbed well above sea level.

Using the Pomona College X-ray Fluorescence Laboratory (XRF), Associate Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey with Trevor Pontifex ’18 and Christopher “Cal” Neikirk ’19 analyzed the chemical elements of shale rock from around the world – providing an important check on the results gathered by University of Oregon Professor Ilya Bindeman’s research, published in the May issue of Nature. “We’re answering a deep time question about Earth’s behavior with this work,” says Lackey.

“The findings are significant. It puts another piece of evidence of when Earth’s continents stood more prominently above the oceans,” says Lackey, who is chair of the Geology Department. “On a planet that was hot and active and had a vigorous mantle before this, it was hard for continental rock to rise really high.”

Lackey provides an analogy: Imagine dumplings in a pot of stew. They begin as dough that doesn’t have much strength, but nonetheless float near the surface of the pot. As they cook and stiffen, they gain strength and begin to rise up above the surface of the pot. If the stew cools and thickens, in the same way the mantle would have, those dumplings could sit even higher. Tectonics would move the dumplings around, and when several collide—think of this as assembling a supercontinent—they can rise even higher.

The research shows that shale rock sampled from around the world contains a record of the weathering of land that spans most of Earth’s history. The team analyzed oxygen isotopes in samples from every continent to test for fingerprints of the style of weathering that occurred. Lackey explains that the conversion process of land (the dumplings in a pot of stew analogy) to clay minerals in shale is recorded in the oxygen isotopes. “It’s profound to think about, that we’re seeing a different style of weathering start [on Earth].”

Lackey joined Bindeman’s research team in summer 2016, when he and laboratory interns took a look at the bulk chemistry of the shales that were sent to their laboratory.

“The important piece of the story is ‘between 2.2 and 2.5 billion years ago, but to see it, we had to go back and scrape ‘together as many shales as we could find, even the rare stuff, going back to 3.5 billion years ago,” says Lackey, who explains that the shales were hard to find and had to be handled with care in the lab.

The Pomona College Geology Department counts on a number of specialized lab instruments for faculty and student research. The XRF Lab was founded in 2010 and uses an Axios wavelength-dispersive spectrometer which allows analysis of a wide range of elements that make up the bulk of crustal rocks. “We operate with ‘the highest level of research thanks to the ‘College’s support for major equipment,” says Lackey.

From Theory to Practice

September 5, 2018 by Patricia Vest Comments Off

Professor Nicholas Ball

A rare collaboration between one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies and a chemistry lab at a small liberal arts college began as the result of a chance encounter.

Chemistry major Ariana Tribby ’17 was presenting a poster at the American Chemistry Society (ACS) National Meeting in Philadelphia in 2016 when her research, under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, caught the attention of Pfizer’s Senior Principal Scientist Dr. Christopher am Ende.

The biopharmaceutical giant was interested in Ball’s lab work using sulfonyl fluorides to make other sulfur-based molecules. Dr. am Ende was particularly interested in Ball’s work with sulfonamides.

Sulfonyl fluorides have been used in biology for decades, are valued for their stability in water and bioactivity and are now emerging as precursors for a myriad of sulfur-based compounds. According to Ball, the stability of sulfonyl fluorides are more attractive over traditional routes using sulfonamides that require reagents that have a short self-life or undesirable side reactions. The key challenge for Pomona-Pfizer collaborative study was to figure out a way to unlock the reactivity of sulfonyl fluorides for the desired reaction.

Sulfonamides are widely prevalent in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. They represented 15 percent of the top 100 most prescribed drugs, with therapeutic applications against cardiovascular, infectious and neurological diseases in 2016.

This mutual interest between Pfizer and the Ball Lab led to a year-long research partnership to develop a methodology to make sulfonamides from sulfonyl fluorides using calcium salts. Pfizer did the initial work to come up with a sketch for a synthetic route, while Ball’s lab work involved optimizing that synthetic route and testing its versatility. After countless hours in the lab–both at Pfizer and at Pomona–many teleconference calls and more than 100 chemical reactions later, the research team had found an optimal reaction by the end of the summer of 2017.

The study was recently published as an open access article in Organic Letters, one of the most highly-regarded academic journals in organic chemistry. Their work will hopefully translate into more efficient ways to make a diverse array of sulfonamides, key for discovering new drug targets.

The article’s authors include five Pomona students who worked with Ball: Cristian Woroch ’19, Mark Rusznak ’18, Ryan Franzese ’19, Sarah Etuk ’19 and Sabrina Kwan ’20, who are a mixture of chemistry and neuroscience majors. On Pfizer’s side, along with am Ende, the research and article author team includes scientists and medical chemists: Paramita Mukherjee, Matthew Reese, Joseph Tucker, John Humphrey, who work in Pfizer’s Worldwide Research and Development division. Leah Cleary of Ideaya Biosciences was also part of the team.

For Ball, the goal for students in his lab is to learn how to turn theory into practice, to critically work through scientific challenges and to understand and take ownership of their work. With this Pfizer study, Pomona students were able to better understand the applications of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry.

“My experience with industry wasn’t until I was on the job market,” says Ball. “I was never exposed to the fantastic science that is occurring at these companies or realized that it was a career possibility. My hope is that this collaboration shows students that there are options for the them with a science degree other than academia.”

Woroch, who was second author in the study, worked closely with both Ball and Pfizer’s am Ende. This project had such an influence on Woroch’s research interests that he is continuing to pursue the topic for his senior thesis, and am Ende will be a second reader for it.

“What I am most excited for is an opportunity to answer questions that have been popping up since the project began,” says Woroch. “Since our collaboration started over a year ago, there has been a clear direction for the research and so when tangentially-related issues arose, I couldn’t address them. Now, I can revisit them and find an entirely new project that is derived from my interests. Dr. am Ende is a very talented scientist and will be a great guide to help me do meaningful and interesting research.”

Woroch adds that the ability to apply science to real world problems is a big part of what drew him to research. “Particularly when projects are challenging or frustrating, having a practical application for your work is a driving force,” he says.

According to ACS data from 2013, 53 percent of chemistry graduates are employed in industry sectors after attending graduate school, while 39 percent go to work in academia.

Besides this research study, Ball, am Ende and Woroch share another commonality: They all received a Beckman Scholarship at some point in their chemistry research careers. The Beckman Foundation provides grants to researchers and nonprofit research institutions in chemistry and life sciences to promote scientific discoveries and to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research.

“I am very excited that our collaboration with Dr. am Ende’s group at Pfizer is continuing,” says Ball. “We already have a follow-up [study] to this recent paper underway. During my first conversation with Dr. am Ende, he stated that we should be working together versus working against each other and I couldn’t agree more! It is even more special that we share the bond of being Beckman Scholars.”

Volcanic Venus

March 23, 2018 by Carla Guerrero '06 Comments Off

Volcanic Venus

For Professor of Geology Eric Grosfils, the scorching planet Venus is a “volcanologist’s playground,” where interpreting well-preserved geological records could help lead to better understanding of volcanoes here on Earth.

Now, a $425,000 NASA research grant will allow Grosfils—the Minnie B. Cairns Memorial Professor of Geology at Pomona—and his research colleague, Pat McGovern from the Lunar and Planetary Institute, to push forward with their efforts to better understand the evolution of stresses within and beneath a volcano as it grows.

The grant proposal, “Breaking the barriers: Time-dependent, stress-controlled growth of large volcanoes on Venus and implications for the mechanics of magma ascent, storage and emplacement,” is a continuation of ongoing research started in 2006 by McGovern and Grosfils.

Their latest grant, awarded by NASA’s Solar System Workings division, provides funding for three years of research and will include a range of new opportunities for student involvement. For instance, students who are just starting their geology education can help perform GIS mapping and analysis of Magellan radar data—work that will help the research team “evaluate the sequence of eruptive events, as well as what structures were forming when, at several large volcanoes on Venus.” More advanced undergraduates can take on more challenging tasks, such as numerical modeling.

In his research as a physical volcanologist, Grosfils investigates the mechanics of magma reservoirs—bodies of potentially eruptible molten rock within the subsurface—and what causes them to destabilize. The question is an important one because knowing when and how a reservoir destabilizes and ruptures is critical to efforts to understand whether escaping magma is likely to move toward the surface and erupt.

“When a magma reservoir destabilizes and feeds materials toward the surface, it can produce an eruption, and persistent eruptions gradually build a load—a volcano—sitting at the surface. The addition of that load over time flexes the crust, however, and changes the stresses around the magma reservoir. This can either enhance the ongoing eruption or shut it down,” explains Grosfils, “and we’re striving to decipher what controls how this mechanical process will play out.”

What makes Venus, the closest planet to the sun, a “volcanologist’s playground”?

“Volcanoes on Earth get affected by a lot of different processes: our atmosphere, oceans, erosion, humans, landslides, plate tectonics … but on Venus, the geological record is in essence not compromised by any of those factors—no plate tectonics, minimal erosion, w no water, no liquid—so when something happens at the surface on Venus, the record is much more likely to be preserved for the long haul.”

The scientists will use observations derived from radar data and topography of Venus to construct numerical models they will use to examine the evolution of stresses within the crust and uppermost mantle as a volcano is growing.

Their research will add to our knowledge about the formation and evolution of the Venusian surface, which in turn helps scientists apply those findings to better understand the long-term evolution of volcanoes on Earth and the hazards they present to surrounding populations.

The Pearl Harbor Diaries

March 23, 2018 by Patricia Vest Comments Off

Pearl Harbor

The attack on Pearl Harbor is familiar history to most Americans, but Pomona College Professor of History Samuel Yamashita has spent years researching little-known aspects of that fateful day.

Poring over prefectural and municipal records and personal diaries, Yamashita chronicles how ordinary Japanese people responded to news of the attack, not only through mass, orchestrated gatherings but also in individual reflections. While “nearly everyone reacted enthusiastically,” with young men the most enthusiastic, Yamashita discovered exceptions that belie the notion of a monolithic response in Japan to news of war.

No one was sorrier that the war had broken out than a Tokyo housewife. Although she was born and raised in Japan, she had spent her 20s and early 30s in Los Angeles. She married and both of her children were born in the U.S. “We firmly believed that no matter how bad our relationship with America got, it would never come to war. … In fighting, one expects that the absolute and final goal was winning. … This was because I thought it was like a child challenging an adult [to fight],” wrote the housewife.

A 48-year-old aeronautical engineer was convinced that Japan could not win a modern war, and he never missed a chance to say so in public. As it happens, he was presenting his views at Tokyo’s Municipal Officials Institute on the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack. “I lectured on my pet theory that Japan was poor in resources, and scientific technique was low; no matter how much we persevered, there would be no victory in modern war,” he said.

Other accounts from young people addressed their ability to continue their schooling if the war continued. “From this point on, I would happily graduate from middle school, but would I be able to enter [ one of ] my choices-Ichiko or Niko [the top high schools in the country]? But if the war situation gets worse while I am a student, I would be drafted and probably would have to go to the battlefield with a weapon,” wrote an anxious middle-school-aged child.

A 13-year old schoolgirl in Tokyo, whose father worked in the U.S., also had mixed feelings about the war. “Today is a very exciting day. At one o’clock the emperor of Japan declared war against England and America. It was so sudden that I could not believe my ears. To fight against the places and friends I love is very hard, because my father is still there. I especially disliked and feared this news.”

A Confucian specialist with mastery of both classical Chinese and classical Japanese, Professor of History Samuel Yamashita has written extensively about early modern and modern Japanese intellectual and cultural history, focusing most recently on Japan during World War II and Japanese and fusion cuisine. He is the author of Daily Life in Wartime Japan 1940–1945 and Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese.

He plans to continue his Pearl Harbor attack response research in small towns and villages upon returning to Japan this year.

Well-Versed Research

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

Well-Versed Research What makes a poem appealing? People prefer poetry that paints a vivid picture, according to a new study from a trio of researchers, including Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, a scholar of English literature and neuroscience.

The research, which appears in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, seeks to answer an age-old question—“Why do we like what we like?”—by gauging what we find aesthetically pleasing in poetry.

The researchers had more than 400 participants read and rate poems of two genres—haiku and sonnet. After reading each poem, participants answered questions about:

Vividness—How vivid is the imagery evoked by this poem?
Emotional arousal—How relaxing or stimulating is this poem?
Emotional valence—How positive or negative is the content of this poem? (For example, a poem about death might be negative, while a poem about beautiful flowers might be positive.)
Aesthetic appeal—How enjoyable or aesthetically appealing did you find this poem?

The results showed that poems that evoked greater imagery were more aesthetically pleasing. Emotional valence also predicted aesthetic appeal, though to a lesser extent; specifically, poems that were found to be more positive were generally found to be more appealing. By contrast, emotional arousal did not have a clear relationship to aesthetic appeal.

Amy Belfi, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University (NYU) at the time of the research, is the lead author. Her co-authors are President Starr, previously dean of NYU’s College of Arts and Science, and Edward Vessel, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany. Belfi is now an assistant professor of psychological science at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Notably, readers differed greatly in what poems they found appealing. Nonetheless, there is common ground—vividness of imagery and emotional valence—in what explains these tastes, even if they vary.

“The vividness of a poem consistently predicted its aesthetic appeal,” notes Starr, author of Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (MIT Press). “Therefore, it seems that vividness of mental imagery may be a key component influencing what we like more broadly.”

“While limited to poetry,” she adds, “our work sheds light into which components most influence our aesthetic judgments and paves the way for future research investigating how we make such judgments in other domains.”

Starr’s research frequently reaches across disciplines, from the humanities into neuroscience. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to get to the heart of how people respond to paintings, music and other forms of art.

She became president of Pomona College in July 2017 after 15 years at NYU, where she conducted research with Belfi.

Critical Inquiry

March 23, 2018 by Staff Comments Off

New Critical Inquiry Courses

Call it Sagehen submersion. Twice a week, first-year students participate in one of 30 Critical Inquiry (ID1) sections—intensive classes that introduce new students to both the joy and the rigor of academia at Pomona. Last fall, there were 30 sections, including10 brand-new courses. Here are a few with intriguing titles.

iSubmit to iSpy

Media Studies Professor Mark Andrejevic says the inspiration for this course came from the recognition that this group of students will be part of the most comprehensively monitored, tracked and data-mined generation in history.

Language and Food

Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Mary Paster wanted to examine the similarities, differences and connections between language and food. “A culture’s entire way of thinking about and interacting with food can communicate much more complicated things,” she says, “like values, religious beliefs and social hierarchies.”

Say It in a Letter

“There is so much to learn from letters of the past,” says Professor of Art Mercedes Teixido. “As artifacts, they are an extension of the hand of the writer; as a document they capture the writer’s mind in a moment of time.” The course was designed to help students find their writing voice in several ways as they read and write letters that are personal and public, local and global.

The First Crusade: Monks of War

Professor of History and Classics Kenneth Wolf’s class was inspired by the involvement of monks with warriors and their “holy violence” between the years 900 and 1150.

Running for Office

Politics Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky designed her course “to dig deeper into the reasons why we have the elected officials we have and, more importantly, what would need to happen to change our politics by changing who runs for elected office.” She hopes some of her students may eventually throw their hats into the ring.

Into Desert Oneness

One person’s wasteland may be another person’s wonderland, says Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey, who has crisscrossed the American West for years in his research. The class looked at complex interactions between people and the natural desert.

Sea Chanties

November 16, 2017 by Patricia Zurita Vest Comments Off

Professor of Music Gibb Schreffler (right) and class aboard the Exy Johnson. Photo by Lushia Anson ’19

TO HELP HIS students get on board with one of his chief research interests, Music Professor Gibb Schreffler got them out of the classroom and out to sea.

On a breezy spring afternoon, aboard the two-masted sailing vessel Exy Johnson in Los Angeles’ San Pedro Bay, Ranzo—Schreffler’s chantyman alter ego—led a group of Pomona and Claremont Colleges students in singing “Goodbye, My Riley” and “Tom’s Gone a Hilo,” traditional work songs known as “sea chanties.” Adding the physical labor and rhythm of pulling halyard lines gave the students a sense of how chanty singing once fit into the work of the crew on a traditional sailing vessel. As the hoists grew more difficult toward the end of the lines, the chanty leader shifted to a “short drag” chanty such as “Haul Away, Joe” and “Haul the Bowline” to reflect the cadence of a more demanding physical effort.

The half-day sailing field trip was part of Schreffler’s special topics course, American Maritime Musical Worlds, where his class explored America’s musical development from the perspective of those who have lived or worked near the water. The goal was to better understand the context and function of the shipboard work songs prevalent in the 19th century.

According to Schreffler, the topic of American maritime music is not well-documented or researched. His scholarship focuses on the musical experiences of African Americans, and his findings place the tradition of sea chanties within the larger umbrella of African American work songs. The epicenter of the chanty genre, he explains, was not Great Britain but America—or, more precisely, the western side of the “Black Atlantic,” rimmed by Southern U.S. ports and the Caribbean.

Schreffler’s research also found that chanty singing by sailors at sea represented just one branch of a larger network of work-singing practices, most of which were performed on terra firma. In fact, far more chanties were sung by stevedores—the workers loading ships—than were ever sung by sailors. Sailors’ labor tended to be associated with white workers, and stevedores’ labor was associated with Black workers—which partly explains the neglect of the latter’s story in ethnocentric narratives told by English and Anglo-American authors of the last century.

Schreffler’s research has been challenging, in part, because much of what has been presented in the last century has created a strong bias against recognizing African Americans as creators of the sea chanty genre. His published work on the subject includes the article “Twentieth Century Editors and the Re-envisioning of Chanties,” in the maritime studies journal The Nautilus.

His research takes him to archives and ports in cities around the country that were centers of maritime commerce, such as Mobile, Alabama, and Galveston, Texas. He also has traveled internationally in a traditional sailing ship from the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic, to the coast of France, to study applied seamanship in order to better understand the historical texts he studies.

Since the maritime work songs Schreffler studies are not used in today’s sailing, recreating their performance helps him imagine them and find answers, despite the lack of detailed information available. Since 2008 he has been working on posting online his renditions of every documented chanty song he has encountered. His purpose for the recordings is to simulate psychologically the process of acquiring a repertoire and learning the genre’s method and style.

“Scholars in my field, ethnomusicology, traditionally employ fieldwork to interpret living culture as ‘text,’” he explains. “In order to study culture of the past in this fashion, I try to convert history into a sort of living text in the present.”

Last spring was his first time teaching the course, but Schreffler previously brought chanties to Pomona College and The Claremont Colleges through the Maritime Music Ensemble he founded and directed in 2013. In the ensemble, all songs were taught orally to simulate a realistic way of acquiring the tradition. Students needed no prior formal training and took part in engaging sessions of rehearsals or jam sessions as well as performances.

Experiencing music in order to understand it is at the core of Schreffler’s teaching and research. Also a scholar of the vernacular music of South Asia’s Punjab region, he learned to play the large drum known as the dhol. “Without my doing this, many of my interlocutors would have had no idea how to relate to what I was doing in studying Punjabi music,” he says.

Schreffler has plans to return to his Punjabi research and work on a forthcoming book during his upcoming sabbatical year. In addition, he headed to the Caribbean during the past summer to get reacquainted with the Jamaican music scene in order to prepare his next spring course. Among the topics he will explore in that class, he says, is the connection of Jamaican music to the beginnings of hip hop and electronic music.

“Some of my students are very interested in producing or becoming DJs, so this course could be of special interest to them, given the connection to the origin of hip hop and dance music.

“My goal with this class, as in all of my classes, is to give them information and lively discussion that will challenge them about something that is related to a topic they’re interested in to begin with. I don’t necessarily tell them that it is related, but I drive them to make the connection. Once they see the connection, it transforms their learning about the original topic of the class.”

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

November 16, 2017 by Staff Comments Off

AS SUMMER CAME to a close, many Pomona students returned to campus with new career experiences, thanks to internships across the country and around the globe. Through the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP), 68 students received funding to participate in work opportunities that would otherwise be unpaid, while others found paid internships that also allowed them to live in new cities and gain new experiences. Here are six of their stories.

Marisol Diaz ’18

Major: American Studies

Internship: Legislative intern with California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia ’99

Location: Sacramento, California

“Interacting with staffers in Assemblymember Cristina Garcia’s office has been great. She has such a wonderful team of people; specifically, in her office, there are a lot of women and women of color. It’s very encouraging to me, and it’s very important in shaping my experience to be surrounded by women.”

Jacob Feord ’18

Double Major: Economics and Japanese Language and Literature

Internship: Intern with the United States Department of State at U.S. Embassy Tokyo-Akasaka

Location: Tokyo, Japan

“A U.S. government institution managed by Americans, located in Tokyo and staffed largely by Japanese local staff makes for a very unique workplace culture. The mixture of languages and business ideologies is a concoction absolutely unique to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. At first it seemed difficult to navigate, but I ended up having a lot of fun getting to know the quirks of the embassy system.”

Pablo Ordoñez ’18

Major: Public Policy Analysis

Internship: Policy intern with the United States

Department of Commerce Census Bureau

Location: Washington, D.C.

“Everyone has this big misconception about the government: It’s a very slow, monotonous, perfunctory place. But like any company, it has a CEO and high-level executives, meetings, people very connected to the mission of the bureau—and that’s helpful to me for any industry I’ll go into. Government could be slow and inefficient, but there are people there who are very committed to the work they are doing who have extremely innovative ideas.”

Carly Grimes ’18

Double Major: Cognitive Science and Politics

Internship: Intern with the Yale University Canine Cognition Center

Location: New Haven, Conn.

“My favorite part of this internship was interacting with the dog’s owners, since I love communicating science research to the general public. The owners were always very interested and would ask great questions that sharpened my ability to make complex scientific theories more easily digestible for people with vastly varying scientific backgrounds.”

Sylvia Gitonga ’20

Major: Economics

Internship: Investment analyst intern with the East African Reinsurance Company

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

“I learned how to establish and maintain relationships not only with clients but also with the company’s employees. I also became more vocal and confident in terms of presenting ideas to people. Although I secured this internship by myself, the one-on-one meetings with Wanda Gibson in the Career Development Office, with regard to my career path, really played a huge role in acquiring the internship. The PCIP funding, however, is what really enabled me to carry out this internship. If not for that, my career growth would be stagnant. ”

Samuel Kelly ’18

Major: Media Studies

Internship: Intern with The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Location: New York City

“I’d say one of the biggest things I’ve learned at this internship is the level of professionalism necessary to make a massive production like The Daily Show operate smoothly and at a high level. It takes a lot of people to get The Daily Show on the air every night, and I’m always impressed at how everyone in the office knows exactly what they need to do to make it successful.”

Thesis Season

June 28, 2017 by April Xiaoyi Xu ’18 Comments Off

Cinderella and Its Politics illustration

DURING THE SPRING semester, as Pomona seniors made their way through their final classes and prepared to slip into their graduation gowns, most still had one big item left on their to-do lists: their senior thesis.

The senior thesis is a capstone project that may well be the longest paper students have ever written. Intimidating as the project may sound—it normally takes a full semester or, in some cases, an entire year to complete—the consensus among students is that it lies at the heart of Pomona’s liberal arts education, giving them an opportunity to connect knowledge from across disciplines and to delve into a specific topic in depth.

As a rising senior soon to embark on a similar journey and eager to know more, I interviewed seniors from a variety of majors to learn about their experiences and seek their advice. The 10 projects featured here—ranging from a novel about the politics of fairy tales to an ambitious endeavor to teach computers how to dance—offer just a taste of the diversity of inventive work students are producing in their final year at Pomona.

Cinderella and Its Politics
Bianca Kendall Cockrell ’17, politics major

After an angry fairy sends everyone in her castle into an enchanted sleep, Princess Alexis must go to America to retrieve the one item that will break the curse: an apple. She befriends Rumpelstiltskin and a vegetarian dragon and ends up in New York City, a place where democracy reigns supreme…

This may not sound much like a politics thesis, and indeed, Bianca Cockrell’s thesis is anything but conventional. Instead of writing a traditional academic paper, Cockrell wrote a novel about the politics of fairy tales, an idea that she got excited about when she took Professor Susan McWilliams’ Politics and Literature seminar in the spring of her junior year. Over the following summer, she continued her quest with a Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) project titled “Once Upon a Regime,” for which she traveled around several European countries and visited fairy tale centers, museums and universities, where she sought insights from fairy tale scholars.

As part of her overall project, Cockrell also submitted two other papers—a political theory piece about revolutions and nation building in fairy tales, and a case-study analysis of modernism and the idea of America presented in early Disney princess films. She proudly calls her thesis “a three-pronged political-theory, creative-writing and historical-case study.”

Cockrell’s reasoning for using this unique format stemmed from a “practice what you preach” idea: “I wanted to see how using classic fairy tale characteristics like ambiguous characters and clichéd storylines contributes to the success of the story and the successful transmission of the ideas and values in the story.” Through this process, Cockrell was able to explore fascinating questions, such as whether Cinderella is a revolutionary, whether too much freedom is good or bad and the role of fairy tale as a democratic vehicle.

Uber, Lyft and the Environment
David Ari Wagner ’17, environmental analysis (EA) major

Uber and Lyft, the “unregulated taxis” that are putting traditional taxi companies out of business, are expanding quickly and changing the landscape of urban transportation. David Wagner’s thesis analyzes the environmental impacts of such companies, particularly in California, with respect to travel behavior, congestion and fuel efficiency. The literature on these topics is new, which Wagner says was one of the most challenging and exciting aspects of this project. His analysis suggests that in several major urban areas, fuel-efficient taxis are being replaced by less fuel-efficient Uber and Lyft vehicles.

Wagner selected the topic while interning at UC Davis’s Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways program, which focuses on three revolutionary developments in transportation: shared, automated and electrified vehicles.” Like the EA major, Wagner’s project is interdisciplinary, utilizing economic, statistical and political analyses, all of which he believes are essential to an understanding of environmental issues. EA can be an emotional topic, he notes—which is why it is both hard and necessary to approach it rationally.

Wagner considers it a good idea to write a thesis as an extension of another project. He also suggests that students who are about to embark on this journey treat it as seriously as they would treat a job, eventually aiming to send the completed product to employers in hopes of making a real contribution.

Estimating the Unknown
Benjamin Yenji (Benji) Lu ’17, mathematics and philosophy major

Benji Lu is a math and philosophy double-major interested in going into law or doing data science and statistical research. For his thesis in mathematics, he developed a method of enhancing the predictive power of a commonly used machine-learning algorithm known as “random forests.” His research seeks to quantify the degree of confidence associated with random-forest predictions in order to make them more meaningful and actionable. To do so, he has been working to increase understanding of the statistical theory behind the algorithm itself.

Lu’s interest in integrating statistics with machine learning began his junior year, when he took a course on computational statistics with Professor Jo Hardin. His thesis grew out of a subsequent SURP project with Hardin, during which he also worked with an applied-mathematics research group at UCLA. Over the course of his SURP project, Lu met daily with Hardin, who encouraged him to write daily reports on what he had learned, what he had done and what he still did not understand. Once the academic year began, they met weekly to continue the project as his senior thesis.

Lu says he has enjoyed working with an expert in such a close setting and applying knowledge from his classes to research. For him, mathematical reasoning can be fun, creative and exciting, and it connects well with philosophy, the other half of his double major. Both subjects, he explains, involve rigorous, purely logical argumentation that can yield both elegant theory and practical results.

So You Think You Can Dance?
Huangjian (Sean) Zhu ’17, computer science (CS) major

Sean Zhu got the idea for his unique thesis a couple of years back while playing Dance Central, a game that scores the player’s dance moves using motion capture. A computer science major and a member of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company, Zhu thought it would be cool to combine the two interests by teaching computers how to dance.

But how does a machine learn dance steps?

“The computer learns from past data,” Zhu explains. “In this case, the data would come from past dance movements.” Using Kinect, the same device that Dance Central employs, Zhu was able to generate and input dance-movement data to his program.

“Computer creativity is a rising field of research,” says Zhu. “We may tend to think that computers cannot be creative, as creativity is a capability that is typically thought to be exclusive to humans. This project challenged me to think about what creativity is and ways to approach this question.”

The Philosophy of Political Control
Matthew Daniel Dahl ’17, politics major

While studying in China during his junior year, Matt Dahl took a Classical Chinese class that exposed him to many original texts in the literary language of ancient China. That’s when the politics major, specializing in political theory, began to question the usual interpretation of the writings of China’s most famous philosopher.

While contemporary scholars assume that Confucius was most concerned with the cultivation of benevolence, Dahl challenges that conclusion through a close reading of the Analects. His thesis argues that the true message of the text concerns methods of political control and the maintenance of power. His contention is that Confucius supports rule by the so-called “gentlemen” not because they are benevolent but rather because they know how to be crafty in their speech. In fact, Dahl claims, “gentlemanliness” is not at all coincident with any of the traditional tenets of Confucian ethics.

Such a reading has been neglected, he suggests, because scholars have overlooked the possibility that Confucius wrote the Analects in the same esoteric manner that Plato wrote the Republic. By applying new interpretive procedures, Dahl believes he has revealed some of the original, radical political teachings that Confucius subtly sought to impart.

Exploring the Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
Ana Celia Núñez ’17, late antique medieval studies (LAMS) major

Ana Núñez’s yearlong thesis examines six early Latin Christian pilgrim itineraria—the ancient equivalent of road maps. Using sources in both English and Latin, Núñez w sought to understand the ways pilgrims experienced the Holy Land as a landscape of blurred temporal boundaries between the biblical past and the pilgrim’s own present.

She recalls that she first came across LAMS in her sophomore year of high school, when she was a prospective Pomona student and happened to attend Professor Ken Wolf’s Medieval Mediterranean class. Now, with her thesis completed and her Pomona diploma in hand, she is heading to the University of Cambridge for a master’s of philosophy in medieval history, after which she aims to return to the U.S. for a Ph.D. and a career in academia.

Núñez says she found the thesis experience memorable and rewarding, and she has one bit of advice for students yet to embark on the journey: “Trust yourself, and it will get done.”

The Screen, the Stage and Beyond
Jaya Jivika Rajani ’17, media studies and environmental analysis major

Napier Award recipient Jivika Rajani spent her senior year working on two nontraditional theses, each with a uniquely creative focus.

For her media studies thesis, she curated a multimedia experience dubbed MixBox, transforming a section of the Kallick Gallery at Pitzer College into a multimedia installation that guided participants through an interactive conversation with a stranger. The catch was that they were separated by an opaque curtain and would never see the person they had just gotten to know. Rajani then filmed debrief interviews in which her participants reflected upon the experience of making connections with strangers when they couldn’t rely on snap judgments based on appearance.

For her environmental analysis thesis, Rajani drew on her background in theatre to write a play rooted in identity politics and environmentalism. After reading other environmental plays and researching works written about the Indian diaspora, she developed her three main characters to represent different schools of environmental thought, from deep ecology to ecofeminism. As one of five winners of Pomona’s 10-Minute Play Festival, Rajani had an opportunity to direct and act in an extract of the play with some friends. She is also working on adapting her work for the screen.

Reflecting on the process, Rajani said that “juggling two theses at once was definitely hard, but I really enjoyed it because I was always working on something that I was genuinely passionate about and felt that I owned from start to finish. I also couldn’t have asked for better advisors—they’ve been very supportive of my plans to continue developing my work beyond Pomona, so I definitely see my projects as much more than just graduation requirements.”

Exploring the History of Labor and War
Jonathan Richard van Harmelen ’17, history and French major

Jonathan van Harmelen’s yearlong thesis on Japanese American history during World War II focuses on the relationship between labor and the war effort. His research began while he was interning at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he worked under Noriko Sanefuji on an exhibit titled “Righting a Wrong.” He has also worked with Professor Samuel Yamashita through a number of history seminars.

The project involved working with public historians, collecting oral histories of survivors, reviewing newspaper articles and statistics and making site visits. Though numerous historians have examined this subject, van Harmelen believes further understanding such forgotten narratives is now needed more than ever. He notes that “the subject of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II is one of the darkest chapters in United States history. While I am not Japanese-American, understanding this crucial subject is a step that all Americans should take, and is now very timely given our unstable political climate.”

For his semester-long French thesis, Van Harmelen focused on the Algerian War and memory as represented through Alain Resnais’ 1963 film Muriel.

An Environmental Perspective on Local Issues in Claremont
Frank Connor Lyles ’17, environmental analysis (EA) major

Frank Lyles, inspired by the thesis of a 2015 EA alumnus, focused on local climate change, groundwater and water-rights issues by reviewing planning documents in Claremont.

Lyles saw the thesis, accompanied by “lots of caffeine” and many a fun conversation, as an awesome educational opportunity and took an interdisciplinary approach, applying the skills he learned from his history, geology and statistics classes to complement his work in EA. He says he thoroughly enjoyed working with Professor Char Miller, who provides feedback on all EA majors’ papers, as well as with Professor W. Bowman Cutter from the Economics Department.

During his final semester at Pomona he took an econometrics class and decided to use what he was learning there to expand his thesis. Part of the challenge was tracking down relevant people and generating interest among stakeholders.

As a Pomona College Orientation Adventure (OA) leader, Lyles likes to think about how EA changes the way he views everything: He stops looking at mountains as just mountains and now understands them as dynamic things that are constantly changing.

Law, Public Policy and Technology
Jesse Solomon Lieberfeld ’17, philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) major

Jesse Lieberfeld’s yearlong, in-depth investigation focuses on the relationship between the Fourth Amendment and modern communications, especially how laws that were developed long before the emergence of modern technology should be interpreted today and in the future. As a PPE major, Lieberfeld approached his research question from both legal and philosophical perspectives, poring over a range of U.S. Supreme Court opinions, articles on privacy, law review papers and interviews.

One of the challenges with this thesis project, says Lieberfeld, was that “there is a gap between studies that focus on law and public policy and those focused on technology; many are experts in one of these fields, but not all.” Lieberfeld’s thesis attempts to bridge this gap.

In particular, Lieberfeld says he enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of this project and is grateful for The Claremont Colleges, since the politics and philosophy departments at each school have different specialties. He says he also appreciates the fact that Pomona does not have too many core requirements, allowing him to take a lot of niche classes.

April Xiaoyi Xu ’18 is a junior majoring in politics and minoring in Spanish.

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