IN THE MESKWAKI LANGUAGE, There is no word for poem. So poet and novelist Ray Young Bear ’73 made up his own: pekwimoni, a word that translates roughly as “story folded up like a fist.”

It’s a word that seems perfectly suited to the interwoven cultural imagery that fills his work. “My poems are therefore origami,” he explains, “large stories that have been compressed with multiple layers of images and messages. They can be complicated or simple, but they’re replete, once the key is turned, with Algonquian-based history.”

Algonquian is the group of Native American languages—and cultures—to which Meskwaki belongs. The Meskwaki, or “People of the Red Earth,” originated in the Great Lakes region of what is now New York and have a long, tragic history of being driven westward, all the way to Kansas. Finally, in the 1800s, they doubled back to central Iowa, bought a chunk of prairie beside the Iowa River and took root there in what is now the Meskwaki Settlement.

Meskwaki language is spoken today by only a few hundred people, and Young Bear is grateful to be among them. Since his formal education took place entirely in English, however, he didn’t learn to read and write Meskwaki until much later, in adulthood. Today he takes pride in being one of the few Native American authors with literary mastery of their native tongue. “I’ve got contemporaries who are very famous who may not be well versed in their language, but I happen to be halfway proficient. That’s a rarity, in my opinion.”

In his early days of writing poetry, he recalls, he usually thought his verses out first in Meskwaki and then rewrote them in English. “But as I started growing up, getting mature, I realized that oftentimes it was just the opposite. It eventually got to the point where, you know, I was writing far too much English; then I sometimes had to go back and start redoing stuff in Meskwaki again.”

Indeed, the two languages flow together in many of his recent poems. Lines of Meskwaki appear here and there among his verses, and his newest volume—Manifestation Wolverine: The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear, a compilation of his earlier collections plus a slate of new poems—includes works like “Three Translated Poems for October,” originally composed in Meskwaki and then translated into English, as well as a series of old Meskwaki peyote and social songs.

But though he uses English with poetic skill and depends upon it to bring his work to a wide range of readers, he still regards it as an alien tongue, part of a culture that subjugated, displaced and nearly wiped out his own. “Sometimes I wonder how much I should accept the English language, because it is, after all, colonialism in progress,” he muses. “Maybe I don’t want to accept the English language because it would mean that we’re defeated. You know, you don’t want to succumb to the civilization that almost killed you.”

Old Bear, Young Bear

The slightly worn La-Z-Boy recliner in Young Bear’s living room appears in some of his poems as a place of visions. It’s where he sits when he’s seeking spiritual guidance, and a number of his poems originated in scenes dreamt there.

Today, however, he has ceded that place of honor to his guest and retreated to a desk chair against the wall, where he sits gazing out at the riot of springtime greenery as he talks about his life and the culture and religion that inspire much of his poetry. On the wall behind him are framed photos of his six adopted children, along with concert posters, Meskwaki artifacts and memorabilia from poetry readings across the country. To his left is a big ceremonial drum, on which he occasionally taps out a rhythm to illustrate a story.

“Most of what I know with regard to language, religion and culture comes from my grandmother and my father,” he says. “Both of them were quite religious, other than the fact that they had different, you know, political beliefs.”

By “different” he means bitterly opposed. His parents were members of powerful clans that represented opposite poles of tribal politics—the traditional and the progressive. “My parents were star-crossed lovers like the Capulets and the Montagues,” he says. “My mother is an Old Bear from the conservative, traditional chief-in-absentia line of beliefs. My father came from the progressive Young Bear faction that believed in working with outside society and getting ahead. And so the Old Bears and the Young Bears were against each other, and then my parents fell in love and had me.”

With his parents separated by political feuding, Young Bear lived until the age of 10 with his grandmother, Ada K. Old Bear, a seminal figure in his life and work. Indeed, the very first poem in his first published collection, Winter of the Salamander, is titled “Grandmother” and begins with the words: “if I were to see / her shape from a mile away / i’d know so quickly / that it would be her.”

“My grandmother didn’t speak any English,” he says, “so I’d converse with her in Meskwaki. She was the one who basically began outlining the world order for me to understand just exactly why we are here.”

Those traditional beliefs still profoundly color his view of the world. “Animism is probably the best way I can describe my beliefs,” he says. “When I go into an elementary school, or even graduate school level, the analogy I give them is: If you see a tree outside, for you and me, we can look at it scientifically and also for aesthetic reasons. But for Meskwakis, they look upon the tree as a protector, as a remnant of the gods that were left here after the first time the world was obliterated.”

The Accidental Poet

Starting in the seventh grade, Young Bear entered the public schools of Tama, Iowa. “That was the first time I had Caucasians for classmates,” he recalls, “and that was when I realized that I was behind in my academics.”

He recalls an essay assignment in particular—one he thought he’d aced. “The teacher came up to me and said, ‘Ray.’ She kind of whispered it and said, ‘Do you know what you did?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ She said, ‘You’ve written a poem, not an essay.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And she walked away. But I didn’t know what that meant. What’s a poem?”

The answer would come to him through popular songs sung by the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. He recalls becoming so fascinated by the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence” that he wrote them down on a piece of paper and carried them around in his billfold. Soon Young Bear would begin to write more intentionally, and poetry would shape his life in surprising ways.

For example, it was a poem that brought him halfway across the continent to Pomona College.

The poem, he says, “was basically a proclamation of my native identity or something like that, a very awkward, very raw poem that I had written in the ninth or 10th grade.” But when he was a high school senior, it was printed in a magazine published by the Upward Bound program, and soon thereafter, he received a surprising letter. “It said, ‘I read your poem, and I was wondering if you’d like to come to school at Pomona College in California. We can offer you a $30-a-month stipend and travel to and from home whenever necessary,’ and so forth.”

It sounded too good to pass up, so he took the ticket the College sent him, and with $25 in his pocket and a paper bag full of snacks, he boarded the train for a two-day trip out West.

At Pomona, he soon found himself in over his head academically—some classes he thrived in; others he found utterly incomprehensible. Today he suspects that he underestimated his own academic abilities and sabotaged his own college career. In any case, after two years of focusing on the classes he loved and ignoring the others, he dropped out and returned home. But he still remembers those two years as some of the most influential on his poetry, mainly because of the poets he encountered on the Pomona campus.

“I attended every poetry reading that I could,” he says. “And they had lots of great poets—nontypical poets like Charles Bukowski. He was the one that really got me interested in bluntness and being, you know, rude.” He also remembers meeting classmates and fellow budding poets Brenda Hillman ’73 and Garrett Hongo ’73 and spending an increasing amount of time alone, writing poetry. “In Manifestation Wolverine, the first 60 or 70 pages are all from Pomona,” he says. “So that was really a prolific time.”

After Pomona, he became a college hopper, spending time at the University of Iowa, Grinnell College, Northern Iowa University and Iowa State University, taking what he wanted from each while resisting requirements that would have led to a degree.

Through it all, he continued to write, though he still refused to think of himself as a poet. In fact, when the University of Dakota Press, which had printed a couple of his poems, offered to publish his chapbook, “that scared me silly,” he recalls. “I only had 30 or 40 poems, and I thought, ‘I’m just a young man trying to write poetry, and it’s imitation. It’s not real.’”

Ironically, it was his traditional grandmother who encouraged him to continue to develop his burgeoning talent with the English language.

“By the time I got to 30 years of age, she began to say, ‘You should use your abilities to write about the history of your uncles and your grandfather, and how he purchased this land in 1856. And the only way you can communicate that is to write in English.’ Which floored me because, at first, she was the one saying, ‘Don’t learn anything, grandson, from the school,’ when she sent me to school, ‘because the whites are always trying to steal our language.’”

Vision Quests

Even today, despite his success as a writer, with four books of poetry and two novels under his belt, Young Bear shies away from referring to himself as a poet. He prefers to call himself a “word collector.”

“A word collector is primarily someone like myself who is bilingual,” he explains, “who is interested in the artistic communication process with the English language but doesn’t use it on an everyday basis. So it’s necessary for me to investigate these words and to see how I can implement them within my work.”

Much like a scrap metal artist, he says, he collects verbal scraps and reassembles them into art.

Even beneath the words, he refuses to take full credit for the images and ideas that make up his poetry. Many of them, he explains, come to him in dreams. “I tend to view myself a lot more these days as somebody who is basically channeling information,” he says. “My grandmother would always say, ‘You and I are protected by spirits invisible to us. They are always around us,’ And so I believe that part of the reason I am able to write these things without any academic foundation is the fact that I’m simply channeling those energies that have been here before.”

To some, that may sound metaphorical, but Young Bear couldn’t be more literal. Indeed, in recent years, he has become more and more involved in trying to use his ability to channel those spiritual connections for more mundane purposes, like solving crimes.

It began with the murder of his brother in 1992, an unsolved crime he would fictionalize in his first novel, Black Eagle Child. “We contacted a psychic then in Dallas, Texas, who had some insights into Meskwaki clan names and some teenage suspects,” he recalls. “Over the years, my parents always believed these suspects would slowly kill themselves with drugs and alcohol. They got away, but perhaps not really.”

A few years later, after watching the news about three missing campers in Yosemite Park, he fell asleep in his La-Z-Boy and dreamt that he was one of the women, talking to a mysterious character through a car window. He took note of the license plate on a nearby car, but forgot it upon waking. The next day, he returned to his La-Z-Boy for a vision quest. “I was able to pin the license down and forward the info to the Sacramento FBI,” he recalls, though he has no idea if anyone ever took him seriously.

But the experience also served his poetry, inspiring a poem called “Three Brothers.”

The vision quests and the “word-collecting” poetry are all part of what Young Bear terms his experimental approach to life and to literature. “There’s no mold; there’s no pattern that I have,” he says. “It’s just an experiment. Everything that I do, almost, is an experiment. That’s what I like about poetry, because, you know, you can go back to something and rewrite it and change it over and over again. I’ve been working on some of my poems for 10 years.”

First Language

Maybe it was inevitable that Young Bear, caught from an early age in the tug-of-war between the traditional and the progressive, would be conflicted about the role of the two languages that have shaped his life as a Meskwaki and a poet. Though he continues to work on his poetry in English, as well as the third volume of his Black Eagle Child trilogy, he is also hard at work on a volume of nonfiction—a combination memoir and Meskwaki history. More and more, he is convinced that the true value of his work will be in whatever power it has to help preserve Meskwaki culture, religion and language.

“Culturally, with tribal languages predicted to die, poetry might be the vehicle against linguistic atrophy,” he muses. Still, the poet who refuses to think of himself as a poet continues to caution himself against taking his own literary ambitions too seriously.

“I wish I had met and been influenced by a person like myself, that fall in 1969,” he says, “who would’ve told me: ‘Hey, young Indian man, you can write and compose poems in English, yes, and you may eventually do it well. However, English isn’t your God-given language. Learn from it as much as you can, but always keep in mind that the first language that gave you animistic insights can’t be found in English. Foremost, English is a language that was used to convert us. In time, those colonial-based persuasions will reverse. Many will realize, even the best writers, that our first languages are key to survival and identity. As your grandmother probably told you, the Meskwaki creator doesn’t speak English. When he asks you what you have done, I can assure you, son, he won’t care about your books in English nor whether your life’s goal was to write a best-seller.’”

—Photos by Mark Wood

With Kailey Lawson ’17
Double Major: Philosophy and Cognitive Science

FOR THE PUBLIC, the term “psychopath” is almost interchangeable with “serial killer,” but Kailey Lawson ’17 believes most people with the personality disorder get a bad rap, and she wants to devote much of her future work in the field of cognitive science to understanding why they think and act the way they do.

“When I tell people that I study psychopaths, they say, ‘Oh my gosh! Why? Those are terrible people!’” she says. “But I think as we understand personality more, we understand that there’s a continuum. You’re not a good person or a bad person—there are all of these things that play together. And psychopathic traits are the same way—there’s a continuum and, you know, everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum.”

In fact, she notes, the traits that mark psychopathy are often present in prominent members of society. “There’s lots of research that high-powered individuals, like CEOs or surgeons, have many psychopathic personality traits. Do you want your surgeon to feel bad when they’re cutting into you? No, you don’t. You want them to be somewhat detached and have a steady hand and not be thinking ‘Oh no, I’m going to hurt him.’”

High-functioning individuals with psychopathic traits haven’t been studied very much, Lawson says, because of the stigma attached to the term. So, in her senior thesis in cognitive science, she tested people from across the spectrum. “I was looking at inhibition, because a core facet of psychopathic traits is disinhibition, a lack of stopping yourself or controlling yourself, even when you might know you should act otherwise.”

What she found was that people who scored higher on the index of psychopathic traits also demonstrated a real deficit in inhibition. “And so I think that illustrates that people with higher levels of psychopathic tendencies don’t have the same abilities that people with lower levels of them do, and they should be treated differently in the legal system, the same way that we would treat people with other cognitive deficits differently.”

And that starts, she believes, with trying to understand them instead of demonizing them.

From an early age, spurn fiction for nonfiction. Fall in love with true-crime books because of your interest in human motives. Aspire to be a criminal profiler until you learn that your image of a profiler is a TV fiction, not a real job.

In high school, follow your mother’s example and get involved in community service, volunteering at a food bank and local homeless shelter. Fall in love with the work partially because you find it fulfilling and have a deep interest in understanding the problems of the people you’re helping.

Know that you don’t want to follow in your brother Nick’s footsteps at Pomona College, but end up deciding it’s the best place for you anyway. And though you’ve always thought philosophy was abstract and boring, take a first-year seminar with Professor Julie Tannenbaum in medical ethics and discover that the field deals with intriguing real-world challenges.

Love your class in forensic psychology with Claremont McKenna College Professor Daniel Krauss so much that you end up as his research assistant. Major in both philosophy and cognitive science because you see them as two ways of understanding human behavior; then spend a summer with Harvard’s Mind/ Brain/Behavior program in Trento, Italy.

Inspired by a lecture by author/activist Bryan Stevenson on mass incarceration, follow his advice about getting “proximate” to the problem. Spend a summer working behind barbed wire at Patton State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in the California correctional system. While there, take an interest in psychopathy, which you come to believe is misunderstood.

As a senior, write two theses on the subject of psychopathy—an examination of the ethical theory of the blameworthiness of psychopaths for your philosophy major, and a study of inhibition deficits in high-functioning psychopaths for your “cog-sci” major.

Conclude that psychopathic traits should be treated as a mitigating factor in both moral and legal domains, and decide you want to study the subject further to be able to influence public policy. Gain admission to a top Ph.D. psychology program at UC Davis with a professor whose research offers opportunities to pursue your chosen work into the future.

In the basement of Bridges Auditorium is a long, meandering hallway lined with photos and posters, offering a history lesson about the amazing parade of celebrities who have passed through here since the facility was completed 87 years ago. Among them are international figures, from Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt to the Dalai Lama and Coretta Scott King; explorers like Admiral Richard Byrd and Amelia Earhart; authors like Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder; poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg and Maya Angelou; comedians ranging from Bob Hope to Lewis Black; performers like Marcel Marceau and Edgar Bergen; such actors as Basil Rathbone and James Earl Jones; and great musicians from every era and musical style, including Vladimir Horowitz, Ray Charles, Andrés Segovia, Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Yehudi Menuhin, Dionne Warwick, Fiona Apple and Taylor Swift. The list, like the hallway, goes on and on.

Signed photo of singer Marian Anderson

Poster for polar explorer Admiral Richard E. Byrd

Poster for singer Ray Charles

Photo of Sir Winston Churchill

Photo of aviator Amelia Earhart

Photo of author Lewis Sinclair

Photo of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay

IN THE WEEKS before she is to leave New York City and move across the country, scholar and future college president G. Gabrielle Starr really should be shedding books and clearing shelves. Instead, a steady flow of new material keeps arriving, at her request and much to her delight.

Starr is reading ahead, poring over Pomona’s history, taking in all she can about the College’s past and present. This makes sense: Gabi was the kind of kid who made up homework for herself if she didn’t have any, just to have the chance to use her encyclopedia. By the age of 3, she was reading the newspaper headlines aloud from her father’s lap, and her mom recalls that “she always had a book—everywhere she went.”

From those early days, she never let go of the tomes.

Louisa May Alcott gave way to Immanuel Kant; Pride and Prejudice and Cane replaced Little House on the Prairie. As a professor of 18th-century English literature whose interests widened to incorporate neuroscience, Starr was soon writing the books, and her reading extended to fMRI brain scans as she found new methods to pursue her work in aesthetics. She also knew how to read people and the complex situations that come with leadership: Still pursuing intensive research, Starr became a savvy and much-loved administrator at New York University, rising to become dean of the College of Arts and Science, with some 7,000 students in her division.

Today, The History of Pomona College, 1887–1969 is at the top of her reading list as she prepares to take office as the College’s 10th president in July, with her formal inauguration in the fall. “I’m not a fan of pomp and circumstance,” says Starr. “I want to start off my time at Pomona with immersion. What brings people to Claremont is that magic of a place” where the life of the mind thrives.

And yet there is an unmistakable sense of excitement at Pomona about her arrival. In her campus meetings, Starr clearly connected with her audiences, both intellectually and in a personal sense. Just as telling is the reaction at NYU, where colleagues seem to be undergoing the five stages of grief.

“She is ferociously brilliant. Absolutely brilliant,” says Professor Ernest Gilman, an English Department colleague and friend who has known her since she arrived at NYU in 2000. “There are a lot of smart people around here, and she stands out as an intellectual force.”

“There’s nobody who doesn’t like Gabi,” adds Gilman, noting that Starr “knows how to get things done without rattling anyone’s cage.”

Pamela Newkirk, NYU’s director of undergraduate journalism, puts it this way:

“I mean, no one’s smarter than Gabi. You can be as smart, maybe,” she says, laughing. “But beyond that, she’s also very warm, just on top of everything. I imagine she doesn’t sleep much because she seems to be everywhere. …

“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t adore Gabi. I just don’t. There probably is somewhere. I’ve never met that person. And that is not an easy thing at a place like this. This is a huge university. … And she’s also someone who I knew would be president of a college.”

STARR HAD ALREADY skipped kindergarten and the eighth grade and was still three years shy of adulthood when she got her hands on a copy of the Emory University course catalog, poring over the lists of classes. She remembers the cover was a watercolor scene of autumn trees on the campus and the theme was “A Community of Scholars.”

“It just seemed really magical,” she recalls. “And it was.”

Yes, Starr would set off for college at the age of 15, after some negotiations with her folks, who certainly knew the value of an education. Her mother, Barbara Starr, taught English and American history at Lincoln High in Tallahassee, Fla., the school Gabi attended. A sharp card player to this day, she negotiated for the teacher’s union. Gabi’s father, G. Daviss Starr, would earn his college degree at the age of 40 and eventually go on to become a professor at Florida A&M. An eloquent speaker with a penchant for Southern witticisms, he had a particular interest in the psychology of literacy. Her older brother, George, had already blazed the trail when, as a math whiz, he took off for college at 15, too.

Learning was at the core of life in their home just outside Tallahassee. Her grandmother (on her father’s side) also lived with them for much of Gabi’s childhood, telling family stories that reached back to the Jim Crow South, Reconstruction and the years before emancipation. The tales ranged from the humorous to the poignant and painful, but they were linked by an enduring faith, a shared commitment to human dignity and a belief in education through the generations. Always precocious, Starr not only took in the history but was eager to share what she learned. Knowledge didn’t mean much outside of a human web that would shape and refine it. “She was a born teacher,” says her mom. “When she would go to Sunday school, she would come back and teach her grandmother the Sunday school lessons.”

Still, as she reached her teens, her dad did worry about Gabi heading off to college so young, and wanted her to consider a women’s college. A deal was struck: She could go as far away as Atlanta’s Emory University, a roughly five-hour drive from their home.

“She was always adventurous,” says her mom. “She didn’t stop until she tried it. And you couldn’t stop her.”

At Emory, Starr plunged right into campus life. She started off studying chemistry, with plans to become a doctor and also to study music. There was so much to explore at the university: She even did a stint on the women’s club rugby team.

“I kind of felt like I was really thirsty and I got a drink,” she recalls. “Or maybe it really was like being in a candy shop—going to college—so many different possibilities to study things and learn about things that I never even conceived of.”

Soon enough the then-emerging field of women’s studies drew her in, as she became fascinated with who holds power in society and who doesn’t, and that discipline would be the source of her B.A. and M.A at Emory. She also spent a year at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, studying philosophy of language, Arabic and French while becoming enamored with French classicism. “I’m a bit of an intellectual magpie,” she says.

Starr, though, would soon find an enduring intellectual focus, one that would guide the rest of her career.

IN HER ELONGATED NYU office overlooking Washington Square Park, Starr pulls one of her most beloved volumes from the shelf filled with books she has saved from her college days. It’s a copy of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, stuffed with more notes than a street preacher’s Bible. She kept it from a course on the book taught by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard during her senior year at Emory.

That class opened her to the world of aesthetics and beauty and the sublime, a realm she has never really left. “I had never even heard of the sublime. I had no idea what it was. It was a fascinating course that really sparked an interest for me in how imagination works, and how human beings engage with all of the things that we create, and those ideas so big that we could never hope to make them real,” Starr says.

Exploring aesthetics was a natural path. Gabi’s father, who died in 2014, had always had a taste for collecting fine things: decorative arts and porcelain from China, as well as family documents and expansive books. Gabi herself had tapped into the arts at a young age, taking up piano at the age of 2, and she has always loved music. These things planted the seeds for her intellectual curiosity.

“We spend so much of our time adjusting the world to make it pleasurable and comfortable, but also challenging—in a positive way—interesting, engaging; and that’s everything from how we design the spaces we live in to how we groom the natural world. … It really speaks, I think, to a deep need that the world fit us in some way, as well as that we fit into the world—and I want to understand more about that.”

Off to Harvard for her Ph.D., she started to explore 18th-century ideas of the imagination. “Part of the great thing about this period in British life,” she notes, “is that it’s before the emergence of the modern disciplines, so if you were writing about what we think of as aesthetics, you’d be writing about it from the perspective of psychology, culture, economics, philosophy, physiology, literary history, any of those perspectives—and they all were combined into new forms of writing.

“So my intellectual history from that perspective has really been that the disciplines provide particular tools, but they don’t necessarily exist in isolation from one another.”

Starr soon made her own leap across the traditional disciplines.

With her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard, Starr went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech and the nearby Huntington Library at a time when cognitive neuroscience was beginning to take off. She joined a reading group on the topic and took a course on fMRI. Delving into that new science, she began to look at imagination and the effects of the arts from the perspective of that field. Not long after she arrived at NYU, a New Directions fellowship from the Mellon Foundation allowed her to study neuroscience in greater depth.

IN NYU’S BRAIN imaging lab, Starr and her colleagues, it could be said, are getting inside the mind, to get a different read on the sublime. Their work involves looking closely at brain scans taken as subjects view art or listen to music from within an fMRI tube.

While people typically agree on what qualifies as a beautiful face or natural landscape, Starr notes, they typically disagree on the beauty of paintings, music, poetry—art. And when we are deeply moved by art, what goes on in our brains is quite a surprise. As she noted in one of her talks a few years back: “The pleasure that we get from the arts is about being able to take pleasure in unexpected places.”

Starr and her co-researchers have found that when people respond in the most positive way to a work of art, it activates what is known as the default mode network. These are the regions of the brain that work together when we are in a resting state—self-reflection, mind-wandering, remembering, imagination—and then they decrease in activity, for the most part, when we perform external tasks.

The fact that this network connected to our inner lives lights up when we have a deep response to art reveals an unexpected pathway between our interior and exterior worlds. Are there more such moments to be discovered? In one co-authored paper, Starr and her colleagues raise the possibility of “significant moments when our brains detect a certain ‘harmony’ between the external world and our internal representation of the self—allowing the two systems to co-activate, interact, influence and reshape each other.”

“Doubly directed” is the term Starr uses for it, and this could also be used to describe Starr. “I still like good, old-fashioned reading poetry and close reading of literature,” she says. “But this is a different kind of knowledge that’s also useful. I would never say that one would replace the other.”

Recognition and grant support have followed the research: Her most recent book, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience, was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Christian Gauss Award. Starr was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015, and her work also has been supported by a National Science Foundation grant. Her novel research also draws speaking invitations, and she once deftly debated noted UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe on whether neuroscience can help us understand art. (You can find the video on YouTube.)

Starr’s approach is “something that very few of us can imagine or even fewer of us do, to make that kind of connection between the humanities and the cognitive sciences,” says Gilman, her NYU English colleague.

“Most of us are comfortably in our little groove; if your subject happens to be, you know, Spenser, you spend a lifetime studying Spenser; you don’t know much about anything else. She’s quite eclectic and broad in her passions.”

IT TAKES ONLY a quick scan of Starr’s NYU office to see the breadth of her interests. Her tomes range from Parental Incarceration and the Family to A Million Years of Music, and from The Works: Anatomy of a City to The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Books not only fill the shelves, they are also neatly stacked, five or six high, in a row down the middle of her conference table.

Her desk is covered in papers: “What’s active is what’s closest to the top,” she explains of her archaeological system, and there’s barely room for her side-by-side computer screens. Of course, her office is simply a reflection of her whirlwind academic life. Out of all these different things, what energizes her?

“All of it. All of it. I finally got two computer screens last year, and if I had three, I’d feel like it was just about enough information.”

Starr’s mind is running plenty of RAM as well. As dean, her days are full of meetings, events, decisions—but she still pursues her research and writes a steady flow of papers, turning in four this past school year alone. “The funny thing about the past six years is that since I became dean, I’ve become much more productive as a scholar … because the amount of time was so radically constricted,” she says. “It was: ‘do it in four hours every Friday afternoon or it’s never going to get done.’”

“I have come to really enjoy not stopping,” she says, laughing. “It catches up with you every now and then, but there’s a lot of fun to be had in helping students and figuring out big problems. And then going back and doing writing is relaxing. So I feel like there’s a balance. Also, I like to go and do things where they’re needed because that always feels good.”

STARR’S MOVE INTO leadership roles began after she earned tenure at NYU and was being recruited by another school: As a condition of staying, she asked to become director of undergraduate studies. “I wanted to be at a place where I could do things for my students and do things for my department because I’d been given this great gift of pretty much a job for life.”

Then colleagues asked her to run for chair of the English Department, which she accepted. Only a year later, when NYU Dean Matthew Santirocco announced his assumption of a new leadership role in 2011, he approached her to ask if she would serve as acting dean. Starr agreed, her work was well-received, and she wound up landing the permanent position in 2013, leading a division with a $130 million budget, a significant fundraising need and a high profile in the heart of Manhattan.

NYU colleagues point to her oratorical skills as helping fuel her rise in the ranks there, with Professor Gilman noting a talk years ago at freshman orientation: “She just gave this amazing, passionate, brilliant speech,” he recalls. “I think some of the people who hadn’t known her began to take her more seriously.”

As dean, she partnered with New York City’s largest community college to create a pipeline in STEM education and helped launch a faculty partnership focused on the global humanities. She is particularly proud of her role in co-founding a cross-university prison education program offering A.A. degrees in the liberal arts to students in a medium-security prison in New York State. “It’s been a lot of fun to get to do things you can’t do when focusing primarily on scholarship and teaching,” she says, noting the opportunity to work with other institutions and even other parts of NYU. “It’s very satisfying when good things happen, when students who never would have come here come here graduate and are successful. That makes me happy.”

THAT’S RIGHT: HAPPY. Starr not only has a penchant for telling jokes; she can also slip quickly into pop-culture talk, discussing anything from The Simpsons to Ghostbusters to the old-school hip-hop of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Her sense of joy is, to be honest, unusual in a college administrator, notes her NYU colleague Newkirk: “She’s a real person. She’s someone you would want to hang out with and have a drink and laugh with.”

Still, Starr says she is only a “sometimes” extrovert, and she never completely let go of the solitary girl who spent a lot of time out in the yard in a tree reading a book. (Once a year, she decompresses by rereading J.R.R. Tolkien’s entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.) “Because I liked imaginary worlds … I loved being inside them. And being an English professor is a great extension of that because then you get to bring other people inside of an imaginary world with you.”

Starr now awaits her move to the cloistered world of Pomona, with its own sort of magic. At NYU, embedded in the bustle of Manhattan, so much could pass by unnoticed. In Claremont, she sees herself popping into the dining halls, stopping by the gym to watch basketball games and, eventually, teaching a first-year seminar and carrying on research with faculty at Pomona and perhaps elsewhere in SoCal. “Pomona,” she says, “isn’t a world to itself or for itself. It is a place where we convene to imagine, argue, engage and build, together, many possible worlds. We can only do this as who we are—a community of the curious—and I’m eager to be a part!”

But first come the good-byes and thank-yous, and the matter of packing her books, shelf after shelf. Could there be any doubt? She is bringing all those beloved tomes, all those worlds, with her.

—Photos by Drew Reynolds