December 2024
Ellie Anderson, assistant professor of philosophy, co-authored the article “Erotic Ambivalence in Beauvoir’s Student Diaries” in Simone de Beauvoir Studies with Dana Rognlie and Megan Burke.
Graydon Beeks, emeritus professor of music, published the article “Two Sets of Lessons for Princess Louisa” in the Winter 2024 issue of the Newsletter of the American Handel Society.
Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, was awarded a Future of Work Presidential grant by the Russell Sage Foundation. Beginning in fall 2025, this multi-year project will analyze two decades of “Justice for Janitors” organizing campaigns by the Service Employees International Union in the American South.
Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics, published the introduction to a special issue of Behavioural Public Policy, which he co-edited, titled “Process, Rationality, and Human Wellbeing.”
Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, presented a webinar, “CLASP 2024 Grants Review: First Look,” on December 12. CLASP (College of Liberal Arts Sponsored Programs) solicits data from members each year about grants received for faculty research or institutional programs; in 2024, about one fourth of the member institutions reported on approximately 1,650 individuals grants from 900 public and private funding agencies.
George L. Gorse, Viola Horton Professor of Art History, published “A ‘Royal Republic’: The virgin Mary as ‘Queen of Genoa’ in 1637” in Questioning Republicanism in Early Modern Genoa, edited by Enrico Zucchi and Alessandro Merlica.
Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and statistics, published an article, “The Making of a Mathematician: Personal and Professional Growth Through Writing” in Women in MathArt: Research, Creativity, and Teaching, edited by Shanna Dobson. Karaali’s submission was included among with those of eight other college faculty in the article “The Haunting of the Lecture Hall,” published in the Fall 2024 issue of Liberal Education: Reflections.
Nina J. Karnovsky, Willard George Halstead Zoology Professor of Biology, published a book chapter titled “Marine Birds” with co-author Maria Gavrilo in the book Elements of a pan-Arctic Ocean Ecology, edited by P. Wassmann and published by Orkana Akademisk.
Jun Lang, assistant professor of Asian languages and literatures, co-authored the article “Second Language Motivational Selves and Interactional Pragmatics in Study Abroad: A Qualitative Study” with Feng Xiao, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures, and Minghua Zhang ’26. The article, published in Languages on December 20, is an invited contribution to a special issue exploring individual differences in second language (L2) pragmatics in study abroad contexts. This study is the first to examine the complex relationship between the integrated model of motivation and L2 Chinese interactional pragmatics while also uncovering how L2 social contact mediates this relationship in a study abroad context.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, co-published with Lina Chang ’27 the article titled “Trump’s Return Debunks the Natural Alliances Myth” with East Asia Forum.
Joyce Lu, associate professor of theatre and Asian American studies, co-produced, co-conducted and acted in a joint performance featuring members of LA Playback Theatre Company and High Desert Playback from Albuquerque, New Mexico. This performance, titled “We’ve Come A Long Way: Journeys Towards Collective Liberation,” was presented at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, on December 15.
Magally Miranda, Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, spoke at the opening plenary of the Southern Border Region AI Conference that took place on December 16-17, hosted by the UC San Diego Labor Center. The conference, titled “Good Tech for Good Jobs: Strategies for Building Worker Power in the Age,” invited scholars, workers, policy makers and organizers to discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence and robotics on a changing labor landscape.
Thomas Muzart, assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures, presented a paper titled “Rethinking Queer and Racial Community Building in France with the Podcast Extimité” at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Australian Society for French Studies on December 11.
Gilda L. Ochoa, professor of Chicana/o Latina/o studies, had her latest article “Activist Legacies: Connecting Current Struggles for K-12 Ethnic Studies to Local Histories, the Example of La Puente High School in the 1960s-1970s” published in the peer-reviewed journal Ethnic Studies Pedagogies.
Lina Patel, lecturer in theatre, had her new play Traces of Desire, commissioned from Playwright's Arena and UCLA, published by Bloomsbury on December 12.
Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, had her book The Unclaimed included in The Atlantic’s 10 best books of 2024.
Hans Rindisbacher, professor of German, gave a guest lecture titled “A Russian/Soviet History in the Modality of the Olfactory” in the Department of Slavic Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University, München, Germany. Rindisbacher also delivered a guest lecture on “Vincent O. Carter at One Hundred: A Black American Voice in Swiss Literature” in the American Studies program at the English Department of the University of Wrocław, Poland.
Monique Saigal Escudero, professor emerita of French, gave the presentation “My Hidden Childhood in WWII Occupied France” at the Webb Schools in Claremont, California, on December 16.
Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, published the essay “One Transnation Under a Groove: ‘Chaal’ and the Modern Punjabi Soundscape” in the edited volume Punjab Sounds: In and Beyond the Region (Routledge, 2025).
Gary Smith, Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics, published an article, “Money and inflation: a case study of the value of transparency,” in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and wrote an opinion piece, “The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating” (Mind Matters, December 5). His article “Big Data and the Assault on Science” (International Higher Education, September 2024) was reprinted as “Saving science from temptations of big data: A worthy fight,” University World News, and a German translation was featured in DUZ Magazine.
The Kinzai Institute for Financial Affairs, under the jurisdiction of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, published a Japanese translation of Smith’s book The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha (co-authored with Margaret Smith). Smith also signed contracts with CRC for two books to be published in 2025: Some Pretty Good Stats Questions and Some Pretty Good Finance Questions.
Jessie Stern, assistant professor of psychological science, had her research on adolescents’ empathy selected by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley to be featured in their list of the Top 10 Insights from the Science of a Meaningful Life in 2024, which “highlights what we see as the most important, provocative, and inspiring findings published in our field.”
Kevin Wynter, associate professor of media studies, was interviewed by WIRED for a piece titled “The Year Villainy Won.”
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, gave an invited workshop titled “Transforming Language Learning with AI: A Deep Dive into Luduan.ai" at the Language Educators Symposium (LES) 2024, hosted by the Penn Language Center and the Educational Linguistics Division, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, on December 6. On December 7, Feng, Lilach Mollick (co-director of Generative AI Labs at the Wharton School of Business) and Abraham López Lee (CEO of Correcto and Forbes 30 Under 30, 2024) each gave an invited talk on AI and language education at LES 2024.
Xiao was invited to review a grant proposal for Hong Kong Metropolitan University and proposals for the Tao-Chung Ted Yao Memorial Award by the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA (CLTA). Additionally, he became the program co-chair of the 2025 CLTA Conference.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, was interviewed for and quoted in “7 New Year’s food traditions that will bring good luck,” which appeared on the National Geographic website on December 31.
Megan Zirnstein, assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science, co-authored a paper with Kinsey Bice (Alexa AI team, Amazon) in The American Journal of Psychology titled “Unraveling the multilingual mind: Exploring individual differences in bilingual language learning and regulation.” The article was included in a festschrift collection in honor of the work that Judith F. Kroll (UC Irvine) has done to advance the science of bilingualism.