Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Following his first volume of poems, Through the Years (2010), and its successor, Roberta and Other Poems (2011), Ricardo Quinones, professor emeritus of literature at CMC, published A Sorting of the Ways: New and Selected Poems​ (2011). The newer collection both draws from his earlier volumes and adds to them. 

Redacting the poems will be Todd Mandel and Lisa Robins. Mandel is a former actor and former CMC advancement officer. Robins, who has enjoyed a lifelong career in theater, TV, and film, is a member of the Actors Studio and has recently received stellar reviews for her solo show, “The Blessing of a Broken Heart." Accompanying Mandel and Robins in the the reading will be rock and jazz icon, Don Preston, who is best known for his keyboard and ground-breaking synthesizer solos with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as well as countless film soundtracks including Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he studies politics, elections, and the US Congress. He is a co-host of AEI’s Election Watch series, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic, a BBC News election analyst, and the chairman of the Campaign Legal Center. Ornstein previously served as co-director of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and as senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission.

A longtime observer and analyst of American politics and the US Congress, he has been interviewed on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NPR, and the PBS NewsHour, among others. His articles and opinion pieces have been published widely, including in Politico, The New York Times, NY Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Ornstein’s books include the bestsellers One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported, with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann (St. Martin’s Press, 2017); and It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, with Thomas E. Mann (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Ornstein has a Ph.D. and a master’s in political science from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota. 

Dr. Ornstein’s talk is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable.

An expert in machine learning and natural language processing, Apoorv Agarwal is dedicated to understanding and improving how humans and machines benefit from working together. His work, which focuses on sentiment analysis, relation extraction, text summarization, and automated Q&A, has received more than 1,000 citations across the international research community. 

Agarwal received the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship award in recognition of his work as first author on two separate patents for IBM’s Watson. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and received the Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching. Agarwal has published more than 30 academic papers in machine learning and natural language processing. In 2014, he was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program, which allowed him to lay the foundation for founding his company, Text IQ.  

Beyond academia, Agarwal has been cited by American Banker, WIRED, Popular Science, New Scientist, and Science Magazine, among others. With Text IQ, he aspires to harness and channel the complementary strengths of humans and machines towards solving high-stakes enterprise data problems. Among other novels, his research focused on the work of C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen. He is one of the co-creators of the Ted Talk "Artificial IntelliDance," a performance which explains AI to a non-technical audience through dance. 

View Video: YouTube with Apoorv Agarwal

What is modernity? Where are modernity's points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries?  Professors Ellen Rentz, John Farrell, and Seth Lobis of the CMC Literature Department will join Jason Crawford of Union University and author of "Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics" (Oxford) and Blanford Parker, author of "The Triumph of Augustan Poetics" (Cambridge) for a lively discussion of how early modern English authors envisioned themselves breaking from the medieval.

The discussion is sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Ron Naveen believes that penguins are indicators of ocean change and, ultimately, sentinels of change. Since 1994, the Oceanites’ Antarctic site inventory has been monitoring and analyzing penguin and seabird population changes across the vast Antarctic Peninsula, where it’s warming faster than anywhere else on earth except the Arctic. Working with collaborative partners, The Lynch Lab at Stony Brook University, Penguin Lifelines at the University of Oxford (UK), and One Oceans Expeditions (Canada), Oceanites represents the world’s only nonprofit, publicly supported Antarctic research program. Oceanites is the only project monitoring the entire Antarctic Peninsula region — analyzing change across the warming Antarctic Peninsula and  interpreting, translating, and decoding why what happens in Antarctica—to its penguins, wildlife, land, ice, and surrounding Southern Ocean—affects all of us.

Mr. Naveen's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.

Jonathan Strom's work focuses on the history of religion in Germany, with particular attention to the interrelation of theology and culture, the emergence of the Protestant clergy, lay revival movements, and conversion. He is author most recently of German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion and was co-editor of the new Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions. His current book project is a cultural history of the priesthood of all believers.
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Strom’s research interests include pietism in continental Europe, the history of the Protestant clergy, and the emergence of modern forms of piety and religious practice. He has written widely on the clergy, lay religion, and reform movements in post-Reformation Germany, and is the author/editor of three books, most recently Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650-1850 (Brill, 2010). Strom is currently at work on two projects, one on conversion narratives in German pietism and another on the history of the common priesthood.

View Video: YouTube with Jonathan Strom

Gibb Schreffler is assistant professor of music and director of ethnomusicology at Pomona College. A scholar engaged in both the contemporary ethnographic and historical study of musical culture, his diverse areas of expertise include the vernacular music and dance of South Asia’s Punjab region, the work-songs of 19th-century American sailors, and the aesthetic practices of Jamaican DJs. His work related to traditional Punjabi drummers appears in numerous journals including Asian Music, South Asian History & Culture, Popular Music & Society, Sikh Formations, and Journal of Punjab Studies.

Professor Schreffler’s Athenaeum performance and presentation is co-sponsored by the Sikh Studies Fund.

View Video: YouTube with Gibb Schreffler

Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, and became a staff writer in 1994, theater critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012 and brings a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theater but in dance, music, and visual art—he demonstrates how to view a production, how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are provocative contributions to the discourse on theater, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America.

Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He also wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote.

Among numerous accolades, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment in 1997. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature. In 2017, Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. 

Professor Hilton Als’ Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' Lerner Lectureship in 1960s' Culture Fund. 

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

First elected to the Legislature in 2010, Senator Holly Mitchell represents nearly one million residents of the 30th Senate District, which ranges from Century City to South Los Angeles and takes in Culver City, Cheviot Hills, Crenshaw District, USC, downtown L.A. and a portion of Inglewood.

A third-generation native Angeleno, Mitchell sits on the Senate Health Committee; the Joint Committee on Rules; the Public Safety Committee; the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee; and the Insurance, Banking and Financial Institutions Committee. She also chairs the Senate Select Committee on Women and Inequality, which she founded. Additionally, she is chair of the Senate Budget Committee. Mitchell previously headed California’s largest child and family development organization, Crystal Stairs, and worked for the Western Center for Law and Poverty.

Frequently cited for her leadership and advocacy on behalf of children, families, the elderly, and the disabled, Mitchell was named the 2017 Lois DeBerry Scholar by Women in Government Leadership and this year received the first Willie L. Brown Jr. Advocacy Award from the California Black Lawyers Association. The National Conference of State Legislatures last summer elected her to its national executive committee. Her advocacy on behalf of the expansion of mental health services earned her the Legislator-of-the-Year Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness California. 

Senator Mitchell’s Athenaeum presentation is part of the "Behind the Veil: Women, Race, Leadership, and Social Change in the Nonprofit Sector” (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the front lines of social change.

View Video: YouTube with Holly Mitchell

Qurrat Ann Kadwani is an actress, producer, MC, TV host, and philanthropist. A graduate of Bronx High School of Science and a theater graduate of SUNY Geneseo, she is the founding artistic director of eyeBLINK (www.eyeblink.org).  

A frequent guest on television programs including Law and Order: SVU, The Blacklist, Mr. Robot, Falling Water, and more, Kadwani teaches monologue writing and performance workshops, monologue prep, and audition prep classes. Her film credits include Antigone 5000, The Tailor, One Night Stand, Last Saturday with Morli, among others. 

Kadwani’s one-woman show They Call Me Q played off-Broadway in 2014 for seven months at St. Luke's Theatre in New York City. In addition to performing on multiple campus and at cultural venues, in December 2013, United Nations Unicef also invited Kadwani to perform.

In reviewing her show, the Village Voice says Kadwani “delivers a winning tale.” NY Theatre Guide wrote, “Filled with charm, humor and heart… They Call Me Q is comedic without seeming over the top, and thought provoking without being preachy.” Broadway World wrote, "In some rare cases, the decision to share tales of one's past can give the audience a theatrical experience that it will remember far after the last show."

The recipient of many service awards, Kadwani has been the host for Chase the Race 2016, MC of events for non-profit organizations such as World Women’s Global Council at the United Nations, Sapna NYC, Your Dil, Lend A Hand India, and SOS Children's Villages India, among others.

Kadwani also coordinates an annual philanthropic project A Slice of Hope as well as the annual Echoes of Love, a suicide prevention fundraiser with music. 

Ms. Kadwani’s Athenaeum performance is co-sponsored by ASCMC’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. 

The Claremont Chamber Choir will perform its celebrated, annual holiday celebration. The Choir, part of the Joint Music Program of Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges, is an auditioned, mixed ensemble of about two dozen students and will be led by conductor Charles W. Kamm, associate professor of music at Scripps College and director of choirs in the Joint Music Program. The Choir will sing the music of Palestrina, Molly Ijames, and Eric Whitacre, plus holiday music by Jonathan Dove, Caroline Malonee, and traditional favorites.

View Video: YouTube with Claremont Chamber Choir