College of Arts and Sciences Convocation.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

I’d like to officially welcome everyone to the Fall Quarter! I hope you have all had a productive and fun first week. 

I am so gratified by the care and preparation that faculty and staff have put in to preparing for yet another quarter of remote instruction. Many, many of you have spent much of the summer retooling so that your online teaching could be the very best. Thank you!

I want to give a shoutout to the SCU Anti-Racist Teaching Collective, specifically to Ethnic Studies faculty Allia Griffin and Jesica Fernández, and alumnae Sydney Thompson ‘20 (Ethnic Studies, Mechanical Engineering), and Khiely Jackson ‘20 (Ethnic Studies) for curating a digital archive of anti-racist public scholarship. Their collaboration has resulted in an extremely thorough and relevant collection of resources, readings, visual texts, poetry, and sociocultural artifacts to support anti-racist learning, dialogue and action within our community. Please take some time to explore and engage with the resources and concepts they have pulled together. 

Another thank you to everyone who attended my first Convocation on the 15th. I found it to be a positive and celebratory way to share in each other’s accomplishments of the last year and kick off the upcoming year. My apologies for getting my notes out of order – who has paper notes anymore?!

I must note, last week’s Convocation slides incorrectly introduced new faculty member Carl Schultz (Music). He received his DMA in Jazz Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is joining us as the Director of Jazz Studies in the Department of Music this fall.

I want to also extend my congratulations, again, to the many award recipients honored at Convocation, and listed below. If you weren’t able to make the live event, you can watch the recording here.

October is right around the corner, with important programs from the Center for Arts and Humanities (Twin Pandemics) and tUrn (Climate Change). I hope to see you there, albeit virtually.

Onward!

Daniel

College Awards

Renee Billingslea

Art & Art History

Professor Francisco Jiménez Reaching Out Award

Juliana Chang

Dean's Office and English

Dean's Service Award - Faculty

Diane Idemoto

Physics

Dean's Service Award - Staff

Brian McNelis

Chemistry & Biochemistry

Dr. John B. Drahmann Advising Award

Danielle Morgan

English

Public Intellectual Award

Pauline Nguyen

Ethnic Studies

Nancy Keil Service Excellence Award

Lee Panich

Anthropology

Professor Joseph Bayma, S.J., Scholarship Award

Jill Pellettieri

Modern Languages & Literatures

Dr. David E. Logothetti Teaching Award

Anna Rivard

Dean's Office

Dean's Service Award - Staff

Navid Shaghaghi

Mathematics & Computer Science

Bernard Hubbard, S.J., Creative Collaboration Award

Gary Sloan

Physics

Nancy Keil Service Excellence Award

Highlights

Francisco Jiménez’s (Emeritus, Modern Languages & Literatures) autobiographical book, The Circuit: Stories From the Life of a Migrant Child, was published in Persian by Teharan Afarinegan Publising in Teharan. He was appointed to the Advisory Board of La Raza Historical Society of Santa Clara Valley. He also made a virtual presentation on his book, Breaking Through, to all first-year students at Los Gatos High School on September 16. His book was selected for their summer reading.

Photo: Book cover of the Persian edition of The Circuit

Ryan Carrington (Art & Art History) was recently interviewed for the article, Sculpting an Identity, in the San Jose Metro Active discussing his work in the upcoming Silicon Valley Sculpture Fine Art Fair. His work provides an investigation into the American Dream, and questions the dynamics of that term for blue-collar workers in America today. The event takes place September 25-27 at Menlo College in Atherton, California.

Photo:  "American Gothic" by Ryan Carrington

Di Di (Sociology) was invited to write a featured essay published on Sociology of Religion. In this essay, she reviewed “Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans” by Russell M. Jeung, Seanan S. Fong, and Helen Jin Kim. She provided an overview of the liyi framework proposed by the authors in their analysis of the sacred family values in Chinese American families. She further argues that this framework is not only helpful to the scholarly understanding of ethnic Chinese’ religiosity and spirituality, but also informative for future understandings of alternative spirituality.

Foglifter, the queer and trans literary magazine founded and designed by Miah Jeffra (English), has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Award.

Katia Moles (Religious Studies) was selected by a panel of judges from the editorial board as a third-place winner of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion’s Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award for 2020. Moles’ article, “A Culture of Flourishing: A Feminist Ethical Framework for Incorporating Child Sexual Abuse Prevention in Catholic Institutions,” is highlighted in the current issue of JFSR (Sept. 2020), on the JFSR website and will be noted at the 2020 (virtual) meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November. The Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award was established several years ago in order to encourage and give recognition to the emerging voices of new scholars, whose research and insights will shape the future of feminist studies in religion. The prize comes with a cash award.

Jesica S. Fernández (Ethnic Studies) was invited to contribute to a webinar series on "Humanizing the Classroom: Critical, Engaged & Defiant Pedagogies During COVID-19. The virtual interactive dialogue featured critical educators and performing artists, Deanne Bell (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Gabrielle Civil (California Institute for the Arts), with facilitator and organizer Urmitapa Dutta (U-Mass Lowell). Jesica presented on a working paper on "Humanizing Heart-Centered Pedagogies toward Radical Healing."
   
Additionally, Jesica's paper "Decolonial Feminism as Reflexive Praxis: Lugones's “World”-Travelling as Stories of Friendship in Academia," co-authored with Kara Hisatake (UC Santa Cruz) and Angela Nguyen (UC Santa Cruz), was published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, featuring a special issue on the work of renewed decolonial feminist scholar Maria Lugones.

Cruz Medina (English) published an article with Perla Luna '19  (Sociology and English) in the journal Rhetoric Review called "'Publishing is Mystical': The Latinx Caucus Bibliography, Top-Tier Journals, and Minority Scholarship." This article examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color. Interview responses from Latinx scholars provide important context for the low percentage of articles by Latinx scholars appearing in "top-tier" journals, well below the acceptance rates of the publications.

Photo: Cruz Medina presenting with Perla Luna at CCCC 2019 conference. From left to right: Cruz, Enrique Reynoso (University of Washington, Bothell), and Perla Luna.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar