Rhiannon Giddens is back! Join us next week for the Spring 2021 Virtual Sinatra Residency.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

This week SCU hosted its 8th annual Day of Giving! The College as a whole raised nearly $61,000 from 277 donations, with each and every department or program receiving at least one donation. Congratulations to the Mathematics and Computer Science department, which raised the most within the College, and to the Theatre and Dance department, which received the largest number of gifts. Santa Clara University raised over $3.5 million from more than 4,500 gifts—a potential Day of Giving record!

I want to give a big thank you to everyone who worked on this, particularly Ali Reimer and Andrew Chait in the Dean’s Office. They both have been working with the departments and programs since November to develop more than 30 new Day of Giving websites for each area within the College, and helped promote the day to our alumni and community members.

As the University wrote in its thank you note to the Bronco community, “Despite one of the worst pandemics in modern history, we came together and proved that we can rally from adversity to victory—and the promise of brighter days of learning at Santa Clara.”

Happy Friday,
Daniel

Highlights

Molly M. King (Sociology) published a peer-reviewed article entitled "The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects of COVID-19 on Scientific Productivity" in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World with co-author Megan Frederickson from the University of Toronto. By looking at the gender composition of more than 450,000 authorships in preprint repositories from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the analysis finds that the underrepresentation of women scientists in the last authorship position necessary for retention and promotion in the sciences is growing more inequitable. A review of existing research and theory outlines potential mechanisms underlying this widening gender gap in productivity during COVID-19 (including gender gaps in childcare and housework responsibilities, dual-academic career families, and teaching and service expectations). The article aggregates recommendations for institutional change that could ameliorate challenges to women’s productivity during the pandemic and beyond.

Image: Women versus men last authorships of bioRxiv preprints from March 15 to April 15, 2020, and March 15 to April 15, 2019. Last authorships are for multiauthored preprints only. Percentages above bars show percentage change year over year for each author position and gender. The graph shows a greater percentage change in men's authorships compared to women's between 2019 and 2020.

Cruz Medina's (English) article "Decolonial Potential in a Multilingual FYC" was selected to be included in the Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2020. The article was submitted by the editor of the journal Composition Studies for consideration and it was chosen by the editors to be included in the Parlor Press collection. In the introduction to the collection, the editors write: "Medina’s article “Decolonial Potential in Multilingual FYC” shines a pedagogical light on how to approach the often still-colonizing effect first-year composition can have on students who are non-native English speakers. Medina cites the writings of students who have encountered the FYC system’s standardization and highlights words like “vulnerability,” “assimilation,” as well as the perceived superiority of English. Medina is clear to connect this attitude to today’s xenophobia in politics and argues a bilingual approach as an antidote to the colonized classroom." The article draws on the Bilingual CTW course that Cruz taught with Juan Velasco (English).

Miah Jeffra's (English) new book, The Violence Almanac, released April 19 by Black Lawrence Press. The collection complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. The stories take the reader through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.

Publisher's Weekly says of the collection: "Throughout these portraits of the exhausted and murderous, the carelessly angry, and the heartbroken and vengeful, Jeffra compassionately and unflinchingly depicts an array of desperate characters as they try to attain the lives they’ve always dreamed of. While the stories can be emotionally challenging, they resonate deeply."

The book has already been a finalist for the Robert C Jones, St. Lawrence, Santa Fe Writers Project, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner and Grace Paley Book Prizes.

Tim Urdan (Psychology) presented in two symposia at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association, which was held online last week. In the first session, a group of motivation researchers discussed strategies for updating current motivation theories to better account for cultural and ethnic differences in motivation. In the second symposium, they commemorated the work and life of Stuart Karabenick, Tim's co-editor of a book series, Advances in Motivation and Achievement. The next volume in the series will honor Dr. Karabenick's work and is currently in production.

Tom Plante (Psychology) published an article, Four lessons learned from 1,000 psychological evaluations of clerics and clerical applicants in the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian Churches, in Spirituality in Clinical Practice. 

Many lessons have been learned after conducting 1,000 psychological evaluations of clerical applicants and ordained clerics in the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian Churches. This article highlights four fundamental lessons learned from conducting these evaluations that may be helpful to clinicians and researchers alike who work in the diagnostic, treatment, or consultation arena with similar church groups. These include research indicating that clerical applicants tend to be (a) psychologically healthy, (b) older with more life experiences than previous generations of clerics, and (c) traumatized by the clerical sexual abuse story. Finally, a call for evidence-based best practices in conducting clerical screening evaluations is a critically important lesson learned.

Ryan Reynolds (Art & Art History) presents recent work in a solo exhibition The Land Remains, at b. sakata garo gallery in Sacramento, April 7- May 1, 2021. This work explores geometry, color, and the crossover between memory and observation in the landscape. Additionally, Reynolds's work is included in two group museum exhibitions. Work held in the St. Mary’s Museum of Art permanent collection is included in a survey of landscape art, Aesthetic Forces: Nature in the Modern California Landscape, 1915-2015. The exhibition runs February 10-July 11 2021. A painting, from his Freeway Series, was selected for the annual juried Crocker Art Museum auction and exhibition, on view from May 23 – June 6, 2021. Proceeds support the exhibition and educational programming.

Image: Willow Falls, oil on canvas panel, 18x24" 2021

Kathleen Maxwell's (Art & Art History) chapter, "Dating Middle Byzantine Gospel Books: The Gospels of Dionysios and Paris gr. 63," has been published in Receptions of the Bible in Byzantium: Text, Manuscripts, and Their Readers, eds, Reinhart Ceulemans and Barbara Crostini (Stockholm: Uppsala Universitet, 2021).

Image: Paris, BnF, cod. gr. 63, Canon Table, fol. 12r

Pancho Jiménez (Art & Art History) exhibited his artwork in three venues this winter and spring.  This winter he exhibited work with the Eutectic Gallery in Portland, Oregon.  Currently, his work is being shown in the Sculpture National held at the Clay Center of New Orleans and in a show titled Natural Materials at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco.

Image: Pancho Jiménez Crayons Ceramic 3”x24”x3”

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar