Dear College Faculty and Staff,

It’s great to see that, despite the pandemic, faculty are still being creative and exploring research opportunities for themselves and their students. Recently, 14 faculty showed interest in an opportunity in the health sciences, with proposals ranging from departments across the College including Biology, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Communication, Ethnic Studies, Mathematics and Computer Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Public Health. I was so impressed with how widely the proposals range and the breadth of issues that they address.

We have sent out the call for applications for this year’s DeNardo Science Research Scholars. This program supports the undergraduate research experience of outstanding science students with faculty mentors. Scholars receive academic year and summer research awards, with additional resources for supplies and travel. Two students, possibly more, will be selected to begin work this summer. I want to encourage you to work with your student researchers to submit applications, which are due April 5.

Next week, I will be addressing the Board of Trustees at their second meeting of this academic year. This will be my first opportunity to speak with the Trustees, and I look forward to sharing the fundraising priorities of the College with them.

Thank you all for your perseverance, hard work and fortitude. I know there is great zoom fatigue settling in; we feel it strongly in my family as well. I do feel that spring is around the corner and I am hopeful that this next spring will bring renewal and reconnection, in sharp contrast to the lockdown that began in March of last year.

Until then, my best wishes to you and yours!

Daniel

Highlights

Theresa Conefrey (English) recently published a paper with her colleague Davida Smyth from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School. The paper, “Reflecting, Integrating, and Communicating Knowledge Through ePortfolios to Increase Civic and Scientific Literacy,” appears in the current edition of the International Journal of ePortfolio. It suggests that ePortfolios can ameliorate curricular fragmentation, help students integrate their learning for authentic real-world STEM problems, and promote scientific literacy to foster civic engagement upon graduation.

Emerging out of her conference paper for The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in June 2019, Robin Tremblay-McGaw's (English) essay "'A Made Up Thing' Full of Depth: The Queer Belonging of Robert Duncan and New Narrative" has just been published in Sillages critiques' special issue on Robert Duncan's Legacies: A Centennial Celebration.

Robin's essay argues that Robert Duncan’s conception of his poet self as “a made up thing and at the same time a depth in which my being is” from The Years as Catches links his poetics to his sexuality. Duncan, at the center of the San Francisco Bay Area “poetry wars,” becomes a source of grand permission in “queer belonging” for New Narrative writers, specifically Robert Glück and Bruce Boone [who was briefly a SCU student]. New Narrative writers turned from the mainstream’s devastating and violent image of gays and lesbians and the Language writers’ desire to jettison the subject from their own writing to Duncan and artist Jess [Collins] for the power and pleasures of the made up, fragmented, collaged—a material based relational art, a set of practices, performing queer belonging that looks back in order to move forward, that articulates “the history of our times” and the possibility of a future.

Jane Curry’s (Political Science) new book, Democracy and Democratization in the Third and Fourth Waves, has just appeared, It was commissioned and published by the University of Warsaw Press. Aurora Zahm '18 (Political Science and Classical Studies) helped edit the book as she did for an earlier book. It is based on the lectures Jane gave at the Center for East European Studies at the University of Warsaw when she taught as the Inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in 2003-4 (her 5th Fulbright since she was an undergraduate) and in the 12 summers she has taught at their summer program for university students from the former Soviet Union and East Europe. For her, it is a way to keep up with what is happening in Central and East Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union so she can share it with her students at Santa Clara and also help prepare a new generation of scholars and activists from these countries.

Jane also has been named the Director of the Cold War Communications Project established and sponsored by the Library of Congress. The Project is to encourage the development of archives of Western broadcasts into the former communist countries and encourage scholars to do research using these broadcasts and looking at their role in American and West European foreign policy.

Jesica Siham Fernández (Ethnic Studies) served as the discussant and facilitator on a panel on "Creating Inclusive Cultures and Healthy Communities," that was part of the virtual program for biennial International Congress on Community Psychology. The panel featured renowned scholars Michelle Fine (City University of New York, The Graduate Center), Monica Madyaningrum (University of Sanata Dharma in Indonesia), Nuria Ciafolo (Pacifica Graduate Institute) and Urmitapa Dutta (University of Massachusetts-Lowell). Themes featured in this dialogue will serve as the foundation for an article contribution to a special issue on "Fostering and sustaining transnational solidarities for transformative social change: Advancing community psychology research and action" in the American Journal of Community Psychology.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar