Dear College Faculty and Staff,

I am excited to welcome award-winning actor BD Wong to campus next week! As the 2021-22 Frank Sinatra Chair in the Performing Arts, he will be joining classes and meeting with students throughout the week. Don’t miss his public performance on October 7 at 7 p.m. in Mayer Theatre. In-person tickets are available for faculty, staff, and students; if you aren’t comfortable coming in person, a live stream will also be available.

I am also very pleased to invite you all to participate in AASHE’s Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education, October 12-14, which the College is co-sponsoring. Organized around the theme “The future is…”, this is truly a great opportunity for our campus, with 200+ live and on-demand virtual sessions available. As an official Host Institution, Santa Clara University has unlimited free registration passes for faculty, staff and students—and, if you register you’ll have access to the sessions through the end of the calendar year! Visit SCU's Global Climate Action Week webpage to find registration information and to learn more.

These are just two highlights of our wonderful return to campus, with much more happening throughout the fall. I am grateful to the campus community for making it all possible to work in person so much, while maintaining our health safety protocols.

Go Broncos (safely and together)!

Daniel

Highlights

Juan Velasco-Moreno (English) presented his new anthology, In Xochitl in Cuicatl (1920-2020: One Hundred Years of Latinx Poetry), at the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, on September 16, 2021. Many poets from this anthology were present at the event, among them Natalia Trevino, Matt Sedillo, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs.

Amy Randall's (History) article, "For the Father of a Newborn: Soviet Obstetrics and the Mobilization of Men as Medical Allies," was recently published in Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Volume 15 (2021): 146–164. It introduces and translates the pamphlet "For the Father of a Newborn" by contextualizing it in Soviet medical efforts to deploy men as allies in safeguarding reproduction and bolstering procreation in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the pamphlet as an illustration of how doctors and other health personnel tried to educate men to protect their wives’ pregnancy and the health of their wives and newborns in the postpartum period, and it considers the implications of these initiatives for women’s bodies, gender norms, sexual practices, models of masculinity, and the socialist goal of promoting women’s equality.

Image: Figure 2. Illustration in the pamphlet, For the Father of a Newborn, in A. N. Shibaeva, Gigienicheskoi obuchenie beremennykh zhenshchin i rodil’nits [Hygienic training for pregnant women and women giving birth] (Moscow: Institute of Sanitary Enlightenment of the All-Union Ministry of Health, 1960), 46.

Omar Davila Jr. (Child Studies), along with Victor Rios (Professor and Associate Dean at UC-Santa Barbara) published an article, “Between Market Logics and Resistance Logics: The Tech Boom and High-Performing Latino Boys in the Bay Area,” in the journal Race Ethnicity and Education. This article offers a three-fold contribution to the fields of education and sociology: (1) examining the nexus of corporate philanthropy, tech companies, and inequality in urban education, (2) examining the experiences of Latino boys as they navigate STEM trajectories, and (3) examining the experiences of high-performing Latino boys, as opposed to the fields' penchant for focusing on low performing boys of color.

Omar was also invited to become an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Publicly Engaged Scholarship at UCSB, where he will continue this line of work with Prof. Rios.

John Hawley (English) has published a chapter, "The Cat and Shakepeare, the Problem of the Ego-Self, and the Vagaries of Literary Reputation," in Reading India in a Transnational Era: The Works of Raja Rao, edited by Rumina Sethi and Letizia Alterno (Routledge).

In Winter 2020, Professor Carl Pomerance, visiting the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, challenged his Number Theory class to either find a positive integer that is a Baille-PSW pseudoprime, or prove that none exists. There is a $620 prize for the resolution of this problem. A pseudoprime is an integer that, in some ways, acts like a prime number, but is, in fact, composite. A Baille-PSW pseudoprime is a Fibonacci pseudoprime that satisfies two other properties. If none exists, then this would give an extremely fast way of testing half of all odd numbers for primality. After the course was over, two of the students, Junhyun Lim '21 (Mathematics and Computer Science) and Shaunak Mashalkar '21 (Computer Science & Engineering and Mathematics) asked Ed Schaefer (Mathematics & Computer Science professor emeritus) for help solving this problem.

They found new methods for creating many Fibonacci pseudoprimes. They then tested 2^31 of them to see if any of them were Baille-PSW pseudoprimes – alas, none were. They wrote an article explaining their new methods and their search for a Baille-PSW pseudoprime. The article has been accepted by The Fibonacci Quarterly, a journal once published out of SCU.

Image: Shaunak Mashalkar, Ed Schaefer, and Junhyun Lim

Eugene Schlesinger's (Religious Studies) chapter "Mission and Worship" was published in Foundations of Worship: Biblical Systematic and Practical Perspectives, edited by Khalia J. Williams and Mark Lamport, published by Baker Academic. The chapter explores, as the title suggests, the interrelation between liturgical practice and the church's mission to the world. The publisher's description of the volume reads:

"This volume brings together an ecumenical team of scholars to present key theological concepts related to worship to help readers articulate their own theology of worship. Contributors explore the history of theology's impact on worship practices across the Christian tradition, highlighting themes such as creation, pneumatology, sanctification, and mission. The book includes introductions by N. T. Wright and Nicholas Wolterstorff. A forthcoming volume will address the historical foundations of worship."

Maggie Levantovskaya (English) published "Tracing the Wolf," a longform personal essay about her attempt to use tattooing to represent some of the experience of living with illness and disability. Specifically, she explores what it was like to get her first tattoo to commemorate surviving a decade with lupus and to make this so-called invisible illness more visible. She also reflects on her experience of growing up in the Soviet Union and being educated in religious Jewish day schools. Both Jewish and Soviet cultures shun tattoos and associate them with heresy or criminality. The essay works through her internalization of these stigmas and examines the relationship between tattoos, visibility and pain.

Tim Myers (English) has five art pieces in the September issue of Woven Tale Press Magazine. His children’s book Yao Bai and the Egg Pirates was featured on the "Superpowered and Empowered" summer 2021 reading list from the Children's Book Council. He has two poems coming out in Exterminating Angel Press Magazine, and an essay with visual art (“Making the Heart Bigger: Story and Human Experience”) in the same publication. His art piece Smoke from a Great Fire in the City recently appeared in Oyster River Pages Magazine.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar