Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Welcome to Spring Quarter! I’m coming to your inbox today instead of tomorrow since tomorrow is Good Friday. It was such a treat to be able to kick off spring with some sunshine and good weather. But it’s still cold! So the French say “Avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil, en mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît” (April, don’t shed a stitch, in May, do as you please!).

Wednesday is SCU’s 10th annual Day of Giving! We have 6 challenges this year—a record for us—to encourage people to support the College!

• $2,500 donated to the Biology department will unlock $7,500 from an anonymous donor
• 35 unique donors to the Communication Department will unlock $12,500 from the Lowe family
• There is also a 2 for 1 matching gift up to $10,000 for donations to the Communication department
• 10 donations to the Friends of Choral Music gift fund will unlock $150 from alumnus Daniel Ratelle ’72
• $25,000 will be unlocked for the Jazz Program from JAMBAR if we get 25 donations to the Music Department
• $5,000 will be unlocked if we get 25 donations to REAL Program 

Whether you choose to support the College with a gift or not, I do hope you’ll show your CAS pride by becoming an Ambassador or participating in some of the events that will be taking place on campus. 

Lastly, I wish to extend my sympathies to the families and academic department of two recently departed faculty, Dr. Denise Carmody and Dr. Teresia Hinga, both of the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Carmody’s career was marked by several important firsts: first female Religious Studies department chair and first woman provost and vice president before her retirement in 2012. Dr. Hinga came to Santa Clara University in 2005 with expertise in religion and women’s issues, particularly in Africa. Her research and her life raised up women’s voices in matters of faith, religion and theology. Losing Professors Carmody and Hinga represents a big blow to Religious Studies; please join me in supporting our colleagues and their families.

Wishing you a gracious, gentle start to spring quarter,

Daniel

Highlights

Justen B. Whittall's (Biology) research using 100-year-old bird nests stored in natural history museums across the country to reconstruct an extinct habitat that rings the San Francisco Bay estuary was profiled in the Spring 2023 issue of Bay Nature Magazine.

Written by UCSC journalism graduate student, Brittney Miller, the article describes the process that Justen, his lab, and Alex Rinkert (San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory collaborator) have been using to identify plant species from song and savannah sparrow nest fragments using DNA barcoding. Undergraduate Aleezah Salmaan '20 (Biology) was instrumental in their 2021 proofs of concept publication in PLOS ONE entitled, "Bird Nests as Botanical Time Capsules."

They continue to identify new plant species from this lost habitat.

Image: Alex Rinkert collects plant fragments using sterile technique from a 100 year old bird nest stored at the California Academy of Sciences.

Miah Jeffra's (English) fourth book and debut novel, American Gospel, was released on March 24 with Black Lawrence Press (New York). The novel concerns gentrification and displacement in a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore that is scheduled to be razed to build a theme park in the theme of Baltimore itself.

Students enrolled in DANC 159 learn how to create and teach standards-meeting theatre, music, dance and visual arts lessons to youth, and study California's bicameral legislature to understand how history, legislation, policy and priorities affect whether every school and every child receives a quality arts education. Students have several civic engagement assignments, including advocating for the arts directly to legislators in Sacramento and through performance and tabling events. The talented students in DANC 159 including members of the SCU's National Honors Society for Dance Arts traveled to Sacramento for Stand Up 4 Arts Education in March. They prepared instrumental and vocal music, solo and group dances, and theatre skits about arts and economics. Leaders of the four largest arts education organizations (California Arts Education Association, California Dance Education Association, California Music Education Association, California Educational Theatre Association) and student artists from all over the state came together for this one-day event to collectively express, advocate for, and celebrate the arts. Kristin Kusanovich (Theatre and Dance) is past president and the interdisciplinary specialist for the state on the executive board of CDEA. She coordinated dance group participation at the event and accompanied SCU students Marti Ramon '23 (Psychology), Luke Roberto '23 (Biochemistry), Amanda Wang '24 (Economics), Jovanna Solomon '24 (Neuroscience, Psychology), Claire Long '23 (Biology, Theatre Arts), Emma Rutter '23 (Neuroscience, Theatre Arts) and Genevieve Schmidt '25 (Theatre Arts), pictured here.

Carport, watercolor on paper, 2023, 10 inches x 14 inches. One of the works featured in the new exhibition at Transmission Gallery.

Jessica Eastburn (Art and Art History) is exhibiting new watercolor paintings on paper in the Small Space at Transmission Gallery (Oakland, CA) from March 30 through May 6, 2023. The paintings were conceived of as representing small ecosystems wherein different elements of the natural world must all get along to thrive. The paintings were made in response to ecological anxiety around the rapidly worsening climate crisis, but are also a celebration of the resilience and exuberance of nature.

The wide variety of books parents read aloud with their 2-year-olds.

Kirsten Read (Psychology) presented new collaborative work on behalf of co-authors from San Jose State and Stanford at this year's biennial Society for Research in Child Development meeting in Salt Lake City. The research paper, "The Rich Language of Storybook Reading" is a quantitative analysis of both the text and speech that 2-year-old English and Spanish learners are exposed to when their caregivers read aloud with them in the home. Findings suggest... reading to young children is especially fertile ground for supporting language development! The talk was part of a four-part symposium at SRCD on "Opportunities for Learning from Shared Reading in Monolingual and Bilingual Environments."

Left to right: Mateo J. Carrillo, Sarah Hines, and Ángeles Picone.

Mateo J. Carrillo (History) organized a panel and presented a paper at the 2023 Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) Conference in Antigua, Guatemala. The title of the panel, which was held on Saturday, March 25, 2023, was "Transforming the Land, Building the State." Dr. Carrillo’s paper, “Revolutionizing Mobility: Rural Infrastructure and the Mexican State, 1925-1940,” explored how civil engineers deployed road and water technologies as well as modernist ideologies and nationalist propaganda to build the state in the years following the Mexican Revolution. He argues that in their drive to modernize rural landscapes and peoples via infrastructure, these technocrats laid the groundwork for mass Mexican migration to the United States. Dr. Carrillo was joined on the panel by María de los Ángeles Picone (Boston College), Sarah Hines (University of Oklahoma), and Carlos Dimas (University of Nevada-Las Vegas).

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar