Faculty Notes Archives
Winter 2005

PAUL FAULSTICH, professor of environmental studies, had an opinion piece, “Bush Administration: A War on Health,” printed in the Claremont Courier. He published a review of Piercing the Ground: Balgo Women’s Image Making and Relationship to Country, in the academic journal “Aboriginal History.” Faulstich also consulted on a book about ecological design for publisher John Wiley & Sons, and served on the academic committee for the “Rock Art Research: Changing Paradigms” congress in Agra, India. In the fall, Faulstich’s new course, “A Sense of Place,” engaged each student in individual social responsibility projects that had them working with the broader community. As a collective project, the class created a water wise garden on campus, which will be formally dedicated during Alumni Weekend to the memory of Carl Hertel.

CARMEN FOUGHT, associate professor of linguistics, was featured on the PBS program “Do You Speak American?” which aired Jan. 5 on KCET. Hour three explored Chicano, the thriving, distinct street talk of the Los Angeles Latino community. Fought is the author of Chicano English in Context. Her research focuses on the dialects of California, from those associated with Latinos and Latinas to the infamous “Valley Girl” way of speaking. She studies the representation of language in the media, including films, television and commercials.

DAVID FURMAN, Peter and Gloria Gold Professor of Art, had a recent narrative ceramic sculpture, “The Irresistible Force vs. the Immovable Object,” chosen for exhibition in the 3rd International Biennale of Ceramics to be held April through June in Incheon, South Korea. Of the 2,500 works reviewed, only 121 international works were selected from 37 countries. Furman’s artwork was one of 23 American sculptures chosen for the exhibition. His ceramic sculpture, “Hey Molly, Molly,” a whimsical porcelain teapot/homage to his dog, Molly, has recently been acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His trompe l’oeil ceramic sculpture, “A Pint of Art,” an ersatz object depicting a paint can with pencils and brushes, has been acquired by the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wis. This is the third acquisition of Furman’s art for the Racine museum. A group of Furman’s realist pieces is included in the exhibition, “Contemplating Realism,” on display March 3-April 2 at the Solomon Dubnick Gallery in Sacramento. “The Trouble Maker,” an erotic ceramic tea pot created by Furman, is featured in the new edition of Electric Kiln Ceramics, by R. Zakin, and published by Chilton Books.

JUDITH GRABINER, Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor of Mathematics, presented the lecture, “It’s All for the Best: Searching for Perfection with Mathematical Models,” at the national joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America in Atlanta on Jan. 8.

RONALD MACAULAY, professor emeritus of linguistics, published Extremely Common Eloquence, Amsterdam, 2005, and Talk That Counts: Age, Gender, and Social Class Differences in Discourse through Oxford University Press, New York, also this year.

PETER NARDI, professor of sociology, published Interpreting Data: A Guide to Understanding Research, Allyn & Bacon Publishers, 2006. The book will be available in April. Nardi’s text teaches students to interpret tables of data, graphs, and statistics found in scholarly publications and to understand quantitative information from popular media and polls. Examples are provided throughout the text with exercises for students to test their knowledge and interpretations.

GREG ORFALEA, director of Pitzer’s Center for Writing, authored the editorial “Snuffing the Fire of Radical Islam” featured in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 12. He also wrote a short essay, “We Were the People,” published in the December issue of Mizna, a literary magazine based in Minneapolis. Another piece, “Valley Boys,” appears in the anthology Jewish in America, 2004. The three pieces are in submission for the PEN America West Award in Literary Journalism. Orfalea also participated with Robert Greenwald, producer of “Outfoxed” and Stephanie Thomas, producer of “The Charlie Rose Show” as a panelist at the national convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council on Dec. 18 in a discussion titled “Combating Political and Religious Extremism in the Media.” The convention was covered by C-SPAN.

SUSAN PHILLIPS, director of Pitzer’s Center for California Cultural and Social Issues (CCCSI), was awarded a $21,000 Harry Frank Guggenheim research grant. Phillips plans to study the effects of a 2003 drug raid, called Operation Fly Trap, on the families of 28 men incarcerated for drug trafficking in South Los Angeles.

HILTON ROOT, Freeman Visiting Professor of Economics at the Claremont Colleges and Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute, published Capital & Collusion: Political Logic of Global Economic Development, Princeton University Press, 2005. Proposing an analytical framework for a new comparative economics of development, the author compares China to India, Latin America to East Asia, and contemporary with historical cases.

SUSAN SEYMOUR, professor emerita of anthropology, served as guest editor in the December 2004 issue of Ethos: The Journal for Psychological Anthropology Vol. 32 (4). The volume is a special edition titled “Contributions for a Feminist Psychological Anthropology.” She contributed the article “Multiple Caretaking of Infants and Young Children: An Area in Critical Need of a Feminist Psychological Anthropology,” and authored the introduction. Seymour also presented a lecture on multiple child care at the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families on Dec. 8.

TERESA VAZQUEZ, visiting professor of Chicano studies and sociology, presented the paper “Vulture City: In Search of a Safer City for Women in Ciudad Juárez,” as part of the panel Urban Landscapes, Redevelopment, and Inequality, XXV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, Oct. 8, 2004; presented photographic work titled “Vulture City,” along with Dr. Betsy Sweet, at the Poster Session of the 45th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Portland, Ore., Oct. 22-23, 2004; and presented the paper “Is Empire a New Planning Regime?” as part of the panel Empire, Globalism and New Orientalisms in Planning, 45th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Portland, Ore., Oct. 23, 2004.

RUDI VOLTI, professor of sociology, presented a paper titled, “Mass Motorization in Spain: Policies, Products, and Processes,” at the Second International Conference on Traffic, Transport, and Mobility held in Dearborn, Mich., in November.

AL WACHTEL, professor of English, published his short story, “Goddess,” in the Spring 2005 issue of The Gettysburg Review.

PHIL ZUCKERMAN, assistant professor of sociology, wrote a chapter, “Atheism: Rates and Patterns Worldwide,” which will appear in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, Cambridge University Press, in 2005. The chapter assembles and analyzes current data on rates and patterns of non-belief in God worldwide, country by country. It also correlates levels of non-belief in various countries with indicators of societal health, such as literacy rates, infant mortality rates, gender equality, life expectancy, homicide rates, and per capita income.