Scholar in Residence appointment for 2025-2026

Dear Colleagues:

I am pleased to announce and congratulate Amanda Lagji as the 2025-2026 Scholar in Residence.

Faculty serving as Scholar in Residence (SIR) pursue scholarly activities and offer a seminar course during their semester SIR residency. The aim of the seminar is to engage students in the process of creating knowledge or artistic work and to enable the SIR faculty to make substantive progress on a scholarly or artistic product by the end of the semester.

The theme for Professor Lagji’s project and seminar is Counterinsurgency.  Professor Lagji is currently working on a book project, Terrorist Plots: Timing Terror in Global Fiction, that analyzes and organizes works of fiction around four main counter-terror logics, and in which she aims “to reclaim the imaginations’ ability to open up rather than foreclose futures.”  During the seminar, to be offered in spring 2026, students will read and provide feedback on draft portions of Professor Lagji’s book.  Together, they will work across literature, history, and politics to track “counterinsurgency” in colonial spaces, seeking to critically examine the impact and implications of the term counterinsurgency and its intersections with dispossession and marginalization.

I look forward to the positive impact of this program for faculty and students alike.  I also thank members of the application review committee for their work: Darin Brown, Curriculum Committee faculty representative; Marley Thomson, Curriculum Committee student representative; Will Barndt, FEC faculty representative; Elena Fields, FEC student representative; and Associate Dean Ahmed Alwishah, DoF representative.

Allen M. Omoto, Ph.D.

Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dean of Faculty

Pitzer College

1050 North Mills Ave

Claremont, CA 91711

https://www.pitzer.edu/dean-of-faculty/