Intersecting Worlds

Creative and Scientific Inquiry 

Visiting Environmental Analysis Professor Monica Mahoney (pictured above, right) joined other scholars in an artist-in-residence pilot project to explore how biological field stations can become centers of ecology, place-based art, and Indigenous perspectives. The Field Station | Field Studio project (pictured above, right) featured The Claremont Colleges’ Robert J. Bernard Biological Field Station and the University of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. In the spring Pitzer College Art Galleries hosted a pop-up exhibition and community conversation with Mahoney and others about the project. 

All in the Family

Professor of Organizational Studies Barbara Junisbai and her collaborators received a grant from Claremont Graduate University’s (CGU) BLAIS Foundation to develop a scale for assessing how organizations support a family-building climate. The team plans to create the scale to reflect the realities of modern workplaces by being inclusive of all genders and gender identities and considering diverse family structures, varied workplace roles, temporal aspects of family-building, and multiple pathways to parenthood.  

Junisbai and her partners hope to advance a theoretical understanding of work-family integration while providing an evidence-based tool for organizations to assess and improve their family-building support systems. Junisbai also co-authored an article with Reggie Bullock Jr. ’22 about the Inside-Out classroom experience in the Professing Education journal.  

John Keats and White Supremacy? 

Assistant Professor of English and World Literature Amanda Louise Johnson explored how U.S. Southern writers appropriated John Keats’ poetry for anti-abolitionist purposes in an English Literary History journal article. Johnson argued that these writers constructed Keats’ cultural image as a saintly, morally abstracted poet to preserve white supremacism in the antebellum South. 

Johnson also wrote an essay included in Money and American Literature, which was published by Cambridge University Press. Johnson argued that the complexity of monetary exchange in the New World forced colonists and settlers to engage in thought-experiments that characterized Adam Smith’s philosophical and economic thought. In performing said thought-experiments, however, Johnson asserted these colonists and settlers leaned toward self-serving rationalizations that Smith found troubling. 

Support for Students

Professor of Economics Menna Bizuneh was appointed as Pitzer’s associate dean for curriculum and advising. In her role, Bizuneh’s primary responsibilities revolve around curricular planning and support, student advising and engagement, and pedagogical innovation and student accommodation processes. 

Supporting Faculty Innovations 

Professor of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Juanita Aristizábal was appointed as Pitzer’s associate dean of global/local initiatives and programming and director of the Institute for Global/Local Action and Study (IGLAS). As associate dean, Aristizábal is focusing on coordinating and developing global and local academic programming and fostering community engagement and advocacy in local and global contexts. As the director of IGLAS, she works to incubate and support innovative faculty work that bridges these contexts and issues.  

Bot Assist 

Associate Professor of Psychology Marcus Rodriguez and his collaborators received a grant from CGU’s BLAIS Foundation to develop a bot to help early-career therapists remember foundational principles. Rodriguez hopes that the AI bot can provide real-time reminders to therapists to put their validation and motivational interview skills into practice with their clients. His team is partnering with community mental health workers supporting underserved youth in Jurupa Valley, California. Rodriguez also co-authored an article for Europe PubMed Central that explored the effects of emotional regulation skills and human interaction on well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Award-Winning Book 

Assistant Professor of Media Studies Lisa Yin Han recently received the Ludwik Fleck Prize. The Society for Social Studies of Science chose Han in recognition of her book Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Sea Floor. The Fleck Prize, first awarded in 1992, recognizes an outstanding book in science and technology studies. Learn more about Han’s book.

The Search for Work 

Assistant Professor of Economics Deepti Goel co-authored an Industrial and Labor Relations Review article, “Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants.” Goel’s work showed that a close tie increases the likelihood of generating a job offer from a social network. 

The Realm of Numbers 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Bahar Acu was a co-organizer of the N+12th Southern California Topology Colloquium held at Pitzer College. The mathematics conference was sponsored by the Claremont Topology Seminar with funding from Pitzer and the National Science Foundation. 

Investment and Social Value 

Visiting Economics and Environmental Analysis Professor Kevin Grell co-authored “Subsidizing Uncertain Investments: The Role of Production Technology and Imprecise Learning” in the Journal of Corporate Finance. Grell’s team developed a framework to analyze government subsidies, firms’ production technologies, and learning under uncertainty. The paper sheds light on which firms should be subsidized, when investment flexibility creates social value, and how to design effective subsidy policies under fiscal constraints. 

Mathematics for Philosophers 

Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics Judith V. Grabiner authored an article in the book The Cartesian Mind. Published as part of the Routledge Philosophical Minds series, the book centers the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Grabiner’s article, “Descartes: Mathematics and Geometry,” explains to the philosophy community how Descartes invented analytic geometry. Grabiner explores how Descartes created a new method of solving problems in geometry by translating them into algebra, using the algorithmic power of algebra to transform the problem into algebraic equations, and then re-interpreting the resulting equations into geometric form.  

Lifetime Achievement Award 

Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology Claudia Strauss (pictured, above right, with Durham Sociology Assistant Professor Mohaddeseh Ziyachi) received the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The award, which honors career-long contributions to psychological anthropology that have substantially influenced the field and its development, was presented to Strauss this spring during the society’s biennial meeting. 

Professor-Student Collaboration 

Professor of Secular Studies and Sociology Phil Zuckerman collaborated with Sophie Myers '27 on the research article “Altruistic Atheists” published in the journal Secularism & Nonreligion. Drawing on interviews with 17 individuals, their article looks at the possible motivations for altruistic behavior in people who are atheistic or grew up in an environment in which a belief in God wasn’t taught.  

Fulbright Scholar in Media Arts 

Professor of Media Studies Jesse Lerner was granted a 2025–26 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to conduct research at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the National University in Mexico City. He is using his time there to complete his book on Latin American experimental media arts. Lerner is a documentary film and video maker, curator, and writer. He served as the director of Pitzer’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry from 2023 
to 2025. 

An NSF Grant for Bangkok Research  

Department of Natural Sciences Professors Pete Chandrangsu and Katie Purvis-Roberts have been awarded a $446,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to fund the international research experience of 18 students from Pitzer and Scripps Colleges. The NSF grant will support a project that builds on five years of work in studying the biodiversity and water quality of Bangkok's canal system. According to Purvis-Roberts, the grant will enable their team “to study the environment of the area more in depth. In addition to understanding water quality (temperature, salinity, total dissolved solids, and chemistry), we will probe the diversity of the microbiome and the plants and insects along the canal, which will greatly expand the water quality knowledge in the area.” 

Occupied U.S. Cities and Conspiracies 

An op-ed by Professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a Transnational Studies Suyapa Portillo Villeda '96, “Low-intensity warfare against immigrants and a series of unanswered questions,” which calls for action over rhetoric in response to the Trump administration’s occupation of American cities, was published in August in the Claremont Courier. An August column by Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott on conspiracy theories and American politics features the commentary and research of Professor of Philosophy Brian Keeley. In the piece “This 1848 painting has uncanny insight into American conspiracy thinking,” Kennicott turns to Keeley’s perspective on American conspiracy thinking, which Keeley says can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence.