Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Ken Miller, Ph.D. (B.A. Pomona College, J.D. Harvard Law School, and Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley) is Don H. and Edessa Rose Professor of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. He became director of the Rose Institute on July 1, 2021, having served as associate director from 2009 to June 2021.

Miller has served as a member of CMC’s Government faculty since 2003. His research focuses on state government institutions, with an emphasis on direct democracy and the interaction between law and politics. His publications include Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America (Oxford University Press, 2020), Direct Democracy and the Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and co-edited volumes Parchment Barriers: Political Polarization and the Limits of Constitutional Order (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and The New Political Geography of California (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2008). 

Previously, Miller was the Ann and Herbert Vaughan Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (2011-2012) and a visiting scholar at the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University (2017-2018). 

At the Rose Institute, he has worked with students on numerous research projects, including the biennial Video Voter Guide project and the 24-state Miller-Rose Institute Initiative Database.

Professor Miller’s Athenaeum presentation celebrates his installation ceremony as the Don H. and Edessa Rose Professor of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

The After School Specials believe in creating a space for passionate individuals who share a love for making music, regardless of their backgrounds or levels of experience. With members as diverse as the music they sing, the group's singer hail from all corners of the 5Cs, country, and world:

Ben Baraga Pom‘24
Caitie Connelly Pom ‘23
Zach Fogel CMC ‘23
Vikrant Goel Pom ‘23
Esther Goldberg SCR ‘26
Sebastian Groom Pom ‘26
Izzy Gustitus SCR ’26
Matilda Kirk Pom ‘25
Fish Mathurin Pom ‘26
Maya Singapuri Pom’24
Lucy Thompson CMC ‘25
Ava Thuresson CMC ‘26
Aaron Wu Pom ‘25
Izzy Yau-Weeks CMC ‘25
Dylan Yin Pom ’23

View Video: YouTube with The After School Specials

Historian Taner Akçam is the inaugural director of the Armenian Genocide Research Program of the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA. Previously he was the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Modern Armenian History and Genocide in the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Akçam grew up in Turkey, where he was imprisoned for editing a political youth journal and was subsequently adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 1976. Akçam later received political asylum in Germany. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of Hanover with a dissertation on The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922. 

Akçam is widely recognized as one of the first Turkish scholars to write extensively on the Ottoman-Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in the early twentieth century. He is the author of more than ten scholarly works as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German, and English on Armenian Genocide and Turkish nationalism. As well, he is the founder of Krikor Guerguerian Online Archive. 

Taner's most known books are A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006, received the 2007 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction) and Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012; awarded the 2013 Hourani Book Prize of The Middle East Studies Association; selected as one of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books on the Middle East for 2012). Akçam’s latest book is Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Palgrave 2018). Because of the findings in this book, Akçam was introduced by the New York Times as “Sherlock Holmes of the Armenian Genocide.”

Taner Akçam's presentation commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and is the Center’s annual lecture dedicated to Armenian Studies.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Taner Akcam

Powell Malina ’25, International Relations: The Secrets We Carry
Wanqian (Joyce) Peng, ’25, International Relations, Economics, and Gender & Sexuality Studies: 28 Days
Theo Siasat ’24, PPE: Beyond Circumstance
Jasmine Tan ’25, Economics and Data Science: Untitled
 

Felicia Marcus is currently the William C. Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program and an attorney, consultant, and member of the Water Policy Group. Most recently, she was chair of the California State Water Board, with regulatory responsibility for water conservation, groundwater management, wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, and desalination, water rights laws, and the state’s drinking water program. Marcus helped lead the board through the state’s worst drought in modern history.

Prior to this, she led US EPA’s Southwest and Pacific Region–working extensively on air, water, and toxics issues while helping negotiate agreements, develop policy, and implement projects on state, tribal, US-Mexico border, and Pacific Islands issues. She also headed the Los Angeles Department of Public Works which under her leadership gained national awards for environmental initiatives and performance.

She has also held senior leadership positions with national non-profit organizations and has been a practicing attorney in the private and non-profit sectors. She currently serves on the Commission on Environmental Cooperation-Joint Public Advisory Council (US, Mexico, Canada) and was recently elected a Fellow in the (US) National Academy of Public Administration.

Marcus has a law degree from NYU and an AB cum laude from Harvard College in East Asian Studies.

Ms. Marcus' Athenaeum presentation is part of the Climate Solutions Series this spring.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Felicia Marcus

Mia Giordano '25, Public Policy: How I Learned to Change My Brain
Luis Mendoza Ramirez '25, Computer Science: Hiding In Plain Sight
Leslie Tello '25, Economics: When The Door Closes
Mohamed Yassin '23, Psychological & Cognitive Sciences: Truth and Dare

Ian Wood is Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds, where he taught for 39 years before retiring in 2015. With expertise in late Roman culture, Barbarian kingdoms of the Dark Ages, Anglo-Saxon sculpture, Northumbrian monasticism, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century historiography of the Barbarian Invasions, he is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His major publications include books that deal with the history of the Franks between 450 and 751, hagiographical accounts of missionary activity in the early Middle Ages, the historiography of the early Middle Ages, the transformation of the Roman World, and the development of a Christian economy. Between 1992 and 1998 he was a coordinator of a major European project on the transformation of the Roman World.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Ian Wood

Cassia Roth is associate professor of history and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. She also serves as director of graduate studies in history. Prior to her position at UGA, she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Her book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil was published in 2020 (Stanford University Press). It won the Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association and the Choice Outstanding Academic Title from the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, and her article “From Free Womb to Criminalized Woman: Fertility Control in Brazilian Slavery and Freedom,” won the 2018 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Article Prize.

She teaches courses on Brazilian history, gender history, slavery, and medicine. She is currently completing her Master’s in Public Health with a focus on epidemiology and global health.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Cassia Roth

Vincent Michelot is a professor of American Politics at Sciences Po Lyon. He currently serves as Attaché for Higher Education at the French Embassy in the United States and as director of Campus France USA. A Fulbright scholar and administrator, Michelot has over 30 years’ experience in international education and transatlantic exchanges. An accomplished scholar, he has served as the director of Science Po, Lyon, and has written and commented widely on French and American politics.

Jacob Soll is University Professor and professor of philosophy, history, and accounting at the University of Southern California.

He received a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge University.

He has taught at Cambridge University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy.

Soll has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur “Genius Prize” Fellowship.

He is the author of four books and numerous academic and newspaper and magazine articles in outlets such as the NYT, Politico, Le Monde, the WSJ and others.

His last book, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations, was a global bestseller.

Richard Sander, holds the Jesse Dukeminier Professorship in Law at UCLA. An economist and law professor, he has taught at UCLA since 1989 and also serves at the director of the UCLA-RAND Center for Law and Public Policy.

Most of Sander's work draws on both law and social science to understand problems of social inequality and evaluate social policies. He is the author of two books: Moving Toward Integration (Harvard, 2018), which attempts to explain the complex evolution of housing segregation in America, the effects of fair housing laws, and the paths to desegregation; and Mismatch (Basic Books, 2012), which examines the paradoxical and often counterproductive effects of many current affirmative action policies in higher education, suggests a better path to diversity, and describes the barriers to reform.

An unpaid, informal advisor to the plaintiffs in the Harvard/UNC cases during the early stages of those cases, Sander also collaborates with judges and scholars to study innovative ways to simplify litigation and to evaluate the results of reforms —an approach that has gained a good deal of traction in recent years.

(This event was originally scheduled for March 21, 2023.)

Food for Thought: Podcast with Richard Sander

Isabel Vincent, award-winning investigative journalist for the New York Post, is the author of the bestselling memoir, Dinner with Edward, the biography Gilded Lily: The making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows, the sex trafficking exposé Bodies and Souls, and See No Evil, an investigation into Latin America’s biggest kidnapping case. Her account of the Swiss bank accounts left dormant after the Nazi era, Hitler’s Silent Partners, won the Yad Vashem Award for Holocaust History. A native of Canada, Vincent covered South American drug cartels for the Globe and the Mail and later reported on conflicts in Kosovo and the civil war in Angola. For many years, she has reported on the madness, mayhem, and corruption of the New York City for the Post and a host of other publications.

Ms. Vincent's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Photo credit: Zandy Mangold

David E. Tolchinsky P'20 is a filmmaker and professor of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He co-founded and directed NU's MFA in Writing for Screen+Stage program, was chair of RTVF for 11 years, and recently co-founded and now directs the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts at Northwestern. 

His work, which spans comedy and darker fare, often involves trauma, memory, and mental illness. His short Cassandra, available on Alter, Apple, and Amazon, has won over 11 awards internationally and is currently being developed into a feature. He produced and scored the NYTimes Op-Doc Contaminated Memories, directed by Debra Tolchinsky, produced Creature Companion, directed by Melika Bass, and recently produced Shudder/AMC's feature Night's End, directed by Jennifer Reeder. He was recently invited by Psychology Today to start a blog, Screenology: pondering mental health and media. He's written screenplays for various Hollywood studios and has written and directed plays performed in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He graduated from Yale (BA) and the USC School of Cinematic Arts (MFA).

Photo credit: Stephen Lewis

Food for Thought: Podcast with David Tolchinsky P'20

Lingling Wei is the award-winning chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of Superpower Showdown. She covers China's political economy, focusing on the intersection of business and politics. Born and raised in China, she has a M.A. in journalism from N.Y.U., got her start covering U.S. real estate, and has won many awards for her China coverage. In 2021, she's among a team of reporters and editors whose work was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Ms. Wei's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Lingling Wei

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel is How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022). Her novel Dominicana was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book, and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. 

Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, and has been published in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She's the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix). An associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, she divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin, Italy.

Ms. Cruz’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.

Photo credit: Erika Morillo