Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

The “Future of Work” event is a panel discussion that brings together leaders across sectors to discuss the ever-evolving workplace. With the growing adoption of advanced technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence), as well as the increased emphasis on a fluid, de-centralized workforce, the nature of the workplace, workforce, and perhaps even the nature of work itself will be changing significantly in the near future. Arjun Lall ’07, Faye Sahai ’90, and Stacie Yee ’99 will explore these topics in a moderated panel discussion, and share their thoughts on the future of work. This panel discussion is a production of the 20/20 in 2020 theme for the CMC research institutes, and is made possible through the collaborative efforts of the Berger Institute and the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Yanick Lahens was born in Haiti. She completed her primary education there prior to leaving for France where she completed university studies in Modern Literature. She returned to Haiti in 1977. She taught literature at the State University of Haiti and participated in the National Pedagogical Institute’s quest to implement educational reforms which contributed, among other things, to the teaching of Kreyol in the early years of primary school. She hosted a cultural program “Entre nous” on Radio Haiti Inter and published her first articles on Haitian literature and society.

Subsequently, she became a member of the editorial board of the Haitian-Caribbean magazine Critical Pathways, which represented an important moment of reflection in Haiti and the Caribbean. She left university education in 1995 and, after being a member of the cabinet of the Minister of Culture Raoul Peck, she joined the direction of the Slave Route Project which is interested in the issue of slavery through arts and sciences until the project ended in Haiti in 2000. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Congress of Francophone Studies and is currently a member of the editorial board of the French-Haitian magazine Conjunction. She recently joined the Board of Trustees of Quisqueya University.

She founded with other writers, the Association of Haitian writers in 1998, and continues to lead seminars on literature.

In 2008 she set up a foundation that supervises youth in social awareness activities. It provides support to associations working to promote reading, set up libraries and organizes cultural events.

In 1990,  she published an essay Entre l'ancrage et la fuite,  the Haitian writer at Editions Deschamps; In 1994 the collection of short stories, Aunt Resia and the gods at L’Harmattan; the collection of short stories The little Corruption in 1999 with Memory Editions; in 2000, the novel In the house of the father with The Plumed Serpent; in 2005 the collection of short stories, The madness came with the rain at the National Presses; in 2008 The color of dawn with Sabine Wespieser and also Faille in 2010, Guillaume and Nathalie in 2013, Moonbath in 2014 and Douces déroutes in 2018.

In the father's house received the Literature Prize in 2009 at the Leipzig Book Fair; The Color of Dawn, the 2008 Millepages Prize, and also the 2009 RFO Prize, the 2009 Richelieu de la Francophonie Prize, the Reader's Prize of the Vincennes city as part of the America Festival in 2010; Guillaume and Nathalie won the ADELF award in 2013, the 2013 Carbet Award for High School students; and, in 2014 Moonbath received the Femina prize.

Her works have been translated into English, Brazilian, Catalan, Japanese, German, Polish and Italian. Translations are in progress in Norwegian and Spanish.

Yanick Lahens has received, among other honors, recognitions from: the women's organization Kay Fanm for her civic involvement in 2007; from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Organization of La Francophonie in Haiti; by the Haitian Studies Association for the whole of her work; by the cultural association ARAKA.

She was the first woman guest of honor at the Book Fair of Books in Haiti in 2009 and was appointed an officer of France's Arts and Letters in 2009.

Yanick Lahens held the first annual chair in Francophone Worlds at the Collège de France during the year 2018-2019. 

A leading expert in national security, intelligence, and counter-terrorism, John O. Brennan served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) from March 2013 to January 2017. As director, he was responsible for intelligence collection, analysis, covert action, counterintelligence, and liaison relationships with foreign intelligence services.

Brennan began his 25-year tenure at the CIA in 1980. Fluent in Arabic, Brennan specialized in Middle Eastern affairs and counterterrorism. Over the years, he served in multiple capacities, including as the agency’s intelligence briefer to President Clinton, CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, chief of staff to then-director George Tenet, and deputy executive director. In 2003, he led a multi-agency effort to establish what would become the National Counterterrorism Center and served as its founding director. After retiring from the CIA in 2005, Brennan worked in the private sector for three years.

Brennan returned to public service in 2009 and served as assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. In this capacity, he advised President Obama on counterterrorism strategy and helped coordinate the U.S. government’s approach to homeland security, counterterrorism, cyberattacks, natural disasters, and pandemics.

Brennan graduated from Fordham University in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. In his junior year, he studied abroad at the American University in Cairo concentrating on Arabic language studies. He subsequently attended the University of Texas at Austin where he received a master’s degree in government with a concentration in Middle Eastern studies in 1980.

Brennan currently is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, a senior intelligence and national security analyst for NBC and MSNBC, and a consultant/advisor to a variety of private sector companies.

Mr. Brennan will deliver the Spring 2020 Lecture for the Res Publica Society Speaker Series.

*NOTE* This is a special “Ath on the Road” Res Publica event and will be held off campus in Orange County. Roundtrip transportation will be provided. Buses with wifi will begin boarding at 3:30 pm and will depart campus at approximately 4 pm; return to campus is expected by 9 pm. 


Food for Thought: Podcast with John Brennan

Viet Than Nguyen and his family came to the United States as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975. As he grew up in America, he began to notice that most movies and books about the war focused on Americans while the Vietnamese remained silenced. Inspired by this lack of representation, he began to write about the war from a Vietnamese perspective, globally reimagining what we thought we knew about the conflict. The New York Times says that his novel, "The Sympathizer," which won the Pulitzer Prize among other awards, “fills a void…giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of forty years ago in a new light.”

Nguyen’s book "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" was a finalist for the National Book Award. Author Ari Kelman praises Nothing Ever Dies saying it, “provides the fullest and best explanation of how the Vietnam War has become so deeply inscribed into national memory.” His collection of short stories, "The Refugees," explores questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. In 2018, Nguyen called on 17 fellow refugee writers from across the globe to shed light on their experiences, and the result is "The Displaced," a powerful dispatch from the individual lives behind current headlines, with proceeds to support the International Rescue Committee.

Nguyen was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. The MacArthur foundation noted that his work “not only offers insight into the experiences of refugees past and present, but also poses profound questions about how we might more accurately and conscientiously portray victims and adversaries of other wars.”

Nguyen is a University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He also works as a cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times.

Professor Nguyen’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Presidents' Leadership Fund and the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

Michael Jerryson, professor of religious studies in the department of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University, looks at the intersections between identity and violence and the ways in which we associate religious identities with peace and violence.

He earned his B.A in Western Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After volunteering for the Peace Corps in Mongolia, Jerryson returned to the University of Wisconsin, Madison and acquired his M.A in Languages and Cultures of Asia with a focus on the socio-political history of Mongolian Buddhism.

He furthered his interest in religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, earning a Ph.D. in Religious Studies with a Global Studies emphasis.

Professor Jerryson's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.

(Parents Dining Room)

Robert Hass is a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. In his tenure as United States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, “imagination makes communities.” He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as “Watershed,” which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. When he is talking about poetry itself, Hass is both spontaneous and original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook.

A prolific poet, Hass’s books of poetry include “The Apple Trees at Olema,” and “Time and Materials.” Awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, and the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

(Excerpted from The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center’s website.)

One of contemporary American poetry’s most eclectic and formally innovative writers, Brenda Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and document, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” Hillman’s poetry investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality. In an interview with Sarah Rosenthal, Hillman described her own understanding of form: “It is the artist’s job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it … I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you’re always bound to fail.” Praising Hillman’s deft handling of form and subject, Marjorie Welish wrote, “Each poem … creates its own experimental configuration, within which the phrase swerves and discombobulates sense, as several registers of subject complicate the sampling of experiences and also as the experimental format throws the lyric into symbolic disarray one moment and naturalist scrutiny the next. And even more: she writes as if the lyric poem had a political calling.”

Born in 1951 in Tucson, Arizona, Hillman earned degrees at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The author of over 10 books of poetry, she has received numerous awards for her work including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her collection Bright Existence (1993) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Loose Sugar (1997) a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. She co-translated Ashur Etwebi’s Poems from Above the Hill (2011), Jeongrye Choi’s Instances (2011), and Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet (2018); and edited or coedited several volumes, including The Pocket Emily Dickinson (2009). A professor of creative writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at St. Mary’s College, in Moraga, California. (Excerpted from the Poetry Foundation website.)

Photo credits: Hass photo—Shoey Sindel; Hillman photo: University of Arizona Poetry Center

Hudson Moore ‘06 is global director of metal procurement & sustainability at Anheuser-Busch InBev, a leading global brewer with a portfolio of over 500 beer brands, including Budweiser, Michelob ULTRA, and Stella Artois. In 2018, AB InBev launched its ambitious 2025 global sustainability pillars: Smart Agriculture, Water Stewardship, Circular Packaging, Climate Action.

A 2006 graduate of Claremont McKenna College where he studied history, Hudson grew up in San Diego. His interest in the global beer industry began at CMC when he joined the Ben Franklin Society, CMC’s home brewing club. After starting his career in financial services, Hudson earned his MBA at Duke University and joined Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2012. In his eight years with the company, he has held various roles in sustainable sourcing and sales strategy, located in the U.S. and Belgium. In his current role, Hudson and his team are responsible for developing and executing the global sustainable sourcing strategy for aluminum cansheet, with a focus on achieving key 2025 sustainability targets of 70% recycled content in cans and 25% carbon footprint reduction.

Mr. Hudson’s Athenaeum presentation is the keynote address for the 2020 Green Careers Conference sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center. 

Sheri Berman is professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include the development of democracy and dictatorship, European politics, populism, and fascism, and the history of the left. She is author of books on European social democracy and the fate of democracy during the interwar years, social democracy and fascism in 19th and 20th century Europe. Her latest book is "Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day."  In addition to scholarly work on these and other subjects, she has published in a wide variety of non-scholarly publications including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, VOX, The Guardian and Dissent.  

Professor Berman’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies and the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, both at CMC.

A neuroscientist by training, Susan Hockfield is the first woman to lead MIT and is the author of the "The Age of Living Machines," which speaks to the technological-biological revolution known as “convergence.” In the 20th century, technologies such as aircraft, the telephone, and the Internet changed our world—to the point where life today is inconceivable without them. In the 21st century, Hockfield says, radical new “convergence” technologies will play a similar role to reshape every facet of our world. “Living Machines,” like virus-built batteries, big-data designed food crops, mind-reading bionic limbs, and countless other inventions are only a few of the practical developments she discusses. With an eye towards how they will affect various industries, from energy, to manufacturing, to health care, to agriculture, to virtually anything, Hockfield provides a first glance into the shape of the world to come.

Hockfield’s ground-breaking career has spanned America’s most prestigious schools. At Yale, she was professor of neurobiology; she subsequently served as the dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and then as Yale’s provost before moving on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She served as MIT's 16th president from December 2004 through June 2012, the first woman and the first life scientist to lead the institute.

Hockfield has also held the Marie Curie Visiting Professorship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She has served as a U.S. Science Envoy to Turkey with the U.S. Department of State, and served as the inaugural co-chair of the White House-led Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a task force of government, industry, and academic leaders. Currently, she is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and professor of neuroscience at MIT.

President Hockfield’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President’s Leadership Fund.


View Video: YouTube with Susan Hockfield


Food for Thought: Podcast with Susan Hockfield

This event has been canceled and will be rescheduled. 

Allyson Hobbs is the director of African and African American Studies at Stanford and an associate professor of history at Stanford University where she teaches American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth-century American history and culture. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Graves Award in the Humanities, and the St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She was honored by the Silicon Valley branch of the NAACP with a Freedom Fighter Award. She served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017. 

She is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Root.com, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Hobbs’s first book, "A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life," published by Harvard University Press in 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. It won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for best first book in American history and the Lawrence Levine Prize for best book in American cultural history, among other accolades.

She is now at work on two books—one a history of Black women’s testimonials of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo, expanding upon her article for The New Yorker, "One Year of #MeToo: The Legacy of Black Women’s Testimonies"; and "Far From Sanctuary: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights," which explores the violence, humiliation, and indignities that Black motorists experienced on the road during the pre-Civil Rights era, at a time when the open road in an automobile symbolized the American dream. 

Hobbs graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford.

Professor Hobbs’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Devon W. Carbado is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law where he teaches constitutional criminal procedure, constitutional law, critical race theory, and criminal adjudication. He also formerly served as UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of BruinX for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Carbado has won numerous teaching awards, including being elected Professor of the Year by the UCLA School of Law classes of 2000 and 2006; he received the Law School's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003 and the University's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2007. In 2005, Carbado was an inaugural recipient of the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship, which is awarded to scholars whose work furthers the goals of Brown v. Board of Education. In 2018, he was named an inaugural recipient of the Atlantic Philanthropies Fellowship for Racial Equity.

Carbado writes in the areas of employment discrimination, criminal procedure, implicit bias, constitutional law, and critical race theory. His scholarship appears in law reviews at UCLA, Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, and Yale, among others. He is the author of "Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America" (Oxford University Press) (with Mitu Gulati) and the editor of several volumes, including "Race Law Stories" (Foundation Press) (with Rachel Moran), "The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives" (Beacon Press) (with Donald Weise), and "Time on Two Crosses: The Collective Writings of Bayard Rustin" (Cleis Press) (with Donald Weise). He is currently working on a series of articles on affirmative action and a book on race, law, and police violence.A board member of the African American Policy Forum, Carbado was the Shikes Fellow in Civil Liberties and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2012.

Carbado graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. At Harvard, he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Black Letter Law Journal, a member of the Board of Student Advisors, and winner of the Northeast Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. Carbado joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1997. He served as vice dean for faculty and research 2006-07 and again in 2009-10. 

Professor Carbado will deliver the 2020 Martin Luther King, Jr., Commemorative Lecture.

The Claremont Treble Singers will perform "A Ceremony of Carols" in which 20th century British composer Benjamin Britten sets medieval and renaissance carols for harp and choir. The Claremont Treble Singers, an ensemble of the Joint Music Program of Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, and Scripps College, is a high-voiced ensemble of about 20 students.  It is led by conductor Charles W. Kamm, associate professor of music at Scripps College and director of choirs for the Joint Music Program.  Harpist Laura Griffin-Casey accompanies the choir.

Preceding the concert will be a short performance by elementary school aged children from local schools in partnership with CMC club Music Mania.

Forrest Gander is a writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. Be With, Gander’s most recent collection, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. His 2011 poetry collection Core Samples from the World was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include two novels, As A Friend and The Trace; the poetry collections Be With, Eye Against Eye, Torn Awake, Science & Steepleflower; and the essay collection Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence. Gander’s essays have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, and the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, United States Artists, and Whiting Foundations.

Directed by Brian Luna '20, the cast includes Diya Courty-Stephens '23 as Pearl & Louis, Sadie Fisher '20 as Melanie, Matthew Hines '22 -as Brandon & Mark, Max Jackman '23 as Tod, Hannah Lak SC '23 as Linda & Mimi, Drew Liptrot PC '22 as Guy, Nandini Mittal '22 as Mary & Sophie, and Alessia Zanobini '23 as Girl. The tech crew includes Amari Huang '23, Grace Soleil Lyde SC' 23.

This special production will be performed on two consecutive nights. Seating is limited to 90 people, in the round, around the stage. 

Ivan Kurilla, Doctor of Sciences, is professor of international relations at European University in St. Petersburg. Kurilla’s major research area is the history of U.S. – Russian relations; he has also conducted research on the problems in the use of history, historical memory, historical politics, and role of historians in contemporary Russia.

Kurilla has authored five books including most recently History: Past in the Present (EU Press, 2017) and Frenemies: History of Opinions, Fantasies, Contacts, Mutual (Mis)understanding between Russia and the USA (NLO, 2018). He has also published numerous articles in leading Russian and international journals, including Journal of American History, Nationalities Papers, Demokratizatsiya, Journal of the Cold War Studies, and Problems of Post-Communism. 

Professor Kurilla’s Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.