Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Robert Malley P'20 is CEO and president at the International Crisis Group based in Washington, D.C.

Malley has served in multiple capacities for two presidential administrations. He was the Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region in 2015-2016; prior to that he was Senior Director for the Gulf Region and Syria. As the most senior White House official focused on the Middle East, he advised the President, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, coordinated government-wide efforts to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and was the lead White House negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal as well as for international talks on the Syrian civil war, including negotiations with the Russian Federation. He also oversaw the National Security Council staff's work on the broad range of Middle East issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to relations with Gulf states. He earned the State Department's Distinguished Service Award in 2016.

Before joining the National Security Council staff in February 2014, Malley founded and directed the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program from January 2002. Prior to that, he was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Until January 2001, Malley was special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. In this capacity, he served as a principal advisor to the President and the National Security Advisor at the White House on the Middle East peace process.

Malley first joined the National Security Council staff in August 1994 as Director for Democracy. He helped coordinate U.S. refugee policy and efforts to promote democracy and human rights abroad. He also played a leading role in U.S. policy toward Cuba. In July 1997, he became Executive Assistant to the National Security Advisor from July 1997 to September 1998, acting as an informal chief of staff for Samuel R. Berger. Malley served as a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court in 1991-1992.

Malley is a graduate of Yale University, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of “The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam” and, with Hussein Agha, of several articles, including “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” “The Last Negotiation”, “Three Men in a Boat” and “Hamas – The Perils of Power”, "The Arab Counter-Revolution." He has published articles in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, and several other publications.

Mr. Malley's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund and the Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC and is part of the "Peace in the Middle East" series. 

John A. Pérez is the current vicechair of the University of California Board of Regents. He was elected to the California Assembly in November 2008, representing downtown Los Angeles and communities of East Los Angeles. In January 2010, his colleagues elected him California's 68th Assembly Speaker. He was subsequently reelected in 2010 and 2012, making him one of the longest serving Speakers in the era of term limits. Prior to his service in the Assembly, Pérez was a lifetime member of the labor movement.

Mr. Pérez's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with John Perez

Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and his research and teaching focus on colonial North America and on Native American history before 1800. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he taught at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia, and he has been a visiting professor at Columbia University. He served as acting chair of Penn's History Department in 2013-2014. A prolific writer, Richter is currently researching English colonization during the Restoration era, for a book tentatively titled The Lords Proprietors: Feudal Dreams in English America, 1660-1689, under contract with Harvard University Press. 

Yve-Alain Bois, professor of art history at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is a specialist in twentieth-century European and American art. Bois is recognized as an expert on a wide range of artists, from Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly. Bois is currently working on several long-term projects, foremost among them the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, the second volume out of a planned five volumes.

Professor Bois' Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. She is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America.

Before joining Harvard, she was UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the first African American faculty member to be appointed to the Institute that was Einstein’s home for two decades. She is also a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.

Allen is the author of six books, including Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, which won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and CUZ :The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017)

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a 2001 winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Professor Allen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Photo credit: Laura Rose

View Video: YouTube with Danielle Allen

Food for Thought: Podcast with Danielle Allen

Candace Adelberg ‘10 graduated from CMC in 2010 where she studied economics and did research at the Lowe Institute of Political Economy. After graduation, Adelberg moved to Washington D.C., where she worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, focusing on quantitative methods for macroeconomic forecasting. In 2013, she started working as a researcher at Google, applying statistical methods to keep “bad guys” off of Google products (think of spam bots, phishing attacks, etc.). In 2017, she moved to X, Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory”, and joined Project Loon. Project Loon aims to provide high-speed internet to the roughly 50% of the world who still lack basic coverage. To do this, they deploy and steer a fleet of stratospheric balloons that provide LTE service to rural areas or areas where networks have been taken out by natural disasters.

Alicia Rockmore ’87 is the founder & CEO of Spark Actions which she launched after the November 2016 elections as a way to make a difference. Rockmore has over 20 years of experience in marketing and brand management both in traditional CPG companies and in startups. Before starting Spark Actions, she was the senior vice president of marketing at Divy, a startup in Fin Tech for millennials, the head of innovation for Jackson (a subsidiary of Prudential plc) and the senior vice president of marketing UberMedia (an idea lab company). She also has significant consumer packaged goods management experience at Unilever (in US and Europe) and at General Mills. She was responsible for launching the first packaged goods website ever and was named by Ad Age as a Top 100 Marketer. She also co-founded Buttoned Up Inc, an organizational products company, named as one of the best small companies to work for by Working Women’s Magazine. A graduate of CMC and received her MBA from the University of Michigan.

Faye Sahai ’90 is recognized as an innovation leader and catalyst for strategic initiatives across multiple companies such as AIG, Blue Shield, Deloitte, Charles Schwab, and Kaiser Permanente. She currently serves as the global head of advanced technology & innovation and employee experience at AIG, one of the world’s largest insurance companies. In addition, she serves as the AIG executive advisor of Global Women in Technology and UP Upward Professionals and Women Executive Leaders Initiative, and global inclusion and diversity task force. She serves on AIG’s global extended leadership team and is also part of the Conference Board’s applied innovation group. Sahai has been an innovation adviser to companies, start-ups and accelerators and serves on the many boards. She was named as Insurance Business Hot 100 in 2017, Elite Women in Insurance Business America in 2017, Ascend Leadership Award in 2017, and Computer World’s Top Premier IT Leaders in 2015 and she received Innovation Enterprise Best Ideation award in 2014. She received her BA in economics and psychology from Claremont McKenna College and her MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, and senior advisor to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. He is executive editor of the widely-read New Geography website and writes the weekly “New Geographer” column for Forbes.com. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Beast and Real Clear Politics. The author of seven books, Kotkin has been described by the New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.”

Mr. Kotkin’s talk is sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

View Video: YouTube with Joel Kotkin

Anoush Baghdassarian is a 2017 CMC graduate who dual majored in psychology and Spanish with a sequence in Holocaust and human rights studies. While at CMC, she made the most of the opportunities at the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, working with asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking, holocaust survivors, and scholars on genocide and crimes against humanity. She was invited to international conferences like Poland's Model International Criminal Court, and presented her research at UCLA's Undergraduate Colloquium in Armenian Studies. With the help of the Mgrublian Center, Anoush has interned at various human rights organizations throughout her undergraduate career including the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.

In addition to these experiences, Anoush is a published author of a historical fiction play about the Armenian Genocide entitled FOUND which has been presented at book events in California, New York, Uruguay, and Argentina, as well as has been produced for stage productions in New York and California (including at the Athenaeum). She has also written a play in Spanish about Argentina's last military dictatorship, and is in the beginning stages of writing a play about the experience of Syrian-Armenians as her Action Project for the Humanity in Action fellowship based on the testimonies she collected this summer through a Davis Projects for Peace Grant.  
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Next month, Anoush will return to Armenia to intern with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and continue to document the testimonies of Syrian-Armenian refugees. With the goal of working on international cases of genocide, forced migration, and crimes against humanity, Anoush plans to continue her education. She will pursue a Masters in Human Rights Studies in September of 2018 before attending law school the following year to study human rights law. 

Anoush is extremely humbled to have received this unique and invaluable opportunity to return to speak at the Athenaeum and give back to the institution that helped to shape her interests and make this research possible. 

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

View Video: YouTube with Anoush Baghdassarian '17

Peter Maier '49 GP'21 GP'21 received a B.A. with honors in economics from Claremont McKenna College, a Juris Doctor degree from UC Berkeley, and a Masters of Law in Taxation from NYU.   

From 1965, Peter Maier was a senior partner of Winokur, Maier & Zang, a San Francisco tax law firm, and chairman and founder of Property Resources, Inc., now a division of Franklin Resources. Maier was also professor of law at the Hastings College of the Law from 1967 to 1995.

In 1981, he was co-founder of Wood Island Associates, an SEC-registered investment advisory firm. This company was purchased in 1998 by U.S. Trust Company and he became a managing director of U.S. Trust. Maier also co-founded a real estate investment advisory firm in 1981 that eventually also became a division of U.S. Trust Company. In 2005, Peter reacquired the securities firm from U.S. Trust and renamed the company “Private Wealth Partners, LLC.” Maier now serves as it chairman.  

Maier is active in various charitable organizations: he is chairman of the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco and is president of the John B. Huntington Foundation. In addition, he serves as a trustee of the Alfred and Hanna Fromm Fund, the University of San Francisco and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. 

View Video: YouTube with Peter Maier '49 GP'21 GP'21

Miry Whitehill started Miry's List in July, 2016 when she accidentally met a family of newly arrived Syrian refugees through a friend. Until then, she was a stay-at-home mom and community activist with over 10 years of experience in digital marketing.

As of December 2017, Miry's List has helped more than 250 families resettling from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Kurdistan. In 2018, Miry's List plans to enroll an additional 500 families into the program and launch an app in partnership with Microsoft to streamline and automate the model and roll out Miry's List programming to every refugee resettlement city in America.

Ms. Whitehill's Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Berger Institute and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Sequence. 

Photo credit: Christopher Patey

View Video: YouTube with Miry Whitehill

A prominent dissident during the communist period in Poland, Adam Michnik spent six years as a political prisoner. In the 1970s, he was a founding member of the Committee for the Defense of Workers, and of the Flying University, an underground network that brought together intellectuals and worker activists. Michnik was a key Solidarity activist throughout the 1980s and a negotiator for the Solidarity team during the Roundtable Talks in 1989 that brought communist rule in Poland to a peaceful end. Between 1989 and 1991, he served in the Sejm, Poland's Parliament.

Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's first post-socialist independent daily. He is the author of many books, including Letters from Freedom: Post Cold War Realities and Perspectives (UC Press, 1998), The Church and the Left (1991), Letters from Prison and Other Essays (UC Press, 1986), and, most recently of In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe (2011).

Mr. Michnik's will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2018 Golo Mann Lecture.  

View Video: YouTube with Adam Michnik

Lauren Faber O’Connor is the chief sustainability officer for the City of Los Angeles. In this role, she is driving the implementation of LA’s landmark Sustainable City pLAn, released in April 2015, which puts forth an actionable vision for transforming LA's environment, economy, and equity. Working with every city department and outside stakeholders, O'Connor focuses on strategic integration of the pLAn's pillars in order to achieve the city's short and long-term goals, ensure benefits accrue to all communities in LA, and pursue regional and international collaborations including Climate Mayors, a coalition of nearly 400 US mayors committed to US leadership on climate change.

Prior to joining the Garcetti Administration, O'Connor served for four years as the West Coast political director for the Environmental Defense Fund ("EDF") in San Francisco. At EDF, she worked on building successful strategies and constructive partnerships to win support on innovative approaches to protecting and promoting climate, clean energy, land, water, and wildlife. In 2010 O'Connor was appointed to assistant secretary for Climate Change Programs at the California Environmental Protection Agency, where she was dedicated to the design and implementation of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32. Prior to her work at CalEPA, she served as senior director for Lighthouse Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., where she advised on comprehensive national climate change and energy strategies for domestic and international companies, and non-government organizations, and in particular, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. From 2005-2009, she served at the British Embassy as senior policy advisor for climate change and energy.

O'Connor serves on the Board of the California League of Conservation Voters and the U.S. Department of Energy State Energy Advisory Board. She is a member of the Catto Fellowship for environmental leadership at the Aspen Institute and of the Truman National Security Project. She holds a bachelor’s degree in earth systems and economics from Stanford University, and master’s degree in Climate and Society from Columbia University.

Ms. O'Connor is the keynote speaker for CMC's fourth annual Green Careers Conference sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center.

View Video: YouTube with Lauren Faber O'Connor

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Walt previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and deputy dean of Social Sciences. He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and serves as co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007). He is currently working on a book about why U.S. foreign policy keeps failing.

Professor Walt is the 2018 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar and his Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.


Food for Thought: Podcast with Stephen Walt

Lynn Novick is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. For nearly 30 years, she has been producing and directing films about American history and culture, among them some of the most acclaimed and top-rated documentaries to have aired on PBS. Her works include Prohibition, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright and The War, a seven part, 15-hour exploration of ordinary Americans’ experiences in World War II.

The Vietnam War, Novick’s newest project co-directed by long-time partner Ken Burns, first aired on PBS in September 2017. An immersive, 10-part, 18-hour epic, it is the first major documentary assessment in a generation of one of the most divisive and consequential events in American history. A groundbreaking 360-degree exploration of the war, the series features testimony from nearly 100 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from all sides of the issue.

Novick is currently working on a two-part biography of Ernest Hemingway, co-directed by Burns and slated for completion in 2020, and College Behind Bars, a feature length documentary produced by Sarah Botstein, about a group of men and women imprisoned in New York State for serious crimes, struggling to earn degrees in a rigorous liberal arts college program, the Bard Prison Initiative. College Behind Bars asks several essential questions: What is prison for? Who in America has access to educational opportunity? Can we have justice without redemption? The film will air on PBS in 2018.

Ms. Novick's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' Lerner Lectureship in 1960s' Culture.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Lynn Novick

Jo Scott-Coe is an associate professor of English composition, literature, and creative writing at Riverside City College. She is also an independent researcher on themes of gender, sexuality, and violence–in education and elsewhere. Her writing about an 8-year legal case of student-on-teacher sexual bullying and harassment appears in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience (Cambridge Scholars Press).

Scott-Coe is also the author of Teacher at Point Blank (Aunt Lute) and MASS: A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest (forthcoming in April 2018). Her first-ever portrait of Kathy Leissner Whitman, “Listening to Kathy” (Catapult), received a Notable listing in Best American Essays. Scott-Coe's nonfiction has appeared in American Studies Journal, Pacific Coast Philology, Tahoma Literary Review, Talking Writing, Cultural Weekly, Superstition Review, Fourth Genre, Salon, and many other publications.

Professor Scott-Coe's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

View Video: YouTube with Jo Scott-Coe

Food for Thought: Podcast with Jo Scott-Coe