Mills Matters

Faculty Afghan expert speaks out

Prior to joining Lead by Learning as its new director in April, Mizgon Zahir Darby’s varied career has included working as a journalist in the Bay Area and New York, directing in the nonprofit space, and founding a consulting firm. She’s also a second-generation Afghan American, her parents immigrating to the United States from Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and she grew up in the extensive Afghan diaspora of the East Bay.

In August, in the midst of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after a nearly 20-year occupation, Darby shared her perspective with multiple media outlets—including CNN, the Associated Press, and various Bay Area news programs. She discussed how the rise of the Taliban will likely impact those left behind, including her own family members, and the complicated emotions she and other Afghan Americans are feeling after these recent developments.

“There is a sense of betrayal, but more so [that it’s] another miscalculation on behalf of the government that has occurred in the story that is Afghanistan,” she told Brian Watt of KQED Radio. “Women and girls have lost their rights, but in addition, they’ve lost their humanity. My concern for women in Afghanistan is the same as it would be in the US if they were being ripped out of their mothers’ arms at 12 or 13 years old to marry terrorists. They may or may not survive. At the end of the day, that question of survival is one that is gut-wrenching.”

Darby has long worked with the Afghan Coalition in Fremont; learn more about their efforts to support the Afghan community at afghancoalition.org.

Donors bolster Mills during tough times

Mills College appreciates the continuing generosity of our community members, including those who gave gifts, grants, and pledges of $50,000 or more between January 1 and June 30, 2021. ◗ Richard and Elaine Barrett, Mei Kwong ’70 and Laurence

Franklin, and Barbara Wolfe ’65 lent their support to the Campus Optimization Fund, which aims to bring new revenue sources to Mills through partnerships with other organizations. ◗ Kwong and Franklin also pledged funds to Mills’ Greatest

Need, which enables the College to respond to its most urgent needs. Catherine Coates ’65, Ann Mulally ’73, and

Glenn and Ellen Voyles also donated to this fund. ◗ An anonymous donor and Alecia DeCoudreaux gave generously to the President’s Fund for Innovation, which directs much-needed resources to strategic priorities. ◗ The estate of Rosalie Torres-Rioseco ’45 continued providing support to an eponymous Endowed Faculty Fund and an Endowed Scholarship, fulfilling Torres-Rioseco’s wish to support faculty salaries and student grants. ◗ The Manitou Fund donated to the Alumnae of Color

Endowed Scholarship, which sponsors the studies of a student of color in conjunction with the Alumnae of Color

Committee of the AAMC.

◗ The Rogers Family Foundation made a pledge to the

Rogers Foundation Lead by Learning Grant to continue its longtime support of the program formerly known as Mills

Teacher-Scholars.

◗ Similarly, the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation renewed its support of Lead by Learning to bolster the program’s mission to provide top-notch professional development to teachers already working in education.

Friendship and Fulbright bring Egyptian academic to Mills

The sequence of events that brought visiting professor Maha El Said to the Mills campus as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar for the fall semester can be traced as far back as 1993. That’s when she and Professor of English Elmaz Abinader first met at a conference in Cairo, where El Said has taught for decades, most recently as an English professor at Cairo University in Giza.

“There was this voice with a big laugh that came running up to me to introduce herself, and the energy was like an explosion,” Abinader says. “Ever since, we’ve been trying to manipulate ways to be in each other’s worlds.”

“We have become sisters, I have to say,” El Said adds.

That sisterhood is not just personal— it extends to their shared research interests as well, which include literature of various diasporas in the United States and gender studies. El Said was one of the Arab region’s first “Americanist” professors, and she introduced the discipline of American studies into Egyptian academia as a whole. “Of course, we have a transnational approach, so it’s all about studying the US from the other side of the world,” she says. “It’s not about America hating or America bashing; it’s about how the US-Middle East relationship actually impacts us and is reflected in our literature and media.”

Her courses have included The Laughing Militia, a look at standup comedy and the political commentary therein, and The Dismantling of the Empire, which examined literature from the Trump era. In her role as the founder of Cairo University’s Anti-Harassment and Violence Against Women Unit, El Said also worked with media studies students and won a grant to create the project “Rewriting the Story of Violence.”

While at Mills, El Said is teaching Arabic literature, and in the first few weeks of classes was already showing a documentary about the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy movement in which she was an enthusiastic participant. “If Mills is going to have an international visitor, this is the international visitor,” Abinader says. “She’s a Muslim feminist revolutionary who works on anti-harassment, who’s a scholar and an English-language specialist. Mills couldn’t miss out on this.”

This is far from El Said’s first time as a scholar in the United States; in fact, on one of her previous trips, she studied spoken word and hip hop at UC Berkeley. This residency, though, has already taught her something new. “One of the first questions Maha asked me was why we have our pronouns at the bottom of our [Zoom] screens,” Abinader says.

“We haven’t gotten there yet in Egypt,” El Said says. “This [Fulbright scholarship] is offering me this beautiful campus and students, but it’s also offering me this opportunity to see the world from a different perspective.”

Lisser lauded by preservation specialists

The California Preservation Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting the state’s many spaces of cultural and historic import, has granted a 2021 Preservation Design Award to Mills College for its restoration of Lisser Hall.

The award, in the Rehabilitation category, will be given at the 38th Annual California Preservation Awards on October 21. Other honorees in the category include the Darling Hotel in Visalia and the Geneva Car Barn & Powerhouse in San Francisco. The foundation called the Lisser project an “exemplary contribution to the preservation of California’s rich and diverse historic resources.”

Lisser’s rejuvenation wrapped up in 2018 after two years of intensive work, and the team responsible for its success included ELS Architecture and Urban Design, especially Diana Hayton; and Senior Director of Facilities, Compliance, and Sustainability Karen Fiene, who recently retired after more than 15 years at the College.

Summer research programs roar back to life

Abigail Jeffers ’21, who graduated last winter with a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, just experienced her fourth summer in scientific research with Mills faculty. Between conducting some sessions in person and others completely online, she was ready for whatever this summer might throw at her.

“My experience two years ago allowed me to develop important skills that help me work independently now, while my work last summer allowed me to sufficiently understand the background of my current project such that I am able to more effectively conduct research on inteins now,” Jeffers says.

There are three summer science research programs at Mills—Russell Women in Science, Jill Barrett Undergraduate Research Program in Biology, and Hellman Summer Math and Science Program—and after a year away from the lab, they all returned with renewed force in 2021.

Jeffers was a Barrett Scholar in summer 2019 and applied again for 2020, only to find those plans dramatically altered by the pandemic. “Our lab group eagerly awaited the day when we would be able to set foot in the lab for the first time,” she says. “In the meantime, we made the most of our virtual Barrett summer and built a database that catalogued more than 1,600 inteins, such that we could make these self-splicing intervening proteins more widely available as a tool for biochemical research.”

This year, Jeffers is a member of Russell Women in Science. Cris Russell ’70 is the benefactor of this program, which also involves an annual lecture event during most spring semesters—after a two-year absence, the event will restart in spring 2022. Mills students who join the program help stage the event, and they also participate in literature reviews and present at conferences.

Nine Russell scholars worked on campus this summer, and they were split between four “labs”:

• The Chu Lab, which studied ways to chemically transform carbon dioxide and turn it into sustainable products that consumers can buy and use. • The Faul Lab, which pursued two research tracks: one that examined how nutrients and carbon cycled through the oceans in the early Cenozoic Era, and another that looked at how East Bay watersheds are affected by acid mine drainage and other pollution. • The Kochly Lab, which explored new synthetic methods using environmentally-friendly ionic liquid solvents. • The Mostafavi Lab (where Jeffers worked), which focused on inteins: small proteins that go through the process known as protein slicing.

Left: Barrett Scholars Amelia Binnett, Mimi Lucking, and Liv Colletta with a study beaver.

Below: Hellman Program participants hard at work— inside the lab!

Inteins were also the focus for Jeffers as a Barrett scholar. Established in 1998 in memory of Jill Barrett ’93, this program gives students the opportunity to work alongside faculty members on established projects during the summer break and into the new school year. Professor of Biology Jenn Smith, who is also director of the Barrett Program, recruits her undergraduates to “Team Squirrel” to help gather samples and crunch data for a long-term project on California ground squirrels at Briones Regional Park.

In fact, because of the sensitive nature of the data being collected, Barrett Scholars were allowed to continue their outdoor fieldwork in summer 2020. “We were allowed to do so because it was crucial [to] study populations every year as part of a long-term study,” Smith says. “However, last year, we were unable to get into the lab and this advancement has been crucial this year for supporting data analysis and opening up opportunities for learning and making discoveries.”

In 2021, those data included the effects of “stress” hormones on the squirrels when they’re exposed to human activity and how a squirrel’s social connection affects the microbes in their stomachs. The long-term work of Team Squirrel has even attracted the attention of an upcoming PBS documentary, Squirrel Movie!, which gathered footage in early June.

The third program, Hellman, helps students get up to speed on how to work in laboratories and approach scientific coursework. Participants live on campus while taking course modules in environmental chemistry and forensic biology, along with other activities both on-campus and off. Last year, it was entirely online, with students glued to their computers for many hours a day during the program’s two-and-a-halfweek running time.

The in-person lab exposure was especially important in 2021, according to program director and Associate Professor of Biology Helen Walter. She also ran a “STEM reboot” for rising sophomores and juniors: the former, because they went their entire first year without time in a physical lab; and the latter to refresh their lab skills.

“I’ve been hearing from students who graduated that people aren’t hiring folks who haven’t been in a lab in a year,” Walter says. “Besides that, their health and safety are at risk.”

Hellman, which had seven students in the program, also sends participants to local institutions, such as the Exploratorium and the California Academy of Sciences, on Fridays. Of course, those plans were complicated by continuing pandemic restrictions. The Hellman Foundation of San Francisco underwrites this program.

Mimi Lucking marking Alpha in Briones Regional Park. This summer's Hellman Summer Math and Science Program participants.

The annual Jill Barrett Undergraduate Program in Biology Symposium returns in the 2021–22 school year! Hear from students about their research findings in Lisser Hall on Monday, October 11; visit tinyurl.com/jill-barrett-21 to register for free tickets. Capacity is limited, and masks are required regardless of vaccination status.

Calendar

Mills College Art Museum

The following exhibition is free to view but requires timed ticketing. Visit mcam.mills.edu to make a reservation. Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension ■ Through December 12

In conversation with Sarah Thornton, October 6, 7:00-8:30 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall

Featuring photographs by Bay Area artist Tabitha Soren, Surface Tension explores the intersection of everyday technology with culture, politics, and human contact. Using an 8x10 large-format camera, Soren shoots iPad screens under raking light to reveal the tactile trail we leave behind. The images beneath are a compendium of private and public experiences, from a young child blowing a kiss good night to her mother to the protests following the fatal 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Music Now Concert Series

Visit performingarts.mills.edu for more information on times and tickets. October 16 ■ XSound

October 23 ■ David Tudor Composer-in-

Residence Mendi and Keith Obadike

October 30 ■ Sarah Cahill November 12–13 ■ Meredith Monk Through a generous grant from the Hewlett 50 Arts Commission, Mills College has commissioned legendary composer, director, and choreographer Meredith Monk to create an immersive performance piece titled Indra’s Net. The piece is inspired by the Buddhist metaphor of the same name, which illustrates the spiritual concepts of emptiness (s´¯unyat¯a) and dependent origination (prat¯ıtyasamutpa¯da).

Indra’s Net will be Monk’s third eveninglength work dedicated to the examination of humanity’s relationship to nature. An exploration of the interplay of music, movement, architecture, and space, the work focuses on the viewer’s perception and how that influences an individual’s relationships in the world. Monk will work with members of the Meredith Monk Vocal Ensemble and chamber musicians from the San Francisco Symphony in the final performance.

We Are The Voices

These online events take place at 5:00 pm and are free to attend. Visit performingarts .mills.edu for tickets. October 14 ■ Labor and the Conditions

of Protest: Critical University Studies with Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell

In their pivotal 2018 essay on the “crisis consensus” in higher education, Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell described questions with which an abolitionist approach might begin. Should the university be saved? What parts of it are worth saving? Co-presented with the Mills College Art Museum and the English Department. October 28 ■ micha cárdenas in

Conversation with Susan Stryker

Speaker cárdenas, author of Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (forthcoming from Duke University Press), and Susan Stryker will discuss cárdenas’s new book and trans of color poetics. This event is part of the Mills Trans Studies Speaker Series, which is now housed under We Are The Voices.

November 18 ■ Labor and the Conditions

of Protest: Militancy, Representation, and Aesthetics with Tobi Haslett and Rachel Kushner

How can artists and writers engage protest without, as the critic Tobi Haslett describes, becoming part of the apparatus through which “radical passion has been gutted, blunted, deflected, suppressed—and frozen into rhetoric, peddled as commodity”? Kushner, whose novels explore crucial histories of resistance, will join Haslett in discussion about what it means to represent militancy now. Co-presented with the Mills College Art Museum and the English Department.

Contemporary Writers’ Series

These online events take place at 5:00 pm and are free to attend. Visit performingarts.mills.edu for tickets. October 8 ■ Paisley Rekdal Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the photo-text memoir Intimate; the book-length essay The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam; and a forthcoming book on cultural appropriation in literature titled Appropriate: A Provocation. She is also the author of six books of poetry. A distinguished professor at the University of Utah, she guest-edited The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology and is currently Utah’s poet laureate.

October 22 ■ Tina Chang Chang, Brooklyn poet laureate, is the author of three poetry collections: Half-Lit Houses, Of Gods & Strangers, and Hybrida. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Chang is the director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University. November 5 ■ Julie Lythcott-Haims Lythcott-Haims is The New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult, which gave rise to a TED Talk with more than five million views. She is also the author of a poetry memoir, Real American, and a third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. She has served on the boards of organizations such as Common Sense Media, The Writers Grotto, and Challenge Success.

Campus kudos

A selection of recent achievements by faculty, staff, and students

Celebrations of the Mills Music Department continue, with public radio station KQED producing a piece on June 24 with the headline “You’ve Heard Experimental Sounds from Mills College (Even If You Don’t Realize It).”

Professor of English Elmaz

Abinader participated in a showcase of Write Now! SF Bay’s latest anthology, Essential Truths, the Bay Area in Color, in partnership with the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. The event took place online on July 22.

Valeria Araujo ’24 contributed a “Perspective” to KQED on June 24, titled “Valeria Araujo: Reconsidering Her Future at Mills,” in response to the news of the Mills transition and potential partnership with Northeastern.

Professor Emerita of Dance Molissa

Fenley participated in Q&As at the American Dance Festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 12 following performances of her choreography to “Right of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky.

Rosina Ghebreyesus ’22 received an invitation to join the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Serial Storytelling summer program this year. The program lifts up filmmakers from underrepresented backgrounds, including women and BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and low-income communities.

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Jay Gupta, the review editor of Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, appeared on the Telos Press Podcast in July on the topic of the changing character of the public sphere, which was also the theme of the summer 2021 issue.

A group of Mills staff members—

Kellie Kendrick, Karen Fiene, Corrie Klarner, Jackson Riker, Ellen Rush,

Luan Stauss, and Joanne Wong—

Elmaz Abinader Jay Gupta

won the Dell 2021 Erase E-Waste Sweepstakes and an accompanying $30,000 classroom technology setup for their work in “rethinking, redesigning, reusing, and recycling” electronic waste. The team sponsored a campus drive this spring to recycle batteries, computer waste, and small appliances.

Associate Adjunct Professor of

Education Nolan Jones participated in a roundtable discussion on the plan by music producers Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iodine to open a high school that focuses on entrepreneurship in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The roundtable appeared on the website The Conversation on July 27.

Assistant Professor of Biochemistry

Ana Mostafavi led the Virtual Summit on Science Literacy in Higher Education on June 14–16. The workshop aimed to further science literacy in a variety of educational settings.

Hannah Pozen, MFA ’22, was interviewed by The College Voice, the student newspaper at her undergraduate alma mater, Connecticut College. Pozen spoke about the illustration work she pursued as an undergraduate and the creative journey she’s been on since then.

Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership Susan Stryker

spoke with Time for a June article about the transgender liberation icon Sir Lady Java. She was also a guest on the Armchair Expert podcast on May 27, speaking about the modern trans experience and her research on the topic.

Professor of Practice Victor

Talmadge was a cast member in the California Shakespeare Theater’s production of The Winter’s Tale, which played September 1–26 at Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda.

Works by Professor of Studio Art Catherine Wagner appeared in the exhibition California Girls 2 at the Richmond Art Center and in a solo show, Clues to Civilization, at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.

Dean of the School of Education

Wendi Williams was a panelist on “Women of Color in the Academy,” part of a lecture series hosted by St. John University’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society, on April 29. She also wrote a June 18 article for Inside Higher Ed titled “Lightening the Burden” on how colleges and universities can alleviate the amount of emotional labor carried out by their BIPOC faculty members.