Campus kudos

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

Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Sahar Abi-Hassan is a co-author of “The Ideologies of Organized Interests and Amicus Curiae Briefs: Large-Scale, Social Network Imputation of Ideal Points,” which was published by the journal Political Analysis in January. The paper discusses a database that started as a project of Abi-Hassan’s in 2018 when she was a graduate student at Boston University. She soon joined two Harvard scholars with a similar idea to determine the ideological scores of the sponsoring organization and content of every amicus brief filed at the US Supreme Court.

◀ The California Task Force on Reparations met at Lisser Hall on Saturday, May 6, and the crowd included a very familiar face: current US Representative and Senate hopeful Barbara Tutt Lee ’73. Before the event got underway, she posed for a photo in the lobby with members of the Millsbased Black Reparations Project. Left to right: Communications & Technology Coordinator Magda Cooney, MM ’23; Visual Content Creator Imani Karpowich-Smith ’18; Director of Events Ife Tayo Walker; Lee; Co-Director Ashley Adams; Director of Curriculum Darcelle Lahr, MA ’17, EDD ’18; and Co-Director Erika Weissinger.

Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology

Christie Chung led a two-part virtual training on leveraging cultural diversity to bolster Asian leaders in higher education. The webinar was hosted by Academic Impressions and took place on April 14 and May 5.

Professor Emerita of Dance Molissa Fenley collaborated with another dance giant in Pat Catterson for a program titled “Taking the Long View,” which was staged at The Dance Complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 15-16. Fenley performed alongside two other dancers in three works, with music by John Cage; Professor Emeritus of Music John Bischoff, MFA ’73; and Vijay Iyer.

Mills Institute Executive Director Nicole Guidotti-Hernández is a coauthor on “No Refuge(es) here: Jane Doe and the Contested Right to ‘Abortion on Demand’,” which appeared in the March issue of Feminist Legal Studies. She also penned “The Renewed Black Genius of Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’” for Ms., which appeared online on March 31.

Professor of English and Ethnic Studies Ajuan Mance wrote an essay for YES! Magazine titled “Drawing While Black: A Reflection on Art, Activism, and Ancestry” that delved into the history of protest in Black art as well as her own recent release, Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance. Mance also provided commentary on the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines after it aired at the Menlo Park Library on April 18.

Associate Professor of Art Yulia Pinkusevich’s chalk and charcoal drawing “Casualty Isorithm 2” was part of the Paperworks exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum, which closed on June 25.

Professor of English Kirsten Saxton presented her paper “Troubling White Femininity through Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment: A Micro-Critical Autobiography” at the American Society for 18th-century Studies Annual Meeting in St. Louis in March. A version of this paper will be published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

Professor of Art Catherine Wagner was one of two artists honored by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) at its annual benefit on May 6. Connie Butler, chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, offered remarks in Wagner’s honor. BAMPFA Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm said that this year’s honorees “have pushed the social, aesthetic, and conceptual boundaries of their fields and paved the way for many others.”