Sally DeNardo visited campus from February 23-25 to meet with DeNardo Science Scholars and Faculty Mentors, and visit labs and classes. (L-R) Micah Lattanner (Public Health), Sally DeNardo, Marie Brancati (Dean's Office), and Alice Villatoro (Public Health).

Dear Colleagues,

We have a lot going on in the College next week. Our Winter Sinatra Chair event, Tres minutos, is one week from today, featuring the work of alumnus Nicolás Lell Benavides ’10 (Music) and student vocalists Jessica Jacoby ’27 (Music and Economics) and Nathan Tu ’27 (Music and Mechanical Engineering) alongside Sinatra Chair Teresa McCollough (Music). The work—inspired by a real program briefly reuniting immigrant families at the U.S.–Mexico border—is so timely and explores the profound emotional consequences of separation. I hope you can attend. If you can’t make the concert, a conversation and preview of the performance will be the subject of Wednesday’s Music@Noon, which is open to all in the Music Recital Hall.

This year, we are proud to be a sponsor of the 2026 Sustainability & Environmental Justice Research Symposium taking place next week on March 10-11, in the California Mission Room in Benson. This free event will feature over 100 student, staff, and faculty presenters sharing their research projects that advance the common good and protect our common home. Topics covered will range from resource equity in California, to cultural sustainability through immersive media, strategic communication for social and ecological value, and more. Learn more and see the full program schedule online. If you would like to attend, RSVP using this link.

I’d like to offer a congratulations to the eleven CAS students who were selected as semifinalists for the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student program! They’ll be hearing over the next few months whether they are selected as finalists, but even making it to this step is a huge accomplishment. Bravo!

This week’s poem is by the late, great Nikki Giovanni, from her 1972 anthology, My House.

I wish you much energy, luck and success these last two weeks of the quarter as we all navigate Week 10 and Finals week!

Daniel

Highlights

Many thanks to all faculty, students, and staff who welcomed parents, siblings, extended family, and friends to Family Weekend.

Kristin Kusanovich (Theatre and Dance, Child Studies) moderated a panel at a high-level convening at the U.N. in Geneva on November 21, 2025, "Addressing Adverse Impacts on Selected Socio-economic Rights." The Climate Inequality, Human Rights and Sustainable Development conference was produced by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue and various UN partners. The event focused on aligning climate action with human rights and the potential and actual tensions inherent in defining equity and human rights from either development or climate action perspectives.

Image: Kristin Kusanovich and panelists at UN conference in Geneva.

Political Science professors Eric Mosinger, Vivien Leung, Elsa Chen, Farid Senzai, and Dennis Gordon discussed politics and current events with a full house of students.

IMPACT, the Political Science Student Association, hosted a lively conversation between students and professors about current events. Topics included U.S. foreign policy, including actions and threats involving Venezuela, Greenland, and Iran, as well as domestic political topics, including ICE and immigration enforcement, voting rights, and the 2028 midterm elections. This event was organized by Political Science major Oliver Straley ’26.

Francisco Jiménez (Modern Languages and Literatures, emeritus) was invited to speak at the Northern California Association of Phi Beta Kappa Conference at Asilomar on February 15. In his address, he offered a personal perspective that challenged common media portrayals of immigrants and underscored the power of storytelling to preserve identity, foster empathy, and transform lives through education and human connection. The presentation featured a screening of The Unbroken Sky, a 24-minute dramatic film adapted from his memoirs, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Kirsten Read (Psychology) presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Naturalistic Experimentation in Child Development (NECD) at Birkbeck, University of London in February. The workshop hosted experts from 40 institutions across 11 countries to share and connect work being done in developmental science that employs strong naturalistic, ecologically valid methods (e.g. studying children in their natural environments) and the unique technology and data analysis strategies that this research depends on. Kristen presented work from her SCU lab, done over the last three years with several undergraduate trainees, on the careful analysis of moment-to-moment conversations that caregivers and children have when reading aloud together.

John C. Hawley (English, emeritus) presented a paper entitled "Families Lost and Found: Heretical Imaginings in Eloghosa Osunde's 'Necessary Fiction', Gerardo Samano's 'Monstrilio', and Ron Hansen's 'Mariette in Ecstasy'" in the Legacies of Literary Heresies seminar sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association Research Committee in Montreal in late February. The paper (and panel) argued that literature itself is a heretical practice, inventing counter-scriptures, counterfeit sacraments, and alternative genealogies of belief, thereby insisting that transgression is not an incidental theme but a necessary boundary of the imagination.

Image: John Hawley hawking Heated Rivalry tchotchkes before the Canadiens home game against New York.

Abel Cruz (Modern Languages and Literatures) published an article titled “The social pragmatics of address in heritage Spanish: a virtual reality study” in Frontiers in Psychology. This is the first study of his research project using virtual reality to study language socialization in immersive environments. The study investigated bilinguals’ choice of pronoun of address across eight virtual scenarios that incorporated several social factors, including the gender and social rank of the addressee. The experimental design successfully elicited a large corpus of production data. The results revealed that Spanish-English bilinguals, female speakers in particular, used the formal pronoun ‘usted’ in female-to-female interactions to convey in-group solidarity. The study also showed that speakers’ pronoun choices in production data did not match their self-reported usage for the same target scenarios. Overall, the study concludes that virtual reality is a promising technology for investigating the pragmatics of language socialization. Abel is grateful to the Imaginarium Lab and to his research assistants for their support with this project.

Jacob Salazar ’27 (English, Anthropology) read his original poetry, then Isabella Song ’28 (Art History) introduced artist Jonathan Calm prior to his talk about his exhibition To Wherever, Forever: Archives of Absence & Sites of Passage on February 5.

Top left (L-R): DeeDee Pan ’28 (Web Design and Engineering, CAH Web Intern), Amy Randall (History, CAH Director), Britt Cain (CAH Manager), Danielle Morgan (English, CAH Associate Director).

The Center for the Arts and Humanities (CAH) hosted its annual Valentine's Day event in collaboration with the SCU Letterpress Collective and the SCU Student Art League (SCUSAL). Dozens of students, faculty, and staff made cards using an antique letterpress (bottom left), created flower bouquets (bottom right), and engaged in other crafts while enjoying refreshments (top right).

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