Faculty Highlights: June 2023

Charles “Chuck” Dickerson, supervisor of special ensembles, was celebrated in The Orchestra Chuck Built, a documentary by Grammy-winning and Emmy-nominated director/producer Ryan Suffern. The film centers on Dickerson’s work in founding, directing, and conducting the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, and was screened at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado.

Professor of Africana Studies Salim Faraji delivered multiple presentations and lectures throughout Spring 2023.

As a founding member of the William Leo Hansberry Society, he co-organized and presented at the society’s Research Symposium in February. In March, he gave a lecture entitled “Early and Medieval Nubian Christianity: Ancient Rites and Cultural Convergence in the Middle Nile Valley” for the American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center, of which he is a member. He also served as a panelist and keynote speaker for the 16th Annual African American Male Summit on the theme Ausar Project: Resurrecting Black Male Excellence.

Faraji was the African Distinguished Speaker for the Africa Subcommittee on the International Education Committee at California State University, Long Beach. He spoke on the topic “Engaging Original African Religions, Spiritualities and Ethics: Enduring Insights and Options for Our Times” on March 14.

Associate Professor of English Mara Lee Grayson co-edited Challenging Antisemitism: Lessons from Literary Classrooms, published by Rowman & Littlefield. The collection provides theoretical framing and historical context for understanding contemporary antisemitism and offers teachers curricular ideas and practical strategies to address antisemitism and amplify Jewish voices in secondary and post-secondary literacy classrooms.

Gilah Yelin Hirsch, professor of art emerita, gave numerous talks and presentations, including: Chronicle of Venice Legends at NeueHouse in Venice, California; Aleph to DNA: The Healing Power of Form at the Stephen Wise Temple in Bel Air; and the Artist as Healer course at McGill University. In June, she will be a keynote speaker and artist-in-residence at Lokman Hekim University in Turkey.

Hirsch’s work was featured in the UCLA Hillel exhibition Jewish Artists Capturing Sense of Self and Community, and her work is also part of the Lancaster Museum of Art’s Sages exhibition, on view through August 2023. Publisher Skira released an extensive monograph following Hirsch’s 2022 retrospective exhibition Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch, for which Hirsch gave an interview at the Salon for the Spiritually Creative Life.

Hirsch’s film Reading the Landscape, which has already received six film festival awards, was nominated as a finalist for Best Original Concept and Best Short Documentary at Berlin’s FilmHaus Film Festival.

Assistant Professor in the Teacher Education Division Minhye Son co-authored “Negotiating Asian American identities: Collaborative Self-Study of Korean Immigrant Scholars’ Reading Group on AsianCrit” in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. By reading, discussing, and writing together, Son and her Korean immigrant early-career scholars made sense of the racialized epistemology imposed on Asian transnational and immigrant scholars. The study’s findings contribute to the expansion of AsianCrit scholarship by highlighting its value in supporting identity exploration among transnational or first-generation Asian immigrants in higher education. Furthermore, the research underscores the importance of identity-based peer mentoring as a means of promoting Asian solidarity.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Kevin Montes co-authored “A Mixed-Methods Examination of Language Used by College Students to Describe Alcohol Recovery” for Health Education & Behavior. The study, conducted in Montes’ CSUDH lab, examines college student perception of alcohol recovery, regardless of their drinking behavior. All ten of Montes’ co-authors are current or former CSUDH undergraduate or graduate students, and this marks their first time authoring a manuscript accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“Key issues in the manufacturing industry include rises in raw material costs, raw material shortages, and supply chain disruption. […] The pandemic has impacted 98% of global supply chains, so we’ve seen this shift of manufacturing companies from cost to reliability.” – Assistant Professor of Finance Jennifer Brodmann appeared on Advancements with Ted Danson to discuss the pandemic and supply chain disruptions.

Through 2020, China submitted plans to launch 12,992 low-Earth-orbit broadband internet satellites. However, it doesn’t have the capacity to launch all of those satellites today. Such was the expert opinion of Larry Press, professor of information systems, who was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for an article about the U.S.-China rivalry and satellite technology.

“Parents have to monitor their children’s use of technology–period.” – Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology, was interviewed for a parenting guide for kids and tech. Rosen recommended that kids under age 10 use technology for no more than 30-60 minutes a day, and that both adults and children should have at least 1-2 hours a day with zero access to any devices.

“Being in the car on the freeway is such a function of being an Angeleno in that you’re a commuter in that space. So I turned that commuter space into the space that I desire–a natural space, a river, a native space, where it’s a highway, not just for us to destroy the environment, but a highway in which animals could thrive.” – Assistant Professor of Art Devon Tsuno was commissioned by the Los Angeles Times to create art that erased or reimagined an L.A. freeway.