A doctoral candidate from Brown University has been selected as the first Mellon postdoctoral fellow. Jennifer Ting will teach Asian American literature at Pomona for two years starting in the fall.

"We [the selection committee] are very excited about the work she has done. Her dissertation seems to us to be a topic that is understudied in the field of Asia American studies and is a very exciting way to look at the field," said English Department Chair and member of the selection committee for the Mellon grant Cristanne Miller.

The Mellon Foundation recently awarded Pomona College four Postdoctoral grants to help the college hire lecturers to introduce new concentrations into the curriculum. Miller says the inclusion of Asian American literature studies is increasingly important in English departments. The committee was enthusiastic about Tings’s dissertation which is entitled "Writing Sexuality and Reading Asian American: The making of a Literary Tradition: 1964-1994."

Ting will be teaching a class entitled English 137A: The Invention of Asian American Literature. The course will include readings such as Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, John Okata’s No-No Boy, Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables as well as criticism by Lisa Lowe, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall. Ting received her B.A. at Yale University in Women’s Studies and is a PhD candidate at Brown University in American Civilization. Miller says, "It was very clear to us that literature is a key ingredient of her work."

The selection committee included English professors Paul Saint-Amour and Kathleen Fitzpatrick as well as members from the Asian American Studies program including Director Linus Yamane, a Pitzer Economics Professor, and Psychology Professor Sharon Goto. No one else on the five Claremont Colleges currently specializes in Asian American literature, and the committee selected Ting to fill this gap.

The other Mellon grants will be awarded over the next two years and will also have two- year terms. "[The grants] will allow us to introduce new elements into our curriculum and, at the same time, will provide some teaching support for the home departments," said Dean of the College Hans Palmer.

Photo by Brian Rothman Professor Pierre Englebert

In other faculty news, Politics Professor Pierre Englebert was awarded the Phi Sigma Alpha award from the Western Political Science Association. The Western Political Science Association is a branch of the American Political Science Association, a forum for political scientists to discuss research annually. Englebert’s paper, entitled "Institutional Congruence, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in Tropical Africa: Theory and Empirical Evidence," was the one selected for the award.

"People wonder why Africa, overall, does poorly," explained Englebert. "One of the things talked about is a capable state. That is a state with institutions that work." Englebert’s paper focused on the way African government institutions evolved out of imperial holdings. While Africa was doing poorly overall, some states were divided in such a way that the states preserved their original cultures present before colonies were set up. These states fared much better than the others which were more culturally divided.

Photo by Brian Rothman Professor Sandy Grabiner

In other news regarding honored faculty members, The National Science Foundation awarded Math Professor Sandy Grabiner a $10,000 dollar grant to host (at Pomona) the fourteenth annual conference on the Banach Algebras. "It is a great opportunity for Pomona to host an important research event like this," said Professor Grabiner. This program, which will take place from July 25 to August 1, will include over 50 talks and invites researchers from many large Southern California universities.

"This is tricky to do at Pomona because we are not a research based institution," remarked Grabiner. "However, Peter Stanley and the deans have been extremely helpful and have gotten money for the conference." This series of lectures will be funded by many of schools in the southern California area who have researchers interested in Banach Algebras including UCLA, Pomona, CMC, Cal Tech, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Bakersfield. The National Science Foundation is also donating about a third of the conference’s budget and will help fund scientists from East European Countries and the former Soviet Union who would otherwise be unable to get enough support to attend this meeting. The participants of this conference will be staying at Oldenborg during the conference.