Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Students, Faculty, and Staff: 
Please sign up using the “Register for this event” button. This will register you for the reception and meal. 

Alumni and Parents:
Please visit the alumni and parent engagement website to register. 

 

Tue, September 30, 2025
Dinner Program
Jessica Fagerstrom ‘06

Jessica Fagerstrom ‘06, medical physicist and educator, will discuss how physics and medicine come together to diagnose and treat cancer and will share insights of her journey from a liberal arts education to a career at the intersection of science and medicine. As a specialist in radiation oncology physics, she will discuss her work with advanced technologies to diagnose and treat cancer, including high dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy and other precision radiation therapies. Her talk will explore the role of science in advancing healthcare, the value of interdisciplinary thinking, and how a CMC foundation prepares students to tackle complex, real-world challenges. Drawing on clinical experience, she will highlight the human impact of scientific innovation and the opportunities for future leaders to shape the future of medicine and technology.

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Jessica Fagerstrom ‘06, medical physicist and educator, specializes in radiation oncology physics and works with advanced technologies such as high dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy and precision radiation therapy to deliver life-saving care. Her clinical and educational work emphasizes that science in medicine is not only about technology—it is about improving lives, ensuring patient safety, and inspiring the next generation of innovators. Fagerstrom is currently in the department of radiation oncology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

As an alumna of Claremont McKenna College, Fagerstrom credits her liberal arts education with shaping the interdisciplinary approach she brings to healthcare. Her career blends deep technical expertise with a commitment to public engagement, including developing hands-on learning experiences to make complex medical science accessible to students of all ages. By connecting scientific innovation to its human impact, she encourages broader participation in science and a deeper understanding of its role in society.

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Wed, October 1, 2025
Lunch Program
Sara Sadhwani and Vernon C. Grigg III

Congressional redistricting has become the most contentious new battleground in politics. In fact, in an upcoming special election, Californians will vote on how the state will move on redistricting. In this second of a two-part series, Sara Sadhwani, professor of political science at Pomona College and a member of the California’s Citizens Redistricting Commission, and Vernon Grigg III, executive director of the Kravis Lab at CMC, will discuss redistricting and the implications for representation, fairness, and the future of democracy.

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Sara Sadhwani is an award-winning scholar and political commentator. A political science professor at Pomona College, her research has been widely published in academic journals examining elections, representation, and public opinion with a focus on Asian American and Latino voting behavior. Sadhwani also serves as a commissioner for the state’s Citizens Redistricting Commission and as a member of the Los Angeles County Governance Reform Taskforce. Her analysis of elections has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and many others. She is a political contributor for Spectrum News SoCal and makes regular appearances on KCAL News, LAist’s AirTalk, and KNX Radio. Sadhwani earned her doctorate in political science from the University of Southern California and has held fellowships at Stanford University and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

Vernon C. Grigg III is the executive director of the Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership and brings to CMC deep experience as a trial lawyer, political actor, and educator. Holding degrees from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics, and the University of Michigan, Grigg has served as CEO & President of Up with People, an international educational nonprofit; as a litigator with clients ranging from government officials to Fortune 100 companies; and as a Managing Assistant District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco. He founded and led the Center for Electoral Equity, a nonprofit organization dedicated to voting issues, served on the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa and clerked for the Supreme Court of Israel. He has taught at Golden Gate University School of Law and is a certified Intergroup Dialogue Leader. 

The Civitas Sessions focus on the stuff you need to know before it becomes the stuff you wish you had known…Curated by the Kravis Lab and hosted at the Athenaeum, this lunch series is designed to build real-world civic skills and the knowledge needed to live thoughtful, productive lives as responsible community members and leaders. Each session will deliver practical knowledge and discuss how the subject matter applies to important current issues. 

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Wed, October 1, 2025
Dinner Program
Michael Bridge and Grace Stewart '17

The concert-accordion (a.k.a. classical accordion) is a little-known instrument in North America. Michael Bridge, the first Canadian to receive a doctorate in accordion performance, gives concerts and speaks globally about music's power to bridge cultural divides, foster empathy, and inspire resilience. In this concert, he will perform striking works by Bach and Sofia Gubaidulina, and be joined by mezzo-soprano Grace Stewart ’17 for a set of Spanish showpieces.

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Michael Bridge is a musical maverick. “A wizard of the accordion” (CBC), he’s a virtuoso performer on both the acoustic accordion and its 21st century cousin, the digital accordion. His concerts and improvisations capture the energy and panache of stadium rock with the elegance and discipline of chamber music.

It all began when Bridge was 5 years old, growing up in Calgary, when his mom bought him a $5 accordion at a garage sale. He has since performed throughout Europe, 25 U.S. states, and all Canadian provinces. He received his doctorate in accordion performance from the University of Toronto. He’s at home with classical, contemporary, jazz, and folk music and has premiered 60 new works.

Bridge embraces a musical aesthetic that is alternatively irreverent, deadly serious, meticulously prepared and completely in-the-moment. Ultimately, he aims to make your world more bearable, beautiful and human—even if only for the length of a concert.

Grace Stewart ’17 is a mezzo-soprano who performs opera, musical theater, and choral repertoire throughout the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, and Orange County regions. She received her M.M. in Opera Performance from the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at Cal State Long Beach. Opera credits include Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro at CSULB and chorus in numerous Pacific Opera Project productions including L’elisir d’amore, Pirates of Penzance, Trial by Jury, Die Fledermaus, Don Bucefalo, and HMS Pinafore. Favorite theater credits include featured dancer in Something Rotten at Rialto Community Players and Legendary Productions’ Beauty and the Beast as Madame de la Grande Bouche and Into the Woods as Lucinda. Grace sings with Pacific Chorale, and she has also sung as a member and soloist of Inland Master Chorale, including as Mother in a concert performance of the musical Ragtime. 

Stewart graduated from CMC in 2017 with a major in Environmental Analysis. While at CMC, she took voice lessons at Scripps and gave a senior recital at the Athenaeum in April 2017.

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Thu, October 2, 2025
Lunch Program
Eugenia Cheng

Math and music are often said to be related, but does this go any deeper than the fact that they both involve counting? In this lively hybrid of talk and concert, mathematician and pianist Eugenia Cheng uncovers mathematical structures in some of her favorite pieces of classical music. She will perform works by Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, Ravel, and Debussy. The music will be interspersed with discussion of a wide range mathematical concepts in the music including lowest common multiples, prime numbers, fractions, fractals, braids and more.

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Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician, educator, author, public speaker, columnist, concert pianist, artist, and composer. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 20 million times to date. She is the author of popular math books including "Unequal" and "How to Bake Pi" and she wrote the "Everyday Math" column for the Wall Street Journal for over seven years. 

Cheng is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won tenure in Pure Mathematics at the University in Sheffield, and holds a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Photo credit: Brian McConkey

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Thu, October 2, 2025
Dinner Program
David Dreier '75 and John W. Dean III

What does principled public service look like when the ground is shifting under your feet? In this candid conversation, former U.S. Representative David Dreier ’75 and former White House Counsel John W. Dean III will compare the opportunities and ethical hazards of governing in two turbulent eras—the Nixon years and the age of Trump. Expect a spirited exchange on rule of law, executive power, congressional leadership, media and transparency, and how institutions—and the people inside them—can steady democracy when politics runs hot.

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David Dreier ’75 served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 2013, becoming the youngest—and the first Californian—chair of the powerful Rules Committee, where he helped shape legislation for floor debate. A former chair of Tribune Publishing and a long-time advocate of press freedom, he founded the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to honor slain journalists on the National Mall. Dreier is a trustee of Claremont McKenna College.

John W. Dean III served as White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon (1970–73) and became a central witness in the Watergate investigation, pleading guilty to a felony as part of the cover-up before turning state’s evidence. Disbarred after Watergate, Dean went on to write widely on law, politics, and presidential power, and has been a prominent commentator and critic of excessive executive authority in the George W. Bush and Donald Trump eras.

This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at CMC. 
 

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Mon, October 6, 2025
Dinner Program
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

How did the sweet, sensitive son of Puerto Rican parents, growing up in an immigrant neighborhood on the far northern tip of Manhattan, become the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century? Examining Lin-Manuel Miranda’s development from his early musicals in high school and college to his transformation as the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the  first biography of the writer-composer-actor-director, draws on more than one hundred fifty interviews with Miranda’s family, friends, partners, and mentors to showcase Miranda’s sources of creativity, namely his exceptional openness, curiosity, and collaboration and the synthesis of his Latino heritage with pop, hip-hop, and Broadway styles to create a dynamic new way to tell America’s oldest stories.

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The first biography of the writer-composer-actor-director, Lin-Manuel Miranda draws on more than one hundred fifty interviews with Miranda’s family, friends, partners, and mentors—from his elementary school music teacher to Andrew Lloyd Webber—as well as Miranda himself. Examining Miranda’s development from his early musicals in high school and college through the genesis of his professional masterworks, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reveals the sources of creativity—not in immutable genius, but in exceptional openness, curiosity, and collaboration.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner teaches English and theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities. As a cultural historian and theater critic, his articles about playwrights from Shakespeare to Quiara Alegría Hudes have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. His pandemic spoof, What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague, was adapted into an Emmy-winning broadcast for PBS, and his New Yorker profile of Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle is being adapted into a feature documentary. He is the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project and a frequent guest lecturer at theaters around the country.

Born and raised in Oregon, Pollack-Pelzer received his B.A. in History from Yale and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard.

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Tue, October 7, 2025
Dinner Program
Nicholas Buccola

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history—and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now,” insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty,” advocating radical individualism. In One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal, Nicholas Buccola, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King’s dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal, one in which we can clearly discern echoes of the current American zeitgeist.

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The Dr. Jules K. Whitehill Professor of Humanism & Ethics and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, Nicholas Buccola specializes in American political thought. His previous books include The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2019) and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York University Press, 2012). He is the editor of The Essential Douglass: Writings and Speeches (Hackett, 2016) and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2016).

His essays have appeared in scholarly journals including The Review of Politics and American Political Thought as well as popular outlets such as The New York Times, Salon, The Baltimore Sun, and Dissent.

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Wed, October 8, 2025
Dinner Program
Desirée J. Garcia

Desirée J. Garcia, professor of film and Latino studies at Dartmouth College, tells the story of the makeup artists and hairstylists who entered the Hollywood studios in the late 1960s, the moment when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission threatened the industry with a lawsuit for discriminatory hiring practices. Drawing on dozens of oral histories she conducted with these artists, Garcia reveals what they encountered as members of racial groups that were still in the minority both on and off screen. Partly a tale of makeup’s evolution to adapt to changing times, partly a history of work and workers, Garcia brings the voices of those who changed the face of the industry to the foreground, revealing a story of race and makeup that has been hiding in plain sight.

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Desirée J. Garcia is professor and chair of the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth College. She has published widely on the overlapping dynamics of race, gender and film genres, including the books The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film (RUP, 2025), The Movie Musical (RUP, 2021), and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (RUP, 2014). Garcia has also authored videographic essays, including What Happened in the Dressing Room ([in]Transition, 2024) and The Bijou Room (ASAP/Journal, 2025). 

She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University and a BA in History from Wellesley College. 

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Thu, October 9, 2025
Dinner Program
William Kristol

Columnist, public intellectual, host of Conversations with Bill Kristol, and founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an organization dedicated to defending America's liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, William Kristol will offer his thoughts and perspectives on American politics, foreign policy, the future of the Republican Party, and the meaning of American conservatism today.

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For three decades, William Kristol has been a leading participant in American political debates and a widely respected analyst of American political developments. Having served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Kristol understands government from the inside and as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, he has studied American politics and society from the outside. 

After serving in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, Kristol founded the Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential magazine for over two decades. Now, as founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, Kristol is in the midst of the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the future of the Republican Party and the meaning of American conservatism.

Kristol frequently appears on all the major television talk shows, and also is the host of the highly regarded video series and podcast, Conversations with Bill Kristol. 

Kristol received his undergraduate degree and his Ph. D. from Harvard University.

Mr. Kristol's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

(Text adapted by the Washington Speakers Bureau profile.)

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711