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2023 College of Humanities Dean’s Scholar Samantha Alarcon

jose.diaz@csun.edu — Thu, 02 May 2024 20:14:09 +0000

May 2, 2024

After six consecutive semesters on the Dean’s List in the College of Humanities, Samantha Alarcon is graduating with a degree in Liberal Studies and a concentration in Social Science. When Alarcon first visited CSUN, she was immediately drawn to the campus. “I loved the layout of everything,” she says. “And I was really intrigued by all of the campus organizations and events that took place. So much to be a part of.” Alarcon cites the dedication of educators in her own past as the inspiration for her desire to work with kids. So, when it came to deciding on a major, Liberal Studies was an easy choice.

Alarcon, who has been playing soccer since she first learned to walk, says that she has always considered herself an athlete. “My dad loved the sport when he was growing up as well,” she says. “So, when I got the opportunity to play here 91��ý while furthering my education, I was thrilled.” Alarcon enjoyed what she describes as a very tight-knit and supportive athletic community here 91��ý, and has made a number of lifelong friends. For her excellence on and off the field, Alarcon was chosen as Female Scholar Athlete of the Year for 2020-21 and 2022-23, and named to the Big West All-Academic Team for the fall season of 2021.

She is currently applying to the Teaching Credential Program here 91��ý while playing out her last season with the CSUN Women’s Soccer Team. Looking ahead, Alarcon is focused on a career in education. “I hope to end up leading a classroom of my own either in the LAUSD or IUSD in Orange County, closer to where I grew up,” she says. “It is also a dream of mine to pursue a job coaching soccer at the youth and college levels.” Wherever her aspirations ultimately lead, we know that Alarcon will succeed in educating and inspiring generations of students who will find themselves fortunate to have her as a teacher or coach. And we here in the College of Humanities 91��ý will forever be proud to count her among our esteemed alumni.

CSUN’s 2023 Wolfson Scholar Natalie Castillo

jose.diaz@csun.edu — Thu, 02 May 2024 20:44:21 +0000

May 1, 2024

The College of Humanities is proud to congratulate CSUN’s 2023 Wolfson Scholar Natalie Castillo. This prestigious award is presented each year to a high achieving senior in honor of CSUN’s first vice president, Leo Wolfson. Castillo, who is graduating with a double major in Central American and Transborder Studies and Biology, exemplifies the spirit of this award both in her academic excellence and through her contributions to the campus and the community.

When she was a senior in high school, Castillo did not necessarily have her sights set on higher education. That was until a counselor took notice of her impressive GPA and encouraged her to apply. As a first-generation college student, she chose a major in Biology to satisfy the prerequisites for dental school, an educational path that her parents thought would lead their daughter to a lucrative and stable career. “I knew that admission into dental school was going to be competitive,” Castillo recalls. “So, I taught myself how to study effectively by watching YouTube videos, doing practice problems more than once, regularly attending office hours, and going to tutoring.” It was during office hours with a professor that Castillo learned about various summer programs and research opportunities. With a faculty recommendation, she was accepted into a Summer Health Professions Education Program at UCLA. While there, she met students from across the country who were also interested in pursuing health-related careers. The program gave Castillo a sense of what dental school might be like, provided research experience, and reassured her that people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds like hers were successfully pursuing careers in health care. Soon after, she was introduced to ecology and evolutionary biology for the first time and Castillo became intrigued. “By the end of that semester, a professor recommended I talk with one of her colleagues, Dr. Robert Espinoza, who offered me the opportunity to study life-history strategies of invasive Brown Widow spiders,” Castillo says. She admits having no idea what that research might entail, but says that her curiosity for science pushed her to accept the offer.

In addition to her academic endeavors, Castillo joined Dreams to Be Heard (DTBH), a campus advocacy group that was active in CSUN’s founding of the Dream Center. “My parents are from El Salvador, so I experienced firsthand the financial and mental struggles of migrant populations in this country,” she says. DTBH also partnered with professors from CSUN’s ethnic studies departments to fundraise and create dozens of microgrants for undocumented students who needed assistance during the pandemic. In addition, working with a non-profit organization called Immigola, DTBH set up free citizenship tutoring for community members in the process of applying to citizenship. “We have also organized a Dia de Los Muertos event since 2021 that is open to the community,” Castillo adds. “The goal is to celebrate, but also to bring awareness about undocumented issues and casualties at the U.S.-Mexico border.” In Biology, she was part of a student-led initiative to create a Biology Student Committee. The group has added a student voice to departmental meetings, held townhalls and career panels, set up a resource website, and created a mentorship program.

Castillo received the CSUN NSP Presidential Scholarship two years in a row which helped support her research and presentations of her work 91��ýposium, the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research at CSUSB, the Southern California Academy of Sciences at CSUF, and at the Entomology Society of America Joint Annual Meeting in Vancouver. She also spent the summer of 2022 in Colombia studying the effects of climate change on pollinators with Dr. Margarita M. López-Uribe from Penn State University. Castillo’s talent and determination also earned her high praise from instructors. “Her work is of an interdisciplinary nature, as it oscillates between fields such as humanities, immigration studies, and the sciences,” says Professor and Chair of Central American and Transborder Studies, Beatriz Cortez. “I am convinced that she will continue to excel, and will contribute in human and academic ways to the projects in which she is involved.”

Castillo’s passion for both Science and the Humanities has clearly influenced her highly successful journey here 91��ý and will no doubt continue to guide her path into a promising future. “I am a double major in Central American and Transborder Studies because this aspect of my identity is important to me,” she says. “And I want to pursue a career in scientific research so that I can make an impact on people’s lives and humanity as a whole.”

An evening with writer/director for "Reservation Dogs" and "Rutherford Falls"

scott.andrews@csun.edu — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 17:01:58 +0000

April 26, 2023

AIS Hires Assistant Professor

scott.andrews@csun.edu — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 18:56:51 +0000

June 17, 2022

Alesha Claveria will join the American Indian Studies Program 91��ý in August as an assistant professor in Fall 2022.  
“The Search and Screen Committee was impressed with her enthusiasm for making a difference in the lives of students and the Native community,” said Scott Andrews, director for AIS. “Her academic interests in American Indian theater, religion, and gender studies will help American Indian Studies contribute to other departments and programs.”  
Claveria said, “Joining the faculty 91��ý is an exciting and humbling opportunity. It is so rewarding to work cooperatively with students to support their campus life, academics, and life journeys. Being able to learn from all the people 91��ý—honoring the wisdom they bring into university spaces from their lives and home communities—will undoubtedly shape and enrich my work as an instructor, theater maker, and community servant."  
Her doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Barbara is titled Staging the Sacred: Corporeal Sovereignty, Survivability, and Salient Humor in Contemporary Native North American Drama and Performance, 1972-2022. In support of that, she received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2021. 
Claveria has made presentations at a variety of academic conferences, including the American Literature Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. She was accepted to present at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, but that event canceled due to COVID. 

For several years, she has been active with administration and programming for the American Indian and Indigenous Collective in Santa Barbara. Her community involvement has included being the artistic director in 2016 and 2018 for the Teatro Tour Troupe, which involved young people in the Santa Barbara area in activist theater performances.  
Claveria has earned an MFA in Creative Writing from National University (2013), an MS in Communications from Montana State University (2007), a BS in Liberal Studies from Montana State University (2004), and an AA in English from Flathead Valley Community College (2002). 
While at UC Santa Barbara, Claveria has worked with members of the Chumash community. She said she looks forward to continuing that relationship while 91��ý and building new ties with the Fernandeno Tataviam Band of Mission Indians and the Tongva community.
In the fall semester, Claveria will teach two sections of AIS 101 Introduction to American Indian Studies and a section of ENGL 310 Playwriting. 

Asian American Studies Professor Tracy Lachica Buenavista Honored with Community Engagement and Scholar Activism Award

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 15:47:35 +0000

June 24, 2020

For her contributions to the community, CSUN Asian American Studies professor Tracy Lachica Buenavista recently received the Community Engagement and Scholar Activism Award at the 10th annual UC Davis Equity Summit.

The UC Davis Equity Summit annually honors activists who fight for equity and change in their communities.

Buenavista, who previously received one of CSUN’s Outstanding Faculty Awards, is known for making significant contributions to scholarship on undocumented youth and is widely recognized as an expert on issues facing undocumented Asian students.

CONTINUED ON CSUN TODAY

2020 College of Humanities Dean’s Scholar Danielle Snali

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Tue, 12 May 2020 19:24:06 +0000

May 12, 2020

Danielle Snali is the 2020 College of Humanities Dean’s Scholar. She is a Religious Studies major, with a Gender and Women’s Studies and History minor, and has accumulated a 3.98 GPA in her studies 91��ý. Danielle is an HSI Pathways/Mellon Student Fellow in the competitive Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) Pathways to the Professoriate Program. Her research project for this program, “Women’s Clubs of the Greater San Fernando Valley, 1878 to the Present” utilized archival sources and conducted oral histories to extend existing literatures to explore the organizing efforts of women’s clubs in the greater San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. While 91��ý, Danielle also worked as a Supplemental Instructor for RS 100 (Introduction to Religious Studies), served as a New Student Orientation Leader, assisted with archiving materials in Special Collections at the library, served as a student representative for the New Faculty Orientation, and worked as a student assistant in the College of Humanities dean’s office. She has been accepted into four prestigious doctoral programs in American History. In the fall, she will begin a doctoral program in US History at SUNY Binghamton, where she received the highly competitive campus-wide Clifford D. Clark Diversity Fellowship. One of her recommenders had this to say about her work 91��ý: “Danielle is one of the hardest working students I have had the pleasure of working with, and it has been a joy to watch her intellectual development as a scholar. Danielle is easy to mentor, curious, passionate about her research, thoughtful, and self-motivated … Her future in academia will no doubt be a credit to CSUN.”

Heidi Schumacher Receives Don Dorsey Excellence in Mentoring Award

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 20:57:06 +0000

January 8, 2020

Heidi Schumacher, staff coordinator for the HSI Pathways program and a faculty member in GWS and English, is one of the 2019 recipients of the prestigious Don Dorsey Excellence in Mentoring awards.

This award is presented to faculty, staff, and/or administrators who have made exceptional contributions to mentoring 91��ý. The first recipient was the award’s namesake, Dr. Don Dorsey. The award was established in May 1998 by the Faculty Mentor Program and EOP in recognition of Professor Dorsey’s invaluable contributions to mentoring and mentor training 91��ý.

Heidi was recognized by this program for her exceptional contributions to mentoring students through the HSI Pathways program. This is a Mellon-funded project that partners three Hispanic Serving Institutions (including CSUN) with five research universities in an effort to boost the number of underrepresented students who earn a PhD and go on to careers as professors. So far, under Heidi’s direction, CSUN has graduated two cohorts of students, all of whom were offered slots in prestigious graduate programs across the nation. The third cohort is busy preparing their PhD applications with Heidi’s guidance. Her work with these students, including a number of EOP students, has taken enormous amounts of time, commitment and organization, exemplifying the kind of holistic, intense mentoring that the Don Dorsey award is designed to celebrate.

Dr. Svetlana V. Tyutina (MCLL) elected Chair of the MLA DAOC

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:54:47 +0000

October 31, 2019

Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee

Function: Prepares the agenda for Delegate Assembly meetings; receives, initiates, and reports on resolutions and motions to be brought before the assembly; establishes ad hoc committees to investigate matters of concern to the assembly; nominates candidates for the Delegate Assembly’s Elections Committee; and works closely with the Executive Council and the staff on matters relating to the activities and future directions of the association. Committee members serve ex officio or are elected either by the Delegate Assembly or by the Executive Council. See the MLA constitution (article 11.C) for details.

Staff liaison: Leigh Neithardt (governance@mla.org)

Angelika Bammer, 2016–Jan. 2020
Michelle J. Brazier, 2017–Jan. 2020; 2019–Jan. 2020 (Ch.)
Judith Butler, 2019–Jan. 2020
Maria Chouza-Calo, 2019–Jan. 2022
Sima N. Godfrey, 2019–Jan. 2022
Jean Elizabeth Howard, 2018–Jan. 2020
Maryse Jayasuriya, 2017–Jan. 2020
Paula M. Krebs, 2017–
Anjali Prabhu, 2019–Jan. 2021
Leah Richards, 2018–Jan. 2022
Svetlana Tyutina, 2018–Jan. 2021

Models for Thinking: An Example of Why Data Sciences Increasingly Need the Humanities

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 20:20:33 +0000

September 17, 2019

In fields involved with knowledge production, unsupervised machine-learning algorithms are becoming the standard. These algorithms allow us to statistically analyze data sets that exceed traditional analytic capabilities. Topic modeling, for example, is gradually emerging as the strategy of choice in marketing research, social sciences, cultural analytics, and in historical, scientific, and textual scholarship.

As the use of topic modeling techniques is likely to become more and more widespread, the problem of data-based identification of topics will increasingly become a central one.

An algorithmic text-mining practice, topic modeling is used to discover recurring subjects and issues in large collections of documents. Parsing such large-scale data sets – classifying genomic sequences, mapping forms of advertisement, observing online discussions, etc. – is a matter of organization: How do you make sense of, and classify, these clusters of information?

The answer, often, is to configure them into abstract but coherent topics. As a consequence, the software-based output of your chosen topic-modeling practice will inevitably confront you with the task of interpreting computer-generated data as texts. (Texts, in this context, being assemblages of elements of signification, or what semioticians call signs.)

Any process of interpretation of textual data relates, from this point of view, to the interplay between observable features and a specific perspective, or that which causes us see what we see during an observational process.

In developing a methodology, then, we must consider both the observed and the observer – and that starts by analyzing the problem of what we see.

The initial consideration might be that what you see in, say, the word bubbles of the DFR Browser – the graphic interface developed by Andrew Goldstone that visually renders the Mallet-processed analysis of your source texts – are not the empirical or directly observable data. They are rather estimated data resulting from a probabilistic processing of the actual words in the source material. Based on what we call posterior probability, these estimations are the influence of further conditions assigned after primary physical evidence – in our case, counting words occurrences – is gathered.

Such lists of words (topics) collectively represent just a possible picture of the object of analysis. Additionally, we need to remind ourselves that Bayesian statistics itself (on which the Latent Dirichlet Algorithm typically used in topic modeling is designed) does not work with physical probabilities but with evidential probabilities.

As a result, when it comes to topic modeling, the computer is in charge of making an initial wild “guess.” This initial guess, which is based on large-scale computations, is then followed by iterations of probabilistic hypotheses. Each hypothesis is based on occurrences and frequency – what happens and how often. Conceptually, this means that we are tasking a computer to use data to make subjective or speculative judgments.

As a collection of words, a topic radiates meaning in different ways to different people. The same is true with different settings and purposes.

To this gigantic algorithmic speculation, we then add the one connected with the human-reading practice (how we identify or label a topic as part of a specific area of meaning).

We can gradually begin to understand how the process of “topic labeling,” far from being the result of any possible automated or standardized procedure, represents the final stage of speculative layers at both the machinic and human level.

It might therefore be useful to assume that a topic is always within the realm of a “possibility of signification,” a textual status that the humanities, and literary theory in particular, have extensively addressed over the past fifty years.

As a collection of words, a topic radiates meaning in different ways to different people. The same is true with different settings and purposes. We can understand, then, how the remarkable amount of scholarship on meaning ambiguity and language polysemy typical of the humanities can come as an extremely valuable help and actual operational toolkit for contemporary data science.

As the use of topic modeling techniques is likely to become more and more widespread, the problem of data-based identification of topics will increasingly become a central one. This will require the implementation of theories of interpretation that literary studies and humanistic scholarship have refined across their centuries-long traditions of studies.

Dr. Mauro Carassai teaches courses in Digital Humanities, literary theory, and American studies.

This article was reposted from i nsideBigData

CSUN Bridges Language Barriers for Spanish-Speaking Communities in Los Angeles

judith.spiegel@csun.edu — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:57:26 +0000

April 30, 2019

In the United States, Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken in homes, yet limited-English proficient Spanish speakers hit communication barriers in most major industries, such as business, healthcare, legal, government and education.

California State University, Northridge’s Department of Modern & Classical Languages and Literatures is attempting to bridge these language barriers with the implementation of advanced Spanish translation service-learning courses on the legal and business communities.

“There is a great need for qualified translators and interpreters, and more so in Southern California,” said Svetlana V. Tyutina, the Spanish graduate program coordinator for the department and director of student service-learning 91��ý. “Next year, we’ll begin offering advanced translation and interpreting classes SPAN 462 and SPAN 472 that will include hands-on experience vital for this field.”

The courses will include internship opportunities through service-learning projects. One of the projects, piloted last fall, will focus on establishing a partnership with the Los Angeles Superior Court. Student participants will interpret for Spanish-speaking clients during the pro-bono mediation event Settle-O-Rama in family law court. Article continues on CSUN Today