G. Gabrielle Starr | |
---|---|
![]() Starr in 2023 | |
10th President of Pomona College | |
Assumed office July 1, 2017 | |
Preceded by | David W. Oxtoby |
Personal details | |
Born | 1974 (age 49–50) Tallahassee,Florida,U.S. |
Spouse | John C. Harpole |
Children | 2 |
Alma mater | Emory University (BA,MA) University of St Andrews Harvard University (PhD) |
Profession | Academic |
Website | www |
Academic background | |
Thesis | The frame of sense:The epistolary novel and the lyric mode in eighteenth-century England (1999) |
Doctoral advisor |
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Academic work | |
Discipline | English literature |
Institutions | |
Gina Gabrielle Starr (born 1974) is an American literary scholar,neuroscientist,and academic administrator who is the 10th president of Pomona College,a liberal arts college in Claremont,California. She is known for her work on 18th-century British literature and the neuroscience of aesthetics. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, [1] an NSF ADVANCE award (joint with Nava Rubin),and a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. From 2000 to 2017,she was on the faculty at New York University. In 2017,she became the first woman and first African-American president of Pomona College. [2] [3] Starr was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. [4] In 2024,she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [5]
Starr grew up in Tallahassee,Florida. She began college at Emory University at age 15,where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in women's studies in 1993. She then studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland as a Robert T. Jones Scholar. From there,she earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard University in 1999. [6]
After receiving her doctorate,Starr decided to retrain in cognitive neuroscience,supported by a New Directions Fellowship awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [7] She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, [2] exploring techniques from cognitive neuroscience.
She joined the faculty at New York University (NYU) in 2000 and became the acting dean of the College of Arts and Science in 2011 and dean suo jure in 2013. [8] [9]
With Susanne Wofford and faculty at NYU,in 2015 Starr co-founded a liberal arts prison education program at Wallkill Correctional Facility in New York State. In addition,Starr,in collaboration with the Borough of Manhattan Community College,initiated a STEM preparation and transfer program,P.O.I.S.E., [10] to provide promising students with support,mentorship,and financial access to encourage them to undertake a bachelor's degree in STEM subjects at NYU.
In 2016 she was selected to be the 10th President of Pomona College,a position she assumed on July 1,2017. [3] During her tenure,she presided over the college's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. [11] She is a proponent of affirmative action. [12] [13] As of 2020 [update] ,her yearly compensation was valued at $685,672. [14]
On April 5,2024,Starr had 19 pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupying her office arrested, [15] prompting protests and condemnations. [16]
Starr's research is highly interdisciplinary, [17] [ better source needed ] combining literary scholarship,empirical aesthetics,psychology,and cognitive neuroscience. Her book Feeling Beauty, [18] offered an initial model of aesthetic experience that relies on a network of interconnected neural structures. Feeling Beauty was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 2014. [19] Her most recent book,Just in Time, [20] continues this work,proposing that the goals individuals take to aesthetic encounters combine with the cognitive demands of aesthetic objects to determine the time course of aesthetic experiences and the neural systems that underpin them.
Her research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the neural basis of aesthetic experiences,providing evidence that the default mode network is involved in the representation of aesthetic appeal. [21] [22] [23] She has published articles in journals including Modern Philology , Eighteenth-Century Fiction , Eighteenth-Century Studies , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Cognition , Neuron , NeuroImage ,and Psychology of Aesthetics,Creativity,and the Arts .
Pomona College is a private liberal arts college in Claremont,California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925,it became the founding member of the Claremont Colleges consortium of adjacent,affiliated institutions.
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California,San Diego (UCSD),where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department,Moscow State University. In 2015,she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts &Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia,the University of Pittsburgh,and Somerville College,Oxford,she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar,writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that:"Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed,in journals and books,as one person."
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David William Oxtoby is an American academic who served as the President of American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2019 to 2024,as well as the ninth president of Pomona College from 2003 to 2017.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University,where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell,she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross,she founded the Society for Affective Science.
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Anna Christina Nobre FBA,MAE,fNASc is a Brazilian and British cognitive neuroscientist working at Yale University in New Haven,CT,USA.
In neuroscience,the default mode network (DMN),also known as the default network,default state network,or anatomically the medial frontoparietal network (M-FPN),is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex,posterior cingulate cortex,precuneus and angular gyrus. It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest,such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others,thinking about themselves,remembering the past,and planning for the future.
Yuko Munakata is a professor of psychology at the University of California,Davis. She has specialized in developmental cognitive neuroscience,taking a connectionist approach to cognitive development. Her research investigates the processing mechanisms underlying cognitive development,using converging evidence from behavior,computational modeling,and cognitive neuroscience. She also focuses on understanding the prevalence of task-dependent behaviors during the first years of life. Munakata received a B.S. in symbolic systems at Stanford University in 1991 and a PhD in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996 under James McClelland;and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1996–1997. She worked at the University of Denver from 1997–2001,University of Colorado Boulder from 2002-2019,and UC Davis from 2019-present
Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
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Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University,where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. She specializes in epistemology,philosophy of mind,and philosophy of language and is best known for her work on perceptual experience,evidence,capacities,mental content,and imagination. She is the recipient of numerous awards,including a Guggenheim Award,a Humboldt Prize,and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for a project on the Neuroscience of Perception. She is the author of The Unity of Perception:Content,Consciousness,Evidence. The book won an honorable mention for the American Philosophical Association 2019 Sanders Book Prize.
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