G. Gabrielle Starr

G. Gabrielle Starr
Starr in 2023
10th President of Pomona College
Incumbent
Assumed office
July 1, 2017
Preceded byDavid W. Oxtoby
Personal details
Born1974 (age 49–50)
Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.
SpouseJohn C. Harpole[1]
Children2[1]
EducationEmory University (BA, MA)
University of St Andrews
Harvard University (PhD)
ProfessionAcademic
Websitewww.pomona.edu/administration/president
Academic background
ThesisThe frame of sense: The epistolary novel and the lyric mode in eighteenth-century England (1999)
Doctoral advisor
Academic work
DisciplineEnglish 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,[2] 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.[3][4] Starr was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.[5] In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[6]

Early life and education

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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.[7]

Career

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After receiving her doctorate, Starr decided to retrain in cognitive neuroscience, supported by a New Directions Fellowship awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.[8] She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology,[3] 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.[9][10]

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.,[11] 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.[4] During her tenure, she presided over the college's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[12] She is a proponent of affirmative action.[13][14] As of 2020, her yearly compensation was valued at $685,672.[15]

On April 5, 2024, Starr had 19 pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupying her office arrested,[16] prompting protests and condemnations.[17]

Research

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Starr's research is highly interdisciplinary,[18][better source needed] combining literary scholarship, empirical aesthetics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her book Feeling Beauty,[19] 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.[20] Her most recent book, Just in Time, [21] 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.[22][23][24] 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.

References

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  1. ^ a b Kendall, Mark (June 28, 2017). "A Couple on the Same Page". Pomona College Magazine. Pomona College. Retrieved August 1, 2024.
  2. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | G. Gabrielle Starr". www.gf.org. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  3. ^ a b "Pomona College's new president will be the first woman and African American to lead the campus". Los Angeles Times. December 8, 2016. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  4. ^ a b Rod, Marc (October 18, 2017). "G. Gabrielle Starr Inaugurated As 10th President Of Pomona College". The Student Life. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
  5. ^ "New Members". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  6. ^ "The American Philosophical Society Welcomes New Members for 2024".
  7. ^ "Gina Gabrielle Starr". St Andrews Science. 1974.
  8. ^ Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon. "New Directions Fellowships Recipients". The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  9. ^ "G. Gabrielle Starr Announced As New CAS Dean". NYU Local. February 6, 2013. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  10. ^ Blackburn, Doug (October 23, 2013). "Starr power: Lincoln High graduate making mark in humanities at New York University". Tallahassee Democrat. pp. C1. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
  11. ^ "P.O.I.S.E." New York University.
  12. ^ Nietzel, Michael T. (October 7, 2020). "Liberal Arts Colleges Face the Full Force Of The Pandemic". Forbes. Retrieved June 20, 2024.
  13. ^ Lemann, Nicholar (July 23, 2021). "Can Affirmative Action Survive?". The New Yorker. Retrieved November 1, 2021.
  14. ^ Starr, G. Gabrielle (October 27, 2022). "Widen the college pipeline so that talent everywhere can succeed anywhere". The Boston Globe. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
  15. ^ "Pomona College". Nonprofit Explorer. ProPublica. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
  16. ^ Rust, Susanne (April 6, 2024). "20 Pomona College protesters arrested after storming, occupying president's office". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on May 8, 2024. Retrieved May 7, 2024.
  17. ^ Kaleem, Jaweed; Petrow-Cohen, Caroline (April 12, 2024). "'I can't focus on anything but rage.' Pro-Palestinian protests roil elite Pomona College". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on May 8, 2024. Retrieved May 7, 2024.
  18. ^ "Why an interdisciplinary lens matters: Gabrielle Starr, Pomona College President". YouTube. August 7, 2018.
  19. ^ Feeling Beauty. MIT Press. July 19, 2013. ISBN 9780262019316. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  20. ^ "The Phi Beta Kappa Society Announces the 2014 Short Lists for Its Annual Book Awards" (Press release). Phi Beta Kappa Society. August 18, 2014. Archived from the original on September 15, 2014. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
  21. ^ Just in Time. MIT Press. June 6, 2023. ISBN 9780262048040.
  22. ^ Vessel, Edward A.; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Belfi, Amy M.; Stahl, Jonathan L.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (September 17, 2019). "The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (38): 19155–19164. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11619155V. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902650116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6754616. PMID 31484756.
  23. ^ Vessel, Edward A.; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Belfi, Amy M.; Stahl, Jonathan L.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (September 6, 2019). "The default mode network, but not ventral occipitotemporal cortex, contains a domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal". Journal of Vision. 19 (10): 97d. doi:10.1167/19.10.97d. ISSN 1534-7362.
  24. ^ Belfi, Amy M.; Vessel, Edward A.; Brielmann, Aenne; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Chatterjee, Anjan; Leder, Helmut; Pelli, Denis G.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (March 1, 2019). "Dynamics of aesthetic experience are reflected in the default-mode network". NeuroImage. 188: 584–597. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.12.017. ISSN 1053-8119. PMC 8493917. PMID 30543845. S2CID 54457693.
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