HSA Blog

In addition to my role as professor of art and the Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson Chair in the Arts and Humanities, I’m an artist who makes photographs, videos, collages, sculptures, sounds, drawings, performances and text-based works. I often start with straightforward objects as subject matter. My approach mines the mundane and the everyday […]

Imagine that the CEO of a company learns that implementing a new policy will harm the environment and also make the company lots of money. The CEO then says: “Implement the policy—I don’t care about the environment, I just want to make money.” Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? Most people would say “yes.” […]

Annabelle Teng ’24 received the 2021 First-year Writing Prize for this paper, written for Professor David Seitz’s Star Trek and Social Theory class, in which students investigated the Star Trek franchise. Sex sells and the film industry lives to make profit, even at the expense of others. Hollywood is problematic—in more ways than one—but the […]

How does social impact work? Many people doubt that social change is even possible, but those on the front lines of efforts to make the world a better place know otherwise. In spring 2021, students in my Global Environmental Politics course at Harvey Mudd interviewed renowned changemakers from their hometowns—activists, elected officials, entrepreneurs and others—with […]

As a rule, I don’t pay much attention to explicitly Orientalist media. I get enough of it implicitly, through the back-door, as it were, by virtue of being a living, breathing citizen of the United States of America. Our mainstream, political, and popular culture is full of exoticized, eroticized, dangerous, and damaging portrayals of the […]

Wealth inequality in the U.S. is at unprecedented levels, and yet we don’t see the kind of resistance to it that one might expect, especially from the ones who are most hurt by it. Every field of social science has its fair share of theories to help understand resistance to oppressive systems, and so does […]

In the remote setting of COVID, orchestra director David Cubek—who holds a joint faculty appointment in Harvey Mudd’s Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts and at Scripps College—continues to engage students in a rich experience with the arts. The Claremont Concert Orchestra is one of three student ensembles in the Joint Music Program […]

The members of the Harvey Mudd Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts (HSA) are deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague Richard G. (Dick) Olson, who died in June, a few months shy of what would have been his 80th birthday. Though he retired from the College in 2011, Dick remained closely […]

Bicycles have been in the news a lot lately as people look for recreation options during the COVID lockdown. Cycling has also received growing attention as a climate-friendly transportation option. In the United States, passenger vehicle trips are the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Over a third of these trips […]

As a historian of psychology and computing, I am interested in two questions: How did the developments in cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI) prompt new approaches to understanding the human mind and its creative abilities? And, how did the ideas about minds and computers travel across political, economic and ideological contexts in the twentieth century? […]