G. Gabrielle Starr

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G. Gabrielle Starr
10th President of Pomona College
Assumed office
July 1, 2017
Preceded byDavid W. Oxtoby
Personal details
Born
Gina Gabrielle Starr

1974 (age 46–47)
Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.
Spouse(s)John C. Harpole
Children2
EducationEmory University (BA, MA)
Harvard University (PhD)
ProfessionAcademic
Websitewww.pomona.edu/administration/president

Gina Gabrielle Starr is an American academic administrator serving as the 10th president of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is a scholar 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. 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]

Early life and education[]

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.

Career[]

After receiving her doctorate, Starr decided to retrain in cognitive neuroscience, supported by a New Directions Fellowship awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.[5] 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.[6][7]

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.,[8] 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]

Research[]

Starr's research is highly interdisciplinary,[9][better source needed] combining literary scholarship, empirical aesthetics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her most recent book, Feeling Beauty,[10] proposes a neural 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.[11] Her current 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.[12][13][14] 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[]

  1. ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | G. Gabrielle Starr". www.gf.org. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  2. ^ Jump up to: 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.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b Rod, Marc (October 18, 2017). "G. Gabrielle Starr Inaugurated As 10th President Of Pomona College". The Student Life. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
  4. ^ "New Members". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
  5. ^ Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon. "New Directions Fellowships Recipients". The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  6. ^ "G. Gabrielle Starr Announced As New CAS Dean". NYU Local. February 6, 2013. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ "P.O.I.S.E." New York University.
  9. ^ "Why an interdisciplinary lens matters: Gabrielle Starr, Pomona College President". YouTube.
  10. ^ "Feeling Beauty". MIT Press. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  11. ^ "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.
  12. ^ 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. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902650116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6754616. PMID 31484756.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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. PMID 30543845. S2CID 54457693.
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