G. Gabrielle Starr: “On Value: Arts, Education, Aesthetics and Policy”

Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr will offer a Presidential Colloquium titled “On Value: Arts, Education, Aesthetics and Policy” at 5 p.m. Monday, April 8, in the Campus Center Carroll Room. The event is open to the public at no charge.

“What we measure and evaluate often prescribes what we value and do,” Starr notes. Based on research into aesthetics from behavioral and neural perspectives, continued engagement as a critic and scholar of the arts, and experience as a teacher and a leader in colleges, Starr will invite the audience to explore, with her, possibilities about how the arts can—and fundamentally do—help us think about not just what we prefer, but what we value.

She will posit ways in which the arts help us explore how those values change. And she will contend that the arts should be at the forefront of what colleges offer our generations of students.

About G. Gabrielle Starr
G. Gabrielle Starr, a highly regarded scholar of English literature whose work reaches into neuroscience and the arts, took office as the 10th president of Pomona College in 2017.

Under Starr’s leadership, the college is in the midst of a strategic planning process to prepare for the future, and has launched a key initiative to support research and engagement in the humanities. In December 2018, the college announced plans for a new athletics and recreation center for health and wellness.

Starr is a national voice on access to college for students of all backgrounds, the future of higher education, women in leadership and the importance of the arts.

Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and author of two books, Starr offers a compelling case for working across academic disciplines to spark intellectual discovery. Her research looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to help get to the heart of how people respond to paintings, music and other forms of art.

Her most recent book, “Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience,” was a finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s 2014 Christian Gauss Award, and her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship and a National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant.

About Smith’s Presidential Colloquium Series
Smith's Presidential Colloquium Series regularly features influential thought leaders in a wide range of fields—from poets and writers to economists and policy experts—to share their expertise, offer insights and inspire discourse on key social, political and global topics that call for attention. Lectures are free and open to the public.