William Weber Chair of Social Science Amy Elman receives the 2025 Lux Esto Award from President Jorge G. Gonzalez during Founders Day events at Stetson Chapel on Friday, April 25.
Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo receives the Outstanding First-Year Advocate Award from President Gonzalez at Founders Day.
Dow Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sandino Vargas-Perez receives the Outstanding Advisor Award from President Gonzalez at Founders Day
Amy Elman, the William Weber Chair of Social Science, is this year’s recipient of the Lux Esto Award of Excellence as announced today during the College’s Founders Day celebration, marking K’s 192nd year.
The award recognizes an employee who has served the institution for at least 26 years and has contributed significantly to the campus. The recipient—chosen by a committee with student, faculty and staff representatives—is an employee who exemplifies the spirit of K through selfless dedication and goodwill.
At K, Elman has taught a variety of courses within the political science, women’s studies and Jewish studies departments. During her tenure, she has also been a visiting professor at Haifa University in Israel, Harvard University, SUNY Potsdam, Middlebury College, Uppsala University in Sweden and New York University.
Elman has received two Fulbright grants, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University. She has written three books: The European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial (2014); Sexual Equality in an Integrated Europe (2007); and Sexual Subordination and State Intervention: Comparing Sweden and the United States (1996). She also edited Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge (1996). In the 1997–98 academic year, she was awarded K’s Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for outstanding scholarship.
In accordance with Founders Day traditions, two other employees received community awards. Dow Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sandino Vargas–Pérez was given the Outstanding Advisor Award and Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry Daniela Arias-Rotondo received the First-Year Advocate Award.
Before arriving at K, Vargas-Perez worked as an adjunct instructor at Western Michigan University, where he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic.
Vargas-Perez has taught courses at K in data structures, algorithms, parallel computing, computing for environmental science, object-oriented programming, and programming in Java and web development. His research interests include high-performance computing, parallel and distributed algorithms, computational genomics, and data structures and compression.
Jazz quartet Liam McElroy (piano), Laura DeVilbiss (flute), Garrick Hohm (string bass) and Adam Cornier-Bridgeforth (drums) performed at the Founders Day celebration.
President’s Student Ambassadors Ava Williams ’26 and Madeline Hollander ’26 introduced President Gonzalez at the 192nd Founders Day celebration.
President Gonzalez recognized the students who served this year as President’s Student Ambassadors and shared the names of 13 more who will serve beginning this fall.
Nominators said Vargas–Pérez has consistently gone above and beyond his responsibilities as a professor to promote learning while finding opportunities for his advisees.
Arias-Rotondo has earned significant funding in support of her research and her commitment to engaging students in hands-on experiences in her lab. A $250,000 grant in 2023 from the National Science Foundation’s Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) provided funding for student researchers, typically eight to 10 per term. In 2024, she received a $50,000 American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund grant, which will support her and her students’ upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts. H.
Arias-Rotondo teaches Introductory Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Structure and Reactivity, and commonly takes students to ACS conferences. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Nominators said she has been a dependable, inspirational and fierce advocate for students.
Gonzalez also recognized the students who served as President’s Student Ambassadors in the 2024–25 academic year and introduced those who will serve the College beginning this fall in 2025–26. As student leaders, President’s Student Ambassadors serve as an extension of the president’s hospitality at events and gatherings, welcoming alumni and guests of the College with a spirit of inclusion. About 15 students serve as ambassadors each academic year. The students selected show strong communication skills; demonstrate leadership through academic life, student life or community service; and maintain a minimum grade-point average.
The 2024-25 ambassadors have been:
Jaylen Bowles-Swain ’26
Christopher Cayton ’25
Kyle Cooper ’25
Blake Filkins ’26
James Hauke ’26
Maya Hester ’25
Madeline Hollander ’25
Gavin Houtkooper ’25
Katie Kraemer ’25
Isabelle Mason ’27
Alex Nam ’25
Tyrus Parnell, Jr. ’25
Isabella Pellegrom ’25
Addison Peter ’25
Maxwell Rhames ’25
Emiliano Alvarado Rescala ’27
Amelie Sack ’27
Dean Turpin ’25
Ava Williams ’25
The 2025-26 ambassadors succeeding this year’s seniors will be:
Five Kalamazoo College faculty members have been awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor, recognizing their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. This milestone also signifies the College’s confidence in the contributions these faculty will make throughout their careers. The Board of Trustees-approved tenure recipients are:
Anne Marie Butler, Art History and Women, Gender and Sexuality
Butler specializes in contemporary Tunisian art within contexts of global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. At K, she teaches courses such as Art and Gender, Queer Aesthetics, Performance Art and core WGS classes. She has supervised 13 Senior Integrated Projects (SIPs).
Outside the classroom, Butler has co-edited the book Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024) and published four articles, as well as a book chapter. She is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and of a research grant from American Institute of Maghrib Studies. She is the current Junior Faculty Fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, has served on the Sherbin Fellowship Post-Baccalaureate Research Award committee, and is co-convener of the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s WGS Collective. She is also a volunteer assistant K swimming and diving team coach, and volunteers at the YWCA and at Kalamazoo Animal Rescue.
Butler holds a Ph.D. in global gender and sexuality studies from the State University of New York-Buffalo, an M.A. in arts politics from New York University, and a B.A. in art history and French from Scripps College.
Anne Marie Butler
Marilyn Evans, Classics
Evans specializes in the archaeology of Roman urbanism, exploring the origins and early development of communities in central Italy. She has excavated sites across the Mediterranean, and for the past 15 years in the ancient Latin city of Gabii. At K, Evans teaches courses across the Classics curriculum, covering ancient language, literature, history and archaeology. She also has effectively integrated community engagement into her Neighborhoods in Ancient Cities course by working collaboratively with the Center for Civic Engagement and the Building Blocks community housing group.
Evans has supervised four SIP students, including two during summer research at archaeological digs in Gabii, Italy, outside of Rome. Her published work includes four peer-reviewed articles and two book chapters. She has served on K’s Educational Policies Committee, as regional vice president for the Classical Association of the Midwest and South, and on the editorial board of Rhea Classical Reviews.
Evans earned her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, her M.A. in Classical Languages from the University of Georgia and her B.A. in Classical Studies and Anthropology, from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Marilyn Evans
Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, English
Kingsley’s specialty is poetry and he also has published works of fiction and nonfiction. His teaching centers on the poetry sequence within the English department: Introduction to Creative Writing, Intermediate Poetry Workshop, and Advanced Poetry Workshop.
Kingsley is the author of three books which have won over a dozen national awards, including the Association for Asian American Studies Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Library of Virginia Literary Award, and the American Fiction Award. He has published poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction in more than 100 journals and/or anthologies, including Poetry, Poets.org, Tin House, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The Southern Review and Oxford American. His collections are Dēmos: An American Multitude (Milkweed Editions, 2021), Colonize Me (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
At K, Kingsley has twice been named a Most Valuable Professor, once by basketball student-athletes and once in football. He has also twice been named an Alpha Lamda Delta Inspiring Professor in back-to-back years.
Kingsley earned an M.F.A. from the University of Miami and an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
Rochelle Rojas, History
Rojas specializes in the early modern Western world and the transatlantic history of the early Spanish empire while focusing on the lived experiences of a wide range of people. She has supervised 11 SIPs, written two peer-reviewed articles, and authored a book, Bad Christians and Hanging Toads: Witch Crafting in Northern Spain 1525-1675, which was released this month by Cornell University Press. She has been awarded an American Association of University Women Short-Term Research Grant and an American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Grant.
Rojas has served as a member of K’s Academic Standards Committee and the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She has been a member of search committees for the vice president of finance and administration; director of grants, fellowships and research; and faculty searches in biology and chemistry. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from the University of Florida, and a master’s degree along with a Ph.D. in history from Duke University.
Rochelle Rojas
Blakely Tresca, Chemistry
Tresca teaches organic chemistry at K while striving to bring research into the classroom. He has mentored more than 30 research students and supervised 14 SIPs with more than 50% of his research mentees attending graduate programs at institutions such as the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin and Washington University in St. Louis.
Tresca has had five published articles and recently received a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF funds will help his students develop a lab partnership with some of their counterparts at the University of Toronto while performing research with peptoid nanomaterials.
At K, Tresca has served on the Educational Policies Committee (EPC), where he participated in revising SIP guidelines and last year’s teacher’s assistant policy. Beyond EPC, he has been an advisor to K’s student chapter of the American Chemical Society (ACS) while working with the local ACS professional chapter. He’s also been the Michigan representative to the Midwest Association of Chemistry Teachers at Liberal Arts Colleges Board.
Tresca holds a bachelor’s degree from Trinity University along with a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Oregon.
Butler is one of nine grantees in the article category, for her article, “Deviance, Penetration, and the Erotic in Aïcha Snoussi’s Drawing Installations,” examining the Tunisian artist’s work. Butler’s research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art, global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia and North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory.
“I am honored to have been selected from amongst many wonderful scholars to receive this prestigious award,” Butler said. “This grant will support 2025 travel to conduct primary research for a new scholarly article on Aïcha Snoussi’s (Tunis and Paris) works. Informed by Heather Love and Audre Lorde, I argue for a new reading of Snoussi’s drawing installations, illuminating intimate relationships between theories of queer of color archives, deviance, and erotics.”
The grant program supports writing about contemporary art, with the goal of maintaining critical writing as a valued way of engaging with the visual arts.
“Artists play a vital role in illuminating key issues of our time, but it is thanks to the attention and insights of arts writers that artists’ visions become widely known and discussed,” said Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant supports and celebrates the crucial contributions of writers who not only transmit but creatively engage with artists’ methods, intentions, contexts, and blind spots to bring their perspectives into focus in the public sphere.”
Assistant Professor of Art History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Anne Marie Butler is a recipient of a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
In addition to nine article writers, the 2024 Arts Writers Grants include nine books and 12 short-form writing awardees, for a total of $945,000 to 30 writers. Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 each, the grants support projects targeted at both general and specialized art audiences, from reviews for magazines and newspapers to in-depth scholarly studies.
“The 30 writers receiving support this year are working on projects asking urgent questions about art’s place in the world today,” said Pradeep Dalal, director of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. “Exploring topics including art’s relationship to fossil fuel extraction, Native art and activism, migration and questions of visibility, internationalist solidarity networks, DIY publishing, and LGBTQ comic artist communities, and covering artists working in Chile, Columbia, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela, this year’s grantee projects actively expand our understanding of contemporary art. Many of these projects make unexpected connections between seemingly disparate aspects of art and culture. Despite the severe contraction of available venues for publishing in the arts, these writers continue to enrich and expand the academic disciplinary frameworks of both art criticism and art history.”
Butler’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP/Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and the London Review of Education. She recently co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024).
Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (Intellect Press, 2024), with Sascha Crasnow, assistant professor of art history at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series, the book presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region from artists and scholars. In addition to serving as editors, Butler and Crasnow wrote one of the chapters, “Transing Contemporary Art: Aïcha Snoussi and Khaled Jarrar.”
The book is important because it stands as the first volume to consider this particular intersection of geographical location, visual arts and queer studies, Butler said—hopefully, the first of many.
“Obviously, it’s a resource for people to learn about queer visual culture in the region and at diaspora, but Sascha and I very much don’t want this book to define that field,” Butler said. “We are more interested in the book generating questions, responses and new inquiry than marking off a territory. We hope it is used to build on.”
Each of the book’s three sections—Unfixed Genders, Intersectional Sexualities, and Sites and Spaces—includes at least one of each type of chapter: scholarly essay, interview and artist contribution.
“I think it’s unique to have that many interviews, and having artists’ contributions is a little bit unique to scholarly volumes,” Butler said. “Especially since this is about contemporary art, we wanted to have those artists’ voices represented. The artists’ contributions are one of my favorite parts of this book. It’s fantastic to read artists talking about their own work in this context.’”
With her research focused on contemporary Tunisian art with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and the state, Butler has long cultivated connection with the artists she studies. Working on this volume allowed her to continue that approach while broadening her lens.
“This volume was great for me to be able to think about some of the things I read, and some of the things that my scholarship is in conversation with, in a little bit bigger way,” Butler said. “Continuing to work with the artists and the people that I’ve made connections with has been important to me. I want to continue to build and maintain those relationships. I also want to continue to ask different questions and ask questions in different ways.”
The work of building relationships served Butler well as she and Crasnow prioritized contributions to the book from people living in the SWANA region, representing diaspora and bringing different perspectives and experiences to the collection.
“We have fewer contributors living in the region than we might have liked to, which is a product of some of the tensions that this volume embodies,” Butler said. “This book comes at an unparalleled moment of queer global visibility, and with queer and trans visibility, there’s always this paradox where it’s good that people are more visible, but also it can put people in danger. There’s also, on the larger scale, cultural imperialism, problems with global flows of scholarship, extractive scholarship, misguided ideas about saving LGBTQ people from their cultures, and a homogenization of a global queerness that is the Euro-American perspective of what queerness is. Visibility comes with all of these complications that we need to be really attentive to.”
Anne Marie Butler, assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality at Kalamazoo College, co-edited a new book, “Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa.”
“Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa” is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.
Gayatri Gopinath, a preeminent scholar on visual culture and queer studies, wrote a forward to the book that Butler believes helps to contextualize the importance of the book at this moment.
“Anne Marie Butler and Sascha Crasnow’s astute framing of the uses of a trans methodology in the study of contemporary SWANA art is a reflection on the mobility of many of the artists they study,” the forward says. “For Butler and Crasnow, to actively trans SWANA contemporary art is to foreground flux and fluidity, and movement over origin or destination, as well as to jettison rigid identity categories. … The very formations of ‘SWANA,’ ‘queerness,’ and even ‘contemporary art’ are predicated on an acknowledgement of the difference, heterogeneity, and incommensurability of the various social and aesthetic formations that fall within these capacious rubrics. Rather than flattening out difference to create a coherent, homogenous whole, the contributors to this volume attend to the particularities, divergences and incoherences within and between these categories. They suggest that it is perhaps only in the recognition of the radical difference and unknowability of the other that a truly ethical relationality can be forged.”
Although the edited scholarly volume is primarily intended for an academic audience, Butler believes that the artist interviews and contributions make parts of it accessible to anyone who is interested. She hopes people will encourage their libraries to purchase the volume, making it available to a larger audience, since they were unable to secure the funding to publish the book online with open access.
“I think it’s a really special book, and I think that a lot of times when people hear edited volume or academic collection, they think, ‘Oh, that’s not something that I would enjoy reading or looking at.’ But I think that this book has a lot to offer a lot of different people.”
Butler has taught at K since 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in global gender and sexuality studies from the University at Buffalo, an M.A. in arts politics from New York University, and a B.A. in art history and French from Scripps College.
Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa is available from the publisher at intellectdiscover.com.
Kalamazoo College has appointed six faculty members as endowed chairs, recognizing their achievements as professors. Endowed chairs are positions funded through the annual earnings from an endowed gift or gifts to the College. The honor reflects the value donors attribute to the excellent teaching and mentorship that occurs at K and how much donors want to see that excellence continue.
The honorees are:
Espelencia Baptiste, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Senior Faculty Chair
Anne Marie Butler, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Junior Faculty Chair
E. Binney Girdler, the Dow Distinguished Professor in Natural Sciences
Sohini Pillai, the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities
Dwight Williams, the Kurt D. Kaufman Endowed Chair
Daniela Arias-Rotondo, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science
Espelencia Baptiste, Anthropology-Sociology
Baptiste is currently on sabbatical in Benin where she is working on a book project focused on different ways Africans and Haitians claim each other across time and space. Her research focus centers on the relationship between Africa and its diasporas. She has been active and engaged within the College since her arrival; most recently, she received the College’s Outstanding Advisor Award in 2023 and served as Posse mentor from 2019-2022.
Her courses include Lest We Forget: Memory and Identity in the African Diaspora, You Are What You Eat: Food and Identity In a Global Perspective, Communities and Schools, and Missionaries to Pilgrims: Diasporic Returns to Africa. Within her teaching, she is invested in challenging students to imagine the production of power, particularly as it relates to belonging, as a continuous phenomenon.
Baptiste has a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Espelencia Baptiste, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership senior chair, received the College’s Outstanding Advisor Award in 2023 as presented by President Jorge G. Gonzalez
Anne Marie Butler, Art and Art History; Women, Gender and Sexuality (WGS)
Butler has a joint appointment in Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research focuses on contemporary Tunisian art within frameworks of global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. At K, she teaches at the intersection of visual culture and gender studies, instructing courses such as Art, Power and Society; Queer Aesthetics; Performance Art; and core WGS classes, and this is her fourth season as volunteer assistant coach for the swimming and diving team at K.
Butler is co-editor for the volume Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia and North Africa, which will be available in October (Intellect Press). She has been published in ASAP/Journal, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and The London Review of Education. She is also an editor for the volume Surrealism and Ecology, expected in 2026.
Butler has a bachelor’s degree from Scripps College, a master’s degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Anne Marie Butler is the the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership junior chair.
E. Binney Girdler, Biology
Girdler is the director of K’s environmental studies program and a biology department faculty member. She focuses on plant ecology and conservation biology with her research involving studies of the structure and dynamics of terrestrial plant communities.
Girdler previously had an endowed chair as the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science. She develops relationships with area natural-resource agencies and non-profit conservation groups to match her expertise with their research needs and the access needs of students. In 2022, she and K Associate Professor of Biology Santiago Salinas contributed to a global research project that proves humans are affecting evolution through urbanization and climate change. The study served as a cover story for the journal Science.
Girdler commonly teaches courses titled Environmental Science, Ecology and Conservation, and Population and Community Ecology along with an environmental studies senior seminar. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Dow Distinguished Professor in Natural Sciences E. Binney Girdler at Batts Pavilion.
Sohini Pillai, Religion
Pillai is the director of film and media studies at K and a faculty member in the religion department. She is a comparatist of South Asian religious literature, and her area of specialization is the Mahabharata and Ramayana epic traditions.
Pillai is the author of Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2024), a comprehensive study of premodern retellings of the Mahabharata epic in regional South Asian languages. She is also the co-editor of Many Mahabharatas (State University of New York Press, 2021) with Nell Shapiro Hawley and the co-author of Women in Hindu Traditions (New York University Press, under contract) with Emilia Bachrach and Jennifer Ortegren. Her courses have included Religion in South Asia; Hindu Traditions; Islam in South Asia; Dance, Drama, and Devotion in South Asia; Religion, Bollywood, and Beyond; Jedi, Sith, and Mandalorians: Religion and Star Wars; and Princesses, Demonesses, and Warriors: The Women of the South Asian Epics.
Pillai has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley; a master’s degree from Columbia University; and a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College.
Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities Sohini Pillai displays some of her personal Star Wars memorabilia including a painting of Grogu gifted to her by a student.
Dwight Williams, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Williams previously was an endowed chair at K, having served as the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Assistant Professor of Chemistry from 2018–2020. He teaches courses including Organic Chemistry I and II, Advanced Organic Chemistry and Introductory Chemistry. His research interests include synthetic organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology.
Williams spent a year as a lecturer at Longwood University before becoming an assistant professor at Lynchburg College. At Lynchburg, he found a passion for the synthesis and structural characterization of natural products as potential neuroprotectants.
Williams learned more about those subjects after accepting a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellowship at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical College of Virginia Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology. During that fellowship, he worked in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology, where his work was published in six peer-reviewed journals.
Kurt D. Kaufman Endowed Chair Dwight Williams holding a molecular model in his office.
Daniela Arias-Rotondo, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Arias-Rotondo earned a grant valued at $250,000 last year from the National Science Foundation through its Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS). The LEAPS-MPS grant emphasizes helping pre-tenure faculty at institutions that do not traditionally receive significant amounts of NSF-MPS funding, including predominantly undergraduate institutions, as well as achieving excellence through diversity. She uses the funding primarily to pay her student researchers, typically eight to 10 per term, and bring more research experiences into the classroom.
This year, Arias-Rotondo earned an American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund grant, which will provide $50,000 to her work while backing her lab’s upcoming research regarding petroleum byproducts. Her lab traditionally develops molecules that absorb energy from light while transforming that energy into electricity. The grant will allow her and her students to take molecules they have designed to act as catalysts and unlock chemical transformations through a process called photoredox catalysis. In this case, those transformations involve petroleum byproducts and how they might be used.
Arias-Rotondo teaches Introductory Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Structure and Reactivity, and commonly takes students to ACS conferences. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University.
Daniela Arias-Rotondo has been named the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Endowed Chair in Natural Science.
Kalamazoo College Professor Emerita Gail Griffin—who taught in the Department of English from 1977 to 2013 and was key to founding what developed into the College’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality program—has recently earned three accolades for her poetry projects.
Among her recent awards:
Griffin earned a Pushcart Prize for the poem “The End of Wildness,” which she published in a recent collection titled Omena Bay Testament. The award is an American literary prize presented by the Pushcart Press to honor the best poetry, short fiction, essays and “literary whatnot” published in the small presses over the previous year.
Headlight Review at Kennesaw State University in Georgia is recognizing Peripheral Visions— Griffin’s chapbook about her diminished eyesight as a result of macular degeneration—with its Poetry Chapbook Prize. The honoree was chosen by another poet, guest judge Valerie A. Smith. Headlight Review provided a cash prize and will publish the chapbook later this year.
Griffin is co-winner of the poetry contest at New Ohio Review, judged by esteemed poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Griffin’s poem titled “Covenant,” for which she will share a cash prize, will be printed in the Review’s issue 35 this fall. Both “Covenant” and a separate poem, “It Comes Down,” are about the author’s brother, who died in December.
At K, Griffin twice was selected by students as the recipient of the Frances Diebold Award for faculty involvement in student life. She received the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship for Excellence in Teaching, in 1989–90, and the Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Creative Work, Research or Publication, in 1998–99.
In 1995, Griffin was selected Michigan Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She received the 2010 Lux Esto Award of Excellence for exemplifying the spirit of Kalamazoo College through excellent leadership, selfless dedication and goodwill. In 2017, she received the Weimer K. Hicks Award for long-term support to the College beyond the call of duty and excellent service in the performance of her job. Her previous books include “The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus and Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces.
Griffin credits a local poetry group, first started by the late Professor Emeritus Conrad Hilberry, that she participates in for inspiring her to continue writing, leading to her recent success.
“I’m quite surprised to be having this little late career as a poet, since my first four books were nonfiction,” Griffin said. “I’m delighted that writing is at the center of my life now that I’m retired. One of my reasons for retiring at age 62 was to make sure that I could do this. Writing can be a very solitary act, but writing is also about community, and I think this community has really encouraged my poetry.”
The Model United Nations team from Kalamazoo College earned an Honorable Mention Delegation award at the National Model United Nations (NMUN) in New York in April, and several awards at the Midwest Model UN (MMUN) conference in St. Louis, Missouri, in February.
The NMUN honor places the 15 K students who participated—half of whom were rookies—in the top 20% of the largest, most established intercollegiate Model UN conference in the world.
“I was very proud of that, especially with a good half of our students coming into New York completely new to conferences,” said Mason Purdy ’24, president of Model UN at K. “We did as much teaching and training as we could, but they had to learn as they went.”
The K team represented the Kingdom of Morocco at NMUN, with students assigned in pairs to various committees. For example, Purdy and Hannah Willit ’24, vice president of Model UN at K, served on the human rights council. Each council considers two topics. For Purdy and Willit, the topics were human rights and the use of private military and security companies as well as human rights of indigenous peoples. Before the conference, teams research existing laws and standards, their country’s history, and other areas that provide context for the topics.
“For example, Morocco has been embroiled in a controversy for years about territory in the Western Sahara,” Purdy said. “One side says this was always Moroccan land and was taken for colonization; the other side says the people who live there don’t really want to be Moroccan; the first side says they are Moroccan, they just don’t realize it. The issue of indigenous sovereignty is a politically tricky one for Morocco, and sometimes you have to represent views at Model UN that maybe you wouldn’t love as an individual.”
The National Model United Nations team from Kalamazoo College attends the conference’s closing ceremony in the UN General Assembly Hall.
The Model UN team from K received Honorable Mention Delegation at the national conference in New York in April.
Fifteen students from K participated in the National Model United Nations in New York in April.
K’s Model UN team represented the Kingdom of Morocco at a national conference in New York in April.
Maddie Hanulcik ’26 served on the commission on the status of women, which considered the empowerment of rural women and girls along with healthcare accessibility for women.
“It was largely an all-women committee, which made it a safe space for women to talk,” Hanulcik said. “We were all dedicated to the same ideas of furthering women’s rights. All of our committee papers passed. I had never been to a conference where every paper passed. It was cool to see us all working together and how everyone felt empowered to share and speak without fear.”
At each Model UN conference, committees employ both formal (speeches) and informal (networking and developing de facto working groups) sessions to work toward a resolution addressing each topic. Over hours and days, a few resolutions will emerge that the dais (a moderating team of staff members) evaluates as acceptable, the committee will vote, and amendments will be made. The goal is that the committee will eventually adopt one resolution unanimously.
“Generally, the aim on a Model UN committee is to try to get as much unanimity in agreement as you can on an issue, because in the real international community, that’s how you get change to actually happen,” Purdy said. “Model UN tries to replicate that, and in the process, it teaches conflict resolution, negotiating, compromise, and social and political skills.”
A highlight of the New York conference for Hanulcik came when the resolution she had primarily worked on was one of just a couple chosen to be sent to the actual United Nations.
“It felt incredible that so many people from so many places had come together, even though we had very different backgrounds, to find resolution on this issue and make such a powerful, moving paper that our dais submitted it to the actual United Nations,” Hanulcik said. “It was wonderful to feel like we have power in the future as the next generation.”
“Even though it’s not the real world—it’s a model—it gives the sense of what you can do outside of school with the classes you’re taking and see how they can be applied,” Hanulcik said. “For example, in my women, gender and sexuality classes, we learn theories about how women can be fully liberated. Then I go to Model UN and see how those policies can be put in place to make a difference in women’s lives. There is such optimism, and that goes for the real UN as well. It’s easy to know that our world is a hard place to live in and can be terrible for so many people. But the UN has this optimism about it. We’re going to keep trying. We’re going to pass these resolutions. We’re going to encourage people to implement them. It’s a place to gather and try to make things a little bit better with the power of collaboration.”
Prior to New York, a smaller group of K students attended the Midwest Model United Nations conference, where the team received several awards. There, the more experienced students represented Azerbaijan while the newer participants represented Lebanon.
“During the St. Louis conference, there was a big plenary where everyone comes together in one room and votes up or down the resolutions that each committee has done,” Purdy said. “There’s debates and amendments, so on and so forth. Representing Azerbaijan, I went to our delegates representing Lebanon—our learners—with a resolution. I said, ‘We would really like your support for this; we would like you to sign on to it.’ They read through it, and they were like, ‘No. Lebanon cannot support this.’ And I was so glad that they didn’t just say yes to me because I was their friend and their teacher. I was like, ‘Yes, you guys are getting it.’ That might have made me more proud than some of the awards we won.”
Those awards included Distinguished Delegation as Azerbaijan, placing the team in the top 10 of all countries represented. Team members also won three individual awards, with Nathan Bouvard winning an award for his position paper in General Assembly 2 as Azerbaijan, Martina Marín winning a position paper award in the World Health Organization as Azerbaijan, and Purdy winning the top honors of Outstanding Delegation as Azerbaijan in the UN Environmental Assembly.
A double major in religion and political science with a Jewish studies concentration, Purdy is grateful that the Office of Student Activities and the Department of Political Science fund Model UN at K.
“Model UN has made a world of difference to me, developing my skills, developing as a person, developing as a leader, being in charge of this club,” Purdy said. “I’m a first-generation student, I come from a very working-class background; If I’d had to pay to participate, I would have had to say no. I’m so glad the K Model UN program is free to students. And we get to do that because the school is very generous, and its donors are very generous. I’m very proud that our program is free because in some places, this is an elite activity. It’s cordoned off for people with wealth, with financial privilege, and I’m glad that’s not the case at this school. Here, Model UN is about your willingness, your talent, your commitment, and that makes a world of difference with our team.
“I’m happy to say Model UN has made the recovery post-COVID, and we are larger and more competitive than I ever saw us. I’m very proud of this program and I hope that the people I hand it off to will bring it to new heights.”
Before going to New York, a smaller group of students attended the Midwest Model United Nations conference, where the team received several awards. The more experienced students represented Azerbaijan while newer ones represented Lebanon.
K’s team that represented Azerbaijan in the Midwest competition placed in the top 10 of all countries represented.
You’ve selected a small plastic peg (pink for female, blue for male), popped it in one of the four available station wagons, and placed it on the colorful board. You’ve chosen your starting direction—college or career—and off you’ve driven, spinning the whirring, ticking wheel and faithfully following the path. Collecting paydays, halting for marriage and the requisite spousal peg, adding baby pegs to your car as landing spaces dictate. Buying houses, hoping to make a profit when you sell. Advancing on the pre-determined path toward retirement, always with an eye to amassing as much wealth as possible along the way; that, after all, is how you win at the Game of Life.
Maybe you drive that path without questioning. Or maybe you wonder, every time: Why do I have to get married? Shouldn’t there be more forks in the road? Can I invent my own career path? What if winning wasn’t tied to wealth?
Growing up, Maddie Hurley ’24 loved playing the Game of Life with her two brothers or with a babysitter. A kid with a big imagination, Hurley’s play often centered around stories—narrating Barbie’s life, developing family dramas through playing house and reading books.
“I think I liked this board game specifically because it has that imaginative aspect,” Hurley said. “I could pretend I was a person with this home, or doing this career, and play out this made-up scenario.”
For the most part, she didn’t question the game too much as a child.
“I remember there were times, though, where I was like, ‘I don’t want to get married,’” Hurley said. “Or times where I would land on a square or draw a card that would tell me I had a boy or a girl, and I would be like, ‘I don’t want any boys. I only want girls,’ or I wouldn’t want to use a pink peg. I didn’t want to be a boy, but I wanted the color blue. I also remember wanting the highest-paid career so I could buy the most stuff and retire to the nicest place at the end; I always wanted to be the lawyer.”
Hurley found herself reflecting on what lessons she might have unknowingly absorbed from the Game of Life’s proscribed path and limited options during a junior-year women, gender and sexuality (WGS) seminar, WGS 390: Feminist and Queer Inquiries, with Assistant Professor of Art History and WGS Anne Marie Butler.
One text from the class that especially resonated with Hurley, Living a Feminist Life, by Sara Ahmed, explores life paths and happiness, and how society shapes our beliefs about those concepts. An article she came across in her independent research, “That Wasn’t Very Free Thinker” by Kim Hackford-Peer, relates a story of the author attending her son’s elementary school assembly. To show how the letter Q is always paired with U, second grade students acted out marriage between the quarterbacks and the queens.
Maddie Hurley ’24 reimagined the Game of Life to be more inclusive and exploratory as part of a junior-year women, gender and sexuality (WGS) seminar, WGS 390: Feminist and Queer Inquiries.
Biochemistry major Maddie Hurley ’24 values the women, gender and sexuality (WGS) courses she has taken at K. “I took WGS 101 my sophomore year and I loved it. It had a big impact on me and changed the way I not only thought about our world and our society, but about myself. It had me questioning my own sexuality, the way I think of gender, the way I think of race. It was so applicable to everything in everyday life.” For WGS 390, Hurley used scholarly literature to deconstruct and reimagine the Game of Life and examine the concepts of heteronormativity and happiness.
“Although it’s an innocent idea and a fun way to help kids learn to spell, it’s so rooted in heteronormativity and gender fatalism,” Hurley said. “Those readings got me thinking about how these life paths have been constructed for me starting at a young age. What did I play? What movies did I watch? That led me to believe I have to get a job, be successful, get married, have kids, and buy a house, or I’m not going to be happy. How did I develop this belief? Where did it come from? Sorting through that reflection and thinking about what I did growing up, I ended up at the Game of Life.”
For her final project for the class, Hurley decided to reconstruct the Game of Life, so it no longer sent the message that there exists one, heteronormative path to happiness. Drawing on scholarly literature, she designed new elements to the game and analyzed the concepts of happiness and heteronormativity as well as the ways systems reinforce the dominant heteronormative narrative.
“Ahmed talks about the Middle English word ‘hap,’ which really means chance,” Hurley said. “You can’t complete certain steps to gain happiness. It’s something that you fall upon—something that just happens.”
So, Hurley included a square on the board that prompts players to draw from an emotion deck that may or may not provide them with a happiness card—the key to winning Hurley’s version—at random. She also introduced more options to many game elements.
“You can choose not to get married or you can choose multiple partners. You could choose to have kids or not have kids. You could get a pet. I included more jobs, like being a janitor or an artist. Instead of buying houses, you could be a traveler. You don’t even have to use a car or a person peg; there could be random player pieces you could choose. I wanted it to be very open-ended.
“I wanted no hierarchy of what is better and what is worse. You can just explore, and no matter which options you choose, you can still win, because everybody has the same opportunity to pull the happiness card.”
Another article the WGS 390 students read, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics” by Cathy Cohen, brought home to Hurley the importance of avoiding a false dichotomy between queerness and heterosexuality. She made the game as inclusive as possible by adding to rather than replacing the traditional path of career, marriage, children, retirement.
“I wanted to make the board more extravagant,” Hurley said. “More pathways, more options. There is not one path to happiness, and we should all question things in our lives—the choices we’ve made, why we made those choices, the impact our experiences have had on our beliefs of life goals, happiness, what it means to be successful. Sara Ahmed wrote something like, ‘To live a feminist life is to question your way of life.’ I loved that, it really stuck with me, and I hope this project could make people question the games they’ve played, the shows they’ve watched, and how those things have influenced them.”
Hurley continues to question and explore her own choices and path. Even as she applied to Ph.D. programs in chemical biology and biochemistry, she asked herself if this was the future she wanted or simply the one she felt was expected.
“As of now, I am going to defer my enrollment a year to the University of Illinois, take a gap year, gain some work experience, and then circle back and see if this is something I want to do,” Hurley said. “I do like science, and I do like school. We’ll see.”
Hurley grew interested in a possible career in research while completing her Senior Integrated Project (SIP), which involved a research experience in a chemical biology lab at the University of Illinois over summer 2023. She has also participated in research at K, in Assistant Professor of Chemistry Blake Tresca’s lab. Other K experiences include studying abroad in Scotland, playing tennis and serving as president of the Food Recovery Network, as well as exploring the WGS offerings.
“Before going into this seminar, I didn’t recognize how heteronormativity is always in the background,” Hurley said. “We as a society don’t process it, because it is normalized, institutionally, through media, in board games. For anyone who deviates from that heteronormative path, there is always a fear of unhappiness, judgment, lack of success. This course and the readings helped me realize how those expectations were socially constructed. How many people have followed that path and are unhappy? It helped me reframe that perspective that heteronormativity tells us what will lead to happiness. You can’t achieve happiness, it’s just something that happens. Sometimes happiness is just there.”
Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Collective Undergraduate Research and Activism e-Conference
Five Kalamazoo College students, including Maddie Hurley ’24, presented their work during the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Collective undergraduate research and activism e-conference on March 28–29.
Anne Marie Butler, Kalamazoo College assistant professor of art history and women, gender and sexuality (WGS), is a co-convenor of the collective and a conference organizer. Held annually for four years, each conference has included K students. Participation develops professional skills, including public speaking and creating a presentation for an external audience, and offers experience that serves students well whatever their next step may be. The conference also features two professional development panels, one focused on careers and one on graduate school.
“Many students present their senior research or SIP, so it provides a practice run if they have a departmental presentation, and a chance for them to share their work with a wider audience,” Butler said. “Students who attend the conference but don’t present can see the amazing research their peers are doing and will hopefully be inspired to present in a future year. I encouraged all of my students from my spring 2023 junior seminar, as well as my SIP students and other students from my classes to apply, and I was so happy that Maddie was interested, because her project does a great job of applying some of the theory we read in class to create a fun and innovative project.”
A biochemistry major, Hurley had previously participated in a poster session at an undergraduate science research conference. In addition to a different presentation format and a virtual experience, the WGS conference offered a different atmosphere.
“It was more open and flexible, and discussion based,” Hurley said. “It was nice to have a conversation about my project with other students and learn about the research they did, to see that we were all genuinely interested and learn about somebody else’s experience.”
Butler said the conference is for students of all years and majors.
“As long as the project ties into WGS themes in some way, we welcome those presentations,” Butler said. “We love creative, activist and research projects, and we have had projects from areas as diverse as biology, visual art, psychology, music and languages. Maddie is an awesome student. She’s very thoughtful and committed to understanding and working with course materials and makes great connections and applications beyond the materials as well, as seen in her project.”
K students presented the following projects at the conference:
Ryan Drew ’24, “The Epistemology of Woman: A Poetic Conversation Deconstructing Biology and Language”
Brynna Garden ’24, “The Influence of Natural Disasters on Violence Against Women”
Maddie Hurley ’24, “Remaking the Game of Life and Reframing Happiness”
Dugan Schneider ’24, “Breaking Linguistic Norms: オネエ言葉 (Onē Kotoba) as a Vehicle for Queer Identity Expression in Contemporary Japan”
Frances Trimble ’24, “(Re)imagining Knowledge Production in Higher Education Through Feminist Pedagogy”
A new fellowship established by alumnus Robert Sherbin ’79 and named after his father, Jerry, is giving its first Kalamazoo College graduating senior a chance to go overseas for 10 months while exploring a subject of deep personal interest.
To fulfill her fellowship, Elle Waldron ’23—a women, gender and sexuality (WGS) major—will visit a variety of feminist and gender-equity organizations to witness the tools and strategies they use to execute their work and complete their goals.
“Having this opportunity to travel and continue my education is a special way to be able to see other perspectives,” Waldron said. “It affirms that it’s possible for me to continue to follow my passions of WGS and gender equity work because people are working in those fields in their careers.”
Assuming her plans develop as proposed, she will travel to Australia, South Africa, Costa Rica and Spain beginning in late August or early September. Through that she will regularly update Sherbin, the College and the Center for International Programs (CIP) on her progress. In fall 2024, she will return to K to present her experiences to prospective fellowship applicants.
Waldron said she felt overwhelmed when she first was notified that she was selected for the fellowship.
“It felt unreal and now I’m super excited,” she said. “I think part of the excitement is being able to challenge myself and push my comfort zone. I feel like this will change the trajectory of my post-grad experience.”
Waldron was one of seven applicants and three finalists in the fellowship’s first year. The other finalists were Zoe Reyes ’23, who planned to study eco-poetry on medicinal plants in biodiversity hotspots; and Shannon Brown ’23, who proposed investigating the social status of French-based creoles in the Caribbean.
Waldron “had a lot of attention to detail with her application and showed she’s aware of how she would be perceived in places as an outsider while being amenable to how she could navigate those kinds of situations,” said Lizbeth Mendoza Pineda ’16, the Sherbin Fellowship CIP liaison and a co-chair of the fellowship’s selection committee. “She also recognizes that she’s only going to be abroad for a short amount of time, yet she’s trying to make as much of an impact and learn as much as possible, while making sure that whatever work she accomplishes is sustainable. I think that’s something that impressed the committee.”
Elle Waldron ’23 will spend 10 months abroad as the first recipient of the Jerry Sherbin Fellowship, funded by Bob Sherbin ’79.
Sherbin participated in study abroad at K by traveling to the University of Nairobi, where he was one of just six undergrads from the U.S. and the only K student.
Later, as a senior, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, an external grant through the Watson Foundation, that allowed him to create and follow through with a one-year project overseas. With that he spent a year in Central and West Africa as a Watson Fellow, conducting a sociological study of long-distance truck drivers. Sherbin said the experience was transformative and guided him toward graduate school at Northwestern University, years spent as an international journalist, and eventually, working as the vice president of corporate communications at NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley-based technology company.
Waldron had her own study abroad experience in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for six months last year.
“I was lucky to have a study abroad experience that allowed me to be comfortable in a space that I wasn’t familiar with because I was supported and had friends in the program,” Waldron said. “Because of that, I recognized my own skills and ability to adapt. With K providing that foundation, I feel I have a fantastic ability to investigate things abroad.”
Now, she hopes those investigations will yield long-term relationships with people from around the world and allow her to consult those people regularly in the future. She would also like it to help her become a better critical thinker and define feminism from a global perspective as it’s influenced by a variety of historical and cultural contexts.
“I think as a WGS major and as an individual, I’m interested in how gender and sexuality structures the world around me,” Waldron said. “But for me, getting out of academia is a bit of a leap, because I’m not sure how to apply all these things that I have learned. I want to work on projects that pursue gender equity and find out how to be the most effective. That’s why I’m interested in this project. I want to see what other new worlds women and people are creating, because I want to see them in my own career.”
Kalamazoo College is known for providing academic experiences that can lead to real-world jobs. Take the example of Steph Guyor ’22.
Guyor’s senior seminar, led by Associate Professor of English Ryan Fong, tackled the concept of restorative or transformative justice, a newer community-based practice that helps society do more than hold law breakers accountable in a criminal justice system. Instead, restorative justice also addresses the dehumanization an offender typically experiences with their punishment, offering basic services along with pathways for making amends to victims and the community, reducing the likelihood for recidivism.
“Within the U.S., justice is traditionally focused on the offender and the crime they committed,” Guyor said. “The punishments are seen as deserved. Yet by focusing on the punishment, the factors that led to the harm being committed often go unexamined, and the needs of the person who’s harmed remain unmet. Viewing punishment as the only appropriate response around accountability ends up taking the form of shame and isolation, which furthers the relational divide and deters people from changing their harmful behaviors. Restorative and transformative justice work to reorient accountability away from punishments and toward meaningful consequences that allow connections to be restored and relational dynamics to be restored.”
Guyor, who double majored in psychology and women and gender studies (WGS), was intrigued by these concepts and said Fong’s class was enjoyable because it allowed her to see justice in a different way. Then came an opportunity to connect those studies to a job, when she heard Ministry with Community in Kalamazoo was hiring a restorative justice coordinator. The nonprofit organization is a secular, daytime shelter and resource center open 365 days a year that helps local residents address homelessness, poverty, substance abuse and other crises.
“I saw the posting and thought it could be an opportunity to make change locally in Kalamazoo in a way that’s influenced by getting to know people,” Guyor said. “I knew I wanted to try to find a way to integrate the psychological understanding of why people do what they do with a socially informed understanding of how social circumstances influence it.”
And today, Guyor relishes her job, which involves learning more about the restorative justice practices in place around the country while collecting data to determine what she can do to solve problems in Kalamazoo. Hopefully, that will lead to a new yet well-rounded restorative justice program at Ministry with Community that reduces the likelihood of repeat offenses.
“It comes with a lot of responsibility that a big part of me was afraid to take on given the idea that I did just graduate,” she said. “But it’s also a unique opportunity that I’m excited to have. I think the goal will be a culture shift within the organization so there will be fewer incidents with fewer people breaking community expectations, and more trust between the members, and between members and staff.”
Guyor said a common misconception about restorative or transformative justice is that it’s soft on offenders—that it lets people off the hook and fails to follow through on a punishment. She cautions against that idea.
“In reality, facing the people who you hurt and holding the space for them to explain their hurt is a lot harder,” Guyor said. “Restorative justice is about having high expectations for people along with a lot of support. It makes sure we’re holding people accountable to the changes they work toward, but not in a way that revolves around shame. In punitive settings, you’re doing things to people. In permissive settings, you’re doing things for people. But restorative justice is more about working with people to make change.”
Fong said he’s likely to continue teaching about restorative and transformative justice at K.
“So many students, especially WGS students, are interested in social justice and activism, but don’t always know what it looks like in practice beyond demonstrations and non-profit work,” he said. “In the wake of the 2020 protests and calls to defund the police, I saw many students wondering what that demand meant. Doing a deep dive into restorative and transformative justice was one way to understand how abolitionist organizers were working in concrete ways to build new systems and structures that address and eliminate violence.”
He’s also incredibly proud of Guyor and honored that he played a role in helping her find her career path.
“I hope she keeps drawing on the skills and knowledge she gained at K and as a WGS student to continue on it for the rest of her life,” Fong said. “That’s really my hope for all our WGS students: that they find meaningful ways to put their education into action.”
Donations Fund Restorative Justice Programs
Ministry with Community, a nonprofit organization, accepts donations for the restorative justice programs being built by K alumna Stephanie Guyor ’22. To donate directly to restorative justice efforts, visit the organization’s website.
Steph Guyor ’22 took classroom experiences with restorative justice and transformed them into a career at Ministry with Community in Kalamazoo.
Guyor, who double majored in psychology and women and gender studies at K, now works as the restorative justice coordinator at Ministry with Community in Kalamazoo.
