G. Gabrielle Starr
Gina Gabrielle Starr is the 10th and current president of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is a literary scholar known for her work on eighteenth-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]
Gina Gabrielle Starr | |
---|---|
10th President of Pomona College | |
Assumed office July 1, 2017 | |
Preceded by | David W. Oxtoby |
Personal details | |
Born | 1974 (age 45–46) Tallahassee, Florida |
Spouse(s) | John C. Harpole |
Children | 2 |
Parents | G. Daviss Starr, Barbara Starr |
Alma mater | Emory University Harvard University |
Profession | Academic |
Website | www |
Biography
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 1993 in Women's Studies. She studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland as a Robert T. Jones Scholar. From there, she earned a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in 1999. After receiving her PhD, 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, exploring techniques from cognitive neuroscience.
She joined the faculty at NYU in 2000 and became the acting Dean of the College of Arts and Science in 2011 and non-acting dean in 2013.[6]
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 (science, technology, engineering, psychology, and math) preparation and transfer program, P.O.I.S.E.,[7] 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,[8] combining literary scholarship, empirical aesthetics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her most recent book, Feeling Beauty,[9] Starr 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.[10] 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.[11][12][13] She has published articles in journals including Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, NeuroImage, and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
References
- "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | G. Gabrielle Starr". www.gf.org. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- "Pomona College's new president will be the first woman and African American to lead the campus". Los Angeles Times. 2016-12-08. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- Rod, Marc (October 18, 2017). "G. Gabrielle Starr Inaugurated As 10th President Of Pomona College". The Student Life. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
- "New Members American Academy of Arts and Sciences/website=amacad.org".
- Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon. "New Directions Fellowships Recipients". The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
- "G. Gabrielle Starr Announced As New CAS Dean". NYU Local. 2013-02-06. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- "P.O.I.S.E." New York University.
- "Why an interdisciplinary lens matters: Gabrielle Starr, Pomona College President". YouTube.
- "Feeling Beauty". MIT Press. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- https://www.pbk.org/WEB/PBK_Member/PRESSROOM/Press_Releases/201408AnnualShortListBookAwards.aspx
- Vessel, Edward A.; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Belfi, Amy M.; Stahl, Jonathan L.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (2019-09-17). "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.
- Vessel, Edward A.; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Belfi, Amy M.; Stahl, Jonathan L.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (2019-09-06). "The default mode network, but not ventral occipitotemporal cortex, contains a domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal". Journal of Vision. 19 (10): 97d–97d. doi:10.1167/19.10.97d. ISSN 1534-7362.
- Belfi, Amy M.; Vessel, Edward A.; Brielmann, Aenne; Isik, Ayse Ilkay; Chatterjee, Anjan; Leder, Helmut; Pelli, Denis G.; Starr, G. Gabrielle (2019-03-01). "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.