Above: Student researcher, Vikas Peddu (photo by Elena Zhukova)
Cowell College
’71 James GRAHAM retired on September 1, 2021, after 28 years of active parish priestly ministry and returned to California. He is living in Sacramento. Projects include transcribing 25 years of homilies and writing essays on priesthood and ministry.
’77 Robert LOMBARDI says he “looks back with fondness at my time at UCSC. Beautiful scenery. Majestic redwoods. Lovely weather. Friendly co-eds. Best four-year vacation ever.”
’79 John R. LEECH says one thing he learned from Noel King was approaching others not only with curiosity and respect but in a way as pilgrims approaching another person across sacred ground. “The Noel Q. King Memorial Lecture gives me an annual, meaningful connection to UCSC,” Leech wrote.
’80 Greg LOWRY is doing studies in ceramics.
’87 Chris RUIZ writes, “Adams House in the 1980s was glorious and is fondly remembered.” After “goofing off for a few years,” Ruiz became a deputy attorney general for 15 years. He is now employed as an administrative law judge with the state of California, which he calls “a truly great job.” He would love to hear from fellow alumni at Chris.ruiz5162@gmail.com. He asks correspondents to please put “UCSC” in the subject line of the email.
’91 Kimberly THEIDON, an anthropologist, examines the lives of children born of wartime rape in Peru and Colombia her new book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin (Duke University Press, August 2022). The book looks beyond the immediate conflict to consider how wartime violence reveals the interdependency of all life. Theidon is Henry J. Leir Professor in international humanitarian studies at Tufts University and author of Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (2012).
’95 Sabrina RITCHIE was recently hired as the executive director of the San Francisco Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth. Ritchie is an accomplished San Francisco Bay Area executive who directed various professional associations, including San Francisco–based Meeting Professionals International’s Northern California chapter.
Stevenson College
’78 Karl BROWN has retired after 34 years at Wells Fargo working on ATM software.
’78 Leslie KARST’s latest novel, The Fragrance of Death, was released in August. Another of Karst’s Sally Solari mystery series, The Fragrance of Death, set in Santa Cruz, takes readers on a wild—and wildly entertaining—culinary romp featuring restaurateur and occasional accidental sleuth Sally Solari.
’95 Tlaloc RIVAS will join the acting faculty at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University this fall.
Merrill College
’82 Stephen RIFKIND wrote to say that he enjoyed the spring ’22 UC Santa Cruz Magazine article about teaching in Vietnam (“Teaching English in Vietnam,” by Kent Wallace [Merrill ’79, poetry and truth/individual major]). “I have taught English in Israel for some 33 years now, more than half my life, and have made Israel my home, both in terms of residence and culture,” wrote Rifkind. “It is enriching to become part of another culture.”
Crown College
’75 Claude ZACHARY was honored by the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and received the 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award.
’84 Scott NEUGROSCHL completed his Master of Science in Legal Studies (MLS) degree from LMU Loyola Law School, with an emphasis on cybersecurity and data privacy law.
’98 Kevin BRYANT’s new book, Spies on the Sidelines: The High-Stakes World of NFL Espionage, was recently released by Rowman & Littlefield. The book covers the techniques NFL teams utilize to collect information on their opponents, and the countermeasures they employ to defend against these. Bryant is a former special agent and has a B.A. in history, an M.S. in sports management, and a M.A. in intelligence studies. His website is www.spiesonthesidelines.com.
’03 Veronica ARTEAGA, LCSW, was appointed president and CEO of the Exceptional Children’s Foundation beginning June 1, becoming the nonprofit human services organization’s third president and CEO in its 76 years of service. She is responsible for leadership of ECF’s 15 service sites throughout Los Angeles County, 375 employees, a 20-member board of directors, and the provision of service to more than 5,000 children and adults with special needs and their family members annually. Arteaga previously served as chief program officer for Wayfinder Family Services, and vice president, housing programs for St. Anne’s Family Services in Los Angeles.
Kresge College
’77 Walker ABEL’s fourth book of poetry, entitled Deer Hoof on River Cobbles: Poems, was published in April. A book description states, “Perhaps part of an American lineage that would include Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver, among others, Abel’s poems explore with lyrical and sensuous language the openhearted self that is broken, mended, and can find a grace beyond ego and human drama.”
’92 Jennifer PETERSEN’s book, How Machines Came to Speak: Media Technologies and Freedom of Speech, was published by Duke University Press in April. Petersen is associate professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and author of Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Her new book constructs a genealogy of the legal conceptions of what counts as “speech” within free speech law, showing how changes in media technology influenced changing legal definitions of speech.
’05 RJ TAYLOR recently published a short story in the Hugo-nominated Apex Magazine. “It Rises and Falls and Rises Again” was also selected as the podcast story of the issue.
’20 Daniel SUBDIAZ is among the first Peace Corps volunteers to return to overseas service since the agency’s unprecedented global evacuation in March 2020. The Peace Corps suspended global operations and evacuated nearly 7,000 volunteers from more than 60 countries at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subdiaz will serve as a volunteer in Zambia in the education sector.
’21 Benjamin GONZALEZ-CUETO was hired as a bilingual digital research associate with GQR based in Washington, D.C. He was able to leverage his research experience in the Human Rights Investigations Lab to land in this great position.
Porter College
’81 Karla HUEBNER went back to school and got a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pittsburgh, then taught at Wright State University for over a decade, and now gets to be called emerita. Books she wrote over the years are starting to see print, starting with Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020; winner of the 2021 Czechoslovak Studies Association book award) and the novel In Search of the Magic Theater (Regal House, 2022). The novel Too Early to Know Who’s Winning will be out in 2023 from Black Rose; and she hopes for many more to come. When not writing, she’s camping, adopting rescue rabbits, and hoping to visit UCSC again sometime in the not too distant future.
’84 Mary TRUNK wrote to say that her experiences at UC Santa Cruz changed the trajectory of her life, in the best possible way. She completed a documentary film called Muscle Memory. The film revisits that incredibly influential time and how it has impacted the present. All the participants in the film are UCSC grads and feel much the same as she does. “UCSC,” she writes, “is where we became artists.” Read a UC Santa Cruz News Center article about Trunk and the film.
’15 Amelie (Amy) MELTZER received her MD degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in May 2022. She was accepted into the psychiatry residency program at UC San Francisco, where she started in June.
Rachel Carson College
’07 Franz HOCHSTRASSER cofounded Raise Green, climate investment platform that is on a mission to democratize sustainable investing. The platform allows anyone to invest for as little as $100 and as much as they can afford into climate projects with verifiable impact.
Graduate Studies
’73 Martin MACH received a Ph.D. in chemistry, studying with Joe Bunnett 1969–1973.
’89 Lata MANI (Ph.D., history of consciousness), independent scholar and filmmaker, published Myriad Intimacies by (Duke University Press, June 2022). In this new experimental work, Mani oscillates between poetry and prose, genre and form, register and voice, and secular and sacred to meditate on the ways in which everyone and everything exists in mutually constitutive interrelations.
’94 Christoph COX (Ph.D., history of consciousness) was appointed dean of the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Cox, who most recently served as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Hampshire College, formally joined Lang College on August 1, 2022.
’04 Carissa CARTER’s (M.S., Earth science) murder mystery, The Secret Language of Maps, exposes the bias that’s implicit in all maps and infographics, even using them to solve the crime in the book’s fictional central story. This practical guide not only teaches you how to read and design maps, but it also gives you the tools to cut through the bias that shapes the interpretation of data and infographics you see in the news.
’15 Tracy PERKINS (Ph.D., sociology) recently published a book with UC Press entitled, Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism. The book tells the story of California environmental justice activists, from the often-raucous protests of the 1980s and 1990s to activists’ growing presence inside the halls of the state capitol in the 2000s and 2010s. Perkins traces how shifting political contexts combined with activists’ own efforts to institutionalize their work within nonprofits and state structures. By revealing these struggles and transformations, Perkins offers a new lens for understanding environmental justice activism in California.
In Memoriam
’75 Ruth P. WILSON (Oakes) passed away on May 15, 2022. Wilson served on the UCSC Alumni Council and was an advocate of the university.
Wilson was born into a segregated environment and attended segregated schools in Tyler, Texas. The family relocated to California, where Wilson was a straight-A student, graduating with top honors from high school.
She earned dual bachelor’s degrees in community studies and biology at UCSC. As an undergraduate she interned with the Gullah Geechee communities in Daufuskie, South Carolina, and in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Post-graduation, she stayed on at UCSC as an administrator of a field work program.
She earned her master’s in social anthropology in 1978 and Ph.D. in social anthropology in 1985, both from Stanford University.
She worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University from 1985–1988, then joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) International Health Program Office as a behavioral scientist/medical anthropologist from 1988–1994, where she worked on the Africa Child Survival Initiative. She was one of CDC’s first Black professionals and medical anthropologists to contribute to health behavior strategies in Africa.
Later she lived for seven years in Dallas while working as an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, 1994–2001.
She returned to California with a faculty position at San Jose State University in 2001, and contributed regularly to advancing fields of medical anthropology and global health. Before retiring due to illness, Wilson served as chair of the African American Studies Department from 2008–2017.