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Summary of Asilomar 2026 presentations (details at https://pbknca.com/event-6076572)

 Friday evening - Seeta Chaganti. Professor of medieval literature. English department UC Davis. 2023 Teaching Excellence Awardee.

Carceral Angels: Medieval Sheriffs and Modern Police Abolition

Seeta Chaganti is a professor of medieval literature in the English department at the University of California, Davis. Her third book, “Carceral Angels,” is in progress and draws upon both her expertise in medieval poetic archives and her activist work in police abolition on the UC Davis campus and beyond it. In recent months and years, modern policing has raised a number of urgent questions for western societies:  Who do police represent, and where does their power come from?  What traditions have shaped these structures, and do they fit our current realities? Are our policing practices consistent with the values that a democratic, pluralist society must uphold?

Saturday morning- Christine Kurtz.  Master Beekeeper

Christine Kurtz is a long time Sonoma County resident with 20 plus years of beekeeping experience under her belt. She is a believer in regenerative and treatment free all-natural hive management and strongly supports locally adapted bee colonies. She patiently educates local beekeepers and encourages them to share their knowledge and their bees. 

Saturday afternoon- Tesla Jeltema (PBK). Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Associate Director, Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics

The History of the Cosmos (and our understanding of it)

Tesla Jeltema is a faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Associate Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. d the roughly 13 miles from Anacapa island to the coast of California.

There is strong evidence that our Universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, that it has expanded and evolved from the Big Bang to today, forming in the process stars, galaxies, and a rich network of larger-scale structures. Tesla reviewed the history of our universe and its composition, including dark matter and dark energy.  With the lens of an observational astrophysicist, she discussed some of the major observations that led us to this picture and how current and future experiments will enable us to further our understanding of the cosmos.

Saturday evening - Giovanni Peri. Department of Economics, UC Davis. 2024 Teaching Excellence Awardee

Immigrants’ and Refugees economic success and their contribution to the US economy

Giovanni Peri is the C. Bryan Cameron Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics at UC Davis and Founder and Director of the Global Migration Center at UC Davis, a multi-disciplinary research center focused on migrations and refugees

Dispelling myths that they displace US workers and depend on welfare, 25 years of research show that immigrants and refugees in the US quickly achieve strong economic integration and success and that their inflow contributes to the employment and economic growth of local US economies as well as to entrepreneurship, innovation and growth of its companies. They bring different skills, increase demand and dynamism and in the recent year the US economy, including its workers, would have benefitted from more immigration, rather than less.

Sunday morning  - Francisco Jimenez. Modern Languages / Literature (Santa Clara University) 

Living and Writing a Migrant’s Life

Francisco Jiménez emigrated from Mexico to California and, as a child, worked alongside his family in the fields. He later earned a B.A. from Santa Clara University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship

Francisco shared a personal narrative rooted in his experiences growing up in a family of migrant workers and how those formative years have shaped his writing. The talk explored the intersections of farm labor, migration, identity, and storytelling, reflecting on the challenges and resilience that marked his upbringing—experiences that echo in the lives of many migrant families today. To provide visual context and bring these stories to life, he used PowerPoint to present childhood photographs from that period and screened The Unbroken Sky, a 24-minute dramatic film adapted from his memoirs.

Sunday afternoon - Mohan Gurunathan is an engineer, activist, and entrepreneur who has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T., and works as an independent engineering consultant in Silicon Valley Food systems / sustainability (Stealth Startup; MIT)

The Earth on our Plate: Why Changing our Diet Is Essential to Saving our Planet

The impact of agriculture on our planet far exceeds that of any other human activity. In this presentation, he explored the surprising connections between our daily food choices and some of the world’s most pressing issues: climate change, deforestation, species extinction, water scarcity, pollution, world hunger, human health, and inhumane treatment of our animal food sources. Dietary changes toward vegetarian and vegan—adopted on a societal scale—are essential to solving many of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Sunday evening - Susanna Faas-Bush 2025 Scholarship awardee (Hardardt award). Classical Archaeology UC Berkeley. Reconstructing Everyday Life in Pompeii: The Mysteries of the Boscoreale Treasure

Susanna Faas-Bush, a PBKNCA scholarship awardee for 2025, is a Ph.D. candidate in Classical Archaeology at UC Berkeley. Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 2017, she graduated from Oberlin College. in 2018 with a double major in Latin Language & Studies and Archaeology and a minor in Greek.

On April 13th of 1895, a worker on private excavations just outside of Pompeii reported something dazzling - a buried hoard of over 100 coins, golden jewelry and silver dining ware found at an otherwise modest Roman villa/vineyard. Susanna Faas-Bush has discovered more than 300 additional pieces from the collection, stored separately in Pompeii but forgotten for decades – a discovery, she states, that “has never gotten the attention it deserves.”

In this presentation, she discussed her doctoral work studying the Villa della Pisanella, an ancient Roman villa-vineyard outside of Pompeii where the Boscoreale Treasure was discovered more than 125 years ago. She focuses on reconstructing daily life for all the inhabitants of the villa, painting a picture of both of the luxury agritourism approach to wine-selling used by the owners of the villa, and the highly controlled lived-experiences of the enslaved laborers.

Monday morning - Jim Richardson B.A., M. Div., PBK: UCLA 1975. The Remarkable Life and Legacy of Willie Brown

Jim Richardson, a former journalist with The Sacramento Bee, wrote the critically acclaimed Willie Brown: A Biography, published in 1996 by the University of California Press

Born in racially segregated Texas in 1934, Willie Brown rose to become the Speaker of the California State Assembly in the 1980s and ’90s — and arguably the most powerful African American politician in the country at the time. With a flair for clothes and controversy, Brown was certainly among the most entertaining political figures of our age. Brown went on to serve two terms as mayor of San Francisco.