Gina Gabrielle Starr | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Starr in 2023 | |
| 10thPresident of Pomona College | |
| Assumed office July 1, 2017 | |
| Preceded by | David W. Oxtoby |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1974 (age 50–51) Tallahassee, Florida, U.S. |
| Spouse | John C. Harpole[1] |
| Children | 2[1] |
| Education | Emory University (BA,MA) University of St Andrews Harvard University (PhD) |
| Profession | Academic |
| Website | www |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | The frame of sense: The epistolary novel and the lyric mode in eighteenth-century England (1999) |
| Doctoral advisor |
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| Academic work | |
| Discipline | English literature, neuroaesthetics |
| Institutions | |
Gina Gabrielle Starr (born 1974) is an American literary scholar, neuroscientist, and academic administrator who is the10th president ofPomona College, aliberal arts college inClaremont, California. She is known for her work on18th-century British literature and theneuroscience ofaesthetics. She is the recipient of aGuggenheim Fellowship,[2] anNSF ADVANCE award (joint with Nava Rubin), and a New Directions Fellowship from theMellon Foundation. From 2000 to 2017, she was on the faculty atNew York University. In 2017, she became the first woman and firstAfrican-American president ofPomona College.[3][4] Starr was elected a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.[5] In 2024, she was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[6]
Starr grew up inTallahassee, Florida. She began college atEmory University at age 15, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees inwomen's studies in 1993. She then studied at theUniversity of St Andrews in Scotland as aRobert T. Jones Scholar. From there, she earned a Ph.D. inEnglish literature fromHarvard University in 1999.[7]
After receiving her doctorate, Starr decided to retrain in cognitive neuroscience, supported by a New Directions Fellowship awarded by theAndrew W. Mellon Foundation.[8] She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at theCalifornia Institute of Technology,[3] exploring techniques fromcognitive neuroscience.
She joined the faculty atNew York University (NYU) in 2000 and became the acting dean of theCollege of Arts and Science in 2011 and deansuo jure in 2013.[9][10]
With Susanne Wofford and faculty at NYU, in 2015 Starr co-founded a liberal arts prison education program atWallkill Correctional Facility in New York State. In addition, Starr, in collaboration with theBorough of Manhattan Community College, initiated aSTEM preparation and transfer program, P.O.I.S.E.,[11] 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 ofPomona College, a position she assumed on July 1, 2017.[4] During her tenure, she presided over the college'sresponse to the COVID-19 pandemic.[12] She is a proponent ofaffirmative action.[13][14] As of 2020[update], her yearly compensation was valued at $685,672.[15]
On April 5, 2024, Starr had 19pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupying her office arrested,[16] prompting protests and condemnations as well as support.[17][18] In October 2024, she unilaterally suspended 12 students who participated in a pro-Palestinian occupation of a building that included vandalism.[19][20]
Starr's research is interdisciplinary,[21][better source needed] combining literary scholarship, empirical aesthetics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her bookFeeling Beauty[22] offered an initial model of aesthetic experience that relies on a network of interconnected neural structures.Feeling Beauty was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award ofPhi Beta Kappa in 2014.[23] Her most recent book,Just in Time,[24] continues this work, proposing that the goals individuals take to aesthetic encounters combine with the cognitive demands of aesthetic objects to determine the time course of aesthetic experiences and the neural systems that underpin them.
Her research usesfunctional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the neural basis of aesthetic experiences, providing evidence that thedefault mode network is involved in the representation of aesthetic appeal.[25][26][27] She has published articles in journals includingModern Philology,Eighteenth-Century Fiction,Eighteenth-Century Studies,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,Cognition,Neuron,NeuroImage, andPsychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
