G. Gabrielle Starr

G. Gabrielle Starr^[1] is the 10th and current president of Pomona College in Claremont, CA. 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,^[2] 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.^[3]

Biography

Starr began college at Emory University at age 15, where she earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in 1993 in Women's Studies. From there, she earned a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in 1999. After receiving her PhD, Starr 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 Dean of the College of Arts and Science in 2013.^[4]

In 2016 she was selected to be the 10th President of Pomona College, a position she assumed on July 1, 2017.

Research

Starr's research combines literary scholarship, empirical aesthetics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her most recent book, Feeling Beauty^[5], 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

References