Westmont Magazine Meet Westmont's Newest Faculty

Dinora Cardoso

She majored in Spanish education at Calvin College in Michigan, received a master’s degree in foreign language education and Spanish from the University of Florida at Tampa, and earned a doctor-ate in 20th century Latin American narrative and women writers of Latin America at the University of Texas, Austin.

Westmont students will benefit from her international experiences; she has taught in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Madrid, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, as well as at Calvin, the University of Texas and Pepperdine. She learned about Westmont when she collaborated on a translation of “Lost Life” by Ernesto Cardenal with Spanish professor Leonor Elías.

Cardoso received three develop-ment grants from Texas Lutheran University, became a Pepperdine Fellow for 2002-2003 and accepted a Dean’s Research Grant from Pepperdine in 2002. “I’ve been touched by the warm reception I’ve received from faculty and students at Westmont,” she says. “People have made an effort to make me feel very welcomed.”

Christena Cleveland

Cleveland received a graduate research fellowship from the Ford Foundation for Minorities in 2004 and earned three travel fellowships. Not only did she have numerous opportunities to interact with students through her teaching experiences, but she served as the director of undergraduate research in the social psychophysiology laboratory for five years.

As a Dartmouth College student, Cleveland received several honors, including the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Excellence in the Social Sciences and recognition as a Rufus Choate Scholar and a presidential scholar. Her undergraduate honors thesis, “The Automaticity of Self-judgments,” demonstrates her early interest in concepts of self.
Cleveland’s office burned in the Tea Fire. “The loss of Bauder Hall has certainly presented a few challenges, but I am so humbled by the Westmont community’s gracious response,” she says. “Everywhere I go, people ask me what they can do to help — even those who lost much more than an office. I am a member of an extraordi-nary community.”

Judy Larson

Judy also directed the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke, Va., where she coordinated the acquisition of a multi-million dollar American art collection. Previously, she served as curator of American art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, where she organized national touring exhibitions on American artists.

While earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in art history at UCLA, Judy worked at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1980 she served as guest curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She completed a doctorate at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, Atlanta, in 1998.

Like many professors, Judy had to evacuate during the Tea Fire.When she contacted a cousin who is a Los Angeles firefighter to learn the status of her house that night, he discovered it was intact and that crews were using her front yard as a staging area.

Maurice Lee

After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in the area of evolution and theology of cooperation, Lee arrived at Westmont this fall to teach historical and systematic theology. He’s interested in identifying new ways to talk about Christianity that our culture and academic community can understand. “Theology gives us a direct connection with people of faith throughout history as well as with friends, family and believing communities,” he says.

Previously, Lee worked for Oxford University Press in two capacities: he served as a special consultant in theology for the “New Oxford American Dictionary” and as an editorial assistant for the “Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide.” In collaboration with Miroslav Volf, Yale professor of systematic theology, Lee co-authored “The Spirit and the Church,” published in “Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology” in 2001. “I look forward to working with excellent colleagues at Westmont, teaching good students, and connecting theology with other fields of study,” he says.

Makoto Masuno

“As a student, I was pleasantly surprised by the culture at Westmont where both the professors and my fellow classmates earnestly wanted to help me,” Masuno says. “Now I’m in the position where my mentors are my colleagues, and I have the opportunity to mentor students.”

The assistance he received from fellow classmates and professors planted a seed in his heart. “I want to encourage students to help and support each other, so I designed a faith and science attitudinal program, which reminds them of the importance of building a Christ-centered scientificcommunity.”

After graduating from Westmont, Masuno worked as a scientist at Miravant Medical Technologies in Santa Barbara in the research and development department for three years. He later earned his doctorate at UC Davis and taught a course at Sacramento City College. His research focuses on the field of marine natural product chemistry, isolating and elucidating bioactive molecules that derive from sessile marine invertebrates. For example, he investigates marine sponges that may biosynthesize a helpful pharmaceutical.

“I have the distinct pleasure of being able to look at God’s creation at the molecular level,” he says.

Sarah Yoder

“I appreciate the opportunity to interact with the broader campus and to learn from students and faculty in other departments,” she says. “Although my areas of expertise are composition, British post-colonial and world literature, I’m interested in voices and writers from the broader world, not just from English literature.”

Writing has always been an integral part of Yoder’s career. Her diverse experiences include writing a video script, publishing poetry, serving as editor and staff writer for the Sioux County Capital-Democrat newspaper, volunteering in the “Write to Succeed” program for victims of domestic violence, and submitting articles to scholarly publications. She received the Lillian and Rupert Radford Fellowship in Rhetoric and Composition for 2003-04, won three creative writing awards in 2005, was runner-up for the VanArsdel Prize for best student essay by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and earned the Nokia Research Award to support research at the National Library of Wales in 2006. She plays the horn in the Westmont Orchestra.