The Wesleyan Connection

All Wesleyan alumni and their families are invited to participate in the Parade of Classes. This traditional Wesleyan festivity begins at 11:30 a.m. May 26.

Join the Wesleyan community for class reunions, educational WESeminars, picnics, campus tours, a parade of classes and much more during the 2012 Reunion & Commencement festivities May 24-May 27 on campus.

Highlights include an Eclectic party featuring The Rooks; an all-college picnic and festival on Foss Hill; a 50th Reunion and President’s Reception for the Class of 1962; a champagne reception for graduating seniors and their families; an eco-friendly All-College Dinner; “Senior Voices” with the Class of 2012; the traditional All-College Sing; Andrus Field Tent party featuring Kinky Spigot and the Welders; and of course, the 180th Commencement Ceremony on May 27. U.S. Senator Michael Bennet ’87, a leading advocate for education reforms that support great teaching, will deliver the Commencement address.

“With more than 150 events, R&C Weekend literally has something for everyone,” says Gemma Fontanella Ebstein, associate vice president for external relations. “But it’s really the people – alumni, students, faculty, staff and their families – who make the weekend memorable.”

WESeminars provide opportunities to revisit the classroom and experience firsthand the academic excellence that is the essence of Wesleyan, with presentations by scholars, pundits, Continue Reading »

Tags: alumni, Class of 2012, rc2012, reunion and commencement

Seth Hafferkamp '12 presents his thesis titled, "Autoionization Lifetime Measurements of Na2 Rydberg States" at the "Celebration of Science Theses" April 19 in Exley Science Center. (Photos by Olivia Drake)

Fifteen Wesleyan students presented posters on their research in the sciences and mathematics at the seventh annual “Celebration of Science Theses” event held April 19.

“You help keep our sciences here vibrant and alive,” Ishita Mukerji, dean of natural sciences and mathematics, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, tells the students gathered in the lobby of Exley Science Center as she congratulates them. Mukerji says she hopes that after pausing to celebrate their achievements, the students will continue to pursue research for many years to come.

The work presented by seniors and BA/MA students spans a wide range of disciplines.

Micah Wylde ’12 presents his research on “Safe Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving."

For his project, Micah Wylde ’12, a computer science major, developed algorithms for self-driving cars, like the cars reportedly being developed by Google. The algorithms translate high-level navigation goals (eg. Drive from home to the grocery store) into actual turns of the steering wheel. “I was working particularly on safety, which is a big deal when you have one-ton cars hurtling down the road,” he explains.

Wylde says self-driving cars are no longer the stuff of science fiction. “Everything has come together in the last five years—algorithms, sensing technology,” he says. “Now it’s just refining it.”

He adds, “In the next decade, there are going to be autonomous cars on the road—no question.”

Tom Oddo ’12, a Science in Society Program major, studied the work of D. D. Palmer, who founded chiropractics at the turn of the 20th century. Oddo plans to train to be a chiropractor after graduation, and sought to explain the stigma attached to the practice. Continue Reading »

Tags: poster session, student achievements, student research

Amy Schulman ’82, P ’11

DLA Piper, one of the world’s largest law firms, has given Wesleyan $500,000 to establish the Amy Schulman Fund for Women and Gender, which will support work in this field at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities.

Schulman ’82, P ’11, is a former partner of DLA Piper who served on the firm’s Board and Executive Policy committees. She is a member of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees and is currently executive vice president and general counsel of Pfizer, Inc.

The gift will enhance the program of Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities, one of the oldest of the humanities institutes in the United States. The Center has a distinguished record of supporting interdisciplinary scholarship, particularly between the humanities and the social sciences. It also assists faculty and students with individual research or teaching projects.

As an undergraduate, Schulman was a student fellow at the Center. The fellowship gave her extended time for independent research and presentation of her work, dialog with peers and faculty mentors, and the opportunity to interact with visiting scholars—valuable experience in taking individual initiative and in teamwork for a future professional woman and leader.

“I can’t imagine a better way to honor such a dedicated alumna and champion of women’s rights,” says President Michael S. Roth. “Amy knows firsthand how the Center for the Humanities can provide a transformative experience that enables students to better understand their capacity for important, productive work. I am grateful to DLA Piper for this act of generosity and recognition.”

Jill Morawski, director of the Center for Humanities and professor of psychology, says: “This gift is much appreciated, especially as it arrives just when we have redesigned the Center’s mission to better serve the humanities. The gift recognizes the Center’s commitment to fostering the original research undertaken by students, as Amy Schulman experienced. It recognizes as well the Center’s longstanding interest in the study of women and gender, a focus that has been importantly featured in lectures, scholarship, and courses.”

Under a challenge grant that the Mellon Foundation recently awarded to the Center, the foundation will match the DLA Piper gift with an additional $250,000.

Tags: alumni, CHUM, Schulman

Phil Resor, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, discussing a fault line in San Francisco, Calif.

A new study designed to give scientists a better understanding of how earthquakes occur by studying ancient faults long after the quakes are over will be led by a Wesleyan faculty member and involve at least two of his students.

Phillip Resor, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, received a $246,728 NSF (National Science Foundation) grant for his study titled “Three Dimensional Characterization of a Pseudotachylyte-bearing Fault.” The grant includes funding for one thesis student for each of the next two years; Wesleyan has contributed additional funding for a second student in 2012. The study will also establish a new collaboration between Wesleyan and scientists from the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), a world-renowned research institute in Italy.

The study is designed to improve the understanding of earthquakes and their effects, one of the primary goals of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program. Specifically, Resor and his students will be examining faults that were once located more than 4 miles below the earth’s surface, where most large earthquakes begin. The conditions were so extreme at these depths that the walls of the faults actually melted due to frictional heating, creating a fault rock geologists call pseudotachylyte.  The study will use high-resolution x-ray computed tomography, similar to medical imaging technology, to look inside these faults for evidence of ancient quakes and gain new insights into their underlying causes.

“In order to produce an earthquake slip must be rapid enough to produce high-frequency waves and sufficiently large to be detectable at the surface,” Resor says. “But seismology has been unable to resolve some key issues in earthquake mechanics. For example, earthquake slip is associated with unstable frictional sliding, Continue Reading »

Tags: earth and, Earth and Enviornmental Sciences, NSF, Resor

Community members Guido and Tish Ciancotta of GREC (sitting), Laura Hofmann of OUTRAGE, Chris Henderson of St. Nicks Alliance, and Pat Dobosz of GEM, pose with ANTH 289 students and faculty Gillian Goslinga and Jill Sigman at the close of the community ritual.

The students in ANTH 289, “Ritual, Health, and Healing” stepped outside the Wesleyan campus this spring to participate in a service learning project in the North Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.

According to Assistant Professor of Anthropology Gillian Goslinga—who co-taught the course with Artist-in-Residence Jill Sigman, a North Brooklyn-based performance artist—Greenpoint is a neighborhood facing multiple health, social and environmental challenges. The students in this Creative Campus anthropology course, which is cross-listed with Science in Society and Dance, had the opportunity to collaborate with a number of community organizations, each dedicated to addressing a different issue. This is the first time Goslinga and Sigman have taught the course, which covers topics such as shamanic ritual and traditional medicine, as well as community health and social and environmental justice, and tackles questions of the efficacy of ritual and the traditional ritual/modern medicine dichotomy. The course also has a weekly movement lab, led by Jill Sigman, where students use choreographed movements to explore course concepts.

The service learning project in Greenpoint grew out of Sigman’s artistic work. A multi-media artist and choreographer, Sigman had been commissioned to create the seventh hut in her “Hut Project” by the Arts@Renaissance unit of St. Nicks Alliance, a community organization that works on affordable housing issues in North Brooklyn. For her Hut Project, Sigman builds sculptures, dwellings and stages out of repurposed and found materials, which then become sites for performance and community discussions on the critical issues of garbage, environment and housing. Goslinga says, “The tie-in with the themes of the course was obvious.”

“One of my goals for the course had been to invite students to query default biomedical framings of health and healing, where individual biology tends to be over-privileged even in epidemiological studies, and to broaden thinking about causalities for suffering, extending these to social, historical and environmental traumas, where suffering can also be about loss and shock, forced displacement and discriminatory policy decisions, structural poverty and environmental degradation (often all are related),” she says. “In these contexts, community ritual can be a restorative response.” Continue Reading »

Tags: Anthropology, Service Learning

At left, Peter Frenzel, professor of German Studies emeritus; Marjorie Rosenbaum; and Wesleyan President Michael Roth, welcome local high school students, teachers, and Wesleyan faculty to the High School Humanities Program celebration, May 4 in the Center for Film Studies.

Every spring semester, more than 80 students attend lectures on Hemingway’s writing, music and social movements, romantic poetry, Greek tragedies and French essays at Wesleyan. But these students aren’t working on a college degree – yet. They’re still in high school.

As part of the Community and University Services for Education’s High School Humanities Program, high school students from six area schools spend six Fridays on the Wesleyan campus, taking classes from Wesleyan faculty. On May 4, Wesleyan hosted a celebration of the program, which is more than 40 years old.

“We’re essentially offering high school students college courses in the humanities. They’re getting a good taste of the college experience,” says program coordinator Peter Frenzel, professor of German Studies emeritus.

Thousands of local high school students have benefited from the Wesleyan program.

This semester, Wesleyan faculty Ellen Nerenberg, Andy Curran, Stephanie Weiner, Sean McCann, Rob Rosenthal and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak are teaching the morning classes. In the afternoon, students watch a film on the same theme as the morning’s lecture.

For example, after a reading, lecture and discussion on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey the students watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? with their professor, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, the Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek.

Established in 1967 by Marjorie Daltry Rosenbaum, Community and University Services for Education (CAUSE) has existed to identify and facilitate the implementation of cooperative programs and projects between Wesleyan University, the Middletown community and the public and private schools in the Middletown area.

The foocus of these programs has been on intellectual and cultural enrichment. Thousands of students have benefited over the years.

Between 80 and 100 students from local public (Middletown High School, Vinal Technical High School, Portland High School and Haddam Killingworth High School) and parochial schools (Mercy and Xavier) participate in the High School Humanities Program every year.

Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, the Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek, spoke about his experience teaching ancient Greek literature in the High School Humanities Program. Szegedy-Maszak teaches the students about Homer's Odyssey or two tragedies by Sophocles (Antigone and Oedipus the King).

Another unique project supported by CAUSE is The Art Show, which exhibits over 1,200 artworks of Middletown students in grades K-12 at Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery. This annual showcase, reflecting the art curriculum in the Middletown Public Schools, draws hundreds of students and their families to campus each spring.

CAUSE also collaborates with Middletown Public Schools and Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts on a project called Silent Sounds. The focus is to encourage young people to explore, enjoy and create literary arts. For eight years now, students in Middletown Public Schools submit poetry and prose for juried evaluation, and winning entries (roughly 30 each year) are compiled into a printed publication.

For more information about CAUSE, contact Frank Kuan, at 860-685-2245.

Tags: humanities

Su Zheng

As a 2012-12 Fulbright recipients, Miriam Berger ’12 will study journalism in Egypt; and Matthew Alexander ’12 and Lynn Heere ’12 will teach English in Germany. Su Zheng, associate professor of music, associate professor of East Asian studies, will study, “China’s Emergent Soundscape: New Music Creativities, Body Politics and the Internet in Defining a Global Chineseness,” in Shanghai, China.

The Fulbright Program is the largest U.S. international exchange program offering opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and teaching in elementary and secondary schools worldwide.

Miriam Berger, a College of Social Studies major, will begin her year abroad on June 1, as a fellow at the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) in Cairo, Egypt. There, she will study Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Egyptian. After improving her Arabic and cultural literacy skills, she will begin her Fulbright research on how Egyptian print newspapers have responded to the Continue Reading »

Tags: Class of 2012, fulbright, student achievements

Rob Rosenthal, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, announced that six faculty members are being appointed to endowed professorships, effective July 1. They include:

Anthony Braxton and Neely Bruce, professors of music, are being jointly awarded the John Spencer Camp Professorship of Music, established by a Wesleyan Trustee in 1929.

Jill Morawski, professor of psychology, professor of science in society, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, will become the Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor. The Osborne Professorship was established with a gift from Wesleyan’s 1861 class valedictorian.

Laurie Nussdorfer, professor of history, professor of letters, is appointed to the William F. Armstrong Professorship, established in 1921 with a gift from Armstrong’s estate.

Joel Pfister, professor of English, professor of American studies, formerly Kenan Professor of the Humanities, is being recognized with the Olin Professorship, established in 1863 to fund a professorship of “rhetoric and English literature.”

Joe Siry, chair and professor of art history, will become the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the Humanities (a position also held by Clark Maines). These professorships were established in 1976, with an endowment from the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust.

Brief biographical sketches of all six recipients follow: Continue Reading »

Tags: Braxton, Morawski, Neely Bruce, Nussdorfer, Pfister, Siry

Anyone interested in the writer's craft is welcome to attend the Wesleyan Writers Conference.

Well-known and award-winning novelists, journalists, publishers and editors will be on the faculty of the 56th Annual Wesleyan Writers Conference, held June 14-17 on campus.

The conference welcomes both experienced writers and new writers.

“Our distinguished faculty offer careful attention to your work and will offer an array of seminars, readings, and panel discussions, all designed to move your work forward, or help you launch a new project,” explains Anne Greene, director of the Wesleyan Writers Conference, director of Writing Programs.

Over the years, conference participants have gone on to win a number of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Whiting Writers’ Award, and nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The Writers Conference features seminars, workshops and panels on novel writing, short stories, poetry, nonfiction, journalism, film and TV, new media, publishing, tips on how to sell your book and talks with agents and editors. Faculty will speak on writing for the stage, writing about science and medicine, short and long form journalism, the future of publishing in the electronic age and more.

The Wesleyan Writers Conference also will host a special one-day festival on Saturday, June 16.

Each member of the conference faculty leads a daily seminar, usually including a short lecture, discussion, and (optional) writing exercises. Participants will be given ample time to develop their own writing in quiet spaces and the Wesleyan libraries.

The faculty include novelists Roxana Robinson, Wells Tower ’96, Kit Reed, Peter Blauner ’82, and Amy Bloom ’75; poet Honor Moore; and nonfiction writers/ journalists Lis Harris, Peg Tyre and William Finnegan of The New Yorker. Publishers, editors and agents include Pamela Dorman ’79 of Viking Press; Stuart Krichevsky; Andre Bernard  of the Guggenheim Foundation; Johnny Temple ’88 of Akashic Books; Bill Contardi; and others. View the faculty member bios online here.

View a video of the Writers Conference below: Continue Reading »

Tags: writers, writers conference

Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government, tutor in the College of Social Studies, says all nations, even our closest allies, do things that cut against our geo-strategic interests.

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask 5 Questions of Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government and author of several books and scholarly articles, including The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics. Lately he has turned his attention to the U.S.-China relationship and its place in the geo-political world.

Q: Your recent work has taken you to the transition in much of the world from a Cold War stance to the coming “cold co-existence” between the U.S. and China. How would you define “cold co-existence”?

A: The future U.S. relations with China will be far different than the Cold War relationship with the U.S.S.R., even if the Chinese get closer to nuclear parity with the U.S. The two nations will be far more interdependent economically than the U.S. and Soviets; hence their fates will be far more interlocked. While we had almost no major economic ties to the Soviets during the Cold War, we are now China’s major market (we ran a $295 billion trade deficit with China in 2011) and China is our largest lender (China presently holds over $1 trillion in American assets—largely bonds). In a sense, we are each other’s principal sources of revenues: trade revenues for China and loans for the U.S. government. This economic interdependence is here to stay, however, it will be embedded in a competitive environment, which will make the two nations anything but close allies. Add to the testy economic relationship friction over human rights, Taiwan, and disagreements over territorial claims in the South China Sea; and you have enough additional negative karma to generate a very “cold” posture between the two great nations.

Q: The economic competition between the two has received heightened scrutiny in the past few years, in part because China ignores the environmental laws employed by most western nations, controls its currency and exerts wage controls on its workers. How will these behaviors affect the relationship with the U.S. and the West in the next few years?

A: The battle of ideologies between communism and capitalism is withering quickly with the depreciation of the communist ideology among both Chinese leaders and people. Continue Reading »

Tags: 5 Questions, CSS, Gallarotti, government, Government Department

More than 60 students presented their recent research at the Psychology Department's Poster Session April 26 in Zelnick Pavilion.

Carolyn Mortell '12 presents her poster titled, "Cardinal Principle Training: Is it Possible to Teach Abstract Number Concepts?" Her advisor is Anna Shusterman, assistant professor of psychology.

Continue Reading »

Tags: poster session, Psychology Department, student achievements, student research

Wesleyan hosted the 10th Annual Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns on April 19-20. The Shasha Seminar is an educational forum for Wesleyan alumni, parents, faculty and friends that provides an opportunity to explore issues of global concern in a small seminar environment.

Endowed by James J. Shasha ’50 P’82, the seminar supports lifelong learning and encourages participants to expand their knowledge and perspectives on significant issues. The 2012 theme was The Political Economy of Oil. Photos of the two-day event are below: (Photos by Olivia Drake and Bill Tyner ’13)

Daniel Esty, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, delivered the keynote address titled, "Protecting Our Environment in Turbulent Times" April 19 in Memorial Chapel. Commissioner Esty spoke about the need to continue moving forward with an energy and environmental agenda for the 21st century, despite a backlash that has developed on these issues.

Dean Malouta P’12, retired geologist with Shell Oil Company, and David Work ’68, P’93, retired regional president of BP Amoco Corporation spoke on "Peak Oil and Beyond" during the Shasha Seminar. Phillip Resor, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, moderated the talk. The panelists explored geology and extraction techniques and questioned, "Are we on the verge of transition to a post-oil world?"

Continue Reading »

Tags: lecture, shasha seminar