David PesciFormer major league baseball player and current Wesleyan Football receivers coach Rico Brogna hopes to be coaching at the professional level soon - in baseball. But he is drawing leadership lessons from Wesleyan's head football coach Frank Hauser in that quest.
Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth has a piece in The Huffington Post on the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's only visit to the U.S. Freud came to New England 100 years ago this fall to deliver a series of lectures.
Olivia DrakeEvery October, Wesleyan's Jewish community dwells in a temporary structure built for the festival of Sukkot. For eight days, students study, socialize, mediate, eat, host events and occasionally sleep in the religious building. This holiday, the Jewish students will celebrate the Israelites 40-year journey to the Holy Land inside an airy, five-mound curving structure of carbon-steel clad in bamboo. Designed by 15 students enrolled in Architecture II, a research-design-build studio, the "WesSukkah" provides a sacred space that adheres to a complex, medieval Rabbinic building code. "The students have crafted something which is both compelling and meaningful for Wesleyan's campus," explains…
David LowDocumentary filmmaker James Longley ’94 has been awarded the prestigious $500,000 MacArthur grant, along with 23 other recipients. Longley’s low-budget, self-financed films are intimate portraits of people in politically volatile countries in the Middle East. While working on his documentaries, Longley lived among ordinary families and gained access to individuals living in places rarely recorded by Western filmmakers. Two of Longley’s works, Iraq in Fragments (2006) and Sari’s Mother (2006), were nominated for Academy Awards. Iraq in Fragments chronicles life in war-ravaged Iraq through the eyes of an abandoned young boy on the streets of Baghdad, the collective energy and…
Wesleyan welcomes 19 newly-hired tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty and adjunct faculty for the 2009-10 academic year. Robyn Autry joined the Sociology Department as assistant professor. She studies the sociology of race and ethnicity, political sociology, comparative historical sociology, institutions, sociology of science and technology and cultural sociology. Autry has a Ph.D. and Master of Arts from the University of Wisconsin, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Javier Castro-Ibaseta joins the History Department and the College of Letters as assistant professor. Castro-Ibaseta studies early modern Spanish history, early modern political culture and cultural/poetic analysis of political…
Marwa Aly, Muslim Chaplin, spoke to Islam Online Radio about her role as a Muslim chaplain for a Sept. 16 story. She discussed her role integrating religious leadership into the campus community.
Several Wesleyan alumni-related films were part of the recent program on view at the Toronto International Film Festival, which was held Sept. 10–19. The festival has become the launching ground for films from around the world as well as for films that go on to win prominent awards. Among the films shown were Youth in Revolt, directed by Miguel Arteta ’89 (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl), a very funny comedy based on the cult novels by C. D. Payne about the misadventures of a sex-obsessed 14-year-old Nick Twisp with a French alter-ego who inspires him to misbehave. Michael Cera…
The Center for the Arts sponsored the 2009 Feet to the Fire Common Moment Sept. 4 on Andrus Field. The Class of 2013 showcased drumming and dance movements from six different cultures—Korean, Cuban, West African, Japanese, Irish and South Indian—where water is an important component of their cultural traditions. The event included drumming, rhythmic movement and fire spinners. The evening culminated with the Class of 2013 forming a human histogram about its own water footprint. (Photos by Nick Lacy)
Berel Lang, visiting professor of letters, visiting professor of philosophy, is the author of the book Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence published by the University Press of New England, the fifth in a series of books by him on the Holocaust. The 260-paged book brings the perspective of philosophical analysis to bear on issues related to the Holocaust. Setting out from a conception of philosophical “witnessing” that expands and illuminates the standard view of the witness, he confronts the question of what philosophy can add to the views of the Holocaust provided in other disciplines. Drawing on the philosophical…
Corrina KerrLaura Stark has joined the Department of Sociology and the Program in Science in Society as assistant professor. Her research focuses on the social history and sociology of medicine, research ethics, human subject research, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), and group/committee decision-making in healthcare. Stark graduated from Cornell University in 1998 with a bachelor's in communication. She went on to obtain a Master's and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University, ending in 2006. She was awarded the biannual prize for best dissertation from the History of Science Society’s Forum for the History of the Human Sciences for her work titled…
Gil Skillman, chair and professor of economics, was a featured guest on WNPR’s “Where We Live” discussion on the general state of the economy one year after the demise of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the recession. Skillman and two other economists discuss what led to the collapse and point out some of the danger points that have been under-reported in the newsmedia and have yet to be addressed by the Federal Government.