Lauren RubensteinApril 22, 20136min
More than 500 admitted students and their families descended on Wesleyan’s campus for WesFest, the annual celebration of all things Wesleyan. Between Wednesday, April 17 and Friday, April 19, they were treated to dozens of tours, panels, lectures and demonstrations to acquaint them with Wesleyan’s academics, student organizations, athletics and facilities. On Friday around noon, the sun came out and visitors took a break to enjoy a barbecue lunch on Foss Hill while a student band played. Cloie Logan and her parents came all the way from Albuquerque, N.M. Cloie fell in love with Wesleyan after visiting as a high…

Lauren RubensteinApril 22, 20137min
Thanks to a new partnership, graduates from Wesleyan’s College of the Environment who meet certain academic standards will be guaranteed admission to Vermont Law School’s prestigious JD (Juris Doctor/Doctor of Law), JD/master’s or master’s degree programs. Vermont’s Environmental Law Program, the largest in the country, is widely considered to be one of the best environmental law programs in the United States. President Michael S. Roth signed the agreement between Wesleyan and Vermont Law School on Wednesday, April 3. “We’re excited to provide this option for students in the College of the Environment to take their interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues…

Lauren RubensteinApril 22, 20133min
Professor of Economics Richard Grossman has been named a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. He will work on a project about the evolution of banking regulation across the industrialized world. Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowship assists research and artistic creation “for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” This year, 175 scholars, artists and scientists were selected to receive fellowships from a group of almost 3,000 applicants from the U.S. and Canada. “The Guggenheim Foundation has been giving awards to distinguished scholars and artists for…

Lauren RubensteinApril 22, 20135min
In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Urip Maeny, artist in residence in dance. She she has taught at Wesleyan since 1972, and will retire this year. Q: Please tell us when and how you first began studying Javanese dance. A: I began studying Javanese dance informally when I was still in elementary school in my hometown of Pekalongan in Central Java, Indonesia in the early 1960s. In 1961, I studied at the gamelan conservatory (high school level) in Surakarta. The school allowed me to focus my study on dance—especially Javanese dance, but also Balinese…

Cynthia RockwellApril 22, 20132min
In his role as 2013 Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Andy Szegedy-Maszak, professor of classical studies and the Jane A. Seney Professor of Greek, brought a slice of Wesleyan to members of the Wesleyan community—alumni, parents, admitted students—living in select cities on the West Coast. The Distinguished Teaching Fellowship—of which Szegedy-Maszak is the first recipient—offers the professor the opportunity to teach a course outside of his/her usual departmental offerings. Szegedy-Maszak is teaching a course through the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life on photography and its effect on social movements. It was this topic he explored in his WESeminar on the Road,…

Olivia DrakeApril 22, 20133min
Two Wesleyan students received honorable mentions from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. Sam Factor '14, a physics and computer science double major, and Elliot Meyerson '14, a computer science and mathematics double major, each received a letter of congratulations and a certificate from the foundation. The 2013-14 Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,107 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. Factor, who hails from Madison, Wisc., hopes to pursue a Ph.D in physics and conduct research in physics,…