Olivia DrakeNo snow yet this season, but campus saw a stretch of foggy days Dec. 3-5. (more…)
For more information on the Wesleyan Orchestra, visit the organization's website.
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Natalie Robichaud ’14Over the summer, Nishaila Porter ’15 worked on a research project as a 2013 Diversity Intern at Columbia University. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program and the U.S. Implementing Organization cosponsored the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory Summer Intern Program at Columbia University for the second consecutive year. The goal of the Columbia University Diversity Internship is to “expose minority students to careers in scientific ocean drilling by providing them with a 10–12 week educational and career building experience.” Current interns work with mentors on research projects using scientific ocean drilling data. While working on the project, titled “Which Marine Fossil Assemblages…
Salvatore Scibona, the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English, is the winner of this year's Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for his novel-in-progress Where In the World Is William Wurs? The award is sponsored by the New York Community Trust and the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers. Members of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative nominated Scibona for the award, which comes with a $7,500 grant. Awards go an author who has previously published a print edition of one or two books of fiction, and who doesn't currently have a publishing contract for a second or third book of…
Ethnomusicologist Sumarsam, University Professor of Music, participated in a festival and conference on Indonesian performing arts at the Smithsonian Institution Oct. 31-Nov. 3. Sumarsam and Andy McGraw Ph.D. ’06 helped organize the conference, "Performing Indonesia: Conference, Music, Dance, and Drama" with support from the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Sumarsam delivered the conference's keynote address on “Traditional Performing Arts of Indonesia in a Globalizing World” on Nov. 2. He discussed Javanese musical and cultural interactions with the rest of the world, focusing on current trends in and the changing role of classical and contemporary gamelan music and other genres in…
On Dec. 4, Ethan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of history, professor of letters, presented the keynote address at a conference on "Does Literature Matter," at the University of North Bengal in India. His talk was titled "Matters of Fact and Matters of Fiction: Literature and the Historian." He also led a workshop on "presence" at the conference. Kleinberg also will be presenting lectures and workshops in Delhi including a talk at University of Delhi on Dec. 10, a workshop at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies on Dec. 11, and a lecture on "History and…
Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, spoke with Patrick Skahill and WNPR News on Nov. 15 about the sun flipping its magnetic polarity, which only happens every 11 years. While the change in polarity is not fully understood by scientists, the event is exciting “because this is kind of a probe into the internal workings of the sun, which is actually really hard for us to get a handle on,” according to Redfield. This solar cycle, Cycle 24, has not been disruptive to satellites or the electric grid, which can react negatively to solar radiation. The sun’s northern hemisphere flipped…
Richard Grossman, professor of economics, spoke about the poor thinking behind nine of the worst economic policy mistakes of the past 200 years at Boston Public Library Dec. 4. Grossman is the author of the newly-published book, Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. He also spoke about economic policy mistakes at the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago on Nov. 14 and the Museum of American Finance in New York on Nov. 21. At Wesleyan, he teaches classes in American and European economic history, macroeconomics, and money and banking. Grossman also is a visiting scholar at the…
A book written by Rick Elphick, professor of history, tutor in the College of Social Studies, received "honorable mention" for the Herskovits Prize, the most prestigious award for scholarship on Africa. This annual award is named in honor of Melville J. Herskovits, one of the African Studies Association's founders. Elphick is the author of The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa, published by the University of Virginia Press in September 2012. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in…
Cynthia RockwellOver a lunch of pizza in Beckham Hall on Dec. 5, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a serial entrepreneur and author of Without Their Permission, addressed a crowded hall of nearly 200 students. He spoke on the importance of the internet, which allows us to access “an incredible amount of information,” and our ability to make use of it to develop new ideas, through maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset. Asking for a showing of hands of those involved in their own creative endeavors, he invited students to seize all opportunities to tell people about their idea—and to view all failures as the…
David LowKate Cooper ’82 has written a new history of the early Christian movement, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (Overlook Press), in which she provides a vibrant narrative of the triumphs and hardships of the first mothers of the infant church. As far as recorded history is concerned, women in the ancient world lived almost invisibly in a man's world. Piecing together their story from the few contemporary accounts that have survived required painstaking research, and Cooper offers a fresh perspective on the triumphs and hardships encountered by these early women. The book tells the intriguing…