Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20109min
Nathan Repasz ’14 of Erie, Pa. arrived on Wesleyan’s campus Sept. 1 in a Jeep loaded with the all the necessities for the year. “He brought all 40 of his t-shirts … and a trillion socks. He probably just doesn’t want to do any laundry,” jokes Nathan’s mother, Lenore Skomal. “It’s a good thing that he only brought a third of his instruments. Just three drums, a pan flute and harmonica. He left behind the guitar and Egyptian oud.” Nathan, an aspiring music and environmental science major, joined more than 750 new and transfer students who moved into their campus residencies on…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
An $800,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support Wesleyan’s College of the Environment (COE) for the next four years. Wesleyan’s faculty and administration approved the COE in 2009 to graduate students who have engaged with critical environmental issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; who are sensitive to how those issues are connected to social and political concerns; who can interpret scientific information correctly; and who can communicate conclusions effectively and honestly. The Mellon Foundation grant will support funding for post-doctoral teaching fellows, visiting COE fellows, (more…)

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
This issue, we ask “5 Questions” to Ron Jenkins, professor of theater. Jenkins is an expert in Balinese theater, international traditions of comic performance, and directing and translating the plays of Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo. He was awarded a residency at the Bellagio Center by the Rockefeller Foundation next spring. He is a former Guggenheim fellow whose research in Bali over the past 30 years has been supported by fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Fulbright Fund. Q: Professor Jenkins, you’ve been teaching theater at Wesleyan for 11 years,…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20101min
On Sept. 1, Matthew Givner ’10 became one of 19 Princeton-in-Asia fellows from around the world who is teaching English in a Chinese province. Givner moved to Dalain, a city of 6.5 million people located 288 miles east of Beijing.  There, he is teaching English, writing, reading and speaking to students at Dalian University of Technology with three other fellows. He teaches 14 class hours per week. Givner learned of the program through a family friend and Wesleyan’s Career Resource Center. He attended two information sessions on the program at the Career Resource Center and decided to apply.   (more…)

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
In 1900, when the student residence at 24 Fountain Avenue was built, heating oil was cheap. Insulation wasn’t a concern. Window sealant didn’t exist. Hot water gushed from the shower heads. “We call homes like this ‘balloon framed,”’ explains Gary Rawlings, lead energy auditor technician for Wesleyan’s contractor Lantern Energy. “Air from the basement flows up through the walls and escapes through the window frames, the area around plumbing pipes, doors, and attic. In this particular house, there’s a big gap around the air duct. That’s never a good sign when you can see down into the basement.” The 24…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20101min
In August, Michael McAlear, chair and associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, presented an interactive lecture about Africa’s water cycle to the Kibera School for Girls. Kennedy Odede '12 and Jessica Posner '09 operate the school and the non-profit organization Shining Hope for Communities in Kibera, Kenya. McAlear’s lecture included an experiment with test tubes he brought for the school. His sons, Matthew and Thomas, donated time in the school’s library. “We cannot thank Professor McAlear and his sons enough for their generous donation of supplies, time, and energy,” Posner says in her blog.

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) project was featured in the Aug. 1 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article titled “In Emergencies, Aid Agencies Turn to a College-Created Software Program.” The article focuses on an emergency-management program called Collabbit. Collabbit is a continuing effort involving undergraduates and computer science faculty at Wesleyan and Trinity College. The software tool helps coordinate large numbers of people and supplies involved in responding to disasters like blackouts and flooding. This is by far the largest project of any kind that I've worked on," Samuel DeFabbia-Kane’11 says in the…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, with a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy during his sabbatical next spring. Between March and April 2011, Jenkins will be working on a book about prison theater projects that he's been directing at correctional facilities including his most recent work at a prison in Indonesia. Jenkins has been collaborating with incarcerated individuals on staging their adaptations of classic texts by Shakespeare and Dante and other authors.  These projects have grown out of work done with Wesleyan students in Connecticut correctional facilities. The specific texts include Shakespeare's Tempest, Dante's Inferno and the Mahabhrata. "The personalized…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20101min
Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera, assistant professor of psychology, organized and chaired a recent conference on honor and honor cultures in Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 20-24. It was funded by the European Association of Social Psychology and the British Academy. The conference had an interdisciplinary and international focus. It brought together international experts on honor from anthropology and psychology. This is the first conference on honor and honor cultures ever organized in psychology. Rodriguez Mosquera has since been invited to guest-edit a special issue on honor for the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20101min
Norm Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, was decorated as Officier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture and Communication in France on April 23. France has a long history of official government distinctions for exceptional achievement. The "Order of Arts and Letters" was established in 1957 to recognize eminent artists, writers and people who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. Shapiro is the author of dozens of books on French culture, literature and poetry. Many are award-winning. The Order of Arts and Letters is given out twice annually to…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20102min
Q: Sarah, you received a Guggenheim Fellowship to translate the Greek tragedy trilogy, The Oresteia.  Please explain the cultural significance of this particular historical play and why your translation will differ from others? A: The Oresteia is the first real tragic masterpiece. I think that the greatness of a piece of literature depends mainly on how much it lets us reflect on at once, and the Oresteia has everything: questions of human nature, the nature of the gods, the social order-- in this case, the startling Athenian moves toward government by ordinary people. And it's all conveyed in intense, complex, almost creepily…

Olivia DrakeSeptember 2, 20101min
Tom Morgan, professor of physics; John Wright Ph.D '06; Jack DiSciacca '07 and Jonathan Lambert (who attended Wesleyan 2002-2010) are the co-authors of an article published in The Physical Review A, June 2010. The publication focuses on the first observation of the semi-classical scattering dynamics of a Rydberg electron with its molecular core. The system is molecular hydrogen veiled in a strong electric field.