The Wesleyan Connection

Long-time Wesleyan supporter John Andrus '33 celebrated his 100th birthday Sept. 19 in Wayzata, Minn. Andrus, who donated several prints to the Davison Art Collection, received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan at his 50th Class Reunion in 1983. As an undergraduate, Andrus was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, the Paint and Powder Club, and the Inter-fraternity Council. He majored in English and English literature. Andrus's granddaughter, Megan Haynes Kelly ’06, attended the celebration.

John Andrus gets a birthday hug from Edith Thorpe, a co-director of the Surdna Foundation in New York, N.Y. The Surdna Foundation, founded by the Andrus family, was created in memory of John Andrus's grandfather, John E. Andrus '1862. The John E. Andrus Center for Public Affairs, otherwise known as the Public Affairs Center or simply the PAC, is funded by the Surdna Foundation. John Andrus is chairman emeritus of the foundation, which provides support for the care of the sick and elderly, medical research, and higher education.

(Photos courtesy of Megan Kelly ‘06)

Peter Shumlin ’79

Vermont State Senator Peter Shumlin ’79 will be honored at the 8th Annual Human Rights Campaign New England Dinner, to be held in Boston on Nov. 14. HRC New England, the largest GLBT civil rights advocacy group in the country, is this year presenting the marriage equality award to “those who were heroes in our fight for equality.”

As President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Shumlin is considered instrumental on the April 15, 2009 Vermont legislature’s vote to override the governor’s veto and pass same sex marriage into law for the state.

Shumlin spoke about his reasons to support the bill last March on Vermont Public Radio. He called the passage “one of the proudest moments of my life” on the UK’s Guardian web site, where he traces his involvement in this historic legislation back to 2000.

“I owe a lot of my commitment to helping promote social justice to my Wesleyan experience,” he says.

It is expected that on Nov. 16, he will announce his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Vermont Governor.

Tanya Harrison MA ’08, who studied with Martha Gilmore, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, and is now at Malin Space Science Systems in California, is first author on a report that says her team found evidence of liquid water flowing on the surface of Mars in multiple locations as recently as this year.

An abstract of the report, titled “Present-Day Activity, Monitoring and Documentation of Gullies With the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera,” was published in the Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 41, No. 7, p. 267. The findings were reported in a speech at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting on Oct. 8, and the work also was presented at the 2009 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting Oct. 19-21.

According to the report, the group found evidence of six active gully flows that formed since 2001. Of the six new flows, three have formation dates constrained to within a single Mars year; these three formed during autumn to early spring, demonstrating that summer warming is not participating in creating the liquid involved in their formation.

“These efforts are focused on understanding how the gullies formed, how they have been degraded, and where they are active today,” the report says.

A recent article in the Tennessean highlighted a notable discovery at Nashville’s Parthenon Museum: a rare and complete copy of William J. Stillman’s 1870 photographic book, The Acropolis of Athens, Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photography.

Museum assistant curator Brenna Cothran '01 at the Parthenon — Nashville's full-scale replica of the Athenian temple — shows a copy of William J. Stillman's photographic works. (Photo by Jae S. Lee / The Tennessean)

Registrar and Assistant Curator Brenna Cothran ’01 came across it as part of an ongoing four-year-old project of inventorying every item in storage as other duties permitted. She told Tennessean journalist Janell Ross that when she saw the book, which had been stashed away in a storage room drawer, “The hair on my arms stood up. It was kind of this adrenaline rush.”

Stillman, an American painter, photographer, journalist, and diplomat had published this work at a time when photography was, one might say, in its adolescence, and tourism had just begun to flourish. Nineteenth- and early early-2oth century admirers of Stillman’s work often removed the pages of the album to frame and hang on their walls. Thus, finding a complete copy of his book is highly unusual and the museum set about raising funds to cover the cost of conserving and restoring it.

Now, the back story. The reason Cothran immediately knew this was an exceptional find: her Wesleyan education—specifically classes with Professor Andy Szegedy-Maszak, who admits, “I guess I talked a bit about William James Stillman, about whom I’ve written a fair amount.” Stillman was a natural subject for the Classical Studies professor who, with his wife, writer Elizabeth Bobrick, has assembled a noteworthy collection of photographs, a number of which have recently been on exhibit at the Getty Museum and were exhibited in 1998 at Wesleyan’s Davison Art Center.

Additionally, Cothran’s find has also served to reconnect the former student with Szegedy-Maszak her former professor. “She wrote me immediately,” he says, “and we’ve been back in touch ever since.” Recently she notified him that the Tennessean article sparked the interest of a donor who has agreed to underwrite the entire cost of restoring the album. “The whole thing is pretty cool,” Szegedy-Maszak says.

Cothran agrees: “When I took art history, Latin literature, and other humanities classes at Wesleyan, I took them for the love of learning. At the time, I never imagined that just a few years later, I would be lucky enough to have a job that allowed me to put what I learned to use. This experience has highlighted for me the value of the education I got at Wesleyan.”

Tim Hollister '78

A father whose 17-year-old son died while driving in 2006, and who went on to take a leadership role in a statewide task force that advised the state legislature on rewriting Connecticut’s teen driving laws, has launched a national blog for parents on safe teen driving.

Tim Hollister ‘78, a West Hartford, Conn. resident and attorney, lost his son Reid in a one-car accident on Interstate 84 in Plainville, Conn. in December 2006. During 2007-08, as a member of Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell’s Safe Teen Driving Task Force, Hollister immersed himself in the issue of why driving is the leading cause of death for teens, and became an advocate for better-informed parental decision-making about teen driving.

“My son’s accident led me to study teen driving laws and statistics in Connecticut and nationally,” Hollister said, “but it was my discovery, as a task force member, that the literature and resources available to parents rarely explain the dangers of teen driving that prompted me to start this blog.”

The blog, “From Reid’s Dad,” is found at http://www.fromreidsdad.org.

“I was astounded to learn that even though 6,000 teen drivers and 2,000 of their passengers die every year, and 400,000 kids are seriously injured, the driving manuals and other literature usually say little more than ‘Be careful.’ Cigarette packs carry warnings about death, and patients going into surgery are warned multiple times that death is a potential consequence, but the driving literature doesn’t warn parents about how dangerous teen driving is, and why,” Hollister observed. “Meanwhile, every night on television we see ads with cars doing 360’s on busy city streets, crashing through glass, spinning into parking spaces, and weaving through dense traffic at high speeds, all without a scratch. Our culture glorifies risky driving. We need a counterbalance that will caution parents and teens.”

In addition, Hollister noted that “Many parents are seduced by the convenience of having another driver in the house, or their pride in their child passing a milestone toward adulthood. My blog is an effort to counsel parents not to put convenience and pride ahead of safe decisions. I have no intention of telling parents how to handle their own kids. My goal is to make important information about teen driving accessible and clear, so that parents will make better decisions.”

The blog, launched in the wake of the federal government’s national summit on distracted driving, includes the story of the death of Hollister’s son and how it led to his service on Connecticut’s task force and his advocacy for safer driving; a list of tips for parents of teen drivers; a summary of Hollister’s teen driving activities; two initial posts, “There Is No Such Thing As A Safe Teen Driver” and “Baseline Dangers and Higher Risks;” and links to informative national websites and databases.

New CD by Steve Lehman '00

Steve Lehman ’00 is an alto and soprano jazz saxophonist who continues to receive praise from jazz critics across the country for performing music on the cutting edge. He is one of several graduates who studied jazz at Wesleyan and have gone on to notable music careers. Lehman is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Columbia University.

Travail, Transformation & Flow (Pi Recordings), his latest CD with his octet, was recently reviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. NPR describes Lehman as “an explorer in the esoteric compositional realm labeled ‘spectral harmony,’ and perhaps his most ambitious innovation is that he’s taken that discipline’s rigorous, math- and computer-based analytical processes and put them to work in the fluid, improvisation-driven genre of jazz.”

Book by Sabrina McCormick ’96

In No Family History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), Sabrina McCormick ’96 offers convincing and compelling evidence of environmental links to breast cancer, ranging from everyday cosmetics to industrial waste. She writes lucidly about the a growing number of experts who argue that we should increase focus on prevention by reducing environmental exposures that have contributed to the sharp increase of breast cancer rates.

McCormick also weaves the story of one breast cancer survivor with no family history of the disease into a powerful exploration of the big business of breast cancer—as drugs, pink products, and corporate sponsorships generate enormous revenue to find a cure. Money continues to be allocated for the search for a cure, and McCormick argues that the companies that profit, including some pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies, may contribute to the environmental causes of breast cancer. Her book reveals how profits drive our public focus on the cure rather than prevention, and also suggests new ways to reduce breast cancer rates in the future.

McCormick is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor of environmental science and sociology at Michigan State University. She is the director and producer of the independent feature-length documentary No Family History. Her web site is www.nofamilyhistory.org.

In early October, the White House press office announced that the President Obama and his family had chosen 45 art works borrowed from several Washington museums to decorate various White House walls, including the text painting Black Like Me No. 2 by Glenn Ligon ’82, which is on loan from the Hirshhorn Musuem.

In an article in the Washington Post about the Obamas’ selection of art works, Blake Gopnik described Ligon as “one of the best one of the best African American artists working today, and also one of the smartest and toughest. His loaner work is a tall white canvas covered from top to bottom with the repeated phrase ‘All traces of the Griffin I had been were wiped from existence,’ a quote from the 1961 book the picture’s named after, Black Like Me, in which the white journalist John Howard Griffin made himself look black and reported on the troubles that befell him. Just as Griffin disappeared into blackness, and into the obliterations of American racism, so Ligon’s stenciled text disappears into an ever thicker mess of black pigment as it descends the canvas, until at the bottom it’s close to illegible.”

The Obamas’ choices include mostly modern contemporary paintings and sculptures by well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, and Edward Ruscha in addition to pieces by lesser-known artists such as Edward Corbett, who worked in Washington in the 1960s, and Alma Thomas, a 1960s-1970s African American abstract painter. Works by other African Americans and Native Americans are also on view as well as bronze dancers by Edgar Degas and still life paintings from the 1950s by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi.

At left, Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson in Zombieland.

The hit movie Zombieland marks the directorial debut of Ruben Fleischer ’97 and was number one at the box office when it opened nationwide on October 2.

During its opening weekend, the film sold $25 million worth of tickets in the U.S. and Canada and cost Columbia (Sony) Pictures and co-financier Relativity Media only $23.6 million to produce. It has remained in the top 10 films at the box office in the weeks that followed. The film also was notable for ending a recent trend of poor openings for movies with horror elements such as Jennifer’s Body and Sorority Row.

Zombieland stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abagail Breslin as four quirky characters who join forces to battle flesh eaters as they head for Southern California, a supposedly zombie-free zone. The film’s popularity may in part be attributed to its combination of genres; the film mixes elements of an action-adventure, a road movie, a buddy comedy, a love story, and, of course, a zombie movie, which broadens its appeal beyond zombie film fanatics.

In her review in Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: “Zombieland is a polished, very funny road picture shaped by wisenheimer cable-TV sensibilities and starring four likable actors, each with an influential following.”

Fleischer majored in history at Wesleyan and worked on various web sites after graduation. He then landed a job as a production assistant on Dawson’s Creek, where he was mentored by writer Mike White ’92 who helped him get a job as assistant to Miguel Arteta ’89, who was directing the film Chuck & Buck (written by White). Fleischer also worked with Arteta on his next feature The Good Girl. He also directed music videos and commercials, produced the MTV cult hit Rob & Big, directed episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and filmed behind-the-scenes footage for Borat.

Fleischer was recently profiled in The Washington Post by Ann Hornaday and commented on why zombie movies continue to attract audiences. He said: “In a way, zombies are expressing anxieties that we have about ourselves as a people… the more-modern zombie movies are more of a statement about our society, where there’s a lot of anxiety about pandemics and viral diseases, and there’s concern about our food supply and contamination and the way the environment is being threatened. It’s just general anxiety about the future and what catastrophes could possibly happen.”

Book by Michael Dylan Foster ’87

In his recent book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (University of California Press, 2009), Michael Dylan Foster ’87 focuses on Japanese water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yokai.

He considers the role of these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, and brings attention to an abundance of valuable and previously understudied material.

Foster traces yokai over three centuries, from their appearance in 17th-century natural histories to their starring role in 20th-century popular media as he examines the monsters’ meanings within the Japanese cultural imagination.