The Wesleyan Connection

Priscilla Meyer, professor of Russian language and literature, was awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) during their annual conference. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of literary and cultural studies.

Meyer is the author of How the Russians Read the French.

More than 2,100 scholars attended the conference.

Pedro Alejandro (photo by Harold Shapiro for The Hartford Courant)

Pedro Alejandro, associate professor of dance, is a recipient of the C. Newton Shenck III Award for a “lifetime achievement in and contribution to the arts.”

Alejandro received the award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven board of directors. He was mentioned in a Nov. 9 article in The Hartford Courant.

Alejandro was featured in The Wesleyan Connection in May 2008.

Ethan Kleinberg researched the origins of the Wesleyan "College Plan" in 1959 and published an article on the challenges facing interdisciplinary programs. (Photo by Cora Lautze '11)

As the College of Letters (COL) celebrates its 50^th anniversary, we asked Ethan Kleinberg, associate professor of history and letters, director of the COL, about his life in two departments, his views on interdisciplinary teaching, how this impacts his own scholarship, and the future of the COL.

Q. How did you end up with a joint appointment in the College of Letters and History Department?

EK: As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley I created my own curriculum combining philosophy, history and religion as a “Humanities Field Major.” In graduate school at UCLA I combined work in History and Comparative Literature and served as a graduate fellow at the U.C. Humanities research Institute at U.C. Irvine where I also studied with Jacques Derrida. When I received a Fulbright to conduct research in Paris it was as a “philosopher.” When I saw the job description for a joint appointment between a History department and an interdisciplinary major that combined literature, philosophy and history and I said to my wife “this job is me!!!” I was overjoyed when I got the call offering me the position. How many other Professors get to teach Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask one day and Milton’s Paradise Lost the next?

Q. Has this given you a new perspective on the academic disciplines and interdisciplinarity?

EK: The challenges and rewards of a life in two departments forced me to think about the parameters of the historical discipline as well as to appreciate the different sorts of questions asked by philosophers, or literary scholars. Beyond this, the responsibilities of serving as Director of the College of Letters led me to research the origins of the Wesleyan “College Plan” in 1959 and then to publish an article on the challenges facing interdisciplinary programs and departments in the 21^st century. Wesleyan still stands at the fore of interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship, but we have to improve the ways that we provide our interdisciplinary programs and departments support without sacrificing the disciplines that ground them.

Q: Has your intellectual work been altered by your appointment?

EK: I feel that the support and interest of my colleagues in the History Department have allowed me to develop as an historian even as I branch out into areas such as critical theory and the philosophy of history. I have been an editor for the Wesleyan based journal History and Theory, also celebrating its 50^th year, since my arrival at Wesleyan and this has been a source of both joy and inspiration. Then of course there are the realities of teaching in the College of Letters.  In any given year I could be teaching texts of antiquity, the middle ages, the early modern, or the modern and in most cases I teach alongside a scholar from another discipline. The joy of this endeavor is that I am always learning alongside and often from the students.

Q.  What projects are you working on currently?

Alexander Nehamas, professor of humanities at Princeton University, delivered the COL 50th Anniversary Philip Hallie Memorial Lecture Nov. 6 in Memorial Chapel. His talk was titled "Because It Was He, Because It Was I: The Good of Friendship."

I have two projects on the front burner right now. The first is a book on the Talmudic Lectures that the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas presented in Paris between 1960 and 1990. This book explores the role and place of the author and authority in intellectual production but also the tense relation between religious belief and historical interpretation. The other project is focused on the utility of employing deconstruction for the writing of history. This project came about as a result of research into the relationship of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida that just seemed to click while I teaching a class on Derrida for my 20^th century intellectual history class. This led me to write an article entitled “Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision” for History and Theory. I am looking forward to completing this book while serving as Director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Paris Program next year.

EK: This is a tough one. A bit of speculative history I suppose.  While I can’t say with any certainty what the academic trends will look like in 50 years I do know that structure of the College of Letters is such that it will be able to move and thrive with the times. At our recent 50th anniversary celebration dinner I was amazed by the ways that the class of 1959 and the class of 2009 were able to come together around a shared experience and a shared body of texts. To be sure the interpretations differed but the COL experience of cultivating the educated imagination, the ability to think individually but discuss collectively, allowed all of our alums to immediately connect across the generations.

Cecilia Miller, associate professor of history, co-chair and tutor in the College of Social Studies; Richard Adelstein, professor of economics and tutor in the College of Social Studies; and Brian Fay, the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, tutor in the College of Social Studies and editor of History and Theory, gather at the College of Social Studies 50th Anniversary lecture Nov. 6.

From its beginnings in 1959, Wesleyan’s College of Social Studies (CSS) has grown into a well-respected program and is celebrating its 50th year in 2009. The multidisciplinary program allows students to explore the subjects of government, history, economics and philosophy concurrently. Many attended lectures and celebrations for CSS during Homecoming/Family Weekend last weekend.

The first event of the weekend was a CSS Public Lecture by John Goldberg (CSS 1983, professor of Law, Harvard Law School) on Friday, Nov.  6. His talk was titled “John Locke on Tort Reform (Really!): A CSS Parable.”  John Goldberg was introduced by Brian Fay, the William Griffin professor of philosophy. Richard Adelstein, professor of economics, gave the response.

Peter Kilby, professor of economics, emeritus, chaired a CSS Alum Speaker Panel on CSS Entrepreneurs on Saturday, Nov. 7. The panelists included Steve Torok ‘73, Donald Zilkha ‘73, Lincoln Frank ‘79, and Jonathan Bush ‘93. A second Alum Speaker Panel, on International Affairs, was chaired by Andrew Crawford ‘97, and included panelists Bob Hunter ‘62, John Stremlau ‘66, Carl Robichaud ‘99 and Michael Brotchner ‘95.

“What impressed me the most was the way in which speaker after speaker mentioned, with specific examples, how the method of study in the CSS continued to profoundly shape the way they handled their jobs in their subsequent career, whether it be a public defender or a venture capitalist,” said Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought and CSS Co-Chair, who attended the event.

“Skills such as being able to write quickly and clearly; and to see many sides of a problem, and integrate them in a single analysis served CSS students well after graduation,” he recounts.

Along with Fay, Adelstein, Kilby (who retired last year), and Rutland, core professors in the CSS within the past 20 years include Cecilia Miller, associate professor of history and CSS Co-Chair; Bill Barber, Andrews Professor of Economics, Emeritus; the late David Titus, professor of government, Emeritus; David Morgan, professor of history, Emeritus; Don Moon, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Professor in the College of Social Studies and professor of government; Nancy Schwartz, professor of government; Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government; Gil Skillman, chair and professor of economics; Joyce Jacobsen, Andrews Professor of Economics; and Erik Grimmer-Solem, associate professor of history and director of the Public Affairs Center.

According to the program description, the College of Social Studies “was created in the belief that the various social studies can best be pursed together, rather than in isolation, and that the student will better understand the subject matter and the nature of each discipline by considering it in its relation to the other disciplines, and to develop a sense of methodological criticism supported by work in philosophy.”

Former Wesleyan President Victor Butterfield crafted the plan for the CSS along with the College of Letters (also celebrating 50 years) and the College of Quantitative Studies, which disbanded in the 1960’s. Butterfield believed strongly in the importance of interdisciplinary studies.

“The curriculum stresses fundamental techniques of analysis in economics, history, and government, as well as their application in the subject matter of those fields. Precision in writing and speaking is stressed in essays and class work. A number of lectures and seminars provide a sense of community that balances the educational aspect of the College,” the program description states.

Throughout the years, CSS has produced more than 930 graduates including John Driscoll, who currently works as the University Relations Alumni Director. Driscoll graduated from Wesleyan in class of 1962 and was a member of the very first CSS class.

“In the beginning the CSS was the unstructured part of Wesleyan,” Driscoll says. “The ‘normal’ parts of Wesleyan were filled with requirements, grades, and regular tests. That may seem odd today, but then we were looked on with a mixture of curiosity, envy and resentment because while others were sweating through the regular grind, we weren’t. At least not in the same way. We were “free” of the superficial preoccupation with grades; we could focus on learning for its own sake. And for us the ability to focus on one tutorial for ten weeks along with a colloquium on epistemology each week was true liberation.”

CSS graduates have gone on to excel in a range of fields, including government service, law, business, the arts and even medicine. CSS graduates have also been well represented on the Wesleyan Board of Trustees, and in recent years the Board has included four or more CSS alumni.

Book translated by Krishna Winston.

Krishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, dean of the Arts and Humanities and coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, translated the new book, Don Juan: His Own Version, written by Peter Handke.

The 128-paged book is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  It will be released in Feburary.

Deb Olin Unferth joined the Department of English in fall.

Deb Olin Unferth has joined the Department of English as assistant professor. She specializes in fiction writing, innovative literature, the short story and the novel.

She says she was attracted to Wesleyan because of its well-known writing program.

“Wesleyan is a fantastic liberal arts school,” Unferth says. “I am very excited to be here. I am enjoying my classes immensely. The students are excellent—in ability, focus, creativity, intelligence, and temperament.”

Unferth has a B.A. in philosophy with distinction from the University of Colorado, where she was Phi Beta Kappa. In 1998, she earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.

Unferth’s debut novel Vacation was published by McSweeney’s in October 2008. The book garnered her the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award for 2009.

Locations included in the book are Manhattan, Syracuse, and Nicaragua (places that Unferth says she knows well). Vacation could be described as being “about leaving–about all forms of departure,” she says.

Unferth’s first book received several positive reviews and the Village Voice called Vacation a “dreamy, surreal debut novel … at once precise and startling.”

Additionally, her story “Wait Till You See Me Dance” was published in the July 2009 issue of Harper’s. Unferth’s collection of stories called Minor Robberies, was published by McSweeney’s in 2007.

Unferth lives in New Haven, Conn. Next semester she will be teaching an advanced fiction writing workshop and a literature class called “Poetics of the Short Short” about the very short story.

Several Wesleyan faculty, graduate students and alumni participated in the 2009 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting Oct. 18-21 in Portland, Ore.

Suzanne O’Connell, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, director of the Service Learning Center, presented a research poster and delivered a presentation titled “Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention and promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences.” She spoke about the grant-funded organization Geoscience Academics in the Northeast (GAIN), which was established to build a community of academic geoscience women within a small geographic area.

Johan Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences, presented an abstract of his research titled “Twelve Years of Element Flux Measurements at Copahue Volcano.” He spoke about measuring water fluxes and river water compositions on the volcano for the last 12 years including a magmatic eruption period in 2000.

Varekamp and Ellen Thomas, research professor of earth and environmental sciences, presented the paper “Natural and Human Impacts on the Evolution of Block Island, RI.” Sarah Gillig ‘09, Emma Kravet ‘09 and Conor Veeneman ‘09 also contributed to the paper.

Dana Royer, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, gave a talk titled “Leaf Economic Traits from Fossils Support a Weedy Origin for Angiosperms.” Royer explained how many key aspects of early angiosperms are poorly known. By studying leaf economic traits such as photosynthetic rate and leaf lifespan, Royer concludes that early Cretaceous landscapes were populated with weedy angiosperms with short lived leaves.

Royer’s former post-doc Dan Peppe and Gabriela Doria M.A. ‘09 gave a talk. McNair Fellow Sofia Oliver ‘10 attended and co-authored Peppe’s paper.

Earth and Environmental Sciences major James Rea ‘09, who currently works at the Cascade Volcano Observatory, presented his work on “Regional Magmatic Setting of Callaqui Volcano (S-Andes, Chile).” Rea samples several rocks from lava flows, scoria cones and dikes around the volcano for trace elements, mineral chemistry and radiogenic isotope compositions.

Earth and Environmental Sciences graduate student Tristan Kading presented a similar abstract titled “Copahue Volcano, Argentina: Introducing ‘Extreme Environments’ on Earth to High School Students” and “Lake Caviahue, Argentina as a Source-Sink for Volcanic Arsenic and Phosphorus.”  Kadding has spoke to local high school students about field work in the small village of Caviahue. The talks highlight the nature of geological field work while touching on some important basic concepts in earth science.

Other attendees included Peter Patton, professor and chair of earth and environmental sciences and Emma Mendelsohn ‘10.

Fred Cohan, professor of biology, delivered a presentation titled “Darwin vs. Mayr on the Origin of Bacterial Species,” during a Darwin conference, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. The event was held Oct. 29-31 at the University of Chicago. Cohan joined other evolutionary biologists, historians and philosophers who connected their work directly with Darwin. 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Joel Pfister’s book The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud was published by Duke University Press in June 2009. Pfister is the chair of the English Department and the Kenan Professor of the Humanities, along with being professor of American studies.