Olivia DrakeAfter 42 years of teaching, and a lifetime of painting and drawing, John Frazer isn't ready to rinse his brushes clean just yet. Although the professor of art, emeritus, is wheelchair-bound after six knee surgeries, his art studio remains intact. Set-up easels, brushes and oil paints, a painter's palate and untouched cotton canvases await his return. "I haven't been able to paint in over a year, but I will return to painting. I am sure of that, but I prefer to work standing up," Frazer says. "It's the only way I've ever worked." Frazer, a Texas native, came to Wesleyan…
Corrina KerrGeoff Hammerson hopes that the students who take his Graduate Liberal Studies Program week-long immersion course Life Among Snow and Ice this March get "an appreciation for the diverse and abundant life of parts of Earth that relatively few people experience" and learn how life copes with challenging conditions. Hammerson has been teaching GLSP classes since 1985. His classes on the environment and nature are usually widely popular. In fact, as this article comes out the March 2009 course is fully enrolled. Most recently he has taught a course on the biology of reptiles and amphibians (more…)
Martha Gilmore, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, received a grant from NASA on Nov. 18. The award, worth $212,000, will fund a study titled "Mapping and Structure Analysis of Fold Belts in Tessera Terrain, Venus." Gilmore is conducting the study with Phil Resor, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences.
Bill HolderJustin Oberman ’96 is planning a run for the House seat that soon will be vacated by Rahm Emanuel in the Illinois 5th district. The date for the election will not be set until Emanuel officially resigns to become President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Oberman is an authority on transportation and homeland security, having served as a founding member and senior executive of the Transportation Security Administration. From 2003 through 2005, he was TSA’s assistant administrator for Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing. He was responsible for the agency’s programs that identify known or potential terrorists threats to the nation’s…
David LowIn the Heights, the Tony Award winner for Best Musical 2008, is one of five recordings nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Musical Show Album category. Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 wrote the music and lyrics for the show. The other Grammy-nominees include the soundtracks for Gypsy, The Little Mermaid, South Pacific and Young Frankenstein. The nominees for the In the Heights album, released by Razor & Tie Entertainment/Ghostlight Records, include Kurt Deutsch, Alex Lacamoire, Andrés Levin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Joel Moss and Bill Sherman ’02, producers, as well as Miranda as composer/lyricist. The nominations for the 51st annual Grammy Awards…
Jeffrey Richards ’69, along with Jerry Frankel and Steve Traxler, will produce two new Broadway plays in the coming months. First up is a revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, scheduled to begin performances at the Shubert Theater in New York City on Feb. 26, 2009. Blithe Spirit is a comedy about Charles Condomine, who with his second wife, Ruth, invites a local medium, Madame Arcati, to his house to do some research into the spirit world for his new book. But trouble arises when Arcati conjures up the ghost of Charles’s first wife, Elvira. The new production has a…
The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service (W. W. Norton, 2008) by Andrew Meier ’85 was the subject of an article in the New York Times on Nov. 8. A former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, Meier spent seven years for his new book researching the fascinating tale of Isaiah “Cy” Oggins, an American radical and Columbia University graduate who served in the highest circles of Stalin’s intelligence agency, the NKVD. From the late 1920s through the 1930s, Oggins traveled to Berlin, Paris, and Manchuria on his missions. In 1947, he was poisoned by lethal injection under Stalin’s…
Sean Patch ’02 knows how to beat the morning rush—he paddles across the Hudson River to his Manhattan teaching job in a kayak. The New York Post caught up with Patch, a former Wall Street trader who started boating to work this past summer to save money after the cost of a ferry ride nearly doubled. "Patch, a 29-year-old high school math teacher, unties the 17-foot kayak he keeps at a dock on the Weehawken waterfront," said the Post. Pulling on an orange life jacket, he grabs a foghorn, a safety light and a drybag holding his laptop and his…
Books William Evans Jr. '40 Is a Figure in World War II Book A new book by Robert Mrazek, A Dawn Like Thunder (Little Brown, 2008), tells a little known story of 35 men in the almost forgotten U.S. Navy Torpedo Squadron Eight that helped change the course of history at the epic World War II battles of Midway and Guadalcanal. These men displayed acts of courage, loyalty, and sacrifice and went on to become the most highly decorated American naval air squadron of the war. Williams Evans Jr. ’40 was one of the heroes in the squadron, and his…
David PesciJeanine Basinger, Chair and Corwin-Fuller Professor of film studies reviews, Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master. Fleming directed such Hollywood classics as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and yet remains curiously "forgotten" by most in the business according to Sragow.
Scott Plous, professor of psychology, is quoted in this Washington Post piece that has the writer wondering if there is a way to make a "friend" of indecision.
Mark Slobin, professor of music, received honorable mention for the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies Dec. 2 by the Modern Language Association of America. Slobin and was honored for his work on Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive, published by Wayne State University Press. The prize is awarded each even-numbered year and is awarded alternately to an outstanding translation of a Yiddish literary work or an outstanding scholarly work in English in the field of Yiddish. Slobin will receive a certificate for the achievement Dec. 28 during the Modern Language Association of America's annual convention…