Olivia DrakeWhen one of Olin Library's books becomes tattered or torn, Preservation Services helps restore the book, making it again available for circulation. In April, the one-room shop located in Olin's basement received its own facelift. "We outgrew the space that we had," explains Michaelle Biddle, head of preservation services. "Our carpet was saturated with dirt and mold, and we needed more space and better lighting." The renovation included removing a wall between Preservation Services and a storage room formerly used by Special Collections and Archives. The storage area was merged with the current preservation lab, adding an additional 180 square…
David LowOscar-winner Akiva Goldsman ’83 (with David Koepp) co-wrote the screenplay of Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard, which was number one at the box office at $48 million during its first weekend. The film opened nationwide at at 3,527 theaters on Friday, May 15. Based on the novel by Dan Brown, Angels and Demons is a prequel to the best-selling thriller The Da Vinci Code which follows the adventures of Harvard University symbologist and theology sleuth Robert Langdon. The movie version of The Da Vinci Code, which also had a screenplay by Goldsman, was a hugely popular film internationally,…
Susan Allison ’85 has just published a poetry collection, Down by the Riverside Ways (Antrim Books). Allison returned to Middletown a few years after graduating from Wesleyan and has lived here since. Most of the poems in this collection have been written in Middletown over the last 20 years. Allison comments: "I like the word concatenation, meaning: to link in a chain, to describe some of the poems. Many of the poems are concatenations of ideas based in experience. The book as a whole is a concatenation, and strives to make sense through random strings of devotion. I owe much…
Jan Naegele, professor of neuroscience and behavior, professor and chair of biology, was honored for her innovative work in bioscience by the organization “We Work For Health" overseen by the Connecticut Consortium of Independent Colleges on May 18. Congressman Joe Courtney presented a plaque to Naegele’s designee, Deborah Hall '11 at a ceremony in Cromwell, Conn.
Scott Plous, professor of psychology, received a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the Social Psychology Network. Plous founded the web-based presence in 1996. The grant will be used to transform the site into a full featured social networking service for visitors and its approximately 2,000 members across the world. For more information read the accompanying article in The Wesleyan Connection.
By Brian Katten, sports information director The 2009 Wesleyan men’s lacrosse team did something that eluded each of the last eight Cardinals lax squads: winning a NESCAC tournament title and earning an automatic bid to the NCAA Division III tournament. Reaching the NESCAC playoff semi-finals for the seventh year in a row and the championship game for the fifth time in team history, Wesleyan finally realized its goal of a conference title on May 3 when the Cardinals downed the Tufts Jumbos, 14-10, for the NESCAC crown. Head Coach John Raba, who stands a remarkable 155-67 over his 13 seasons,…
An essay titled "The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism," by Liza McAlister, associate professor of religion, associate professor of African American studies, associate professor of American studies, has been selected as a "key essay" in the book, American Studies: An Anthology. American Studies is a vigorous, bold account of the changes in the field of American studies over the last 35 years. Through this set of carefully selected key essays by an editorial board of expert scholars, the book demonstrates how changes in the field have produced new genealogies that tell different histories of…
Recent sculptures by Melissa Stern ’80 will be shown with work by four other artists at the Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery Open House in Kent, Conn. from May 23 through July 5. The opening is from 4 to 6 p.m. on May 23. Stern's work reflects both non-Western and outsider art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are characterized by their richly drawn and deeply layered surfaces. She uses a wide range of materials from encaustic to clay, pastel to steel. “All of my pieces share a thematic thread,” Stern says. “Childlike and goofy my figures live in a dream…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the lead author of a new article on the intuitive foundations of children's mathematical thinking. The article, co-authored with collaborators at Harvard University, is titled "Children’s multiplicative transformations of discrete and continuous quantities." It will appear in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2009, in a special issue devoted to the typical development of numerical cognition.
A photography book featuring contributions by Jennifer Tucker, associate professor of history, associate professor of science in society, chair and associate professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, was shortlisted for the 2009 And/or Book Awards, the UK’s leading prizes for books published in the fields of photography and the moving image. The book, Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900 , was written by Tucker, Corey Keller, Tom Gunning and Maren Gröning. It is published by Yale University Press. The book received the And/or Book Award during an awards ceremony April 23 in London.
Andrew Curran, associate professor of French, has been awarded the 2009-2010 Paul Klemperer Fellowship at the New York Academy of Medicine. This fellowship is awarded to support summer research in history and the humanities as they relate to medicine, the biomedical sciences and health. Curran is currently completing a book titled The Anatomy of Blackness, an interdisciplinary study related to the status of the African in the Enlightenment-era life sciences.