Cynthia RockwellEllen J. Zucker ’83, a partner at the Boston-based firm of Burns & Levinson LLP, was honored as one of the 10 "Top Lawyers of the Year" by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, the statewide lawyers' newspaper. David Yas, publisher and editor-in-chief of the publication, pronounced Zucker a “fabulous litigator,” noting in particular two of her recent successes at the trial court and appellate levels. He touted Zucker’s representation of Malvina Monteiro, a former employee of the City of Cambridge, who claimed that she had faced retaliation after filing a complaint of race discrimination. The jury agreed and awarded Monteiro more than…
David LowGrowing up, Steve Almond ’88 secretly desired to live the life of a rock star but after taking piano lessons he realized he had no musical talent. Though he didn’t become a musician, he became the next best thing: an obsessive music fan, particularly of rock and roll—or what he calls “a drooling fanatic.” Almond’s new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House), recounts his love for music from his earliest rock criticism to his devotion to obscure bands to his meeting with Erin, a former heavy-metal “chick” who became his wife. As he has shown in…
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press) by Seth Lerer ’76 has been honored with the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The $30,000 award, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism, is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University of California San Diego, where he is distinguished professor in the Department of Literature, will receive the award in a free, public event at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 6, in the Senate Chamber…
Olivia DrakeHilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, received a five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Magnitude Biases in Mathematical Cognition, Learning, and Development." The grant supports research on the development of children's mathematical understanding. The grant is worth $761,005. More about her grant and studies can be found here. Read more here.
Wesleyan's Center for the Arts received a grant for $10,000 from the New England Foundation for the Arts for the "Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance -Summer 2010-Pilot Program."
Brian KattenBen Cohen ’10 was chosen to receive the 2010 Bill Esposito Memorial Award by the Eastern College Athletic Conference - Sports Information Directors Association (ECAC-SIDA). Named for long-time sports information director Bill Esposito, who served in the profession at St. John's University in Jamaica, N.Y. for 25 years, the award recognizes the outstanding contributions of a senior student among the ECAC membership (more than 300 East Coast Colleges from all NCAA Divisions) who plans to pursue a career in sports information. Cohen has been a stalwart of Wesleyan's sports information student staff for three years. A staff sportswriter for the…
Five Wesleyan students will be honored at the Wesleyan's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) Program banquet in honor in honor of its graduating fellows of 2010 on May 4. The students are Sarah Brown, Indee Mitchell, Katherine Rodriguez, Carolyn Sinclair McCalla and Miles Tokunow. The fundamental objective of MMUF is to increase the number of minority students, and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities, who will pursue PhDs in core fields in the arts and sciences. The program aims to reduce over time the serious faculty under-representation of individuals from certain minority groups, as well as to…
Thirteen Wesleyan students participated in Pre-Law Career Day March 26 in Brooklyn, N.Y. The students visited Chief Magistrate Judge Steven Gold '77 at the U.S. Eastern District Court. The day comprised of a career panel of other Wesleyan alumni lawyers assembled by Gold, a networking pizza lunch and the viewing of court proceedings. “It was an excellent experience for the students, and an example of how Wesleyan’s alumni lawyers connect with our students,” says trip organizer James Kubat, associate director of the Career Resource Center and pre-law advisor. The undergraduates on the trip include Alison Cies; Philip Clark; Erica Davidson;…
Vera Schwarcz, the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, director of the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, chair and professor of East Asian Studies, professor of history, was a guest author at the Farmington River Literary Arts Center's "Readings by the River" series April 18. Schwarcz read from her book of poetry titled Chisel of Remembrance. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Schwarcz has made the quest for remembrance a central theme in all her works. Her writing has been nominated for the National Jewish Book Award and has been accorded several major grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Suzanne O'Connell, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, director of the Service Learning Center, will be the K. Douglas Nelson Lecture Series keynote speaker at Syracuse University April 22. Her title is “Weddell Sea Sediment, ODP Site 694: One Clue to Antarctica’s Past.” The event is sponsored by Syracuse's Department of Earth Sciences.
Student activists involved in Students for a Just and Stable Future were featured in an April 18 Middletown Press article titled "Wesleyan students raising awareness of clean energy, camping outside a week." The students want state leaders to work toward requiring that all electricity in the state comes from renewable sources such as solar or wind power by 2020. They are "rejecting the dirty electricity of their dorm rooms and are instead camping on Foss Hill." “What we want is that anytime you are in your house in Connecticut and you turn on a switch, all that electricity is coming…
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