David LowIn his remarkable sports book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door (University of Massachusetts Press), Marty Dobrow ’83 explores the “anguish of almost” as he examines the lives of six minor league baseball players who are so close to something they want so much, something they have always wanted, but something they still might not get. What links them together, aside from their common goal of wanting to play on a major league team, is that they are all represented by the same team of agents whose own aspirations parallel those of the players they represent. The book explores the contradictory culture…
Cynthia RockwellJoy Anderson ’89, the founder and president of Criterion Ventures, was selected for Fast Company’s 2011 list of “100 Most Creative People in Business.” Criterion Ventures is a hybrid for-profit/non-profit firm consisting of Criterion Ventures and Criterion Institute. It identifies large-scale social and environmental problems and designs and implements collaborative ventures and projects that generate solutions to the problems. A political science major at Wesleyan, Anderson was an teacher and administrator in Brooklyn, with professional leadership roles at the national level. She completed her her Ph.D. in American History from New York University in 2001. Since founding Criterion Ventures in…
Award-winning TV news producer and documentarian Paul Mason ’77 was appointed president and CEO of Link TV, the U.S.-based global-affairs independent broadcaster. Mason, a 28-year veteran of ABC News, says his plan for Link TV includes digital news platforms in combination with independent global journalism. In a video interview, Mason explains: "In some ways global news is covered like a sporting event, as opposed to actual lives that are lived…And I also ask: Since the earthquake in Japan, how often has an American news audience actually seen follow-up coverage about what has happened in Japan, and about of how lives are…
Olivia DrakePam Tatge, director of the Center for the Arts, received a $600 grant from the Middletown Commission on the Arts (MCA) to support the Arts Walk at Riverview Plaza this summer. Arts Walk was a pilot program of the Middletown Commission on the Arts to host arts activities at Riverview Plaza as a way to attract people to visit downtown Middletown on weekends in the summer. The Center for the Arts and Center for Creative Youth used the funds to provide performances/activities for people who passed by the plaza.
Leah Wright wrote a chapter titled "The Black Cabinet: Economic Civil Rights in the Nixon Administration," which appears on pages 240-290 in the book, Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican. More information on the book is online here. Wright is assistant professor of African American studies, assistant professor of history. Wright also spent part of the summer as one of four Frederick B. Artz Scholars at Oberlin College. She examined the papers of Jewel LaFontant MANkarious – a prominent civil rights activist, lawyer and presidential appointee.
Margot Weiss, assistant professor of anthropology, assistant professor of American Studies, is the author of Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, published in January 2012 by Duke University Press. Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM (SM) community. Margot Weiss conducted ethnographic research at dungeon play parties and at workshops on bondage, role play, and flogging, and she interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners. She describes a scene devoted to a form of erotic play organized around technique, rules and regulations, consumerism, and self-mastery. Challenging the notion that SM…
Sarah Croucher co-edited the book, The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts, published in 2011. Croucher is assistant professor of anthropology, assistant professor of archeology, assistant professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies. The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts: Postcolonial Historical Archaeologies explores the complex interplay of colonial and capital formations throughout the modern world. The authors present a critical approach to this topic, trying to shift discourses in the theoretical framework of historical archaeology of capitalism and colonialism through the use of postcolonial theory. This work does not suggest a new theoretical framework as such, but rather suggests…
Natasha Korda, professor of English, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2011. Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives,…
Manju Hingorani, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, co-authored a study titled "hMSH2 controls ATP processing by hMSH2-hMSH6," published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on Sept. 19. The abstract is online here. Hingorani co-authored another study with David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, professor of chemistry, titled "Allosterism in Muts Proteins: How DNA Mismatch Recognition Signals Repair." The study was published in the Biophysical Journal in 2011. The abstract is online here.
Bill HolderEconomics professor explains why building infrastructure is the best way to promote job growth in Connecticut.