Brian KattenWhen asked about his strongest football memory from his playing days at Wesleyan, Sandy Herzlich ’81 came up with a 20-7 win at Amherst in 1979. “We beat Amherst up there in just a great game,” Sandy recounted. “Kosty [defensive coordinator Peter Kostacopoulos] put in a wild game plan and we were shuttling personnel in and out, and it worked. I remember that as being a very satisfying win.” Head Coach Bill Macdermott called it “one of the best defensive games I’ve ever seen Wesleyan play.” Mac was in his ninth season at the helm. Sandy’s memory of his first…
David LowJustin Kurian ’94 has published his first novel, The Sunlight Lies Beyond (Regent Press), whose protagonist John Arden, a disillusioned American from a Wall Street background, lives in Romania in 1992, a country in transition three years after the collapse of the Communist regime. His life becomes entangled with various people caught in a tumultuous world, among them actors at the National Opera and a talented, ambitious businesswoman who is repressed by society. Arden finds that if he can successfully confront the tribulations ahead, he may possibly vanquish his inner demons. Kurian recently shared some thoughts about working on the…
Bill Holder“Just Look at What You Did!” is the headline on a Nicholas Kristof column, letting readers know that his request that they commemorate Mother’s Day with donations led to a $135,000 gift to Shining Hope for Communities, a project in the Kibera slum of Kenya led by Kennedy Odede ’12 and Jessica Posner ’09. Kirstof writes: “So while in Kenya recently, I dropped by to see what was being done with your money. In the grim alleys of the Kibera slum in the capital of Nairobi, I found a dazzling girls’ school being built with some of those donations —…
Anne Adelman ’83 is the co-author (with Karry Malawista and Catherine Anderson) of Wearing My Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life (Columbia University Press), a book that is certain to enliven psychodynamic theory for students, teachers, clinicians, and others eager to learn the ins and outs of practice. The authors share amusing, poignant, and sometimes difficult stories and reflections from their personal and professional lives as they invite readers to explore the complex underpinnings of the profession, along with analytical theory’s esoteric nature. The vehicle of the story is an integral part of psychodynamic practice…
In 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,…