Bill HolderTimothy Shiner has been appointed the director of university events and scheduling. He will continue to maintain the New Student Orientation program. Shiner came to Wesleyan in 2006, initially as the director of student activities and leadership development. He quickly transformed the student activities office into an efficient and streamlined department that worked closely with the events and scheduling office. Recognizing his talent for organization, Shiner was asked to lead the New Student Orientation program in 2007. Elisa Del Valle will become the associate director of student activities and leadership development. Del Valle joined the student activities and leadership development team…
Cynthia RockwellLife During Wartime, an exhibition by New York-based artist Melissa Stern ’80, opens Friday, Sept. 16, with a reception at the Barbara Archer Gallery in Atlanta, Ga. A collection of new work by Stern, Life During Wartime explores 1940s America as seen from a contemporary vantage point, using collage materials from that era, as well original drawings. The exhibition continues through Oct. 29. In an article for NY Arts, Stern wrote: “Images of the 1940s have long played a subtle but important role in my artwork. My father was a World War II veteran, along with most of the other…
Rebecca Sender ’85 was appointed deputy director for finance and administration for The Yale Center for British Art. She comes to the Center from the Princeton University Art Museum, where she served as associate director for the last decade; she was also its acting director from January 2008 to June 2010. At Yale, she will manage the operating budget for the Center for British Art, as well as oversee the institution’s security, facilities and operations, human resources, Information Technology and the Museum Shop. She also will manage the institution’s emergency plan and will work with the center’s partner institution, the…
David LowIn his new book, Paul on Mazursky (Wesleyan University Press), film scholar Sam Wasson ’03 talks to writer and director Paul Mazursky about his substantial career, which includes such memorable movies as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto, An Unmarried Woman, Moscow on the Hudson, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and many more. His rich human comedies, grounded in pure emotion, are hard to classify and contain scenes that are simultaneously sincere and hilarious, realistic and romantic. His works represent Hollywood’s most sustained comic expression of the 1970s and 1980s but they have not really…
Sam Han ’06 has written Web 2.0 (Routledge), a highly accessible introductory text which examines crucial discussions and issues surrounding the changing nature of the World Wide Web. It puts Web 2.0 in context within the history of the Web and explores its position within emerging media technologies. The book discusses the connections between diverse media technologies including mobile smart phones, hand-held multimedia players, “netbooks” and electronic book readers such as the Amazon Kindle, all of which are made possible by the Web 2.0. The publication also considers new developments in mobile computing as it integrates various aspects of social…
Olivia Drake(Article submitted by Raghu Appasani) Many Wesleyan students have ambitions to create positive social change and make an impact. This summer, two Wesleyan undergraduates, Lennox Byer ’12 and Alexander Small ’13, travelled to the state of Gujarat in India. Specifically, they travelled to the district of Vadodara where they resided at the Sumandeep Vidyapeeth University (MINDS collaborator) as MINDS Ambassadors. Lennox and Alex have been core members of The MINDS (Mental Illness & Neurological Disorders) Foundation since its incorporation in 2010. The MINDS Foundation is an organization founded by Wesleyan undergraduate Raghu Appasani ’12. The organization has a persistent commitment to…
Eric GershonIn an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, Frederick Cohan, professor of biology, professor of environmental studies, discusses how his experience as a child watching perhaps the greatest “perfect game” in baseball history – The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax’s 1-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs in 1965 – provided lessons for the mining of old data for both baseball front offices and biologists such as himself who specialize in studying bacteria. Read the op-ed here.
David PesciDiscussing the phenomenon of how memories change over time in The Hartford Courant, John Seamon, professor of psychology, professor of neuroscience and behavior John Seamon explains that the mental narrative many of us have created contain inaccuracies, even for seminal events such as the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Seamon, who studies how people remember and recall information, says that many people change details or add “facts” to their mental accounts over time, imbuing them with emotion and convictions. The changes are so profound that, even when confronted with the actual facts of the events, people will continue to insist that their…
University Professor of Music Sumarsam is the author of a paper titled "Binary Division in Javanese Gamelan and Socio-Cosmological Order," which was published in the Proceedings 1st Symposium Singapore: ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia. The abstract of the paper is online here. According to the abstract, “The paper presented by Sumarsam exhibited a firm commitment to indepth musicological analysis of aspects of gamelan music, yet strongly connecting the music analysis to aspects of cultural studies, that is, the social and cosmological order of Javanese society.” In addition, BBC quoted Sumarsam in their broadcasting on "A History of…
Brian Northrop, assistant professor of chemistry, has published “Substituent Effects on the Reversibility of Furan-Maleimide Cycloadditions” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. His co-author is Robert Boutelle, a 2011 Wesleyan graduate who is now a graduate student at UCLA. The paper is online here.
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry, has published “Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders: Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology” in Mutation Research, 2011. The article is online here.
Charles Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology, co-authored a study that was published the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in July 2011. The research suggests self-report assessment measures of personality pathology are more stable and orderly than those obtained by clinical diagnostic interviews, and informs Sanislow’s larger research agenda involving approaches to diagnosing mental disorders. Read the study, titled "Comparing the Temporal Stability of Self-Report and Interview Assessed Personality Disorder" online.