Olivia DrakeWesleyan's Green Street Arts Center received a $7,500 grant from the Middletown Youth Services Bureau on Sept. 27. The award will support Green Street's Arts and Science Afterschool program during the 2013 fiscal year.
The Center for the Arts received a grant worth $6,485 from the New England Foundation for the Arts to support "Voices of Afghanistan." Voices of Afghanistan was the first performance of Music & Public Life, a year-long campus and community-wide exploration of sounds, words, and the spirit of music in public.
Greg Voth, associate professor of physics, received a grant worth $300,000 from the National Science Foundation's Material Research division to support his study on "Rod Dynamics in Turbulence: Simultaneous 3D measurements of Anisotropic Particles and Velocity Fields" through May 31, 2015. In a wide range of natural and industrial situations, turbulent flows carry particulate material. For example, clouds are turbulent flows containing water droplets and ice crystals. Papermaking uses turbulent suspensions of fibers. If the particles are spheres, there are a variety of tools available for measuring their motion. But usually the particles are not spheres, and the movement and…
Wesleyan received a $10,000 grant from the Learning by Giving Foundation to support a Service Learning course titled "Money and Social Change: Innovative Paradigms and Strategies" on Sept. 18, 2012. The course is taught by Joy Anderson '89, visiting assistant professor of public policy. Students will use the $10,000 grant dollars to allocate to local organizations. The course will culminate in students writing a request for proposals based on the personal theory of change around capital and social change that they will develop throughout the course. Learn more about the class online here.
Constance Leidy, assistant professor of mathematics, received a $130,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematics Science to support her research on "Noncommunative Techniques in Knot Theory" through Aug. 31, 2014.
Lori Gruen, professor of philosophy, environmental studies, and feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the co-editor of Reflecting on Nature Readings in Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Second Edition, published by Oxford University Press, August 2012. Spanning centuries of philosophical and environmental thought, Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, will inform and enlighten students while also encouraging debate. The comprehensive collection presents 50 classic and contemporary readings on the intellectual climate and patterns of environmental concern. The selections are topically organized into sections on animals, biodiversity, ethics, images of nature, wilderness, aesthetics, climate change and food. This thematic organization, in combination…
Lauren RubensteinProfessor of Music Eric Charry is the editor of a new book, Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World, published Oct. 23 by Indiana University Press. The book is part of the African Expressive Culture series. Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Charry and an international group of contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa; the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, raga and gospel music; and the continued vitality of…
Richard Elphick, co-chair of the College of Social Studies, professor of history, is the author of The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa, published by University of Virginia Press, Sept. 26, 2012. From the beginning of the 19th Century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa’s ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation’s history. The missionaries articulated a universalist and…
Michael McAlear, chair and associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, is the co-author of "The adjacent positioning of co-regulated gene pairs is widely conserved across eukaryotes," published in BMC Genomics, October 2012. The article is online here. The co-authors are Ph.D candidate James Arnone and Jeffrey Arace '12; Adam Robbins-Pianka BA '08, MA '10; and Sara Kass-Gergi '12. The team investigated co-regulated gene sets in S. cerevisiae beyond those related to ribosome biogenesis, and found that a number of these regulons, including those involved in DNA metabolism, heat shock, and the response to cellular stressors were also significantly enriched for adjacent gene…
Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Son of Destruction, published by Severn House (U.K.) in October 2012. The U.S. version will be released in March 2013. When his mother dies, Dan Carteret has only two leads to the identity of his father: a photograph of four young men, and a newspaper cutting showing the remains of a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Carteret travels to his mother's hometown of Fort Jude and discovers that three cases of spontaneous combustion have occurred there in the recent past. In the search for his father, he confronts…
Amy MacQueen, assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry; Karen Voelkel Meiman, research associate; and Sarah Moustafa BA'11, MA'12 are co-authors of the paper, "Full-Length Synaptonemal Complex Grows Continuously during Meiotic Prophase in Budding Yeast," published by PLOS Genetics, Oct. 11, 2012. Moustafa worked on the paper as an undergraduate researcher and again as a BA/MA student. An abstract and the paper is online here.
Benjamin TraversOn Friday, Sept. 7, The MASH, inspired by Fete de la Musique, also known as World Music Day, highlighted the student music scene at Wesleyan University and kicked off the year-long campus and community-wide Music & Public Life program. The event opened with Wesleyan President Michael Roth joining the faculty and staff band Mattabassett String Collective for a short set at the Usdan University Center. Three outfitted stages -- located at the West College Courtyard, Usdan Huss Courtyard and Olin Library lawn -- provided students with both the opportunity to listen to some of Wesleyan's most popular student bands and…