David LowMathematical physicist Jennifer Chayes ’79 recently announced the opening of the new Microsoft Research New York City lab, which will consist of 15 researchers who previously worked at Yahoo! Research. According to The New York Times, the lab will “include well-known researchers in hot niches of computing research like Duncan Watts (online social behavior), David Pennock (prediction markets) and John Langford (machine learning).” Chayes will be the managing director of the new research lab. On the Inside Microsoft Research web site, she says: “This new lab will provide an opportunity for Microsoft Research researchers and developers worldwide to share and…
Lawrence P. Jackson ’90 is the author of My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (University of Chicago Press). Part detective story and part wrenching family history, the book delves into the history of Jackson’s family in slavery and emancipation in Virginia’s Pittsylvania County. Johnson's publication was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered. This summer, n+ magazine,a publication of literature, culture and politics, will include a long essay with sections from the book. Jackson’s research led him to the house of distant relations. He then became absorbed by the search for his ancestors and aware…
Cynthia RockwellA new exhibition by visual artist, author, and educator Wendy Richmond ’75 opened at The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design on May 25. "Wendy Richmond: Navigating the Personal Bubble" will be up through Nov. 4. Richmond documents and explores the ways in which digital technology creates “personal bubbles”—or mobile privacy zones, which transform the social experience of sharing public space. Museum director John Smith calls her work “surprisingly revealing of the ways in which we interact and communicate in this digital age,” and adds that the video installation, “Alone in Public (2012),” was created especially for the…
Ari Brand ’06 has received acclaim for playing the title role in My Name Is Asher Lev, a play produced by the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn. which completed its run on May 27. The play has been adapted by Aaron Posner from the Chaim Potok novel about a troubled, successful painter whose creative work clashes with the world of his parents. In a positive review of the production in The New York Times, Anita Gates writes: “If you are unfamiliar with the actors in the excellent new Long Wharf production of ‘My Name Is Asher Lev,’ just…
Olivia DrakeThe Wesleyan Chapter of Brighter Dawns, a non-profit organization founded by Tasmiha Khan ’12, was featured on News 8 WTNH on May 11. Brighter Dawns raises funds to build latrines and wells in Bangladesh. According to the report, Brighter Dawns started when Tasmiha Khan went to a slum in Bangladesh with her family and visited a young woman living in poverty. "Her name was Usma. She was about 15 years old. Had three children. Was forced into poverty at that time," she said. Khan started doing a few things to help that family, and when she came back to the U.S. she kept helping,…
David PesciKennedy Odede ’12 was featured in a May 5 Hartford Courant article discussing his mother’s impact on all he has done in the last four years. Odede came to Wesleyan from the Kibera slum of Nairobi and has since built a school, a clean water latrine, and a health center back home. "Work hard and read books. Look around you, but don't hate," Jane Achieng Odede told the young son she struggled to feed in Kibera, one of the world's largest slums next to Kenya's capital of Nairobi. Residents there are mostly jobless or live on less than a dollar a day,…
In an interview with popular Berkshire radio host Alan Chartock on the NPR affiliate WAMC, Wesleyan President Michael Roth discussed topics ranging from his time at Wesleyan to Freud and the creation of the College of the Environment.
Elizabeth McAlister, associate professor of religion, was invited to present recent work on how evangelical missionaries are responding to the Haiti earthquake at a conference on Refugees and Missionization at the Max Planck Institute, Goettingen, Germany Oct. 6-7, 2011. She also attended an invited conference on the study of prayer funded by the Templeton Foundation at the Social Science Research Council, Desmond NYC, on April 30, 2012. McAlister also is an associate professor of African American studies and associate professor of American studies.
Mary Jane Rubenstein, associate professor of religion, is the author of "Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing and the Sovereign," published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 80, No. 2, pages 485–517, in 2012. Until very recently, the paper explains, "the creation myth of secular modernity has been the hot big bang hypothesis: the explosion of our single universe out of a single point. Physicists concede that in its traditional form, this story performs an uncanny recapitulation of Christian creation theology: the universe bursts forth suddenly, in a flood of light, out of nothing. As many contemporary thinkers have…
Lauren RubensteinLeo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, is the co-editor of the book, Träume. Das Traumtagebuch 1875-1931, published by Wallstein Verlag in 2012. Träume is the dream journal of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Schnitzler is the author of La Ronde, Fräulein Else and other classics of early 20-century Austrian literature. Prepared together with Peter Michael Braunwarth to celebrate Schnitzler's 150th birthday, the revised and expanded version of the dream texts originally included in Schnitzler's diaries can be read as an implicit challenge to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Schnitzler's Träume (Dreams) is both an "unconscious" autobiography of its author, whom Freud called his doppelgänger, and a dark, surreal reflection of…
Charles Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology; Ellen Bartolini '11; and Emma Zoloth '10 are the co-authors of an article on avoidant personality disorder, published in the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, 2nd Edition by the Elsevier imprint Academic Press, pages 257-266, 2012. According to an abstract of the article, "Avoidant personality disorder (APD) is characterized by severe and chronic social anxiety. Prospective studies demonstrate modest symptomatic stability and chronic functional impairment. Current diagnostic conceptualizations distinguish APD from other distress disorders, such as anxiety and depression, by a long-standing pattern of social avoidance accompanied by fears of criticism and low self-worth so pervasive that it defines who a…
Justine Quijada, assistant professor of religion, is the author of two new publications. They include: “Signs as Symptoms in Buryat Shamanic Callings,” published in The Healing Landscapes of Central and Southeastern Siberia, with David Anderson, ed. The publication is supported by the Canadian Circumpolar Institute (CCI) Press in cooperation with the Centre for the Cross-Cultural Study of Health and Healing, University of Alberta. The edited volume is the first in a possible series that addresses health problems in Native Canadian communities by both training doctors to consider cross-cultural perspectives in health, and to train more Native Canadians as doctors. The book…