Alumni Share Stories of How Wesleyan Shaped Their Lives

Back on campus for Reunion & Commencement weekend in May, in this video, alumni of class years from 1953 to 2008 share stories of how Wesleyan shaped their lives. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://youtu.be/E18u2RBSKEc[/youtube]

Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, is a guest speaker featured in the new HBO documentary, "Casting By." The documentary premiered Aug. 5. Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert Redford and others make appearances in the film. "Casting By" explores the unsung hero of Hollywood: a casting director. The story focuses on Marion Dougherty, known for pioneering the casting business, long before the Casting Society of America or the Directors Guild of America existed. Dougherty gave actors including James Dean, Glenn Close, Al Pacino, Bette Midler, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight and Diane Lane…

Laura Patey joined the Office of Student Affairs as an associate dean on July 1. Nathaniel Lerner joined the University Events and Scheduling Office as an assistant director on July 1. Jelisa Adair joined the Center for Community Partnerships as a civic engagement fellow on July 1. Zachary Fischman joined the Center for Community Partnerships as a center of prison education fellow on July 1. Ashleigh Corvi joined the Office of Admissions as an assistant dean on July 1. Geraldina Muzik joined the Health Services Department as a medical office manager on July 8. Thomas McLarney joined the Health Services…

Two faculty members and two graduate students co-authored a paper published in the July 18 edition of the academic journal, Biochemistry. Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies; Manju Hingorani, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry; chemistry graduate student Daniel Czyzyk; and molecular biology and biochemistry graduate student Shreya Sawant wrote the paper, "Escherichia coli Heptosyltransferase I: Investigation of Protein Dynamics of a GT-B Structural Enzyme." It appears online here. Biochemistry is a publication of the American Chemical Society.

William Klaber ’67 is the author of a new novel, The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, published by Greenleaf Book Group Press. This fictional memoir is based on the real-life Lucy Ann Lobdell who, in 1855, decided to live the rest of her life as a man. She was involved in what may have been the first same-sex marriage in America when she married Marie Perry and made history when she was put on trial in Minnesota for wearing men’s clothes. While Lobdell promised to write her own memoir about her adventures in male attire, her account was never found, and…

Joshua Horwitz ’91, a student at Wilkes University’s graduate creative writing program was awarded the 2013 Beverly Blakeslee Hiscox ’58 Scholarship. The scholarship was established by Hiscox's children to honor their mother's service to Wilkes University as a trustee from 1986-2003, and first preference is given to a non-traditional student with family responsibilities. Horwitz is pursuing his master of arts in creative nonfiction, studying memoir under his mentor Beverly Donofrio ’78, author of Riding In Cars With Boys (1992) and, most recently, Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace (2013). Horwitz’s work-in-progress, titled Once Upon a Mania, explores a…

In his new collection Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs (Johns Hopkins University Press), Michael Wolfe ’68 brings together his English translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, with a foreword by Richard Martin, a classics professor at Stanford University. Greek epitaphs, considered by some scholars to be the earliest artful writing in Western Europe, are short celebrations of the lives of a rich cross section of society that help form a vivid portrait of an ancient era. Wolfe divides his book into five chronological sections spanning 1,000 years, beginning with the Late Archaic and Classical periods and ending…