Olivia DrakeTwo years after its founding in May 2011, Wesleyan University’s Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship (PCSE) is becoming a hub of activity by supporting students and alumni interested in creating and sustaining programs, businesses, and organizations that advance the public good. During the 2012-13 academic year, the PCSE offered 36 events featuring 30 alumni and five students, awarded 22 grants to 44 applicants, provided bi-weekly student counseling hours to dozens of undergraduates, and added more than 30 alumni volunteers to its growing network. 2012/2013 highlights include: Five $5,000 Seed Grants were awarded to individual students or student teams with plans for a new venture or a scaling up of…
Professor of Economics Richard Grossman presented a paper during the Workshop on Monetary and Financial History, held June 26 at the at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The paper he presented, titled, "Bloody Foreigners! Overseas Equity on the London Stock Exchange, 1870-1913," considers data on capital gains, dividend, and total returns for domestic and overseas equities listed on the London Stock Exchange during 1870-1913. The paper is available to read here.
Kate CarlisleWith the U.S. Capitol glowing to the east, the White House 10 blocks west and Pennsylvania Avenue buzzing eight stories below, a crowd of more than 160 Wesleyan alumni, parents and friends gathered June 19 to “Talk Politics” with three high-profile Wes alums. The event, a fundraiser for financial aid and the annual Brown Lecture, featured a lively discussion among Colo. Gov. John Hickenlooper ’74, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin ’79 and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet ’87, who all credited Wesleyan’s interdisciplinary programs and spirit of inquiry for their political success. “If you were to ask any of the people I…
Natalie Robichaud ’14Postdoctoral Associate Intan Suci Nurhati ’05 and others from the Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) are the first team to drill for coral samples in Singapore waters. Nurhati is a climate scientist but she works alongside a marine biologist and a professor of ocean geochemistry, creating “an interesting synergy where [they] work on different topics" but use the same material - corals. As a climate scientist, Nurhati’s main focus is changes in the climate that have been recorded by the coral. “By studying the chemistry of corals, you can tell…
David LowFor his new study Japanoise (Duke University Press), David Novak MA ’99 has conducted more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. Noise is an underground music—made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects—that first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. This unusual kind of music has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, characterized by its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances. For its dedicated…
Cynthia RockwellSasha Chanoff ’94, founder and executive director of RefugePoint, hosted an inaugural event on June 19 in advance of World Refugee Day in Cambridge, Mass., near the organization’s headquarters. Featured was the work of photojournalist Amy Toensing, a regular contributor to National Geographic, whose latest project, In the Shadows: Urban Refugee Children, documented the lives of urban refugee children in Africa, one of the populations RefugePoint works to protect. RefugePoint, an action-oriented organization, is focused on locating people whose lives are caught in an untenable zone—unable to go home, yet unable to find themselves a new, safe place to live—and helping…
In her new book Geographical Diversions (The University of Georgia Press), Tina Harris ’98 employs cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture to explore the social and economic transformations that take place along one trade route that extends through China, Nepal, Tibet, and India. She makes connections between the seemingly mundane motions of daily life and more abstract levels of global change by focusing on two generations of traders and how they create “geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like.” She observes the tensions between the apparent fixity of invisible national boundaries…
Tejas Desai '03, author of The Brotherhood and creator of The New Wei Collective, will release Dhan's Debut and Other Stories, his first collection of short stories, this fall. Desai's previous novel, The Brotherhood, the first book in The Brotherhood Trilogy, is a noir thriller that deals with contemporary social issues facing the Indian-American population.While at Wesleyan he wrote a collection of short stories with the same title and similar themes. Reworked over the years into its current version, the novel expresses Desai's interest in “the different ideologies inherent in Hinduism and Buddhism, differences of personality and outlook, the relationship…
Maya Gomes ’06 and her co-author Matthew Hurtgen published their paper, “Sulfur isotope systematics in a permanently euxinic, low-sulfate lake: Evaluating the importance of the reservoir effect in modern and ancient oceans,” in the June issue of the journal, Geology. In the paper, the authors present data that shows how geologists can use sulfur isotope compositions of marine sediments to discover variations in oceanic sulfate levels through Earth history. Gomes explained that the paper is very important to researchers who study the climate of the past because “marine sulfate levels play a role in regulating oxygen and carbon dioxide levels…
The Newman's Own Foundation awarded Wesleyan's Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship a $30,000 grant on June 17. The award will fund grants for students doing unpaid internships or other extra-curricular experiences in social justice, corporate responsibility, international development, and related fields.
Bill FisherNandita Vijayaraghavan '13 is a government and East Asian studies major with a love of music. In this video, Vijayaraghavan describes why she chose to come to Wesleyan from her hometown of Chennai, India. She applauds Wesleyan's open curriculum. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ZlDPfvodA[/youtube]
At a special Reunion & Commencement appearance with all ticket sales going to financial aid, Amanda Palmer '98 played the piano and the ukulele and joyfully performed a set of her inimitable songs on the stage in Crowell Concert Hall on May 24. Her husband, Neil Gaiman, winner of writing honors from the Newbery Medal to the Hugo Award to the Will Eisner Comic Award, read from his work and joined Palmer in fielding questions from a rapt audience of alumni, parents and students. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://youtu.be/v8GwhGkZauI[/youtube] More information about Wesleyan's THIS IS WHY campaign and upcoming events can be…