Olivia DrakeWesleyan's Center for the Arts received a $42,660 grant from Dance/USA, the national service organization for professional dance. The CFA is one of 20 member organizations across the country awarded funding for "Round Two of Engaging Dance Audiences," the first national funding program for audience engagement practices focused specifically on the art form of dance. The award will support two new CFA programs: the DanceLink Fellowship Program, in which Wesleyan students will intern with three professional dance companies during the summer, and then serve as ambassadors for the companies when they are presented on campus during the 2013–2014 Breaking Ground…
Wesleyan’s Program for Student College Success received a grant of $2,500 from the Community Foundation of Middlesex County on Jan. 7. The funds will support the four-week summer session and 40 weeks of academic-year programming that help first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students successfully transition into college.
Lauren RubensteinMatthew Kurtz, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, has published an article in the March 2013 issue of Scientific American Mind magazine. Kurtz, who studies schizophrenia, writes about the less-well-known symptoms of the disease, which include cognitive and social deficits. These troubles make it difficult for people with schizophrenia to maintain meaningful relationships, hold jobs and live independently. Sadly, drugs used to treat the hallucinations and delusions in schizophrenia do nothing to improve patients' quality of life in these other areas. In the article, Kurtz describes some of the new psychological interventions shown to improve cognitive…
Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, is the co-author of "Probing potassium in the atmosphere of HD 80606b with tunable filter transit spectrophotometry from the Gran Telescopio Canarias," published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 419, pages 2233-50, 2012.
An article by Ethan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of history, professor of letters, is featured in the 50th anniversary issue of Perspectives on History, the monthly publication of the American Historical Association. The article, titled "Academic Journals in the Digital Era" is part of a forum on "The Future of the Discipline" edited by Lynn Hunt. View the full list of contributors online.
David LowKrishna Winston, the Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, is the translator of Patrick Roth's Starlight Terrace, published by Seagull Books in 2012. In a rundown Los Angeles apartment building—the titular Starlite Terrace—Roth unfurls the tragic linked stories of Rex, Moss, Gary and June, four neighbors, in a sort of burlesque of the Hollywood modern. In each of their singular collisions with fame, Roth’s dark prose presages a universal and mythical fate of desperation. In “The Man at Noah’s Window,” Rex shares the story of his father, a supposed hand double for Gary Cooper in High Noon. In “Eclipse…
Peter Gottschalk, professor of religion, is the author of Religion, Science, and Empire Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, published by Oxford University Press in November 2012. In this 448-page book, Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse…
Brian KattenAssistant football coach Jeff McDonald will be a regular columnist/blogger for the online edition of American Football Monthly, the top college football coaches' magazine in the country, during 2013. His first article titled, "The Importance of Off-Season Self Scouting to Keep Your Defensive System Evolving," is currently live. In addition, McDonald has an article in the February edition of the print magazine involving the use of the iPad as a coaching tool. The article can be seen in part here, but is only available fully to magazine subscribers. This past summer, McDonald began working with AFM with a series of instructional videos…
Bill FisherIn this video, Lori Gruen, professor of philosophy; professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies; professor of environmental studies, talks about the ethics of caring for chimpanzees who have been subjected to invasive biomedical research. She discusses recent positive developments in the movement to retire to sanctuaries the last 1,000 federally-supported research chimpanzees in the United States. Professor Gruen maintains the website www.last1000chimps.com to track the movement of the remaining research chimps in the U.S. from labs to retirement. Find more information about Chimp Haven, the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary where many research chimps live in retirement, at www.chimphaven.org. #THISISWHY [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3HEdXEc95s[/youtube]
Lori Gruen paints a picture of life at the Chimp Haven sanctuary
New psychological therapies can improve patients' cognitive and social skills, change brain activity
Wesleyan Media Project analysis finds record ad volume and negativity; evidence of micro-targeting