Eric GershonIn an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, Frederick Cohan, professor of biology, professor of environmental studies, discusses how his experience as a child watching perhaps the greatest “perfect game” in baseball history – The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax’s 1-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs in 1965 – provided lessons for the mining of old data for both baseball front offices and biologists such as himself who specialize in studying bacteria. Read the op-ed here.
Brian Northrop, assistant professor of chemistry, has published “Substituent Effects on the Reversibility of Furan-Maleimide Cycloadditions” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. His co-author is Robert Boutelle, a 2011 Wesleyan graduate who is now a graduate student at UCLA. The paper is online here.
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry, has published “Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders: Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology” in Mutation Research, 2011. The article is online here.
Facilities managers Jeff Sweet, Mario Velazquez and Deborah Holman began the summer of 2011 staring down the number 2,863. That’s the total number of beds in Wesleyan’s undergraduate housing pool – somewhat greater than the number of bedrooms in the university’s 225 residences. In an annual rite known as the summer maintenance program, Sweet, Velazquez and Holman oversee the inspection, basic repair and cleaning of each and every room in Wesleyan’s varied housing stock, from the aptly named High Rise to the stately Eclectic Society to the multitudinous wood-frame houses. The project amounts to a carefully choreographed dash toward the end…
In a June 30 “Modern Love” column in The New York Times, Lindsay Abrams ’12 writes that she “designed my ideal boyfriend in a dorm room voodoo ceremony orchestrated by my roommate…” "…My specifications were that he be tall, scruffy and a bit older than me. I preferred that he major in math or the sciences to offset my artistic nature, and that he like to watch TV with me at night. I know that vague characteristics like height and age do not true love make, but I was warned that being too specific on a campus of only 2,900…
This issue we ask "5 Questions" of Vera Schwarcz, who spent the spring semester as a Lady Davis Fellow at Hebrew University in Israel. Schwarcz is the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, professor of history, professor of East Asian studies. She returns to campus this fall. Q: What will you remember most about your recent sojourn in Israel? A: What lingers most in mind is the vibrant commitment to live fully the values of Jewish tradition. In Jerusalem, each day I witnessed some act of kindness, some conscious effort to reach out to strangers in a way that pays homage…
An international group of scholars convenes at Wesleyan on June 27 for a four-day conference on topics in animal studies, including animal naming, the ways children mourn animal deaths, 19th-Century pet-keeping and the human impulse to laugh when playing with dogs. The conference is the culminating event in the first annual Animals and Society Institute-Wesleyan Animal Studies Fellowship Program, which brings to campus a broad range of scholars studying human-animal relations. The group includes professors and Ph.D. candidates in a variety of fields, including psychology, sociology, philosophy, English, women’s studies, veterinary medicine and environmental studies. Eight of the presenters are…
Lots of people like watching birds. Understandably, birds don’t always like people watching them. For the Audubon Center at Bent of the River, a 700-acre nature preserve in Southbury, Conn., this presented a problem: the swallows and kingfishers along a popular trail were perpetually startled by human visitors. Assistant Professor of Art Elijah Huge and the 11 students in his Architecture II class devised a solution – a chic bird blind they designed and built from scratch. The structure represents the third major design-build project for North Studio, a faculty-student design collaborative Huge founded in 2006 that is cultivating a…
A Ph.D candidate and six recent graduates received Fulbright Fellowships for the 2011-12 academic year. Aaron Paige, a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology, has received a Fulbright Fellowship to support his dissertation fieldwork in Malaysia, as well as a research grant from the Society for Asian Music to support research in Chennai, India. The dissertation project, “From Kuala Lumpur to Kollywood: Music, Language, and Identity in Tamil Solisai,” involves multi-sited ethnography and will trace the various meanings of Tamil hip-hop as it travels within and between local, national, and transnational spaces. Paige's work will take him to Chennai in the summer…
In a lengthy Q&A in the June 7 issue of Current Biology, Professor of Biology Fred Cohan talks about the evolution of bacteria, his favorite course at Wesleyan – and the legendary 1965 baseball game that impressed upon him the power and possibility of data. For the full Q&A, click here.
Po-wei Weng, a Ph.D. candidate in Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology program, has won a $15,000 grant to support his dissertation work on a popular Taiwanese Puppet television series. Competing with applicants from all disciplines and many top colleges in the United States, Weng was this year the only person from the music studies field to win an award from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. His dissertation project is "Music, Technology, and Mediated Modernity: Soundscape of Pili Budaixi in Taiwan." Currently in Taiwan, Weng returns to Middletown in August.
This issue we ask "5 Questions" of Dick Miller, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, Emeritus, who retired from active teaching in 2006. Next fall, he’ll be back in the classroom with a liberal arts spin on the uses and abuses of financial accounting. Q: In the fall, you'll emerge from retirement to teach ECON 127, "Introduction to Financial Accounting," a type of course that's rarely been offered at Wesleyan. Why this course, why now and why you? A: The Economics Department has recognized that we need an accounting course in our curricular offerings, but we have difficulty in getting a visitor to…