Ziba Kashef

More than 100 high school students who took classes at Wesleyan in partnership with National Ed Equity Lab were inducted into the Lab’s National Honor Society on March 12 during a virtual ceremony. These students performed in the top 20 percent nationwide this fall. Wesleyan is a partner of Ed Equity Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding higher education access to students at low-income Title I and Title I-eligible high schools. These high schools receive federal funding to support students from low-income families. The courses are co-led by Wesleyan faculty members, who provide instruction virtually, in partnership with teachers in…

Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center and the Immigrant Justice Fund, began her talk about “Championing Immigrants’ Rights in the Trump Era,” with a few statistics. She noted it had been only 34 days since Inauguration and already the president had issued 10 anti-immigrant executive orders and 36 anti-immigrant policies. “More than one a day,” she said before an audience of students, faculty, and staff at Beckham Hall on Feb. 26. From there, Matos described the fast-changing landscape for immigrants and all Americans. She stated that the Administration was focused on three main priorities. They included radically…

For the sixth year in a row, Wesleyan has been recognized as one of the colleges and universities with the highest number of students selected for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship international academic exchange program. Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided over 400,000 talented and accomplished students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbrighters exchange ideas, build people-to-people connections, and work to address complex global challenges. Fulbright…

Alumnus, professor, and civil rights attorney Theodore M. Shaw ’76 returned to Wesleyan on Feb. 11 to deliver the 2025 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Luncheon keynote address. During his talk, Shaw reminisced about his time at the University, shared highlights of his career, and offered his thoughts about the current political moment. Standing at the podium, Shaw paused to honor the Hall’s namesake, Edgar Beckham, who was the first African American dean at the University. He also recalled that as a student he had played pickup basketball in the same space which was once known as the small…

In 2018, author and journalist Pagan Kennedy ’84 became intrigued by news reports about rape kits and the backlog in processing them. The scandal of nearly a half million kits left untested fascinated her and was the start of a research journey that led to her most recent book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story (Penguin Random House). “The more I thought about it, the more amazing it seemed to me that this kit existed at all—that there was this nationwide, very elaborate system for collecting sexual assault evidence seemed to me kind of a…

In Professor of Physics Francis Starr’s Lab, researchers focus on studying the complexities of soft matter and materials. One target of their investigations are phase change materials, or substances that can transition from one state to another, similar to common transitions between a solid and liquid, but in this case the material can very rapidly switch between two different solid phases. In a recently published paper, Starr and his student co-authors developed a novel model to simulate a phase change that could one day have an impact on such practical matters as how quickly our smartphones process data. For their…

While Professor of Philosophy Stephen Angle was on sabbatical in Beijing, China in 2016-2017, he wanted to find a way to directly engage fellow experts on and advocates of Confucianism. He attended conferences and met with other Confucianists before coming up with the idea of organizing a series of dialogues about the meaning of Confucianism today. The dialogues—eight in all—culminated in Angle’s latest book Progressive Confucianism and its Critics: Dialogues from the Confucian Heartland. To Angle’s knowledge, the dialogues—most of which took place at Renmin University in Beijing—were the first of their kind to put Chinese Confucians, most of whom…

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Iris Yoon first became intrigued by topology—a branch of mathematics concerned with the study of shapes—as an undergraduate student. “I took a topology class in undergrad which was fascinating to me,” said Yoon. “And I found this field by accident. I went on Google and searched ‘applications of topology’ and found that it was an actual field of research.” That fascination led Yoon to contact a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who invited her to join his weekly research seminars and ultimately served as advisor for her Ph.D. in applied mathematics and computation science. …

A month after one of the most momentous national elections in recent memory, the Wesleyan Media Project hosted their 2024 Post-Election Conference at the Frank Center for Public Affairs on Dec. 6. The all-day event featured four panels, moderated by Government department faculty members: Associate Professor of Government Logan Dancey, Associate Professor of Government Alyx Mark, Professor of Government Erika Franklin Fowler, and Assistant Professor of Government Justin Peck. More than a dozen scholars from institutions across the country presented their research to the audience of faculty and students. The topics of panel presentations ranged from political advertising in 2024…

On Wednesday, Dec. 4, 15 students were formally inducted into Wesleyan’s Gamma chapter of Phi Beta Kappa Society. This impressive group were early-decision inductees, meaning they met the rigorous criteria before they are expected to graduate. At the start of the event, Nadja Aksamija, associate professor of Art History and president of the Phi Beta Kappa Committee, shared that these high-achieving students joined an estimated 525,000 society members from across the country. Aksamija went on to explain that Phi Beta Kappa, founded in 1776, is the oldest surviving Greek letter society in America. To receive this honor, the latest group…

For 85 years, WESU, Wesleyan’s campus radio station, has offered a mix of music and public affairs programming. This year, the station launched a new program, Engage Radio, to shine a light on the community-engaged work of its university partners and residents from across the greater Middletown community. Broadcast bimonthly on Friday afternoons, Engage Radio has featured a blend of stories that has included artist in residence Sunny Jain talking about his music and the experience of South Asians globally; Center for Prison Education (CPE) Director Tess Wheelwright sharing the history and milestones of CPE; and community partner Donna Hylton,…

At the age of 27, Valentina Ramia received an urgent call from a friend in Ecuador, where she was born, to join a newly formed government. With her master’s degree in public policy analysis and management, Ramia left her work at a think tank in New York to return home and assist with governing in the new administration. The year was 2007. In her role as an under secretary, Ramia was put in charge of social policy in a newly formed department, and asked to help resolve a crisis in the prison system. Working with the prisoners’ unions and other…

Wesleyan’s Ed Equity Lab Scholars Inducted into Honor Society

Expert Talk on Immigrant Rights and Democracy

Wesleyan Named Fulbright Top Producer for Sixth Year

Theodore Shaw ’76 Gives Annual MLK Talk

Alum’s Book Reveals Untold History of Rape Kits

Starr Lab Develops New Model to Study Novel Phase Change Material

Angle’s New Book Debates Critical Questions About Confucianism

Math Researcher Provides New Tool to Study the Brain

Post-Election Conference Probed Impact of Political Ads, Messaging

Fifteen Wesleyan Students Joined Phi Beta Kappa

New WESU Program Shares Community Engagement Stories

Narratives of Fear: An Anthropologist’s Research with Asylum Seekers