Olivia Drake(more…)
Salvatore Scibona, the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English, is the winner of this year's Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for his novel-in-progress Where In the World Is William Wurs? The award is sponsored by the New York Community Trust and the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers. Members of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative nominated Scibona for the award, which comes with a $7,500 grant. Awards go an author who has previously published a print edition of one or two books of fiction, and who doesn't currently have a publishing contract for a second or third book of…
Ethnomusicologist Sumarsam, University Professor of Music, participated in a festival and conference on Indonesian performing arts at the Smithsonian Institution Oct. 31-Nov. 3. Sumarsam and Andy McGraw Ph.D. ’06 helped organize the conference, "Performing Indonesia: Conference, Music, Dance, and Drama" with support from the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Sumarsam delivered the conference's keynote address on “Traditional Performing Arts of Indonesia in a Globalizing World” on Nov. 2. He discussed Javanese musical and cultural interactions with the rest of the world, focusing on current trends in and the changing role of classical and contemporary gamelan music and other genres in…
On Dec. 4, Ethan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of history, professor of letters, presented the keynote address at a conference on "Does Literature Matter," at the University of North Bengal in India. His talk was titled "Matters of Fact and Matters of Fiction: Literature and the Historian." He also led a workshop on "presence" at the conference. Kleinberg also will be presenting lectures and workshops in Delhi including a talk at University of Delhi on Dec. 10, a workshop at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies on Dec. 11, and a lecture on "History and…
Richard Grossman, professor of economics, spoke about the poor thinking behind nine of the worst economic policy mistakes of the past 200 years at Boston Public Library Dec. 4. Grossman is the author of the newly-published book, Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. He also spoke about economic policy mistakes at the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago on Nov. 14 and the Museum of American Finance in New York on Nov. 21. At Wesleyan, he teaches classes in American and European economic history, macroeconomics, and money and banking. Grossman also is a visiting scholar at the…
A book written by Rick Elphick, professor of history, tutor in the College of Social Studies, received "honorable mention" for the Herskovits Prize, the most prestigious award for scholarship on Africa. This annual award is named in honor of Melville J. Herskovits, one of the African Studies Association's founders. Elphick is the author of The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa, published by the University of Virginia Press in September 2012. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in…
Larry Woolard II '03 was sworn into the City of Middletown Police Department in October 2013. At Wesleyan, he was a religion studies major and captain of the football team. "Larry was quite a football player for Xavier High School and for the Cardinals, especially in an exciting Homecoming win over Williams. I suspect he is one of Wesleyan's first local police officers," said John Driscoll, advisor in the Wesleyan Career Center.
On Nov. 20, Zoe Mueller '13 spoke about "GIS in the Real World: How to Land a GIS Job" during National Geography Awareness Week celebrations at Wesleyan. GIS (geographic information systems) allow users to visualize, question, analyze, interpret, model and understand data to reveal relationships, patterns and trends. Mueller spoke to current students about careers in GIS, differences between non-profit and for-profit work, and applications of GIS outside of academia. Wesleyan's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences also sponsored multiple events in honor of National Geography Awareness Week, including a crowdsourced GIS map and geocaching scavenger hunt.
Ethan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, is the co-editor of Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, published by Cornell University Press in November 2013. Kleinberg also is professor of history, professor of letters and executive editor of History and Theory. In this book, Kleinberg and co-editor Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and…
The prestigious Folio Society of London has just brought out a limited collector's edition of Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, a book of fables translated by Norm Shapiro, professor of French. The collection, originally published by University of Illinois Press in 1985, was the first of his several volumes of La Fontaine, culminating in the award-winning The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (2007). Jean de La Fontaine was the most widely read French poet of the 17th century. This new collector’s edition presents 50 of his fables.
Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera, associate professor of psychology, and her former student, Leslie Tan BA/MA '11, are co-authors of a paper published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Nov. 19, 2013. In the paper, titled, "Shared Burdens, Personal Costs on the Emotional and Social Consequences of Family Honor," the authors present two studies on the consequences of threats to family honor. In Study 1, 99 Pakistanis (67 females, 30 males, 2 undisclosed) and 134 European-Americans (65 females, 69 males) reported a recent insult to their family where the offender was either a family or a non-family member. The insults targeted the family…
Joop Varekamp and Ellen Thomas are the authors of three chapters included in a reference volume for Long Island Sound. The book, Long Island Sound: Prospects for the Urban Sea, is published by Springer in 2013. Varekamp is the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences, professor of environmental studies. Thomas is research professor of earth and environmental sciences. Varekamp co-authored a chapter titled "Metals, Organic Compounds and Nutrients in Long Island Sound: Sources, Magnitudes, Trends and Impacts," and another chapter titled "The Physical Oceanography of Long Island Sound." Thomas co-authored a chapter titled…