Olivia DrakeRichard Grossman, professor of economics, presented a paper titled "Contingent Capital and Bank Risk-Taking: Evidence from British Equity Markets before World War I” at the Yale Economic History Workshop on Feb. 21. Masami Imai, chair and associate professor of East Asian studies, associate professor of economics and director of the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, co-authored the paper. The workshop was sponsored by Yale University's Department of Economics.
Janice Naegele, professor of biology, professor of neurosceince and behavior, and a group of Wesleyan students attended the Connecticut Forum on “The Glorius, Mysterious Brain” Feb. 25 at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, Conn. The Connecticut Forum is a nationally recognized, nonprofit organization that offers live, unscripted panel discussions among renowned experts and celebrities, and community outreach programs. Nagele’s group listened to Autism advocate Temple Grandin, author and Harvard professor Steven Pinker and cognitive scientist Paul Bloom. In addition, Michael Greenberg '76, chair of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, spoke to Naegele's students about “experience-dependent changes in gene expression."
Johan "Joop" Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of environmental studies, was elected as president of the Board of Trustees of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment (CFE). The CFE is an organization of environmental advocacy, habitat restoration and outreach with about 20 staff members. Its mission is to protect and improve the land, air and water of Connecticut and Long Island Sound by using legal and scientific expertise and by bringing people together to achieve results that benefit the environment for current and future generations.
Priscilla Gale, private lessons teacher for jazz and voice in the Music Department, will host a show on "Sacred Song Reiki" for Internet Radio - VoiceAmerica.com. The show will be aired at noon on Saturday starting April 23. VoiceAmerica features more than 200 hosts talking about a variety of topics—from sports and finance to health, hobbies, pop culture and business. It has more than 2.5 million listeners.
Computer science majors Jeff Ruberg ’12, Michael Vitale ’11 and Katie Wagner ’12 participated in the Humanitarian Fee and Open Source Software Project summer internship program. For their project, they worked on software that is part of the Tor network. Tor is software that allows users to browse the web anonymously, and is used by human rights workers, individuals in repressive regimes, and people who just don’t want corporations tracking their on-line movements. It is implemented as a world-wide network of “relays” that are run by volunteers on anything ranging from academic servers to home computers. Ruberg, Vitale and Wagner completely re-designed and…
Johan “Joop” Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of environmental studies, is the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, titled Continental Margin Volcanism. He's also the co-author of an article titled "Back-arc basalts from the Loncopue graben (Province of Neuquen, Argentina)," which is published in the special issue.
Two Wesleyan alumni who wrote Ph.D dissertations on Russian politics have recently accepted tenure-track jobs in political science departments. Russian and East European studies major Danielle Lussier '98, will be an assistant professor at Grinnell College, where she will be replacing Robert Grey '61. Lussier wrote her B.A. thesis on the women's movement in contemporary Russia, and her Ph.D at the University of California, Berkeley on a comparison of civil society and political mobilization in Russian and Indonesia. College of Social Studies major Lauren McCarthy '01 will be an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She wrote her…
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Margot Weiss, assistant professor of American studies, assistant professor of anthropology, and Naomi Greyser at the University of Iowa organized a symposium on Academia and Activism Feb. 11 in Russell House. The event brought together nine interdisciplinary scholars for two open roundtable discussions on the possibilities and difficulties of bridging academic and activist work. Panelists on the two roundtables reflected on a series of questions: "What are the intersections and gaps between activist and academic work? How is activist labor intellectual and when is intellectual labor activist? How might we historicize dichotomies of theory and practice, 'ivory tower' and 'real…
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