Olivia DrakeScott Higgins, associate professor of film studies, edited the book, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, published by Taylor & Francis, 2010. Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies. In this new volume, edited by Higgins, an international group of leading…
Katherine Kuenzli, associate professor of art history, is the author of The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-Siecle, published by Ashgate, 2010. According to the publisher,"this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for 20th-century modernism." "Over the course of the 10 years that define the Nabi movement (1890–1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in…
Mark Slobin, professor of music, is the author of Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press, 2010. According to the publisher, "This is the first compact introduction to folk music that offers a truly global perspective. Slobin offers an extraordinarily generous portrait of folk music, one that embraces a Russian wedding near the Arctic Circle, a group song in a small rainforest village in Brazil, and an Uzbek dance tune in Afghanistan. He looks in detail at three poignant songs from three widely separated regions--northern Afghanistan, Jewish Eastern Europe, and the Anglo-American world--with musical notation and lyrics included.…
Associate Professor Gina Ulysse is the author of “Rising From the Dust of Goudougoudou,” published in the Winter 2011 edition of MS Magazine. The world has watched Haiti’s most vulnerable women survive quake, flood, cholera and homelessness in the last year— yet those women still feel invisible. “A year after the quake, I can look at Haiti and only see doom. More public-health crises are inevitably on the way. NGOs remain a parallel state system that negates local authority and workers. There is still no concrete plan to permanently house the homeless,” she writes in the article. Ulysse is associate professor…
The Center for Faculty Career Development welcomes Wesleyan faculty and staff to Academic (Technology) Roundtable meetings (also known campus-wide as A(T)R meetings), co-sponsored with Olin Library and Information Technology Services. The weekly meetings aim to promote conversation, cooperation, and the sharing of information and resources among Wesleyan’s faculty and staff. This spring, the luncheon topics include pedagogical uses of student-produced podcasts, dyslexia research, teaching evaluations and more. A(T)Rs are held at noon in the Develin Room of Olin Library, and a buffet lunch will be served. The schedule is below: Thursday, Feb. 24; Ad Hoc Committee on “The Evaluation of Nontraditional…
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The Wesleyan community participated in the 2011 Social Justice Leadership Conference (SJLC) Jan. 21-22 on campus. The SJLC provides an opportunity for students, student groups, faculty, staff, alumni and community members to learn about creating change through the application of a variety of skills. Sessions focused on the many manifestations of injustice, leadership skills that may be applied to social movements, and how participants can be involved in creating change. The conference’s keynote speaker was Geoffrey Canada from the Harlem Children’s Zone. Photos of the event will appear in a future issue of The Wesleyan Connection.
Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, is the translator of Théophile Gautier’s Selected Lyrics. The book was published in December by Yale University Press. Théophile Gautier [1811–1872] was a prominent French poet, novelist, critic, and journalist. He is famous for his virtuosity, his inventive textures, and his motto “Art for art’s sake.” His work is often considered a crucial hinge between High Romanticism—idealistic, sentimental, grandiloquent—and the beginnings of “Parnasse,” with its emotional detachment, plasticity, and irresistible surfaces. According to the book’s preview: “Norman Shapiro’s translations have been widely praised for their formal integrity, sonic acuity, tonal sensitivities, and overall poetic…
Masami Imai, associate professor of economics, chair and associate professor of East Asian studies, director of the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, is the co-author of an article titled, “Bank Integration and Transmission of Financial Shocks: Evidence from Japan,” published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 3, No. 1, pages 155-183 in January 2011. This paper investigates whether banking integration plays an important role in transmitting financial shocks across geographical boundaries by using a dataset on the branch network of nationwide city banks and prefecture-level dataset on the formation and collapse of the real estate bubble in Japan.…
James McGuire, professor of government, is the author of "Mortality Decline in Chile, 1960-1995," published in Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750-2000, Cambridge, Mass: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2010; and "Political Factors and Health Outcomes: Insight from Argentina's Provinces," published in the United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2010, September 2010.
Charles Sanislow, assistant professor in psychology, co-authored a publication showing that personality disorders increased the time to the remission of a depressive episode, and accelerated the time to relapse of a new depressive episode following remission. The work was published in the December issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and stems from the NIH-funded Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Study, a 10-year prospective study on which Sanislow is a co-investigator.
Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, received a $55,973 grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute to support the Advanced Spectra Library Project: Cool Stars. The grant will allow Redfield to facilitate the analysis of data collected on the Hubble Space Telescope and travel to meetings to present the results. He will collaborate with 20 other researchers from around the world on the project. "All astronomers, worldwide, put in proposals once a year to use the Hubble to get observations. They get about 10 times more requests than they have time to give," Redfield explains. "If you are approved, you…