All News – Page 138

Since arriving on campus freshman year, Ingrid Eck ’19 has fully immersed herself in all Wesleyan has to offer: working on the Wesleyan Green Fund; founding Veg Out, a student group dedicated to food justice; and joining—and currently serving as president of—Wesleyan’s only sorority, Rho Epsilon Pi. She is also working toward not one, but three majors: government, environmental studies, and French studies. More recently, she’s felt a desire to get involved in the broader Middletown community and “truly get to know the city in which I have been living.” This summer, Eck had a unique opportunity to become intimately…

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In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we speak with Assistant Professor of Psychology Alexis May ’05, who joined the Department of Psychology this fall. May will be among the speakers at the Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns on Sept. 14–15. Q: Welcome (back) to Wesleyan, Professor May! You earned your BA from Wesleyan in psychology and neuroscience and behavior in 2005. Please tell us about your journey since then. A: After gaining substantial clinical research experience in the psychology department as a project coordinator for [Walter Crowell University Professor of Social Sciences, Emerita] Ruth Striegel Weismann, I was sure of my…

Inspired by Fête de la Musique (also known as Make Music Day or World Music Day), the seventh annual The MASH festival on Sept. 8 highlighted Wesleyan's student music scene, with multiple stages on campus featuring everything from a cappella ensembles and soloists to student and faculty bands. The name “MASH” is derived from the idea of a mash-up, since the festival features a mixture of different styles, genres, and musical expressions. Stages were set up near Foss Hill, Olin Library, and North College. Performers included Baby Jeremy, Beach Juice, Rebecca Roff, Slavei, FieldFare, Jack Canavan-Gosselin, Myles Johnson, Quasimodal, Philippe Bungabong, Lila…

Stéphanie Ponsavady, assistant professor of French, is the author of a new book titled Cultural and Literary Representations of the Automobile in French Indochina: A Colonial Roadshow, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. In the book, Ponsavady aims to answer the question: How are the pleasures and thrills of the automobile linked to France’s history of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation in Southeast Asia? Ponsavady addresses the contradictions of the “progress” of French colonialism and their consequences through the lens of the automobile. She examines the development of transportation systems in French Indochina at the turn of the 20th century, analyzing…

A book written by María Ospina, assistant professor of Spanish and assistant professor, Latin American studies, was recently nominated for the Gabriel García Márquez Spanish American Short Story Award. The prize is awarded annually by the National Library of Colombia and the Colombian Ministry of Culture to a short story collection in Spanish that has been published the year before by authors from the Spanish-speaking world (Spain and Latin America). This year, the jury selected 14 titles from 127 submissions. This award is considered the most important prize in the short story genre in the world of Hispanic letters and honors…

This summer, Mariel Middlebrook '20 gathered archival material on 19th-century alkali workers in London through a Wesleyan Student-Faculty Research Internship. The Student-Faculty Internship program provides students with paid opportunities to work on research projects in collaboration with Wesleyan faculty. As a recipient of the internship award, Middlebrook was able to work alongside Associate Professor of History Jennifer Tucker, who is collecting information on Widnes, an industrial town in Halton, Cheshire, Northwest England, that is known for being the birthplace of Britain's chemical industry in the late 1840s. (Tucker's article, "It’s No Downton Abbey, but It’s Just as Much a Part of…

Sonia Sultan, professor of biology and professor, environmental studies, and her former students Brennan Baker BA/MA '18 and Lars Berg '16 are the coauthors of a paper published in the August 2018 issue of Frontiers in Plant Science. The study, "Context-Dependent Developmental Effects of Parental Shade Versus Sun Are Mediated by DNA Methylation," presents work that Baker completed as a BA/MA student in 2017–18. The article is part of a special Frontiers theme on the emerging area of ecological epigenetics. In this study, the coauthors compared the development of individual plants when their parents were grown in shade or in full…

On Sept. 1, Wesleyan President Michael Roth '78 appointed Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, to the position of Special Advisor to the President. As she prepares to retire from Wesleyan, Basinger will work closely with President Roth on matters relating to Wesleyan Film--cultivating partnerships with organizations like the American Film Institute; conducting master classes and workshops; and supporting fundraising for the expansion of the Center for Film Studies. Though Basinger is stepping away from full-time teaching, she will continue her service to the Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives and offer support to Scott Higgins, the Charles…

In 1870, Orange Judd bequeathed Wesleyan $100,000 to build Judd Hall, which was designed as a building for the study of natural sciences. Included with this building was the Wesleyan Museum, which housed a prominent natural history collection containing over 300,000 specimens. In 1957, the museum was closed and specimens were donated to other museums, put into storage in various places on campus, or "temporarily" loaned to local schools. In 1970, before the current museum reopened in Exley, the collection stored in the tunnels under Foss Hill was found to have been severely vandalized, with many specimens lost, stolen, or…

New Student Orientation for the Class of 2022 concluded Aug. 31 with the annual Common Moment, an event where members of the incoming class are brought together through music and performance. This year, the students worked with choreographer Heidi Latsky to create her installation ON DISPLAY, a performance art investigation of the body and the gaze. In a large-scale, participatory version of Latsky’s touring work, the first-year students performed the roles of both seer and seen on Andrus Field and discussed their personal experiences of these roles. Students were challenged to commit to the exercise without judgment, to trust both…

This fall, Wesleyan welcomes 71 new faculty, including 15 tenure-track faculty, 10 professors of the practice, 1 adjunct, and 45 new visiting faculty. "Academic Affairs, in conjunction with a number of departments and centers, ran successful searches for a number of new professor of the practice positions this year in order to expand the curriculum in particular areas such as writing, education studies, physics, and others, where these faculty could be of great value," explained Joyce Jacobsen, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. Bios of the new ongoing and full-time visiting faculty are below: Anthropology Joseph Weiss, assistant…

Eck ’19 Helping City of Middletown Earn Sustainability Certification

Student Fire-Spinners Perform for the Class of 2022

New Assistant Professor May ’05 Researches Suicide Risk and Prevention

More than 20 Bands, Musicians Perform during The MASH

Ponsavady’s New Book Examines the Development of French Transportation Systems

Ospina’s Fiction Nominated for Prestigious Spanish American Short Story Award

Tucker, Middlebrook ’20 Study the History of U.K. Alkali Workers

Sultan, Baker ’18, Berg ’16 Coauthor Paper on Plant Development

Basinger Appointed Special Advisor to the President

Wesleyan’s Natural History Collection and Curiosities Featured in Usdan

Students Go “ON DISPLAY” During Common Moment

Wesleyan Welcomes 71 New Faculty in 2018-19