Olivia DrakeThe Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) project was featured in the Aug. 1 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article titled “In Emergencies, Aid Agencies Turn to a College-Created Software Program.” The article focuses on an emergency-management program called Collabbit. Collabbit is a continuing effort involving undergraduates and computer science faculty at Wesleyan and Trinity College. The software tool helps coordinate large numbers of people and supplies involved in responding to disasters like blackouts and flooding. This is by far the largest project of any kind that I've worked on," Samuel DeFabbia-Kane’11 says in the…
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, with a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy during his sabbatical next spring. Between March and April 2011, Jenkins will be working on a book about prison theater projects that he's been directing at correctional facilities including his most recent work at a prison in Indonesia. Jenkins has been collaborating with incarcerated individuals on staging their adaptations of classic texts by Shakespeare and Dante and other authors. These projects have grown out of work done with Wesleyan students in Connecticut correctional facilities. The specific texts include Shakespeare's Tempest, Dante's Inferno and the Mahabhrata. "The personalized…
Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera, assistant professor of psychology, organized and chaired a recent conference on honor and honor cultures in Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 20-24. It was funded by the European Association of Social Psychology and the British Academy. The conference had an interdisciplinary and international focus. It brought together international experts on honor from anthropology and psychology. This is the first conference on honor and honor cultures ever organized in psychology. Rodriguez Mosquera has since been invited to guest-edit a special issue on honor for the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.
Norm Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, was decorated as Officier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture and Communication in France on April 23. France has a long history of official government distinctions for exceptional achievement. The "Order of Arts and Letters" was established in 1957 to recognize eminent artists, writers and people who have contributed significantly to furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. Shapiro is the author of dozens of books on French culture, literature and poetry. Many are award-winning. The Order of Arts and Letters is given out twice annually to…
Q: Sarah, you received a Guggenheim Fellowship to translate the Greek tragedy trilogy, The Oresteia. Please explain the cultural significance of this particular historical play and why your translation will differ from others? A: The Oresteia is the first real tragic masterpiece. I think that the greatness of a piece of literature depends mainly on how much it lets us reflect on at once, and the Oresteia has everything: questions of human nature, the nature of the gods, the social order-- in this case, the startling Athenian moves toward government by ordinary people. And it's all conveyed in intense, complex, almost creepily…
Tom Morgan, professor of physics; John Wright Ph.D '06; Jack DiSciacca '07 and Jonathan Lambert (who attended Wesleyan 2002-2010) are the co-authors of an article published in The Physical Review A, June 2010. The publication focuses on the first observation of the semi-classical scattering dynamics of a Rydberg electron with its molecular core. The system is molecular hydrogen veiled in a strong electric field.
Matthew Kurtz, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the author of “Treatment approaches with a special focus on neurocognition: overview and empirical results,” published in Understanding and Treating Neuro- and Social-Cognition in Schizophrenia Patients, in 2010 and “Compensatory Strategies; Insight: Effects on Rehabilitation; Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test,” published in Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology, New York: Springer, 2010.
John Seamon, professor of psychology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the author of “Memorizing Milton’s Paradise Lost: A study of a septuagenarian exceptional memorizer,” published in Memory, 2010.
Jill Morawski, professor of psychology, professor of science in society, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of “The Location of our Debates: Finding, Fixing and Enacting Reality,” published in Theory and Psychology; “Review of Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life,” published in Isis; and “Postwar Promises and Perplexities in the Social Sciences: The Case of ‘Socialization’,” published in History of Psychology.
Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, received a grant worth $116,634 from the Department of the Air Force for a study titled “Ab initio approach to nonlinear dynamics of collective excitations in networks of coupled optical Microresonators.” The grant will be applied through July 2013. The grant is shared with CUNY College.
Eric Charry, associate professor of music, received a $115,117 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support a Summer Institute in Ethnomusicology June 20-July 1, 2011 at Wesleyan. The Society of Ethnomusicology will oversee the institute, which will be attended by 22 college instructors and three graduate students. Wesleyan hosted a similar conference in 2008.
Barry Chernoff, chair of the Environmental Studies Program, the Robert Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies; director of the Environmental Studies Certificate Program, professor of biology, received an $800,000 award from The Andrew Mellon Foundation to support the College of the Environment. The grant, awarded on June 25, will support the COE for four years.