David LowTony winning actor Frank Wood ’84 is currently starring in Clybourne Park, a darkly comic play by Bruce Norris, which deals with race relations among neighbors. The play opened to good reviews in February, and runs through March 21 at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons. Clybourne Park begins in 1959 in a Chicago neighborhood as a white family moves out. In Act Two, the action shifts to 2009 and a white family moves in to what has become a predominantly black community that promises to be gentrified. During the intervening years, change overtakes the neighborhood, along with attitudes, inhabitants, and property values.…
Cynthia RockwellIrvin Richter ’66, chairman and chief executive officer of Hill International (NYSE:HIL), was named to the New Jersey Business Hall of Fame. He was one of only four laureates this year. This is a lifetime achievement award for individuals who have made a significant contribution to the quality of life and the business climate in New Jersey, and who will also serve as “role models for the next generation of New Jersey's business leaders,” according to Dave Weaving, chair of the induction event, scheduled for April. Richter founded Hill in 1976 and the company is now considered one of the…
In the Feb. 1 issue of The New Yorker, Carlo Rotella ’86, the director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, profiles U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Rotella points out that President Obama has allotted Duncan more than 70 billion dollars in federal economic-stimulus funds to hand out to the states—more money than any Secretary of Education has had before him. Duncan has exceptional leverage with this stimulus money and his close relationship with Obama, which dates back to when Duncan worked in Chicago. Rotella writes about Duncan’s childhood on the South Side of Chicago, his passion for…
In The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Duke University Press) Joseph Litvak ’76 offers a rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America by uncovering a political regime that did not come to an end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) conflated Jewishness with what he calls…
(By Anne Calder ’11) Allison Heaney ’09 has been awarded a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the study Professional Ethics. A law student at Duke University, she will spend two weeks this summer traveling to New York, Poland and Germany. The Fellowship enables students in law, medical, seminary, journalism and business to address contemporary and future ethical issues by looking to the past. In the context of Nazi Germany and Auschwitz, Heaney will analyze the responsibilities lawyers have to their clients and to society. Heaney was a psychology major at Wesleyan, and is now pursuing a master’s degree in psychology while…
Olivia DrakeBruce McKenna ’84 is the lead writer for the HBO series The Pacific. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced this as follow up to Band of Brothers, for which McKenna also wrote. According to a Feb. 28 article in The Los Angeles Times, McKenna accompanied a locations crew to a tiny coral island near Guam known as Peleliu to prepare for the $200M show. A ridge there is laced with hundreds of caves -- undisturbed for more than half a century -- where Japanese troops hid out from U.S. Marines during one of the WWII's deadliest conflicts. "There are still skeletons…
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Corrina KerrWesleyan President Michael Roth is the author of "Why Photography Matters to the Theory of History," published in History and Theory, 49.1 February 2010.