Cynthia RockwellSeptember 15, 20161min
Former student-athlete Jack Mackey ’16 was named a recipient of the Sport Changes Life Victory Scholar Program. Victory Scholars are “driven young athletes who spend a year mentoring young people through sport in communities in Northern Ireland and Ireland, while studying for their Masters degree and continuing to play the sport they love.” This year, 23 scholars will embark on a life-changing experience of community outreach initiatives, and academic and athletic fulfillment to help mold the lives of young people and enable them to develop a global perspective. With the help of The Rory Foundation, the Victory Scholars program will…

Randi Alexandra PlakeSeptember 15, 20162min
Seth Lerer ’76, literary critic and Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, spoke to Slate.com on the complex history of children’s literature. “The earliest kids books…were largely designed to teach moral behavior,” he said. "They were about social decorum and a particular way of being a child, especially in relation to parents and teachers. Some children’s books—many of the early medieval romances, for instance—had an adventure quality to them, but always a moral and spiritual quality too.” He also observed the increasing focus on young women in today’s literature. “When you look at the…

Randi Alexandra PlakeSeptember 14, 20162min
Film studies major Adam McGill ’16 screened his short film Punked! at the Princeton Student Film Festival this summer. McGill’s comedy is about a punk rock singer and guitarist named Dale, whose allegiance to his music is challenged when a new romance enters his life. McGill filmed the short in the fall of 2015 as a senior thesis project at Wesleyan. During his time at Wesleyan, McGill was taught by Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, who said, “I’m happy to see his work recognized outside the classroom. He joins a long line of Wesleyan film majors who have…

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Randi Alexandra PlakeSeptember 14, 20163min
Chris Weaver MALS ’75, CAS ’76, visiting professor in the College of Integrative Sciences at Wesleyan, was appointed co-director of the Video Game Pioneers Archive at the Smithsonian Institute’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. This one-of-a-kind initiative will record oral-history interviews with first-generation inventors of the video game industry, creating a multimedia archive that will preserve the evolution of the industry in the words of its founders. The archive will offer scholars and the public the opportunity to better understand the personalities, technologies, and social forces that have driven interactive media to become one of the…

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Cynthia RockwellSeptember 14, 20162min
A Connecticut dance event offered Associate Professor of Dance Katja Kolcio an additional way to explore her ongoing dance/movement project highlighting the effect of political forces at work in Ukraine. Last summer, Kolcio invited colleague and Associate Professor of Dance Nicole Stanton to join with two other dancers, both with ties to Ukraine, to create a dance. This event, Dance for Peace, was sponsored by Artists for World Peace, an organization founded and led by Wendy Black-Nasta P’07, with music director Robert Nasta MA ’98, P’07. Kolcio, who holds a doctorate in somatics, places the dance they created, “Steppe Land,”…

Randi Alexandra PlakeSeptember 6, 20163min
Recent works by Ben Charles Weiner ’03, a New York-based artist, are on display at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles. Artdaily.org praised the works in this exhibition, Textures of You,  as “lush yet uneasy,” noting that Weiner was inspired by synthetic body enhancement products and used a hyperrealistic technique to create the paintings. Read the full article here. In a recent conversation with The Wesleyan Connection, Weiner explained the workflow and artistic style he used for these paintings. “Formally, my approach to painting these subjects takes inspiration from the stock textures used in graphic design and CG rendered imagery.…

Cynthia RockwellSeptember 6, 20162min
In 2010-11, when Matthew Ball ’08 was stationed in the Tora Bora region of Nangarhar province, serving in the 4th Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, he and the other soldiers relied on Qismat Amin, then only 19 years old, for both information and communication with the local Afghan residents. Now a Stanford law student, Ball is on a personal mission: To fulfill what he views as his duty to the young interpreter who worked with him during his deployment. "There's a really strong bond that a lot of soldiers have with interpreters—they're crucial members of the team. ... There…

Randi Alexandra PlakeSeptember 1, 20162min
John Bonin, the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science, and his former student Dana Louie ’15, are authors of a new paper published in Journal of Comparative Economics titled, “Did foreign banks stay committed to emerging Europe during recent financial crises?” In the paper, Bonin and Louie investigate the behavior of foreign banks with respect to real loan growth during times of financial crisis for a set of countries where foreign banks dominate the banking sectors. The paper focuses on eight countries that are the most developed in emerging Europe and the behavior of two types of banks:…

Cynthia RockwellAugust 31, 20163min
On Aug. 24, Colombia’s president signed a peace deal with FARC rebels, ending the world’s longest running conflict. For insight on the accord, PBS NewsHour anchor and correspondent Hari Sreenivasan turned to Cynthia Arnson ’76, director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Noting that the text of the accord is complex, covering more than 250 pages and  five basic agreements—agrarian reform, upcoming FARC political engagement, illicit economies (including drug trafficking), transitional justice, and terms of disarmament—Arnson added, “And as with any peace accord, the real test comes when it’s time to implement, and the…

Randi Alexandra PlakeAugust 31, 20162min
Laura Walker ’79, New York Public Radio CEO, was recently interviewed by Fortune on the topic of women in the podcasting industry. She discussed how she got her start in radio, what business school was like for women in the 1980s, and why more women are needed in podcasting. Walker discussed the motivation to help start Werk It, WNYC’s annual festival for women in podcasting, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to get more women involved in podcasting. “I think that many women are natural storytellers and aren’t fearful of mixing the personal and the factual. I…

Lauren RubensteinAugust 11, 20162min
Nicholas Rasmussen '87, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, spoke on NPR's "Morning Edition" about progress made in the fight against the Islamic State. He said the tactical gains the U.S. military and its partners are making in Iraq and Syria are a "necessary" part of quashing the danger it poses—but not "sufficient." Rasmussen told NPR that government agencies—ranging from federal to local—are working well together, and counterterrorism leaders are confident they can detect, disrupt or stop big, complicated attacks on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001. But the danger remains from smaller-scale attacks directed or inspired by ISIS, and these may linger…

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Lauren RubensteinAugust 8, 20163min
WNPR's The Colin McEnroe Show featured a conversation between Joss Whedon '87, Hon. '13; Jeanine Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, Curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives; and David Lavery, author of Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Avengers and co-founder of the Whedon Studies Association. Basinger described her experience with Whedon while he was a student at Wesleyan. "When I encountered Joss at Wesleyan, he was my superhero because he was a really fabulous student, an original thinker and somebody who you just knew was born to be a storyteller. Those things were very, very clearly in…