Arts & Humanities

Community-based, data-driven stories are Koeppel Fellow Jacqueline Rabe Thomas’ bread-and-butter. Instead of walking into a pitch meeting with a defined story arc, as is often required in the modern media landscape, Thomas prefers to come in with a general topic to take to community members and find the story from there. “Community-based reporting is sort of just standing on the sidelines and observing what's happening. Listening to people at community meetings or the park or wherever, staying attuned to the Facebook groups that are the communities in the areas you're serving, and then determining what the story is,” Thomas said.…

Through a series of intimate and informal salons, Wesleyan’s Embodying Antiracism Initiative Fellows shared some of the work they have created this year during the program’s Think Tank. The salons are mini-festivals of arts, ideas, and activation, looking at works-in-progress and building community, said Stephanie McKee-Anderson, Executive Artistic Director of partnering organization Junebug Productions and Special Advisor to Provost Nicole Stanton. A Fellow might have the seed of a creation, so a salon could be a helpful place to dialogue about that idea, while the others might act as thought provocateurs. “What questions make a creator more excited about their…

Director and Producer Stephen Talbot ’70 was an early adopter of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He first began to turn against the war as a member of the mandatory Junior ROTC at Harvard High School, now Harvard-Westlake, in California in the mid-1960s. Talbot and his fellow high school classmates were given required trainings about the war. One of their JROTC instructors was called into active duty overseas in Vietnam and was severely injured. The news shook Talbot and he slowly began to question the war. Now nearly 60 years later, Talbot has produced and directed a documentary on the anti-war…

One spring day in 2011, 15,000 people gathered in the streets of Tokyo, all of them singing a song that had been released online just three days prior. It was a self-cover of a love song, but re-configured and lyricized to protest the use of nuclear power in Japan following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A tale of a teenage crush reignited at a high school reunion was turned into accusations of governmental lies about nuclear safety. Flickering love to unwavering anger. A sentiment that carried thousands to the streets. The song “Zutto Suki Datta” (“I Always Loved You”) by Kazuyoshi…

In this continuing series, we review alumni books and offer a selection for those in search of knowledge, insight, and inspiration. The volumes, sent to us by alumni, are forwarded to Olin Library as donations to the University’s collection and made available to the Wesleyan community. In honor of Women’s History Month, this edition of YJHTRT features stories that celebrate the lives and legacies of women in American history. Steve Golin ’60, Women Who Invented the Sixties: Ella Baker, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) While there were many protests in the 1950s—against racial…

Every exhibition presented in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery establishes an idea–or an argument–of what art is, how art is made, who makes art, and what art does. “With every presentation, we attempt not to narrow the answers to any of those big questions,” said Associate Director of Visual Arts and Adjunct Instructor in Art Benjamin Chaffee ’00. “We think critically about the art that is shown and also how we’re framing it.” The most recent exhibition at Zilkha has created an interesting opportunity for juxtaposition. "Liquid Gold" includes a video installation and a sculpture by Assistant Professor of…

In recognition of a year since the Russian attack on Ukraine, Wesleyan's Dance Department and WesWell co-hosted Ukrainian dance artist Mariia Bakalo, to teach a Contemporary Dance class and a workshop in Ukrainian Dance: Choreotherapy. The Choreotherapeutic approach focuses on the collective dynamic experience of moving together in rhythm and special configurations with other people. Bakalo taught a Bukhovynian dance from the southwestern region of Ukraine. Participants, including students, staff and faculty, children and Middletown community leaders from Community Health Center of Middletown and the Free Center, learned, laughed and sweat together. “The event was a testament to the resilience…

Translation can be both a weapon for imperial conquest and a way to explode language in new and innovative ways, according to a New York Times bestselling writer. Author Rebecca F. Kuang and Stephen Angle, Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and director of the Fries Center for Global Studies, engaged in a wide-ranging discussion February 20 about the relationship between languages, translation, and colonialism, a theme in her bestselling novel “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution.” Kuang spoke as part of Power of Language Week, sponsored by the Fries Center.…

Through a series of fun masterclasses and performances, members of The Second City integrated the company’s tenets of improvisation into the curriculum of four Wesleyan performance courses. Since its premiere in 1959, The Second City has revolutionized improv as an art form and launched the careers of iconic performers ranging from John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner to Mike Myers, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Keegan-Michael Key. When Dean of the Arts and Humanities Roger Mathew Grant learned that The Second City would be available to come to Wesleyan, he thought about how improvisation is a foundational…

Assistant Professor of African American Studies Kaisha Esty’s recent article on African American women's and girls’ battle during the Civil War over labor and sexual consent was named winner of the 2022 Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize for the best article in African American women’s history. The prize is awarded by the Association of Black Women Historians. “The shifting legal ground and character of the state that Black women and girls confronted reveals their fraught historical relationship to notions of sexual consent within the framework of Western liberalism. Their strategies speak to the ultimately burdened ways that African American women…

In this continuing series, we review alumni books and offer a selection for those in search of knowledge, insight, and inspiration. The volumes, sent to us by alumni, are forwarded to Olin Library as donations to the University’s collection and made available to the Wesleyan community. In honor of Black History Month, this edition of YJHTRT highlights BIPOC authors and subjects. Shereem Herndon-Brown ’96 and Timothy L. Fields, The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions: A Conversation about Education, Parenting, and Race (John Hopkins Press, 2022) This guidebook, co-written by two college admissions professionals and Black fathers, addresses questions and…

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts has announced the highlights of its 2023 spring season, including world premiere dance and Connecticut premiere theater and music performances, as well as solo exhibitions by both alumni and current faculty. “The Center for the Arts is thrilled to be hosting several projects that consider, with such care, different scales of human existence, memory, and sense of belonging,” said Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, Director of the Center for the Arts. “From the urgency of ‘Ocean Filibuster,’ which takes up humanity’s relationship to the vastness of the ocean, to the intimacy of Carrie Yamaoka’s ’79 in…

Koeppel Fellow Jacqueline Rabe Thomas on the importance of community-based reporting

Arts, Ideas, and Activation: Embodying Antiracism Fellows Share Creations

Wesleyan Alumnus to Release PBS Documentary on Anti-War Protests

Visiting Professor Talks Protest Music in Japan Following the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

“You Just Have to Read This…” Books by Wesleyan Authors Golin ’60 and Woodruff ’96

Open-Ended Questions: New Exhibit at the Zilkha Gallery

Dance Department Holds Ukrainian Dance Workshop

Bestselling Author R.F. Kuang Speaks on Power of Translation

The Second City Teaches Improvisation to Wesleyan students

Esty’s Research Honored by Association of Black Women Historians

“You Just Have to Read This…” Books by Wesleyan Authors Herndon-Brown ’96 and Saint John ’99

“Sharing the World With Each Other:” Spring Performances at CFA