Campus News & Events

Center for the Arts Director Pamela Tatge '84, MALS '10, P '16, will leave the university in April to serve as executive director of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. There, she will set the artistic vision and strategic goals for the organization, including programming one of America’s longest-running international dance festivals, and overseeing education, preservation, and audience engagement programs, as well as marketing and development. For the past 16 years, Tatge has overseen robust programming in music, dance, theater, and visual arts at the CFA. She has supported the realization of faculty and student work in the arts and spearheaded the development of the university’s…

What started out as a class assignment has evolved into a public website. During the fall semester, students enrolled in the Philosophy 268 course, The Ethics of Captivity, explored the various forms and conditions of captivity, including prisons, zoos, laboratories and sanctuaries. As one of the class assignments, Lori Gruen, the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department, asked her students to work in small groups on a blog post, highlighting a variety of ethical and political issues that captivity raises for humans and other animals. (more…)

On the release of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's latest dietary guidelines, The Washington Post looks back at the man responsible for starting it all: William Olin Atwater, Class of 1865 and later a chemistry professor at Wesleyan, who authored the very first dietary guidelines in 1894. According to the Post, at that time, the U.S. government provided basically no funding into nutritional research, and good nutrition meant simply getting enough to eat. But Atwater was a firm believer that nutrition was about more than simply staving off hunger. He framed the effort to figure out what foods are good for you as a moral…

Wesleyan’s Winter Session, held Jan. 6-19, provides students with an opportunity to take a full-semester course in only two weeks. Students completed reading and writing assignments before classes started. Classes meet five hours per day. Indira Karamcheti, associate professor of American studies, is teaching ENGL246: Personalizing History. Students participate in daily memoir reading and writing, and question how they are shaped by their historical times and places. Students construct narratives about our times and selves in a series of writing workshops. They discuss memory itself, childhood, place and displacement, language, loss/trauma/melancholia/nostalgia, self-invention or transformation, family and generational differences. The class engages with…

Jon Barlow, professor of music, emeritus, died Dec. 15 at the age of 73. Barlow arrived at Wesleyan in 1966 after receiving his BA and MA from Cornell University. He arrived as the Music Department began its visionary phase and taught in the department for 34 years. Grounded in “Western” music history, Barlow expanded his horizons geographically and conceptually, constantly creating innovative courses, which attracted serious students. Many of his students went on to become established composers, performers, musicologists and ethnomusicologists. (more…)

Alcohol use, traffic fines and race, and the impact of caffeine on sleep were among the topics presented at a poster session in which students enrolled in a project-based course at the Quantitative Analysis Center demonstrated the power of statistical analysis to illuminate social problems. The QAC Student Research Poster Session, held Dec. 11 in Beckham Hall, served as a final exam for students taking QAC 201: Applied Data Analysis. Several Wesleyan faculty and alumni evaluated the students’ poster presentations. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the QAC 201 class allows students to spend a semester studying a topic they are passionate about. They learn to generate hypotheses…

Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, was recently featured in a Hollywood Reporter article “The Professor of Hollywood,” by film historian and best-selling author Sam Wasson ’03, who studied with Basinger at Wesleyan. The magazine brought together 33 of her former pupils who work prominently in the film industry for “an A-list class reunion” photo—and several of them talk about how Basinger inspired them, encouraging their self-expression while also sharing with them her love for the medium. In the article, Basinger discusses how and why she came to devote her life to the study of film and how working…

William "Bill" Firshein, the Daniel Ayres Professor of Biology, emeritus, died Dec. 7 at the age of 85. Firshein arrived at Wesleyan in 1958 after receiving his BS from Brooklyn College and his MS and PhD from Rutgers University. He taught at Wesleyan for 47 years before retiring in 2005. Firshein was an active scholar who was awarded research grants totaling more than $2 million over his career. He investigated the molecular biology of DNA replication cell division in Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli and their plasmids. In his most recent book, The Infectious Microbe, published by Oxford University Press…

The gift-giving season came early for four non-profit organizations in the local community. On Dec. 7, a class of 10 innovative problem solvers with an interest in philanthropy, awarded $10,000 in grant funds to selected organizations. As part of the the course Money and Social Change: Innovative Paradigms and Strategies, students spent the fall semester thinking about the role of capital in social change. Students researched the mission statements of 188 organizations in Middlesex County, compared them side by side, and after a final six-hour voting process, whittled their selection to four. The surprise monetary awards, provided to the class by the Learning by…

Wesleyan's First Year Seminar Program (FYS) is benefiting from a three-year, $225,000 grant from The Endeavor Foundation of New York. The FYS program is part of a comprehensive effort to realize the potential of the first year of college to be academically transformative. With the Foundation’s support, Wesleyan will expand and enhance the program. This fall 43 FYS courses were offered to students; 10 FYS will be offered in the spring. “The FYS program is a key part of our structure to support development of multiple student competencies, in this case in the area of writing, and to tie competency-building…

#THISISWHY For the second consecutive year, Wesleyan recently was recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its work diverting food waste. It is the only educational institution in Connecticut to receive a "Regional Food Recovery Achievement Certificate." Wesleyan joined the EPA's Food Recovery Challenge in 2013. Through this program, organizations pledge to improve their sustainable food management practices and report results. Organizations are encouraged to follow the EPA's Food Recovery Hierarchy to prioritize their actions to prevent and divert food waste. The hierarchy suggests a range of options, from reducing the volume of surplus food generated and donating extra food…

On Dec. 8, Wesleyan received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and two grants from National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants will support a poetry program at Wesleyan University Press, a faculty fellowship, and electronic dance and theater publications. The NEA provided an Art Works award of $25,000 to Wesleyan University Press to support its poetry program. The Art Works category of the NEA supports the creation and presentation of both new and existing work — a goal that aligns with the mission of the Wesleyan University Press, a program that has already published an internationally renowned…

Center for the Arts Director Pam Tatge to Lead Jacob’s Pillow

Ethics of Captivity Course Creates Public Website

Washington Post Reports on Atwater’s Contributions to U.S. Dietary Guidelines

Students Study Digital Arts, Personal History, Foreign Policy during Winter Session 2016

Professor Barlow Remembered as a Brilliant Pianist

Students Share Statistical Research at QAC Poster Session

Basinger Praised as Iconic Film Professor in The Hollywood Reporter

Firshein Remembered for being a Founding Member of the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department

Money and Social Change Class Awards $10K to 4 Local Non-Profits

The Endeavor Foundation Supports First Year Seminar Program

Wesleyan Recognized for Efforts Diverting Food Waste

NEA, NEH Supports Wesleyan U. Press, Humanities Books, Fellowships at Wesleyan