Olivia DrakeThree Wesleyan music graduate students and two faculty were accepted to present at the Society for Ethnomusicology's 2018 Annual Meeting Nov. 15–18 in Albuquerque, N.M. Bianca Iannitti will present a case study on the queer Indian-American DJ, Bianca Maieli, in order to explore the queer female identity within Desi music and virtual spaces. Gene Lai, MA '16, will present a study titled "Disdained at Home Embraced by Motherland: The Revitalized Tamil Folk Drumming Ensemble in Singapore." And Douglas Kiman will present a study titled "Mapping Klezmer Music in Contemporary Europe: A Case Study of the Jazz’n Klezmer Festival." He will also be presenting at the Society…
Himeka CurielMore than 2,000 parents, families, friends, and alumni are attending Family Weekend, a three-day celebration of the Wesleyan experience, Sept. 28-30 Highlights include: WESeminar lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and performances Gordon Career Center Open House and Wesleyan Summer Grants Showcase Tailgating Friends of the Wesleyan Library Book Sale Campus tours Football, soccer, and field hockey vs. Hamilton College Lunches and brunches with families and friends The 26th Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium presenting Black Phoenix Rising Alumni and Student of Color Celebration The 8th Annual Stone A Cappella Concert For a full schedule of events, visit www.wesleyan.edu/fw2018. View the photo gallery…
Lauren RubensteinNext summer, Wesleyan will assume leadership of the Center for Creative Youth (CCY), a precollege residential program that offers four weeks of intensive study in the arts. CCY, a program created by the Capitol Region Education Council (CREC), has been hosted on the Wesleyan campus since its inception in 1976. Wesleyan will oversee the noncredit program for camps beginning in summer 2019. (more…)
Adrian Peter Standaart, private lessons teacher of flute, passed away Sept. 16 at the age of 70. Standaart was born in Richmond, Va., and grew up in Asheville, N.C. He was of Dutch descent and came from a musical family; his father was an organ builder and his mother an organist. He was educated at Duke University, the North Carolina School for the Arts, and Yale University. Standaart came to Wesleyan in 1975 and continued to teach flute until shortly before his death. "His knowledge of the flute literature was encyclopedic, and his influence as a pedagogue and a champion of…
For her ongoing contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychology, Jill Morawski, Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor and professor of psychology, is the recipient of two distinguished awards. Morawski was most recently honored with the American Psychological Association Division 24 Award for Distinguished Theoretical and Philosophical Contributions to Psychology. The award was presented at the annual meeting of the APA, at which Professor Morawski delivered an invited address, “Chasing Psychology’s Objects: The Quest for Ontological Certainty.” It is the division's highest award and recognizes one of its members each year for lifetime scholarly achievement. Morawski also received the American Psychological Foundation’s 2017 Joseph B.…
On Sept. 20-21, core members of the Grammy-nominated Haitian "roots" band Boukman Eksperyans, along with the band leaders’ son Paul Beaubrun (band leader of Zing Eksperyans), engaged with several groups on campus. Boukman, founded in 1978, is one of Haiti’s best-known bands and performs traditional Vodou rhythms with pop, reggae, and blues. After learning that the group was touring between Brooklyn, N.Y., and Montreal, Canada, faculty from African American Studies and the Music Department invited and coordinated their visit at Wesleyan. On Thursday, band members led a workshop for students enrolled in the West African Music and Culture course, taught by John Dankwa, adjunct…
Cynthia RockwellSuicide and Resilience: Finding the Words was the topic of the 2018 Shasha Seminar, held Sept. 14-15 on campus. Endowed by James Shasha '50, P'82, the Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns supports lifelong learning and encourages participants to expand their knowledge and perspectives on significant issues. The educational forum provides Wesleyan alumni, parents, and friends with an opportunity to explore issues of global concern in a small seminar environment, The seminar was codirected by Karl Scheibe, professor of psychology, emeritus, and Jennifer D’Andrea, director of Wesleyan’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), the seminar, held Sept. 14-15, (Photos by Olivia Drake, Rebecca Goldfarb…
Christian CamerotaOn Thursday, Sept. 20, Wesleyan University launched a new home page, part of a broader core messaging effort to update and strengthen University-wide communications. The home page design process was driven by rigorous analysis of usage statistics and by examining best practices for websites. The home page’s state-of-the-art functionality is intended to differentiate Wesleyan in an increasingly crowded and competitive higher education landscape, and to highlight the University’s distinctive qualities. (more…)
Four Wesleyan University Press–affiliated authors were nominated for book awards this month. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rae Armantrout is one of 10 contenders for the National Book Award for Poetry. Her collection, Wobble (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) was named to the award's longlist on Sept. 13. Finalists will be revealed on Oct. 10. Teetering on the edge of the American Dream, Armantrout’s Wobble seeks to both playfully and forcefully evoke the devastation of a chaotic, unstoppable culture. Two authors were named 2018 CT Book Awards Finalists by the Connecticut Center for the Book, a Connecticut Humanities program. The awards recognize and honor authors and…
Wesleyan professors Lisa Dierker and Jennifer Rose were recently awarded a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to extend and disseminate their research on passion-driven statistics. The grant begins in the fall of 2018 and extends through 2023. Recognizing the rapidly increasing importance of data-oriented skills in the modern workforce, passion-driven statistics was developed as a novel approach to make statistics and quantitative methods courses more accessible and engaging, particularly for traditionally marginalized students. It moves away from canned exercises, toward more applied, real-world, project-based learning experiences. ”An empowering curriculum needs to rise to many challenges,” Dierker…
On Feb. 21, 1969, a group of brave students chained the doors shut to their Fisk Hall classroom and demanded that Wesleyan offer more support to its black community. As a result of this peaceful protest, Wesleyan established the Center for African American Studies, the Malcolm X House dormitory, and the black student union, Ujamaa. The black students who graduated that spring became known as the Vanguard Class of 1969. During the 2018–19 academic year, African American Studies is commemorating its 50th anniversary with a plethora of events surrounding the topic of "Blackness, Race, Sexuality, and Power." In addition, the…
Gillian Brunet, assistant professor of economics, was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize in American Economic History by the Economic History Association Sept. 8 in Montreal, Canada. The prize is awarded annually on behalf of Columbia University Press for the best dissertation in U.S. or Canadian economic history completed during the previous year. Brunet, who joined the faculty at Wesleyan this fall, completed her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation focused on the state-level effects of World War II spending in the United States. Titled, Understanding the Effects of Fiscal Policy: Measurement, Mechanisms, and Lessons from History,…