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…
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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…
Julia Mitchell '19 paced the women's cross country team with a first-place finish at the Little Three Championship on Sept. 8 in Amherst, Mass. Although Williams College ultimately won the Little Three title, the Cardinals had four runners place in the top 10 as they finished in second place, ahead of Amherst College. Little Three Championships are declared when a varsity team from Wesleyan, Williams, and Amherst defeats the other two rivals. The fierce competition among the schools dates back to at least 1910. In 2017-18, women’s crew, volleyball, men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse won Little Three titles. Mitchell, of Bellevue, Wash.,…
Lauren RubensteinSince arriving on campus freshman year, Ingrid Eck ’19 has fully immersed herself in all Wesleyan has to offer: working on the Wesleyan Green Fund; founding Veg Out, a student group dedicated to food justice; and joining—and currently serving as president of—Wesleyan’s only sorority, Rho Epsilon Pi. She is also working toward not one, but three majors: government, environmental studies, and French studies. More recently, she’s felt a desire to get involved in the broader Middletown community and “truly get to know the city in which I have been living.” This summer, Eck had a unique opportunity to become intimately…
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This summer, Mariel Middlebrook '20 gathered archival material on 19th-century alkali workers in London through a Wesleyan Student-Faculty Research Internship. The Student-Faculty Internship program provides students with paid opportunities to work on research projects in collaboration with Wesleyan faculty. As a recipient of the internship award, Middlebrook was able to work alongside Associate Professor of History Jennifer Tucker, who is collecting information on Widnes, an industrial town in Halton, Cheshire, Northwest England, that is known for being the birthplace of Britain's chemical industry in the late 1840s. (Tucker's article, "It’s No Downton Abbey, but It’s Just as Much a Part of…
New Student Orientation for the Class of 2022 concluded Aug. 31 with the annual Common Moment, an event where members of the incoming class are brought together through music and performance. This year, the students worked with choreographer Heidi Latsky to create her installation ON DISPLAY, a performance art investigation of the body and the gaze. In a large-scale, participatory version of Latsky’s touring work, the first-year students performed the roles of both seer and seen on Andrus Field and discussed their personal experiences of these roles. Students were challenged to commit to the exercise without judgment, to trust both…
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More than 135 undergraduate research fellows shared their summer-long research during a poster session on July 26 in Exley Science Center. Students from the Psychology Department, College of the Environment, Biology Department, Neuroscience and Behavior Program, Chemistry Department, Physics Department, Astronomy Department, Math and Computer Science Department, Quantitative Analysis Center, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department, and Astronomy Department presented posters. Posters often contain text, graphics, and images that illustrate the students’ research results on a single board. Poster session attendees can view the posters and interact with the authors. The summer research program is hosted by the College of Integrative Sciences.…
Cynthia Rockwell
Bill HolderFive Wesleyan students determined to make life better for girls in rural African areas have received a prestigious $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. Their start-up nonprofit, Rural Access, seeks to expand access to health and education in impoverished areas, while also raising awareness of pressing health issues. Among those is the need to address lack of menstrual hygiene products, which frequently keeps girls out of school and leads to high dropout rates, poverty, and other harmful outcomes. This summer, Rural Access will be working in Ethiopia and Guyana to make menstrual hygiene kits and distribute them to girls. The…