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Olivia DrakeJanuary 8, 20162min
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…

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Olivia DrakeDecember 14, 20152min
Students enrolled in Sculpture I and Studies in Computer-Based Modeling and Digital Fabrication displayed their art around the Center for the Art's public spaces Dec. 12-16. Sculpture I, taught by Professor of Art Jeffrey Schiff, is an introduction to seeing, thinking and working in three dimensions. Throughout the semester, the class examined three-dimensional space, form, materials and the associations they elicit. Through the sculptural processes of casting, carving and construction in a variety of media, students developed and communicated a personal vision in response to class assignments. Projects included janitorial supplies hanging in suspension, plastic color shapes making a stain-glass window, electronic components…

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Olivia DrakeDecember 14, 20153min
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…

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Olivia DrakeDecember 9, 20153min
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…

Lauren RubensteinDecember 2, 20154min
Four Wesleyan undergraduates and a faculty member received awards in the latest call for proposals from NASA's Connecticut Space Grant Consortium. Astronomy major Rachel Aronow '17 was awarded an Undergraduate Research Fellowship in the amount of $5,000 for her project, "Planet Formation and Stellar Characteristics in Tatooine-like Systems." She is working with Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, studying Tatooine-like systems (named after the fabled home system of Luke Skywalker), which are planet-forming disks that surround a close pair of stars that are in orbit around each other. Aronow conducted research with Herbst last summer, and these funds will support further…

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Laurie KenneyDecember 2, 20152min
Two evenings of theater will be presented by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures this month. Both events are free and open to the public and will take place at the department's common room at 300 High Street in Middletown, Conn. Students from French 281 and Theater 291 will present three plays in French on Dec. 9 at 6 p.m.: "Tu honoreras ton père et ta mère"  or “You Will Honor Your Father and Mother," by Samira Sedira; "Ah! La belle vie" or “Oh! The Good Life," by Anne Giafferi; and “First Lady,” by Sedef Ecer. A reception will follow. The…

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Lauren RubensteinNovember 24, 20153min
The world is currently facing the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Concerned Wesleyan students are volunteering with community organizations, coordinating various speaker panels, fundraising for international NGOs and agencies, and engaging in advocacy efforts. This fall, Casey Smith ’17 and Cole Phillips ’16 founded the Wesleyan Refugee Project (WRP). Smith, a College of Social Studies major who is pursuing certificates in Middle Eastern studies and international relations, has worked with refugees since high school, advocated for refugees’ rights in Washington, D.C., and volunteered for refugee resettlement organizations. She is currently studying abroad in Jordan, where she helps refugees access…

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Lauren RubensteinNovember 24, 20154min
The basement of the University Organizing Center at 190 High Street is now home to Red Feather Studios, Wesleyan’s first and only student-run recording studio. Red Feather officially opened in spring 2015 after being a work in progress for a few years. “The music culture at Wesleyan is unlike any I’ve seen at other universities,” added Oscar Parajon '16, a founding member and head studio manager at Red Feather, who is majoring in American Studies. “Before Red Feather Studios, what was happening was a plethora of ‘bedroom producers’ throughout campus that did not have a platform to make their art.” According…