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By Rose Chen '26 Tony Award-winning director Thomas Kail ’99 joined the Gordon Career Center, in collaboration with the Theater Department, for a career conversation and a Q&A session on Monday, Oct. 30. Kail graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in history and went on to work with fellow graduate Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02. He became renowned for directing Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, the latter of which earned Kail a 2016 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. Kail is currently represented on Broadway with the critically acclaimed revival of Sweeney Todd and has been tapped…

Brooklyn-based composer and dhol (double-headed drum) player Sunny Jain will fine tune a new piece of work during his year-long artist residency at Wesleyan. Jain is developing the latest iteration of his first music theater project “Love Force.” He started working on the storytelling piece in 2020, and previously presented portions as part of a commission from the music venue Joe's Pub, a program of The Public Theater in New York, delivering the narration as well as drumming. The idea of the show “Love Force” is embedded in rhythm and improvisation and includes immersive elements. Jain is trying to figure…

Associate Professor of Spanish María Ospina’s most recent novel has been recognized with the 2023 Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the most important literary awards in the Spanish speaking world.” Founded in 1993, the prize is awarded each year to the female author of a novel originally published in Spanish. The award is given by the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and Ospina will give a speech at the ceremony in Nov. 29. Her book was published by Random House in Latin America in April. Ospina’s novel was selected unanimously out of over 100 applicants from…

Thousands of alumni and family members converged on Wesleyan University’s campus for Homecoming and Family Weekend from Oct. 27 to 29. Attendees walked the footpaths they once knew, hugged loved ones they hadn’t seen in a while, sparked up their grills at the football game, sat in on WeSeminars, and joined in on a historic University announcement. After hours of tailgating on Andrus Field, with music blaring and the distinct smell of hotdogs in the air, Wesleyan’s football team took the field against rival Amherst in front of 5,000 fans. The Cardinals cruised to a 34 to 7 victory over…

By Thomas Lyons '26 Growing up, Imani Ochieng '25 said she hesitated to tread onto the field hockey turf. Not for the usual reasons (fear of stick clashing, high-speed flying objects, and funny-looking goggles), but because of her family's legacy on that field. "My dad was an Olympian, my mom was almost an Olympian," Imani said. "In a way, [those successes] made me shy away from field hockey more than other sports." Now a star left back on the Wesleyan field hockey team, she has wholeheartedly joined the family's love of the game. Instrumental to her field hockey journey, Imani said, has…

The Supreme Court ruling on SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC may have ended affirmative action in college admissions this past June, but Wesleyan will continue to recruit a racially and economically diverse applicant pool. This year’s 31st Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium on Oct. 28 invited several distinguished alumni in the fields of law, civil rights, and admissions, to discuss access and opportunity in higher education, a topic that has been at the forefront of the higher education conversation for the past several months. The panel featured Tanya Greene ’91, director of US Programs, Human Rights Watch; Shereem…

Wesleyan University announced the launch of a $600 million fundraising initiative, the largest in the University’s history, on Saturday, October 28 during Homecoming and Family Weekend. Approximately 350 members of the Wesleyan community gathered to celebrate that more than $360 million had already been raised through the initiative, called “This is Not a Campaign. This is Wesleyan.” “Wesleyan is not your ordinary liberal arts college, and to signal this, we make a point of scrapping the ordinary term ‘campaign’—the ordinary just doesn’t do justice to who we are and who we want to be,” wrote President Michael S. Roth ’78…

Wesleyan’s Music Department continued its tradition of performing in unexpected spaces this month, with musicians showing up in library and museum venues on campus. “Instrument—Body,” a series of four performances in surprising locations presented in conjunction with the seminar of the same name and curated by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Ethan Philbrick, kicked off with bassist Brandon Lopez and musician and multimedia artist Cecilia Lopez MA '16 on synthesizers in the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History in the Exley Science Center in the afternoon on October 20. Professor of Music Paula Matthusen presented the third iterations…

Stewart E. Novick, Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, Emeritus, passed away recently at the age of 78. Stew received his BS from Stony Brook University and his AM and PhD from Harvard University. He served as a research fellow at Harvard and a research associate at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, University of Colorado at Boulder, before he arrived at Wesleyan in 1978, where he taught until his retirement this past summer. During his 45 years at Wesleyan, he was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a National Science Foundation Fellow, and a Woodrow Wilson…

Tula Telfair’s paintings explore wilderness in the form of recalled and imagined landscapes in order to acknowledge its inherent power and remarkable fragility. “My work investigates consciousness, memory, and the subjectivity of perception to anchor our place in the world,” Telfair said. As someone who creates photo-realistic, but materially varied and analogue process oil paintings of places that only exist in her mind’s eye, issues surrounding artificial intelligence interest her. Last year she put forward the topic: Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Consciousness for Wesleyan’s annual Shasha Seminar on Human Concerns. “As I was imagining the proposal, my first thought was,…

Some trudge, others sprint. Some materialize from otherworldly forces, others from infectious diseases. Some want flesh, others have a more specific taste for brains. Whatever their individual differences, we know zombies when we see them. And from 1932’s White Zombie to 2023’s The Last of Us, we’ve seen these charismatic, cannibalistic humanoids on the screen a lot through the generations. Off-screen, they’ve seeped into our language. (In the business world, a “zombie” lumbers on the edge of insolvency.) And more broadly, as suggested by a recent conspiracy theory that testing the nation’s emergency broadcast system would trigger an outbreak of ghouls,…

By Rose Chen '26 Students and members of the community gathered at Van Vleck Observatory (VVO) on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 14 for solar eclipse and astronomy-related fun. Despite the cloudy weather, attendees received eclipse glasses for safe future viewings and a planetarium show, as well as books available to check out from Russell Library and demonstrations in both English and Spanish from graduate students in the astronomy department. “I think, of course, everybody was disappointed that the clouds didn't cooperate today,” Associate Professor of Astronomy and Integrative Sciences Meredith Hughes said. “But it's never cloudy in the planetarium,…

Tony Award Winner Kail ’99 Speaks to Students

Sunny Jain to Create New Music Theater Project During Wesleyan Residency

Ospina’s Novel Given Prestigious Honor, the 2023 Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Wesleyan Celebrates Homecoming and Family Weekend

An Olympian and His Daughter Reflect on their Connection

31st Annual Dwight L. Greene Symposium

Wesleyan Launches Historic Fundraising Initiative

Music in Unexpected Spaces

Stewart E. Novick, Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, Emeritus, Passes Away

Shasha Seminar on Human Concerns: Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Consciousness

McAlister Explores Our Undying Attraction to the Undead

Community Views the Solar Eclipse