Olivia DrakeIn January, two Green Street Teaching and Learning Center programs received grants. Pratt & Whitney awarded Green Street with a $5,000 award to support its Discovery AfterSchool Program, which serves 80 Middletown students in Grades 1-8 each year. The program offers a range of classes in the arts, math, and sciences and helps children to build self-esteem and problem-solving skills. Also, the Connecticut Mathematics and Science Partnership Program presented a $168,437 award to the Project to Increase Mastery of Mathematics and Science (PIMMS) to support a continuation of PIMMS' Intel Math Institute. The institute gets K-8 teachers excited about math, prepared for Common Core, and equipped with a toolkit of…
Winter at Wesleyan, Jan. 9. (Photos by Olivia Drake) (more…)
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A commentary by Leo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, was featured in the Times Literary Supplement in January. The commentary focuses on Austria’s exploitation of Karl Kraus’s great anti-war drama, The Last Days of Mankind, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. Kraus first published the play in four special issues of his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch) in 1918–19. "The red wrappers and the documentary photograph of Wilhelm II used as the frontispiece of the epilogue initially lent it the explosive impact of a revolutionary pamphlet," Lensing writes in the commentary. "Kraus…
Tula Telfair, professor of art, is having a solo exhibition of 21 new monumental oil paintings at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum Jan. 10 through March 15. The opening reception is 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 29. In a "World of Dreams— New Landscape Paintings," Telfair paints monumental landscapes and epic-scale vistas that act as windows into another world — a dream world — where everything seems familiar yet remains beyond grasp. Drawing upon the long tradition of landscape painting from the backdrops of the Renaissance through the Romanticism of the 19th century, she presents a thoroughly contemporary perspective upon an archaic art form. Instead of documenting…
Brian Katten#THISISWHY In this Q&A meet Laila Samy from the Class of 2018. Q: You came to Wesleyan from your hometown of Cairo, Egypt. Can you describe your life growing up in a foreign country? What was your secondary-school education like? A: Growing up in Egypt and going to school there made me feel very grateful because I had a great opportunity to both play squash and get a decent education which lead me to move on to the next experience which is completing my last two years of high school in the U.S. and that lead me to be able to…
The Green Street Arts Center, also home to Wesleyan's Project to Increase Mastery of Mathematics and Science, is now named the Green Street Teaching and Learning Center, or Green Street TLC. "This structure better represents the work we do in the community and also allows us to grow our programs in the arts, math, and sciences for kids, teachers, and our broader community," said Director Sara MacSorley. Green Street TLC will continue its Discovery AfterSchool Program, which serves 80 Middletown students in Grades 1-8 each year; a Private Lessons Program, and a Green Street-to-Go Residency Program that brings teaching artists…
A poem by Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, professor of English, is published in the Jan. 12 edition of The New Yorker. Willis, a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Alive: New and Selected Poems, which will be published this spring. She is an expert on 20th century American poetry and poetics, poetry and visual culture, 19th century poetry and poetics, modernism, post-modernism, poetry and political history and the prose poem. The published poem is titled "About the Author."
Jason Wolfe, professor of biology emeritus, died Dec. 23 at the age of 73. Wolfe joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1969 after receiving his BA from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completing two post-doctoral fellowships at Kings College, University of London, and Johns Hopkins University. He taught cell biology, human biology, biology of aging and the elderly, and structural biology at Wesleyan for 39 years. In his research, Wolfe asked big questions about how reproduction and aging are regulated. With funding from NIH and NSF, he produced a consistent and enviable body of work published…
Four faculty from the History Department participated in the American Historical Association Meeting in New York City Jan. 2-5. The topic was "History and Other Disciplines." Professor of History Ethan Kleinberg presented “Just the Facts: The Fantasy of a Historical Science." Kleinberg also is the director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of letters and executive editor of History and Theory. Assistant Professor of History Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock spoke on “From a Society Free of Religion to Freedom of Conscience: How Toleration Emerged from within Totalitarianism." She also is assistant professor of Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian studies and tutor in the College of…
Wesleyan recently received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The awards will support research by Wesleyan faculty Mary Alice Haddad and Sanford Shieh. Mary Alice Haddad, associate professor of government, received a $33,600 grant for the NEH Fellowships for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan project titled, "Environmental Politics in East Asia: Strategies that Work." “Japan has experienced some of the world’s most intense environmental crises and taken leadership roles in finding solutions," Haddad said. "The Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan will enable me to examine the ways that Japan’s experience has served as a model for…
Priscilla Meyer, chair and professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian studies, is the recipient of a 2014 Excellence in Post-Secondary Teaching award, granted by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). AATSEEL exists to advance the study and promote the teaching of Slavic and East European languages, literatures, and cultures on all educational levels. Meyer received her award during the the 2015 AATSEEL Conference Jan. 9 held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The event featured scholarly panels, supplemented by advanced seminars, roundtables, workshops, informal coffee conversations with leading scholars, and other special events, such as poetry…