David LowSebastian Junger ’84 has directed a new documentary, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, which premiered on HBO this month. The film covers Hertherington’s career as a war photographer, from his earliest days covering the civil war in Liberia to his final days in Misrata. He was killed in 2011 at age 40 in the siege of Misrata during Libya's civil war. Junger pays tribute to Hetherington's video and still photography and how he engaged himself on a personal level with his subjects. Junger and Hetherington were co-directors of the acclaimed…
Olivia DrakeA book written by Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen was honored by the Biographers International Organization on April 22. Her book, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was nominated for a 2012 inaugural Plutarch Award for "best biography of the year." Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the prize aims to be the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that the winner will be determined by secret ballot from a list of nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. The BIO nominated 10 books for the award. The Plutarch Award will…
Best-selling author Mary Roach 81 has just published her latest gift to readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W. W. Norton), in which she takes a memorable tour inside and outside of the body. Her fascinating book on the process of eating brings readers upclose with the bodily equipment that turns food into the nutrients and sustenance that keeps us ticking. On her quest for knowledge of the digestive tract, Roach meets with professors and technicians, murderers, mad scientists, Eskimos, exorcists, rabbis and other unique characters. She is fearless in asking taboo and embarrassing questions with relish and humor.…
Lily Baggott '15Plate subduction, magmatism, and mantle plumes are the focus of a recent study by Christopher Kincaid ’83, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. A highly contested topic, the three proposed causes of volcanism in the northwestern United States led Kincaid and his team aboard the RV Endeavor to publish an article in the scientific journal Nature. “I always tell people that I got on this track to being an oceanographer because of my time at Wes,” Kincaid said. “I can trace it back to taking small geology classes alongside master’s level grad students. It made a huge…
Gabe Rosenberg '16Nancy Rommelmann ’83 has released Transportation (Dymaxicon), a new book of short stories. A journalist as well as an author, Rommelmann writes with an unflinching documentarian gaze, focusing on the dreams, delusions, and occasionally criminal behaviors of subjects like serial killers, con men, and homeless teens. In her new collection, Rommelmann tells stories that lean towards science fiction at points and towards magical realism at others. The opening story, “The White Coyote,” is a piece of black humor about a creature injected at birth with human DNA and its shaming at a Catholic grade school gymnasium. In “X-Girl,” a woman…
Cynthia RockwellJack DiSciacca '07 is first author on a paper that appeared in the April issue of Physical Review Letters, a premier journal for physics. Now a Ph.D candidate at Harvard, DiSciacca earned his undergraduate degree with high honors; Foss Professor of Physics Tom Morgan was his advisor. The published paper, “One Particle Measurement of the Anti-Proton Magnetic Moment,” details DiSciacca’s research on the antiproton, which is an antimatter particle. Morgan explains, “DiSciacca spent the last six months at CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research], at the same accelerator facility where physicists recently discovered the Higgs boson to measure the…
Lauren RubensteinTogether with two former members of her lab, Hilary Barth, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, had a paper published in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Titled, "Developmental Change in Numerical Estimation," the paper was also written by Emily Slusser, formerly a post-doctoral fellow in psychology and now a faculty member at San Jose State University, and Rachel Santiago '12. The paper represents a challenge to a prominent theory of how children's numerical thinking changes throughout the preschool years and into childhood. The article is available to purchase here.
James McGuire, professor and chair of government, professor of Latin American studies, tutor in the College of Social Studies, recently had a book chapter and an article published. The chapter, titled, "Social Policies in Latin America: Causes, Characteristics, and Consequences," appeared in Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics, edited by Peter Kingstone and Deborah J. Yashar and published March 8 by Routledge. The chapter classifies the main social policies enacted in Latin America from 1920 through 2010, explores the effects of those policies on the well-being of the poor, and outlines some of the forces and circumstances that led to…
Mark Saba ’81 recently released Painting A Disappearing Canvas (Grayson Books), a collection of poems spanning 30 years. Centering on his Polish and Italian roots in Pittsburgh, the poems focus on the subject of family life and universal themes of what it means to be alive. Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, writes in the book’s foreword that Saba is a “writer who meditates on the entanglement of his roots and who sounds as if he is tenderly worried that his children not be too bound up with this entanglement while at the same time he is…
Watch five exciting professors at Wesleyan give talks on the ideas they can’t stop thinking about during Wesleyan Thinks Big, March 28 in Memorial Chapel. Students nominated their favorite professors earlier in the semester to give nine-minute lectures, without slides, handouts, or Moodle, on a topic of their choice. Wesleyan Thinks Big was inspired by TED Talks and encourages professors to talk about things they aren’t able to fit into class but are excited and inspired by. The videos are online here. View photos of the event here. The faculty and their topics are: Paula Matthusen, assistant professor of music,…
Ahead of the publication of his new book, Grossman talks economic policy with The Boston Globe
Rutland discusses Chechnya's history with terrorism, possible influences on Boston bombing suspects