David LowNovelist Kaylie Jones ’81 has written a new memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (William Morrow, 2009) in which she explores her life growing up with her well-known father, who was also a writer (From Here to Eternity) and her mother, who as an alcoholic who could be cruel and unloving. Jones also writes about her adulthood as she struggles to overcome her own drinking problem and to become a writer in the shadow of her father, and the difficulties of dealing with her mother as she declines physically and mentally. In her review of the book in The…
Olivia DrakeDeb Olin Unferth, assistant professor of English, won the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award for her book, Vacation, (McSweeney's Press). She recieved $5,000 for being the contest winner. According to an Aug. 15 edition of The Los Angeles Times, about 100 readers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the broader Richmond, Va. Community, participated in the selection process.
Gary Yohe, the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics, is quoted in an Aug. 21 USA Today article titled "Poor communities hit hardest by global warming." The article focuses on a study produced by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report about its economic forecasts. Yohe is an author on the IPCC report. "IPCC identified the poor, the elderly, and the very young as the most vulnerable categories of people on the planet ... regardless of location, as Katrina and the European (2003) heat wave taught us," Yohe says in the article. "Nonetheless, the most vulnerable are more likely to…
Four Wesleyan spring athletes were named first-team All-Americans in the July/August edition of the Jewish Sports Review, the pre-eminent national publication honoring Jewish athletes. Among those honored from Wesleyan, softball standout Talia Bernstein ’11 (#9), who earned first-team all-NESCAC as well as regional honors from both the New England Softball Coaches Association and the National Fastpitch Coaches Association after leading the Cardinals to a second-place finish in the NESCAC tournament with her .482 batting average, was a first-team Jewish All-American. Two members of the Wesleyan men's lacrosse team, Jason Ben-Eliyahu ’09 (#27) and Lonny Blumenthal ’10 (#13), found spots on…
Keera Bhandari ’08, MA ’09 and Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, are the authors of a new article on children's social cognition. The article, based on Bhandari's research project for her master's degree in psychology, is titled "Show or tell: Testimony is sufficient to induce the curse of knowledge in three- and four-year-olds." It will appear in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2009.
Corrina KerrPatrick Dowdey, curator at the Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology, and adjunct assistant professor of East Asian Studies, is a co-curator of Pearl of the Snowlands: Buddhist Printing at the Derge Parkhang, an exhibit of original prints from Tibetan Buddhists. The exhibit will be held from Sept. 11 to Dec. 5 at The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College in Chicago. The prints from the Derge Parkhang are still created from hand-carved woodblocks, as they have been for over 300 years. Dowdey will participate in a Nov. 21 panel discussion about the prints he helped retrieve…
Bill HolderA recent New York Times story noting that Shanghai and Beijing are “new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates” featured Joshua Arjuna Stephens ’07, who took a temporary job with China Prep, an educational travel company. Stephens told the Times that he new little about China and didn’t speak the language, but he wanted to “do something off the beaten track.” Now, two years after leaving for China, his is fluent in Mandarin and works as a manager for XPD Media, a social media company based in Beijing that makes online games. Young Americans are attracted by the…
David PesciAll American Wesleyan volleyball player Lisa Drennan '09 has signed to play professional volleyball in Denmark this year.
In a piece in The Huffington Post, Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth recounts the strong ties Senator Edward Kennedy H'83 had with Wesleyan, and how the late Senator had the "courage to believe in the possibilities for positive change."
No Quarter: The battle of the Crater, 1864 by Richard Slotkin, Olin Professor of English, emeritus, is praised in a recent review in The New York Times. The book examines a Civil War battle in 1864 that involved extensive use of black soldiers by the Union and became a polarizing political symbol that might have cost Lincoln his second term as President of the United States. The review calls No Quarter "a riveting narrative and fair play to both sides, while exhuming an important episode from relative obscurity."
Jeanine Basinger, Chair and Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, discussed in The Los Angeles Times the recent reappearance of gigolo-type characters in feature films and television. Basinger talks about the social and economic implications of such characters and what they may imply about current times.
Geoffrey Ginsburg '78 is part of a team that has developed a genetic test for influenza that identifies infection before symptoms can even arise. The advance, reported in USA Today, could offer tremendous opportunities for early treatment of flu and the potential reduce the number of people who come down with the illness as save lives.