Tag Archive for 5 Questions

5 Questions With . . . Urip Maeny on 40 Years Teaching Javanese Dance at Wesleyan

by Lauren Rubenstein • April 22, 2013

Artist-in-residence Urip Sri Maeny, who is known on campus as “Maeny,” says Javanese dance requires highly controlled movements of different parts of the body to be synchronized with musical rhythms. (Photo by Olivia Drake)

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Urip Maeny, artist in residence in dance. She she has taught at Wesleyan since 1972, and will retire this year.

Q: Please tell us when and how you first began studying Javanese dance.

A: I began studying Javanese dance informally when I was still in elementary school in my hometown of Pekalongan in Central Java, Indonesia in the early 1960s. In 1961, I studied at the gamelan conservatory (high school level) in Surakarta. The school allowed me to focus my study on dance—especially Javanese dance, but also Balinese and Sudanese dance. After graduating, I taught dance at the conservatory for a couple of years. As both a student and faculty member at the conservatory, I danced in many cities in Java and Bali. Once, I performed the most sacred Javanese dance in the court of Surakarta.

Then, in 1968, I moved to Jakarta, and worked at the Cultural Office there. My assignment included teaching at the Presidential Palace, especially to the children of the President. I was also a member of a performing arts group, which performed abroad in Hong Kong, Australia and the Middle East.

Q: How did you end up coming to the U.S., and teaching at Wesleyan?

A: In 1971, I joined my husband, Sumarsam, who at that time was working and teaching gamelan at the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, Australia. In 1972, Wesleyan invited Sumarsam to teach gamelan, so we both departed Australia for Wesleyan. Soon after arriving at Wesleyan, the Wesleyan Music Department assigned me to assist my husband, teaching Javanese dance. I taught Javanese dance as part of the World Music Program until I was transferred to the Dance Department in the mid-1980s. I continue to teach a course in Javanese dance, and closely collaborate with the gamelan group in the Music Department. I direct Javanese dance and dance drama on and off campus, including a Javanese dance drama and gamelan performance at Lincoln Center in New York. While in residence at Wesleyan, I have performed in many cities in the U.S. and abroad. I have also briefly taught Javanese dance at Cornell and at Smith College.

Q: What has kept you at Wesleyan for 40 years?

A: Teaching Javanese dance to American students is a challenge, especially when you teach it by yourself. Javanese dance requires highly controlled movements of different parts of your body to be synchronized with musical rhythms. (See more photos of Maeny ‘s class online here. Watch a video of Maeny teaching Javanese Dance at Wesleyan online here.)

by Olivia Drake • January 25, 2013

In his new book, Professor Ashraf Rushdy explains why lynching became a form of spectacle in the late 19th Century until the 1930s. (Photo by Olivia Drake)

(Story contributed by Jim H. Smith)

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Ashraf Rushdy, professor of English, professor of African American Studies and chair of the African American Studies Program. Rushdy is the author of American Lynching, a meticulously researched interpretive history of how lynching became a uniquely American phenomenon and how it has endured, evolved and changed over the course of three centuries. The book was published by Yale University Press in October 2012.

American Lynching by Ashraf Rushdy

Q: Scholars have been writing about lynching for more than a century now. There is a significant body of extant literature. What did you aim to achieve with American Lynching? How is it different from other books on the subject?

A: There are, indeed, many books about lynching, and I’m beholden to that body of scholarship. Many of the books that have been written are about specific cases of lynching. There are fewer books that attempt to interpret the phenomenon generally. That’s what I have attempted to do with my book.

Lynching has been part of the American fabric for a long time, but the term has not consistently described the same thing over that time. I wanted to understand how lynching had taken root in America and how one practice, widely referred to as lynching, could develop into something quite different. And I wanted to offer a strong interpretation.

It’s interesting to note that lynching was not always a racially motivated act. The relative absence of lynchings in slaveholding Northern states and the occurrence of lynching in non-slaveholding western states is explained by the extent to which the mores and established precedents that emerged from those original slave laws took hold of the imagination of the residents of those states.

Q: Is lynching a uniquely American phenomenon, or is there a uniquely American “style” of lynching?

A: Well, the term “lynching” is certainly uniquely American. It derives from Colonel Charles Lynch,

by Olivia Drake • December 11, 2012

This semester, Rick Elphick is teaching a sophomore history tutorial on “The Emergence of Modern Europe” and “The History of Southern Africa.”

In this edition of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Richard “Rick” Elphick, professor of history and co-chair of the College of Social Studies. Elphick is the author of The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa, published by the University of Virginia Press in September 2012.

Q: What do you think is the main message, or the main achievement, of your new book?

A: For decades, historians of South Africa have struggled to trace how a white minority, starting in the 1650s, established a system of stark inequality among the races in the region. My book attempts to reconfigure the history of South Africa by interweaving the pressures toward inequality, which are now fairly well understood, with an account of the pressures toward racial equality. These pressures, I argue, were rooted chiefly in the proclamation of the equality of all persons before God, a message brought to South Africa by Christian missionaries. My story begins with the first missionary in 1737, and ends in 1960.

Q: Do you give the missionaries credit for the eventual overthrow of white rule and apartheid in the 1990s?

A: Not really. I do give credit to the mission schools, where black leaders, almost all of them devout Christians, acquired a belief in racial equality that inspired their resistance to oppression. I also emphasize how Christian doctrine ate away at the conscience of some white South Africans. But, as for the missionaries themselves, many appear in my book as deeply conflicted between their theoretical ideals and their fear of confronting the white power structure. And many showed a lack of confidence in blacks that bordered on racism.

Q: You also say that missionaries helped create the apartheid ideology?

A: Many writers have tried to find a link between religion and the doctrine of radical racial separation known as apartheid. In my view, however, they have looked in the wrong places. I trace the origins of the doctrine to missionary leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church.

by Olivia Drake • October 22, 2012

Michael Dorsey, visiting professor of environmental studies, says the College of Environment’s Think Tank is “a novel, innovative space for learning.”

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Michael Dorsey, visiting professor of environmental studies. In September, he was reappointed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Advisory Committee.

Q: Professor Dorsey, you’re a visiting professor of environmental studies and a fellow in the College of the Environment’s Think Tank. What is the 2012-13 Think Tank theme, and what is your role in the year-long exploration?

A: The 2012-2013 College of the Environment’s Think Tank theme is: environmental justice and global health.

Despite growing awareness of the problems of environmental injustice and related impacts on health and sustainability, many communities here in the U.S. and around the globe remain vulnerable or are being put at risk in new ways. This year’s COE Think Tank will use our collective interdisciplinary strengths and practical experience to seek to tackle these complex issues. Using complementary, yet distinct, disciplinary approaches to examine the connection between environmental justice and global health, we will explore the health and livelihood implications of environmental injustice from local to global scales –from neighborhood struggles for food justice to regional responses to mountaintop removal in Appalachia and environmental activism in East Asia to the plight of island communities facing unfolding global climate disruption.

Q: Why did you want to be part of the Think Tank, and what do you hope will be accomplished?

A: The College of Environment’s Think Tank is a novel, innovative space for learning; it is a unique space for environmental autodidactical fellowship. Individual learning blossoms as a result of camaraderie and collegial labor—of both peer faculty and dynamic student fellows.

by David Pesci • September 26, 2012

William “Vijay” Pinch, professor of history, adjusts the topsail of the Joseph Conrad, during an NEH-funded summertime institute in June. Pinch participated in the five-week institute, in part, to refine and improve his maritime world history course. (Photo by Heather Agostini)

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of William “Vijay” Pinch, professor of history. Pinch spent five weeks this summer interacting with maritime scholars and working in the archives and library at Mystic Seaport.

Q: What were you studying at Mystic Seaport this summer?

A: From June 25 to to July 27, I was privileged to be a student in a “summer institute” at Mystic Seaport, focused on “The American Maritime People.” The institute is usually pitched to graduate students, but every few years it is offered to college and university faculty with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was one of those NEH-funded summers. The faculty who teach at the institute represent some of the top scholars in maritime history, especially in the context of the Atlantic and (mostly) North American world. What was especially interesting to me, as someone who was not originally trained in maritime history (or North American history for that matter), was to see how the field of maritime history has broadened, so that it now encompasses everything under the rubric of the human interaction with and perception of the sea over time. This appealed to my wider world-historical instincts. Similarly, it was instructive to see the ways in which the maritime experience mediated New England’s interaction with other parts of the Americas and the wider world. We also examined marine environmental history, fisheries history, the history of oceanography, naval history, and the recent maritime past and maritime present–including the geo-strategic challenges on the horizon (especially in the Pacific and Indian Oceans), the rise of container shipping, bulk cargo supertankers, and the mega-cruise ship phenomenon.

Q: How does this inform, or how is it informed by, your other areas of interest?

A: My initial interest in the summer institute at Mystic stemmed from a desire to refine and improve my maritime world history course. I’ve offered the course in varying incarnations over the past seven years or so, and each time I struggle with what to include and how to organize it. So the five-week course was excellent for stimulating new thinking along these lines. I’d like for students to be able to take better advantage of all that Mystic and the wider region have to offer. What makes the summer institute special is the combination of traditional classroom learning with more hands-on “public history” kinds of activities.

by David Low • August 30, 2012

Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English. (Photo by Vanessa Haney)

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English and faculty fellow in the Center for the Humanities. Cohen is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, an engrossing biographical triptych about three complicated, glamorous, independent, and influential women of the last century (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012).

In a review of her new book in Businessweek, Craig Seligman writes:
“ ‘All We Know’ is really much more about reflecting on lives … than about chronicling them. Experimental biography, if such a genre can be said to exist, is a high-wire act. Cohen never loses her balance.”

Q: What courses have you taught at Wesleyan and which have you enjoyed teaching the most?

A: I teach the sequence of nonfiction workshops in the English Department: Techniques of Nonfiction, Intermediate Nonfiction Workshop, and Advanced Nonfiction Workshop. I also teach a Special Topics course on biographical writing, and courses such as Stein and Woolf, and Fictions of Consumption. This fall at the Center for the Humanities, I will offer a course that engages with the semester’s theme of “Temporality.”

It’s impossible for me to say which I’ve enjoyed teaching the most. I love teaching Wesleyan students—and partly because of them, every time I teach “the same” course it’s a new experience. But the workshops also vary every year because I assign different texts and because every semester we bring different, exciting writers to campus. Alison Bechdel, Lisa Jarnot, and Bernard Cooper are three of the several who will be giving readings and meeting with students this fall.

Q: What do you believe about writing that you have shared with your students?

A: Revise!
Read writing that inspires and challenges you.

Write about what really matters to you and do it so well that it is compelling to others.

Keep editing your work.
Be strict with yourself, but patient with your own process.

Q: How did you decide to write about the lives of these three separate women—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland—in your new book?

A: I started writing a book about Madge Garland and spent several years doing archival research and conducting interviews about her life. But at a certain point it became clear to me that while I could write a whole book about her, such a book would, ironically, not quite do her justice. Her life was one of accomplishment, but a lot of what she had done was hard to pin down. The same was true for my other subjects. I wanted to say something bigger about the milieu in which Madge had moved, to show what certain women’s lives looked like in the 20th century, and to emphasize previously unseen connections—and the often intangible work of making connections among people, which was work they had all done. In the meantime, I had written a magazine profile of Mercedes de Acosta and was hearing about Esther Murphy from the writer Sybille Bedford (whom I had first met because I interviewed her about Madge Garland).

by Lauren Rubenstein • July 31, 2012

Richard Grossman, professor of economics.

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Professor of Economics Richard Grossman. In July, Grossman spoke to the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s about the Libor scandal rocking the global financial industry. Grossman’s 2010 book, Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800, reviews banking crises over the past 200 years in North America, Europe and other regions, and considers how they speak to today’s financial crises around the world. He blogs at Unsettledaccount.com.

Q: Professor Grossman, what is the Libor, and what is this scandal all about?

A: “Libor” is the London InterBank Offered Rate. Produced daily for the British Bankers’ Association, it is calculated by asking a group of banks how much they estimate it will cost them to borrow money. Banks are asked to provide estimates of borrowing costs for 15 different maturities ranging from overnight to one year in ten different currencies, so Libor is not one interest rate, but 150. Because not all of the banks deal in all maturity-currency combinations, somewhere between 6 and 18 banks are polled. The highest and lowest estimates are thrown out and the remainder—about half–are averaged to yield Libor. Libor plays a vital role in the world financial system because it serves as a benchmark for some $800 trillion in transactions–everything ranging from complex derivatives to simple home mortgages.

Because so much money is riding on Libor, traders have an incentive to pressure their banks into altering submission estimates to improve their profitability. The scandal is that they did just that. Even a small movement in Libor can lead to millions in extra profits–or losses–for banks.

It has also been alleged that the British authorities encouraged banks to lower their submissions in the wake of the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy to give the impression that banks had access to plentiful and cheap funds and were therefore less vulnerable to the crisis than they actually were.

Q: Sounds like a big deal for the banks, but why should an average person like me care?

A: If the interest rate you pay on your mortgage, home equity loan, or credit card balance is tied to Libor—and it may well be—then you should be concerned that the rate is set fairly.

by Olivia Drake • May 27, 2012

Professor of Chemistry Wallace "Pete" Pringle (standing) celebrates his retirement from Wesleyan with his graduate research group. The students, pictured, from left, are Daniel Obenchain, Brittany Long, Daniel Frohman, and Andrea Minei, Ph.D. '09.

Q: Professor Pringle, you joined Wesleyan’s Chemistry Department as an assistant professor in 1968. How have times changed?

A: I started here before there were female students. Wesleyan had NO COMPUTER at all, and Ph.D. programs were just starting. At the time, we had 11 faculty in the department: Al Fry, Gill Burford, John Sease, Jose Gomez-Ibanez, Peter Leermakers, Julia Tan, Don Sebera and Larry Faller were here, and two faculty came here when I did–Paul Haake from UCLA and Peter Wharton from Wisconsin. Of this group, Al Fry is the only one still working in the department. The department had just moved out of Hall Chemistry Labs, a building that had columns that juxtaposed Olin. The Science Library is there now. Ted Etherington was president and many faculty smoked pipes during faculty meetings. All wore coats and ties and there were very few women faculty. The chemistry department nowadays is slightly larger than in 1967-68, and has grown in theoretical, inorganic, biochemistry and spectroscopy. There are many high-field NMR spectrometers also. I was the first occupant of my brand new office in Hall-Atwater and I am still there.

Wallace "Pete" Pringle, professor of chemistry, retired this May after a 44-year tenure at Wesleyan. (Photos by Roslyn Carrier-Brault)

Q: What are you research interests?

A: My research group, which was comprised of 60 undergraduate and 16 graduate students, worked on far-infrared spectroscopy on ring molecules such as diboranes and collision induced rotation-translation spectroscopy between nonpolar molecules. The kinetics of the reactions of trace specific cogeners of polychloro-biphenyls- or PCBs – in water. PCBs became ubiquitous in the environment and they are concentrated up the food chain and have health consequences. One way they can be destroyed is by oxidation–so we studied that. Much of my other studies have been on the forces that cause gas phase molecules to turn into liquids. The small forces between molecules that lead to liquids are poorly understood–so we study that.

Q: What was your biggest research accomplishment?

A: My lab confirmed the existence of a 50-year-old prediction of a ring puckering vibration in diboranes. Diborane is a very peculiarly bonded small-ring molecule that ignites spontaneously in wet air. Our lab showed that the rate of oxidation of PCBs was a function of the number of chlorines in the molecule and was independent of the positions of substitution. PCBs are molecules that have one or more chlorine molecules placed on two bonded benzene rings. These liquids do not burn or decompose and were added to the oil in electric company transformers to keep the transformers from exploding and burning as they did before PCBs were discovered by chemists. They were so stable that they accumulated in the environment; however they save many, many lives by keeping transformers from exploding and burning near schools, hospitals and buildings in cities.

by David Pesci • May 9, 2012

Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government, tutor in the College of Social Studies, says all nations, even our closest allies, do things that cut against our geo-strategic interests.

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask 5 Questions of Giulio Gallarotti, professor of government and author of several books and scholarly articles, including The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics. Lately he has turned his attention to the U.S.-China relationship and its place in the geo-political world.

Q: Your recent work has taken you to the transition in much of the world from a Cold War stance to the coming “cold co-existence” between the U.S. and China. How would you define “cold co-existence”?

A: The future U.S. relations with China will be far different than the Cold War relationship with the U.S.S.R., even if the Chinese get closer to nuclear parity with the U.S. The two nations will be far more interdependent economically than the U.S. and Soviets; hence their fates will be far more interlocked. While we had almost no major economic ties to the Soviets during the Cold War, we are now China’s major market (we ran a $295 billion trade deficit with China in 2011) and China is our largest lender (China presently holds over $1 trillion in American assets—largely bonds). In a sense, we are each other’s principal sources of revenues: trade revenues for China and loans for the U.S. government. This economic interdependence is here to stay, however, it will be embedded in a competitive environment, which will make the two nations anything but close allies. Add to the testy economic relationship friction over human rights, Taiwan, and disagreements over territorial claims in the South China Sea; and you have enough additional negative karma to generate a very “cold” posture between the two great nations.

Q: The economic competition between the two has received heightened scrutiny in the past few years, in part because China ignores the environmental laws employed by most western nations, controls its currency and exerts wage controls on its workers. How will these behaviors affect the relationship with the U.S. and the West in the next few years?

A: The battle of ideologies between communism and capitalism is withering quickly with the depreciation of the communist ideology among both Chinese leaders and people.

by Lauren Rubenstein • April 17, 2012

Assistant professor Sarah Croucher is leading an archeological dig in the Beman Triangle, located between Vine Street, Cross Street, and Knowles Ave. Local resident Leverett Beman divided the land in 1847, and sold these plots off to other African-American families. (Photos by Olivia Drake)

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask 5 Questions of Sarah Croucher, assistant professor of anthropology, assistant professor of archaeology, assistant professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Croucher will lead an archaeological dig on the site of the Beman Triangle in Middletown on April 28-29. The public is welcome to attend. To view photos of the dig on April 14-15 click here.

Q: Professor Croucher, what exactly is the Beman Triangle and what is its significance to the history of Middletown?

A: The Beman Triangle is the land between Vine Street, Cross Street, and Knowles Ave., where homes have existed since the early 19th century. Local historian Liz Warner has shown that something very important happened here in the mid- to late-19th century. Leverett Beman, son of the first Pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Middletown, had the land divided into plots by a surveyor in 1847, and sold these plots off to other African-American families. This seems to be a deliberately planned community; a way that members of the AME Zion Church could become property owners (something that remains hard for many people today), and live as neighbors in a relatively prosperous community. The Beman Triangle is of national importance as very few African-Americans were able to go through a similar community-building process in the mid-nineteenth century, when they still lacked U.S. citizenship and slavery was still legal in many states. Although the houses might not look like much today, the site is an important testament to the lives of the nineteenth century Beman Triangle community.

Q: What do we know already about the AME Zion Church community?

A: There has been some wonderful historical research done on the Beman Triangle community by local historians Liz Warner and Janice Cunningham, as well as Wesleyan alumnus Jesse Nasta as part of his thesis. This work has shown us how active the residents were politically, in ways that are traceable through historical documents.

by Lauren Rubenstein • March 26, 2012

Assistant Professor Laura Stark hopes her new book can inform scientists, scholars, students and research participants of new research regulations created by the Office of Human Research Protections.

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask 5 Questions of Laura Stark, assistant professor of sociology, assistant professor of science in society, assistant professor of environmental studies. Stark recently published a new book, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research.

Q: Professor Stark, what inspired you to study institutional review boards (IRBs), which regulate research on human subjects?

A: I first became interested in this project in 2002 because of a great coincidence of scholarship. At the time, I was reading historical works that explained why the Nuremberg Code after World War II had so little effect on medical research in the U.S. I was also going through IRB training to conduct interviews as part of a research study, and found that the IRB training manuals attribute the modern origins of American research ethics to the Nuremberg Code. The two contradictory accounts intrigued me. I am generally interested in how new knowledge is produced in science and medicine, and I also think it’s important to use research methods appropriate to the question at hand (which is why I use both ethnographic and historical methods in the book). As a result, I started to explore how the ethics evaluation process developed historically and how it works today, and investigate the conflicting accounts of the importance of the Nuremberg Code.

I was excited at the prospect of exploring uncharted territory by observing IRB meetings and reconsidering the history of IRBs using new historical materials from the National Institutes of Health.

Q: What was most striking about the IRBs you observed?

A: As an ethnographer, I was struck by how similar these different IRB “field sites” felt to me. Each was a day’s drive from my home, each was composed of quite different individuals, and each used a lot of discretion in evaluating researchers’ proposal. Yet their methods for reaching decisions were remarkably similar. The three boards didn’t communicate with each other and they certainly weren’t trying to model on each other, and yet they use similar decision-making techniques.

As I argue in the book, these similarities are a function of the common configuration of IRBs all around the country. Since 1966, The U.S. surgeon general has required all universities, hospitals and other organizations that receive federal funding for research on people to get prior approval from a human-subjects

by Lauren Rubenstein • March 6, 2012

Daniel Long, assistant professor of sociology, studies education in the U.S. and abroad. In February, he was invited to testify before the Connecticut General Assembly’s Education Committee about education reform plans.

In this issue of The Wesleyan Connection we ask 5 Questions of Daniel Long, assistant professor of sociology.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy has made education reform a major priority this year. He has proposed a sweeping package of reforms, including overhauling teacher tenure, increasing Education Cost Sharing grants to struggling districts, funding more preschool slots for low-income children, and requiring districts to contribute additional money for students to attend charter schools.

Q: Connecticut suffers from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gap in the country. What can be done to address this?

A: In Connecticut—as well as nationwide—longitudinal studies have shown that the achievement gap is constant or decreases during the months that children are enrolled in school, meaning black and white and poor and non-poor students learn at the same rate while in school. But the gaps are quite large before students enter school, and expand during the summer. To address this, many have suggested increasing the time kids spend in school, and offering academic enrichment activities to poor and minority students during the summer. Experimental studies have also shown that really high-quality early childhood education—which includes small class sizes, great teachers, social workers who support parents, and adequate health services—can make a big difference. Unfortunately, many early childhood education programs, such as Head Start, don’t meet these standards. The Perry Preschool Project in Michigan and the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York are examples of really effective programs.

Q: Governor Malloy seeks to boost funding for charter schools, requiring municipalities to provide an additional $1,000 per student. Do you think this is a good use of taxpayer money?

A: No, I don’t. On average, students perform equal or worse in charter schools than in public schools. Connecticut’s charter schools do a little better than the national average—in part,