David LowIn her illuminating new book, Doctoring Freedom (University of North Carolina Press), Gretchen Long ’89 shares the stories of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education, as she reveals the important relationship between medical practice and political identity. Even before emancipation, African Americans recognized that control of their bodies was an essential battleground in their struggle for autonomy, and they devised strategies to retain some of that control. During her research, Long, an associate professor of history at Williams College, closely studied antebellum medical journals, planters' diaries, agricultural publications, letters from wounded African American…
Five alumni have contributed to exceptional documentaries that were shown this January at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Marc Shmuger ’80 is one of the producers of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which had its premiere at Sundance. Directed by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, the film is an in-depth study of all things related to WikiLeaks and the larger global debate over access to information. It tells a compelling story of what happens when a small group of people decide to break open the intelligence vaults of the world’s most powerful nation. The…
Olivia DrakeWesleyan alumni Jessica Posner '09 and Kennedy Odede '12 appeared on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams on Jan. 17 in a report titled “Couple’s School becomes Lifeline in Kenyan Slum.” Watch the report, hosted by Rock Center Special Correspondent Chelsea Clinton, online here. Posner and Odede are co-founders of Shining Hope for Communities, an organization working to combat gender inequality and extreme poverty in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. In August 2009, Shining Hope for Communities founded The Kibera School for Girls, the first tuition-free school for girls in Kibera. By providing a superior education, daily nourishment, uniforms, and schools supplies all free of…
This January, Liz Garcia ’99 brought her first feature film, The Lifeguard, to Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah to be shown in the U.S. Dramatic competition. She directed, wrote, and co-produced the movie; her husband, Joshua Harto, is a co-producer and an actor in the film. The Lifeguard follows a young woman (Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars) who leaves her job as an Associated Press reporter in New York City and returns to her hometown in suburban Connecticut where she last felt happiness. Complications arise as she rebels against adulthood by resuming her high school job as a pool…
Jim Margolis ’93, a six-time Emmy Award winner, left his job last year as an executive producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to become the show runner for a new series, Newsreaders, which airs at midnight Thursday on Adult Swim, part of the Cartoon Network. Co-created by Rob Corddry, Jonathan Stern and David Wain, Newsreaders is a sketch comedy show in the form of a fake TV news magazine and a spinoff of a successful Adult Swim series, Children’s Hospital, a parody of the hospital drama genre. The new series features both established and up-and-coming comic talents. In…
An audio-archive project managed by Jorge Arévalo Mateus PhD '12 will be available to the general public in the United States and the Dominican Republic in 2013. The project, "The Sacred and Festive Music of the Liboristas Communities of the Dominican Southwest," contains 32 hours of field recordings gathered between 2001 and 2004. With support from the GRAMMY Foundation® in the category "Preservation and Archive," Arévalo Mateus digitally preserved music audio recordings captured in rural areas of the Dominican Republic preserving more than 20 genres. The result is the first archive documenting the different genres of music played at Liboristas communities…
Halley Feiffer ’07 is the star and co-writer (with Ryan Spahn) of the feature film of He's Way More Famous Than You, which premiered in the dramatic competition at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January. The film is directed by Michael Urie, the star of Ugly Betty and Partners, and co-stars Urie, Spahn, Jessie Eisenberg (with whom Feiffer appeared in The Squid and the Whale), Natasha Lyonne, Mammie Gummer, Tracee Chimo, and Ralph Macchio. Feiffer plays a struggling actress will stop at nothing to get her movie made in this sharp, satiric comedy about the film…
Cynthia Rockwell(Story contributed by Susannah Betts ’15) Dr. Joseph Fins ’82 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in a ceremony on Oct. 6, 2012, along with 180 other influential artists, scientists, scholars, authors, and institutional leaders, according to a press release from Weill Cornell Medical College, where Fins is The E. William Davis Jr., M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics, and professor of medicine, public health and medicine in psychiatry. Fins, a leading expert on medical ethics and health policy, is the author of more than 200 publications and several books, including the soon to be published Rights…
Philip Stern ’97, assistant professor of history at Duke University, received the 2011 Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in the field of British, British Imperial, or British Commonwealth history since 1485. The prize, awarded by the American Historical Association, recognizes Stern’s The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011). The prize committee calls Stern’s book a “sophisticated study of the East India Company …[that] challenges a long-established account of the chartered company as a trading venture that only belatedly became a territorial power” and lauds him…
Susan Rodrigue McFarland ’90 was appointed director of health, safety and environmental affairs at the Barnes Group, Inc., in Bristol, Conn. A molecular biology and biochemistry major at Wesleyan, McFarland earned a master’s degree in environmental sciences at the University of New Haven and an M.B.A. from Rensselaer in Hartford, Conn. She has worked in environmental compliance and occupational safety for 22 years. Prior to joining the Barnes Group, she worked at Pratt and Whitney, Sikorsky Aircraft and Carrier Corporation.
(Story contributed By Susannah Betts ’15) Elizabeth Liang ’92, who graduated from Wesleyan with a B.A. in English literature, is the author of two recently-published essays. Her essay, "Transforming Three Sisters, A Hapa Family in Chekov’s Modern Classic," was included in the academic journal Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies published by San Jose State University. It's published online here. Another of her essays, "Checked Baggage: Writing Unpacked," is in the anthology Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads, and Third Culture Kids published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Morten Ender, professor of sociology at the United States Military Academy at…
Ralph Jones III '78 was recently named president and chief operating officer of SPARTA Insurance. An economics major at Wesleyan, he began his insurance career at Chubb and Son, with underwriting positions of increasing responsibility in their offices on both the East and West coasts. Named chief underwriting officer for Europe, he moved to London and later became president of Chubb Europe. In 1999, he was named CEO of Chubb Executive Risk (later Chubb Specialty Insurance). In 2003, he joined Arch Worldwide Insurance as their CEO and then, five years later, joined Everest Reinsurance Holdings as president and COO. Jones…