Olivia DrakeA four-part documentary film series directed by Tony Zosherafatain '10 will stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Topic starting Feb. 25. Titled Trans in Trumpland, the series investigates the impact of anti-trans policies on the lives of four transgender Americans during the Trump administration era. The series was featured in Variety, NBC News, Deadline, and The Daily Beast. "We're at a crucial moment in our country, and Trans in Trumpland encapsulates the past four years, not just for trans people, but for a wide variety of groups," Zosherafatain said. "There is a lot of intersectionality in the series, including race, immigration, income inequality,…
Alumni and staff who have met with success in the November 2020 elections include: Amy Bello, administrative assistant for the African American Studies Department, won her first term as a State House representative for Connecticut's 28th District. Bello, a Democrat, is serving on the Wethersfield Town Council and is the former mayor. Read more in this Nov. 5 Hartford Courant article or in this past Wesleyan Connection article. Michael Demicco ’80 won his second term serving as a State House representative for Connecticut's 21st District. Demicco, a Democrat, represents Farmington and Unionville, Conn. Read more here. Former two-term Democratic Colorado…
On July 26, Los Angeles artist Michael Gittes '10 was featured on NBC Nightly News in a "There's Good News Tonight" segment. For an entire month, Gittes worked on a project titled "Strangers to No One," which involved painting 1,800 flowers. He donated the works to every employee at the Interfaith Medical Center in New York City, a nonprofit community hospital, to show his appreciation for frontline health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic. "If you love somebody, you give them a flower," Gittes said in the interview. Donning a Wesleyan University sweatshirt on the show, Gittes demonstrated how he…
Lauren RubensteinNumerous students, alumni, and faculty from Wesleyan's Cognitive Development Labs recently presented their research at the 2019 Cognitive Development Society biennial meeting, held Oct. 17–19 in Louisville, Ky. The labs are led by Professor of Psychology Hilary Barth and Associate Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman. Barth and Kerry Brew '18, MA '19 presented their poster, "Do Demand Characteristics Contribute to Minimal Ingroup Bias?" The work was done in collaboration with lab alumni Taylar Clark '19 and Jordan Feingold-Link '18. Sophie Charles '20, lab coordinator Katherine Williams, and former lab coordinator Alexandra Zax presented their poster, "The Role of Digit Identity…
More than 110 Wesleyan students, faculty, alumni, and local guests participated in the second annual Power of Language Conference, April 26-27 at the Fries Center for Global Studies. The event was open to the entire Wesleyan community. The two-day event featured six panels that focused on: Creative Language Learning, Crossing Time and Border through Translation, Language and Society, Language in Curriculum, Arabic in the U.S., and Polyphony through Literature. "The presentations ranged from class final projects (such as a comic version of Dante’s Inferno, reimagined at Wesleyan) to senior theses (such as the challenges of translating early modern Spanish into…
College-aged individuals are at an increased risk for mental health issues, as well as poor sleep. There is a rich body of research on the negative consequences of poor sleep for cognitive, physical, and mental functioning. Furthermore, several studies provide support for the importance of three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) for optimal mental well-being. Less well understood, however, is the issue of “directionality” between basic psychological needs and sleep as students transition across semesters. “In other words, it is not clear whether an individual’s perceived fulfillment of these basic psychological needs predicts improvements in sleep later on;…
Cynthia RockwellAlumni who have met with success in the midterm elections include: Democrat Alex Bergstein '88, who won a Connecticut State Senate race; Democrat Brian Frosh ’68, who won re-election as Maryland Attorney general; Democrat Matt Lesser ’10, who prevailed in Connecticut's State Senate race for the 9th district, which includes Middletown; Democrat Amy Martin ’99 is judge-elect for the Texas District Court 263; and Democrat Max Rose ’08, who won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 11th Congressional District. An article in the Greenwich Time quoted Bergstein, post-victory, as saying, "'I am elated. I am humbled. I…
Forty-three Wesleyan alumni, students, parents, and friends gathered in London on July 3 for a reception featuring artist Michael Gittes ’10. Gittes, an American studies major, discussed his work, which is being displayed as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit, Michael Jackson on the Wall. For the exhibit, Gittes created an experimental video. In addition, alumni Glenn Ligon ’82, Jonathan Horowitz ’87, and Lyle Ashton Harris ’88 also have works exhibited in the gallery. (more…)
Editorial Staff(By K Alshanetsky '17) Brooklyn rapper Latasha Alcindor ’10, also informally known as LA, is following up the release of her debut album B(LA)K. with her newest project, Teen Nite at Empire. The project is named for the Empire Rolling Skating Center, a former nightlife venue in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, which closed its doors in 2007 due to increasing gentrification in the area. As described on her Bandcamp––where audiences can listen to and purchase the album––it is dedicated to "the around the way ones, 2 for $5 bootlegs and realizing freedom.” Having grown up frequenting and coming of age…
Randi Alexandra PlakeWe Together, a short film by Henry Kaplan ’10, has been accepted into the Slamdance Film Festival and will be playing in Park City, Utah, later this month. Slamdance Film Festival runs alongside Sundance Film Festival every year, and is self-described as “a showcase for raw and innovative filmmaking,” with a focus on new and emerging artists, filmmakers, and storytellers. We Together is a seven-minute long story of a zombie who comes to remember the person who he used to be, before he was a zombie. “The film premiered online this fall and garnered a lot of buzz from the online…
Phil Resor, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, and Gus Seixas '10 are co-authors of "Constraints on the evolution of vertical deformation and Colorado River incision near eastern Lake Mead, Arizona, provided by quantitative structural mapping of the Hualapai Limestone," published in the February 2015 issue of Geosphere, Vol. 11, pages 31-49. The paper includes research from Seixas's honors thesis at Wesleyan. In this study, the authors quantify the structural geometry of Hualapai Limestone, which was deposited in a series of basins that lie in the path of the Colorado River. The limestone was deformed by by a fault pair…
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