Olivia DrakeJohn Finn, professor of government, recently finished recording a 12 lecture audio series on the First Amendment for “The Great Courses,” which offers college courses by engaging professors. Finn’s course on “The First Amendment and You: What Everyone Should Know,” is a practical guide to understanding the protections and limitations implied by this fundamental constitutional provision. Finn, an internationally-recognized expert on constitutional law and theory, helps listeners grasp why we have a First Amendment, what and whom it protects, and why it matters. Finn is also an internationally-recognized expert on constitutional law and political violence. His public lectures include testimony…
Jennifer Tucker will serve as interim director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, beginning immediately through the end of the fall 2013 semester. Tucker has accepted this position in order to enable the faculty and the university to formulate a vision for the Allbritton Center that will engage the curriculum and faculty scholarship, and enhance the intellectual life of the university. Her work this year will provide a framework for strategic planning and guide the search for a new director. Tucker is chair and associate professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, associate professor of history,…
A book by Margot Weiss, assistant professor of American studies, assistant professor of anthropology, received the 2012 Ruth Benedict Book Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology. Her book, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) was honored in the category “Outstanding Monograph." This prize is presented each year at the American Anthropological Association's national meeting to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a topic that engages issues and theoretical perspectives relevant to LGBTQ studies. Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual…
Lauren RubensteinJeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, chair of film studies, was honored in Variety magazine's special feature edition, "Women's Impact Report 2012." In the profile, Basinger discusses her typical work week; the often-underestimated number of hours that college professors dedicate to their jobs; her secret to work-life balance; and why she doesn't carry a cell phone. She says, "My worklife and my personal life are very highly integrated. Students I've taught have now become my friends and are a part of my life. I don't have a problem juggling two lives, my life is coherent and it's only one life. In a…
In an op-ed published Oct. 18 in The Jakarta Post, Ronald Jenkins, professor of theater, writes about a disturbing new documentary in which “gangsters” responsible for mass murders in Indonesia from 1965-66 reenact their crimes as they remember them. "This enables audiences to witness the deaths, not as they happened, but as they are remembered by the killers," he writes. The documentary, "The Act of Killing" by Joshua Oppenheimer, “reveals the links between the human capacity for self-delusion and cinema’s ability to reedit the past into comforting fantasy," writes Jenkins.
On Oct. 17, Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, professor of government, professor of Russian and Eastern European studies, had an op-ed published in The Moscow Times exploring whether the European Union deserves the recently awarded Nobel Peace Prize. "Europe is certainly a more peaceful place today than at any time in its past, but does the E.U. deserve all the credit for this? Defenders of the committee's decision argue that the E.U. has ended the centuries-old proclivity of European states to invade each other. It's true that most of Europe has enjoyed six decades…
Greg Voth, associate professor of physics, received a grant worth $300,000 from the National Science Foundation's Material Research division to support his study on "Rod Dynamics in Turbulence: Simultaneous 3D measurements of Anisotropic Particles and Velocity Fields" through May 31, 2015. In a wide range of natural and industrial situations, turbulent flows carry particulate material. For example, clouds are turbulent flows containing water droplets and ice crystals. Papermaking uses turbulent suspensions of fibers. If the particles are spheres, there are a variety of tools available for measuring their motion. But usually the particles are not spheres, and the movement and…
Michael McAlear, chair and associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, is the co-author of "The adjacent positioning of co-regulated gene pairs is widely conserved across eukaryotes," published in BMC Genomics, October 2012. The article is online here. The co-authors are Ph.D candidate James Arnone and Jeffrey Arace '12; Adam Robbins-Pianka BA '08, MA '10; and Sara Kass-Gergi '12. The team investigated co-regulated gene sets in S. cerevisiae beyond those related to ribosome biogenesis, and found that a number of these regulons, including those involved in DNA metabolism, heat shock, and the response to cellular stressors were also significantly enriched for adjacent gene…
Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Son of Destruction, published by Severn House (U.K.) in October 2012. The U.S. version will be released in March 2013. When his mother dies, Dan Carteret has only two leads to the identity of his father: a photograph of four young men, and a newspaper cutting showing the remains of a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Carteret travels to his mother's hometown of Fort Jude and discovers that three cases of spontaneous combustion have occurred there in the recent past. In the search for his father, he confronts…
Janice Naegele, professor of biology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, and Laura Grabel, the Lauren B. Dachs Professor of Science and Society, professor of biology, were recently honored in Hartford Magazine’s “Amazing Women” issue. Two of only 13 women selected this year for recognition, Naegele and Grabel were lauded for their contributions to the field of stem cell research. The magazine's profile of Naegele states: "The research conducted by Janice Naegele, who is professor of biology and neuroscience and behavior at Wesleyan University, is opening up new possibilities for treating epilepsy through stem cell therapy. Her work focuses on temporal lobe epilepsy,…
On Sept. 14 and 15, Professor of Economics Richard Grossman attended a conference in Munich jointly sponsored by the Bundesbank (the German central bank) and a Munich-based research institute called CESifo. Grossman chaired a session and acted as a discussant at the conference, whose focus was, "The Banking Sector and the State." According to the conference website: "The current financial and sovereign debt crisis has shown once again that the banking sector and the state are intertwined in many ways: On the one hand, the state lends support to distressed banks and accepts risks from the private sector; in this…
On Aug. 31, "Where We Live," a program on WNPR public radio, featured two segments about music at Wesleyan. Rob Rosenthal, provost, vice-president of academic affairs and the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, and his son Sam Rosenthal, a writer and musician in New York City, discussed a new collection of Pete Seeger's personal writings that they co-edited. The book is Pete Seeger: In His Own Words (Paradigm Publishers). They described the experience of combing through decades of Seeger's writings in the folk singer's Beacon, NY home while he hovered nearby. "He would drop in from time to time…