Lauren Rubenstein“We’ve moved the meeting/truck forward.” “That was a long wait/ hotdog.” "We’re rapidly approaching the deadline/guardrail.” English speakers use a shared vocabulary to talk about space and time. And though it’s not something we’re necessarily conscious of, psychologists have found that the identical words we use to describe our wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the length of an especially impressive hotdog are not a fluke, but rather are telling of the cognitive processes involved in thinking about time. Past studies have shown that priming people with spatial information actually influences their perceptions of time. For example, people primed to imagine…
Olivia DrakeWesleyan Provost Rob Rosenthal and his son, Sam Rosenthal, presented a reading with rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famer Pete Seeger July 18 at Bryant Park in New York City. They are mentioned in this July 19 The New Yorker story. According to The New Yorker, "Rosenthal spoke ... briefly, about collecting Seeger’s words. He said that over and over, he found letters to Seeger saying, 'I’m in the middle of my own political struggle and what has kept me going is your music.'" The letters were “From people all over the world,” Rosenthal said. Rob and Sam Rosenthal are the co-editors…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of "Active (not passive) spatial imagery primes temporal judgements." Written along with Jessica Sullivan of the University of California-San Diego, the article was published in the June 2012 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. For this article, Barth and Sullivan looked deeper into the previously demonstrated cognitive connections between how we think about space and time. They found that only when people are asked to imagine actively moving themselves through space are their perceptions of time influenced. When participants in the experiment were primed with a similar…
The Wesleyan Board of Trustees has awarded tenure to eight faculty members. Additionally, four associate professors and two adjunct faculty members also have been promoted. Wesleyan President Michael Roth and Rob Rosenthal, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, announced the promotions, which were effective July 1. Newly tenured faculty, promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor Gloster Aaron, associate professor of biology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, arrived at Wesleyan in 2006, following five years as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. Aaron studies the brain’s synaptic circuitry to better understand communication patterns in the neocortex. His most recent…
Assistant Professor Maria Ospina, who recently completed her first year in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at Wesleyan, can trace her academic interests directly back to her childhood in Colombia and her longtime interest in history. “My interests in violence, memory and culture stem in part from my own experiences growing up in Colombia during the 1980s and 90s, in a very complex region that has been marked by armed conflict, the hemispheric War on Drugs and different waves of migration. The combination of political turmoil and a vibrant cultural production that actively reflected on the histories of violence…
Rick Davidman '84 is hosting the opening of an exhibition of Tula Telfair's paintings on July 26. Telfair, professor of art, is known for her large oil paintings that combine images of epic landscape and dramatic weather with minimal elements of pure color. The opening will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. in the lobby of the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square, New York City. Admission is free and wine and hors d'ouerves will be served. For info and to RSVP, contact Rick Davidman '84 at rick@dfngallery.com. Telfair's web site can be viewed here.
Peter Rutland, the Colin and Nancy Campbell Chair of Government, gave a lecture on "Democracy and Capitalism" at the Urals State University in Yekaterinburg, Russia on May 31. He published an opinion piece about the region's new governor in the Moscow Times on June 3. On June 9, he attended a meeting of the International Advisory Committee of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian President's State Academy for Economics and Public Administration, to discuss the curriculum and select faculty for a new B.A. in Comparative Politics.
Elizabeth McAlister, associate professor of religion, was invited to present recent work on how evangelical missionaries are responding to the Haiti earthquake at a conference on Refugees and Missionization at the Max Planck Institute, Goettingen, Germany Oct. 6-7, 2011. She also attended an invited conference on the study of prayer funded by the Templeton Foundation at the Social Science Research Council, Desmond NYC, on April 30, 2012. McAlister also is an associate professor of African American studies and associate professor of American studies.
John Kirn, professor of biology, chair and professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of three recent articles. They include: "Adult neuron addition to the zebra finch song motor pathway correlates with the rate and extent of recovery from botox-induced paralysis of the vocal muscles," published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 31(47): 16958-16968. Yi-Lo Yu ’03, MA ’04 co-authored this paper. "Morphological plasticity in vocal motor neurons following song crystallization in the zebra finch," published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Accepted manuscript online on April 2, 2012. DOI: 10.1002/cne.23120. Biology major Kathryn McDonald Ph.D. '09 co-authored this article. And "Adult neurogenesis is associated…
David PesciA book by Margot Weiss, assistant professor of American Studies, assistant professor of anthropology titled, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) is a finalist for the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards in the LGBT Studies category. According to the announcement nominating Weiss for the 24th Annual Lambda Literary Awards, “the Lambda Literary Award is the most prestigious book prize in the LGBT community with over 600 total nominations.”
Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, is the author of the book, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?, published by Columbia University Press in April 2012. In Thinking Animals, Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries. Weil's considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such…
A new book by Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, was given an enthusiastic early review in The New Yorker’s book blog on March 12. Her book, All We Know, will be published in July 2012. "Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, for many years a fashion editor at British Vogue—is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph... By servicing Murphy and, in the book’s shattering final section about Madge Garland,…