Olivia DrakeLeah Wright wrote a chapter titled "The Black Cabinet: Economic Civil Rights in the Nixon Administration," which appears on pages 240-290 in the book, Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican. More information on the book is online here. Wright is assistant professor of African American studies, assistant professor of history. Wright also spent part of the summer as one of four Frederick B. Artz Scholars at Oberlin College. She examined the papers of Jewel LaFontant MANkarious – a prominent civil rights activist, lawyer and presidential appointee.
Natasha Korda, professor of English, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2011. Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives,…
Manju Hingorani, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, co-authored a study titled "hMSH2 controls ATP processing by hMSH2-hMSH6," published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on Sept. 19. The abstract is online here. Hingorani co-authored another study with David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, professor of chemistry, titled "Allosterism in Muts Proteins: How DNA Mismatch Recognition Signals Repair." The study was published in the Biophysical Journal in 2011. The abstract is online here.
David PesciThis issue, we ask “5 Questions” of Charles "Chuck" Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology, who is both a clinical psychologist and a psychopathologist and studies a variety of mental illnesses and the approaches used to diagnose and treat these ailments. Q: You are clinical psychologist but also a psychopathologist. Can you explain that second title for us? A: Psychopathology is literally “the pathology of the mind.” To study disorders of the mind requires a variety approaches. Biology and brain systems tell us a lot about when things are working right in the brain, and how they go wrong. We also…
Eric GershonIn an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, Frederick Cohan, professor of biology, professor of environmental studies, discusses how his experience as a child watching perhaps the greatest “perfect game” in baseball history – The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax’s 1-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs in 1965 – provided lessons for the mining of old data for both baseball front offices and biologists such as himself who specialize in studying bacteria. Read the op-ed here.
University Professor of Music Sumarsam is the author of a paper titled "Binary Division in Javanese Gamelan and Socio-Cosmological Order," which was published in the Proceedings 1st Symposium Singapore: ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia. The abstract of the paper is online here. According to the abstract, “The paper presented by Sumarsam exhibited a firm commitment to indepth musicological analysis of aspects of gamelan music, yet strongly connecting the music analysis to aspects of cultural studies, that is, the social and cosmological order of Javanese society.” In addition, BBC quoted Sumarsam in their broadcasting on "A History of…
Brian Northrop, assistant professor of chemistry, has published “Substituent Effects on the Reversibility of Furan-Maleimide Cycloadditions” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. His co-author is Robert Boutelle, a 2011 Wesleyan graduate who is now a graduate student at UCLA. The paper is online here.
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry, has published “Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders: Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology” in Mutation Research, 2011. The article is online here.
Jennifer Rose, research associate professor of psychology, received a grant worth $450,000 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The grant will fund research on the use of Integrative Data Analysis to inform the development of nicotine dependence symptoms among novice smokers.
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There's something fishy about one of Connecticut's minnows, and the topic hooked researchers in the Department of Biology. During the last ice age, Connecticut was covered by layers of snow and ice, forcing organisms to seek refuge elsewhere. After the glaciers retreated, recolonization of the fauna and flora resulted in the diversity of native species that inhabit the state today. "But where did they come from? How did they come back to the Northeast to give us all the organisms we see today?" asks biology graduate student Michelle Tipton. "These questions are of particular interest to the ichthyologists at Wesleyan with…
Professor Laura Grabel has received a $750,000 grant from The State of Connecticut Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee for her study titled "Angiogenesis of Embryonic Stem Cell Derived Hippocampus Transplants." It is her third grant from the Committee since Connecticut began its state-funded human stem cell research program in 2006, and second where she is the principal investigator (P.I); she was co-P.I. on the other. Grabel, professor of biology and Lauren B. Dachs Professor of Science in Society, is also a co-director of Connecticut’s Human Embryonic Core Facility, a research center in Farmington, Conn. that houses some human stem cell…