Olivia DrakeGreg Goldberg joined the Sociology Department as an assistant professor. His research interests include political economy, social theory, media and popular culture, digital and network technologies and music and sound. This semester he is teaching Introductory Sociology and Media and Society. "Thus far, I've found the students at Wesleyan to be ambitious, open, creative and independent thinkers; they are truly a pleasure to teach," he says. "They have sharp critical thinking skills, and are game for anything I can think to throw at them. I've been continually impressed by their ability to engage complex social questions and issues, and I…
Sally Bachner, assistant professor of English, is the author of The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction. 1962-2007, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2011. In The Prestige of Violence, Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a…
Michael Weir, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, professor of biology, received a grant worth $328,200 from the National Institutes of Health on Sept. 19. Weir will use the funds to support a study titled, "Proteomic Analysis of Translation Initiation of Yeast," through August 2011.
Tsampikos Kottos, associate professor of physics, received a grant worth $140,121 from the National Science Foundation on Sept. 1. The grant will support a project titled "IDR:Novel Photonic Materials and Devices based on Non-Hermitian Optics" through August 2014. Kottos is collaborating with faculty from Southern Methodist University, University of Central Florida, University of Arkansas and Yale University.
Bill HolderStacey Close, a professor of history, philosophy and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University, will spend the current academic year at Wesleyan as an ACE Fellow. Sponsored by the American Council on Education, the program prepares fellows to serve American colleges and universities in leadership positions. “It's a pleasure to welcome Stacey Close to campus,” says President Michael S. Roth. “Wesleyan will surely benefit from the expertise he brings, and I hope he will fulfill his professional goals through his association with us.” Close has served as director of faculty development at Eastern’s Center for Educational Excellence and as…
Leah 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.