Lauren RubensteinNatural disasters are becoming more common all over the world. While the focus is often on restoring physical damage, these disasters also impact residents of the affected region psychologically in ways that are less well understood. In a paper published in the journal Traumatology on Feb. 7, Assistant Professor of Psychology Royette Tavernier, along with five student coauthors, examined the psychological impact of tropical storm Erika, which hit the Caribbean island of Dominica in August 2015. The data analyzed was based on a sample of 174 college-aged individuals who completed survey-based assessments of several psychosocial variables six months after the storm.…
Olivia DrakeAn invited perspective article written by Michelle Personick, assistant professor of chemistry, and Danny Robertson ’18 is featured on the cover of the Feb. 26, 2019, issue 4 of Chemistry of Materials. Personick was invited to contribute the perspective article as part of Chemistry of Materials’ “Up-and-Coming” series of Perspectives. The series provides a place for emerging, early career scientists to discuss and provide insights into new areas of materials science, and to showcase their research accomplishments. The perspective, titled "Growing Nanoscale Model Surfaces to Enable Correlation of Catalytic Behavior Across Dissimilar Reaction Environments," highlights recent advances and potential future directions in the…
John Finn, professor emeritus of government, is the author of Fracturing the Founding: How the Alt-Right Corrupts the Constitution, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019. Finn is an internationally recognized expert on constitutional theory, the rule of law and political violence, and the First Amendment. His public lectures include testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, as well as lectures in Bolivia, Canada, Chile, England, France, Italy, and Spain. Many in the radical right, including the Tea Party, the militia movement, the alt-right, Christian nationalists, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, and a host of others, brand themselves as constitutional patriots. In Fracturing…
Helen Poulos, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies, is the coauthor of two published papers in February. "Response of Arizona cypress (Hesperocyparis arizonica) to the Horseshoe Two Megafire in a south-eastern Arizona Sky Island mountain range," is published in the February issue of International Journal of Wildland Fire (Issue 28, pages 62-69). It is coauthored by Andrew Barton, professor of biology at the University of Maine at Farmington. This study documents the effects of the 2011 Horseshoe Two Fire in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona on Arizona Cypress. Two Wesleyan students, Hunter Vannier '20 and Michael Freiburger '21 assisted…
Mark Slobin, the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, Emeritus, is the author of Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back, published by Oxford University Press (November 2018). Slobin's book is the first-ever historical study of music across all genres in any American metropolis. According to the publisher: Detroit in the 1940s–60s was not just "the capital of the 20th century" for industry and the war effort, but also for the quantity and extremely high quality of its musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. Slobin, a Detroiter from 1943, begins with a reflection of his early life with his family and others,…
Andrew Curran, the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities, is the author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, published by Other Press on Jan. 15. According to the publisher: "Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world’s first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity—for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century’s accepted truths,…
Alexa Jablonski '22On Nov. 11, Victoria Smolkin, associate professor of history and Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies, joined forces with her brother, artist Vlad Smolkin, to share their work with the public at a new and revamped Main Street Gallery Art Opening/Books & Bagels Talk at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester, Conn. Smolkin is the author of a new book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, published by Princeton University Press in 2018. A scholar of Communism, the Cold War, and atheism and religion in Russia and the former Soviet Union, Smolkin’s expertise also…
Four poems, translated by Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation and Poet in Residence Norman Shapiro, appear in the November 2018 Vol. III edition of the international esoteric journal, Better Than Starbucks!. This poetry magazine is edited by American poet and translator Michael Burch. The poem below, titled "You ..." is translated from the French of Cécile Périn and appeared in The Gentle Genius of Cécile Périn. (Copyright © 2016 by Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press.) You … When you were but the merest tot, Babbling in cowering awkwardness, When you were only fresh-begot, Flesh of my flesh, I loved you less…
Avery Kaplan '20Helen Poulos, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies, is the coauthor of two papers published Oct. 22 in the journals Fire and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, respectively. Poulos lead-authored a paper on fire and plant evolutionary ecology titled, "Do Mixed Fire Regimes Shape Plant Flammability and Post-Fire Recovery Strategies?" Contrary to a new model assuming that plant species have evolved three divergent flammability strategies, Poulos and her fellow researchers present three case studies that indicate plant species have evolved "bet-hedging strategies" that mix a variety of flammability and post-fire recovery strategies. Poulos also co-authored a paper led by ecologist Christopher Johnson of…
Assistant Professor of Psychology Mike Robinson, Samantha Hellberg '16, and Trinity Russell '17 are coauthors of a study published in the Journal of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, October 2018. In the paper titled "Cued for risk: Evidence for an incentive sensitization framework to explain the interplay between stress and anxiety, substance abuse, and reward uncertainty in disordered gambling behavior," the coauthors propose a theoretical framework about how cross-sensitization of reward systems in the brain, in part due to uncertainty, leads to high levels of comorbidity between gambling, substance use, and anxiety disorder. In particular, the coauthors review the literature on how cue…
Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, is the editor of the book Critical Terms for Animal Studies, published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2018. Gruen also wrote the book's introduction and a chapter on empathy. In addition, she invited Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, to write a chapter on difference. Animal studies is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field devoted to examining, understanding, and critically evaluating the complex relationships between humans and other animals. Scholarship in animal studies draws on a variety of methodologies to explore these multifaceted relationships in order to help us understand the ways…
Molecular biology and biochemistry graduate student Brandon Case and Manju Hingorani, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, are coauthors on a study published in Nucleic Acids Research in October 2018. The paper, titled “Coordinated protein and DNA conformational changes govern mismatch repair initiation by MutS,” reports new findings on how the Mutator S (MutS) protein repairs mistakes in the DNA sequence, which is essential for maintaining the accuracy of the genetic code. The collaborative effort from researchers at Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University employed single molecule and ensemble kinetic methods to…