faculty publications

While the majority of students are away from campus during the summer months, many members of Wesleyan’s faculty, staff, and alumni are hard at work and making headlines. President Joseph R. Biden announced that attorney Ed Siskel ’94 will serve as White House counsel on August 22. Siskel spent four years working in the White House Counsel’s Office during President Barack Obama’s administration, including time as the Deputy Counsel. Siskel will lead a team to provide the president with legal counsel, help to craft policies and executive actions, and defend and advance Biden’s agenda. “Ed Siskel’s many years of experience…

Every day, when Charles Barber comes home from teaching at Wesleyan, he starts what he calls “his second shift.” After a short nap, he settles down to reading, research, and writing, a disciplined practice that has allowed him to be, over the past several years, a prolific nonfiction author. Since 2019 Barber has published three substantive works and has more ideas in the pipeline. “I wish I’d started (writing) earlier. I had done some other things—I was working in the mental health world, and I was proud of what I did. I am now trying to get as much done…

Assistant Professor of Art Tammy Nguyen will follow her recently won Guggenheim Fellowship with her first museum solo exhibition, taking place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from Aug 24, 2023 to Jan 28, 2024. Nguyen was recognized with the Guggenheim for her work intersecting the disciplines of painting, drawing, printmaking, and bookmaking. She’s bringing the same wide-ranging approach to her newest show, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book-length essay Nature, written in 1836 in Concord, Mass. “I am thinking a lot about some of the essential ideas in Nature, like how does man create and extend his…

From completing life-saving surgeries, to performing heart-gripping music, to fearlessly swimming the English Channel, the possession of paired appendages (arms and legs) is critical to human achievement. However, paired appendages are not unique to humans. Scientists have long known that human limbs evolved from the paired fins found in fishes, but where the first paired fins came from remains one of the great mysteries in evolutionary biology. Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Amanda Cass was a co-author of a large, multi-institutional study published in the journal Nature investigating how paired appendages evolved in early vertebrate animals. The study, spearheaded by…

A chance encounter with a scarlet tanager, a migratory songbird that travels from North to South America on a yearly basis, prompted Associate Professor of Spanish María Ospina to consider the larger topics of what animals think and feel and, ultimately, how human beings define their own concept of home. Ospina has recently released a novel written in Spanish entitled “Solo un poco aquí,” published by Random House in Latin America, where she explores how animals move across the landscapes that humans transform. Ospina’s novel has been reviewed in Spain’s most important newspaper, El País, by the renown Mexican author Emiliano…

New research from Assistant Professor of Government Alyx Mark and Tiger Bjornlund ’24 shows that courts with publicly financed elections are viewed as more legitimate and less susceptible to donor influence than those that are selected through privately financed campaigns. The paper, titled “Public Campaign Financing’s Effects on Judicial Legitimacy : Evidence From a Survey Experiment,” was published May 30 in the journal Research and Politics. “There is so much focus on the U.S. Supreme Court, but there are entire other levels of courts that receive less attention that have an impact on our day to day lives,” Mark said. In Spring…

President Michael S. Roth ’78 wrote a review of an anthology of the late Hayden White’s works titled The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Roth said White “was a consistently intelligent and engaging postmodern advocate for thinking about history as a form of imaginative reconstruction that could either constrain people or inspire their liberation.” Roth also penned an op-ed in The Boston Globe drawing parallels between education and democracy. “We must be on our guard against those who are afraid of that exploration; we must stand up against…

Associate Professor of the Practice in Letters Charles Barber wrote “In the Blood,” the true story of how an absent-minded inventor and a down-on-his-luck salesman joined forces to create a once‑in‑a‑generation lifesaving product. The book was published in May 2023 by Grand Central Publishing. Giulio Gallarotti, Professor of Government, will release a new book titled “Alternative Paths to Influence: Soft Power and International Politics” in June 2023. The book, which explores the process by which soft power is created, will be published by Routledge. He was also recently named a Senior Fellow at the Global Climate Innovation Center, working with businesses…

President Michael S. Roth ’78 spoke about “Safe Enough Spaces” and their place in the debate around free speech at a symposium on Speech and Expression on College Campuses at Skidmore College on April 15. President Roth wrote a book review of “The Age of Guilt: The Super Ego in the Online World” by Mark Edmundson for The Washington Post. The book examines online judgementalism through a Freudian lens, Roth writes. He called Edmundson’s writing “engaging” with a “friendly yet incisive” tone. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Review newsletter quoted a tweet from Roth in a piece about scholars…

President Michael S. Roth ’78 authored a review of “Unearthed: A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust” by Meryl Frank for The Wall Street Journal. The memoir details her research into her family’s history and a book inherited from her aunt, Mollie, which depicts the brutal murder of Jewish performers by Nazis—including one of her cousins. Roth told The New Yorker that reading storied texts with specific lens’ geared toward re-affirming your own beliefs is like “shooting fish in a barrel.” He spoke on the topic for a piece on Hillsdale College’s…

Every time author and Assistant Professor of English Rachel Heng begins a new project, she asks herself, “what are the stakes?” Why is she writing this story? When writing her new novel, The Great Reclamation, she saw her mother reminiscing about former greenscapes converted to tall buildings in her native Singapore. She grew up hearing stories of life before the high-rise filled city she grew up in. “My mother would go to places and say, ‘oh, you know, we used to live here, but I don't really know where it is anymore because they changed all the roads,’” Heng said.…

Reinhold Blumel, Charlotte Augusta Ayres Professor of Physics, has recently published three papers in the journal Scientific Reports: "Effects of the coupling of dielectric spherical particles on signatures in infrared microspectroscopy;" "Space-resolved chemical information from infrared extinction spectra", and "Domes and Semi-Capsules as Model Systems for Infrared Microspectroscopy of Biological Cells." David Kuenzel, Associate Professor of Economics, published Non-tariff Measures: What's Tariffs Got to Do with It? in the February 2023 issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics. The paper systematically examines the empirical link between various tariff measures and the imposition of non-tariff barriers in WTO member countries. Matthew M. Kurtz, Professor of Psychology, published a piece…

Wesleyan in the News: August 2023

New Book Tells of Most Successful Medical Development of the Iraq War

Guggenheim-Winning Professor To Hold Solo Art Show in Boston

New Study Offers Insight Into How Paired Appendages Evolved

New Novel Explores Animal Life

Publicly Financed Judicial Elections Viewed as More Legitimate, New Paper Says

Wesleyan in the News: June 2023

Faculty Achievements: May 2023

Wesleyan in the News: May 2023

Wesleyan in the News: April 2023

Heng Publishes New Novel The Great Reclamation

Faculty Achievements: Spring 2023