faculty publications

It was sitting in the peace of synagogue with his wife where Stephen Angle began to contemplate his personal relationship to Confucianism. Angle, Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and professor of philosophy, had spent his career studying the ancient philosophy, which emphasizes personal ethics and morality. He’d written multiple academic books on the subject. The roots of his interest went all the way back to high school with a fascinating class on non-Western cultures. Still, there had always been one small remove between the ideas and his own life. “I didn’t understand the Hebrew being chanted. Half of…

Royette Tavernier Dubar, assistant professor of psychology and director of the on-campus Sleep and Psychosocial Adjustment Laboratory, recently authored a commentary called “#NoJusticeNoSleep: Critical intersections of race-ethnicity, income, education, and social determinants in sleep health disparities,” published in Sleep Health on Feb. 1. Dubar’s work in #NoJusticeNoSleep examines the link between racial, ethnic, and socio-economic factors relating to inequality and how well people sleep. Her commentary uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a launching point for further exposing inequality in the United States and bringing it to the forefront of public discourse through social movements, with a new emphasis on health.…

Reinhold Blumel, Charlotte Augusta Ayres Professor of Physics, recently co-authored a paper in Nature called “Power-optimal, stabilized entangling gate between trapped-ion qubits.” Yunseong Nam, one of the other co-authors, worked with Blumel as a graduate student. Blumel’s contributions to this paper stem from his connections to IonQ, a technology company for quantum computing. Nam is now the company’s chief theorist.

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Raquel Bryant and Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Teresita Padilla-Benavides are two women in STEM whose work has recently been highlighted in national science journals. Bryant, who will join the Wesleyan faculty in July 2022, co-wrote a paper titled “Microfossil and geochemical records reveal high-productivity paleoenvironments in the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway during Oceanic Anoxic Event 2” that will be in the December volume of Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Her work has also been featured as a Research Highlight in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Padilla-Benavides recently co-wrote an article titled “The…

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Helen Poulos recently co-authored three new papers: “Wildfire and topography drive woody plant diversity in a Sky Island mountain range in the Southwest USA,” published in Ecology and Evolution on Oct. 5. “Choked out: Battling invasive giant cane along the Rio Grande/ Bravo Borderlands,” published in River Research and Applications on Sept. 20. And “Mixed-severity wildfire as a driver of vegetation change in an Arizona Madrean Sky Island System, USA,” written alongside Michael Freiburger ’21 and published in Fire on Oct. 20. Poulos’s research focuses on plant distribution patterns as a result of the…

Assistant Professor of History Ying Jia Tan authored a new book titled Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882-1955, already available as an e-book and soon to be available in hardcover, beginning Oct. 15. The work, published by Cornell University Press, explores Chinese power consumption and electrical development throughout seventy-three years of war and revolution. According to the book's abstract: Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civil war, to the 1937 Japanese invasion that robbed China of 97 percent of its generative capacity. Along…

Jeremy Zwelling Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Assistant Professor of Religion Yaniv Feller penned an article over the summer titled “Too Good to be True?” for the Tel Aviv Review of Books. In the piece, Feller discusses the Museum of the Jewish People (ANU), which first opened March 2021. One of the museum’s main exhibits begins with a segment called “Mosaic: Identity and Culture in Our Times” before moving into the historical roots of Judaism, exploring different forms of Judaism in contemporary and historical contexts, as well as the diversity of the Jewish people and the way they observe…

Professor of Biology Sonia Sultan recently co-authored an article titled “Transgenerational effects of parent plant competition on offspring development in contrasting conditions” with BA/MA student Robin Waterman ’20. The article, published in Ecology on Sept. 8, examines the relationship between parent plants and their offspring, especially how competition among such parent plants can alter the next generation. “Conditions during a parent’s lifetime can induce phenotypic changes in offspring, providing a potentially important source of variation in natural populations. Yet to date, biotic factors have seldom been tested as sources of transgenerational effects in plants,” reads an excerpt from the paper’s…

Professor of Religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein recently co-authored an essay in collection titled Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination alongside Mark C. Taylor ’68, professor of religion at Columbia University. The book, published in September 2021 by the University of Chicago Press, explores how visual elements function in relationship to humans and technology. “Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision,” the book’s description reads. “Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image,…

David Kuenzel, associate professor of economics, is the co-author of a new paper published in the European Economic Review titled "Preferential Trade Agreements and MFN Tariffs: Global Evidence." In the paper, Kuenzel and his co-author, Rishi Sharma from Colgate University, study theoretically and empirically the effects of countries' import composition on multilateral liberalization using a global tariff database that covers the 2000–2011 period. Kuenzel and Sharma provide evidence that greater preferential trade agreement (PTA) import shares induce tariff cuts on non-member countries. The baseline estimates imply that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of imports from PTA partners…

The first time Ethan Kleinberg, the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of History and Letters, immersed himself in the world of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas 20 years ago, he wrote a book. “It was written as a traditional intellectual history and I found that what that I had done was to completely deactivate the aspects of Levinas’ thought where he believes that there are ethical guidelines that come to us from outside our own history, these transcendent ethical guidelines puncture any historical or contextual moment,” Kleinberg said. He didn’t like what he’d written, so he took an unprecedented step—he…

A new paper co-authored by Teresita Padilla-Benavides, assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, is published in the July 2021 issue of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Journal. Titled "The molecular and cellular basis of copper dysregulation and its relationship with human pathologies," the paper explores the role of copper in human disease. Copper (Cu) is an essential micronutrient involved in critical metabolic reactions and biological functions. In humans, mutations or malfunctions of genes that regulate copper stability in the body may lead to numerous pathologic conditions, severe neurodegenerative conditions, or metabolic diseases. Copper also plays…

Angle’s New Book Offers Modern-Day Confucian Guide to Life

Dubar Pens Commentary #NoJusticeNoSleep for Sleep Health Journal

Blumel, Nam Write Paper on Quantum Physics

Papers by STEM Faculty Padilla-Benavides, Bryant Published

Poulos Authors 3 New Environmental-Themed Papers

Tan Authors Book on Chinese Power Development During Revolution and War

Feller Pens Article Analyzing New Jewish Museum in Israel

Sultan, Waterman ’20 Co-Author Paper on Plant Reproduction

Rubenstein, Taylor ’68 Collaborate On Essay Collection

Papers by Kuenzel, Vásquez Published in Economics Journals

Kleinberg Authors New Book on Levinas’ Cultural Legacy

Padilla-Benavides Explores How Copper Affects Human Disease in FASEB Journal