Olivia DrakeMartha Gilmore, the George I. Seney Professor of Geology, and her former graduate student Patrick Harner MA ’13 are the co-authors of a paper titled "Visible–near infrared spectra of hydrous carbonates, with implications for the detection of carbonates in hyperspectral data of Mars," published in Icarus, Vol. 250, pages 204-214, April 2015. The paper suggests that hydrous carbonate minerals might be relevant on Mars. "We bought and made these unusual minerals in my lab and then took spectra of them to simulate what Mars orbiters might see. Carbonate minerals form in water on Earth (e.g., limestones), and are predicted for Mars, but…
Masami Imai, professor of economics, professor of East Asian studies, is the co-author of an article titled "Attribution Error in Economic Voting: Evidence from Trade Shocks," published in the January 2015 edition of Economy Inquiry, Volume 53, Issue 1, pages 258-257. Rosa Hayes '13, currently a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, also is one of the paper's co-authors. This article exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990 to 2009. Masami and his co-authors found that voters, on average, exhibit…
Professor of Government James McGuire is the author of a book chapter titled "Democracy, Agency and the Classification of Political Regimes," published in Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O'Donnell by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Guillermo O'Donnell (1936-2011) was widely recognized as the world's leading scholar of Latin American politics. During his doctoral studies, McGuire worked closely with O'Donnell in both Argentina and the United States, translating from Spanish to English O'Donnell's Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Argentina, 1966-1973, in Comparative Perspective (University of California Press, 1988). McGuire's chapter in this new volume commemorating O'Donnell's life and work argues that schemes for classifying…
Lauren RubensteinThe Washington Post selected President Michael Roth's book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, on its list of top 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2014. A brief summary of the review states: The president of Wesleyan University describes two distinct traditions of a liberal education--one philosophical and "skeptical," the other rhetorical and "reverential"--and argues that both are necessary for educating autonomous individuals who can also participate with others. Beyond the University was originally reviewed in the Post on May 23 by Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. In that review, Nelson calls the book "a substantial and lively discussion" as well…
Assistant Professor of Psychology Clara Wilkins is the co-author of a paper titled "You Can Win But I Can't Lose: Bias Against High-Status Groups Increases Their Zero-Sum Beliefs About Discrimination" published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014. The article will be published again in the in the journal's March 2015 print edition. Wilkins co-authored the article with several other researchers including Joseph Wellman, formerly a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Wesleyan, who is now at California State University, San Barnardino, and Katherine Schad BA '13/MA '14. The study considered what causes people to espouse "zero-sum beliefs"—or beliefs that gains for one…
A book by Magda Teter, the Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish Studies, received honorable mention for the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. The Schnitzer Book Award was established in 2007 to recognize and promote outstanding scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies and to honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: innovative research, excellent writing and sophisticated methodology. Teter's book, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation, published by Harvard University Press in 2011, was honored in the Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History category. In recognizing her book, the Prize Committee wrote: "In this beautifully written and…
Steve Stemler, associate professor of psychology, is the co-author of "Development and Validation of the Wesleyan Intercultural Competence Scale (WICS): A Tool for Measuring the Impact of Study Abroad Experiences," published in Frontiers: the Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, XXIV, 25-47, 2014. He's also the co-author of "Testing the theory of successful intelligence through educational interventions in Grade 4 language arts, mathematics and science," published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 881-899, 2014.
Susanne Fusso, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies, is the translator of Sergey Gandlevsky's autobiographical novel, Trepanation of the Skull, published in November from Northern Illinois University Press. Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella Trepanation of the Skull is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky’s brain tumor, surgery and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet’s personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin.…
Wesleyan faculty Joop Varekamp and Ellen Thomas are among the authors of a paper on rates of sea-level rise along the eastern U.S. seaboard titled "Late Holocene sea level variability and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation," published in the journal Paleoceanography, Volume 29, Issue 8, pages 765–777 in August 2014. Varekamp is the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences and professor of environmental studies. Thomas is research professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan, and also a senior research scientist in geology and geophysics at Yale University. Pre-20th century sea level variability remains poorly understood due to…
Tsampikos Kottos and Ali Basiri, a Ph.D. student in physics, are co-authors of a paper titled "Light localization induced by a random imaginary refractive index," published in Physical Review A 90, on Oct. 13, 2014. Kottos is the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics. In the paper, the authors show the emergence of light localization in arrays of coupled optical waveguides with randomness.
Kate CarlisleAssistant professor of Astronomy Meredith Hughes and eight colleagues have found evidence of magnetic fields in stardust – an indication that magnetic fields are important in the process of planetary system formation, according to a new paper in the journal Nature. The discovery is another step in work by Hughes and other astronomers to understand how celestial bodies are formed. It is known that magnetic fields in the “accretion disks” of stars play a dominant role in the star formation process. Using data from an observatory near Bishop, Calf., Hughes and her colleagues were able to spot signs of magnetic…
Wesleyan faculty Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock and Susanne Fusso are the co-authors of “The Confession of an Atheist Who Became a Scholar of Religion," published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 15, Number 3, Summer 2014. The paper is based on an interview Smolkin-Rothrock completed on Russian atheist Nikolai Semenovich Gordienko. Smolkin-Rothrock is assistant professor of history; assistant professor of Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies; Faculty Fellow Center for the Humanities; and tutor in the College of Social Studies. Fusso is professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies. Among the most prominent professors of “scientific atheism” in the Soviet Union, Gordienko also was the author…