Olivia DrakeJohn Finn, professor of government, is the author of Peopling the Constitution (Constitutional Thinking), published by the University Press of Kansas on Feb. 24. According to the University Press of Kansas, Peopling the Constitution outlines a very different view of the Constitution as a moral and philosophical statement about who we are as a nation. This "Civic Constitution" constitutes us as a civic body politic, transforming "the people" into a singular political entity. Juxtaposing this view with the legal model, the "Juridic Constitution," Finn offers a comprehensive account of the Civic Constitution as a public affirmation of the shared principles of…
Mike SembosAssistant Professor of Theater Rashida Shaw ‘99 shared her observations as a researcher, ethnographer and audience member who has attended urban theater productions in Chicago for a chapter in a book called Black Theater Is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, 1970-2010, written by Harvey Young and Queen Meccasia Zabriskie, and published in November 2013 by Northwestern University Press. It features interviews with producers, directors, choreographers, designers, dancers, and actors, and serves to frame the colorful four-decade period for the African American artistic community in the Windy City.
Michael McAlear, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, is co-author of “A New System for Naming Ribosomal Proteins” published in Current Opinion in Structural Biology 24:1–5 in 2014.
Meredith Hughes, assistant professor of astronomy, is the co-author of a paper titled "Molecular Gas Clumps from the Destruction of Icy Bodies in the β Pictoris Debris Disk," published in the journal Science on March 6. Read more about Hughes study in this Wesleyan Connection article.
Ron Jenkins, professor of theater, is the author of an article titled, "African-American Step Dancing meets Balinese "kecak'" published in the March 6 edition of The Jakarta Post. The article highlights a cross-cultural theater collaboration that brought together African-American step-dancers and Balinese "kecak" performers who create interlocking rhythms with choral chants. Jenkins wrote the article while in Pengosekan Village, Indonesia doing sabbatical research. Read the article here. Jenkins also wrote a book review titled, "Illuminating: The Enigma of Time," which appeared in the Feb. 24 edition of The Jakarta Post. The book, Time, Rites and Festivals in Bali, is written by Gusti Nyoman Darta, Jean…
Marguerite Nguyen, assistant professor of English contributed a book chapter titled, “Like We Lost Our Citizenship: Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Hurricane Katrina," for the book Improbable Southerners: Asian Americans in the South, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2013.
Brian Northrop, assistant professor of chemistry, and chemistry graduate student Merry Smith are the co-authors of "Discrete, Soluble Covalent Organic Boronate Ester Rectangles,” published in Chemical Communications, 49, pp. 6167-6169 in 2013.
Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies; Manju Hingorani, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry; molecular biology and biochemistry graduate student Shreya Sawant and chemistry graduate student Daniel Czyzyk co-authored "E. coli Heptosyltransferase I: Exploration of Protein Function and Dynamics" published in Biochemistry, 52, 5158–5160 in 2013. They presented the paper at the 23rd Enzyme Mechanisms Conference held in Coronado Bay, Calif. in January 2013 and at the 57th Biophysical Society Conference held in Philadelphia, Pa. in February 2013.
Lily Saint, assistant professor of English, is the author of “You Kiss in Westerns: Cultural Translation in Moustapha Alassane’s Le Retour d’un Adventurer" published in The Journal of African Cinemas in October 2013.
Elizabeth Willis, professor of English, authored several poems recently: "Alive" is forthcoming in American Reader in 2014. "Ephemeral Stream" was posted on Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets online on Jan. 2, 2014. "Survey” was published in A Public Space No. 17 in 2013. "The Witch" is included in the forthcoming 100 Poems Your Teachers Don't Want You to Read anthology to be published by Penguin Putnam in 2015. "Watertown Is Ninety-Nine Percent Land" is included in the forthcoming Collected in One Fund Boston Benefit anthology to be published by Granary Books in 2014. "Oil and Water" included in the Oh Sandy!:…
Natasha Korda, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, faculty fellow and professor of English, authored “Coverture and Its Discontents: Legal Fictions On and Off the Early Modern English Stage” published in Married Women and the Law in England and the Common Law World published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2013. She also is the author of “The Sign of the Last: Gender, Material Culture and Artisanal Nostalgia in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday” included in the special issue on “Medieval and Early Modern Artisan Culture” published in The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2013.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, associate professor of religion, is the author of Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, published by Columbia University Press, 2014. “Multiverse” cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. While this idea has captivated philosophy, religion and literature for millennia, it is now being considered as a scientific hypothesis—with different models emerging from cosmology, quantum mechanics and string theory. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the…