faculty – Page 7

Nine members of the Wesleyan faculty retired during the 2014-15 academic year. They include John Carr III, professor of theater (1984-2014); James Donady, professor of biology (1972-2015); Richard Elphick, professor of history (1971-2015); Brian Fay, the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy (1971-2015); Gale Lackey, adjunct professor of physical education (1978-2015); Laurie Nussdorfer, the William Armstrong Professor of History (1986-2015); George Petersson, the Fisk Professor of Natural Science (1973-2015); Vera Schwarcz, the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies (1975-2015); and Ann Wightman, professor of history (1981-2014). On May 23, the faculty gathered for a reception. Several faculty also held their…

On June 3, the Office of Human Resources coordinated an Ice Cream Social for faculty and staff. The event took place at Usdan University Center's Huss Courtyard. Employees won raffle prizes and participated in volleyball games, water balloon toss and bean bag toss. Mario Torres, a material handler from Physical Plant, deejayed the event while the Center for the Arts provided musical entertainment with steel pan drums. Several students who work on campus over the summer also attended the social event. "This was a fun way for colleagues to get out of the office, mingle and kick off the summer…

Hari Krishnan, assistant professor of dance, recently received the Choreomundus Scholars in Residence Award, which will support a three-week residence at the University of Roehampton in London, beginning May 18. During his residency, Krishnan will teach and mentor Choreomundus students who are working on their final project. Krishnan expressed excitement over his award: "I am delighted and honored to be one of two recipients of the prestigious Erasmus Mundus grant for visiting scholars to the "Choreomundus International Masters in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage" at the University of Roehampton’s Department of Dance in London." (more…)

Wesleyan’s Green Street Teaching and Learning Center has received a $12,500 grant from the Petit Family Foundation to support the center's Girls in Science Summer Camp. Green Street Director Sara MacSorley accepted the gift from Dr. William Petit. The Green Street Girls in Science Summer Camp will take place August 3 - 7 and will be open to girls entering grades 4, 5, and 6. Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies, Ruth Johnson, assistant professor of biology, and Christina Othon, assistant professor of physics, will participate in the five-day program, covering topics from biochemistry to physics and culminating…

How do faculty help students, and themselves, thread a path through an ever-growing body of information? What practices can faculty and students find that enable them to bring a clear and sustained focus to their work in the classroom and the laboratory? Through two workshops and discussions, held Feb. 19, participants can consider how one might approach teaching from a contemplative perspective, in both the long and short term. Faculty and students will experiment with the adaptation of several traditional contemplative practices to classroom situations including “stilling” (breath and body awareness), contemplative writing, “beholding,” and explore how these might be instantiated in a classroom, laboratory or personal…

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Stray dogs are everywhere in Santiago, Chile. They lie on sidewalks, wander the parks, and even cross busy streets unaided. No one seems to mind; they’re just part of the culture. For Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters, they also were a striking reminder of the purpose of her recent trip to Santiago. At the invitation of the U.S. Embassy there, she visited the Pontificia Catholic University of Chile Jan. 6-9 to discuss current trends in American animal studies. Although academics have studied animals from various perspectives for a long time, animal studies as a cross-disciplinary field has come into its own…

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A poem by Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, professor of English, is published in the Jan. 12 edition of The New Yorker. Willis, a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Alive: New and Selected Poems, which will be published this spring. She is an expert on 20th century American poetry and poetics, poetry and visual culture, 19th century poetry and poetics, modernism, post-modernism, poetry and political history and the prose poem. The published poem is titled "About the Author."

Jason Wolfe, professor of biology emeritus, died Dec. 23 at the age of 73. Wolfe joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1969 after receiving his BA from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and completing two post-doctoral fellowships at Kings College, University of London, and Johns Hopkins University. He taught cell biology, human biology, biology of aging and the elderly, and structural biology at Wesleyan for 39 years. In his research, Wolfe asked big questions about how reproduction and aging are regulated. With funding from NIH and NSF, he produced a consistent and enviable body of work published…

Q: Welcome back to Wesleyan, Professor Grappo! Can you please fill us in on what you’ve done since graduating from Wes? A: After graduating from Wesleyan in 2001, I worked a fifth grade teacher at a Catholic school in the Bronx. Then I went to grad school at Yale and got my Ph.D. in American Studies. I took a job for a couple years as an assistant professor of American studies at Dickinson College, a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. Last year, I came to Wesleyan as a visiting professor, and this year I began as a full-time, tenure-track…

On Oct. 24, Richard Grossman, professor of economics, was a discussant at a conference titled “Organizations, Civil Society, and the Roots of Development," organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. Grossman commented on a paper by Dan Bogart (University of California at Irvine) titled “Securing the East India Monopoly: Politics, Institutional Change, and the Security of British Property Rights Revisited.” The paper focuses on the history of the English East India Company and ways it yields new insights on the relationship between politics, institutional change, and the security of property rights in Britain.

9 Faculty Retire in 2014-15

Faculty, Staff Mingle at Ice Cream Social

Krishnan Receives Choreomundus Scholars in Residence Award

Petit Foundation Awards Grant to Green Street

Faculty, Students Invited to Workshops on Contemplative Pedagogy Feb. 19

Faculty Curate Picture/Thing Exhibit in Zilkha Gallery

Weil Leads Workshops in Chile on Trends in American Animal Studies

Students, Faculty Participate in Metacognition Workshops Jan. 29-30

Willis’s Poem Published in The New Yorker

Professor Emeritus Jason Wolfe Remembered for Mentoring, Cell Biology Research

Assistant Professor of American Studies Grappo ’01 Teaches Latino Studies, Queer Studies

Grossman Discussant at Economics Research Conference