Publications

There are few things as deeply embedded in the American consciousness as the ideas of religion and capitalism. Assistant Professor of History Joseph Slaughter’s new book talks about the connection between those two aspects of the national psyche and how Christian capitalism developed in the first half of the 19th century. The book, entitled Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic, was published in November by Columbia University Press. In the first half of the 19th century, the United States saw both a series of Protestant religious revivals and the dramatic expansion of the marketplace. “It’s easy for…

In a recent article in the journal Regional and Federal Studies James McGuire, Professor of Government, found that Trump's 2020 vote share was a strong and robust predictor of a lower COVID-19 vaccination rate across US states, US counties, and Connecticut towns alike, adjusting for wide range other factors thought to affect the vaccination rate. At each of the three subnational levels, McGuire showed, the Trump 2020 vote share was also correlated more closely than the Trump 2016 vote share or the Romney 2012 vote share with the COVID-19 vaccination rate. McGuire estimated the statistical impact of the Trump 2020…

Susanne Fusso, Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages, professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies, is the translator of the first English-language version of Sergey Gandlevsky’s novel Illegible, published by Northern Illinois University Press. Gandlevsky (b. 1952) is widely recognized as one of the most important living Russian poets and prose writers, and has received numerous literary prizes. Illegible, published in 2002, is his only work of prose fiction to date. The novel has a double time focus, with both the immediate experiences and retrospective meditations of Lev Krivorotov, a 20-year-old poet living in Moscow in the 1970s.…

Assistant Professor of Psychology Kyungmi Kim, Youngbin (Amabel) Jeon ’19, Alexis Banquer ’20, and Danielle Rothschild ’19 are coauthors of a study published in the October 2018 volume of Consciousness and Cognition. In the paper, "Conscious awareness of self-relevant information is necessary for an incidental self-memory advantage," Kim and her students examine the relative contributions of conscious vs. unconscious self-processing to the incidental self-reference effect. The incidental self-reference effect refers to a memory advantage for items simultaneously presented with self-relevant information (e.g., one’s own name) over those presented with other relevant information (e.g., someone else’s name) when the task at…

The National Library of Sweden has announced that the Wesleyan-published (in affiliation with Wiley-Blackwell Publishing) History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History is its 10th most popular foreign e-journal. History and Theory publishes articles, review essays and summaries of books in the areas of critical philosophy of history, speculative philosophy of history, historiography, history of historiography, historical methodology, critical theory, time and culture, and history and related disciplines. The electronic form to all who subscribe to the print edition. The editors include Ethan Kleinberg, Julia Perkins, Philip Pomper and Gary Shaw.

Q: Dena, you recently celebrated your first-year anniversary working as a publication production manager in the Office of University Communications. Do you oversee all publications produced for campus-use? A: Not all, but I manage hundreds of projects- booklets, posters, direct mail pieces, banners, postcards and more- that are intended for Wesleyan communities on-campus and off. Q: Please cite a few examples of publications that you have helped manage recently. A: The Wesleyan Annual Fund’s compelling direct mailer, the freshly redesigned packet mailed to newly admitted students, and the simply elegant Homecoming and Family Weekend booklet are terrific examples. Each uniquely…

Wesleyan University Press published a photographic book about the Connecticut River Oct. 23. The photographs in The Connecticut River: A Photographic Journey Through the Heart of New England follow this major waterway for 410 miles, from its origin near the Canadian border to its wide mouth on Long Island Sound, giving readers a vivid portrait of a living artery of the New England landscape. Middletown is featured in the book. Author and photographer Al Braden opens the book with an essay introducing important aspects of the river, and Chelsea Reiff Gwyther, executive director of the Connecticut River Watershed Council, closes with…

Alex Dupuy, the Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of Sociology, is the author of "Indefensible: On Aristide, Violence, and Democracy," published in the November issue of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 30, pages 161-173. The article is edited by David Scott.

Michael Armstrong-Roche, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, associate professor of medieval studies, is the author of Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in Persiles, published by the University of Toronto Press in May 2009. The 384-page study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era. At the same time it seeks to illuminate how such a…

Carl T. West ’11 and Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, are co-authors of the article "Short-time Loschmidt gap in dynamical systems with critical chaos," which was accepted for publication in Physical Review E Rapid Communications.

Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, co-authored an article with Jessica Sullivan ’08 and Ariel (Ballinger) Starr ’07. Their work on children’s numerical estimation will appear in the journal Cognitive Development in 2009.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, assistant professor of religion, assistant professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of the book, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, published by Columbia University Press, March 2009. Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty…

New Book Explores Religion in the 19th Century Marketplace

New Research Shows 2020 Vote for Trump a Strong Predictor of Lower Vaccination Rates

Fusso Translates Gandlevsky’s Illegible

Kim, Students Coauthor Paper on Self-Memory Advantage

History and Theory Journal Gains Popularity in Sweden

Dena Matthews Oversees Hundreds of Campus Print Projects

Wesleyan University Press Releases Book on the Connecticut River

Dupuy’s Article on Aristide, Violence Published in Caribbean Journal

Armstrong-Roche Author of Book on Cervantes

West ’11, Kottos Co-Author Article on Dynamical Systems

Barth, Sullivan ’08, Starr ’07 Co-Author Numerical Estimation Article

Rubenstein Author of Strange Wonder