This fall, Assistant Professor of Biology Joe Coolon is teaching Principles of Biology (MB&B181) and Cell and Development Journal Club (BIOL505). (Photo by Olivia Drake)

This fall, Wesleyan welcomes Assistant Professor Joseph Coolon to the Department of Biology.

Coolon comes to Wesleyan from the University of Michigan where he worked as an assistant research scientist and a postdoctoral fellow for the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Coolon has a BS in biology and PhD in biology from Kansas State University. His dissertation was titled “Ecological Genomics of Nematode Responses to Different Bacteria.”

At Wesleyan, Coolon plans to have two primary research projects. The first project is aimed at understanding the major sources of variation in gene expression including changes in DNA sequence, responses to the environment, and epigenetic effects of previous generations’ experiences.

This project takes advantage of new technological advances in high throughput sequencing and custom computational tools developed in his lab to measure genome-wide gene expression.

The second project focuses on a largely unmet challenge in genomics, determining the functional consequences of a changes in gene expression. To do this, he uses the fruit fly Drosophila sechellia, which has evolved to eat only a single fruit that produces toxic compounds capable of killing most insects. Through an evolved change in gene expression identified by his group, this species has become resistant to the primary toxin of the plant. This project will functionally characterize how this adaptation works mechanistically.

“I am excited to bring new genomics research to Wesleyan,” he said.

Coolon, who has an ongoing collaboration with faculty at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Connecticut Health Center, is interested in understanding the patterns, process and mechanisms of change in gene expression genome-wide using Drosophila. He also is the co-author of more than 15 published papers, many on gene expression and gene regulation in Drosophila.

“I look forward to building collaborations with the other genetics and genomics research groups in both Wesleyan’s Biology and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Departments in the future,” he said.

This fall, Coolon is teaching Principles of Biology (MB&B181) and Cell and Development Journal Club (BIOL505). Next spring he will teach a new course called Genomics Analysis (BIOL310). This new course, developed by Coolon, will introduce current applications of genomics techniques, how to build a genomics workflow, and an introduction to statistical analyses in R programming language providing hands on experience in the analysis and interpretation of large data.

“I am passionate about both scientific research and science education and Wesleyan is a perfect balance of both, with a world-renowned research reputation and outstanding undergraduate and graduate education in the liberal arts tradition,” he said.

Assistant Professor of Government Yamil Velez’s expertise lies at the intersection of psychology and political science. This year he is teaching Racial and Ethnic Politics and Place and Politics. (Photo by Olivia Drake)

In this News @ Wesleyan story, we speak with Yamil Velez, a new member of Wesleyan’s Government Department.

Q: Welcome to Wesleyan! Please tell us about your background—where did you grow up, go to school, etc?

A: I grew up in Miami, Florida as the only son of two immigrant parents. My parents divorced at an early age and since my mother had to work and go to school to support us, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. It was my grandmother who instilled a passion for politics in me, as I would spend every afternoon listening to talk radio and discussing contemporary politics with her. When it was time to go to college, I opted for a university in the capital of Florida with a great political science department – Florida State University – and there I began my journey as a political scientist. Political science appealed to me because it reminded me of the long conversations I would have with my grandmother about local and global politics, and I was excited to contribute to the discussion.

Q: As an undergrad, you double majored in political science and psychology. How did this inform your graduate work and scholarly interests today?

A: I appreciated political science for its focus on understanding how different political actors interact and its emphasis on institutions. However, I always felt like these courses did not place enough importance on the individual so I sought out psychology as a double major. I took a political psychology course in the spring of my junior year. After that semester, I decided to go to graduate school. My professor in that class strongly recommended that I go to Stony Brook because at the time, it was the only program that specialized in political psychology, a sub-discipline that united my two fields of study. I was ecstatic once I found out I was admitted and I am glad I went there. It was such an interesting department with the most fascinating people. I still remember my first prospective students meeting with the head of the department, Milton Lodge. He described how some of his recent work had found that exposure to judicial symbols led people to accept the legitimacy of judicial decisions, irrespective of their beliefs about the decision. I responded, “Wow,” and Milton Lodge snappily said, “Wow is right.” This was a place where conventional thinking in the discipline was constantly challenged and I believe my research reflects the Stony Brook spirit.

Q: What attracted you to Wesleyan’s Government Department?

A: Wesleyan University has a reputation for producing people who go out into the world and make a difference. Along with having excellent colleagues who study important topics in America and abroad, I wanted to be a part of a department where I could teach highly engaged students.

Q: What courses are you teaching this year? Are there other courses you hope to teach in the future?

A: This year I am teaching two courses: Racial and Ethnic Politics and Place and Politics. In the future, I hope to teach courses on immigration politics, gentrification, political psychology, and experimental methods.

Q: How would you describe your teaching style?

A: I consider my teaching style to be highly interactive. I like students to participate and confront the material through debate and discussion.

Q: It’s obviously an exciting time in American politics with the 2016 presidential race heating up. Will you be bringing current events into your curriculums, and how?

A: Since both of my classes focus on race and ethnicity in the United States, it is difficult not to include discussions about current events. Almost every topic we will be covering in both of my classes is in the news on a regular basis, which speaks to the importance of race and ethnicity in our time.

Q: Who or what are you watching closely this election season?

A: I am watching whether candidates on either side of the aisle will competently address immigration, police-community relations, and inequality.

Q: You’ve published papers in the past about factors influencing voters’ attitudes and behaviors. Please tell us about these.

A: My research focuses on how local racial and ethnic composition shapes citizens’ perceptions and attitudes of out-groups. I find that local influxes of immigrants cause people who value conformity and diversity to polarize on the issue of immigration. I also find that citizens accurately perceive these local increases in immigration and are more sensitive to changes in local immigrant composition than existing levels.

Q: What are you researching currently? How did you become interested in this topic?

A: I am currently working on a book project that examines when native-born residents of ethnically diversifying communities will engage in local politics to fight off immigration and when they will move out of those communities. This project is meant to speak to literatures in sociology, political science, and economics that study immigration but have not integrated each other’s insights. I have always been interested in the topic, but the current salience of immigration in national politics has motivated me to think deeply about the topic.

Q: What do you like to do for fun?

A: Music is one of my biggest passions. I have played in multiple bands, produced a handful of albums, and still compose music whenever I get a chance. 

Satoshi Omura Hon. ’94, the honorary Max Tishler Professor of Chemistry, received a Nobel Prize on Oct. 5.

Satoshi Omura was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for developing a new drug, which has nearly eradicated river blindness and dramatically reduced mortality from other devastating diseases. Omura made the discovery that led to this drug while a visiting professor at Wesleyan in the early 1970s.

Omura has remained in touch with Wesleyan colleagues since then and in 2005 was appointed the first Max Tishler Professor of Chemistry, an honorary position. He returns to campus every few years to meet with faculty and present his current research.

The Nobel Committee honored Omura and William Campbell for discovering the drug Avermectin, as well as Youyou Tu, who discovered Artemisinin, on Oct. 5.

“These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually,” the committee said in a statement. “The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immeasurable.”

Omura came to Wesleyan in 1971 while on sabbatical from the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, and worked closely with the late Professor of Chemistry Max Tishler for a year and a half. According to Albert Fry, the E.B. Nye Professor of Chemistry, who was a young professor here at the time, Omura brought to Wesleyan a number of extracts from soil samples to analyze their effects on harmful microorganisms.

“Within months after arriving here, he found a material (the microorganism Streptomyces avermitilis) that apparently was highly potent against a wide variety of bacteria, and quickly discovered that this was really a very attractive antibiotic,” Fry said.

Tishler, who joined Wesleyan’s faculty after retiring as senior vice president of research and development at the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co., introduced Omura to contacts at Merck, which developed the microorganism isolated by Omura into a powerful, broad spectrum antibiotic.

“This was one of the major discoveries that has happened at Wesleyan over the years,” Fry said. “So it as very exciting to see that develop from the initial discovery that Omura made into a product that has now saved many thousands of lives, particularly in Africa.”

The drug has also proven valuable in treating livestock and pets, as well as reducing in humans the incidence of filariasis, which causes the disfiguring swelling of the lymph system in the legs and lower body known as elephantiasis.

In 1994 Wesleyan awarded Omura an honorary Doctor of Science. In 2001, Omura established an endowed fund for the department, which supports operations, equipment and the work of junior faculty.

“We have been extremely fortunate to have Satoshi Omura as a member of this department. We are of course very excited and pleased that Satoshi has won this award,” Fry said. “In fact, some of us have thought that this was long overdue.”

Omura also has an ongoing relationship with faculty in the College of East Asian Studies, to which he donated cherry trees.

“I’m delighted that Dr. Omura has been honored for his research that began at Wesleyan–a truly important contribution to world health,” said Mary Alice Haddad, professor and chair of the College of East Asian Studies, professor of government, professor of environmental studies. “We look forward to deepening Wesleyan’s relationship with him in the future, possibly through the exchange of scientists.”

Hear a WNPR report on the Nobel Prize, featuring Fry, here. Japan’s Fuji TV also covered the news; Fry’s interview begins about a minute into the video.

In addition, Paul Modrich, who collaborated on DNA mismatch repair research with Manju Hingorani, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, received a 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hingorani, postdoctoral researcher Miho Sakato and Modrich co-authored a paper titled “MutL Traps MutS at a DNA Mismatch,” published in the July 21 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Modrich, along with Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl and Turkey’s Aziz Sancar “mapped and explained how the cell repairs its DNA and safeguards the genetic information,” the Nobel committee reported. Modrich’s research on DNA mismatch repair showed how cells correct errors when DNA is replicated during cell division.

Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies (Photo credit: Smallz + Raskind)

Jeanine Basinger, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, was recently featured in a Hollywood Reporter article “The Professor of Hollywood,” by film historian and best-selling author Sam Wasson ’03, who studied with Basinger at Wesleyan. The magazine brought together 33 of her former pupils who work prominently in the film industry for “an A-list class reunion” photo—and several of them talk about how Basinger inspired them, encouraging their self-expression while also sharing with them her love for the medium.

In the article, Basinger discusses how and why she came to devote her life to the study of film and how working as an usher in a movie theater, watching the same film over and over, helped her to understand the filmmaking process—and gave her the foundation for her future as a film scholar at a time when there were no film schools. In 1960 she began work in the advertising department at a scholastic publisher on the Wesleyan campus, but within a decade, she began teaching at the University some of first film study classes in America.

Basinger with 33 former students who are film industry leaders. (Photo by Smallz + Raskind)

Wasson writes: “She may not be a household name anywhere other than Hollywood, but Jeanine Basinger … is an iconic figure in American cinema, one of the most beloved and respected film history professors in the history of film studies. In fact, she pretty much invented the discipline, starting Wesleyan University’s Film Studies program back in 1969, a time when the notion of studying movies as a serious art form was still considered radical thinking. The list of her former pupils could fill the Dolby Theatre— and quite often they do. Among them, Michael Bay (’86), Joss Whedon (‘87), Laurence Mark (’71), Akiva Goldsman, (’83), Paul Weitz (’88), Marc Shmuger (’80) and Alex Kurtzman (’95). Other Wesleyans, like Stephen Schiff (’72) and Bradley Whitford (’81), never took her courses but became campus acolytes anyway. Then there’s the list of Hollywood luminaries who simply consider her a close friend, like Clint Eastwood (‘Truly one of my favorite people,’ he says) and Isabella Rossellini, who donated her mother’s letters and diaries to Basinger’s famous Wesleyan Cinema Archive (‘She always shows an exquisite sensitivity,” she says, ‘never forgetting that Ingrid Bergman is for me my mother, not just a great actress’).”

Read more of the Hollywood Reporter article.

On Feb. 2, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Joyce Jacobsen announced that Wesleyan has hired eight new tenure-track faculty in fields including African American studies, sociology and physics, among others. Wesleyan also made a senior hire, which will be announced later this semester after a successful tenure review, Jacobsen said. Nine other faculty searches are ongoing and will hopefully be completed this spring.

“With 18 searches going on, we will likely have a larger than usual group of new faculty coming to campus next fall,” said Jacobsen. “We’re excited to welcome this accomplished and diverse group of scholar-teachers.”

Brief bios of the eight new tenure-track faculty follow:

Abigail Boggs, assistant professor of sociology, is a Wesleyan alumna whose PhD thesis from University of California – Davis is titled “Prospective Students, Potential Threats: The Figure of the International Student in U.S. Higher Education.” Her work crosses the boundaries of feminist studies, popular culture, queer studies, and transnational studies. Her first book manuscript, “American Futures: International Studies and the Global U.S. University” is currently under review.

Khalil Johnson, assistant professor of African American studies, is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia who is currently finishing his dissertation at Yale, titled “Our Black Teachers: African-American Education and Settler Colonialism, 1730-1980.” He has been particularly interested in the complicated relationships between African-Americans, Native Americans, and European-Americans in the American West. His paper “The Chinle Dog Shoots: Federal Governance and Grassroots Politics in Post-War Navajo Country” won the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize in 2014.

Michael Meere, assistant professor of French, holds a BA from Northwestern University and a PhD from the University of Virginia, as well as two master’s degrees from Lyon II and the Sorbonne. His book Troubling Tragedies: Violence on the French Renaissance Stage is currently under review, and he has already begun a second monograph, Performing Social Dramas in Early Modern France. He was also the sole editor of a collection of essays on French renaissance and baroque drama, and the author of many other articles. He has been a visiting faculty member at Wesleyan since 2014.

Courtney Patterson, assistant professor of sociology, earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently completing her dissertation at Northwestern, titled “Fat Chance, Slim Chance: Identity, Culture, and a Politic of Fatness” while serving as a teaching fellow in Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College. She is interested in the intersectionality of body size, race and gender. She has had three articles published as a graduate student with several more in the works.

Renee Sher ’07, assistant professor of physics, has a PhD from Harvard and a BA in physics from Wesleyan. She specializes in condensed matter physics, in particular the study of semiconductors and organic polymers with a focus on photovoltaic materials. Her research has resulted in a number of publications in top journals in the field. She comes to Wesleyan from Stanford and the SLAC Lab.

Michael Slowik ’03, assistant professor of film, has a PhD from the University of Iowa, a MA in humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in film from Wesleyan. His 2014 book After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era: 1926-1934, based on his dissertation, has been shortlisted for the Kraza-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award. He also has published articles on different topics in film, including one about how modern films have dealt with the rise of terrorism.

Royette Tavernier, assistant professor of psychology, holds a BS from Trent University and a PhD from Brock University in Ontario. She specializes in sleep research, particularly among adolescents and emerging adults. She has published several papers on this topic, and she has also studied the stress response of villagers to Tropical Storm Erika in her native Dominica.

Takeshi Watanabe, assistant professor of East Asian studies, holds a BA and a PhD from Yale, where his dissertation won the Marston Anderson Prize. He has written several articles about the role of food and representations of it in Japanese art, religion and culture, particularly during the late Heian period. He returns to Wesleyan after teaching here from 2012 to 2014 as a visitor.

Associate Professor Nicole Stanton notes that faculty dance concerts play a crucial role in academic life: “For many of us in the dance department, this is our creative research. This how we explore our ideas and passions and how we engage with the world and with critical, cultural, social and political themes.”

On the weekend of April 15-16, the CFA theater was home to the spring faculty dance concert, Storied Places. In addition to the dance, which was choreographed and directed by Chair and Associate Professor of Dance, Associate Professor of African American Studies, and Environmental Studies Nicole Stanton, the performance also featured original compositions and musical direction by Adjunct Professor of Music and African American Studies Jay Hoggard ’76. Adding a further layer of texture was narrative text, written and performed by Chair and Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of African American Studies, Professor of English and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Center for African American Studies Lois Brown.

Additionally, Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy L’Merchie Frazier created visual scenography and design—some based on the photographs that grace the cover of Hoggard’s new two-CD set, Harlem Hieroglyphs.

The collaboration, which featured a host of musicians and dancers—including Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Dante Brown ’09 and Rick Manayan ’17—had begun with Hoggard’s compositions, which were inspired under the theme of “Migrations”—as he thought specifically of the migration his own family had made from the rural South to a new home in Harlem, as well as more generally about the movement of peoples throughout history and how that was illustrated in music, particularly jazz.

Nicole Stanton recalls that she had reached out to Hoggard, at the suggestion of Pam Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16, who was then director of the Center for the Arts.

“I enjoy very much the idea of collaboration and collaboration across disciplines,” Stanton explains. “I’m interested in dance and the total art form that engages a lot of different senses and a lot of different modes of expression.”

Faculty Jay Hoggard, Lois Brown, Nicole Stanton, and L’Merchie Frazier are teaching the new Collaborative Cluster Initiative Research Seminar. (Photos by Olivia Drake)

Stanton and Hoggard talked about the possibility of working together at some point and then, Stanton recalls, “Last summer Jay approached me with a project idea he was interested in—he was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom, and ideas about how the African American music form had migrated from the rural south to the urban north and the history of Jazz. That was kind of where we started from. We’d been going back and forth, sharing resources, and then Jay suggested Lois as a possible partner for us, for bringing in more textuality and her sense as a historian. The three of us began working.”

The team also received university support in what Stanton calls “an interesting grant sponsored for the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Collaborative Cluster grant.” Brown, Hoggard, and Stanton developed cluster of courses in their own disciplines that dovetailed under the theme of “Movement, Memory and Migration,” which explored the histories of migrations through different art forms. Stanton notes that the students in the Cluster courses were engaged with Storied Places as performers, interns, documentarians, and they will also have their own separate interdisciplinary performance piece on May 10.

Brown notes that she was particularly primed to enjoy the collaboration. “One of Pam Tatge’s greatest gifts to me was her invitation to merge the craft of teaching in the humanities with the craft of teaching in dance,” she notes. “My time with choreographers Liz Lerner and Jawole Zollar during the fall of 2013 laid bare the power of interpretation and its multifaceted, corporeal qualities. That unforgettable connection certainly informed my collaboration with Jay and Nicole and with our Visiting Artist L’Merchie Frazier who worked on set design and taught the seminar Visual Storytelling: Race, (in)Visibility and the American Landscape this semester as part of our Collaborative Cluster.” 

The faculty particularly enjoyed the process of watching the others work in their discipline. “I am amazed that Jay as a composer actually in his brain thinks of each part, writes it down on paper and then simply gets the musicians to come in and play the part as he has envisioned it,” says Stanton. “That’s not how I work as a choreographer. I need the people and the bodies in the space moving together to make formal and content decisions.”

Brown concurs: “One of the most powerful journeys that I think we undertook together was the journey to and through our respective disciplinary languages. I still remember the sunny afternoon in Vanguard Lounge during one of our collaboration meetings when Jay declared, ‘I think sonically!’ It was a reminder then and throughout the process that we each hear, see, imagine, and respond in different keys even as we move around a supposedly singular object or theme. Watching us become more acutely aware of the different modes of interpretation—from the early days of conversation to the last moments of the actual performance—always will stay with me.” 

Hoggard noted the challenge of his three-tiered role in the production—as a jazz musician performing, as the conductor for his Harlem Hieroglyphs ensemble, and as director of the choral group—keeping all in synch with dance and spoken word: “In doing live music for any show, we musicians use word and visual cues from the other performers. Conducting other musicians, as well as playing my vibraphone, adds a whole new level of complexity, particularly with jazz, which is by nature open to improvisation, in a live show, which will vary each time. I was watching the dancers very carefully to get internal cues—what we jazz performers usually do within our group with each other. It was a different level of complexity, merging the music with the dance unit, the choral unit, and the spoken word—when do you blend, when do you back off?”
His ultimate take-away: “I was only sorry that it ended after the second day. It was a good collaboration.”

“I liken my interest in contemporary dance to poetry—a way of engaging the world that is deeply specific but also open to inviting different ways to interpret the experience,” notes Stanton. “I’m interested in the idea of engagement, fellowship, inspiration—so I hope that people found themselves connected, invited to bring their own imaginations, their own selves, to this, which I call—not a story, but a ‘story-ness’ of experience. Storied Places revolves around this amazing group of artists exploring idea of movement, memory and migration.”

Brown concludes, “There are powerful tensions in the piece—the call to go, and the yearning to stay; the effort to be rooted, and the reality that one must be separated from places that cannot be replicated. Migration and memory go hand in hand, and I think that what we produced and performed really grappled with the romance and the tragedies of these difficult gestures and movements.” 

Additionally, the performance included dance and spoken word by Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Dante Brown ’09, Sydnie Liggett, Kellie Lynch, Rick Manayan ’17, and Annie Wang; and live music by the Jay Hoggard Harlem Hieroglyphs Ensemble including pianist and organist Warren Byrd, bassist Belden Bullock, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music and Private Lessons Teacher Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and Wesleyan graduate music student Sean Sonderegger on saxophone; plus singers Janice Watson, Coordinator of International Student Service in the Dean’s Office, Leta Watson, Jordan Watson, and Kim Burnett, all members of the Cross Street A.M.E. Zion Church Choir.

The project was sponsored by the Dance Department, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Center for the Arts Creative Campus Commission program, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Office of Academic Affairs, and the African American Studies Program.

Mark Slobin, second from left, was celebrated by colleagues, friends and family during a day long conference and concert April 16.

Mark Slobin, the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music, was honored April 16 with “Ideas on the Move,” a conference celebrating his career and many accomplishments. Slobin will retire from Wesleyan June 30.

Slobin is an ethnomusicologist who has written extensively on the subject of East European Jewish music and klezmer music, as well as the music of Afghanistan.

The daylong event featured talks by alumni from as far back as 45 years. Topics included “Mark’s Metaphors: Visual Poetics, Pedagogy and Theoretical Clarity;” “ONCE Upon a Time: Mark Slobin’s Experimental Ethnomusicology;” “How Mark Slobin Became an Ethnomusicologist;” and “Growing Up With Mark.” A concert, featuring Irish, Yiddish, Korean and other music, also was held in honor of Professor Slobin in World Music Hall. View a list of all speakers and musicians on this website.

Slobin came to Wesleyan on July 1, 1971. He has been president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, president of the Society for Asian Music, and editor of Asian Music. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Seeger Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award (for lifetime achievement) from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Curt Leviant Award In Yiddish Studies from the Modern Languages Association (honorable mention). He was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Chosen Voices (1989).

In his blog, President Michael Roth said: “He is at home with all kinds of sounds, and his students (many of whom were present at the conference) work on everything from Mongolian throat singing and African funeral music to hip-hop and klezmer. He’s even written the book on music at Wesleyan.

“Mark spoke briefly at the conference about how Wesleyan has fostered groundbreaking research, practice and teaching in music for a very long time. Thanks to him, and to his colleagues and students, we expect that to continue far into the future.”

The evening concluded with a Javanese Wayang Puppet Play “Arjuna in Meditation,” performed with the Wesleyan Gamelan Ensemble under the direction of I. M. Harjito and Sumarsam (dhalang) and guest musicians.

Faculty presented talks during Wesleyan Thinks Big April 21 in Memorial Chapel. During the TED-talk style event, Wesleyan professors lectured for 10 minutes on an experience, a personal passion or an existential question.

Assistant Professor of Science in Society Anthony Ryan Hatch spoke “On Serving Others: Labor and Justice in the New Gilded Age.”

Associate Professor of Theater and Latin American Studies Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento presented a talk titled “The Other Latin America.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies Clemmie Harris spoke on “Why Police Reform Is Not Enough: Race, Urban Neighborhoods, and the Selective Enforcement of Stop and Frisk.”

Several Wesleyan students, faculty and staff attended the talks. (Photos by Rebecca Goldfarb Terry ’19)

Through grants, workshops, seminars, publications, and formal and informal discussions, the Center for Faculty Career Development (CFCD) aims to cultivate dialogue among Wesleyan’s faculty and encourage association with faculty members at other academic institutions.

On April 12, about 25 faculty members attended a CFCD workshop titled “Becoming More Visible: Enhance Your Online Profile” in Usdan University Center. The workshop taught faculty ways to become more visible to colleagues, students and non-campus organizations by optimizing their work and presence online through search engine optimization as well as social media.

The workshop was taught by editor Naedine Joy Hazell MALS ’14 and Scott Johnson. Hazell has been editor-in-chief of The Hartford Courant, a three-time judge of the Pulitzer Prizes, editor of Hartford Magazine and New Haven Living and more. Johnson spent 25 years in journalism before moving into rebranding and strategy. Beginning as a graphic artist and designer, he then moved into newspaper redesign. He then moved from newspapers to the Associated Press in New York as director of graphics and visuals and authored the AP visual style guide. He currently works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the Strategy and Innovation Department.

(Photos by Tom Dzimian)

Wesleyan President Michael Roth, at right, congratulates Abraham Adzenyah for teaching at Wesleyan 46 years and for the naming of the Abraham Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall (formerly the Center for the Arts Rehearsal Hall). A ribbon cutting ceremony took place May 7.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, was honored with a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students (View photo set here). Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

Abraham Adzenyah speaks to the audience.

During the event, Adzenyah was honored with the naming of the Abraham Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall (formerly the Center for the Arts Rehearsal Hall). This is the first time that a leading U.S. university has named a building after a traditional African musician. In addition, grateful students, alumni and friends have raised more than $225,000 to establish the Abraham Adzenyah Endowed Wesleyan Scholarship.

“West African drumming has been one of the most important parts of our Music Department since the beginning of our World Music Program in the 1960s,” said Professor of Music Eric Charry. “Abraham Adzenyah has been the pillar of the World Music Program, being here for so many decades and training so many of our students. He has been such a valued colleague within our Music Department. He has such breadth and depth of experience, and it’s just a pleasure to have had him around and for him to have offered the kinds of expertise that he does.”

Early in his career, Abraham Adzenyah studied, performed, and taught drumming in his native Ghana, including five years of formal study in music, dance, and drama at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. He was one of the first artists to be named Master Drummer in the Ghana National Dance Ensemble. On arriving at Wesleyan in 1969, he began to offer courses in West African music, dance, and culture. He received a BA in liberal arts from Goddard College in 1976, and an MA in music from Wesleyan in 1979.

Throughout his years at Wesleyan, Adzenyah was a visiting artist and teacher at dozens of workshops, colleges and conservatories, and has performed all over the world, alone and with eminent musicians such as the late Wesleyan Artist in Residence Ed Blackwell, Wesleyan’s John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Emeritus Anthony Braxton, Hugh Masekela, Steve Gadd, Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Ornette Coleman and Rufus Reid. He has also influenced and inspired students and professional musicians through his recordings. While at Wesleyan, Adzenyah received the Afro-Caribbean World Music Symposium Achievement Award and the Percussive Arts Society Award.

Adzenyah was featured in the May 7 Hartford Courant in an article titled “A Unique Honor for Retiring Master Drummer at Wesleyan.”

The celebration was co-sponsored by the Center for the Arts, the Music Department, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, and University Relations.

Several past and present students and faculty attended the celebration.

Adzenyah was honored with a farewell concert.

The afternoon concert featured Wesleyan’s  West African Drumming and Dance Ensemble, Tufts University’s Kiniwe Ensemble with the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Kekeli African Music and Dance Ensemble, Berklee College of Music’s West African Drum and Dance Ensemble, Montclair State University’s West African Drumming and Dance Ensemble with the Rhythm Monsters, and Ayanda Clarke ’99. (Photos by Caroline Kravitz ’19)

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

On May 7, Master drummer Abraham Adzenyah, adjunct professor of music, emeritus, returned to campus for a ceremony, farewell concerts, and reunion featuring past and present students. Adzenyah taught West African music, dance and culture at Wesleyan for 46 years and retired in May.

Wesleyan recently hired five additional tenure-track faculty who will begin their appointments during the Fall 2016 semester. They join eight other faculty who were hired in February.

The new faculty include:

Joan Cho, assistant professor of East Asian studies. Cho’s BA is from the University of Rochester, and she is completing her dissertation at Harvard, titled “The Dictator’s Modernity Dilemma: Modernization and Generation Turnover under Authoritarianism.” Her research interests include authoritarian regimes, comparative democratization, civil society and social movements, and democracy and dictatorship, with a regional focus on Korea and East Asia.

Victoria Manfredi, assistant professor of computer science. Manfredi, who holds a BA from Smith College and a PhD and MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is currently a scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Previously she served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Web and InterNetworking Group in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. The main theme underlying her research is how to design network protocols that work effectively in dynamic network conditions.

Reda Moursli, assistant professor of economics. Moursli holds a BA from Al Akhawayn University, Morocco, and an MS and PhD from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His dissertation was titled “Corporate Governance and the Design of Board of Directors.” He is interested in corporate governance, empirical corporate finance, investor protection and financial econometrics.

Gabrielle Ponce, assistant professor of letters. Ponce completed her BA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MFA and PhD at The Johns Hopkins University, where she is completing her dissertation on “The Unknown History of the Invention of Don Quijote: The Primacy of Poetry in the Prose of Miguel de Cervantes: 1567-1615.” Her research interests include cultural and intellectual history in the Spanish Golden Age, Spanish theater and Renaissance and Baroque Spanish poetry, and Cervantes and Freud.

Hirsh Sawhney, assistant professor of English. Hirsh holds a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MFA from Rutgers-Newark University. He is an author whose writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The New York Times Literary Supplement, as well as numerous other periodicals, and his first novel, South Haven, was published this year. Sawhney has been a visiting faculty member at Wesleyan since 2013.

Tom Morgan

Tom Morgan, Foss Professor of Physics, recently attended the 43rd Institute of Physics U.K. Plasma Physics Conference in Isle of Skye, Scotland. He presented a flash verbal presentation and a poster contribution dealing with the properties of water following focused laser induced breakdown.

After a plasma (a gas of ions and free electrons) is formed in water by laser breakdown, the energy is dissipated through light emission, shockwaves and cavitation bubbles. When the breakdown is close to the surface of the water, surface waves and water ejection from the surface up to heights of 60 cm also occur.

All of these phenomena have been observed in the laboratory at Wesleyan in conjunction with Lutz Huwel, professor of physics, Matt Mei ’18, and international collaborators. Joining the effort from abroad are Professor Tomoyuki Murakami, Seikei University, Tokyo, and Professor Bill Graham, Queen’s University, N. Ireland.

New effects not seen before have been observed, particularly near the surface at the air-water interface. The air-water interface is ubiquitous with applications to biology, environmental studies, chemical analysis and medicine, but its detailed behavior under different conditions is not well understood. The research uses both state of the art computer simulation and experimentation to elucidate the evolutionary dynamics and structure of bulk water and the air-water interface.

“Since the meeting was in Scotland, the researchers though it appropriate to try a liquid other than water and results were reported on whiskey as well,” Morgan said.

The Wesleyan Oral History project features an interview with Bob Rosenbaum.

Twelve oral history interviews of Wesleyan community members, including faculty emeriti and administrators, are available at Olin Library. Transcripts and recordings have been deposited in Special Collections and Archives, and Leith Johnson, university archivist, has worked to make the transcripts available on WesScholar.  (A link to the collection of memoirs will also be available from the Wasch Center website.)

The set includes an extensive interview with Bill Firshein, the Daniel Ayres Professor of Biology, Emeritus, who passed away in December 2015. In this interview, Firshein related a whole complex of matters having to do with his Wesleyan career—his work as a scientist, his Jewish identity, his relationship with the administration, his colleagues, his hobbies and avocations. Another treasure in the collection is an interview with Bob Rosenbaum, who just completed his 100th birthday celebration in November. Rosenbaum is a University Professor of Sciences and Mathematics, Emeritus. He also served as academic vice president, acting president, and chancellor at Wesleyan.

“Should anyone undertake a history of the last 50 years of Wesleyan, going forward, these oral histories will be invaluable resources,” said Karl Scheibe, director of the Wasch Center. “And if no such history emerges, the oral histories will be even more important for the detail they contain and the perspectives they represent.”

Heather Zavod and Christine Foster, freelance writers who have contributed to Wesleyan magazine, are working on a new set of interviews this year, thanks in part to funding from the Friends of the Wesleyan Library and the library. The new participants are Jelle DeBoer, John Driscoll, Rick Elphick, Dick Buel, Duffy White, and Allan Berlind.

John Bonin, the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science, and his former student Dana Louie ’15, are authors of a new paper published in Journal of Comparative Economics titled, “Did foreign banks stay committed to emerging Europe during recent financial crises?”

In the paper, Bonin and Louie investigate the behavior of foreign banks with respect to real loan growth during times of financial crisis for a set of countries where foreign banks dominate the banking sectors. The paper focuses on eight countries that are the most developed in emerging Europe and the behavior of two types of banks: The Big 6 European multinational banks (MNBs) and all other-foreign controlled banks. The results show that bank lending was impacted adversely during recent financial crises, but the two types of banks behaved differently. The Big 6 banks’ lending behavior was similar to domestic banks supporting the notion that these countries are treated as a “second home market” by these European MNBs. However, the other foreign banks in the region were involved in fueling the credit boom, but then decreased their lending aggressively during the crisis periods. The results suggest that both innovations matter for studying bank behavior during crisis periods in the region and, by extension, to other small countries in which banking sectors are dominated by foreign financial institutions having different business models.

“I am particularly proud of this collaborative publication because it does not stem from a student’s honors thesis, but rather from work that began with the Quantitative Analysis Center summer program and that Dana and I continued throughout her senior year in addition to her regular coursework,” Bonin said.

The paper is available online and will appear in a forthcoming hardcopy issue of the journal.

This fall, Wesleyan welcomes 55 new faculty including 15 new tenured and tenure-track faculty, 33 visiting faculty and seven fellows. They come from top PhD programs throughout the country with expertise ranging from private protocols for computer networks to sleep and psychosocial adjustments to intersectionality of body size, race and gender. Three tenure-track faculty also are Wesleyan alumni.

The 2016-17 group represents the most diverse class of new faculty to date.

“We are proud of our progress in the past two years towards diversifying the Wesleyan faculty along multiple dimensions,” said Joyce Jacobsen, provost and vice president for academic affairs. “A diverse faculty, among many other positive features, is one that can model different ways of experiencing scholarly life for our students.”

Antonio Farias, vice president for equity and inclusion/ Title IX officer, says his office and the provost work together to coordinate the hiring and retention process from beginning through promotion and tenure, with clear leadership from President Roth and the Board of Trustees.

Wesleyan’s new tenured and tenure-track faculty include (back row from left) Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer, Abigail Boggs ’02, Meng-Ju (Renee) Sher ’07, Michael Slowik ’03, Victoria Manfredi; (front row from left) Joan Cho, Royette Tavernier, Takeshi Watanabe, Courtney Patterson-Faye, Khalil Johnson, Kali Gross and Reda Moursli. Not pictured: Michael Meere, Hirsh Sawhney and Tiphanie Yanique.

Wesleyan’s new tenured and tenure-track faculty include Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer, assistant professor of letters; Abigail Boggs ’02, assistant professor of sociology; Meng-Ju (Renee) Sher ’07, assistant professor of physics; Michael Slowik ’03, assistant professor of film studies; Victoria Manfredi, assistant professor of computer science; Joan  Cho, assistant professor of East Asian studies; Royette Tavernier, assistant professor of psychology; Takeshi Watanabe, assistant professor of East Asian studies; Courtney Patterson-Faye, assistant professor of sociology; Khalil Johnson, assistant professor of African American studies; Kali Gross, professor of African American studies; and Reda Moursli, assistant professor of economics; Michael Meere, assistant professor of French; Hirsh Sawhney, assistant professor of English; and Tiphanie Yanique, associate professor of English.

Their bios appear below:

Abigail Boggs has a BA from Wesleyan and a PhD from the University of California – Davis. Her dissertation is titled “Prospective Students, Potential Threats: The Figure of the International Student in US Higher Education.” Bogg’s work crosses the boundaries of feminist studies, critical ethnic studies, queer studies and transnational studies. Her first book manuscript, American Futures: International Students and the Global U.S. University is currently under contract with Fordham University Press.

Joan Cho received her PhD in political science from the Government Department at Harvard University in 2016. Her dissertation, “The Dictator’s Modernity Dilemma: Theory and Evidence from South Korea” examines the conditions under which political institutions are more or less effective at neutralizing opposition forces in authoritarian regimes. Her current work examines the legacies of authoritarianism, and she will be teaching courses on social movements in East Asia and Korean politics and society.

Kali Gross earned her PhD in history and a certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the award-winning book, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Duke UP, 2006) and the newly released, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford UP, 2016). Gross is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on black women and crime and her writing frequently explores how historical legacies of race, gender, and justice shape mass incarceration today. She has held numerous fellowships and been scholar-in-residence at institutions such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Library Company of Philadelphia and was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr., received his BA. in English literature from the University of Georgia and will receive his PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in December 2016. His research specializes in the intertwined histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous people in North America, with emphases on U.S. settler colonialism, education and counter-hegemonic social movements. While teaching elementary school on the Navajo Nation, he unwittingly joined a historic cohort of African Americans who taught in reservation boarding schools as employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the civil rights era. His current manuscript project, Schooled: The Education of Black and Indigenous People in the United States and Abroad, 1730-1980, historicizes the Post-War migration of hundreds of African American educators to Indian Country and has unearthed a colonial genealogy of four generations of social reformers, missionaries, philanthropists, activists, and teachers who, since the 18th century, have used schooling to reconcile the founding cataclysms of the United States––the ongoing presence of Indigenous nations, free black people, and non-white immigrants. The result is a dramatic and transnational reinterpretation of American education and its consequences for colonized peoples across the globe.

Victoria Manfredi received her BA in computer science and neuroscience from Smith College and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Manfredi is interested in how to design more robust and private protocols for computer networks. Her work focuses on characterizing networks using analysis and data mining, using the derived insights to develop more robust and private communication protocols.

Michael Meere specializes in early modern French studies with a focus on theater and performance. He has edited French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory (Delaware, 2015), has published on authors ranging from Rabelais to Voltaire, and he has completed a book manuscript on representations of violence in the 16th century French tragedy. Meere has a PhD from the University of Virginia, a BA from Northwestern, a Master 2 from the Sorbonne and a Maîtrise from Lyon 2. Alongside his scholarship on drama, he also directs French-language theater productions at Wesleyan. During the 2016-17 academic year, Meere coordinates the Renaissance Seminar, co-convenes the Queer Studies Research Collective, and is chair of the board of the Friends of Wesleyan Library.

Reda Moursli obtained a Bachelor in Business Administration from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco in 2006. In 2007, he moved to Sweden to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Gothenburg, where he received his MS in finance in 2009. In 2016, he earned a PhD in economics from the University of Gothenburg. His current research looks at the effects of social networks on the supply of effort by directors in U.S. firms, and how these networks influence the success of directors in the market for directorships. He also studies the impact of social networks on the market for corporate control in the U.S. Moursli’s teaching interests include corporate finance, corporate governance, statistics, financial econometrics and econometrics.

Courtney Patterson-Faye earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in April from Northwestern. Her dissertation was titled, “Fat Chance, Slim Chance: Identity, Culture, and a Politic of Fatness.” She also served as a teaching fellow in Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College. Patterson-Faye is interested in the intersectionality of body size, race and gender.

Gabrielle Piedad Ponce-Hegenauer earned her PhD in the Department of German & Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University, where she previously completed her MFA in the Writing Seminars Department. She has been the recipient of the Sankey Award for Poetry, the Charles Singleton Center Fall Travel Grant in Spain, and the Millicent Mercer Johnsen Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. Her research and teaching is focused on a comparative and tropological approach to the study of imaginative and philosophical forms of writing as they developed in European vernaculars over the course of the early modern period.

Hirsh Sawhney‘s debut novel, South Haven, is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement, and is the editor of Delhi Noir, a critically-acclaimed anthology of fiction. Hirsh has directed an adult education program serving undocumented workers in Brooklyn and taught English to asylum seekers in London. He is an advisory editor at Wasafiri, a journal of international literature based out of the Open University.

Renee Sher ’07 has a PhD from Harvard and a BA in physics from Wesleyan. Her research uses ultrafast spectroscopy to study energy conversion processes in renewable energy materials. Sher will begin teaching in the spring of 2017.

Michael Slowik ’03 has a PhD from the University of Iowa, a MA in humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in film from Wesleyan. His 2014 book After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era: 1926-1934, based on his dissertation, has been shortlisted for the Kraza-Krausz Foundation Moving Image Book Award. He also has published articles on different topics in film, including one about how modern films have dealt with the rise of terrorism.

Royette Tavernier holds a BS from Trent University and a PhD from Brock University in Ontario. She specializes in sleep research, particularly among adolescents and emerging adults and is the director of the Sleep and Psychosocial Adjustment Lab at Wesleyan. Tavernier’s research program examines the link between sleep and psychosocial adjustment. She uses both subjective (e.g., self-report) and objective (e.g., actigraphy) assessments to measure a number of sleep characteristics, such as sleep duration, sleep latency, sleep efficiency, and sleep quality. Her interest in psychosocial adjustment spans a wide range of indices, including academic performance, emotional wellbeing, quality of interpersonal relationships, and technology use. Some of the statistical tools used in her research include: auto-regressive cross-lagged analysis, growth curve modeling, latent class analysis, and hierarchical linear modeling. Her interest in sleep and psychosocial adjustment extends to both short term (i.e., day-to-day) as well as long term (over years) associations, with a particular emphasis on the developmental age periods of adolescence and emerging adulthood.

Takeshi Watanabe received his PhD from Yale in 2005 and was a visitor at Wesleyan in 2012-2014. His prize-winning doctoral dissertation reconsidered the significance of a literary work called the Eiga Monogatari, or The Tale of Flowering Fortunes, that examines the historical events of the 11th century. His current research examines history of food and eating customs as reflected in pre-modern Japanese literature, and he is teaching a course this semester called From Tea to Connecticut Rolls: Defining Japanese Culture through Food.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of Wife, a collection of poems published in November 2015. Wife won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and is currently a finalist for the Forward Prize for a First Collection. Yanique also the author of the novel Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014. She also is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35. Her writing has won the 2011 Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize.

Associate Professor of Dance Katja Kolcio, bottom left, and Associate Professor of Dance Nicole Stanton, bottom right, perform with Freedom Dance Ukraine this summer. The project was based on Kolcio’s recent work in Ukraine. Other members of the ensemble: (above, left to right): Elvira Demerdzhy Julian Kytasty, Alina Kuzma.  (Photo by Lucy Guiliano)

A Connecticut dance event offered Associate Professor of Dance Katja Kolcio an additional way to explore her ongoing dance/movement project highlighting the effect of political forces at work in Ukraine.

Last summer, Kolcio invited colleague and Associate Professor of Dance Nicole Stanton to join with two other dancers, both with ties to Ukraine, to create a dance. This event, Dance for Peace, was sponsored by Artists for World Peace, an organization founded and led by Wendy Black-Nasta P’07, with music director Robert Nasta MA ’98, P’07.

Kolcio, who holds a doctorate in somatics, places the dance they created, “Steppe Land,” in the context of her project in Ukraine, where she has familial roots. Focusing on the role of physical engagement and creativity in social politics, Kolcio had recently taken her sabbatical in that country, working with those affected by the invasion and forced annexation of Crimea by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

There, Kolcio found a colleague in movement artist Elvira Demerdzhy, who ran an improvisational movement collective in Simferopol, Crimea, until hostility toward Tatars—her ethnic group—forced her to leave Crimea to live in Ukraine. “Together with thousands of refugees displaced by the war with Russia, Elvira is struggling to make sense of things,” says Kolcio, noting that Demerdzhy is resilient. “She wrote ‘You don’t have power for sorrow or for [self-pity], you just stand up and save your life. Dance is a way to make sense of things when words don’t suffice.”

Kolcio’s work in Ukraine is about just that—finding resilience through using one’s body to make sense of the world. Her methodology, somatics, offers a way to “integrate body and mind but also integrate self and environment. It helps one feel one’s weight in the world and one’s possibilities and creative impact in the world. It’s about developing creative agency.”

Back in the States last spring, Kolcio welcomed Demerdzhy on her first visit, eager to provide a full experience of dance in America. The two saw Visiting Artist in Dance and the College of East Asian Studies Eiko Otake P’07,’10, perform in New York City and they also visited Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Then came the invitation from Black-Nasta’s group to create and perform their own dance.

It was a perfect opportunity: “I was interested in working with a group of artists from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, and specifically to ask ‘in what ways might movement research and performance inform and deepen our understanding of place and displacement?’”

“He performed a song he’d recently discovered from the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine. It was very cyclical, and so it was about coming back, and coming back, and coming back, to the question of—Where are we going?” she recalls. “It’s interesting how sound became so important in the dance composition—not words but sound from every direction. Elvira wrote, ‘Our dance, “Steppe Lands,” was an effort to make sense of the situation for ourselves. I thought once that the lives of thousands of people after annexation reminds me of thousands of different sounds that are filling the space, but which cannot.’”

Stanton also felt the success of this cross-cultural collaborative venture. “It was an honor for me to work with the amazing, creative and accomplished artists Katja assembled, and a gift to perform alongside such exceptional dance artists in the concert as a whole! The idea of the arts at work for our communities, for justice and peace at a time when there is so much hate and violence gives me hope.”

Chris Weaver MALS ’75, CAS ’76, visiting professor in the College of Integrative Sciences at Wesleyan, was appointed co-director of the Video Game Pioneers Archive at the Smithsonian Institute’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. This one-of-a-kind initiative will record oral-history interviews with first-generation inventors of the video game industry, creating a multimedia archive that will preserve the evolution of the industry in the words of its founders. The archive will offer scholars and the public the opportunity to better understand the personalities, technologies, and social forces that have driven interactive media to become one of the largest entertainment businesses of all time.

The Lemelson Center became interested in the video game industry while working to acquire the basement laboratory of the late Ralph Baer, considered the father of the video game industry. The Baer family and the Smithsonian wanted to expand on the importance of video games in today’s society so they tapped Weaver, someone with his own remarkable career in the industry and a close friend of Baer, to take the helm as external director, working side-by-side with Arthur Daemmrich, director of the Lemelson Center. This partnership has resulted in the creation of the Video Game Pioneers Archive, a long-term, massive undertaking—and a first for the Smithsonian—made even more unique by the fact that, according to Weaver, “no other industry in the history of technology has ever created anything like this. This archive will be a comprehensive recording of the creation of an industry as told by its founders.”

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation

Weaver envisions the archive will have both wide appeal and the opportunity to spark further technological advances. “Through physical exhibits and virtual access, the Video Game Pioneers Archive has the potential to touch hundreds of millions of people around the world and teach them about the relationships between disruptive technologies, their application across disciplines, and the resulting societal influence,” said Weaver. “This is exactly the sort of thing we are seeing happen with the outgrowth of the video game industry into areas as disparate as vehicular training and medicine.”

When asked to name his favorite aspect of working on the archive, Weaver noted that both the current work as well as its future ramifications were important to him. “Working to design and create the archive is a remarkable opportunity not just to participate in, but to influence the direction of the large-scale effort long into the future,” he said. Weaver hopes the archive will help scholars obtain insights into the development of the video game industry, as well as make a number of additional discoveries, which he hopes can be “applied across every industry to better understand the nature of those who possess the capacity to innovate and invent.”

Reflecting on his time at Wesleyan, weaver believes his liberal arts education prepared him for this project by providing him with experience in working across educational disciplines. “The ability to look past the immediate is one of the reasons I have been able to visualize and help create many influential technologies and products,” he noted, adding that this project paves the way for similar archival projects in the future. “Given its unique structure and materials, such as computer code, graphic art, and other valuable artifacts supplementing the oral histories, we have the opportunity to provide a blueprint for how a developing technical industry can best be preserved for future study.”

Weaver, a video game pioneer himself, founded Bethesda Softworks in 1986. Among other advances, he was one of the first programmers to incorporate physics into sports games and his company was tapped by Electronic Arts to write the first John Madden Football.

He is a visiting professor in the College of Integrative Sciences at Wesleyan and a distinguished scholar and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This spring he will teach CIS 250 Computational Media: Video Game Design and Development, a cross-disciplinary course.

From The Fukushima Project, by Eiko Otake and William Johnston: Hattachi Benten 7 August 2016 No. 0457; Photo by William Johnston.

A Body in Fukushima, the collaborative work of Wesleyan artist-in-residence Eiko Otake P’07, ’10 and Professor of History and East Asian Studies William Johnston, will be on view at the Cathedral of St, John the Divine in Upper Manhattan as part of a larger exhibition The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies from Oct. 6 through March 12. Otake, who serves as an artist-in-residence at the Cathedral and a co-curator with Hannah Eisner ’07 for this project, will offer a short performance for the opening reception, which is open to the public. The exhibition includes works by many notable artists such as Kiki Smith, Kara Walker and Meredith Bergmann ’76.

The project offers a response to and a wider revisiting of the 1984 exhibit of sculptor Edwina Sandys’s Christa, a conceptualizing of the crucified Christ in female form, which sparked considerable outrage at the time. In a statement introducing this re-exhibition of the sculpture, now alongside works of 21 contemporary artists, the project directors note: “Christa’s essential statement …remains vital to our world today: people are hungry to see themselves and each other fully represented in society, especially in its most powerful and iconic institutions.

Otake and Johnston’s collaboration, A Body in Fukushima, explores environmental disaster, human failure, and loss through Johnston’s photographs of Otake’s presence in Fukushima, the site of the 2011 earthquake, tsumanmi and nuclear meltdowns. The large area of Fukushima remains uninhabitable to this day. Prior to this artistic collaboration with their three visits to Fukushima in 2014 and this summer, the two have co-taught courses on the atomic bombings and mountaintop removal mining.

In artists’ statements the two note the importance of a physical presence and bearing witness. Otake says, “By placing my body in these places, I thought of the generations of people who used to live there. Now desolate, only time and wind continue to move.”

Johnston, also, speaks to the historic context of the place: “By witnessing events and places, we actually change them and ourselves in ways that may not always be apparent but are important. Through photographing Eiko in these places in Fukushima, we are witnessing not only her and the places themselves, but the people whose lives crossed with those places.”

From The Fukushima Project, by Eiko Otake and William Johnston: Minami Soma, Shiogama Shrine, 3 August 2016 No. 426; Photo by William Johnston

From The Fukushima Project, by Eiko Otake and William Johnston: Tomioka 5 August 2016 No. 0215; Photo by William Johnston