Roth on Wesleyan

The novel has been at the core of lifelong learning for generations of students, and so I am delighted that this year’s Shasha Seminar will focus on the genre. Amy Bloom, who directs the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, is leading the event, which will take place on campus April 5-6. “The Novel is not only […]

Did you know that Wesleyan has a marvelous photography collection to complement its first-rate collection of prints? From time to time I teach a seminar on Photography and Philosophy, and my students and I have the delightful opportunity to work with pictures in the Davison Art Center. You still have a chance to get a […]

Teaching a Wesleyan course online presents me with the opportunity to interact with students from scores of different countries. I am teaching The Modern and the Postmodern in Middletown, and the course is also available on the Coursera platform. Here in what students often call the “campus bubble” our political issues often seem abstract or […]

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing one of the many fine student productions presented by the Theater Department at the Patricelli ’92 Theater. Claire Whitehouse ’14 adapted Matilde Mellibovsky’s Circle of Love Over Death and created A La Ronda, a play that focuses on the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Claire spent months in Argentina […]

Great news from swimming and diving coach Peter Solomon: Angela Slevin ’15 has qualified and is being invited to compete in this year’s Div. III NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships being held March 19th – 22nd in Indianapolis, IN.  Angela will be competing in the 1,650-yard (mile) Freestyle, 500-yard Freestyle, and the 200-yard Freestyle events during […]

Sigmund Freud asked to offer a guest blog. We posted it yesterday on The HuffingtonPost. In December I enjoyed announcing to the guards at The Jewish Museum that my name was Sigmund Freud, and that I was coming for the Wish You Were Here event. I died in 1939 (and it was enough already), but […]

This review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History  appeared in the Washington Post this morning. I know there are many people at Wesleyan searching for ways to make a difference in the face of the environmental disasters of climate change. Kolbert is a thoughtful, engaged and determined guide.   Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Field […]

    Looking out my window at snowy Andrus field, or walking Mathilde gingerly on the sidewalks around campus, it sometimes seems like we are in for an endless winter. The dominant subject for discussion on the faculty listserve is snow removal, and finding a couple of tons of salt this week was a cause […]

Sunday’s Nicholas Kristof’s column (NYT online) was entitled “Professors, We need You!”  He begins this way, “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” and then he quotes former Princeton prof Anne-Marie Slaughter: “All the disciplines […]

I’m very late on this, but still I wanted to give a shout out to Guy Geyer Marcus ’13, who recently won the Apker Prize, which Prof. Brian Stewart tells me “is the highest award for undergraduate research in physics.”  Wade Hsu ’10 won the prize in 2010, while working closely with Prof. Francis Starr.  […]