In the News: Spring 2022
With our growing community of changemakers, scholars, and innovators, Wesleyan and our alumni are often in the news. Here is just a sampling of highlights from the past year:
JAYLEN BERRY ’18 discusses his passion to support people of color and become a catalyst for mobility in his community. He talks about his work with Wesleyan’s Patricelli Center and founding the Jaylen D. Berry Scholarship fund with the goal of supporting young men and women from Connecticut who plan to use their education to create positive change in the world. Metro Hartford, JANUARY 24, 2022
MICHAEL MITTELMAN ’97 crafts and donates homemade wooden bowls to raise money for families with food insecurity. ABC News with David Muir, JANUARY 25, 2022
WESLEYAN’s CARCERAL CONNECTICUT PROJECT will develop new curricula, archival research, and public exhibitions, films, and conferences that explore slavery, race, and industrialization in New England. The project is supported by a $16 million Mellon Foundation grant. Forbes, JANUARY 28, 2022
JENNIFER RAYNOR, assistant professor of economics, discusses the changing legalities of wolf conservation. National Geographic, FEBRUARY 15, 2022
AMY BLOOM, Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, shares the story of her marriage, her husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and his decision to end his life in her new memoir titled In Love. The New York Times, FEBRUARY 27, 2022
JAIME DeLANGHE ’08, senior principal of product management at Slack, explains how she turned her liberal arts degree into a lucrative product management career. “I have always been fascinated by how language works (and doesn’t work) to communicate, translate meaning, and develop new ideas. Building a good search product is rooted in resolving all of the same linguistic and semiotic challenges—just at a much larger scale.” Built In, MARCH 8, 2022
KATJA KOLCIO, associate professor of dance and director of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, speaks about the origins of Ukrainian nationalism and how Ukrainian national identity is changing. The Conversation weekly podcast, MARCH 17, 2022
LIVIA COX ’23 is a recipient of the 2022 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. By visiting hospitals, pain clinics, drug consumption rooms, and treatment centers; as well as learning from doulas, plant experts, and traditional healing practices, Cox hopes to better understand how pain is managed, fought, accepted, celebrated, and ignored. The Middletown Press, APRIL 6, 2022
EIKO OTAKE, artist-in-residence, and WILLIAM JOHNSTON, John E. Andrus Professor of History, created a new Bodies in Fukushima film using 459 of Johnston’s photographs. The New York Times, APRIL 6, 2022
MAAZA MENGISTE, professor of English, and JENNIFER MITTELSTADT ’92,
named 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship winners. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, APRIL 7, 2022
