Ron Roman MALS ’97 reached out to us about his upcoming book Of Ashes and Dust, an “apocalyptic story of anarchy and chaos upending America,” as described in Publishers Weekly. He wrote, “Miss my ol’ days at Wesleyan! Wish I could go back into a time machine!” Yup, we know the feeling!
Class Notes Editor
classnotes@wesleyan.edu
David Michael Renison, MALS ’99 passed away on Feb. 8, 2020. An obituary will be posted when it becomes available.
Gerard J. Putz, MALS ’69 passed away on Dec. 3, 2019. An obituary will be posted when it becomes available.
When It’s Leaving Time by Ang Pompano CAS’95 has been nominated for a Best First Novel Agatha Award. The book was launched last October at the Wesleyan R.J. Julia Bookstore. Ang has been writing mystery for more than 20 years.
Tucker Griffith MALS ’10 joined Lathrop Gage in Boston as a partner in the Intellectual Property Transaction group. He has 20 years’ experience in intellectual property law, previously practicing with a Connecticut-based boutique intellectual property firm.
Jorge Arévalo Mateus PhD’13 and Bill Carbone MA’07 are executive directors at The Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archives and TeachRock/Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, respectively, located in New York City. The two organizations announced a partnership. The Association For Cultural Equity in conjunction with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is providing content to TeachRock to be utilized in creating lesson plans and other teaching resources. The cultural materials collected by Alan Lomax, one of the most celebrated folklore collectors and musicologists in America’s history, provide an engaging and powerfully personal basis for looking at history through the music that past generations took joy and comfort in, stretching back to the Colonial period and beyond. The two become friends as graduate students in Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology program.
Wendy Wickwire PhD’83, professor emerita in the department of history at the University of Victoria in Canada, has published a new book called At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. The book is about James Teit, an ethnographer and Indian rights activist. Her book received praises and accolades, with one of the notable reviewers, author Julie Cruikshank saying, “Wendy Wickwire’s groundbreaking historical investigation places James Teit as a key figure in early North American anthropology, but also as central to historical Indigenous rights activism in British Columbia.”
Royal Hartigan PhD’86 produced We Are One–blood drum spirit. The documentary explores the musical ties between jazz and its West African roots by following the American jazz group, blood drum spirit, to Ghana, featuring Abraham Adzenyah MA ’79, David Bindman ’85, MA ’87, and Wes Brown ’74. It won Best Documentary Feature at the Jukebox International Film Festival and Best Sound/Music Score at the Moscow Indie Film Festival.
Katie Vandrilla MALS’18 published a children’s book, Thumper’s Hospital Adventure, which follows the eponymous toy bunny on an adventure to find his best friend Katie after she is diagnosed with cancer. The real life Katie is a cancer survivor and all proceeds from the book will go to Make-A-Wish. Katie is a high school chemistry teacher and freelance journalist.
Managing Editor Cynthia Rockwell
crockwell@wesleyan.edu | 860/685-3705
In June, Carl McDaniel MA’66, PhD’73 will be the featured speaker during Natural History Week on Star Island in New Hampshire. Carl is an experimental scientist and environmental educator.
Royal Hartigan PhD’86, a professor at the UMass-Dartmouth, completed a J. William Fulbright artist/scholar residency at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. He toured with his Blood Drum Spirit ensemble and completed a film, We Are One, whose theme is connections among global, African, and American cultures through music. The film features Abraham Kobena Adzenyah MA’79, retired professor, and his ensemble features fellow Wesleyan grads, saxophonist David Bindman ’85, MA ’87, and bassist Wes Brown ’74.
Anthony Maulucci MA’89 taught two writing workshops at the San Miguel Writers Conference in February in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The featured speakers for the 2018 conference included novelist Wally Lamb and poet Rita Dove. Speakers in years past have included Billy Collins, Gail Sheehy, and Naomi Klein.
Associate Editor Cynthia Rockwell
crockwell@wesleyan.edu | 860/685-3705
Jorge Arévalo Mateus, PhD ’13, (ethnomusicology) is executive director of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), advancin the value of cultural equity as a humanist, social and moral principle. Beyond promoting the work of folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, in partnership with the American Folklife Center (Library of Congress), his engagement as cultural advocate involves developing new approaches to field research and documentation of cultural traditions, applying new technologies and methods to recuperate, repatriate, and disseminate embodied cultural knowledge; provide access to the treasures of people and culture; and preserve material resources.
David Novak MA ’99, assistant professor of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has released his work, Japanoise, after more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States. In his book, David traces the “cultural feedback” that generates and sustains Noise, an underground music genre made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects that first emerged in the 1980s.
Bill Carbone MA ’07 writes, “I will cap off a busy summer of music festival performances with a trip to Europe to perform at the 24th annual Zappanale music festival in Bad Doberan, Germany. The festival invited my trio, The Z3, who perform the music of Frank Zappa rearranged for a trio of Hammond organ, guitar, and drums, to headline the second day of the festival and host the jam session on the third day. The festival also features more than a dozen alumni of the bands Zappa led between 1967 and 1992.
