/ Meet The Spoke Subscribe

In celebration of the myriad contributions Wellesley College faculty members make to local, national, and global public discourse, and in order to facilitate further contributions, The Spoke will provide a new pathway to public engagement. We, the editorial board of The Spoke, are faculty members who work in various disciplines and are in various stages of our careers. We meet weekly to discuss emergent and current local, national, and global events and to decide the week’s blog content, and we curate and solicit replies to blog posts from colleagues, students, alumnae, and other members of the community. Our approach relies on the foundational principles of the Albright Institute:

• To engage with issues of global importance and current events.

• To focus on raising questions and making intellectual connections, rather than developing or offering “answers” to the topics under discussion.

• To foster interdisciplinary exchange both across the College, with colleagues and students at other institutions, and beyond the borders of academia. Our aim is to collaborate in meaningful and truly multidisciplinary ways.

• To work with students and with alumnae to further the goal of educating women to be global citizens for leadership. Involvement in The Spoke gives students the platform to explore pressing contemporary issues through a multitude of disciplinary lenses. Students experience the value and challenges of working in a team while proposing, modifying, fine-tuning, debating, editing, and, ultimately, publishing their ideas.

Meet the Albright Institute Faculty Scholars, The Spoke’s editorial board, for 2017-2018:

Julie Walsh (assistant professor, philosophy)

Specialist in early modern philosophy, with a focus on theories of human freedom and philosophical method in both rationalist and empiricist traditions, especially the systems of the women writing in the period.

Cord Whitaker (assistant professor, english)

Specialist in late medieval English literature, especially Chaucer, romance, and theological works, with a focus on the impact of medieval religious conflict and premodern rhetoric on the history of race.

Brenna Greer (assistant professor, history)

Historian of race, gender, and culture in the 20th-century U.S. with a focus on African American business and visual culture.

Eni Mustafaraj (assistant professor, computer science)

Data scientist who studies web-based socio-technical systems in order to convert the digital traces that users generate while interacting with these systems into meaningful insights.

Marc Tetel (professor, neuroscience)

Researcher focusing in neuroendocrinology, estrogen and progestin action, brain and behavior.

Sara Wasserman (assistant professor, neuroscience)

Researcher utilizing fruit flies and 'virtual-reality' flight simulators to investigate the neuronal mechanisms that permit the multi-sensory integration required to produce contextually appropriate behavior.

Akila Weerapana (associate professor, economics)

Specialist in macroeconomics, particularly international economics, the economics of conflict, and monetary economics.

Contact us at thespoke@wellesley.edu.