Wellesley in the News
As the leading women’s college, Wellesley’s faculty, students, and alumnae are featured in national and international media on a daily basis. Below is just a sampling of the extensive press coverage generated by Wellesley.
American Studies professor Petra Rivera-Rideau discusses Daddy Yankee's career and rise in mainstream American music. Rivera-Rideau says part of Daddy Yankee's success, among others, comes from the fact that he slows down the chorus, and that enables English speakers to sing along.
Sociologist and American Studies professor Michael Jeffries discusses #OscarsSoWhite as the nominees for the 91st Academy Awards were announced. Four years since the #OscarsSoWhite controversy—when a sea of white faces made up the only actors nominated for Academy Awards—questions about diversity remain, with just one black actor and one black actress out of 20 overall acting nominees, and not a single woman nominated for directing or cinematography. Jeffries weighed in on if progress was being made.
Mention of Spanish professor Marjorie Agosin's book about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, and comment from her about the roles that mothers played in using symbols and leveraging alliances for their cause. “In Latin America they stigmatize the poor, the missing, the students,” Agosin said. “If you establish an alliance of people from the middle class, the upper class ... you see that it happens in every aspect of society.”
Economics professor Olga Shurchkov weighs in on recent research from European scholars that found that people prefer politicians with glasses. "Because all the experiments are so well controlled and the participants had no other information, only the image, any characteristic associated with appearance, such as glasses, then becomes more much important to the decision-making process," said Shurchkov. "In the real world, people would know other information about a candidate, and so glasses may not be as important a factor as it was in a study like this."
In the midst of a debate about pulling American troops out of Syria and partially withdrawing from Afghanistan, political science professor Stacie Goddard discusses how the U.S. got there in the first place, and the history of American military's involvement in those countries and conflicts.
Professor Emerita Susan Reverby's 2010 discovery of unethical experiments on Guatemalan patients in the 1940s with syphilis is acknowledged in the wake of a U.S. federal judge ruling that the company and organizations running the experiments—Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johns Hopkins University, and the Rockefeller Foundation—must face a $1 billion lawsuit over their roles. The experiments aimed to find out if penicillin could be used to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and individuals were subjected to the medical experiments without their knowledge or consent.
Feature on art professor Alexandria Smith and her first exhibition, and approach to her painting and teaching.
Rosanna Hertz, sociology and women's and gender studies professor, discusses sperm donor siblings and the growing movement to connect genetic families.
As sperm donation becomes more common, some parents are now starting to introduce kids to their genetic relatives at an early age. In The Atlantic, Professor of sociology and women's and gender studies, Rosanna Hertz, discusses her new book Random Families, and the changing norms around donor-sibling networks.
