Did You Ever Write a Paper About Wesleyan? Send It to Us!

This past finals week (or in any semester prior tbh), did you write a paper about Wesleyan? I frequently stumble down the WesScholar rabbit hole at inopportune times and procrastinate by reading about the history of coeducation at Wesleyan or University partnerships in urban renewal in Middletown. I may be desperately alone in this, but I’d like to think that I’m not.

I was thinking it would be cool to have a more extensive aggregation of student scholarship about Wesleyan and so I was like “Let me find all of the WesScholar theses about Wesleyan and then ask the aether.”

Here are all of the honors theses on WesScholar that I was able to find:

• “Institution, Culture, and Ideology: The Self-segregation of Chinese International Students at Wesleyan University” – Huiao Cui ’13, SOC
• “At the Intersection of Work and School: Internships and the Liberal Arts” – Lauren Valentino ’10, SOC
• “170,000 Seats: How Socioeconomic Inequality Works to Restrict Access to Premier Colleges and Universities” – Barry Finder ’09, SOC
• “Middle-Class Middletown? Wesleyan University and the Reinvention of Urban Space” – Stephanie Campbell O’Brien ’08, SOC
• “Beyond Access: Cultural Capital’s Increasing Significance in Selective College Admissions” – Wesleying founder Holly Wood ’08, SOC
• “Long Lane Farm: How Student Farmers Reveal the Increasing Conflicts Within Liberal Arts” – Katherine Kellar Gilpin ’15, SOC
• “Women in Science: Interest, Culture, and Covert Discrimination” – Daphna Spivack ’14, SOC
• “Keeping It Casual: A Sexual Ethics for College Campus Hook Up Culture” – Camila Tili Recalde ’16, AMST
• “The Material Culture and Culture of Medicine in 19th Century Middletown, Connecticut” – Amy Cao ’15, ANTH
• “Leaving the Nest: Life at the Neoliberal University” – Sophie Massey ’15, ANTH
• “How to Get to Long Lane School: An Ethnography of a Place” – Beth Davies ’09, ANTH
• “Achieving ‘Gender Party’ at Wesleyan University: Admitting Women, Maintaining Patriarchy” – Daniel Trentin Grassian ’09, ANTH, FGSS
• “Wesleyan University’s World Instrument Collection: A Biographical Analysis” – Alice Beth McKenney ’08, MUSIC, ANTH
• “When Workers Organized at Wesleyan University” – Alexandra Ricks ’16, HIST
• “Yours for the New Social Order: Student Radicals at Wesleyan University, 1929-1941” – Nicholas Davenport ’10, HIST
• “Attitudes Toward Blacks and Immigrants at Wesleyan University, 1831-1920” – Jeffrey Liss ’86, HIST
• “The ‘Quails’: The History of Wesleyan University’s First Period of Coeducation, 1872-1912” – Louise Wilby Knight ’72, HIST
• “Mayors, Slums, and Universities: Urban Renewal, Civic Leadership, and Community Response in Two Connecticut Cities” – Earl Lin ’15, HIST and AMST

[Updated, Monday 5/22/17 at 1:41PM]

Here’s another honor’s thesis:

• “An Adversarial Place: The 1989-1990 Academic Year at Wesleyan University” – Caroline Fox ’12, ENGL

[Updated, Tuesday 5/23/17 at 10:40AM]

Jennifer Hadley from Special Collections emailed us and let us know about a resource on WesScholar that has links to “student papers written on historical Middletown-area topics” going all the way back to 1976. Here are some of the Wesleyan-related papers:

• From April 2012: “Title IX and College Athletics: A Case Study of
  Wesleyan University and Equality” – Julie Platt ’12
• From December 2005: “Two Years of Protest: Divestment at Wesleyan University, 1988-1990” – Quinn Hechtkopf ’06
• From May 1987: “The Creation of a Pluralistic Religious Orientation:
  The Integration of Jews and Judaism at Wesleyan University” – Stuart Svonkin ’89
• From December 1986: “A Flourishing College Will…Build Up a Town:
  The Twelve Local Trustees of Wesleyan University, 1830 – 1840″ – Betsy Potts ’89
• From 1980: [Wesleyan History] – Joel Tillinghast ’80

And, our Twitter friend @jarsilver reminded us about the 1991 thesis about the history of the CSS:

• “A History of the College of Social Studies” – Jeffrey Hayes ’91

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While all of these honors theses are pretty cool, they are all already readily accessible through the library and WesScholar. I would love to expand this aggregation of scholarship about Wesleyan to final papers and other course projects, which don’t often see any light after the semester in which they are written and graded.

If you have ever written a paper, thesis, or other academic project about Wesleyan, we want to link to it! If you’re into having your work aggregated, email staff[at]wesleying[dot]org with your paper/project as an attachment. In your email, please share the title of the work and whether or not you want it published with your name attached.

We’ll update this post periodically as submissions come in, so feel free to bookmark this post somewhere if you want I guess. Also, please share this post with anyone you know who has written some cool stuff about Wesleyan that you think other people might like to read.

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Submitted works:

• From December 2014: “Tropes of Latinx Workers in the Wesleyan University Jobs for Justice Campaign, 1999-2000” – Alexandra Ricks ’16
• From May 2017: “Hummus in Hindsight: Activism and Memory at Wesleyan” – Ariel Edelman ’20