Governing Board

Joseph Bruno is a Professor of Chemistry at Wesleyan.  He is a graduate of Augustana College, Rock Island, Il, where he was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa.  He completed his graduate work at Northwestern University, earning a PhD in Chemistry in 1983, completed a thesis parts appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, then performed postdoctoral research at Indiana University.  In 1984 Bruno joined the Chemistry Department at Wesleyan University as an Assistant Professor.  He served as the Chairman of the Chemistry Department, was later named Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, then served as Vice President and Provost at Wesleyan.  Bruno’s research is in the area of organometallic chemistry, and he and his students synthesize and utilize transition metal compounds with catalytic applications.  He has received numerous grants for research, for pedagogical development, and in support of university programs in the sciences, and he is the author of over sixty papers and patents.  As Dean and as Provost, he recognized the value of collaborative approaches to educating students about science, and he supported faculty members who pursued collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches to that aim.  He is interested in sustainable building practices and building maintenance, and is accredited as a LEED Green Associate by the Green Building Certification Institute.

Frederick Cohan studies the evolutionary genetics, ecology, and systematics of bacteria.  His principal interests are in the origins of ecological diversity in bacteria and in developing methods for detecting and characterizing newly divergent bacterial lineages.  He is developing and testing a diversity of models for the tempo and dynamics of species formation in the bacterial world.  He teaches courses at all levels from General Education to Graduate courses, and he has recently developed a course on Global Change and Infectious Disease for the Environmental Studies programs.  He was trained in evolutionary genetics, earning his B.S. at Stanford in 1975 and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1982.  He has published over 50 articles in evolutionary genetics and systematics.  He is a Professor of Biology at Wesleyan University, where he has been on the faculty for 24 years.

Marc Allen Eisner is the Henry Merritt Wriston Chair of Public Policy and Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, where he teaches courses on political economy and public policy, including environmental policy and regulation and governance.  Eisner has written several books, including Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics (1991), Regulatory Politics in Transition (1993, 2000), The State in the American Political Economy (1995), Contemporary Regulatory Policy (2000, 2006), From Warfare State to Welfare State (2000), Governing the Environment (2007), and most recently, The Institutional Evolution of Market and State (2010).  Eisner's published research on environmental regulation has focused on issues ranging from corporate environmental practices to co-regulation. His most recent environmental scholarship explores the regulatory challenges associated with emerging technologies, most notably nanotechnology, and appears in a Resources for the Future volume entitled Governing Uncertainty (2010).

Lori Gruen, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University. Gruen's work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and ethical practice, with a particular focus on ethical issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, non-human animals and the environment.  She is one of the early pioneers of ecological feminist philosophy.  She has published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics and epistemology, environmental justice, and human relations to non-human animals.  Gruen co-edited Reflecting on Nature (Oxford, 1994) which is currently being revised for a second edition.  She is completing a book Ethics and Animals (Cambridge, forthcoming) and another on captive chimpanzees.  http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu/  Gruen is co-editor of Hypatia:  A journal of feminist philosophy and sits on the editorial boards two other journals -- Ethics and the Environment and Ethics, Place, and Environment.  She also directs Wesleyan's Ethics in Society Project.  http://www.wesleyan.edu/ethics/teaching/

Katja Kolcio, PhD. is Associate Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. Her research is in social somatic theory, investigating the role of physical engagement and creativity in practices of knowledge production, and about modern dance as a political art form. Katja's choreography engages the community and environment within which it occurs.  Her interests also include integrating traditional arts into contemporary performance.

Publications:
Movable Pillars Creating a Foundation for Dance Studies in the Academy, 1956-1978 (2010, Wesleyan University Press),
Branching Out: Oral Histories of the Founding of Six National Dance Organizations (2000, American Dance Guild, nominated for the De La Torre Bueno Prize),
Faking It: The Necessary Blind Spots of Understanding (2009, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies), A Somatic Engagement of Technology (2005, International Journal for Performance Art and Digital Media),
and book reviews in the Dance Research Journal and the New England Theater Journal.

Choreography:
Katja has received choreographic fellowships from the New York State Council of the Arts and Meet the Composer, and has been commissioned to create original choreography/repertory by Wittenberg College, Duke University, Ohio State University (Slavic Studies Program), Antioch College, New York University (Department of Music), and Yara Arts Group (NYC). Choreography has been presented at Judson Church, New York University Black Box Theater, St. Marks Church, The Ukrainian Museum of New York, The Bridge for Dance, La Mama Experimental Theatre, the Ukrainian Institute of America, various community gardens throughout NYC, the Honchar Museum (Kyiv, Ukraine), Kyiv Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and in colleges around the United States.

Katja received her PhD in Somatics/Cultural Studies and her MA in Dance from Ohio State University and her MA in Political Science from University of Georgia.

Elizabeth Milroy (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1986) teaches the history of art and material culture in North America. She is also a Visiting Scholar in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the history of cultural institutions and cultural landscapes in the United States, she has organized exhibitions and has published numerous articles and catalogue essays. Recent publications include  "'For the like Uses, as the Moore-Fields': The Politics of Penn's Squares," in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (2006) and  "A Crowning Feature: The Centennial Exhibition and Philadelphia's Horticultural Hall" in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (2006). Her essay, "Pro Bono Publico: Ecology, History and the Creation of Philadelphia's Fairmount Park System" is forthcoming in Nature's Entrepot: Philadelphia's Urban Sphere and its Environmental Thresholds, edited by Michael Chiarrappa and Brian Black (University of Pittsburgh Press; for 2010). She is currently completing a major history of Philadelphia's cultural landscapes titled The Green Country Town: William Penn's Legacy and the Birth of Philadelphia's Public Parks, 1682-1882.

Patton came to Wesleyan in 1976 as an assistant professor in earth & environmental sciences.  His research interests are in the general field of geomorphology Locally, his research has focused on the hydrology and geomorphology of the Connecticut and Housatonic estuaries and the geologic development of the small coastal coves on the Connecticut shoreline.  Another line of research is the impact of catastrophic floods on river systems and the geologic history of river systems in semiarid climates.  In addition to publications in scientific journals he is the co-author of, A Moveable Shore: The Fate of the Connecticut Coast (1991), with James Kent, an account of the geologic history and coastal processes active on the shoreline written for the general public.

Sonia Sultan is Professor and Chair of Biology at Wesleyan and an internationally known evolutionary ecologist.  Her research focuses on developmental plasticity of individual plants in response to environmental variation. Comparative experiments in Sultan’s lab investigate how  patterns of environmental response vary among closely related plant species and contribute to differences in ecological breadth, invasiveness and evolutionary potential; her publications include both empirical and theoretical studies of these questions.  At Wesleyan, Sultan teaches courses from introductory biology to advanced seminars, including a new course on Evolution in Human-Altered Environments.  Prior to joining the Wesleyan faculty, Sultan spent three years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California’s Center for Population Biology. She holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton and a doctorate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard. Sultan was recently awarded a year’s fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.