Who's Who

WILLIAM ARSENIO is a professor of psychology and director of clinical research training at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University. He and his students are currently interested in how children and adults learn to regulate and control their mood states using empirically supported techniques from positive psychology (e.g., meditation, directed writing, and lifestyle modifications).

David Beveridge is University Professor of Natural Science and Mathematics at Wesleyan. His professional interests include theoretical physical chemistry and molecular biophysical, structural biology and bioinfomatics, quantum mechanics, statistical thermodynamics, molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo computer simulation.  In addition, he has a strong interest in the history of ideas, the visual arts, and modernism.

BRIAN DAGNALL, executive chef at Wesleyan, trained at Johnson and Wales University and the Culinary Institute of America. After studying under master chef Paul Amaral as a teenager, Dagnall traveled the United States, working as executive chef at numerous restaurants. Upon returning to New England, he joined Bon Appetit Management Company and has served as executive chef at four universities in the northeast. He shares Bon Appetit’s commitment to socially responsible practices and support of local farmers and vendors.

Andrew DeRocco was dean of the faculty at Trinity College, president of Denison University, and Connecticut's commissioner of higher education.  Previously the Institute Professor of Molecular Physics at the University of Maryland, he earned graduate degrees from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.  A long-standing interest in the mystery genre was sparked b a childhood encounter with the relentless logic of Sherlock Holmes.

Rhea Padis Higgins is an adjunct professor in the art history department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford.  She taught at Wesleyan in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program from 1986-2002.  Her area of expertise is 19th century European painting, with an emphasis on post-Impressonist artists.

John Finn is a professor of government at Wesleyan.  He received his BA in political science from Nasson College, a JD from Georgetown University, a PhD in political science from Princeton University, and a degree in culinary arts from the French Culinary Institute.  He has taught at Wesleyan since 1986, where his research focuses on constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, the legal regulation of terrorism and political violence, and cuisine and popular culture.

Richard Kagan is a professor emeritus of history at Hamiline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.  He has a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialization in Asia.  He has written extensively on China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.  He was recently appointed visiting professor in the history department at Wesleyan.  He has published travel writings and taken many students abroad, where they had to write travel journals.  He has traveled extensively in America, East Asia, and Europe.

Clare Rogan is curator of the Davison Art Center and an adjunct assistant professor in the art history program at Wesleyan.  She received her BA from Princeton University and her PhD from Brown University.  She teaches courses on the history of prints, history of photographs and museum studies.  Her publications include articles on early lithography and German art of the early 20th century.

JEANINE BASINGER is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan. She is the founder of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives and the originator of the film studies department. She has authored more than 11 books including her newest, I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies, published in January 2013 by Knopf. A two-time recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching, she also has been named a “women of impact 2012: academics” by Variety for her work developing some of the industry’s most powerful talent. She is a trustee of the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review and has recently been named to the Film and Theatre Committee of the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art. A nationally recognized expert on film, she is regularly interviewed by the media.

STEVE COLLINS is an assistant professor of film studies at Wesleyan as well as a writer and director specializing in his own brand of melancholy comedy. He has made several award-winning shorts that have played at the Tribeca, Seattle, SXSW, Clermont-Ferrand, New York Short Film Expo, and Boston Independent film festivals. His film Gretchen won the $50,000 Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival and can be seen on the Sundance Channel. He recently finished his second feature, a love-story about adult children called You Hurt My Feelings.

Scott Higgins is an associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan.  He has published two books, Harnessing the Rainbow: Technicolor Aesthetics in the 1930's and Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, and is working on a third about film serials from the 1930s and 1940s.  His areas of specialization include aesthetics, silen and classical cinema, narrative theory, genre, and technology.  In 2011, he received Wesleyan's Binswnger Prize for Excellence in Teaching.  He hosts a blog at shiggins.blogs.wesleyan.edu/.

Marc Longenecker is a visiting instructor of film studies and the programming and technical manager for film studies at Wesleyan.  He is an advisor to the Wesleyan Film Series student board and a frequent guest speaker for the Wesleyan Summer Film Series.