Author: Gerry Everding

Andrew Flachs, a sociocultural anthropology graduate student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded the Political Ecology Society Eric Wolf Prize for the best article-length paper based in substantive field research that makes an innovative contribution to political ecology.

The way our brains are wired may reveal a lot about us, according to new research co-authored by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis. For example, people with “positive” behavioral traits, such as sharp memories, many years of education and robust physical endurance, have stronger neural connections between certain brain regions than people with “negative” traits, such as smoking, aggressive behavior and a family history of alcohol abuse.

The Experimental Psychology Division (Division 3) of the American Psychological Association (APA) has awarded its 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award to Larry L. Jacoby, PhD, an internationally recognized scholar of human memory and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

If Republican senators from tobacco-growing southern states believe in social responsibility, they would fully explore the TransPacific (TPP) trade agreement’s potential impact on countries around the world, including provisions that influence the ability of American tobacco corporations to flood the globe with cheap, cancer-causing cigarettes, suggests the author of a book on the history, social costs and global politics of the tobacco industry.

While party politics have put House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the hot seat in recent months, his hasty resignation from Congress this morning was unexpected, suggests Steven S. Smith, PhD, a nationally recognized expert on congressional politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

While Pope Francis’ whirlwind tour of the United States might seem like a politicized poke-in-the-eye to some conservative American Catholics, his itinerary and social justice talking points closely mirror core Catholic beliefs detailed in church scripture since Matthew wrote his gospel, suggests a historian of Christianity at Washington University in St. Louis.

Political polarization — when public opinion goes to two extremes, without moderates or a real middle ground — is the focus of a lecture series that kicks off Monday, Sept. 28, with a talk by Steven S. Smith, PhD, director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Social problems linked to America’s growing disparities in income and wealth will be a major focus of the re-launched Department of Sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, including its first co-sponsored public lecture of the fall semester. ​

Issues at the crossroads of religion, medicine and law will be the focus as the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics opens its fall lecture series Thursday, Sept. 10, with a talk on “Obamacare and American Values.”

Ashley Wilson, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award to continue her research on long-term conjugal cohabitation relationships that are a common alternative to formal marriage among poor residents of the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya.