Author: Liam Otten

When teenage Dungeon Master Tilly Evans dies in a car wreck, her sister must commence a mythic quest of her own. So begins “She Kills Monsters,” a bittersweet coming-of-age story filled with demon queens, secret tomes and ragtag adventurers battling for lost souls.

Three graduate students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have won national honors from the International Sculpture Center, publishers of Sculpture magazine.

In the wake of the Great Recession, U.S. undergraduate degrees conferred in English language or literature fell roughly a quarter. Yet over the last three years, WashU’s English major has grown by about 30% — reflecting changes to how the department recruits, supports and communicates with undergraduate students.

Can you ever escape your past? Tennessee Williams spent a lifetime trying. His years in New York, New Orleans and Key West are the stuff of literary legend. But it was St. Louis where Williams lived longest, and St. Louis that shaped him as an artist and a person. So argues Henry I. Schvey in “Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams.”

Weicong Huang and John Whitaker, both from the Master of Landscape Architecture program in the Sam Fox School, have won national honors from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Dorothy, a publishing project — the independent book publisher co-founded by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker — has entered into a sales and distribution agreement with the New York Review of Books that will amplify its book promotion and marketing efforts. Dutton, associate professor of English, and Riker, senior lecturer in English, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University […]

Internationally renowned painter Meleko Mokgosi, who uses the scale and tropes of cinema and history painting to explore questions of class, ethnicity and gender roles, will serve as the 2021-22 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow.

“Women of color, Black and Asian women in particular, have rarely been treated with dignity or nuance in the Bond series,” writes film scholar Colin Burnett. Whether that changes, with the Oct. 8 release of “No Time to Die,” the 25th Bond installment from Eon Productions, remains to be seen. But the films’ poor collective record belies how “writers in other official Bond media, especially comics and novels, have been tipping the gender and racial imbalance for some time.”

Abram Van Engen, professor of English in Arts & Sciences, has co-edited a new collection of essays about religious feeling in early American history and literature. 

In “Kent Styles,” junior Zachary Stern explores questions of family, trust and the ghosts we can’t escape. This weekend, the play will receive its world-premiere staged reading as part of WashU’s annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival.