Author: Liam Otten

Penina Acayo Laker, assistant professor of communication design, discusses the Sam Fox School’s new interdisciplinary minor in creative practice for social change.

Poet, dramatist, translator and literary theorist John Dryden was a central figure in the politics and culture of Restoration England. In a new survey for Oxford University Press, WashU’s Steven Zwicker provides an authoritative overview of Dryden’s influential 40-year career.

Blues singer Kim Massie, who died Oct. 12, was a beloved figure in St. Louis — a grandmother of six who held court downtown twice each week for more than two decades. Washington University’s Paige McGinley, who wrote about Massie in her 2014 book “Staging the Blues,” remembers the singer.

Cheryl is charming and vivacious. Cheryl is selfish and unreliable. In her new comedy “Cheryl Robs a Bank,” which will debut this weekend as part of the A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival, Holly Gabelmann explores questions of identity, self-presentation, anti-heroism and who gets to tell the story.

Dorothy, the small-press publishing project led by Danielle Dutton, associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences, and Martin Riker, senior lecturer in English, has won a Golden Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

John Whitaker, a master’s candidate in landscape architecture and advanced architectural design, has won an Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Photographer Jess T. Dugan will serve as the 2020-21 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. The fellowship, which is jointly sponsored by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is designed to promote the creation and exhibition of contemporary art as well as the teaching of contemporary art principles.

“Amnesia is not the right word,” said Geoff K. Ward, “because we’ve forgotten without ever really knowing.” In “Truths and Reckonings,” the show he curated for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, Ward confronts histories of racist violence with the aim of untangling their continuing legacies.

I suspect that some people decided to delay watching Michaela Coel’s HBO/BBC One series I May Destroy You for fear that it would, well, destroy them. I did. Many of us choose to forego media that represents sexual violence.

There are lots of kindly encomiums for persons of distinction: brilliant, wonderful, generous and so on. But it is a rare person who can be described as great. Dr. Danforth was such a person. He was great, truly great.