Author: Liam Otten

The 2020 presidential election is over. Joe Biden has won. And yet the clarity and consensus that elections once brought, however grudgingly, now founders on the shores of post-fact partisanship, says Douglas Flowe, assistant professor of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

The most powerful aspect of the Whitney Museum’s 2018 retrospective ‘David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night’ was not hanging on a wall, but rather was vibrating through the air. In an empty room the artist’s voice consumed all who entered, its crushed granite timbre almost tactile to the ear.

In this video, artist Tim Portlock, chair of undergraduate art at the Sam Fox School, discusses his use of visual effects and 3D animation software, his new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the state of the American dream.

On Nov. 7, Joe Biden was declared the winner in Pennsylvania, making him president-elect of the United States. Yet it had been clear since Americans went to the polls Nov. 3 that Biden would win the popular vote. The days of uncertainty and drama were entirely due to the arcane and archaic mechanics of the Electoral College, says Rachel Brown, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

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.