Arts & Culture

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, known for her groundbreaking, richly layered depictions of queer life and family relationships, will receive the 2022 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis.

Acclaimed author, cartoonist, philosopher, screenwriter and essayist Charles Johnson, who won the 1990 National Book Award for his novel “Middle Passage,” will present the keynote address for the 2022 Faculty Book Celebration at Washington University in St. Louis.

Alumna Merissa Nathan Gerson has written a heartfelt roadmap to help us navigate the tumultuous, uneven, often unacknowledged terrain of death and loss.

Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman will join new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound to preview David T. Little’s opera-in-progress “What Belongs To You,” based on the novel by WashU alumnus Garth Greenwell.

Caroline Kita, associate professor of German and of comparative literature, and Samuel Shearer, assistant professor of African and African American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, have won research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In a new book, Wolfram Schmidgen, professor of English, explains how the excitement and anxiety about a disordered world affected literary invention in 18th-century England. “Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730” combines intellectual history with close analysis of the literary inventions of Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe.

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.