Arts & Culture

SpectorFranklin “Buzz” Spector, professor and former chair of the Department of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has been named dean of the College and Graduate School of Art, both part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Spector also will hold the Jane Reuter Hitzeman and Herbert F. Hitzeman, Jr. Professorship of Art. The appointment, effective July 1, was announced by Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts.

W.J.T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of Art History and English at the University of Chicago, will speak on “The Future of the Image” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in the Etta Eiseman Steinberg Auditorium as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ spring lecture series. An award-winning teacher, scholar and theorist of media, art and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology—the study of images across the media.

ShaughnessyPoet Brenda Shaughnessy will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5, in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Her collection titled “Human Dark with Sugar” is one of five finalists for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

BernheimerFiction writer Kate Bernheimer will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus.

Courtesy PhotoBorn in Seoul, Korea, and educated at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, the Ahn Trio — sisters Maria, Lucia, and Angella — will return to Edison Theatre Saturday, Feb. 28, to present a piano-trio repertoire with commissioned works by some of today’s most visionary composers.

Superpowers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Take “Wonderboy,” the new collaboration by San Francisco choreographer Joe Goode and master puppeteer Basil Twist. Blessed with uncanny empathy and superhuman sensitivity, the title character is virtually paralyzed by everyday sights and sounds — the clash of bells, the glare of sunlight, a young man passing […]

Courtesy Photo”Wonderboy,” the new collaboration by San Francisco choreographer Joe Goode and master puppeteer Basil Twist, comes to St. Louis Feb. 20 and 21 as part of Edison Theatre’s OVATIONS Series.

The 2009 spring concert series presented by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences continues with an array of events that will entertain, inspire and inform music-loving audiences in the St Louis and surrounding areas.

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to “get lost” in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

The Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanites Lecture Sries, “FanZ and Enthusiasts: The Passions of Modern Reading,” will open with a program by noted cultural historian Janice Radway at noon on Tuesday, February 17 in the Women’s Building Lounge.