Arts & Culture

Paul DonnellyPaul Donnelly, AIA, PE, the Rebecca and John Voyles Chair in Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, has received the Distinguished Professor Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Donnelly is one of only five professors nationally to receive the honor, which recognizes sustained creative achievement in architectural education.

Courtesy photoOlaf KuhlkeCultural geographer Olaf Kuhlke will speak on competing representations of nationhood in post-Wall Germany March 8 for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Kuhlke, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, investigates the construction of nationalism and its expression in public spaces. His recent study Representing German Identity in the New Berlin Republic (2004) examines how various social and cultural movements have utilized the human body and metaphors of nature to represent German national identity.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Ph.D., one of the country’s pre-eminent scholars in African-American history, will serve as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Washington University Feb. 28-March 1. During his visit, he will give two public talks. Kelley, who is professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), is a leading scholar of the modern civil rights movement, jazz studies and African-American music and culture.

Feb. 23 marks the world premiere of “civil disobedience” by Carter Lewis, playwright-in-residence. The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences commissioned the drama.

David KilperJohn HoalJohn Hoal, Ph.D., associate professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, will speak about his recent work in New Orleans at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 5, as part of the spring Architecture Lecture Series. Last fall Hoal’s firm, H3 Studio Inc., was one of five selected to lead the Unified New Orleans Plan, which will coordinate rebuilding in the city’s 13 planning districts.

DanceBrazilFor almost 30 years DanceBrazil has combined modern dance with contemporary and traditional Afro-Brazilians forms such as samba and the martial arts-inspired capoeira. Now the internationally acclaimed troupe will bring its magnetic, gravity-defying mix of strength and power, intricacy and elusiveness, to Washington University’s Edison Theatre.

With so much attention given to transportation, many people are surprised to learn that buildings are the single largest contributor to global warming. Yet in the United States, buildings are responsible for almost half (48%) of all greenhouse gas emissions. On Feb. 20 the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will host The 2010 Imperative: A Global Emergency Teach-In, a live web-cast exploring the relationship between ecology and design.

The experimental Los Angeles troupe led by artistic director and Academy Award-winner Tim Robbins will present a new stage adaptation of Orwell’s dystopic classic Feb. 16-17.

Courtesy photoJo LabanyiJo Labanyi, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, will speak on “Facts and Fictions: Knowledge, Delinquency and Madness in Late 19-Century Spain” Feb. 27 as part of the Center for the Humanities’s 2007 Faculty Fellows’ Lecture and Workshop Series. The following day Labanyi will lead a workshop on the rigid ordering of gender in 19th-century Spain.

The Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present a concert of music drawn from theatrical works at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25, in the university’s Graham Chapel. Dan Presgrave, instrumental music coordinator in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciecnces, will conduct the concert, which highlights Aaron Copland’s music for the ballet Rodeo. Also on the program are the “Masquerade Suite” of Aram Khachaturian and Frederick Delius’s “The Walk to the Paradise Garden.”