Arts & Culture

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc with the academic conference schedule, the daily online colloquium “Music Scholarship at a Distance,” co-founded by Washington University’s Paula Harper, has emerged as an important venue for musicologists to continue sharing their work.

Looking for some good books to read while social distancing? Washington University alumni and faculty have you covered. Here are some book suggestions for every taste.

Portland, Ore.-based artist Lyndon Barrois Jr., and artist Wyndi DeSouza, who divides her time between St. Louis and Newark, N.J., have won the 2020 Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Awards.

To mark National Poetry Month, the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences is inviting readers of all backgrounds to create short poems in response to daily prompts.

Todd Decker and Kelly Daniel-Decker launched the Department of Music’s new “Musical Postcards” video series with an intimate living room performance of the Gershwin classic “Love is Here to Stay.”

Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the “Decameron,” is set on the outskirts of Florence in 1348. His protagonists have retreated to the countryside in the wake of the Black Death, which is decimating their city both mortally and socially. The book offers important lessons as we confront the global threat of Coronavirus.

The built environment often shapes the spread of disease. Many early cases of COVID-19, the 2019 novel coronavirus, centered on a seafood market in Wuhan City, China. Airports, hospitals and other gathering points can easily become sites of virus transmission. But as the world grapples with the COVID-19 outbreak, Hongxi Yin, associate professor in advanced building systems and architectural design at Washington University in St. Louis, is exploring whether using portable furnaces to sterilize contaminated building exhaust might help to stem the contagion.

“Midnight Special,” a new exhibition by Heather Bennett, lecturer in art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, will open March 13 at Monaco, the artists’ cooperative gallery.