Africa Initiative awards new round of pilot grants
The spirit of international collaboration is still strong at Washington University, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of eight teams recently received funding from the Africa Initiative for new research projects on the continent.
Q&A with Christine Sun Kim
With her spare line and sly, deadpan humor, Christine Sun Kim investigates sound as a physical and social phenomenon while also interrogating the cultural hierarchies in which sound operates. In her new mural for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, the artist and Deaf activist highlights how the weight of history and everyday experiences intertwine to affect the lives of Deaf people.
WashU’s French Connexions named French Embassy Center of Excellence
The French Connexions Cultural Center at Washington University in St. Louis has been elected to the Centers of Excellence of the Embassy of France.
Rarities of These Lands
Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic
Over the course of the first half of the century, the northern Netherlands secured independence from the Spanish crown, and the nascent republic sought to establish its might in global trade, often by way of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim powers. Central to the political and cultural identity of the Dutch […]
Porn Work
Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism
Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Part labor history, part ethnography illuminating the lives of the performers who work in the medium, “Porn Work” takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they […]
Bolivia in the Age of Gas
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country’s natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas, Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the […]
Parikh co-edits collection documenting Ferguson uprising, afterlives
Shanti A. Parikh, associate professor of anthropology and African & African American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, co-edited a collection, “@Ferguson: Still Here in the Afterlives of Black Death, Defiance and Joy,” published in social and cultural anthropology’s flagship journal, American Ethnologist.
Katabasis
By Lucía Estrada
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis, winner of the 2017 Bogotá Poetry Prize, is the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English. It takes its title from the Greek word for descent, referring to both classical knowledge quests into the underworld […]
The Black Widows of The Eternal City
The true story of Rome's most infamous poisoners
“The Black Widows of the Eternal City” offers, for the first time, a book-length study of an infamous cause celebre in seventeenth-century Rome, how it resonated then and has continued to resonate: the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows, who shared a particularly effective poison to murder their husbands. […]
Since 1948
Israeli Literature in the Making
A portrait of Israeli literature in its full transnational and multilingual complexity. Toward the end of the twentieth century, an unprecedented surge of writing altered the Israeli literary scene in profound ways. As fresh creative voices and multiple languages vied for recognition, diversity replaced consensus. Genres once accorded lower status—such as the graphic novel and […]
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