Humanities & Society

Women are underrepresented in the important fields of science, technology, engineering and math — minority women even more so. To help close the gender gap, Washington University will sponsor an innovate new charter school: the Hawthorn Leadership School for Girls, the first single-sex STEM charter school in St. Louis.

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in the continuing series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars held biweekly on the Danforth Campus beginning through April 14. The series begins Monday, Feb. 3, with Sean H. Williams, JD, professor at the University of Texas School of Law. His topic is “Dead Children: Tort Law and Parental Investments in Child Safety.”

Unpaid internships are the norm in many industries. The Career Center’s summer stipends help students pay their bills while working an unpaid internship. The Career Center also awards grants to students who must travel to a job interview or would like to attend a Career Center Road Show.

Falling oil and gasoline prices have prompted some in Congress to debate about increasing the federal fuel tax, which helps fund highway and bridge construction, among other projects. Increasing the tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993 and isn’t tied to inflation, to help offset revenue lost through lower prices at the pump may seem like a good idea in theory, but it’s much more difficult in practice, says tax law expert Adam Rosenzweig, JD, of Washington University in St. Louis.

The food was terrible. Kool-Aid, Manwich, Jiffy Pop, Twinkies, Spam (when the word referred to something edible). But Pat Hazell loved it all. In “The Wonder Bread Years,” Hazell — one of the original writers for “Seinfeld” — turns a fond yet pitiless eye to the brick-a-brack of American childhood. The acclaimed one-man show comes to the Edison Ovations Series Jan. 24 and 25.

Washington University boasts one of the nation’s most successful TRIO Programs, a federal initiative to support low-income and first-generation students. The program has helped Arts & Sciences senior Greg Opara, the son of Nigerian immigrants, buy books, travel home for breaks and, most recently, fly to interviews at top medical schools.

Experts and key strategists on charter schools in Missouri were in Brown Hall Dec. 11 for another event in the Brown School Policy Forum’s Child Well-being series, an ongoing public discussion on child welfare in Missouri. “Charter Schools in Missouri: The Emergence of Reform” examined state charter school policy both past and present and how the development of charter schools affect school choice and education reform strategies.

Washington University Medical Center faculty, staff and students will perform their third annual winter concert at 4 p.m. Jan. 18 in the lobby of the Center for Advanced Medicine, 4921 Parkview Place. A reception will follow the concert. The event is free and open to the public.

Renewable energy subsidies have been a politically popular program during the past decade. These subsidies have led to explosive growth in wind power installations across the United States, especially in the Midwest and Texas. But do these subsidies work? Not as well as one might think, finds a new study from Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School.

A multiweek visit to the United States by Burmese lawmakers kicked off with a two-day intensive workshop on constitutional reform conducted by David S. Law, professor of law and of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The curriculum included mechanisms and strategies for amending a constitution; options for structuring a federal system of government; the decentralization of control over natural resources; protection of minority rights; the role of the judiciary in promoting democracy and enforcing constitutional guarantees; and strategies for promoting the rule of law. Law was selected to conduct the workshop for his interdisciplinary background and expertise on global constitutionalism, constitutional drafting, design of government institutions, and Asian constitutionalism in particular.​