Humanities & Society

Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in WashU Arts & Sciences, has been nominated for a 2026 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportwriting.

WashU Libraries host “Unalienable Rights: America at 250,” a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, at 2 p.m. July 2 at Olin Library. The free event features a talk about the Declaration and children’s activities.

Fatherhood today is shaped by two powerful expectations: to be actively involved in caregiving and to provide financially, according to research by Patrick Ishizuka, assistant professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Mitra Naseh, an assistant professor at the WashU Brown School, has received a $612,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health as co-principal investigator on a new project titled “Community-Driven Solutions for Sustainable Systems Change.”

Inside a World War II-era bunker at Tyson Research Center, preserved birds, handwritten logs and mold-covered artifacts tell a story of science, stewardship and changing times.

This semester, students took a deep-dive into the celebrated and complicated history of the U.S., through lectures from scholars at WashU and throughout the country.

WashU’s John Inazu argues that the ability to gather with others is essential to a healthy democracy — particularly at a time of deep social and political division. He was among the faculty presenting as part of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics course “1776: Then and Now.”

Nicole Spangler, a rising senior studying classics and history in WashU Arts & Sciences, received a prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, becoming the first WashU student to win that honor since 2014.

Tazeen Ali, an assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, says Thomas Jefferson’s Quran confronts us with the question of what the founders themselves knew they couldn’t avoid: Will the promises of 1776 stop at the edge of our own religion, or will they extend to Muslims and beyond?