Humanities & Society

The George Warren Brown School of Social Work’s Livable Lives Initiative has awarded eight grants to faculty across the university. The selected projects investigate policies and programs designed to help those with low or moderate incomes achieve lives that are more stable, secure, satisfying and successful.

Given ongoing agitation by a chorus of elected officials, the stage may be set for a major overhaul, if not outright abolishment of the nation’s largest home mortgage financing operations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Radhakrishan Gopalan, who teaches finance at Olin Business School, tells Smart Money that the private market should be able meet home financing needs, in most cases.

While the story of Michelangelo’s artistic genius has been told many times, the story of his social ambitions has been told scarcely at all. Indeed, scholars have largely dismissed the artist’s claims to noble birth. Yet it was precisely that belief that propelled Michelangelo’s lifelong quest not only to improve his family’s financial position, but to improve the very social standing of artists. So argues art historian William Wallace in the new biography “Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and his Times.” 

Two days before the Haiti earthquake, Lora Iannotti, Ph.D., nutrition and public health expert from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, traveled to Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti, to continue her research about undernutrition and disease prevention in young children. The massive tremor changed her focus from research for the future to survival, with her team helping children in the aftermath of the quake.

WUSTL faculty from law and political science were quick to offer opinions to the news media about implications of a controversial Jan. 21 ruling by the The U.S. Supreme Court that will allow corporations and unions to spend freely in elections, a decision many expect to shift the balance of political power.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn campaign spending limits for corporations “strikes a serious blow against efforts to stem the dominance of corporations in our political process,” says Gregory  P. Magarian, J.D., constitutional and election law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.  “The Court overruled a longstanding decision that had struck a sensible, carefully drawn balance between the self-interest of corporations and interests of integrity and fairness in the political process.“

In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will host the fourth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Tying Loose Ends—Becoming Financially Secure,” from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 23, in Brown Hall, Room 100.

Ray Suarez, author and senior correspondent for PBS’s The NewsHour, was scheduled to present “The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 31, in Graham Chapel. This lecture has been canceled.

In his latest book, “Repairing Paradise, The Restoration of Nature in America’s National Parks,” WUSTL political science professor William R. Lowry takes us to Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Everglades national parks to examine four contentious issues that disrupted the natural side of these parks, and identifies keys to how they could be overcome. Lowry comments on the book in an extensive review published Jan. 8 in the magazine National Parks Traveler.   

In remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Society of Black Student Social Workers at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work will host the fourth annual “Financial Freedom Seminar: Tying Loose Ends — Becoming Financially Secure,” from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 23, in Brown Hall, Room 100. The seminar, free and open to the public, is designed for St. Louis community youth and adults interested in building wealth, repairing and maintaining good credit, purchasing a home or starting and expanding a business.