Humanities & Society

PhD candidate Dick Powis likes to joke that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then he should be allowed to submit 100 photographs for his dissertation. His photo is one of many showcased in the Department of Anthropology annual photo contest. Glenn Stone, a professor in Arts & Sciences, started the contest a decade ago to showcase the stunning photography his students bring back from the field.

“Revitalizing Democratic Pluralism” will be the focus as political scholars Melissa Rogers and Peter Wehner take the stage for a public forum on polarized politics at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium.

Geoff Ward, associate professor and associate chair of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded the 2018-19 W.E.B. Du Bois Award by the Western Society of Criminology.

Prehistoric peasant farmers struggling to put more food on the table fueled the global spread of some of the world’s first and most important domesticated grain crops beginning as early as 7,000 years ago, according to an international study led by anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis.

As part of its work on gun violence and human rights, the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis has submitted comments to the United Nations Human Rights Committee ahead of the group’s periodic review of the United States, urging stronger action on gun violence.

U.S. communities with higher smoking rates or lower excise taxes were less likely to adopt retail policies restricting tobacco sales, according to new research from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Stephen Lockhart, MD, AB ’77, is an avid outdoorsman who makes sure future generations have the opportunity to explore nature.

Now, Lidong Pan, LLM ’04, is a managing partner at a Chinese law firm, where he excels at dealing with international clients. He says it’s in part thanks to the education and practical experience he got through Washington University.

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.