Humanities & Society

The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court has renewed debate about the future of Roe v. Wade. Mary Ann Dzuback, chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in Arts & Sciences, suspects that conservative justices will continue chipping away at reproductive choice, rather than mount a frontal assault on the decision. But she warns that by undermining Roe’s guarantee of reproductive choice, the court risks its own reputation and authority.

In 2015, Washington University re-established the Department of Sociology in Arts & Sciences. Concentrating on the origins and impacts of inequality, faculty and students are investigating some of the nation’s most critical and urgent social challenges.

In just a few years, students have come to think of the sociology department as a home, as their own special place at the university.

R. Marie Griffith’s new book analyzes how, and why, “sex divided American Christians and fractured American politics.”

When she was 10, Shirley Padmore Mensah survived a coup in her native Liberia. Due to that and encouragement from her father, Mensah studied at Washington University’s School of Law eventually becoming a judge in Missouri with a deep appreciation of the rule of law.

As a student, Kurt Summers, BSBA ’00, was interested in business and public service. Throughout his career he has married those two interests. He did so most recently in 2014, when he became the treasurer for the City of Chicago.

Older adults living in public senior housing communities experience a large degree of loneliness, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Nevertheless, senior housing communities may be ideal locations for reducing that loneliness, the study finds.

As the United States celebrates its founding on July 4, new research on “collective narcissism” suggests many Americans have hugely exaggerated notions about how much their home states helped to write the nation’s narrative.

President Donald Trump on June 20 directed his administration to detain migrant families together instead of separating parents from their children, but one of the nation’s leading immigration experts argues that jailing migrant families is still “cruel and unnecessary” under U.S. law.

The Neidorff Family and Centene ­Corporation Dean of the Brown School, Mary McKay, discusses her career-long commitment to social justice, and the impact that bringing public health, social work and public policy together in the Brown School can have on its students.