Newsroom Stories

The website My St. Louis encourages students to get off campus and explore St. Louis’ neigborhoods and attractions. The site also offers a look at St. Louis politics, history and culture.

Who is Mónica de la Torre? A disappeared subversive? A funk-dancing cheerleader? In “Doubles,” the poet and visiting Hurst Professor of Creative Writing asks that very question, in the form of a sly email exchange.

In 1840, finally free to marry the love of his life, composer Robert Schumann was inspired to a creative frenzy, writing 168 songs. On Sept. 29, baritone Ian Greenlaw will perform 16 of them—from the celebrated Dichterliebe cycle—as part of WUSTL’s annual Liederabend concert.

The Online College Database has named Washington University in St. Louis one of “50 Colleges Committed to Saving the Planet” in recognition of its new environmental policy major. The College Database called the major “a rigorous journey through the tangled web of politics, bureaucracies, public opinion, regulation, the global political economy, sustainability, global oil battles, climate change, genetically altered foods, air and water quality, and biochemistry.”

Carol Camp Yeakey, PhD, founding director of the interdisciplinary program in Urban Studies and of the Center on Urban Research and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of 23 scholars selected as 2013 fellows by the American Educational Research Association.

The Blues and the Abstract Truth by St. Louis saxophonist Oliver Nelson (1932-1975) is among the most influential jazz albums of the 1960s, a masterpiece of blues structure, modern arrangement and post-bop cool. On Thursday, Sept. 12, Washington University will pay tribute to this distinguished alumnus with a free concert at 8 p.m. in Holmes Lounge as part of the Jazz at Holmes series.

With a one-year grant from Washington University’s International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), researchers at Washington University in St. Louis plan to use some high-tech methods to better understand the processes, mechanics and interfaces that plants use to move iron from the soil, through water and into the plant.

The seas have risen and covered the earth. A few soaked survivors cling to mountaintops and tall buildings. So begin The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, an inventive, heartwarming and visually spectacular tale by Australia’s Tim Watts. On Oct. 5, this acclaimed one-man-show, part environmental parable, part Orpheus and Eurydice, will launch Edison’s ovations for young people series.

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have selected the collaborative firm Freecell Architecture as winner of PXSTL. The $50,000 urban design competition winner will create a temporary space for outdoor performances in Grand Center beginning in spring 2014.

Deeply concerned about an “innovation deficit” that is threatening the nation’s economic growth, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton and Timothy M. Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri System, sent a joint letter last month to Missouri’s U.S. congressional delegation urging their support in helping close this innovation gap. Wrighton and Wolfe also  joined more than 160 university presidents and chancellors in signing an open letter July 31 to President Obama and the U.S. Congress asking them to restore federal investments in higher education and research.