Newsroom Stories

Three aspiring playwrights will present staged readings of their works Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 as part of the 2011 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival. Nicknamed “The Hotch,” the festival is sponsored by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences and is named in honor of celebrated alumnus A.E. Hotchner. It consists of an intensive two-week workshop, led this year by nationally known dramaturg Megan Monaghan Revis, which culminates in the staged readings.

Graduate school can be lonely, stressful place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it. At 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26, the Washington University in St. Louis community will get to see something out of the ordinary: The Graduate Professional Council, with assistance from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Assembly Series, will screen The PHD Movie (2011) in Edison Theatre. The film will be followed by a discussion led by Jorge Cham, PhD, creator of the online comic strip for graduate students that inspired the movie.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis will dedicate a new building, Preston M. Green Hall, Friday, Sept. 23, and in conjunction will hold the symposium “Challenges & Opportunities in Engineering Education & Research.” The symposium, which will feature National Science Foundation Director Subra Suresh, DSc, is open to the public. It will be held from at 2:30 p.m. in Room 300 of the Laboratory Sciences building on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus. 

The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis have announced the selection of the next two Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellows. Chelsea Knight, a New York-based artist whose narrative-based videos, photographs and participatory performances explore the nature of social control and the current state of democracy, will serve as the Freund Fellow for the 2011-12 academic year. Stih & Schnock, a Berlin-based collaborative team that focuses on issues relating to collective memory, will be Freund Fellows for 2012-13.

One of the most promising markers of Alzheimer’s disease, previously thought  only to be inside nerve cells, now appears to be normally released from nerve cells throughout life, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Fatou Bensouda, deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), will discuss the current issues facing the ICC at noon Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall. She also will receive the 2011 World Peace Through Law Award from the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute.

The Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis will mark its 100th anniversary with a month-long series of events in October, including lectures and a symposium featuring some of today’s most visionary scientific thinkers.

The No. 2 volleyball team ran its record to 14-0 — the team’s best start ever — by winning the Molten Colorado College Invitational Sept. 16 and 17. Updates also included on men’s and women’s soccer, cross country, football, tennis and women’s golf.

Japanese body art, elaborate tattoos, fashion and pre-modern pornography are among topics to be explored as the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis opens its fall seminar series. The Japan Embodied: New Approaches to Japanese Studies seminar series opens at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, in Room 18, Busch Hall, on the Danforth Campus with a free, public program on body ornamentation in Japanese culture.

The voice is commonly understood as a vehicle for communicating meaning and, alternatively, as a source of aesthetic pleasure — approaches personified by the military commander and the opera singer. But in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar proposes a third paradigm: psychoanalysis. In October, Dolar, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor, will lead a three-day series, titled “From Hegel to Freud and Kafka,” exploring the linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the voice, as well as its use by Sigmund Freud, Georg W.F. Hegel and Franz Kafka.