It’s not easy being a Chicago Cubs fan. Just ask Chakravarthi Narasimhan, PhD, the Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School. Though Narasimhan’s sports life may have more downs than ups, his professional life has been a grand slam. “Chak is a key member of the school’s senior faculty and has built an outstanding marketing group here at Olin,” says colleague Todd Milbourn, PhD.
Washington University Libraries present a book talk by Michael Sherberg, PhD, associate professor of Italian in Arts & Sciences, at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 5, in Olin Library, Ginkgo Reading Room, Level 1. Sherberg’s lecture — titled “Boethius in the Renaissance: What Recent Acquisitions Teach Us” — will discuss three 16th-century translations of Boethius’s influential 6th-century work, Consolation of Philosophy, and what the translations tell modern scholars about the politics and poetics of translation in the Renaissance.
With its poodle skirts, bouffant hairdos and withering irony, John Waters’ Hairspray (1988) feels almost timeless. It could be set at any point after which the 1950s had ceased to be cool. It is actually set in 1962, the year James Meredith became the first African-American admitted to the University of Mississippi. That historical grounding is at the center of a new staging of Hairspray: The Musical, the 2002 Broadway extravaganza based on Waters’ film, by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.
The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts has announced the recipients of its 2011 Faculty Creative Activity Research Grants. Four art and architecture faculty members will each receive between $1,000 and $8,000 to support a variety of projects. These range from research about the Elizabethan “Lost Colony” of North Carolina and a monograph on Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck to a mobile art studio traveling the Gulf Coast and new methods of architectural fabrication in Jakarta, Indonesia.
President Barack Obama is calling for a more modernized and concentrated hiring process in the federal government as more of its workers retire. While the government attracts many excellent candidates, the recruitment process remains bureaucratic, cumbersome and complex, leading many talented workers to be turned away. “The federal government is facing a war for talent and its competitors are winning,” says Jackson A. Nickerson, PhD, professor of strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.
Arts & Sciences starts the fall semester with a new program director and four new departmental chairs, two of whom are heading newly created and reorganized departments.The Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (ANELL) and the programs in East Asian Studies (EAS) and Jewish and Islamic Studies (JINES) have been reorganized into two full-fledged departments.
About 1,500 School of Medicine employees took a walk in Hudlin Park Sept. 28 to kick off Tread the Med, the school’s walking campaign. More than 120 teams and nearly 1,900 employees have registered for the program, which encourages walking 10,000 steps a day.
A chance encounter with James McLeod by Jazz at Holmes series organizers beneath the Brookings Hall archway in 1998 would lead to the continuation of the popular series, which has become a local instituion in its 13th season. On Oct. 6, Jazz at Holmes will honor McLeod, who died Sept. 6, with a concert by legendary St. Louis saxophonist Freddie Washington.
Washington University Libraries and the St. Louis Poetry Center will present a program featuring the works of renowned American poet Elizabeth Bishop at 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 23, in Wilson Hall, Room 214, on Washington University’s Danforth Campus. A reception will follow in the Ginkgo Reading Room in the nearby Olin Library. The event is free and open to the public.
Tomás Saraceno creates spectacular, gravity-defying installations and visionary sculptural models inspired by clouds, bubbles, spider webs and other natural structures. On Oct. 5, Saraceno — who was born in Argentina and now lives and works in Germany — will discuss his work as part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Public Lecture Series. The talk, which begins at 6:30 p.m. in Steinberg Hall, is held in conjunction with the exhibition Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific, on view through Jan. 9 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.