Arts & Sciences

Recently, Washington University in St. Louis political experts Steven Smith, Betsy Sinclair and Andrew Reeves sat down to discuss the reliability of the 2020 polls, as well as election integrity and voter confidence in the election outcome.

At a time when Americans are increasingly polarized and partisans share a mutual disdain for one another, students in Betsy Sinclair’s “Public Opinion and American Democracy” course at Washington University in St. Louis are learning how to bridge the divide.

Li Yang, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, conducted research with black phosphorus — a material with a thickness of just a few atomic layers — in a study that is hailed as a milestone of the past 50 years by the Physical Review B, an academic journal of the American Physical Society.

Scaled survivors of the coldest night in south Florida’s recent history all converged on the same new, lower limit of thermal tolerance, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold. Biologist James Stroud in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis led the team that reported the findings in the journal Biology Letters.

Poet, dramatist, translator and literary theorist John Dryden was a central figure in the politics and culture of Restoration England. In a new survey for Oxford University Press, WashU’s Steven Zwicker provides an authoritative overview of Dryden’s influential 40-year career.

Deanna M. Barch, chair of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, and Randall J. Bateman, MD, professor of neurology at the School of Medicine and director of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network and Trials Unit, have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Three political science experts at Washington University in St. Louis discuss the battle for control of the U.S. Senate and House. This roundtable discussion is the first of a two-part 2020 election series aimed to help listeners better understand the news, polls and issues in this year’s election.  

Blues singer Kim Massie, who died Oct. 12, was a beloved figure in St. Louis — a grandmother of six who held court downtown twice each week for more than two decades. Washington University’s Paige McGinley, who wrote about Massie in her 2014 book “Staging the Blues,” remembers the singer.

Shanti A. Parikh, associate professor of anthropology and African & African American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, co-edited a collection, “@Ferguson: Still Here in the Afterlives of Black Death, Defiance and Joy,” published in social and cultural anthropology’s flagship journal, American Ethnologist.

Cheryl is charming and vivacious. Cheryl is selfish and unreliable. In her new comedy “Cheryl Robs a Bank,” which will debut this weekend as part of the A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival, Holly Gabelmann explores questions of identity, self-presentation, anti-heroism and who gets to tell the story.