Arts & Sciences

Nancy Berg, professor of Hebrew language and literature in the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Arts & Sciences, has won a National Jewish Book Award for best anthology for the 2018 book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew (and What It Means to Amer­i­cans).”

Photographer Jennifer Colten, senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and Paul Tran, a senior poetry fellow in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, both at Washington University in St. Louis, have won 2019 Artist Fellowships from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis.

The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis recently announced its 2020-21 cohort of faculty fellows.

Hard plant foods like seeds and nuts may have made up a larger part of early human ancestors’ diet than currently presumed, according to a new experimental study of modern tooth enamel from anthropologists in Arts & Sciences.

Based on 60 in-depth interviews with black medical doctors, nurses and technicians in the health care industry, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis finds that wherever black workers are positioned in an organization — top, middle or bottom — informs and shapes their impressions about workplace racial discrimination.

A balloon-borne scientific instrument designed to study the origin of cosmic rays is taking its second turn high above the continent of Antarctica three and a half weeks after its launch.

Political scientist David Carter co-authored a study of more than 50 barriers erected around the world, most of which have emerged since 2001. He and his co-author at the University of Chicago found that legal trade plummets up to 31% as a result of constructing a wall between two neighboring countries.

Chemists in Arts & Sciences have re-engineered one of nature’s solar cells to drive electrons down an alternate path. This work advances the understanding of the earliest light-driven events of photosynthesis and is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New Arts & Sciences research finds that chimpanzees that use a multi-step process and complex tools to gather termites are more likely to share tools with novices. The study helps illuminate chimpanzees’ capacity for prosocial — or helping — behavior, a quality that has been recognized for its potential role in the evolution of human cultural abilities.

For thousands of years, goosefoot and knotweed were grown as crops, possibly feeding as many indigenous people of North America as corn. But the domesticated forms of these lost crops became lost over the years, and now a Washington University in St. Louis archaeologist is trying to figure out why — and recreate them.