Arts & Sciences

Jennifer Gartley, a professional flutist who has performed with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, serves as programming and public outreach director for the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. It’s just one of the notes she plays at Washington University.

A new book from Washington University in St. Louis cultural anthropologist Rebecca Lester explores eating disorders — a topic that impacts and kills almost as many people in the United States as the opioid crisis yet receives a fraction of the sympathy, support or funding.

Is music universal? To answer that question, Christopher Lucas, assistant professor of political science, worked with colleagues from Princeton and Harvard to analyze music from 315 societies from across the planet. Their findings are published in the Nov. 21 issue of Science.

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” Ntozake Shange’s beloved Broadway drama, in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre Nov. 21-24.

The book “Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning”(2019) by Rafia Zafar, professor of English and of African-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, is featured in a new exhibition celebrating the 125th anniversary of the New York Public Library.

Undergraduate and graduate students at Washington University can submit entries for the annual A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival. The deadline to turn in scripts — which may be full-length, one-act or 10-minute plays — is 4 p.m. Jan. 17. Winning playwrights will be announced in March.

Want to help stop the decline of our insect friends? A new publication from Brett Seymoure in Arts & Sciences shows how artificial light at night negatively impacts thousands of species that have evolved to use light levels as cues for courtship, foraging and navigation.

The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ College and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design announce a new round of Divided City faculty collaborative grants.

In Bolivia, a tangled election mess seems to have reaffirmed the popularity of leader Evo Morales. A Washington University in St. Louis faculty member says the country has propped up a new leader in what amounts to a military coup.

Reappropriation — by which a group of people reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group — can tame uncivil discourse, finds a new study by political scientists and a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.