Arts & Sciences

Allegations against R. Kelly have finally exploded into the #MeToo era with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly.” But the singer’s troubling behavior can be traced back decades. “There was a lot of sexual energy around Kelly that we as young people felt was a little bit dark and a little bit inappropriate and a little bit taboo,” says Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., who studies race, gender and popular culture at Washington University in St. Louis. In the early 1990s, McCune was a student at Kenwood Academy, the Chicago magnet school Kelly had attended just a few years before — and a classmate to one of Kelly’s earliest accusers.

Monique Bedasse, assistant professor of history and of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2018 Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history.

Six faculty members from Washington University in St. Louis have won Emerson Excellence in Teaching awards.

Carl Bender, the Konneker Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics in Arts & Sciences, has received a Humboldt Research Award. The award is given to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Federico Ardila, professor of mathematics at San Francisco State University, will deliver the Loeb Undergraduate Lecture in Mathematics, “Using geometry to move robots quickly,” at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17, in Brown Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The Black Rep will present the world premiere of the drama “Canfield Drive” in Edison Theatre Jan. 9. The play, some four years in the making, runs through Jan. 27 and explores how two powerful journalists from very different ideological perspectives grapple with the 2014 death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

A Washington University in St. Louis interdisciplinary initiative has sparked a wave of faculty research and the publication of a new book examining the incidence of cancer among low-income women of color in St. Louis and the Metro East communities of Illinois, including East St. Louis.

Henry W. Berger, professor emeritus of history in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Dec. 10. He was 81.

Rebecca Lester, associate professor of sociocultural anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed the next editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. She also was recently elected president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Washington University in St. Louis announced that its X-Calibur instrument, a telescope that measures the polarization of X-rays arriving from distant neutron stars, black holes and other exotic celestial bodies, launched from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.