Arts & Sciences

When fading patriarch Beverly Weston goes missing, his family gathers for a reunion bordering on the apocalyptic. So begins “August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning drama by Tracy Letts. Washington University’s Performing Arts Department will present the show in Edison Theatre Feb. 23 to March 4.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced Feb. 15 that Timothy A. Wencewicz, assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship. He is among 126 outstanding U.S. and Canadian researchers selected as fellowship recipients this year.

Kater Murch, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a 2018 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

A new study in Parasites & Vectors finds ticks in urban parks dominated by an invasive rose bush are nearly twice as likely to be infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, as compared to ticks from uninvaded forest fragments. But the trend reverses itself at a broader scale.

After years of reluctance — and with the help of his journalist daughter, alumna Debbie Bornstein Holinstat — Michael Bornstein shares his remarkable story of surviving Auschwitz in “Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz.”

Professor Gerald Early recently oversaw African and African-American Studies’ transition from program to full-fledged department at WashU. Here, he talks about the student activism that kick-started black studies programs around the country.

Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies and of African and African-American studies, both in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the keynote address for “Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities,” the 26th annual conference of the American Men’s Studies Association.

The Ritz Chamber Players, arguably the nation’s finest touring African-American chamber ensemble, will make its St. Louis debut Feb. 16 in Washington University’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

A rare, coastal flowering plant known as Tidestrom’s lupine — threatened by native deer mice that can munch up to three-quarters of its unripe fruits under cover of an invasive beachgrass — has been given a new life with the large-scale removal of that grass, a long-term study in the journal Restoration Ecology shows.

Blacks, especially women, are more likely to have been unarmed when killed by police than non-blacks, and that risk appears to increase in police departments with a greater presence of non-white officers, according to a new study of nationwide data from Washington University in St. Louis. The study is the first in a series of reports from the ongoing Fatal Interactions with Police (FIPS) research project, which includes contributions from public health and biostatistics experts at hospitals and universities.