Arts & Sciences

Researchers have created a novel polymer that changes color and contracts when exposed to visible light. The tiny, makeshift muscle does some heavy lifting — relatively speaking.

William F. Tate, dean of the Graduate School at Washington University in St. Louis, is included in the 2018 “Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings,” as determined by Frederick M. Hess, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of education policy.  

Los Angeles artist Tim Youd will pay homage to longtime English professor Stanley Elkin by retyping the latter’s 1976 novel “The Franchiser.” Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, in conjunction with the exhibition “Tim Youd: St. Louis Retyped,” the 11-day performance begins Jan. 26 in Ridgley Hall’s Holmes Lounge.

Sibling pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque — praised by The New York Times as “the best piano duet in front of an audience today” — will perform four-hand works by Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass and Bryce Dessner (known to many as guitarist for The National) Jan. 28 as part of the Great Artists Series at Washington University in St. Louis.

Washington University faculty members Tili Boon Cuillé, Lerone A. Martin and Angela Miller have won prestigious research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Henrietta W. Freedman, a former member of the Washington University in St. Louis Board of Trustees and a founder of the university’s Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI), died in her sleep, surrounded by family, at her St. Louis home Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018. She was 95.  

The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has won a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help transform doctoral training in the humanities.

Robert Henke, professor of drama and comparative literature in Arts & Sciences, edited “A Cultural History of Theatre In the Early Modern Age” (2017). The volume is third in a six-volume set tracing the complex interactions between theater and culture over the past 2,500 years.

Mark McDaniel, professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is co-recipient of a 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Conference of Prospective Memory.

Using satellite imaging and drone reconnaissance, archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis have discovered an ancient irrigation system that allowed a farming community in northwestern China to raise livestock and cultivate crops in one of the world’s driest desert climates.