Arts & Sciences

Eliotte Henderson, AB ’10, has appeared as a dancer and singer on the Grammy’s and the MTV Video Music Awards, served as a background vocalist for The X-Factor and traveled the globe — twice — as a member of Taylor Swift’s band.

South Central Los Angeles, 1976. The lawns are manicured, the palm trees sway, the savings bonds are tucked optimistically away. But the Youth is restless. In “Passing Strange,” the singer and playwright Stew offers a semi-autobiographical account of his journey to artistic self-discovery. The Performing Arts Department will present the Tony Award-winning rock musical Oct. 21-30 in Edison Theatre.

Cindy Brantmeier, professor of applied linguistics and education in Arts & Sciences, has been named a distinguished visiting professor of applied linguistics by the School of Foreign Languages of Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.

The first documented evidence of wild chimpanzee mothers teaching their offspring to use tools has been captured by video cameras set to record chimpanzee tool-using activity at termite mounds in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, according to new research from anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis.

It is a staple of the political season: “The founders wanted this,” a candidate confidently declares. “The founders wanted that.” But not so fast, says Peter Kastor, principal investigator for the digital archive “Creating a Federal Government.”

It is the ultimate symbol of public trust. Accompanying the president, at virtually all times, is a military aid with a large black satchel known as the “nuclear football.” But for all its prominence in the popular imagination, the football does not contain some sort of “nuclear button” that might allow a president to single-handedly initiate nuclear launch, says Krister Knapp, senior lecturer in history in Arts & Sciences.

Six members of the Washington University in St. Louis community will be among the speakers at an upcoming TEDxGateway Arch event.

Andie Berry, whose play “Son of Soil” will receive a staged reading Oct. 1 as part of the A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival, discusses her work.

World-renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones will receive Washington University’s 2016-17 International Humanities Prize Sept. 29. In this Q&A, Joanna Dee Das, assistant professor of dance, talks with Jones about his career, his choreographic process and his latest works.

In 1630, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, proclaimed to fellow Puritan settlers that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” In this video, Abram Van Engen examines the surprising history of Winthrop’s striking image and its subsequent adoption by presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.