Arts & Sciences

A play is a text but also a performance. Dance is a discipline but also a communication. To be truly understood, both must be experienced live. For its 2015-16 season, the Performing Arts Department will present classic comedy and contemporary drama as well as original works by faculty and students.

Several Washington University in St. Louis faculty and staff members have received collaborative awards through The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative organized by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design.

​​St. Louis may seem a bit too far away from Mexico to have had a serious impact on the outcome of the Mexican Revolution, but the city actually played an important role in the events that shaped the nation, according to Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, PhD, associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.​

Brittany Packnett’s commitment to social justice has taken her from the streets of Ferguson all the way to the White House, where she helped shape policy to make policing less racially biased.

Elizabeth Gentry Sayad, AB ’55, MA ’03, preserves the St. Louis region’s French history.

“[Improvisation] is much more difficult than reading music. You don’t have to be very gifted to read a novel. You do to write a novel,” says Rich O’Donnell, director of the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music.

Two alumni couples from very different decades share their stories of coming to Washington University and finding their perfect matches — life partners and an ideal hometown.

Though he studies chemistry, graduate student Cole Pruitt has been interested in the game of Go since he was 6 years old. After playing Go in college, he decided to create a documentary about the popular Asian game. Working on it taught him new appreciation for the game.

Ashley Wilson, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award to continue her research on long-term conjugal cohabitation relationships that are a common alternative to formal marriage among poor residents of the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya.

Washington University in St. Louis mathematician Blake Thornton, PhD, came in first in the paddleboard division of the MR340, an endurance race on the Missouri River. Before signing up for next year’s race, you might want to read this article as well as watch the video.