Arts & Sciences

​Washington University in St. Louis is sending 15 students to this year’s Clinton Global Initiative University, which begins Friday, March 6, at the University of Miami.  Founded by the Clinton Global Initiative, an initiative of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, CGI U supports projects that advance five focus areas: education, environmental sustainability, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation and public health. The university hosted CGI U in 2013.

Ignacio Infante, PhD, assistant professor of comparative literature and of Spanish in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will have his article “Remaking Poetics after Postmodernism: Intertextuality, Intermediality and Cultural Circulation in the Wake of Borges” published in the winter 2015 issue of Comparative Literature (Duke University Press).

The Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have announced the first recipients of Faculty Collaborative Grants. Presented under the auspices of The Divided City, a new urban humanities initiative, the awards are funded in part by a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, thousands of Bosnian refugees have settled in South St. Louis. Today, “Little Bosnia’ includes more than 60,000 people — the largest Bosnian community outside Bosnia. On Tuesday, March 3, the Department of Music and musicians from the St. Louis Symphony will explore their stories with a free concert titled “Bosnian Journeys: Generations.”

Why do so many of us cry at the movies? Why do we flinch when Rocky Balboa takes a punch? What’s really happening in our brains as we immerse ourselves in the lives being acted out on screen? These are the questions that Washington University in St. Louis neuroscientist Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD, explores in his new book, “Flicker: Your Brain on Movies.”

Higher education reduces recidivism rates by as much as half. Yet today, only a small fraction of U.S. prisoners have access to such programs. In the fall of 2014, University College launched the Washington University Prison Education Project, a three-year pilot program supported by a grant from the Bard Prison Initiative.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced Feb. 23 that Kater Murch, PhD, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been awarded a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship. He is among 126 outstanding U.S. and Canadian researchers selected as fellowship recipients this year. The fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the next generation of scientific leaders.

The next round of spring Assembly Series programs at Washington University in St. Louis will cover a variety of topics, from how society talks about contagious diseases to delving into major philosophical theory to the possibility of cloning a mammoth.

Ram V. Dixit, PhD, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, received a five-year, $1,163,940 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation to study mechanisms underlying plant cell morphogenesis.

The American Library Association and its Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Round Table has selected Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr.’s book, “Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing” for its 2015 “Over the Rainbow” list.