Arts & Sciences

An astrophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis is among the team hunting for an elusive particle called a WIMP, that may be the fundamental particle of dark matter. To catch this notoriously wily particle they have built a detector consisting of a large vat of xenon in a deep chamber of a played-out gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

​The Department of Music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis will present its annual sing-along to “Messiah” at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14. The performance, which will include the Christmas portion of “Messiah” as well as the “Hallelujah Chorus,” will take place in Graham Chapel.

Smart writing on timely topics for the widest possible audience. This is the mission of The Common Reader, a new journal launched this fall by Gerald Early. Early and Managing Editor Ben Fulton discuss The Common Reader, online journalism and the continuing value of ink and paper.

Rare objects from the University Libraries Department of Special Collections are featured in “Into the Vault,” a new video series produced by Arts & Sciences in collaboration with University Libraries and hosted by Seth Graebner, PhD, associate professor of French in Arts & Sciences. Among them are Galileo’s “Dialogue,” Denis Diderot’s “Encyclopédie,” Charles Darwin’s “The Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects” and a 1678 letter from Isaac Newton to natural philosopher Robert Hooke.

Samuel A. Wickline, MD, has been chosen to receive the Chancellor’s Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis. He will receive the honor Saturday, Dec. 6. Faculty achievement awards will be presented to David A. Balota, PhD, and Steven L. Teitelbaum, MD.

Christopher “Kit” Wellman, PhD, chair of the Department of Philosophy, has won the 2015 Berger Memorial Prize, awarded to an outstanding published article in philosophy of law.

Former U.S. senators John C. Danforth and Joe Lieberman will discuss “The Role of Religion in America’s Broken Politics” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9, in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis. The event is sponsored by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics as part of the Danforth Distinguished Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

A new summer program targeting sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders will be available in the summer of 2015. The Middle School Summer Challenge combines advanced coursework in a range of academic interests with leadership development designed to provide participants with a complete scholastic and social experience.

American presidents spend their time in office trying to carve out a prominent place in the nation’s collective memory, but most are destined to be forgotten within 50-to-100 years of their serving as president, suggests a study on presidential name recall released Nov. 27 by the journal Science.

Jean Allman, director of the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, discusses The Divided City, the nature of the humanities and the health of the field today.