Arts & Sciences

Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a commission from Chamber Music America, the national network of chamber music professionals, to compose a piece for the New York-based duo New Morse Code.

Over the course of about 24 hours Sept. 22-23, four student athletes from Washington University in St. Louis were tabbed by national coaches’ organizations as “Athlete of the Week.” It’s an unprecedented honor in school history, one in which Athletics Director Josh Whitman calls “inspirational.” To put it into perspective, the university received only six such honors throughout the entire academic sports year in 2013-14.

Arts & Sciences faculty (from left) Jami L. Ake, PhD, John M. Doris, PhD, Mark Rollins, PhD, and Douglas L. Chalker, PhD, were recognized for their teaching and leadership during Arts & Sciences’ annual faculty reception this month. Ake and Chalker both received the Distinguished Teaching Award; Doris received the David Hadas Teaching Award; and Rollins received the Distinguished Leadership Award.

Over the past several decades, Michael Kinch of Washington University in St. Louis says, the pharmaceutical industry has managed to dismantle itself. In a provocative series of articles and interviews, Kinch, the director of the Center for Research Innovation in Businessat the university, has been describing the history of this dismantling and its implications for the future of medicine.

A film crew from NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corp., visited the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis last week to film for a series called “Cosmic Front HOTLINK” about the wonders of the universe. Here, they interview Ernst Zinner, PhD, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences. He pioneered techniques to study tiny bits of matter from stars that died before the solar system was born.

Steven Fazzari, PhD, a leading scholar on the relationship between rising income inequality and macroeconomic trends in the United States, will be chair of the recently re-established Department of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, has announced.

Legal segregation may be over, but segregation is hardly a thing of the past. This fall, the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will launch “The Divided City: An Urban Humanities Initiative.” The $1.6 million project — funded in part by a four-year, $650,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation — will examine segregation from a variety of perspectives.

In “Reembarque/Reshipment,” Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando examines the lasting influence — on Cuban language, music and culture — of Haitian laborers, brough to work the sugarcane fields and coffee plantations. At 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, Rolando will host a free screening in the Danforth University Center. 

In the 1950s and ’60s, Gaslight Square hosted a who’s who of American entertainers — everyone from Lenny Bruce to Miles Davis to Barbra Streisand. On Thursday, Sept. 25, Washington University will pay homage to Gaslight Square with a special Jazz at Holmes concert.

The St. Louis Rams have selected Virginia Braxs, senior lecturer in Romance languages and literatures in Arts & Sciences, as a recipient of the NFL Hispanic Heritage Leadership Award.