Arts & Sciences

The Assembly Series will feature next week speakers who explore issues of race, culture and identity — in two distinct ways. At 5 p.m. Monday, Sept. 29, race and gender scholar Roderick Ferguson, PhD, will deliver the annual James E. McLeod Lecture on Higher Education. At noon Tuesday, Sept. 30, legal and literary scholar Patricia J. Williams, JD, will speak for the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities’ annual lecture series. Both are free and open to the public.

​On Sept. 11 — just one week into the 2014 NFL season — running back Adrian Peterson was indicted on charges of beating his four-year-old son with a tree branch. In the uproar that followed, Peterson was suspended from professional football and pilloried by pundits left and right. Washington University in St. Louis Associate Professor Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., PhD, who writes about masculinity, performance studies and popular culture, shares his thoughts.

Cellist Kenneth Kulosa and pianist Patti Wolf launch the fall Danforth University Center Chamber Music Series on the campus of Washington University in St. Lous at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 23, with the music of Sergei Rachmaninov and Igor Stravinsky.

As much as we might try to leave personal lives at home, the personality traits of a spouse have a way of following us into the workplace, exerting a powerful influence on promotions, salaries, job satisfaction and other measures of professional success, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

Iver Bernstein, PhD, director of American Culture Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, discusses this fall’s Modern Segregation lecture/workshop series in the context of recent events in Ferguson, Mo., and the “urgent need for the university to be a university.”

Playwright-in-residence Carter Lewis recommends “Good In Everything,” the new Shakespeare in the Streets adaptation of “As You Like It.” Performances are Thursday through Saturday, Sept. 18-20, in Clayton.

This week, Kristen O’Neal, a senior in English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will present a staged reading of “Kairos,” her first full-length play, as part of the university’s annual A.E. Hotchner New Play Festival. O’Neal discusses “Kairos,” the playwriting process, and what it is like to finally hear the words out loud.

​Washington University in St. Louis’ Jill Stratton, the “world’s oldest RA,” hel​ps students, staff and faculty to find their joy. Stratton strives to develop common education experiences, multidisciplinary courses and expanded programming at university housing.

H. Holden Thorp, PhD, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, will be named the inaugural holder of the Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professorship during a ceremony at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, in Emerson Auditorium in Knight Hall.

Sharon Stahl, PhD, vice chancellor for students at Washington University in St. Louis and longtime adviser and mentor to undergraduates in the College of Arts & Sciences, has announced that she will retire at the end of the academic year, June 30, 2015, according to Provost H. Holden Thorp.