Arts & Sciences

“The anthropological concept of culture is extremely important and often misunderstood because many of the things that are assumed to be biologically determined, like criminality or homosexuality or IQ, are really behaviorally and societally defined,” says WUSTL physical anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, and it forms the basis for his Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture, “The Importance of the Concept of Culture to Science and Society,” the next Assembly Series program held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 9.

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, many faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure. Read more to see who they are.

When Carl Neureuther, a 1940 graduate of Washington University, set up an endowment in 1987 to support library collections, he was also ensuring support for something more: a lifelong love of reading. The results are in for this year’s Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition sponsored by Washington University Libraries.

Parents must learn to accept the people their children are, as opposed to the people we wish them to be. A difficult lesson—all the more so when that child is a centaur. In “Sagittarius,” author Greg Hrbek follows a young couple frantically searching for their missing newborn—who is either a child with profound birth defects or a miraculous, mythological creature.

Featuring more than 100 students from the WUSTL Choirs and WUSTL Symphony Orchestra, the annual Chancellor’s Concert is among the university’s largest performances of the year. “American Voices,” the 2013 concert, which takes place April 7, will feature music by Leonard Bernstein, Randall Thompson, Aaron Copland and Howard Hanson.

As part of its Clinton Global Initiative University efforts, Washington University in St. Louis has announced a major institutional commitment to action around the important issue of sustainability.

The Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) disappeared from the Negev, the desert region in southern Israel, in the 1920s. But a remnant herd survived in the Shah of Iran’s zoo. Some of these animals were reintroduced to the desert beginning in 1982. Recently scientists at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Washington University in St. Louis have been inventing clever new ways to check on the status of these famously elusive animals.

Washington University Professor Gerald L. Early, PhD, a noted essayist and American culture critic, will receive a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame in The Loop. An induction ceremony will be at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, April 11, outside the Moonrise Hotel, 6177 Delmar Blvd. His star will be embedded at a later time near the corner of Delmar and Eastgate Avenue after construction is completed on the first phase of WUSTL’s Loop Student Living Initiative.

Mindfulness — paying attention to one’s current experience in a nonjudgmental way — might help us to learn more about our own personalities, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, author of the Tony- and Pulitzer-nominated In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), will discuss her work for the Performing Arts Department April 3. The PAD will produce Ruhl’s provocative, critically acclaimed comedy as its spring Mainstage production April 19-28.