Arts & Sciences

A series of application workshops will be held for students interested in the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) to be held at Washington University in St. Louis April 5-7, 2013. The workshops will focus on application criteria and developing the required Commitment to Action. A Commitment to Action is a concrete plan that addresses a pressing challenge in one of CGI U’s five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, or public health. The first workshop will be held from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, in Brown Hall, Room 118. 

For decades, author, educator, environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben has been telling us things we don’t want to hear — presenting scary scorched Earth scenarios due to carbon emissions in the atmosphere. He also leads a global initiative — 350.org — to try to solve the climate crisis. McKibben will give the keynote address for the Sustainable Cities Conference Thursday, Nov. 1, on campus. 

That Mitt Romney, when he became governor of Massachusetts, did not know a sufficient number of women leaders in business and politics to appoint women he knew or knew about to positions in the state government is troublesome, says Mary Ann Dzuback, PhD, director of the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Conductor Steven Jarvi, praised as an “eloquent and decisive” conductor by The Wall Street Journal, will make his public debut with the WUSTL Symphony Orchestra Oct. 27. The Parent and Family Weekend concert, which takes place in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, will feature music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Adam Schoenberg and Edward Elgar.

Aron Rodrigue, this year’s annual Holocaust Memorial Lecturer, has put to rest the widely held notion that Sephardim living in the Balkans and other European lands during the Holocaust were not as badly affected as the Ashkenazi in Eastern Europe. The truth is they experienced the same persecution and destruction under Nazi occupation. Rodrigue will speak on campus Monday, Oct. 29.

Elizabeth Roxas, a former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre — whom The New York Times once described as the “cool, still, lyrical center of the Ailey storm” — leads a master class with dance students in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences earlier this month.

Five new department chairs have been named in Arts & Sciences: Mark G. Alford, PhD, Department of Physics; Mark Rollins, PhD, Performing Arts Department; John Nachbar, PhD, Department of Economics; Hillel Kieval, PhD, Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; Peter Schmelz, PhD, Department of Music; and Timothy Moore, PhD, Department of Classics.

In The Anchorage, his debut collection, poet Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul, in poems located in New York’s summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod’s open shoreline. On Thursday, Oct. 25, Wunderlich will read from his work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

Evolutionary biologist David C. Queller, PhD, was installed Oct. 16 as the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences in a ceremony in Holmes Lounge.

​More students are enrolling in University College’s post-baccalaureate pre-med program because of the economy and a newfound desire to help people.