Arts & Sciences

At Washington University in St. Louis this semester, the Department of Physics and University College, both in Arts & Sciences, will describe a few great experiments in physics. Four lectures will be held at 10 a.m. on four consecutive Saturday mornings, March 10–31, in the Hughes Lecture Room, Room 201 in Crow Hall.

Washington University in St. Louis will host the “Work & Livable Lives Conference” Feb. 27 and 28 to address current employment-related challenges and how they limit the ability of U.S. households to lead secure and stable lives, raise children successfully, and contribute to the community.  The conference will include panels on household financial fragility, measurement of economic security, the American Dream, labor and employment policy, and health policy and employment. All conference events will be held in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall and are free and open to the public.

WUSTL’s Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) will host an information session titled “Show Me LLI” for prospective students at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24, at West Campus. The event, free and open to senior adults ages 55 and older, will feature an orientation followed by several sample classes.

War. Terrorism. International expansion. President William McKinley is frequently overshadowed by his charismatic successor, Theodore Roosevelt, yet McKinley’s presidency was arguably the more action-packed, with lasting implications for American power and its role in the world. So argues Scott Miller, author of The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century (2011). At 5 p.m. Monday, Feb. 20, Miller will discuss McKinley and his legacy for the Center for the Humanities’s third annual Presidents’ Day Lecture.

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service at Washington University in St. Louis has announced faculty scholars receiving Innovation Grants for Community-Based Teaching and Learning. The grants provide faculty members with financial support for curriculum development and implementation.

This Valentine’s Day, flip through cable TV listings, and you’ll see a bevy of romances whose common themes and conflicts can be traced back to medieval times. What is considered “romantic” in contemporary Western society — love from afar, willingness to suffer, idealization of the love object — is partly a legacy of themes in medieval romantic poetry, says Jessica Rosenfeld, PhD, assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences and author of the book Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love After Aristotle.

Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton issued a statement Feb. 13 following the release of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2013 in which Wrighton noted the importance of our nation’s continued investment in scientific research.

Three musicians from the St. Louis Symphony will join baritone Keith Boyer, a master’s candidate in vocal performance, and pianist Amanda Kirkpatrick, teacher of applied music in Arts & Sciences, for a free performance Feb. 21. Sponsored by the Department of Music and the symphony’s Community Partnership Program, the concert will feature music of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt.

Do you understand what the IT guy is talking about? Really? Neither do The Water Coolers. Like a Seinfeld episode set to music, or a Dilbert cartoon sprung to life, this New York-based sketch comedy troupe both celebrates and eviscerates modern corporate culture in all its fast-talking, slow-moving absurdity.

Washington University in St. Louis has joined a national experiment to develop a new generation of college science and engineering faculty, one equipped to excel in the classroom as well as the lab. Founded in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL), the mission of the CIRTL network of 25 research universities  is to prepare science graduate students to be as bold and creative in the classroom as they are in their programs of research.