Arts & Sciences

Richard Stang, PhD, professor emeritus of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Dec. 14, 2011, of pancreatic cancer. He was 86. Stang specialized in 19th-century English literature, particularly the Victorian period.

Constitutional courts worldwide are increasingly turning to legal arguments and ideas from other countries for guidance and inspiration. But scholarly interest in the growing judicial use of foreign law paints a very misleading picture of the globalization of constitutional law, says David Law, JD, PhD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that for those who want to see the U.S. Supreme Court make greater and more sophisticated use of foreign law, encouraging its members or inviting them to additional conferences and gatherings is likely to have little impact. “At this point in time, the greatest obstacle to judicial comparativism in the United States is not the unwillingness of individual judges to consider foreign legal materials, it is the current political economy of the American legal education.”  

Some WUSTL news stories never get old, and some just get better with time. WUSTL news editors picked 11 stories from 2011 — some new, some old — but all worth a second look as we head into 2012.

Any multicellular animal poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of its cells will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes. Given the incentive for cheating, how is cooperation among the cells enforced? In the Dec. 16 issue of the journal Science, Washington University in St. Louis biologists Joan Strassmann and David Queller suggest the answer is frequent population bottlenecks that restart populations from a single cell.

With the holidays right around the corner, many parents are scanning the latest “recommended toy” lists as they make their final purchases. An education expert at Washington University in St. Louis says that, while educational toys are a fine idea, children receive the most benefit when their parents play with them and engage them in their new gifts. R. Keith Sawyer, PhD, associate professor of education in Arts & Sciences, offers advice to parents worried about making the right toy choices for their children.

Ernst K. Zinner, research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a three-year, $1,380,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study presolar grains in a sample of the Murchison meteorite, a primitive meteorite that fell to Earth near the town of Murchison, Australia, in 1969. Presolar grains are literally tiny bits of stars — stardust — that were born and died billions of years ago, before the formation of the solar system. Some carry within them clues to the process of nucleosynthesis by which new elements are forged in the bellies of supernovae. 

Jennifer K. Lodge, PhD, and Ernst Zinner, PhD, have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Lodge and Zinner are among 539 new fellows who will be acknowledged in the Dec. 23 issue of Science magazine.The 2011 AAAS Fellows also will be honored at a Feb. 18, 2012, ceremony at the organization’s annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Opera on the Kansas plains? Picnic, a recent work by American composer Forrest Pierce, centers on a handsome drifter whose arrival in small Midwestern town spells both liberation and catastrophe. At 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Dec. 15 and 16, the Washington University Opera Workshop will present excerpts from Picnic, which features a libretto by WUSTL’s Tim Ocel, and four other operas in the 560 Music Center Ballroom Theater.

Remarks made during the recently settled NBA lockout brought the subject of race and sports back into the forefront. Gerald Early’s A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports, is a series of essays that give historical perspective to the issue of race and sports through distinct personalities such as baseball’s Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood and NFL quarterback Donovan McNabb. Early, PhD, is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Most WUSTL faculty members teach a variety of courses to both graduate and undergraduate students but can have limited opportunities to discuss teaching with colleagues outside of their department. WUSTL offers i teach, its biennial symposium on teaching, to provide such an opportunity. The 2012 i teach symposium will take place Thursday, Jan. 12, from 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. at Seigle Hall on the Danforth Campus. It is free and open to all WUSTL faculty members.