Arts & Sciences

The American public exhibits deep partisan divisions about the direction that federal fiscal policy should take, finds a new national survey from the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The American Panel Survey will take place monthly, and will measure shifts in attitudes over time.

Peter Gizzi’s poetry practically vibrates with tensions — between the lyrical and the abstract, joy and grief, interior and exterior. In Threshold Songs, his fifth and most recent collection, the writer is at once elegiac and experimental, building poems and shaping meanings from the rhythms and collisions of words and language even as he mourns a string of personal losses. On Thursday, Feb. 23, Gizzi, the Visiting Hurst Professor of Poetry, will read from his work as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series.

Herbie Hancock is arguably the most influential jazz pianist of the last 50 years. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, Washington University’s Jazz at Holmes series will pay tribute to Hancock with an evening of his music performed by St. Louis’ own Ptah Williams. Now in its 13th year, the series will present free concerts by local and nationally known jazz musicians most Thursday nights throughout the spring.

“Maria.” In Latin cultures, it is the iconic female name — embracing sacred and profane, encompassing women from Maria Magdalena to the Virgin Maria to the romantic lead in West Side Story. It is also the inspiration for Mad’moiselle, a richly theatrical, and frequently tongue-in-cheek, examination of the Marias in all our lives. Next month, Ballet Hispanico, the nation’s preeminent Latino dance organization, will present Mad’moiselle and other recent works as part of the Edison Ovations Series.

Dance students in the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences get things moving Feb. 6 as part of an advanced master class led by acclaimed improvisational dancer Kirstie Simson. Described as “a force of nature,” by The New York Times, Simson was on campus as the PAD’s 2012 Marcus Residency Dance Artist.

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.

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.

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.