Arts & Sciences

Japanese body art, elaborate tattoos, fashion and pre-modern pornography are among topics to be explored as the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis opens its fall seminar series. The Japan Embodied: New Approaches to Japanese Studies seminar series opens at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, in Room 18, Busch Hall, on the Danforth Campus with a free, public program on body ornamentation in Japanese culture.

The voice is commonly understood as a vehicle for communicating meaning and, alternatively, as a source of aesthetic pleasure — approaches personified by the military commander and the opera singer. But in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar proposes a third paradigm: psychoanalysis. In October, Dolar, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor, will lead a three-day series, titled “From Hegel to Freud and Kafka,” exploring the linguistics, metaphysics, ethics and politics of the voice, as well as its use by Sigmund Freud, Georg W.F. Hegel and Franz Kafka.

The Mars rover Opportunity, which was designed to operate for three months and to rove less than a mile, has now journeyed more than seven years crossing more than 21 miles. Today, it is poised at the edge of a heavily eroded impact basin, the possible location of clay minerals formed in low-acid wet conditions on the red planet.

Arts & Sciences students will have to look in a new place this year to find their advisers and other administrative services. The College of Arts & Sciences moved its offices over the summer to the first floor of Cupples II Hall, which has been renovated over the past year. In addition, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the Office of Undergraduate Research have new homes in Cupples II.

Students in a service-learning course in the Department of History in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are working on an application to get the grocery store and its adjacent buildings — better known as “Tillie’s Corner” — on the National Register of Historic Places. The class, “Building St. Louis History: The City and Its Renaissance,” is taught by Sonia Lee, PhD, assistant professor of history.

Frustration, friendship, struggle, joy, anguish and love are among the emotions explored by some of Japan’s most talented young actresses as the Young Starlets in Japanese Cinema film festival debuts at Washington University in St. Louis Sept. 24 through Nov. 5. Among the films being shown is Kamikaze Girls, the 2004 film from director Nakashima Tetsuya.

Compression. Suspension. Torsion. Failure. The language of dance finds surprising echoes in the language of engineering. This fall, Lucy Guerin Inc., one of Australia’s premiere young dance companies, will launch the Edison Ovation Series with Structure and Sadness, an award-winning, evening-length work inspired by the 1970 collapse of Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge.  

Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held on the Danforth Campus biweekly beginning Monday, Sept. 19, through Nov. 28. Presentations will be from noon-1 p.m. in Seigle Hall, Room 348. The series begins with a lecture by Joan C. Williams, JD, the Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California Hastings College of the Law Foundation Chair and director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings on “Why Gender is So Unbending: Gender Pressures on Men.”

James E. McLeod, vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, died Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital of kidney failure after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 67. In a letter addressed to the WUSTL community Sept. 6, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced that “Washington University has lost one of its greatest citizens and leaders.”

Because the Sept. 11 attacks happened on U.S. soil, it makes sense that they might have had a more profound impact in the United States than in Western Europe. But key differences in how Muslims were perceived before 9/11 in the United States and Western Europe also played a key role in how much — or how little — attitudes on Muslims changed after 9/11, says John R. Bowen, PhD, an anthropology and religious studies professor, both in Arts & Sciences, at WUSTL.