Arts & Sciences

Just as every society has it stories, so does every discipline. The history of opera and the history of science are narratives just as surely as the events unfolding in our newspapers. From April 7-10, approximately 350 scholars from across the United States and abroad will gather in St. Louis for the International Conference on Narrative, which explores the use of narrative in literature, history, cultural studies, medicine, psychology, art history, music and other disciplines. 

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, the following faculty members were appointed with tenure or promoted with tenure: David T. Curiel; Mary C. Dinauer; David C. Queller; Joan E. Strassmann; Patrick Lawrence Burke; Feng Chen; Gammon M. Earhart; Justin Fay; Michael D. Frachetti; Denise P. Head; Joseph M. Jez; Jennifer M. Kapczynski; Nan Lin; Tabea A. Linhard; Francis N. Lovett; Liang Ma; Igor Marjanovic; Robi D. Mitra; David E. Reichert; Guillermo Rosas; Gillian Kay Russell; Lori Watt; and Jie Zheng.

The National Research Council is conducting a series of “Town Hall” meetings across the country to roll out the Planetary Science Decadal Survey 2013-2022 Wednesday, April 6, and the McDonnell Center for Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis will be hosting one of the events at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, in Room 201, Crow Hall. It will consist of a one-hour presentation by Amy Simon-Hall of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who was a member of the survey’s steering committee, followed by a one-hour question-and-answer period.  

Andrew Stewart, PhD, the Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, will deliver this year’s John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in Classics as part of the Assembly Series. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium on Washington University’s Danforth campus.

Arts & Sciences recognized the achievements of five alumni during the 14th Annual Arts & Sciences Distinguished Alumni Awards Ceremony, held March 24 at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis. Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, and the Arts & Sciences National Council hosted an awards dinner.

The insult-laden screaming matches that often mark today’s political and religious disagreements don’t have to dominate the national dialogue, suggest two former St. Louis clergymen. A panel discussion on the future of interfaith cooperation, featuring Rabbi Steve Gutow, JD, and the Rev. Michael Kinnamon, PhD, is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus.

The Concert Choir of Washington University will perform King David, the dramatic oratorio by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 2, in Graham Chapel. Described by Honegger as a “symphonic psalm,” King David is divided in 27 brief sections that together revisit a series of familiar Biblical stories. These range from David’s early life as a shepherd and his relationship with Saul, the first king of Israel, to the famous battle with Goliath, David’s own rise to power and his lust for the married Bathsheba.

Love and death: the most primal of motivations. At 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 10, Washington University’s Eliot Trio — which consists of pianist Seth Carlin, violinist David Halen and cellist Bjorn Ranheim — will perform a pair of works by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93) — works composed, respectively, to honor a doomed romance and a departed friend.

University College, the continuing education and professional studies division in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL, will host a panel discussion titled “Journalism in the Digital Age: Anything Goes?” at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in the Danforth University Center, Room 234. The panel discussion is free and open to the public.

In Counting from Zero a computer security expert named Mick O’Malley must track down and thwart an enormous botnet, or network of zombie computers organized to receive commands over the Internet and perform the hacker’s bidding. The novel, by Alan B. Johnston, who teaches engineering courses at Washington University in St. Louis, is both a fast read and a chilling tutorial on the the increasingly serious threats to computer security.