Arts & Sciences

Bridging St. Louis and Shanghai and expanding the scope of WUSTL’s academic programs far beyond the Danforth Campus, a new study abroad program is being launched at Fudan University. Aimed at examining Chinese language, culture and society, and the role of China in global and historical contexts, the comprehensive educational program is scheduled to begin in fall 2011.

A team of researchers, including earth and planetary scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, for the first time has been able to reconstruct both ocean temperature and general ice thickness of massive glaciers during one of the biggest mass extinctions in history hundreds of millions of years ago. The extinction, which occurred between 445 and 443 million years ago in the Late Ordovician Period, is one of the five biggest mass extinctions in Earth history, wiping out an estimated 75 percent of simple marine species.

In 1997, at the distinguished Siddons School on Manhattans Upper East Side, the school year opens with distressing news: Astra Dell, “that pale girl,” “the dancer with all the hair,” is suffering from a rare disease. And so begins All Souls, the funny, poignant and wickedly original tale of innocence, daring and illness by Christine Schutt, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences, who will present two events as part of the Writing Program Reading Series. 

Practice may not always make perfect, but a novel study of Midwestern middle school science students suggests it just might. New research from Washington University in St. Louis shows that students who received three quizzes on content questions before a unit test performed at the “A” level on those test questions, compared with a “C” level on questions that were not quizzed beforehand but still on the test.

Many modern copies of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto IV, include the phrase “glitter and light” when describing the beauty of Queen Lucifera. But is that the phrase Spenser intended to depict the self-proclaimed monarch? This is one of many questions that Joseph Loewenstein, PhD, tackles as an editor of a new Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser.

Gerald L. Early, PhD, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of the Center for the Humanities, has been named to the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences established by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Washington University in St. Louis graduate and undergraduate students recently helped teacher Scott McClintock and his students at Maplewood Richmond Heights Middle School complete a diverse study of wind energy, biomass, solar power, and hydropower, spending an entire week with four different classes.

Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal (left) explains her research during the 16th annual Graduate Student Research Symposium held Saturday, Feb. 26, in the Laboratory Sciences Building. She was among nearly 60 graduate and professional students who presented their work to a broad audience of diverse academic backgrounds.

One of the most acclaimed poets of her generation, Louise Glück has, over the last four decades, received virtually every major honor available to a U.S. poet, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” At 8 p.m. Thursday, March 10, Glück, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University, will read from her work as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series. 

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British ambassador to the United States, will deliver a major policy address at 4 p.m. Friday, March 4, in Holmes Lounge, Ridgley Hall. His talk is the annual T.S. Eliot Lecture, which is named in honor of the famed poet and author who was the grandson of WUSTL co-founder William Greenleaf Eliot.