Arts & Sciences

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. 

If the titans of finance had only been paying attention, they would have seen that former Washington University in St. Louis economics professor Hyman P. Minsky had predicted the Great Recession decades before it happened.

The Washington University Summer Writers Institute will offer a new Multi-Genre workshop, which will encompass fiction, poetry and screenwriting, along with its popular Creative Nonfiction workshop.

Adeetee Bhide, a senior majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious Churchill Scholarship. Each year, only 14 Churchill Scholars are selected from among 103 American colleges and universities. Bhide also is just the second WUSTL student to have ever won a Churchill.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is among the most celebrated Irish poets of her generation and arguably the foremost female poet today writing in Ireland and Great Britain. Next week, Ní Chuilleanáin, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will present two events as part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series 

Praised as “one of the finest players of his generation” by the Moscow’s Kommersant Daily, Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton is renowned for his spectacular performances of Romantic music, particularly the work of Franz Liszt (1811-86). On Feb. 26, Hamilton will mark the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth with a solo piano recital titled “Liszt and His Contemporaries: A Pianistic Panorama” and take part in a free symposium organized by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. 

Freshmen Ana Solorio (left), Michelle Hall and Dylan Simonsen chat with James E. McLeod, vice chancellor for students and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, during a reception this winter at Whittemore House. The three students were honored as the inaugural class of James E. McLeod Scholars.

Washington University in St. Louis students are helping students in Scott McClintock’s middle school science class at Maplewood-Richmond Heights use wind turbines, solar collectors and other materials to investigate ways to maximize energy from renewable sources.

City versus forest. Apollonian rationality versus Dionysian subconscious. Wayward lovers and working-class thespians versus the regal, glittering world of the fairies. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a study in contrasts, joining elegant verse and bawdy humor with cruel punishments and magical enchantments “past the wit of man.” This month, the Performing Arts Department will present the Bard’s most popular comedy — arguably the most popular ever written — as its spring Mainstage production.  

How have race relations in America evolved since the civil rights movement of the 1960s? Was the election of President Barack Obama a milestone in this regard? Did it truly serve as a turning point in America’s history of racial inequality? Later this month, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis will explore these questions and more with a symposium titled “Race in the Age of Obama.”