Arts & Sciences

Cemeteries and marching bands, skeleton krewes and carnivals both glittering and raucous. Even prior to Hurricane Katrina, few cities understood the fine line between revelry and requiem better than New Orleans. In April, celebrated choreographer Trey McIntyre — arguably among the most acclaimed of his generation — will return to the Edison Ovations Series with Ma Maison, a rousing homage to the spirit, vibrancy and resiliency of The City that Care Forgot.

Cellist Anne Fagerburg, violist Morris Jacob and violinist Erin Schreiber — all members of the St. Louis Symphony — will join pianist Martin Kennedy, assistant professor of music, and mezzo-soprano Nöel Prince, instructor in voice, for a free performance at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 28. Sponsored by the Department of Music and the St. Louis Symphony Community Partnership program, the concert will feature music of Franz Liszt, Edward MacDowell, Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.

Julian Bond, one of the nation’s most respected civil rights leaders, will deliver the keynote address for the Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship 20th Anniversary Conference and Alumni Reunion March 31- April 1 at Washington University in St. Louis. Bond’s address, titled “Post Racial America: Fact or Fiction?” will be at 11 a.m. Friday, April 1, in Graham Chapel. It is free and open to the public.

A Cannes Film Festival-winning science fiction film from Kenya, Pumzi (Air), is one of the highlights of the sixth annual African Film Festival Friday, March 25, through Sunday, March 27 at Washington University in St. Louis. This year’s eight films, all of which will be shown in Brown Hall, Room 100, focus on themes of immigration and personal responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.