Arts & Sciences

In the wake of the 2010 election, Washington University in St. Louis congressional expert Steve Smith looks ahead to the next Congress and how the new majority in the House of Representatives and Republican gains in the Senate will affect President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda.

Acclaimed poet and fiction writer Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine as “the rock star of modern poetry” and author most recently of Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), will present a pair of events as part of the fall Writing Program Reading Series. Myles is the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. 

Shirley H. Perry, a Washington University in St. Louis alumna and author of the recently released After Many Days: My Life as a Spy and Other Grand Adventures, will tell about her days as a CIA operative during the Cold War at a reading and book signing at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Tisch Commons in the Danforth University Center at Washington University.

It’s a madcap weekend of comic mayhem as Chicago sensations 500 Clown target a pair of literary classics with in-your-face improv, commedia dell’arte and physical theater. On Friday, Nov. 5, the company will descend upon Edison Theatre with 500 Clown Macbeth, a boisterous romp through William Shakespeare, followed on Saturday, Nov. 6, by 500 Clown Frankenstein, a similar affront to Mary Shelley. 

Some of the world’s leading social scientists will be on campus Thursday through Saturday, Nov. 4-6, as Washington University in St. Louis hosts an academic conference honoring the legacy of Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North, PhD. North, who celebrates his 90th birthday Friday, Nov. 5, is the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts & Sciences and co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

The Department of Education in Arts & Sciences will host a one-day conference on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education on Friday, Nov. 5 in Seigle Hall, Room 148. Titled “Beyond Stock Stories and Folktales: African Americans and the Pipeline to the Professoriate: An Evidence-Based Examination of STEM Fields,” the conference will focus on diversity in science education.

Lighting designer Ruth Grauert, who spent 40 years as assistant and stage director to legendary choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1910-93), will discuss “The Path to Post-Modern Dance and the Nikolais Aesthetic” at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 3. The talk will explore the evolution of dance since the 1940s, as choreographers increasingly moved away from technique-centered to idea-centered works. 

Stephen Fawley, a senior in biology in Arts & Sciences, explains his research project “Using Estradiol-Inducible Promoters To Determine the Role of Auxin in Plant Defense During Pseudomonas Syringae Infection” to senior biology majors Hao Yang and Perry Morocco during the fall Undergraduate Research Symposium Oct. 23 in Olin Library.

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences will host the Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 28-30. Titled “The Past in the Present: Revolutions, Reactions, Transgressions,” the conference, co-hosted with the Office of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, will take place at the Crowne Plaza St. Louis-Clayton Hotel and in Eads and Wilson Halls on the Danforth Campus.

An international team of researchers based at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, including a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered well-dated human fossils in southern China that markedly change anthropologists perceptions of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World.