Arts & Sciences

Poet Kerri Webster, who is completing a three-year appointment as visiting writer in residence in The Writing Program in the Department of English, will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 15. Webster is the author of the collection We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, as well as a pair of chapbooks: Rowing Through Fog and Psalm Project.

Genetic variations among moray eels don’t show any geographic patterning, apparently because a long-lived larval form called a leptocephalus maintains gene flow among populations. With geographic isolation off the table, it is difficult to understand how the morays diversified into many species.

The Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present its fourth biennial Young Choreographers Showcase Friday, April 9, through Sunday, April 11, in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The concert will feature more than a dozen dancers in nine original works created by student choreographers in the Dance Program. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office at (314) 935-6543.  

Writer Tatyana Tolstaya, one of the foremost chroniclers of post-Gorbachev Russia, will present a pair of events at Washington University April 5 and 6. Tolstaya is the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. 

Regarded as one of the nation’s leading African historians, Jean Allman, PhD, shares her passion for the continent through her teaching, mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students, prolific writing and worldwide scholarly presentations, and editorship of a book series that ensures other scholars’ writings about African history are published.

A team of psychologists at Washington University that include graduate student Jonathan Jackson have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.

Bernard F. Schutz, PhD, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture Wednesday, April 7. Schutz will give a talk titled “Gravitational Waves: Listening to the True Music of the Spheres” at 7 p.m.

James Lennox, PhD, a prominent scholar of the history and philosophy of biology, will deliver the annual John and Penelope Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 7, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium. This event, which is free and open to the public, originally was scheduled for April 8.

Outgoing, gregarious people who fill their lives with deep, meaningful conversations may have found at least one key to a happier life, suggests research from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Arizona.

A new chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the national collegiate Hispanic honor society and largest foreign-language honor society in the world, opened on campus with an induction ceremony March 22 in the Danforth University Center.