Arts & Sciences

The Edison will launch its 2010-11 Ovations Series with Of Bodies of Elements, a new evening-length concert by Dancing Earth, the premier indigenous contemporary dance ensemble working today. Led by choreographer Rulan Tangen, this acclaimed troupe is poised at the intersection of ritual, culture and ecology, employing Native American traditions and perspectives to explore contemporary — particularly environmental — issues and concerns.  

Christopher Field, PhD, one of the leaders of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis as an I-CARES Distinguished Speaker at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 21, in Graham Chapel. Field and a team of scientists have calculated how fast temperature zones are likely to move across the planet in the future and whether plants and animals will be able to migrate fast enough to stay ahead of the heat.

The haunting modern fairy tales of Kate Bernheimer both echo and update stories and motifs drawn from traditional German, Russian and Yiddish folklore. On Sept. 16 and 23, Bernheimer, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will present two events as part of the Writing Program Reading Series. 

The St. Louis Nu-Jazz 5tet will launch Washington University’s fall Jazz at Holmes series with a free concert at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 9. The popular series features professional jazz musicians from around St. Louis and abroad performing in Holmes Lounge — a casual, coffeehouse-style setting — most Thursday evenings throughout the academic year.  

The warming that following the last Ice Age was interrupted by a cold snap that killed off megafauna such as the giant ground sloth and the wooly mammoth. Could this crisis have been caused by an asteroid impact or a comet breaking up in the atmosphere? Unfortunately the geological evidence for such a dramatic event has not stood up to scrutiny. In PNAS a group of scientists challenges the catastrophists last, best hope: shock-synthesized nanodiamonds. 

In its 15th year, the “Work, Families and Public Policy” series, a schedule of Monday brown-bag seminars presented on campus biweekly through Dec. 6 will give faculty and graduate students of St. Louis-area universities an array of opportunities to lunch and learn. The series features one-hour seminars on research interests including labor, households, health care, law and social welfare by faculty from local and national universities.

Born and raised in Chicago, Carol Camp Yeakey, PhD, knew from an early age that cities would play a commanding role in her life.

Marshall Klimasewiski (far right), director of the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, leads a lively discussion in Eliot Hall Aug. 30 of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Freshman Reading Program book for this year.

From mordant humor and exuberant defiance to love and war and existential anguish, the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will scale the heights and plumb the depths of our shared mortal coil with its 2010-11 season.

Multimedia solos and structured improvisations will share the stage with Flamenco and classical Indian works in Dance Close Up, the biennial concert of new and original choreography by faculty in the Dance Program in Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences.