Arts & Sciences

The Gateway Arch soars above the City of St. Louis. Eero Sarrinen’s awe-inspiring design is visually stunning, extraordinarily graceful and an architectural masterpiece, but it is also a mathematical marvel.

Have African-American intellectuals abandoned the Civil Rights Movement? Do black academics need to reengage the larger community, and if so, how? What is the relationship between contemporary politics and popular culture? Some of the nation’s most prominent African-American writers and thinkers will address these questions and more during the 2009 Callaloo Conference, which takes place March 25-28 at Washington University in St. Louis.

Two years ago, Washington University alumna Elizabeth Birkenmeier (LA ’08), then a junior, relished her role as a rash, young Queen Elizabeth in the historical drama “Highness,” winner of WUSTL’s 2006 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition, held annually in the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences. Now Birkenmeier has returned to campus, but this time as a playwright who will witness the world premiere of her own winning production—”Candlestick Park”—at the end of this month.

Acclaimed dancer and choreographer Claire Porter will present an informal dance concert titled Namely, Muscles at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 20, in the Annelise Mertz Dance Studio. The hour-long, one-woman show features Porter as Dr. Nickie Nom, a “forensic orthopedic autopsy muscular anatomical specialist” whose poetry enacts all the major muscles of the body — and then some.

Pianist and harpsichordist Charles Metz, Ph.D., will perform an intimate program for the Washington University Department of Music in Arts & Sciences at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 22, as part of its spring 2009 concert series. The concert — which will take place at the 560 Music Center in University City — will feature 16th-century English and 17th-century Italian music performed on the virginal, a smaller, rectangular version of the harpsichord.

The Washington University Opera, led by director Jolly Stewart, will present Dominick Argento’s “The Aspern Papers” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 20 and 21. Written in 1987 and based on the Henry James novella published nearly a century earlier, the production is presented by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences and will be performed in the university’s Edison Theatre, located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd.

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

Numerous prominent researchers will gather at WUSTL March 12-14 to discuss the nature of human sociality. The conference, titled “Man the Hunted: The Origin and Nature of Human Sociality, Altruism and Well-Being,” is the first of its kind to focus on the evolution of cooperation, altruism and sociality in primates and humans.

Fiction writer Kate Bernheimer will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge for the Writing Program Reading Series.

NorthCommunity-based conservation in Madagascar, property rights for the poor in Argentina and trade-offs between violence and power in societies throughout human history are among topics to be explored in a free public workshop on the social science of international development from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. March 24 in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.