Arts & Sciences

One thousand years ago this year, a Japanese court lady put the finishing touches on what would become the world’s oldest novel. Spanning 75 years, more than 350 characters and brimming with romantic poems, “The Tale of Genji” tells the story of an emperor’s son, his quest for love and the many women he meets […]

An expert on race relations, prejudice and diversity issues in a multicultural society, Alvin Poussaint, M.D., will present the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture for the Assembly Series. The talk will be held at 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 15, in the Laboratory Sciences Auditorium on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

Patterns in the Midwest this spring are eerily reminiscent of 1993 and 1994, back-to-back years of serious flooding. But Midwesterners have not learned “geologic reality,” says Robert E. Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences.

Irish poet and novelist Ciaran Carson will read from his work at 8 p.m. Monday, April 14, for the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. The event, sponsored as part of the Writing Program’s spring Reading Series, is free and open to the public and takes place in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge. Carson […]

One mark of a great novel, it’s been said, is its ability to stand the “test of time,” to remain captivating to readers from generation to generation. Washington University will honor such a novel Friday, April 18, with two campus events celebrating the 1,000th anniversary of “The Tale of Genji”, a central pillar of the Japanese literary canon.

Merle Kling, Ph.D., former provost, executive vice chancellor, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis, died April 8 of esophageal cancer in St. Louis. He was 89.

BarchThe Silvio Conte Center for Neuroscience Research at Washington University has a new director. Deanna Barch, associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, of psychiatry and of radiology, takes over leadership of the center from John Csernansky, the former Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry, who has become the chairman of psychiatry at Northwestern University.

A team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis that includes Alan R. Templeton and the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa has developed a technique to detect the ancestry of disease genes in hybrid, or mixed, human populations. The technique, called expected mutual information (EMI), determines how a set of DNA markers is likely to show the ancestral origin of locations on each chromosome.

David MarchantPAD students in Cecil Slaughter’s “Grid”A group of 18 students dancers from the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences has taken top honors at the Central Region conference of the American College Dance Festival Association. The conference was held March 4 to 9 at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. The students were recognized for their performance of “Grid,” an original work choreographed by Cecil Slaughter, senior lecturer in dance.

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo Services*The Lion and the Jewel*Men versus women, modern versus traditional, culture versus colonization. Such conflicts lie at the heart of The Lion and the Jewel, a sly and subversive comedy by Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka. In April, the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will present this deceptively light-hearted carnival of dance and song as its spring mainstage production.