Arts & Sciences

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.

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 on April 18 with two campus events celebrating the 1,000th anniversary of the Tale of Genji, a central pillar of the Japanese literary canon often hailed as the world’s first novel.

An international group of researchers, led by Fiona Marshall, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought.

Washington University’s Eliot Trio will perform a pair of piano trios by Edouard Lalo and Franz Schubert at April 10 in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall. Dedicated to performing masterworks of the piano trio literature, the group consists of Seth Carlin, professor of music and director of the piano program in the Department of Music; violinist David Halen, concertmaster for the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra; and cellist Bjorn Ranheim, also with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

The Film and Media Studies Program in Arts & Sciences will host the 2008 Italian Film Festival of St. Louis April 4 through April 19. The festival will feature the St. Louis premieres of six recent Italian feature films, screened on Fridays and Saturdays for three consecutive weeks. All films will be shown in 35mm […]

Renowned Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun will join award-winning American poet Brian Henry for a reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 3. The event, sponsored by the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences as part of its spring Reading Series, is free and open to the public and takes place in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst […]

Glen Bowersock, D.Phil., an internationally respected historian on Greek, Roman and Near Eastern history and culture, will give the Biggs Lecture in the Classics for the Assembly Series. The talk, “Globalization in Late Antiquity,” is scheduled for 4 p.m. April 10 in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. Bowersock is professor emeritus of ancient history at the Institute […]