Arts & Sciences

Courtesy photoLeslie MorrisLeslie Morris, Ph.D., associate professor of German and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, will launch the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences’ 2006 Faculty Fellows’ Lecture and Workshop Series with a pair of events Feb. 16 and 17.

Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, hailed by the Irish Literary Supplement as the “most acclaimed Gaelic poet of the century,” will read from her work at 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, for Washington University’s Writing Program Reading Series.

No one is born highly creative; creativity takes hard work.Do you desire to be a more creative person but don’t think you have the “creative” gene? You may have some hard work ahead, but it’s possible to become the next Walt Disney or Martha Stewart, says an expert on creativity at Washington University in St. Louis. “No one is born highly creative,” says R. Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., associate professor of education and of psychology, both in Arts & Sciences. “Psychologists studying creativity have discovered that it is based on cognitive processes we all share. Creativity is not the result of some magic brain region that some people have and others don’t.” Oxford Press has just released Sawyer’s latest book, “Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation,” a seminal overview of the history of creativity and of research into traits that highly creative people all share.

Courtesy photoOliver LakeIn the mid- and late 1960s, the Black Arts Movement emerged as the aesthetic and spiritual corollary to the Black Power philosophy. In St. Louis, Black Artists’ Group (BAG), which flourished between 1968 and 1972, gave rise to a host of nationally recognized figures, including Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett of the World Saxophone Quartet. Today, this influential yet little-known collective is undergoing a resurgence of interest, with the reissue of rare BAG recordings on the Ikef, Quakebasket and Atavistic record labels; a new definitive history published by the Missouri Historical Society Press; and an upcoming sypmosium at Washington University in St. Louis.

Photo by Bill StoverA graduate student art exhibit titled Offcourse featured the work of some 65 graduate students from numerous disciplines across the University.

The reading, sponsored by The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, is free and open to the public and will take place in Duncker Hall’s Hurst Lounge.

Photo by Mary ButkusJohn Baugh, director of African and African American Studies, was recently installed as the first Margaret Bush Wilson Professor in Arts & Sciences.

Good pollinators wantedMother Nature could use a few more good pollinators, especially in species-rich biodiversity hotspots, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS online, Jan. 16, 2006). Jana Vamosi, Ph.D, postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary and Tiffany Knight, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and their collaborators have performed an exhaustive global analysis of more than 1,000 pollination studies which included 166 different plant species and found that, in areas where there is a great deal of plant diversity, plants suffer lower pollination and reproductive success. For some plant species, this reduction in fruit and seed production could push them towards extinction.

Randy Korotev with a sample meteorite found in Siberia.The mysterious orb you find in your backyard that wasn’t there just the day before has to be a meteorite, right? Wrong. Overwhelmingly the chances are it’s a meteorwrong, says Randy Korotev, Ph.D., research associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that 998 out of 1,000 meteorites are from asteroids, one out of 1,000 is from the Moon, and one out of 1,000 is from Mars. Of the hundreds of meteorites that have been found in the United States, none has been a lunar meteorite, and only one has been a Mars meteorite.

A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes — strongly — the ‘Out of Africa’ replacement theory. That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations — thus making love, not war.