Arts & Sciences

Her research and teaching interests include postwar and contemporary German literature, Jewish Studies, narrative theory and autobiography.

It’s one of the most acclaimed off-Broadway shows of the last decade and surprise winner of the 1996-97 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical.

The Washington University Concert Choir will present an evening of French choral music at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 20, in Graham Chapel. The program, which will feature Gabriel Fauré’s beloved Requiem, is dedicated to the memories of Elizabeth Gray Danforth, wife of Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth and first lady of Washington University for nearly a quarter century, who passed away last spring; and Sona Haydon, a longtime lecturer in piano for the Department of Music, who died last fall.

Opal Andrews*Violet: A Musical Pilgrimage*It’s 1964. An embittered yet deeply religious young woman, disfigured by childhood injury, boards a bus for the Deep South, in search of a TV evangelist who claims to possess healing powers. So begins Violet: A Musical Pilgrimage, one of the most acclaimed off-Broadway shows of the last decade. From April 21 to 30, the Performing Arts Department will present six performances in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre.

The assistant professor of theory & composition earned a doctorate from the Juilliard School in 2005 and joined WUSTL’s music department last fall.

Jon Cook, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will speak on the craft of poetry at 8 p.m., Thursday, April 15. Cook is the author of Romanticism and Ideology (1981), William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (1991), Poetry in Theory (2004) and the forthcoming Hazlitt in Love.

Erin McGlothlin, 2006 faculty fellow and assistant professor of Germanic languages & literatures, will speak on “Narrative Transgression in Contemporary German-Jewish Holocaust Literature” April 17. The talk will investigate ways in which contemporary German-Jewish writing on the Holocaust overtly attempts to puncture the sacred taboo on Holocaust representation by deploying satire, irony, farce, the grotesque, the burlesque and the pornographic.

Fueled by the simplicity of red state-blue state election maps, some pundits have leaped to the conclusion that America is experiencing a landmark shift in traditional political allegiances, with poor, working-class voters leaving the Democratic Party to become “NASCAR Republicans” while wealthier voters join the ranks of an increasingly elite bunch of liberal, limousine-driving “Latte Democrats.” Not so, says the WUSTL co-author of a new study of how income influences state-by-state voting patterns. More …

Your mood at the time might determine whether or not you help this woman.Do you consider yourself a moral person? Most of us do. But what is it exactly that makes us moral beings? A philosopher at Washington University in St. Louis thinks that circumstance and mood often have an extraordinary impact on how people behave, no matter what kind of character they may appear to have. Or, in other words, seemingly Sweet Sally may turn into Selfish Sally if in a foul mood. More …

FieldsDistinguished professor and writer Wayne Fields will present the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities/Phi Beta Kappa/Sigma Xi Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. April 12 in Graham Chapel. The talk, on “Love and Seduction: Our Anxiety About Rhetoric,” is free and open to the public.