Arts & Sciences

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo ServicesCommunity Music SchoolWashington University has reached an agreement with Webster University to purchase the Community Music School building, 560 Trinity Ave., in University City. Built in 1929, the two-story, 45,000-square-foot former synagogue is located less than a mile from the Hilltop Campus and will provide Washington University with additional — and much needed — performance, rehearsal and teaching facilities.

Fiction writer Scott Heim will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, for the Writing Program Reading Series. Heim is the author of the novel Mysterious Skin (1995), recently adapted to film by director Gregg Araki. The story is set in the small-town of Hutchinson, KS, where two boys belonging to the same Little League team unknowingly share struggles and obsession — sex, loyalty, first love and aliens — that direct their adolescent lives.

MayLarry May, Ph.D., professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences, will deliver a keynote address on “The Moral Writer” as part of Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors, Washington University’s fourth annual faculty book colloquium, at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 7, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

WUSTL Photo Services*Koto* by Alonzo KingWashington University Dance Theatre (WUDT), the annual showcase of professionally choreographed works performed by student dancers, will present Reach/Rebound, its 2005 concert, Dec. 2-4 in Edison Theatre. The concert will feature close to 40 dancers, selected by audition, performing six works by faculty and guest choreographers, including Alonzo King, founder and artistic director of Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet in San Francisco.

Marissa Shields, winner of the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences’ annual Young Artist Piano Concerto Competition, will appear as soloist.

He is the author of Mysterious Skin, a novel that “will haunt and enrage you”; it was recently adapted to film by director Gregg Araki.

For Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., associate professor of Persian and of comparative literature, both in Arts & Sciences, poetry is much more than an academic discipline. It is a profoundly personal experience that requires both the poet and the reader to be fully involved in its consummation. “Poetry is the magic we perform with language,” she […]

Carl M. Bender, Ph.D., professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, delivered a talk, titled “Ghost Busting: Making Sense of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians,” as a principal invited speaker at four international conferences this summer. The first conference was the 10th Claude Itzykson Meeting on “Quantum Field Theory Then and Now,” held in June at the Service […]

John R. Bowen, Ph.D., the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a 2005 Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corp. of New York. Bowen, who also is chair and professor of Social Thought and Analysis in Arts & Sciences, is one of 16 scholars nationwide selected in this highly competitive fellowship program.

The Washington University Symphony Orchestra will be joined by Marissa Shields, winner of the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences’ annual Young Artist Piano Concerto Competition, for a performance at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, in the University’s Graham Chapel.