Arts & Sciences

McdonnellJohn F. McDonnell retired as chairman of the board for McDonnell Douglas Corporation in 1997 after a more than 35-year career at the company. He was elected chairman and chief executive officer in 1988, a position he held until September 1994. From then until his retirement at the time of the merger with Boeing, he was chairman of the board. McDonnell led the company successfully through the early 1990’s when the U.S. defense budget and the aerospace markets were shrinking dramatically. In the face of a rapidly consolidating aerospace industry, he oversaw the merger of McDonnell Douglas with Boeing to create the world’s largest, broadest, and strongest aerospace company.

Courtesy photoMichael MartoneAcclaimed fiction writer and essayist Michael Martone, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 27. In addition, Martone will speak on coincidence and fate in fiction in a lecture entitled “Homer on Homer or a Bunch of Stuff That Happens” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3.

Richard Burkhardt will examine the scientific, social and political aspects in the development of ethology as a modern science in his Thomas Hall Lecture at 4 p.m. on October 25. He teaches history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and specializes in the history of evolutionary theory and ethology, which is the study of animal behavior by means of comparative zoological methods.

Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow will discuss “The Economics of New Antimalarial Drugs” at 2:30 p.m. Oct. 21 in the Bryan Cave Courtroom, Anheuser-Busch Hall. Arrow, a longtime professor of economics at Stanford University, recently chaired a National Institute of Medicine committee that issued a report titled “Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance.” Malaria, along with tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, is one of the big three global killers of the world’s poorest people.

Based upon research done in northeastern Louisiana, anthropology’s T.R. Kidder thinks the traditional viewpoint could be completely wrong.

The blistering yet exuberant depiction of modern urban life will kick off the OVATIONS! Series Oct. 21-22.

Forget purple mountains and fruited plains. The contemporary American landscape is more typically composed of parking lots and shopping malls, factory towns and industrial developments, argues Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. From Oct. 26-29, Coolidge will host a number of events exploring St. Louis’ urban landscape as part of the yearlong series “Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” co-sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Religion and pluralism, natural law, feminist ethics, responding to terrorism, deliberative democracy, race and reparations, American conservatism, identities and borders, and classical critiques of democracy will be among topics explored Oct. 21-22 as the Association for Political Theory holds its 2005 meeting at Washington University.

The Center on Urban Research & Public Policy is an interdisciplinary effort dedicated to promoting scholarship and debate on critical issues facing urban America and dense populations around the globe.

The center is an interdisciplinary effort dedicated to promoting scholarship and debate on critical issues facing urban America.