Arts & Sciences

On Wed., Sept. 14, at 4 p.m. in McMillan Cafe (Room 115) in McMillan Hall, an interdisciplinary panel of Washington University professors will hold a conversation about the meaning and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Below is a link to the Washington University news release about the U.S. News & World Report undergraduate rankings for 2004-05: http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/3627.html To view a full listing of U.S. News magazine, book and Web-only rankings for 2004-05, please visit the U.S. News & World Report site: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php

As the Senate prepares to consider nominees for two Supreme Court vacancies, some liberals fear that President Bush will use the opportunity to pack the High Court with conservative-leaning justices, pushing the law of the land dramatically to the right for years to come. However, a new book on the history of America’s judicial nomination process offers compelling evidence that a president’s ability to perpetuate personal political legacies through court appointments tends to be both short-lived and unpredictable. When it comes to the politics of Supreme Court nominees, president’s don’t always get what they want, suggests WUSTL Supreme Court expert Lee Epstein.

The award-winning Uhan Shii will also offer a public performance at the Saint Louis Art Museum auditorium at 7 p.m. Sept. 23.

An homage to the great Swedish singer Jenny Lind, widely known as “The Swedish Nightengale,” will begin at 8 p.m. Sept. 12.

The staged reading focuses on Margaret, a young Korean-American architecture student who must present her final degree project.

The “Host Family Program” and the “Speak English With Us Program” are part of the Office for International Students and Scholars.

Carl Phillips, professor of English and African & African American Studies, both in Arts & Sciences, has won two prestigious poetry awards — The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry — for his recent collection The Rest of Love: Poems (2004).

Ken BotnickUnsettled GroundLandscape. The word evokes mountain lakes and desert plains, rivers and trees and fields of green. Yet in present-day America, landscape has become an increasingly complex and divisive issue. Suburban development sprawls ever outward while many traditional urban cores crumble to rust and rubble. Once a nation of cities and farms, we now find ourselves confronting a frequently uneasy mixture of natural and postindustrial environments. On Sept. 19 and 20, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts will host a national symposium titled “Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” Co-sponsored with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Unsettled Ground” is the first in a yearlong series of lectures, panel discussions, artistic interventions and workshops exploring the intersection of contemporary architecture, art, ecology and urban design.

St. Louis saxophonist Freddie Washington, a popular mainstay of Gaslight Square clubs in the 1960s, will launch Washington University’s ninth annual Jazz at Holmes series with a performance from 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 15.