Arts & Sciences

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.

Literally translated as “evening of song,” Liederabend is a German term referring to a recital given by a singer and pianist.

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

Fish in ponds can be a flowering plant’s best friend, according to WUSTL ecologists.Fish and flowering plants would seem to have as much in common as pigs and beauty soap. But ecologists at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Florida have found an amazing relationship between the different species that provides a new direction for understanding how ecosystems “hook up.” A team of researchers, headed by Tiffany Knight, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has shown a correlation between the presence of fish in ponds and well-pollinated St. John’s wort (Hypericum fasciculatum, Hypericaceae) at a Florida research station.

Photo by David Kilper / WUSTL PhotoThoroughman (background) and Taylor tracked the moves that people make.Practice makes perfect when people learn behaviors, from baseball pitching to chess playing to public speaking. Biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have now identified how people use individual experiences to improve performance.

Anthropologists uncover new theory on hunter-gatherer communities at one of North America’s largest, oldest earthen mounds, in northeastern Louisiana.The typical picture of the hunter-gatherer community is that of a small number of people wandering across the landscape, hunting for food and gathering nuts and berries. They were not complex in their political and social organization and were thought of as very simple people. But could that traditional viewpoint be completely wrong? An anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis thinks it may be, especially for hunter-gatherer communities in Southern and Eastern parts of the United States.