Arts & Sciences

Soprano Debra Hillabrand, a master’s candidate in vocal performance in Washington University’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, will present a graduate voice recital at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 24. The program includes music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Charles Ives as well as the gypsy songs of Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák.

A sociocultural anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis spent 18 months in a Mexican convent in an attempt to understand young women’s motivations for leaving their homes, friends, school and independence to become a nun. Rebecca J. Lester, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, was also interested in understanding “what goes on emotionally, psychologically and spiritually with these women as they try to decide if they should pledge themselves eternally to Christ and the church.” Lester found while doing her fieldwork at the convent from 1994-95 that the more interesting question was “what kept these women there, day after day?” In her new book, “Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent,” released April 5, Lester sets out to explain the force of “the call.”

Tennessee Williams’ ‘blue’ bookA piece of literary history has returned to Washington University in St. Louis, thanks to a fortuitous find in a New Orleans bookstore. In 2004, Henry I. Schvey, Ph.D., professor and chair of the university’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, co-directed the world premiere of “Me, Vashya,” a one-act play written in 1937 by then-student Tennessee Williams. Only weeks later, Schvey happened upon another important Williams-related artifact from 1937: a small blue Washington University test booklet containing what appears to be Williams’ Greek final, which he had worried about passing, as well as a previously unknown poem. It is assumed Williams wrote the 17-line poem, which he appropriately titled “Blue Song,” in the back of the booklet while taking his exam.

“This research opens up the possibility of getting detailed protein information from past human populations,” says WUSTL anthropologist Erik Trinkaus.

The concert is free and open to the public and will be held in conjunction with the exhibit Inside Out Loud at the Kemper Art Museum.

He wrote The Other Man Was Me, which won a National Poetry Series Award; and What the Body Told, which won a Lambda Literary Award for poetry.

Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal evolved from notes Childs took while doing fieldwork in Nubri.

Performing Arts Department Director Henry I. Schvey made the fortuitous find in a New Orleans French Quarter bookstore.

A WUSTL researcher has identified a bacterium as the pathogen living on bubbles in hot water environments.A team of researchers, led by an environmental engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, has applied a molecular approach to identify the biological particles in aerosol responsible for making employees of a Colorado hospital therapeutic pool ill. They found: when the bubble bursts, the bacteria disperse, and lifeguards get pneumonia-like symptoms.

Combinatorial chemistry provides researchers a vast library from which to choose.A researcher studying drug design for nerve damage therapies has gotten her answer to questions by following some old advice: she used the library. It’s not the kind of library her mother or teacher suggested, but a combinatorial chemistry library of many different protein sequences that some day might help her and her colleagues develop a successful timed drug delivery system.