Arts & Sciences

The Washington University Opera will present Lee Hoiby’s A Month in the Country — based on the play by Ivan Turgenev — at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 18 and 19. The piece is something of a lost gem in the world of opera: first adapted in 1964 for the New York City Opera, under the title Natalia Petrovna, it was revised in 1980 but had gone years without a performance until last December, when the Manhattan School of Music launched a well-received production.

HackerAward-winning poet Marilyn Hacker will read from her work at 7 p.m. Friday, March 18, at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The author of 11 books of poetry and essays, Hacker is a cancer survivor and prominent lesbian activist as well as an influential literary editor and a gifted translator. Much of her work details her own struggles with breast cancer and the loss of friends to AIDS. The talk sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum’s Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art.

Photo by Robert BostonA fossil of a diminutive human nicknamed “the Hobbit” likely represents a previously unrecognized species of early humans, according to the results of a detailed comparison of the fossil’s brain case with those of humans, apes and other human ancestors.

Her new book is titled The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China.

Photo by Robert BostonInvestigators Charles Hildebolt (right) and Dean Faulk hold a cast of the skull of the “Hobbit,” likely a new species of prehistoric humans.Medical school researchers performed a detailed comparison of the fossil’s brain case with those of other human ancestors. More medical news

The wife of Professor Emeritus Burton Wheeler, she died Feb. 25.

The author of a number of definitive texts, he’s a professor of ancient philosophy at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge.

Seth Carlin, David Halen and Michael Haber will take the stage at 8 p.m. March 18 in the Whitaker Hall auditorium.

The University and the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology (NCSSSMST) are co-sponsoring a professional conference March 10-12 on the Hilltop Campus. The exploration-themed conference will encourage attendees to “Map Your Course With Math, Science and Technology.”

When both husband and wife hold college degrees, it is the husband’s degree — and the husband’s degree alone — that typically determines whether a “power couple” will move to another city for career purposes, suggests a new study by economists at Washington University in St. Louis. The study is bad news for young women seeking gender equity in salary and career opportunities.