Arts & Sciences

At the end of high school, twins Akhil and Rohith Kesaraju were ready to go their own ways. Then they visited Washington University, and everything changed. Now, preparing to graduate, the Kesaraju twins have grown both apart and together on parallel paths of service and research.

Eileen G’Sell, senior lecturer in Arts & Sciences, has published two pieces on French filmmaker Céline Sciamma as well as the Current Affairs essay “What Do Women Really Deserve?”

Kater Murch, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, helped an Argonne Laboratory team with their effort to create a new form of qubit, reported in a recent Nature paper. This system shows great promise to be developed into ideal building blocks for future quantum computers.

The 2020 book “Bolivia in the Age of Gas” explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia. The work by Bret Gustafson, in Arts & Sciences, won the 2022 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.

Students in the “Gender and Education” spring course are examining issues surrounding gender and sexuality in education, like representation in curriculum and experiences of LGBTQ students and teachers, which have taken on new urgency given the current political climate.

The Great Artists Series at Washington University in St. Louis presents affordably priced concerts by some of today’s finest classical musicians. The 2023 series will feature Grammy Award-winning mezz-soprano J’Nai Bridges, star of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Akhnaten,” as well as the England’s legendary Academy of St Martin in the Fields with cellist Johannes Moser, pianist Emanuel Ax, and violinist Augustin Hadelich.

The Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, established in 2005 by Yale University and Howard University to recognize outstanding scholarly achievement, recently inducted four WashU doctoral candidates.

Corinna Treitel, chair and professor of history in Arts & Sciences, will co-direct an exploratory seminar at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in June 2022. With Sari Altschuler, of Northeastern University, Treitel will guide a group of 12–15 leading scholars on a discussion about “Rethinking Health and the Humanities During and After COVID-19.”

A team that includes Lee Sobotka and Robert Charity, both in Arts & Sciences, concluded that the role that neutrons play in the creation of carbon, considered the definitive building block of life, is much smaller than previously thought.

Anika Walke and Geoff Ward, both in Arts & Sciences, won a grant from the Rubin and Gloria Feldman Family Education Institute to support their upcoming Studiolab graduate course “Memory for the Future: Theories and Practices of Critical Curation.”