Arts & Sciences

The Washington University community is invited to watch a livestreamed conversation Nov. 9 between former first lady Michelle Obama and college students including WashU sophomore Natasha Chisholm. 

Abram Van Engen, professor of English in Arts & Sciences, has won the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize for “City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism.”

Secret military experiments. A television star turned health-care activist. The yearslong battle to remove a Confederate statue in New Orleans. This month, the Film & Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences will screen more than 20 films as part of the 2021 St. Louis International Film Festival.

A team led by biologist Arpita Bose in Arts & Sciences modified a microbe so that it can produce a biofuel using only carbon dioxide, solar panel-generated electricity and light.

Roya Beheshti Zavareh, associate professor of mathematics and statistics in Arts & Sciences, won a three-year $203,917 grant from the National Science Foundation.

P. Roy Vagelos, MD, and his wife, Diana Vagelos, are providing $15 million to support the university’s Division of Biology & Biomedical Sciences. The gift will fund undergraduate and graduate work in the life sciences. The couple made the gift to honor former Chancellor William H. Danforth, MD, who died last year.

Glenn Davis Stone, professor of sociocultural anthropology and of environmental studies in Arts & Sciences, is part of an international team of researchers funded by the European Union to study CRISPR in agriculture and food production. Stone is co-leader of the perceptions part of the study.

Research from Tim Bono, lecturer in psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences, finds that students who get a good night’s sleep night in and night out earn higher marks and have greater well-being.

In a new book, Wolfram Schmidgen, professor of English, explains how the excitement and anxiety about a disordered world affected literary invention in 18th-century England. “Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730” combines intellectual history with close analysis of the literary inventions of Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe.

Calvin Lai in Arts & Sciences received a nearly $350,000 grant, part of $33 million allotted by the Department of Justice to improve community policing.