Arts & Sciences

A review including new data analysis, published Oct. 14 in Science, exposes the harm mass incarceration has on families and advocates for family-friendly criminal justice interventions.

In the wake of the Great Recession, U.S. undergraduate degrees conferred in English language or literature fell roughly a quarter. Yet over the last three years, WashU’s English major has grown by about 30% — reflecting changes to how the department recruits, supports and communicates with undergraduate students.

Can you ever escape your past? Tennessee Williams spent a lifetime trying. His years in New York, New Orleans and Key West are the stuff of literary legend. But it was St. Louis where Williams lived longest, and St. Louis that shaped him as an artist and a person. So argues Henry I. Schvey in “Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams.”

The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity has launched a new podcast, “Everywhere with CRE².” The podcast plans to explore research from center faculty and fellows and dive deep into issues affecting St. Louis and the world.

Nan Liu, research assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is first author of a new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that analyzes a diverse set of presolar grains with the goal of realizing their true stellar origins.

Islands are hot spots of evolutionary adaptation that can also advantage species returning to the mainland, according to a study led by biologist Jonathan Losos in Arts & Sciences, published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New research from the laboratory of Jonathan Losos begins to unravel one of the major mysteries of invasion biology: why animals that tend not to hybridize in their native range abandon their inhibitions when they spread into a new land. The study is published the week of Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A lunar probe launched by the Chinese space agency recently brought back the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years. Now an international team of scientists, including Bradley Jolliff in Arts & Sciences, has determined the age of these moon rocks at close to 1.97 billion years old.

Richard Loomis, professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences, received a three-year $700,000 grant, with a collaborator at Marquette University, from the National Science Foundation to study highly energized molecules’ reaction pathways.

Dorothy, a publishing project — the independent book publisher co-founded by Danielle Dutton and Martin Riker — has entered into a sales and distribution agreement with the New York Review of Books that will amplify its book promotion and marketing efforts. Dutton, associate professor of English, and Riker, senior lecturer in English, both in Arts & Sciences at Washington University […]