Next year marks the 200^th anniversary of the classic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, which first gave life to “the monster,” now an icon in his own right.  The story can perhaps credit some of its long-lived popularity to the fact that it intersects with many fields of study: literature, biology, ethics, sociology, media studies and … earth science?

“I’ve always been a fan of the book,” admits Michael Wysession, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He read Frankenstein for the first time in middle school. “I was really into the whole genre. It was a big part of my adolescence.”

When WashU began to consider the many ties the book has across the university in order to celebrate the novel’s anniversary, Wysession was quick to point out the influences and parallels with his field, including how the book came to be, it’s setting and how Shelley’s ideas dovetail with the larger issue of climate change today. (Just a warning — there are some spoilers ahead for those unfamiliar with the novel.)

If you like Frankenstein, thank a volcano

We likely have earth sciences — and more specifically Mount Tambora — to thank for the novel’s creation at all. In 1816, the year the book was written, 18-year-old Mary Godwin had a bit of a reputation. She had an affair and a child out of wedlock with a married man (later her husband Percy Shelley). That summer, she and Shelley went on vacation with Lord Byron and writer-physician John Polidori to Geneva, but the weather was terrible. Gloomy, dark, rainy and cold, the group of writers decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. Mary wrote Frankenstein. So how does this involve a volcano?

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was the largest volcano eruption in the last several centuries. “There were a lot of sulfate aerosol particulates ejected into the atmosphere, and this blocks out some sunlight and causes temperatures to drop,” Wysession says. “We didn’t have satellites and computer technology at that time, so we couldn’t quantify it. But with smaller volcanic eruptions, such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991, we saw the global temperatures drop more than a degree over the next year, even in spite of the El Niño at that time, which normally drives temperatures upward.

“The following year, 1816, was known as ‘The Year Without Summer,’” Wysession continues. “The climate in the eastern United States was just devastating. Crops failed, the winter rains were freezing, it snowed in the summer; there was mass starvation. Whole towns in New England actually decided to pack up and leave, causing a mass exodus south and westward.” Though the Louisiana Purchase was made in 1803, it wasn’t until this time that the first large migration began. So this volcano in Indonesia played an important role in the settling of the United States.

But back to Mary Shelley. “Europe was also devastated. Temperatures were several degrees colder on average. It was cold, bleak and rainy, and there was massive flooding,” Wysession says. In fact, the flooding inspired many European governments to found their first national scientific organizations to study meteorology in order to better predict such floods in the future. “It was a dismal time, and I think that led to a feeling of gloom and pessimism that year throughout Europe, which was particularly hard hit. It was the perfect atmosphere for dreaming up Frankenstein.”

Exploring the Arctic

Modern-day earth scientists study the Arctic to learn about our planet’s changing climate. For different reasons, people in the 17^th and 18^th century were fascinated with the Poles. Many hoped to find a northwest passage for commercial reasons, but for most, it was the mystery. “It was this frontier,” Wysession says, “and there weren’t many frontiers left. People had no idea what was up there. At the time of Mary Shelley’s writing, there were still people — learned people — who thought there was this tropical land at the North Pole with sunny sands and palm trees, and if you could only get across the ice, you would find this paradise.

“It was also a disastrous place where repeated expeditions dramatically failed: ships stuck in the ice for months or years, crushed by the ice, and many explorers simply never returned,” he says. “It was this terrible but very attractive place, so huge numbers of fictional stories at the time involved the North Pole.” Several Edgar Allen Poe stories take place at the Poles, and even Dracula featured a ship coming back from the Arctic with no one left alive.

This cultural fascination also plays out in Frankenstein. The Arctic provides the bookends of the novel. Captain Robert Walton, a sea captain, who has set out for the North Pole for fame and fortune, rescues the nearly frozen Victor Frankenstein from the icy landscape. When Frankenstein learns of the captain’s mission, the scientist recounts his life’s tale and the misery his creation of the monster has caused. After providing this warning, Frankenstein dies, and the monster boards the ship to mourn his passing. Famously, the monster then drifts out to sea on an ice raft, never to be seen again.

The danger of Arctic travel surely provided inspiration to Shelley and her contemporaries, but stories like Frankenstein also reveal a fascination with the act of discovering new knowledge. People then were as fascinated by science as we are now. Remember Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth? It sounds crazy to us now, but Wysession says there were serious scientific theories at the time that predicted the Earth was hollow. “There was a well-developed hollow earth theory, and Jules Verne tapped into that,” Wysession says, “just as Mary Shelley was inspired by Luigi Galvani doing experiments with dead frogs, connecting electrodes to them, putting in electric charge and watching the frogs twitch.”

Ironically, Wysession says, Frankenstein could never be framed the same way today because the ice is gone. “The Northwest Passage has opened up. Global warming has melted the ice, and what all these explorers were trying to achieve for centuries has now inadvertently occurred. So the very premise of the story couldn‘t even happen anymore. I was just up in the Arctic Circle last summer, lecturing on a National Geographic expedition, and there was very little ice. That whole region has changed dramatically.”

We are Victor Frankenstein

Though Mary Shelley didn’t predict climate change in Frankenstein, Wysession sees similarities between the actions of the eponymous scientist and our excessive production of greenhouse gasses.

Wysession, though, is the first to admit that climate change is complex. “There are many factors, no doubt about it, but I think every climate scientist now — even those that work for the petroleum industry — know that humans are contributing to global warming. We have enormous amounts of data, both current and historical. We know how greenhouse gases work. We know that the existing level of carbon dioxide causes our planet’s surface to be 30 to 35 degrees warmer than it would otherwise have been. There are very strong correlations between carbon dioxide levels and temperature over centuries, millennia, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years and even billions of years. The data are unequivocal on this.”

According to earth scientists, the planet should have been sliding into the next ice age right now, but instead, temperatures are higher than ever. “The way our climate mode has worked for the last million years or so is that we’ve had about 100,000 years of brutal, variable ice age followed by a brief, less than 10,000-year period of warmer, stable interglacial weather.” This pattern has obviously had a dramatic effect on humanity. Agrarian communities first started to develop 130,000 years ago, but then an ice age came again, and we returned to a hunter-gatherer way of living for another 100,000 years. When the climate warmed again 10,000 years ago, that’s when the roots of our civilization took hold.

“The forces that drive this ice age have nothing to do with anything on Earth,” Wysession says. “They’re called Milankovitch cycles, and they’re a function of the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit, the tilt of Earth’s axis of rotation, and the angle at which that axis of rotation points. These fluctuations alter how much sunlight reaches Earth, and how much either gets reflected off of continents, which are largely in the Northern Hemisphere, or absorbed by the ocean, which is most of the Southern Hemisphere.

“Those cycles began to drive us back into the next ice age,” Wysession says, “and it had been getting progressively cooler for thousands of years. But in an amazingly short amount of time, we‘ve not only kicked ourselves out of it, we‘re now higher in temperature than the mean peak 7,500 years ago and still going up at an unprecedented rate. There is a good reason why most countries around the world are doing everything they can to take action toward this.”

It’s difficult to pin any single weather event on climate change, but Wysession points out that the ocean was 13 inches higher when hurricane Sandy hit the east coast in 2012 than it was just 150 years prior. “One analogy I like, from climate scientist Michael Mann, is: ‘Look, if you take a basketball court and you raise the floor up by one foot, you’re going to get more slam dunks.’ And hurricane Harvey is another one of these slam dunks, and they’re going to keep happening with more regularity, and they’re going to cost these local regions hundreds of billions of dollars each time they occur. We have to start asking ourselves at this point: to what degree is the nation, the government, the rest of the country responsible?”

The data don’t just reveal climate change as the force behind the major storms lately; they point to humans. “The cause of global warming is obvious given what we know about greenhouse gases,” Wysession says. “When we pump 9 or 10 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere each year, there isn’t a need to look for another cause.” A recent data visualization in Bloomberg illustrates this point nicely.

“We see it right there. The smoking gun is pointing us right in the face,” Wysession says. “Climate change is the monster we made. We are Victor Frankenstein.”

Next steps for Victor Frankenstein

“I try to maintain a positive outward face because from my experience working with kindergarteners up through training teachers, if I just go through that litany of all the evils the humans are doing — and it’s a long list — people’s faces go blank very quickly,” Wysession says.

“For geologists, we’ve seen the past, we know what it holds, and we know it will happen again in the future,” he says. “A large volcano, meteor impact, or any one of a number of things can affect our climate in a dramatic way, and our infrastructure is already stretched to the limit. From a sustainability perspective, our planet can really only hold about half a billion humans long-term, and we’re at 7.4 billion right now. We’re a trainwreck waiting to happen. But when talking to people, I do try to focus on the places where we’ve been able to enact change.”

That growing hole in the ozone layer above the arctic? We’ve been able to stop it. Remember when the U.S. had burning rivers and smog so dark the street lamps were on during the day? In the late 60s and early 70s, Congress passed legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to limit pollution. Even in China, where 1.6 million die every year from coal-exhaust–related lung diseases, they are now working on improving air quality.

“When things get bad enough, countries will make changes,” Wysession says. “There are aspects of climate change, however, that are not easily reversible, and that’s something that makes climate change unique. The ocean overturns over a period of thousands of years, so the heat that we’re pumping into the ocean now will continue to circulate and come up for thousands of years. Even if we were to stop what we’re doing right now and cease all burning of fossil fuels, our atmosphere will continue to warm for thousands of years.”

Despite the reality of the situation, Wysession tries to remain optimistic. “I hope there will be a lot of really good science fiction and horror stories that are written from the current climate changes,” he says. Hopefully, these literary descendants of Frankenstein can spark necessary responses. “The sooner that we can take action on this, the better it will be for the sake of future generations.”

The post Climate change: The monster of our own making appeared first on The Source.

In 2003, bestselling author Max Brooks published the Gray’s Anatomy of survival guides. The Zombie Survival Guide took readers on a journey through the anatomy of the living dead: their physical attributes, behavioral patterns and historical origins. Some balked at the concept, some wrote it off as nonsense, and some hid a copy under their bed just in case.

If you are Jamie Thomas, AB ’06, the survival guide sits alongside a collection of research on the re-animated dead: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Resident Evil, Night of the Living Dead, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and soon, Zombies Speak Swahili, Thomas’ upcoming book published through Oxford University Press.

An assistant professor at Swarthmore College, Thomas specializes in sociolinguistics, Swahili and zombie studies. Given that zombies aren’t known to be literate or loquacious, the intersection of fields is both unorthodox and curious.

“Thinking about zombies is a way of thinking about what makes us human. That’s the way I approach it,” Thomas, dawning vibrant lavender glasses and a broad smile, explains. “And without language, humans are not as human as they purport to be.”

Thomas’ fluency in Swahili and love of language originated at WashU, where she studied Anthropology and Swahili Studies, but her zombie intrigue didn’t surface until her year of fieldwork in Mexico City, where she observed African studies classes. One day during a discussion around media and violence, a student introduced Thomas to Resident Evil, a survival horror video game with zombies speaking Swahili instead of their typical dribble.

Two years later, after traversing Tanzania and Micronesia, Thomas kept returning to that moment in Mexico City. Zombies, she thought, are the perfect medium for teaching why language matters to students.

“When you get this idea of a zombie being paired with a language like Swahili, what you begin to see is the dehumanization of such a language,” Thomas says. “Then it begins to point to a larger issue in the constellation of the way we treat each other – which languages count closer to humanity and which languages don’t.”

The conjuring of a zombie, which the American media appropriated from Afro-Caribbean culture, appeared in films like White Zombie and I Walked With A Zombie in the early half of the 20th century, but it wasn’t until George Romero’s 1968 B-movie Night of the Living Dead that we were introduced to the now-familiar creature: the peaked, wide-eyed, flesh-eating, once-human we know today.

Romero’s classic, which premiered at a time of extreme civil unrest, explores ideologies of otherness and enslavement. Ben, the black male protagonist and lone survivor after the attack, is “mistaken” as a zombie and killed by the same white mob that has come to save him.

According to Thomas, in using zombies to address racial tensions in the sixties, “Romero succeeded in igniting an imagination that also played to extant fears, to latent fears in the way our society works.”

Thomas’ undergraduate class, Languages of Fear, Racism and Zombies, delves into the evolving cultural iterations of the zombie and the present and prescient anxieties monster films communicate.

This year, the latest horror hit and talk of the town, Get Out, was a ripe case study. Jordan Peele released his horror thriller at a time when the Black Lives Matter Movement elicited a new national consciousness around race in America. Get Out follows Chris, a black man who visits his white girlfriend’s seemingly liberal family (“I voted for Obama!”) only to discover that his lover is not who she seems and his vigorous, youthful body will soon house the brain of an aging, blind, white man.

“What was particularly fascinating about Get Out is you get a full transformation now of the zombie to something that involves very expressly the brain, something that involves the subjugation of one’s consciousness and soul,” Thomas says. “It shows you how far the zombie concept has come in fifty years that you can basically have all the trappings of a zombie, but never mention the word zombie throughout the entire film, and people still get it.”

In Get Out, the evolution of the zombie mirrors that of racism — increasingly implicit and insidious, but ultimately as real and as threatening as ever before.

As the survivalist genre continues to adapt, Thomas has hope for the future of zombie films.

“I would like for some of these zombie narratives to challenge us more by presenting dystopic settings and contexts that force us to deal with more inclusive survival,” Thomas says. “Can we survive in more collective ways instead of fighting each other and killing each other?”

After returning home from an afternoon with Thomas, I receive an alert on my iPhone — George Romero, at 77, had died. Perhaps it was just a spooky coincidence, or perhaps it was a sign of the supernatural. Thomas hasn’t completely written off the existence of the occult, either.

“When I see a news story about somebody on bath salts eating someone’s face, that does fuel my curiosity.”

The post The language of the undead appeared first on The Source.

The Revista de Estudios Hispanicos has received the 2017 Respo Award from the hispanistas.com blog. The Respo Award is presented to the journal that receives the most consistently positive posts for a period of two consecutive years in the “Journals” category at hispanistas.com. The blog, launched in 2009, is an open-access forum for Hispanists to share their experiences related to journals, presses or conferences.

The Revista de Estudios Hispanicos is an internationally recognized, peer-reviewed journal that publishes work pertaining to Hispanic literatures, cultures and film. Faculty and staff in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences —  Anna Eggemeyer, Javier García-Liendo, Ignacio Infante, Stephanie Kirk, Ignacio Sánchez Prado and graduate student editorial assistant Francesca Dennstedt — make up the editorial board for the journal.

The post Washington University journal wins Respo award appeared first on The Source.

Six of Washington University in St. Louis’ recent alumni and one current student were selected by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to conduct research or teach English this academic year.

The program recognizes talented students who are committed to promoting global collaboration and understanding through research and teaching.

This year’s Washington University participants are:

• Alena Antonowich, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in international and area studies and educational studies from Arts & Sciences and is studying education in Argentina; 
• Mark Beirn, who is pursuing his PhD in history from Arts & Sciences and is studying history in Germany;
• Amanda Fitzpatrick, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and history from Arts & Sciences and will teach English in Malaysia;
• Amritha Gourisankar, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the School of Engineering & Applied Science and is studying public health in India;
• Meghan Gunn, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and archaeology from Arts & Sciences and will teach English in Malaysia;
• Rory King, who graduated in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and applied linguistics from Arts & Sciences and will teach English in Mexico; and
• Kathleen Przybylski, who graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in English and secondary education from Arts & Sciences and is teaching  English in Greece.

The post Six alumni and one current student participating in Fulbright Student Program appeared first on The Source.

An older Neandertal from about 50,000 years ago, who had suffered multiple injuries and other degenerations, became deaf and must have relied on the help of others to avoid prey and survive well into his 40s, indicates a new analysis published Oct. 20 in the online journal PLoS ONE.

“More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Known as Shanidar 1, the Neandertal remains were discovered in 1957 during excavations at Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan by Ralph Solecki, an American archeologist and professor emeritus at Columbia University.

Previous studies of the Shanidar 1 skull and other skeletal remains had noted his multiple injuries. He sustained a serious blow to the side of the face, fractures and the eventual amputation of the right arm at the elbow, and injuries to the right leg, as well as a systematic degenerative condition.

In a new analysis of the remains, Trinkaus and Sébastien Villotte of the French National Centre for Scientific Research confirm that bony growths in Shanidar 1’s ear canals would have produced profound hearing loss. In addition to his other debilitations, this sensory deprivation would have made him highly vulnerable in his Pleistocene context.

As the co-authors note, survival as a hunter-gatherer in the Pleistocene presented numerous challenges, and all of those difficulties would have been markedly pronounced with sensory impairment. Like other Neandertals who have been noted for surviving with various injuries and limited arm use, Shanidar 1 most likely required significant social support to reach old age.

“The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neandertals,” said Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor.

The complete journal article can be read here:  External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal. PLoS ONE

Contact: Erik Trinkaus, trinkaus@wustl.edu, 314-935-5207; Sébastien Villotte, sebastien.villotte@u-bordeaux.fr. 33-540-002-554

The post Older Neandertal survived with a little help from his friends appeared first on The Source.

Sowande’ Mustakeem, associate professor of history and of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2017 Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history.

Sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, the prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book on the African diaspora. Established in 1992, it honors Charles H. Wesley and Rayford W. Logan, pioneers in the field.

Mustakeem received the honor for her book “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage” (2016). Drawing from ship logs, records and personal documents, Mustakeem goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore how the oceanic transport of human cargoes — infamously known as the Middle Passage — comprised a violently regulated process that was foundational to the institution of bondage.

In addition, Mustakeem and her percussion band, Amalghemy, recorded a free “Slavery at Sea” soundtrack, which mirrors the feelings and vibrations forged in the book.

The post Mustakeem receives Wesley-Logan Prize for book appeared first on The Source.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) is one of the most influential artistic creations of the last two centuries.

At 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 29, the Washington University Symphony Orchestra will present three world-premiere student compositions inspired by Shelley’s book in the 560 Music Center’s E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall.

“North,” by Andrew Savino, is structured as a series of fragments, reflecting the disjointed memories that pass through the minds of both doctor and monster as they make their final Arctic journey.

“The dissonant effect in the strings at the beginning creates a wind-like mood, establishing the setting of being in a cold environment,” writes Savino, a junior studying computer science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, in his composer’s statement. “From here, the main theme is heard, and warped through the rest of the piece.”

“Dialogue,” by Ethan Evans, a junior majoring in music and in international and area studies in Arts & Sciences, captures the interaction “between the piano and orchestra, between dark and light themes [and] between the colliding worlds of classical music and film scoring.”

“The Frankenstein Suite,” by sophomore Cole Reyes, who is majoring in music composition and in math in Arts & Sciences, consists of two movements. “The Creator” evokes “a tormented scientist deep inside his own thoughts,” while “The Monster” juxtaposes sweeping and aggressive harmonies to capture “the torment of intention versus reality.”

Rounding out the program will be “Tragic Overture” (1880) by Johannes Brahms; “Danse Macabre” (1874) by Camille Saint-Saëns; and Leopold Stokowski’s 1927 transcription of “Toccata and Fugue” (1703-07) in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The performance is free and open to the public and sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the campuswide Frankenstein Project and the First Year Center’s Common Reading Program.

The 560 Music Center is located at 560 Trinity Ave. in University City. For more information, call 314-935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.

See also:

The post Music for Frankenstein appeared first on The Source.

A new oral history series on the contributions of pioneering plant genetics researchers includes online video interviews with two professors who have strong ties to Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis: Glenn Stone and Mary-Dell Chilton.

Unveiled recently by the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., the ongoing  Archive of Agricultural Genetic Engineering and Society (AAGES) video series offers in-depth interviews with more than a dozen research “pioneers who played pivotal roles in the inception of modern agricultural genetic engineering.”

Stone, professor of anthropology, is an expert on the ecological, political and cultural aspects of agriculture. He was one of the first social scientists to study genetically engineered crops in developing countries and has written extensively on India and the Philippines. He was interviewed during a sabbatical leave supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Chilton led a collaborative study that produced the first transgenic plants while a member of the biology faculty at Washington University in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This groundbreaking research, which was the basis for the significant contributions plant biotechnology has made to agriculture today, earned her the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences for 2002. She is now a distinguished science fellow at Syngenta.

The post Videos spotlight university ‘pioneers’ in GMO plant research appeared first on The Source.

Garland E. Allen, professor emeritus of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive the History of Science Society’s 2017 Sarton Medal for lifetime scholarly achievement Nov. 10 at the society’s annual meeting in Toronto.

Allen’s research explores the history and philosophy of biology with particular emphasis on the interrelationships between genetics, embryology and evolution. The co-author of several college textbooks, he has made important contributions to the history of genetics and its relationship to eugenics and agriculture in the United States. He is writing a history of genetics in the 20th century, situating the field’s explosive development in its socio-economic context.

Named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2010, Allen has held advisory and leadership roles with the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hastings Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been active in the History of Science Society, serving on its Pfizer Prize Committee and its council from 1994-96.

At the AAAS meeting in 1998, Allen delivered the Sarton Lecture, an annual tradition established in 1960 to bridge the gap between the history of science and the contemporary scientific community. George Sarton was a Belgian chemist-turned-mathematician who moved to the United States at the beginning of World War I. He is credited with founding the field of history of science in the 1930s while he was a professor at Harvard University.

The post Allen honored for lifetime achievement appeared first on The Source.

Adverse experiences in childhood — such as the death of a parent, growing up in poverty, physical or sexual abuse, or having a parent with a psychiatric illness — have been associated with physical and mental health problems later in life. But new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that multiple adverse experiences in early childhood are linked to depression and physical health problems in kids as young as 9 to 15. Further, the researchers have identified a potential pathway in the brain to explain how such stressful experiences influence poor health in kids.

The researchers found that a key brain structure involved in regulating emotions and decision-making is smaller in kids who have lived through three or more adverse experiences before the age of 8, compared with kids whose lives were more stable. Young children who faced multiple adverse experiences also were 15 percent more likely to develop severe depression by their preteen and early teen years and 25 percent more likely to have physical health problems, such as asthma and gastrointestinal disorders. Due to the health problems, these kids were more likely to miss school.

The new findings are published Oct. 30 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

“We did not expect we would see health problems in children so young,” said senior investigator and Washington University child psychiatrist Joan L. Luby, MD. “Our findings demonstrate how powerful the psychosocial environment can be. A child’s brain doesn’t develop based solely on its genetic infrastructure. It’s influenced by the stresses of poverty, violence, the loss of a parent, and other adverse experiences, which together can have serious health consequences evident as early as the teen and preteen years.”

The study involved 119 children, who were ages 3 to 6 when the project began. The researchers tracked adverse experiences in the kids’ lives — which also included experiences such as natural disasters, a parent’s arrest, or a parent with a serious illness requiring hospitalization. The children in the study averaged more than five such experiences before the age of 8.

The researchers also performed multiple MRI brain scans of these children when they were ages 6 to 13. The first scans, performed when the children reached school age, showed that the inferior frontal gyrus was smaller in children who had more adverse experiences. The researchers also determined that the structure appears to be part of a pathway through which the stresses of adverse childhood experiences may influence mental and physical health.

“People exposed to adversity early in life experience changes in the volume of the inferior frontal gyrus that probably can make children more vulnerable to behavioral issues and bad decision-making,” theorized Luby, director of Washington University’s Early Emotional Development Program. “We suspect that such changes are associated with issues such as poor diet, risky and more dangerous behavior and generally not taking very good care of yourself, and overall, this contributes to poorer mental and physical health outcomes.”

Previous research has connected adverse childhood experiences to problems such as cancer, heart disease and mental illness in older people, but no one had looked at whether those stressful experiences are linked to health problems in adolescents. And until now, researchers had not been able to explain how such experiences could contribute to poor health in these kids.

The researchers found that when kids had three or more adverse experiences, they also had smaller brain volumes that, in turn, were associated with lower scores on a scale that measures how well a child expresses emotions. Poor emotional expression has been associated with depression and worse social and emotional outcomes.

Such children also had more physical health problems. Parents reported that kids who had more adverse experiences were more likely to have significant health problems that appeared to affect school attendance.

Deanna M. Barch (left), of Arts & Sciences and the School of Medicine, and Joan L. Luby, MD, examine brain images from MRI scans of children. (Photo: Robert Boston/School of Medicine)

In earlier research, Luby, who also is the Samuel and Mae S. Ludwig Professor of Psychiatry, found that kids can be resilient and, with nurturing parenting, may be able to overcome individual stressors such as poverty or the loss of a parent. This new research indicates that when kids accumulate multiple stressors, the experiences pile up and cause problems early in their lives, and family members and doctors need to be aware of the powerful influence of these psychosocial risks so that kids can get the help they need.

Luby added that the study could alter the way doctors and researchers think about the development of disease.

“We know toxins in the environment can contribute to disease, but this study suggests that kids can experience physical and mental health problems from exposure to psychosocial ‘toxins,’ too,” she said.

Luby and her colleagues plan to continue tracking the health of these children as they grow into adulthood. Meanwhile, the researchers also are beginning a multidisciplinary study to follow pregnant women and their infants to see whether psychosocial stressors and adversity experienced during pregnancy and the first three years of a child’s life also affect brain development and overall health.

The post Early childhood adversities linked to health problems in tweens, teens appeared first on The Source.

An accurate analog clock tick-tick-ticks with a constant precision and well known frequency: one tick per second. The longer you let it tick, the better to test its accuracy — 10 times as long corresponds to a ten-fold improvement in any frequency uncertainty. But is there a faster way to determine a frequency?

It turns out there is, in a new discovery published this week in Physical Review Letters through a collaboration between Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rochester.

The speed-up in frequency measurement comes from quantum mechanics. When a quantum bit is used to measure the frequency of a signal, the strange rules of quantum mechanics allow the frequency measurement to be much more accurate. The technique hinges on the ability to put the quantum bit in a superposition of its two quantum states, and then shift these states around in time with the signal.

Kater Murch, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, along with Arts & Sciences graduate student Mahdi Naghiloo and theory collaborator Andrew Jordan of the University of Rochester described the technique as a “quantum magic trick.”

“It’s reminiscent of the magic tricks that involve a ball placed under one of two cups and the cups are shuffled around — except this time, the ball can be under both cups at the same time,” Murch said. “The resulting speedup in frequency measurement is astonishing. Now, by measuring for 10 times as long, the frequency uncertainty can be reduced by a factor of 100 — enabling enhanced resolution of the frequency beyond any other technique of its kind.

“Earlier theory work published by the Jordan group this year has proven in two separate papers that the technique applied in this paper is the theoretical optimum that quantum mechanics allows.”

The experiment was completed by using a superconducting quantum system where an external oscillating signal with unknown frequency caused the quantum system to undergo periodic changes. By applying quantum pulses on top of the oscillating signal, the state of the system could be controlled so that the final readout of the quantum system became highly sensitive to the precise value of the oscillation frequency. The underlying physical source of the advantage is related to the fact that the energy of the quantum system is time-dependent, which causes the quantum states corresponding to different frequencies to accelerate away from each other, giving enhanced distinguishability in a given time.

This method permitted enhanced resolution of the frequency beyond any other technique of its kind, Jordan said.

This work is just one example of how the new field of quantum technologies uses the laws of quantum physics for technological advantage over classical physics, Jordan said. Other examples include quantum computing, quantum sensing and quantum simulation. For those fields, the exploitation of quantum physics provides benefits such as a speed up of database search, the factoring of large numbers or the rapid simulation of complex molecules.

Such fine-scale measurement of the frequency of a periodic signal is the fundamental ingredient in diverse applications, including MRI medical imaging devices, the analysis of light emitted from stars and, of course, clock precision. Accelerating these measurements in a way that Murch and Jordan have demonstrated could have profound impacts in many areas.

Murch and Naghiloo used timekeeping and GPS, and such constantly advancing technologies, as examples of the importance of their findings.

“Nowadays, most of us carry a phone in our pocket that is capable of telling us almost exactly where we are on Earth using the Global Positioning System,” Murch said. “The way this works is that your phone receives signals from several different satellites, and by timing the relative arrival of these signals it infers your position. The accuracy of the timing directly relates to the accuracy of your position — a relationship between timekeeping and navigation that has persisted for hundreds of years.

“Well before GPS, a sailor who wanted to know his location would navigate by the stars. In the Northern Hemisphere, the height of the north star will tell you your latitude, but to know your longitude, you need to keep track of the time. As the night goes on, the stars circle around the north star — the height of any star above the horizon is related to the local time, and by comparing this time to a clock set to Greenwich Mean Time, the time difference gives your longitude.”

Nautical timekeeping underscores the vitality of frequency advances.

“In the 1700s, accurate clocks were the main limitation to ocean navigation,” Murch said. “The Scilly naval disaster of 1707 — one of the worst disasters in British naval history — was widely blamed on poor navigation, prompting the British government to invest heavily in precise clocks. The resulting chronometers transformed marine navigation and greatly accelerated the age of discovery.

“Advances in timekeeping continue to have profound impact on technology and fundamental science. Quantum tools, such as the quantum speedup in frequency measurement that we discovered, are necessary to push these technologies forward. This is an exciting time for quantum physics because these quantum resources are increasingly leading to practical advantages over traditional measurement approaches.”

The study was funded by: National Science Foundation grants DMR-1506081 and PHY-1607156; Office of Naval Research No. 12114811; and Army Research Office No. W911NF-15-1-0496. This research used facilities at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering at Washington University. Murch also acknowledged support from the Sloan Foundation.

The post A bit of a ‘quantum magic trick’ appeared first on The Source.

A memorial service for Gregory Paul Smith Jr., who was entering his junior year at Washington University in St. Louis, will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, in the Women’s Building Formal Lounge.

Smith died July 27, 2017, while studying abroad at the London School of Economics. He was 20.

Smith, of St. Joseph, Mich., was majoring in mathematics with a minor in philosophy, both in Arts & Sciences, with a second major in economics and strategy in Olin Business School.

He is survived by his parents, Gregory “Greg” Paul Smith and Roberta Christine Smith; his sister, Katherine “Katie” Marie Smith; and his grandmothers, Katherine “Kathy” Crane and Frances Marie Smith.

Read Smith’s obituary in his hometown newspaper.

The post Memorial service for student Gregory Paul Smith Jr. planned Saturday appeared first on The Source.

As a lead co-author of the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards being adopted by more than three-quarters of U.S. schools, Michael Wysession, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has long been criss-crossing the country, helping school districts adapt to a new way of teaching that focuses on students performing the practices of science. Now, he also gets to present an innovative “Elevate Science” instructional program for elementary- and middle-school learners that he co-authored, published in October through Pearson Education.

The program, combining both print workbooks and interactive digital activities, attempts to stimulate critical thinking and group collaboration while at the same time enhancing interest in science. The program is designed to align with the Next Generation Science Standards by weaving together the practices, core ideas and broad, crosscutting concepts of science around phenomenon-based problem-solving storylines.

Wysession has co-authored more than 30 science textbooks in his career.

The post Wysession authors schoolkids’ new science programs appeared first on The Source.

“Never Been a Time,” a documentary film by Denise Ward-Brown, associate professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, will be screened Sunday, Nov. 5, as part of the 26th annual St. Louis International Film Festival.

The film traces a line from the 1917 East St. Louis, Ill., race riot through the civil rights movement to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., over the shooting death of Michael Brown, and the 2017 protests in Minnesota over the shooting death of Philando Castile.

“Never Been a Time” will be featured as part of “Mean Streets: Viewing the Divided City Through the Lens of Film and Television.” The five-day program explores how film and television reflect — both consciously and unconsciously — problems within U.S. society, including the overt and covert racism that has long segregated our cities. The program is presented by Washington University Libraries, the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, Cinema St. Louis, the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and the Missouri History Museum, in conjunction with “The Divided City” initiative.

The post Film festival presents Ward-Brown’s ‘Never Been a Time’ appeared first on The Source.

Can art be separated from its cultural context? Can one society understand another? And when things go bad, how much are good intentions worth?

In “Kiss,” Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderon explores the power, empathy and sometimes difficult responsibilities of live theater.

“The story centers on a group of earnest, young American actors who want to be a part of the global moment,” said William Whitaker, professor of the practice in drama, who will direct the drama Nov. 16-19 for the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“They stumble across a script, posted on the internet, by an unknown Syrian writer,” Whitaker continued. “In a gesture of solidarity, they decide to stage it.

“And they get it horrifyingly, humiliatingly wrong.”

‘Any way possible’

Born in 1971, Calderon has earned an international reputation for intimate, politically infused works exploring the lingering traumas of Chile’s dictatorial Pinochet regime (1973-90). For “Kiss,” the first play he has written in English, Calderon wanted to address the current, catastrophic violence of the Syrian civil war.

“But there’s one problem with this, which is that I don’t know about the culture,” he recently told American Theatre magazine. “I don’t speak the language. I’ve never been to Syria, or to the region for that matter.

“But I think that for me this is urgent, and I think that theatres should reach out and try to address this war and this tragedy in any way possible. So I decided to write a play about the war in Syria, but also about a misunderstanding about Syrian culture.”

Largely structured as a play-within-a-play, “Kiss” begins with its well-meaning Americans performing the Syrian script in the heightened emotional style of a Middle Eastern musalselat, or soap opera.

“It’s terribly, delightfully comic,” Whitaker said. Afterward, “the actors are feeling good, there’s nice energy in the room, and they’ve lined up a Skype interview with the playwright. But pretty quickly, they begin to realize just how badly they’ve misread everything. And so they huddle up and begin again.

“This is a serious play with big intentions and aggressive momentum,” Whitaker added. “Calderon chastises us for being lazy about the things that we think we know. But he’s also a champion of the artist, and hopeful that good information and respectful, intelligent storytelling can beget change.

“Getting something wrong can be humiliating, but it’s also clarifying,” Whitaker concluded. “It challenges you to go further, to push forward, to try to get it right.

“You can’t just stop at meaning well.”

Cast and crew

The cast of six features Scott Greenberg as Youssif/Daniel; Anna McConnell as Hadeel/Andrea; Austin Moulder as Ahmed/Martin; and Natalie Thurman as Bana/Laura. Sabrina Sayed plays the Syrian woman on Skype. Tyler Parker is the interpreter.

Sets and costumes are by Erica Frank and Michael Carovillano. Lighting and sound are by Ricardo Solis and Sam Jamison, with projections by Ben Lewis. Stage manager is Sarah Azizo, with assistance from Joshua Sarris. Nathan Lamp is assistant director.

Tickets

“Kiss” begins at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 16, 17 and 18; and at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 18 and 19.

Performances take place in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, located in Mallinckrodt Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd. Tickets are $20, or $15 for students, seniors and Washington University faculty and staff, and $10 for WashU students. Tickets are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office.

For more information, call 314-935-6543.

The post Art, war and good intentions appeared first on The Source.

In 2014, the Washington University Prison Education Project launched its first two classes at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific, Mo.

In the years since, more than 20 faculty from across Arts & Sciences have taught archeology, drama, history, literature, math, philosophy, physics, psychology, writing and other topics to more than 40 participating students.

In this Q&A, program manager Jennifer M. Hudson, lecturer in political science, discusses the Prison Education Project, its animating philosophy and the importance of the liberal arts.

Your background is political theory. Tell us about your work.

I study the concept of bureaucracy and its relationship to democracy. How do bureaucracies shape politics and our lives? We’ve been trained to think about it in a certain way, which doesn’t necessarily match what we see today, in both public and private sectors.

Today, certain jobs are organized in ways that suggest freedom. You’re your own boss if you drive for Uber. But the structure is profitable because the organization is able to monitor everything you do and to incentivize certain behaviors.

That’s bureaucratic management, shaped by a bureaucratic mentality, even if we don’t always recognize it as such.

So bureaucratic control still exists, even if the mechanisms are subtler.

Yes, exactly. Your boss may not be watching your desk, but everything is managed and measured. The bureaucracy is more diffuse, but the mentality is still there.

You previously taught for the Bard Prison Initiative and joined the Washington University Prison Education Project last fall. How would you characterize the program’s philosophy?

This is college that happens to take place in prison. That’s the heart of it.

It’s also about demonstrating the relevance of the liberal arts more broadly. We can all agree on the importance of STEM fields, and the need for practical skills. But the humanities help you see the world in a different way. Raw data doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings have to gather it and interpret it, and the humanities help you to do that, in any arena. They also give you a sense of ownership, in your own life and in the larger community of ideas.

Taken literally, “liberal arts” means the art of being free. That’s what our project is.

What’s the most common misperception about teaching in prison?

I had an interesting conversation with a student a while back. Someone had asked him if he was basically “one of the good guys” who had just taken a wrong turn somewhere and got caught up in the system. And he found that idea insulting because it denied his agency and recast him entirely as a victim. In fact, he takes full responsibility for the choices that landed him in prison.

I’ve also had students question the dividing line between nonviolent and violent offenses. Even if you’re “only” selling drugs, you can still be part of a social structure in which violent things take place.

Some people assume all of our students are nonviolent offenders brought up on drug charges. We don’t look into backgrounds — so I really don’t know what their charges are — but being in a medium-security facility only means you’re close to being released. And the charges turn out to be irrelevant when it comes to the question of whether a person can thrive academically.

It sounds like participants truly grapple with the idea of rehabilitation.

They have to. And I think we have to, as a country. We put so many people in jail that we need to find ways of living together again in society.

The Prison Education Project was launched with a grant from the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison but is now fully funded by the Office of the Provost — the only program of its kind entirely supported by a single university. How does that shape your work?

Many college-in-prison programs rely on a volunteer work force. That can be problematic because it means they mostly recruit a certain type of person, which further separates what’s happening in those classes from what’s happening on the rest of campus.

As much as possible, we want the Prison Education Project to replicate the kind of rigorous, high-quality education available to all Washington University students — and that begins with faculty recruitment. This is not a remedial program or a community service or campus activism program. It’s about serious academics.

In its first year, the project offered five courses. Last year, you had 13, including two for prison staff, as well as two noncredit workshops. How else would you like to grow?

Well, we’d like to offer more classes, particularly in math and the sciences. Next year, we’ll have our first graduation ceremony, for people earning associate’s degrees. We’re also beginning to present speakers, symposia and other events, both on campus and in the prison. The ambition is to establish the Prison Education Project as a broader intellectual center for thinking about the role of higher education in democratic society.

Participating faculty are encouraged to use the same curricula they use for campus classes. But is there anything you have to approach differently, pedagogically speaking?

The biggest difference is just that students are older. As an adult, you have a lot more experience trying to manage your life, which often involves navigating bureaucratic structures and dealing with pressures that college students may not have encountered. But otherwise, it’s more similar than you might think.

Sometimes, during class, it’s easy to forget where you are. I remember one student mentioning, just as an aside, that he “couldn’t wait to get out of here.” And I asked, “Why? Am I boring you?”

But, of course, he didn’t mean the classroom.

At 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15, Hudson will host a book discussion with Daniel Karpowitz, director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and author of “College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration.” The event is co-sponsored by the School of Law’s Public Interest Law & Policy Speakers Series. For more information, visit prisonedproject.wustl.edu.

The post Washington People: Jennifer M. Hudson appeared first on The Source.

In the fall of 1517, German theologian Martin Luther mailed his “Ninty-Five Theses” to the Archbishop of Mainz — and, legend has it, nailed a copy to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Thus began the Protestant Reformation, a century-long religious and political whirlwind that reshaped European culture and society.

At 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19, the Washington University Choirs will mark the 500th anniversary of Luther’s protest with “Reformation/Revolution,” a free concert exploring the Reformation era and its lasting influence on debates about power and exploitation.

The program will open with “Nun danket alle Gott” (1730), a short cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, a devout Lutheran who spent much of his professional life writing music for St. Thomas’ church in Leipzig, Germany. The program will continue with works drawn from the Catholic, Anglican and Calvinist traditions, followed by 20th-century songs representing the fights for women’s suffrage and African-American civil rights.

The evening’s centerpiece will be Alice Parker’s “A Sermon from the Mountain: Martin Luther King” (1969). Commissioned shortly after King’s assassination, the 45-minute cantata combines excerpts from his writings and speeches with Biblical passages and choral settings of traditional spirituals.

“Reformation/Revolution” is sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. Nicole Aldrich, director of choral activities, conducts. Sandra Geary is pianist. Kevin McBeth serves as narrator for “A Sermon from the Mountain,” and Robert McNichols, Jr. will intone the words from Scripture. Other soloists include soprano Jennifer Kelley, alto Kwamina Walker-Williams and tenor Duane Martin Foster.

The performance will take place in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall, located in the 560 Music Center, at 560 Trinity Ave. in University City, Mo. For more information, call 314-935-5566 or email daniels@wustl.edu.

The post ‘Reformation/Revolution’ concert Nov. 19 appeared first on The Source.

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

“The eastern dispersals of wheat and barley were distinct in both space and time,” said Xinyi Liu, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences, and lead author of this study published in the journal PLOS One.

“Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.,” Liu said. “While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route (via India and Tibet) for barley.”

Based on the radiocarbon analysis of 70 ancient barley grains recovered from archaeological sites in China, India, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, together with DNA and ancient textual evidence, the study tackles the mystery of why ancient Chinese farmers would change the seasonality of a barley crop that originated in a latitudinal range similar to their own.

The answer, Liu explains, is that barley changed from a winter to summer crop during its passage to China, a period in which it spent hundreds of years evolving traits that allowed it to thrive during short summer growing seasons in the highlands of Tibet and northern India.

“Barley arrives in central China later than wheat, bringing with it a degree of genetic diversity in relation to flowering time responses,” Liu said. “We infer such diversity reflects preadaptation of barley varieties along that possible southern route to seasonal challenges, particularly the high altitude effect, and that led to the origins of eastern spring barley.”

Liu’s research on the dispersal of wheat and barley cultivation adds a new chapter to our understanding of prehistoric food globalization, a process that began about 5000 B.C. and intensified around 1500 B.C. This ongoing research traces the geographic paths and dispersal times of crops and cultivation systems that expanded across Eurasia and eventually worldwide, from points of origination in North Africa and West, East and South Asia. The eastern expansion of wheat and barley is a key story in this process.

In the hot, arid southwest Asian region where wheat and barley were first domesticated, they were grown between autumn and subsequent spring to complete their life cycles before arrival of summer droughts. These early domesticated strains included genes carried over from wild grasses that triggered flowering and grain production as days grew longer with the approach of summer.

Because of this spring-flowering life cycle, early domesticated varieties of wheat and barley were poorly suited for cultivation in northern European climates with severe winters and a different day length pattern. Previous research by the second author in this study, Diane Lister, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge, has shown that barley and wheat adapted to European climates by evolving a mutation that switched off the genes that made flowering sensitive to increases in day length, allowing them to be sown in spring and harvested in fall.

Liu’s study shows that barley evolved similar mutations on its way to China as farmers pushed its cultivation high into the mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. By the time barley reached central China, its genetic makeup had been altered so that flowering was no longer triggered by day length, allowing it to be planted in both spring and fall.

The study confirms that ancient barley from central China contains mutations at the Ppd-H1 gene locus that switch off the photoperiod response. It also shows that extant barley landraces planted in China carry the genetic haplotype A, which infers that Chinese barley has a different genetic origin than the haplotype B barley that made its way to northern Europe.

The ancient movement of wheat and barley cultivation into China offers two distinct stories about the adaption of newly introduced crops into an existing agrarian/culinary system, Liu said.

Ancient wheat that traveled to China along Silk Road routes also was genetically modified by farmers who selected strains that produced small-sized grains more suited to a Chinese cuisine that prepared them by boiling or steaming the whole grains. Larger wheat grains evolved in Europe where wheat was traditionally ground for flour.

Along the southern migration route for barley, the main story is the flowering time — changed by farmers to gain control over the seasonal pressures of high-altitude cultivation, Liu said.

Recovery of these ancient grains has become more routine in the last decade as scholars mastered a flotation technique that allows the separation of seeds and other minute biological material from excavated dirt immersed in a bucket of water. This approach, pioneered in China by the third author of this study, Zhijun Zhao, a professor of archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has transformed the understanding of ancient farming in China.

The PLOS One findings reflect the contributions of 26 co-authors, including archaeologists who recovered the grains and those who analyzed them at leading archaeobotanical laboratories in the U.S., U.K., China and India. The team also includes leading experts for barley archaeogenetics, radiocarbon analysis and agricultural history around the globe.

“We’ve recently realized how much prehistoric crops moved around, on a scale much greater than anyone had envisaged,” said senior co-author Martin Jones, the George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge. “An intensive study of chronology, genetics and crop records now reveals how those movements laid the agrarian foundations of Bronze Age civilizations, enabling the control of seasons, and opening the way for rotation and multi-cropping.”

Financial support was provided by the European Research Council (249642), National Natural Science Foundation of China (41620104007 and 41672171), National Social Science Foundation of China (11AZD116 and 14ZDB052), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y65201YY00), the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, India (EMR/2015/ 000881), and the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES) at Washington University.

The post Ancient barley took high road to China, changed to summer crop in Tibet appeared first on The Source.

A memorial service for Joe Bonwich, an adjunct instructor in University College in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will be at 11 a.m. Friday, Nov. 24, at Christ the King Catholic Church, 7316 Balson Ave. in University City, Mo.

Bonwich, a longtime, revered St. Louis food writer and restaurant critic, died Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017, while on vacation in Florida. He was 58.

He had taught journalism courses in University College for the past 14 years; the most recent course he taught was “Writing About the World of Food.”

For more about Bonwich, who was director of content strategy at The Vandiver Group, read his obituary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The post Memorial service set for Joe Bonwich, adjunct instructor appeared first on The Source.

Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected as a 2018 artist-in-residence at USF Bergen. The Norwegian cultural center hosts a variety of artists, creative enterprises, art organizations and education establishments. Stark joins several other residents from around the world.

In addition, this summer the St. Louis Post-Dispatch named Stark a 2017 “rising star.” Those honors come in the midst of a year of accomplishments for Stark, a composer of contemporary classical music.

Stark composed music for Sundance Film Festival entrant “Novitiate,” a story about a young woman who trains to become a nun in the early 1960s. The film premiered at Sundance in January, and Sony Pictures Classics released it in October.

Stark also was selected this spring for a fellowship from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Chosen from an applicant pool of nearly 3,000 scholars, artists and scientists in the U.S. and Canada, Stark is one of the 173 Guggenheim Fellows this year.

The post Stark wins Norwegian fellowship, other accolades appeared first on The Source.