WashU English Professor Anca Parvulescu, who also holds a joint appointment with the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities (IPH), will use Hermann Hesse’s novel, “Der Steppenwolf,” as well as a contemporary video installation, to consider the role of laughter in modernity. In her talk she will raise the question of whether Hesse’s faith in the promise […]
Tag: current week
Jennifer Eberhardt: “Visual Attention and Racial Bias”
Psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt investigates how subtle racial biases are interpreted in the brain. Her research, conducted both in the laboratory and in the field, reveals the extent to which racial imagery, and subsequent judgments based on imagery, suffuse our culture and influence different actions and outcomes for blacks and whites within the criminal justice system. […]
Jay Winter: “The Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide”
In many ways, (the Armenian genocide) shows that the old idea that war is politics by other means is outdated in the 20th century. War is hatred by other means. And in this case, hatred means extermination. The First World War was the biggest war ever to date. The Second World War was bigger still. […]
Elisabeth Lloyd: “The Orgasm Debates”
For decades, scientists have disagreed over the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm. Because women don’t need to achieve orgasm to conceive, it doesn’t have the same adaptive significance as the male orgasm, which must occur for reproduction. Weighing in on this biological puzzle, evolutionary biologist and historian of science Elisabeth Lloyd, in her book, […]
Christine Souffrant:
When Christine Souffrant, a Haitian immigrant who grew up in a family of street vendors, saw how the earthquake of 2010 had devastated the vending trade, she created a company to digitize the industry and develop a global market. The successful result is Vendedy, Souffrant’s social enterprise dubbed “EBay meets Etsy for street vendors,” which […]