Gerald Early

WUSTL’s University College will host “The Future of Sports,” a panel discussion featuring Bob Costas, Bill James and other sports experts and historians, at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 29, in Graham Chapel. The panel discussion is free and open to the public. The panelists will discuss topics ranging from performance-enhancing drugs to the collective-bargaining negotiations in the National Football League to the potential rise of soccer in the United States.  

“Teaching Jazz as American Culture”Jazz is “America’s Music.” Established in the early 1900s, the music has remained popular for nearly a century, going through many variations. In the 1920s, jazz was “pop” music, but today it is often shunned by younger people in favor of today’s popular tunes — rap, rock and country. Can jazz, with its broad history and reputation for being “art” music, be relevant to youth today? The director of a summer jazz institute at Washington University in St. Louis hopes to show that jazz is not only relevant, but also essential. More…

Acclaimed essayist and cultural critic Gerald L. Early, Ph.D., will give this year’s Phi Beta Kappa Lecture for the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. April 10 in Graham Chapel.

The institute’s goal will be to “offer teachers new and engaging ways to teach popular music as a humanities subject,” Gerald Early says.

EarlyGerald Early, Ph.D., the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English and director of the Center for the Humanities, both in Arts & Sciences, has received a $222,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Education Programs. The grant will fund “Teaching Jazz as American Culture,” an NEH Summer Institute to be held at Washington University in 2005.

Original cover art, “Love and Rockets” #15There is no shortcut from popular art to cultural respectability, but few have wandered longer than comic book, which has only recently begun to receive its critical and scholarly due. In October, the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis will present The Rubber Frame: Culture and Comics, a book and a pair of complementary exhibitions that together trace the evolution of comics from early precursors in 18th and 19th century England and Switzerland to turn-of-the-last-century newspapers, the raucous undergrounds of the 1960s and ’70s and the literary alternative comics of today.

Under the guidance of its advisory board, the International Writers Center in Arts & Sciences at Washington University is expanding its mission, and to reflect this growth, changing its name as well. In September, the International Writers Center will become The Center for the Humanities with the tag line: Dedicated to Letters and Humanistic Research and Their Presence in the Public Life. The Center for the Humanities will host a ceremony and celebration at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 2, in the Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge.