Ray Arvidson with model of Mars Rover

Our Research

Arts & Sciences faculty, students, and research staff investigate questions at the forefront of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a great university is its ability to contribute new knowledge through research. Faculty in Arts & Sciences are frequently recognized around the world for their research leadership. In addition to faculty, both graduate and undergraduate students are critical to research and often play a hands-on role in major projects.

Fostering connections — among disciplines and throughout the research community — is an idea that lies at the heart of Arts & Sciences research. Our faculty are pioneering interdisciplinary approaches for investigating some of the planet’s most intractable challenges, such as climate change, antibiotic resistance, and global food insecurity. Our vibrant campus serves as an incubator for original ideas and scholarly innovations across disciplines and among faculty and students.

In Arts & Sciences, we are uniquely positioned to bring together scientific and humanistic approaches that will develop critical perspectives on global heath, the environment, social issues, and policy. Such topics form the basis for engaging our students in a variety of academic research projects both in the US and abroad. Our new initiatives address complex problems for society’s benefit, focusing on diversity, community, and culture.

Phages

Phage or Foe?

As everyone has probably heard, antibiotics are less and less effective. So what would happen if you got an infection that was resistant to all the known antibiotics? One surprising answer is that they might treat you with viruses from pond sludge. As Fredrik Inglis explains, this old remedy is getting a new look.

Math for a changing world

Ari Stern and graduate student Sanah Suri are developing new mathematics to describe the simulation of complex dynamical systems, a theoretical endeavor with real-world implications.

the faculty bookshelf

 Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard
 The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved (second edition)
Matthias Göritz's Colonies of Paradise: Poems
Die Sprache der Sonne
Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers
Astaire by Numbers: Time & the Straight White Male Dancer
Voicing Politics: How Language Shapes Public Opinion
Understanding Success and Failure in Adult ESL
Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires
No Blank Check: The Origins and Consequences of Public Antipathy towards Presidential Power
Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640
The Guest Lecture
Poetics of Race in Latin America
The Art of Scenic Design: A Practical Guide to the Creative Process
Understanding Philip Roth
Appearance in Reality
Best Men
Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis
Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America
Jane Eyre in German Lands: The Import of Romance, 1848-1918
Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020
Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage
Betrayed in the Bluegrass
Cancer Navigation: Charting the Path Forward for Low Income Women of Color
Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment
Electrifying Mexico Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City
Sound Experiments: The Music of the AACM
Theme for Lester
Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis
Infinite Variety Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds
Cellular Transformations: Between Architecture And Biology
Purgatorio
Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature
Feeling Godly: Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America
Boyz n the Void
Pensar el cuerpo: historia, materialidad, y simbolo
Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock
The Kimono Tattoo
How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach
Debating Sex Work
The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction
A Simpler Life
Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic
You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy
42 Today
Cutting Words: Polemical Dimensions of Galen’s Anatomical Experiments
Bolivia in the Age of Gas
Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
The Laws of Hammurabi: At the Confluence of Royal & Scribal Traditions
City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism
The Passion Project: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives
Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning
Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History
From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800-1950
Ray Arvidson with model of Mars Rover

We’re exploring Mars to better understand Earth. On Mars, we can learn about geological processes and environmental processes — maybe habitability, maybe life, that remains to be seen — for a period of time that’s lost on Earth.

―Ray ArvidsonJames S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences