Originated in Italy in the 16th Century, the theatrical form commedia dell'arte traditionally finds a group of actors participating in a comedic scenario featuring slapstick conceits called mécanisme. And for his original commedia dell'arte presentation at St. Ambrose University, one fittingly titled Commedia Dell'arte, director Daniel Rairdin-Hale insists that he and his cast have come up with some mécanisme doozies.

Since 2005, the Arab Barometer project that Amaney A. Jamal co-founded has interviewed ordinary people in the Arab world about their views on (according to ArabBarometer.org) "governance, political life, and political, social, and cultural values."

So Jamal had extraordinary insight into the Arab Spring that began in 2010, and its aftermath. In a phone interview last week, she said she had seen the seeds of change but didn't know if or when they would blossom. "It was very clear and obvious in our public-opinion polls that the status quo was not sustainable," she said. "That the levels of frustration, the levels of mass discontent with the status quo were there. What was not clear was whether ... there was going to be some sort of trigger to bring it all down."

Jamal will present "The Arab Spring: Did All Go Wrong?" - St. Ambrose University's Folwell Lecture in Political Science & Pre-Law - on February 9, and the answer to that question should be obvious enough to anybody who pays attention to international news.

The cast members in St. Ambrose University's production of Working offer a somewhat unexpected and altogether delightful sincerity in their portrayals of American workers in various trades. These young actors, after all, presumably don't have much, if any, career experience as full-time masons, receptionists, or prostitutes, among other professions. Yet they handle this musical as though possessing full knowledge of the experiences of the average worker, which, during Wednesday's dress rehearsal, helped me connect with the oftentimes funny, sometimes touching material.

Sandra Steingraber has bachelor and doctorate degrees in biology and a master's in creative writing. "I had long been a biologist by day and poet by night," she said in a phone interview earlier this month. "I kind of kept my writing world and my science world separate."

And that was her intention when she set out to write the book that would become Living Downstream. "It was going to represent my best attempt as a biologist to summarize the links between cancer and the environment," she said.

But the poet in her ended up transforming the project into something unusual: a deeply personal story intertwined with a scientific one, as Steingraber discusses her own cancer in the context of the troubling relationship between chemical pollution and the disease. The hook of the book, she said, is "the life behind one of the data points in the cancer registry, namely my own."

Steingraber will be speaking at St. Ambrose University on October 22 as part of the school's Sustainability Project, which includes events throughout the academic year. Her lecture, she said, will apply the "conceptual theme" of Living Downstream (originally published in 1997, with a second edition and film adaptation released in 2010) to fracking - induced hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas and petroleum.