Rebecca Zorach, Professor in Art History, is curating an exhibition at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts as part of AFRICOBRA in Chicago, “a linked series of exhibitions and public programs scheduled May–September 2013 focusing on the Chicago artist group AFRICOBRA (African Commune Of Bad Relevant Artists), founded in 1968 and still active.”
AFRICOBRA: Philosophy, curated by Zorach, will run from June 28 to August 11, 2013 at the Logan Center. According to the press release, the exhibit:
…is designed to highlight the aesthetic philosophy of AFRICOBRA first articulated in statements and exhibition text in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition in the Logan Center Gallery will demonstrate how the AFRICOBRA philosophy was collaboratively developed by the five founding members, through a presentation of key early works and selected current works, raising the question of how founding principles continue to inform each artist…Themes to be addressed include the revolutionary politics of the period, the project of bringing art to the people through a range of media, and the relationship of gender roles and family to the political context of the time.
Zorach is also assisting with the opening exhibition AFRICOBRA: Prologue at the South Side Community Art Center, which runs from May 10 to July 7, 2013 and is curated by University of Chicago students. The opening exhibition will provide historical background and contemporary context for the other exhibitions in the series.
AFRICOBRA in Chicago is a collaboration between The South Side Community Art Center, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and The DuSable Museum of African American History. A jointly-published website with detailed information about each of the events will launch later this month.
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Two alumni with ties to the Division of the Humanities will be recognized at the 72nd Annual Alumni Awards Ceremony on Saturday, June 8th.
Nancy Parra, AM’66, PhD’73, is a member of the Alumni Club of Houston, the Alumni Board of Governors, and the Visiting Committee to the Division of the Humanities. The years of her involvement with the Alumni Club of Houston have seen an increase in alumni participation. During her time with the Alumni Board of Governors she helped produce the Student Externship Program, which both positively impacts the lives of students and promotes alumni service. Parra will be presented with the Alumni Service Award in honor of her her continued advocacy for the University.
Eva Fishell Lichtenberg, LAB’49, AB’52, AM’55, PhD’60, will be presented with the Alumni Service Medal “for her thoughtful approach in identifying the needs of current students to ensure their overall experience – from curriculum, student life, and extracurricular activities – showed growth and revitalization.” She has served on the Alumni Board of Governors, the Visiting Committee to the Department of Music, the Visiting Committee to the College, and currently serves on the University of Chicago Women’s Board and the Visiting Committee to the Division of the Humanities. She also serves on a number of charitable boards throughout Chicago.
Learn about the Alumni Awards Ceremony and read the full alumni biographies here.
Alumni Weekend will take place from June 6 to June 9. To find out more about the weekend’s programming and to register, please visit the Alumni Weekend site.
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For the ”Where Chicago Eats” issue of the Chicago Reader, Anton Ford, Assistant Professor in Philosophy, and Miranda Swanson, AM’01, contributed their thoughts on food.
Anton Ford and Hannah Gold, a fourth-year in the College, debated whether something as crowd-pleasing as a doughnut can be an absolute good in an article penned by Gold. The relationship of donuts to philosophy arose in Ford’s “Justice” lecture class, in which he asked, “If one finds a box of doughnuts in a hallway, is she forced to eat them, doughnuts being unmistakably delicious?” ultimately concluding, “Doughnuts are not an absolute good. You choose whether or not to eat another’s doughnuts; the act, therefore, cannot be justified.”
Miranda Swanson, AM’01, writes about her favorite Chicago chef, who is also her husband. The enjoyment they take from meals has also become a family affair—Swanson’s two and a half year old twins are now old enough to appreciate lobster on linguine as well.
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Jessica Burstein, AM’90, PhD’98, published Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art as part of the Refiguring Modernism series. The book proposes a new understanding of modernism: cold modernism, which “operates on the premise that ‘there is a world in which the mind does not exist, let alone matter.’” Burstein wrote about the experience of publishing her book in the latest issue of The University of Chicago Magazine.
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In an article for Forbes.com, Jeff McMahon, AM’02, examines the beloved, accessible, and often rule-breaking writing style of Roger Ebert, X’70. McMahon notes that many tributes to Ebert since his death have somewhat clumsily focused on his love of movies, and neglected the nuance and humility he brought to his reviews. Along with his obvious passion for the films he reviewed, McMahon’s article illustrates that Ebert should be remembered both for his honesty and his respect for the audience. “Why was Roger Ebert the greatest movie reviewer?” McMahon asks. “Not because he cared about movies, not because he told us what to think about movies, but because he told us just enough to care and to think for ourselves.”
McMahon is an alumnus of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) and currently serves as the program’s writing advisor. He also teaches journalism courses for the Committee on Creative Writing.
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Michael Silverstein, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology, and Raúl Coronado, Associate Professor in English Language and Literature, lectured as part of the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival. Coronado spoke on Latino Identity and Literature, drawing on his studies of Latina/o literary and cultural history from the colonial period to the 1940s. Silverstein gave a lecture titled “America’s Tongues” that highlighted his work in the structure and history of language.
Information about the 2013 Chicago Humanities Festival can be found here.
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Patrick Jagoda, Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature, was profiled in the Winter 2013 issue of Grey City. Jagoda, who has been teaching at UChicago since 2010, is affiliated with one of the eighteen inaugural faculty research projects sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. In the interview, Jagoda explains how the project “uses digital storytelling and game design to work through various health issues with youth, especially high-school aged youth…co-creating digital stories that have to do with everything from sexually transmitted infections to sexual violence to gender issues.”
Jagoda also describes the importance of viewing video games as types of texts, stating that video games held as much importance as novels did during the late 20th and early 21st century. He also points out how receptive UChicago faculty members have been to his research, saying, “People want to share in the work and experience games that they might not otherwise be playing, or think about how categories central to a discipline such as English, like narrative or aesthetics, might help us think about this new form.”
Read the entire interview here.
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Tagged with English Language & Literature, Faculty.
Jennifer Chiaverini, AM’92, published Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, a Civil War-era historical novel that details the life of Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became Mary Todd Lincoln’s personal seamstress. In a New York Times article on Keckley, Chiaverini says that the inspiration to write about Keckley’s life came from research for earlier Civil War-era books, which often relied on Keckley. According to the article, after reading Keckley’s controversial memoir, Chiaverini had the idea to write a novel based on “day-to-day moments between the seamstress and the first lady.”
Chiaverini is also the author of the New York Times bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series.
More alumni-penned books can be found on the University of Chicago Magazine Goodreads page.
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Tagged with Alumni.
Monday night screenings, shot-for-shot dissections, and lively discussion are all par for the course during film classes with Tom Gunning, the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Cinema and Media Studies. The University of Chicago Magazine profiled Gunning, highlighting his “History of International Cinema, Part II: Sound Era to 1960″ course. Throughout the class, he offers nuanced readings of films such as M, a 1931 police procedural by Fritz Lang, and It Happened One Night, a genre-defining romantic comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The small cinematic details Gunning fixates on are writ large by viewing the films on the big screen.
Pick up What Is Cinema?, the text Gunning uses when teaching “History of International Cinema, Part II”.
Read a Tableau interview with Tom Gunning here.
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Justine Nagan, AM’04, a graduate of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), was presented with one of the 2013 40 Under 40 Media Leadership Awards from the New Leaders Council. Nagan is the Executive Director of Kartemquin Films, which produces documentaries focused on social justice such as Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters. In 2009, she directed Typeface, a documentary that explored The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, WI, and examined artists’ responsibility to preserving a dying craft alongside how rural towns can “survive in a shifting industrial marketplace where big-box retailers are king.”
The 40 Under 40 Leadership Awards honor individuals in four categories: political leadership, media leadership, advocacy, and entrepreneurship. Recipients are selected by members of the New Leaders Council for exemplifying the organization’s “ideal of political entrepreneurship.”
Learn more about the council here and see upcoming films from Kartemquin here.
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Hillary Chute, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature, as well as Rachel DeWoskin and Jeffrey Brown, both faculty members in Creative Writing, were featured on the Newcity Lit 2012 “Lit 50″ list, which celebrates “on-the-page creators” active in the Chicago literary scene. Chute was called an “alt-comics impresario” who “may be the one to take Chicago from being a comic-book city to a full-blown metropolis of graphic storytelling,” while Brown was hailed as an “ascendant talent” for his comic memoirs such as Darth Vader and Son. DeWoskin’s memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing is currently in development at HBO, while her most recent novel Big Girl Small won an Alex Award, which honors books with special appeal to young adults.
Read the full list here.
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Kate Zambreno, AM’02, visited the Logan Center to give a reading from her newest work Heroines. Watch the video of the reading here.
The Rumpus called Heroines “relentless and reflective” and “a genre-defying battle cry about forgotten and suppressed women in literature (as well as her role in the gendered story of her own life).” Heroines developed in part from Zambreno’s blog Frances Farmer is My Sister, where she meditates on the voices and biographies of writers like Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald.
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Tagged with Alumni.
Two faculty members from the Division of the Humanities received new professorships. Clifford Ando has been appointed the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in Classics and the College. Ando studies law, religion, and government in the Roman Empire, and is the co-director of the Center for the Study of Ancient Religions. He joined the UChicago faculty in 2006.
Richard Neer has been named the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies, and the College. Neer studies intersections of aesthetics, architecture, and history, with emphasis on phenomenology and theories of style in classical Greek sculpture, neo-Classical French painting, and mid-20th-century cinema. He is currently the executive director of Critical Inquiry, and joined the UChicago faculty in 1999.
Fourteen UChicago professors received named professorships, and six have been named Distinguished Service Professors. Read more about the honored Humanities faculty members here.
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Tagged with Clifford Ando, Faculty, New Professorships, Richard Neer.
Paul Durica, PhD candidate in English Language and Literature, was featured in The Chicago Tribune, discussing his company Pocket Guide to Hell and how his engagement with Chicago history has informed his scholarly work (and vice versa). On his motivation for founding Pocket Guide to Hell, which regularly sponsors events such as reenactments of the 1886 Haymarket Riot, Durica explains, “As I was doing research for my dissertation (about tramps, hobos and transients in American literature), I kept coming upon all of this good material that didn’t fit into my academic work. I wanted to share what I was learning with the broader public.”
On Sunday, March 17, Pocket Guide to Hell will recreate “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna’s 1908 First Ward Ball at the Hideout (1354 W. Wabansia Ave.) at 8 p.m. According to the article, “Coughlin and Kenna conceived the First Ward Ball as a way of further stuffing their pockets, already bulging with graft, through imposed ticket and liquor sales…by 1908 it attracted 20,000 drunken, yelling, brawling revelers to the Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue. The guests slopped up 10,000 quarts of champagne and 30,000 quarts of beer. It was very messy.” Durica will portray Kenna.
Learn more about Pocket Guide to Hell here.
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Arnold I. Davidson, Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Divinity School, was promoted to the rank of Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, recognizing his contribution to the promotion of French culture. The Ordre des Palmes Académiques is a French Order of Chivalry for academics and cultural and educational figures, comprised of three ranks (Knight, Officer, and Commander). Other notable recipients include literary scholars Roger Pearson and Lionel Gossman.
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Tagged with Awards, Faculty.
Graduate Student Affairs has announced the winners of the 2012-2013 Innovation Grant, which provides funds for projects created by students “that encourage graduate students’ academic progress, professional development, or personal growth.” The winning projects below were proposed by graduate students in the Division of the Humanities.
- Chicago Art Journal Website: Proposed by Solveig Nelson, the Chicago Art Journal Website project aims to use the Innovation Grant to create a website for The Chicago Art Journal, a student-run, peer-reviewed journal located in the Department of Art History, in order to expand the journal’s content and expose it to a wider audience.
- Essential Graphic Design for NELC Students Workshop: Proposed by Tytus Mikolajczak, the goal of the Essential Graphic Design for NELC Students Workshop is to expose graduate students in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations to graphic design software necessary for the preparation of digital images, a requirement for scholarly careers in the field.
- Open Source Tools for Writing Dissertations and Professional Documents in the Humanities: This two-hour session, proposed by Sarah Iker and Peter Shultz, aims to introduce graduate students to open-source tools that will allow them to create properly formatted and professional academic documents across a variety of operating systems.
- University of Chicago Move and Shake Women Retreat: Proposed by Alisha Jones, this two-day retreat offers a reflection on work-life balance for graduate student women, particularly women of color. Through the guidance of mentors, the retreat will allow women of color a safe space to discuss their experiences in the academy, while also providing an exchange among women on many different academic career paths.
Read all of the awarded proposals here.
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Tagged with Graduate Student Affairs, graduate students, Innovation Grant.
The Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society announced eighteen inaugural faculty research projects to begin in the 2013-2014 academic year, creating teams of faculty members with the goal of fostering and sustaining collaborative interdisciplinary research. Many of the large-scale, seed, and faculty fellows projects have principal investigators from the Division of the Humanities:
LARGE-SCALE PROJECTS
SEED PROJECTS
- Audio Cultures of India: New Approaches to the Performance Archive: Philip V. Bohlman, Kaley Mason, James Nye, Laura Ring
- Global Literary Networks: Hoyt Long, Richard Jean So, Thomas McEnaney
- Health and Human Rights in the Humanities: Building Capacity with Human Rights Principles: Susan Gzesh, Daniel Brudney, Evan Lyon, Haun Saussy, Renslow Sherer
- The Voice Project: Martha Feldman, David Levin
- What are Arab Jewish Texts? Texts and Questions of Context: Orit Bashkin
- Working Group on Comparative Economics: Alain Bresson, David Schloen, E. Glen Weyl
- Working Group on Political Theology: Andreas Glaeser, Cliff Ando, Julie Cooper, Michèle Lowrie, William Mazzarella, John McCormick, Omar McRoberts, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Eric Santner, Lisa Wedeen, Eric Slauter
- A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī (1414-1492) in the Dar al-Islam and Beyond: Thibaut d’Hubert
NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FACULTY FELLOWS
- Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage: Yuri Tsivian
- History, Philology, and the Nation in the Chinese Humanities: Judith Farquhar, Haun Saussy
- Material Matters, A project of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society, in partnership with the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry: Christine Mehring
Founded in June 2012, the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society was named for Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer. David Nirenberg, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of History and Social Thought, and director of the Neubauer Collegium, said of the projects, “Our faculty members have set their sights on areas of great complexity and deep importance, and reached out to their colleagues across the University in hopes of discovering newly collaborative ways of thinking about these questions.”
Learn more about the Neubauer Collegium here.
Read the UChicago News coverage of Neubauer Collegium projects announcement here.
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Tagged with Faculty, Neubauer Collegium.
William Nickell, Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, was featured in The Washington Post‘s recent, front page article on Sochi, site of the 2014 Olympic games. Nickell is currently developing Sochi in Six Dimensions, a digital cultural mapping project that will chart Sochi’s “transformation from a model Soviet city into an elite resort and Olympic site.” According to the article, Sochi was once famed for its sanatoriums, where workers could partake in trade union-sponsored rest cures akin to those enjoyed by the aristocrats. With the Olympics approaching, Sochi is now being turned into a resort town, which Nickell describes as “Russian Dubai, with high-rise residential apartments and an elite resort, more like a contemporary spa than Soviet sanatoria.”
Sochi in Six Dimensions aims to “capture all of these layers, with particular attention to the projection of this new, elite city over the surface of the former egalitarian and proletarian one.” Read more about the Sochi mapping project here.
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Several faculty members of the Department of Visual Arts were featured on Newcity Art’s list of “Chicago Artist’s Artists.” Newcity Art is devoted to coverage of visual arts in Chicago, and includes news, reviews, and features. Jessica Stockholder, Professor and Chair, was praised for the way that Chicago has featured in and informed her work, particularly with “Color Jam,” her summer 2012 installation. Laura Letinsky, Professor, was noted for her innovative “constructions,” which combine the notions of reproductions and originals, as well as William Pope.L, Associate Professor, for the ways he explores “the abject fantasies underpinning the absurdity of black male identity—and, by extension, all American identities.”
Read the full profiles here.
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Tagged with Faculty, Visual Arts.
David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of History and Social Thought, wrote an article titled “Anti-Judaism as Critical Theory” for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nirenberg, who studies “the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by inter-relating with or thinking about each other,” echoes Hannah Arendt‘s The Origins of Totalitarianism when he asks in the article, “How and why do ideas about Jews and Judaism become convincing explanations for the state of the world in a given time and place?” Utilizing theorists like Arendt, Marx, and Hegel, Nirenberg traces the history of thinking about Judaism and how that thought has shaped our view of the world.
Read the full article here, and find his latest book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition here.
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