Laurence Rothfield, former director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago and associate professor of English and comparative literature, recently published The Rape of Mesopotamia (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Rothfield examines the pillaging of over 15,000 Iraqi historic artifacts following the fall of Saddam Hussein through extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors to try and understand how this looting was allowed to occur and what lessons the international community can learn from this shameful episode.
The Rape of Mesopotamia has been favorably reviewed in Harper’s Weekly, among other publications.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Cultural Policy Center, English Language & Literature, Faculty.
The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center recently secured the purchase of the first three core collections of scanned Tibetan literature, adding to their already impressive collection of over four million pages of text. The Center works to digitally preserve and expand access to Tibetan Buddhist literature; you can view the collection by clicking
here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Digital Humanities, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, Joseph Regenstein Library.
The University of Chicago welcomed Grammy award winning soprano Dawn Upshaw back to campus for two performances in November 2009. Upshaw is a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed in venues ranging from Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, and in 2007 she was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation as the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius” prize.
On November 7, 2009, Dawn Upshaw and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra mesmerized a packed audience at Mandel Hall with a program that included the premiere of In the Land of the Lemon Trees. This song cycle was composed by Alberto Iglesias, an Academy Award-nominated composer best known for his work with director Pedro Almodovar. Chicago Tribune classical music critic John von Rhein wrote the following in his review of the performance:
[Alberto] Iglesias based his vocal work on English and French poems by John Ashbery, Rene Char and Wallace Stevens. Rather than clothe their dense verses in astringent modernist harmonies, as one might have expected, Iglesias has opted instead for luminous, diatonic lyricism. Long, shapely vocal lines are set within shimmering orchestral textures shot through with the throbbing riffs of amplified guitar.
Upshaw was the composer’s ally in transforming obscure poetic musings into deeply affecting music. The singer again proved herself a wonder at evoking moods and expressive nuances. Her voice has acquired more varied colors, while her diction and musicianship remain impeccable.
To read John von Rhein’s review in its entirety please click here.
On November 17, 2009 Upshaw returned to Mandel Hall to perform with eighth blackbird and other distinguished guests as they presented the song cycle Ayre by famed composer Osvaldo Golijov. Golijov’s music reflects his own complex personal experiences, and Ayre is no exception as it focuses on the intermingling of Christian, Arab, and Jewish culture before the expulsion of the Jews in the late 15th-century. Golijov says, “With a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian. How connected these cultures are and how terrible it is when they don’t understand each other. The grief that we are living in the world today has already happened for centuries but somehow harmony was possible between these civilizations.”
To find out more about future events on campus sponsored by the University of Chicago Presents, please click here; to learn about events sponsored by Artspeaks, please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Music.
Matthew Crawford, AM’92 PhD’00, was featured on the Colbert Report on June 24, 2009 to promote his recent book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin Press). Crawford’s book explores the valuable lessons that manual labor can instill in individuals, and ultimately forces his reader to question the value of ‘knowledge work’ versus ‘manual work’. To see Matthew Crawford’s interview with Stephen Colbert please click here. Crawford is also profiled in the September/October 2009 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine; please click here to read more.
You can also read his article “The Case for Working With Your Hands” (adapted from his book) published in The New York Times Magazine here.
Posted in Making Headlines, Multimedia.
Tagged with Alumni, Philosophy, Publications.
The University of Michigan recently awarded alumni Bulbul Tiwari, PhD’08, an Honorable Mention in their Division of the Humanities’ Emerging Scholars Prize. Tiwari is also only the third person in the United States to submit a dissertation entirely in digital form. Her work blurs the distinction between scholarship and documentary filmmaking and includes investigations of both the heritage of great Indian epics to comic films about truckers in India.
Outside evaluator Kathy Woodward, Director of the Simpson Humanities Center at the University of Washington, writes, “Tiwari proves you don’t have to be in a research job at a university to grow the humanities, nor contribute to and understand of heritage. And you can make work that addresses K-12 as well as articulated film and scholarly communities. Hers is an act of breadth as well as depth.”
To read more about Bulbul Tiwari’s work and the prize please click here.
Posted in Articles, Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Awards, South Asian Languages & Civilizations.
The University of Chicago trustees recently approved the design for the Reva and David Logan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. The state-of-the-art complex is slated to open in Spring 2012 along the Midway Plaisance at 60th and Ingleside. To read more about the project please click here.
Update:
William Michel, AB’92, MBA’08, has been named executive director of the Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and Theaster Gates, an artist-in-residence and lecturer in visual arts, has been appointed director of arts-program development. To read more about the Logan Center and architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s architectural vision, please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Interdisciplinary Centers and Programs, Music, Visual Arts.
Entering its tenth year of programming, the Chicago Humanities Forum provides an opportunity for University of Chicago faculty to engage with a public audience by presenting some aspect of their current research. With the support of the Humanities Division Visiting Committee Centennial Endowment, the Franke Institute for the Humanities sponsors this annual series as part of their broader mission to make the humanities relevant to people’s everyday life.
One of the highlights of last year’s program was a talk in March of 2009 by professor of philosophy Candace Volger. In exploring “Ethical Challenges,” Professor Vogler skillfully wove together examples from philosophy, literature, and everyday life. She challenged the audience to examine their daily choices between right and wrong, peppering the lecture with examples from the economic crisis of the last year. You can listen to a recording of Professor Vogler’s talk by clicking here.
This year’s program continues this tradition of broadening the dialogue between academia and the community-at-large. Adrian Johns, professor of history, will start the year off by discussing “The Politics of Media Piracy” on November 4, 2009. He will challenge the audience to think about the history of intellectual piracy from the invention of the printing press to the dawn of the Internet era and how this history influences contemporary debate about access, use, creativity, and commerce.
A talk by Wendy Doniger on “Faking It: Narratives of Circular Jewelry and Resourceful Women” will follow on February 3, 2010; the series will conclude with Josef Stern’s discussion of “The Unbinding of Isaac: Maimonides on Genesis 22 (The Aqedah)” on May 5, 2010.
Engage yourself in the humanities at the University of Chicago by attending Professor Johns’s lecture (and future Humanities Forum events) at the Gleacher Center, located in downtown Chicago at 450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive. All the lectures are free, but advance registration is recommended. To reserve your spot for the lecture, please call 773-702-8274, and for more information about the Franke Institute please visit franke.uchicago.edu.
Posted in Articles, Multimedia, Press Releases.
Tagged with Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Kathy Fox, Administrative Assistant for the Classics Department, was honored for her commitment to helping students as the winner of the 2009 Marlene F. Richman Award for Excellence and Dedication in Service to Students. The Office of the Vice President for Campus Life writes, ”as evidenced by the swelling campaign by students who have nominated Kathy for this award for several years, she has been and remains a major source of support for students in her department. Kathy is an exceptionally caring, professional, and kind member of our community.”
This is the second year that a member of the Division of Humanities has won the Richman Award. Last year’s winner, Juanita Denson retired shortly after receiving the award following over forty years of service to the University.
Congratulations Kathy!
For more information about Kathy’s work and the award please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Classics, Staff.
This summer preeminent Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina received a prestigious Koussevitzky Music Foundation commission award. Once completed her new work will be premiered in a performance sponsored by Contempo, the University of Chicago’s new music collective. Gubaidulina is considered one of the leading post-Soviet Union composers, and her work is “prized for its imagination, intellect, dramatic qualities, and deep inner spirituality.” Previous winners of this award include Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Aaron Copland.
Martha Feldman, professor and acting chair of the University’s Department of Music, notes the larger significance of the award as it relates to the University of Chicago’s growing influence in the performing arts: “With the imminent opening of the Reva and David Logan Arts Center for Creative and Performing Arts, now is a brilliant time in our institutional history to establish such a relationship. To await a work from Sofia Gubaidulina is to be in a very special position.”
For more information about the award please click here and for more information about Contempo please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines, Press Releases.
Tagged with Awards, Music.
The polynomial texture mapping machine in use at the Oriental Institute. Photo Credit: persepolistablets.blogspot.com/
New technological advances are helping fuel the study, collaboration, and discussion of thousands of tablets discovered in Iran in 1933, and on loan to the Oriental Institute since 1936. The Persepolis Fortification Archive has benefitted from the use of an advanced electronic imaging machine that takes a set of 32 pictures of each side of the tablet and then knits the images together to create a cohesive image that the viewer can manipulate as needed. Not only are the images recorded for posterity and further research, they can also be transported electronically to researchers around the world to allow for collaboration, learning, and further study.
Matt Stolper, Director of the Persepolis Fortification Archiver says, “thanks to electronic media, we don’t have to cut the parts of the archive up and distribute the pieces among academic specialties. We can combine the work of specialists in a way that lets us see the archive as it really was, in its original complexity, as one big thing with many distinct parts.”
To read more about this exciting project please click here.
Posted in Articles.
Tagged with Oriental Institute.
Curators move speedboat into Smart Museum as part of Heartland Exhibit.
Chicago Magazine recently profiled Smart Museum of Art “visionary” curator Stephanie Smith in their September 2009 issue. Smith and fellow curators from the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands spent the past few years road tripping across the vast interior of America to compile a rich variety of contemporary art from this often overlooked region. The result of their efforts is Heartland, currently on exhibition through January 17, 2010 at the Smart Museum.
The curators also compiled a blog that details their multi-year travels through posts and photographs. Of particular note are their recent posts about the challenges of staging the exhibit in the Smart Museum. The above photograph shows the spatial challenge that the curators faced in maneuvering an old speedboat that comprises part of Design 99’s movable sculpture Heartland Machine.
To read more about Stephanie Smith please click here. For more information about the Smart Museum of Art please click here, and to read the curators’ blog please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Smart Museum of Art.
Photo Credit: Luke Fiedler ‘10
Olivia Gude, MFA ’82, is currently restoring and expanding her 1992 mural Where We Come From…Where We’re Going at the 56th and Lake Park Avenue Metra underpass. This restoration is part of a larger citywide effort to promote public art, and it is funded in part through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the South East Chicago Commission, and Alderman Leslie Hairston. Gude and the project are profiled in the University of Chicago Magazine in its September/October 2009 issue. To read more about this project please click here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Visual Arts.
The Chicago Tribune has featured Lenore Grenoble, the Carl Darling Buck Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and an expert linguist. The Tribune’s article, entitled “Saving world’s words,” describes Prof. Grenoble’s quest to preserve endangered languages, and with them the culture and history of their native speakers. From the article:
“When the language is in trouble there are all kinds of other things in trouble, so that’s the canary in the coal mine,” [Grenoble] said.
Grenoble traveled to Greenland earlier this month because the country is one of the few places on the planet where the local language is strengthening despite having a limited number of speakers. Grenoble hopes that the secrets to the Greenlandic language’s success will help other native tongues, especially those that face extinction.
The United Nations estimates that half of the 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing before the century ends.
“If you’re living in a northern environment and you’re subsisting on some part on the environment, everything is changing,” said professor Ross Virginia, director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College.
“What’s cutting edge about [Grenoble's] work is the recognition of that and her willingness to get into these northern environments and try to understand the nature of change.”
See the full Chicago Tribune article here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Faculty, Linguistics, Slavic Languages & Literatures.
The University of Chicago News Office has reported that Milton Ehre, an authority on 19th-century Russian drama and Professor Emeritus in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, died Tuesday, June 30 at at the age of 76. Ehre joined the Chicago faculty in 1967 and was a celebrated teacher as well as a researcher and translator of Russian literature. In 1999 he received a Quantrell Award, which the University gives annually to faculty for exceptional work with undergraduates. Ehre was particularly interested in teaching undergraduates and devoted to teaching in the humanities core curriculum.
“The role of the teacher is to make himself superfluous,” Ehre said at the time. “The less they need you, the better the teacher you are. It’s like being a parent.”
For more information, see the News Office’s press release.
Posted in Press Releases.
Tagged with Faculty, Slavic Languages & Literatures.
The University of Chicago News Office has reported that Anna Lisa Crone, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, who was widely respected for her ability to elucidate difficult Russian poetry of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, died June 19 after a 15-year battle with cancer. Crone, 63, died in her home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
“Lisa spent her life in Russian literature, generously imparting to others her vast knowledge and wisdom,” said Robert Bird, Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University.
Crone was a wide-ranging scholar of Russian and Slavic literature and language. Her first monograph, Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyphony and the Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves (1978), was an innovative literary study of the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozanov. Bird said the book opened a new chapter in the study of Russian philosophical discourse.
For more information, see the New Office’s full press release.
Posted in Press Releases.
Tagged with Faculty, Slavic Languages & Literatures.
Joshua Harker's recreation of Mummy Meresamun's face. See more at joshharker.com.
The University of Chicago News Office reports that the Oriental Institute brought in Chicago forensic artist Joshua Harker and police sketch artist Michael Brassel to reconstruct the face of Meresamun, the Oriental Institute’s 2,800-year-old mummy. Both artists, though working independently, produced strikingly similar images. The drawings are on display at the Oriental Institute Museum, and have been placed on the institute’s website and Meresamun’s Facebook page.
Artist Joshua Harker will return the University of Chicago campus on October 24 to talk about the process of recreating the mummy’s face as part of the 2009 Humanities Day. For more information about that event, see the Humanities Day website.
Posted in Press Releases.
Tagged with Oriental Institute.
Eleanor Heartney, graduate from the Department of Art History, is the author of the new book Art & Today, which explores themes in the last 25 years of art. She was interviewed recently by The Brooklyn Rail, and she talked about globalism, Catholicism, and how the University of Chicago fit into her life story. From the interview:
HEARTNEY: One of the most exciting classes I took was on Medievalism, which fed into my whole Catholic obsession and was taught by Linda Seidel, the terrific Romanesque scholar.
RAIL: Who edited Meyer Schapiro’s Romanesque Architecture Sculpture: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.
HEARTNEY: That’s right. Another one was a class on Frank Lloyd Wright, which was taught by Joseph Connors, who was at one time the Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. I was interested in the political aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work as a kind of social planner and social theorist. So I think those two classes, both of them, pointed the direction towards where my writing eventually would go.
Read the full interview here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Art History.
Rose Schapiro, ‘09, has published an entry in UChiBLOGo, the blog of the University of Chicago Magazine, on the English Department’s annual BA-thesis reading. The optional theses earn graduating students honors in their major. This year saw 50 projects—an unusually high number. Schapiro writes:
There’s nothing like writing a long, somewhat scary paper to ensure solidarity with your classmates. And there’s nothing like a cake shaped like a book to get English majors to cheerfully show up to an event.
Read the full blog post here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with English Language & Literature, Students.
UChiBLOGo, the blog of the University of Chicago Magazine, has published some excerpts from the 2009 Kestnbaum Lecture, given by Stuart Dybek. Click here to get a taste of Dybek’s insights on flashbacks in prose vs. film and poetry’s suspension of time.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Committee on Creative Writing.
Arika Okrent, a 2004 PhD graduate from the Department of Linguistics, has written a book on the world of invented languages. In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, examines 900 years containing at least 900 attempts at creating new languages. The Boston Globe describes:
Okrent goes so far as to attend an Esperanto congress in Havana, admitting that beforehand “the clearest mental picture . . . I could muster was five gray-haired radicals on folding chairs bantering about the Spanish Civil War and their stamp collections.” What she finds instead is quixotic perhaps, but strangely vital. Beyond Esperanto, she investigates a number of other invented languages, their creators, and speakers – if any.
See the full article here.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Linguistics.
