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.
UChiBLOGo, the blog of the University of Chicago Magazine, has posted a video of Julia Oldham, MFA’05, and her work mimicking the repetitive movements of insects. Click here to enter the world of the insect.
Posted in Making Headlines, Multimedia.
Tagged with Alumni, Visual Arts.
The blog of Powell’s Books (local bookseller extraordinaire) has among its summer reading recommendations A Brief History of Time, a collection of poems by Shaindel Beers, AM ‘00. From the blog:
I heard Beers read several poems from her book and was astounded by their frank honesty and contemporary themes. In recent years I have grown incredibly tired of obtuse and gutless poetry and there is nothing obtuse or gutless about Beers’ poems. They strike straight and true.
Click here to start your summer reading.
Update: Shaindel Beers talks about her craft in this interview. “Some people fall into alcohol, some people fall into drugs; I fell into poetry.”
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.
John Preus, MFA ‘05, has been profiled in Medill Reports. The article talks about his working in the neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn to craft “spaces of interaction” and encourage a sense of community. Citing the University of Chicago’s trademark interdisciplinary focus as an influence on his work, the article describes his recent projects:
They range from a porch on South Harper Avenue and East 57th Street to a café two blocks south, from the refurbished interior of a one-time-candy-store-turned-residence at 69th Street and Dorchester Avenue to an outdoor space built into the front lawn of a home on East 54th Place.
“I’m attracted to places where the boundary between outside and inside is really thin,” he said, “and you can pass back and forth really easily without much trouble.”
For more information, see the full article here, and also the website of Material Exchange, the artists’ co-op that Preus co-founded.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Alumni, Visual Arts.
The Chicago Tribune reports that John Beer, doctoral candidate in Social Thought, has been hired as Time Out Chicago’s new theater writer. Beer had previously freelanced for the weekly publication. You can find his work in Time Out’s theater section.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Students.
Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist and research associate at the Oriental Institute, has co-authored a paper with Michael Vannier (Department of Radiology, University of Chicago Medical Center) on the recent CT scans of Mummy Meresamun, now on display at the museum of the Oriental Institute. From the paper:
Although numerous books, journal articles, reports, and news articles discuss CT scanning of mummies, no comparable examination exists in terms of the details found, number of images generated, technical specifications of the imaging system, and computer-graphics results.
Click here for an interactive look at the results of the scans.
Posted in Press Releases.
Tagged with Faculty, Oriental Institute.
The National, an English-language newspaper based on Abu Dhabi, is drawing attention once again to The Rape of Mesopotamia. Written by Lawrence Rothfield, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and a Research Affiliate at the Cultural Policy Center, the book examines the looting of the Baghdad Museum following the American occupation in 2003. From the article:
So what happened? It is one of the merits of Rothfield’s meticulous account that it shies away from a simple explanation. Instead, The Rape of Mesopotamia shows, again and again, how communications failed, how signals were missed, how mutual suspicion between archaeologists and museum officials prevented the formation of a more unified front for dealing with the byzantine Washington bureaucracy.
For more information, see this previous post with links to Prof. Rothfield’s New Yorker interview and to an excerpt from his book.
Posted in Making Headlines.
Tagged with Comparative Literature, Cultural Policy Center, English Language & Literature, Faculty, Publications.
