Anthony Elms, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, has been selected to curate one floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art for its 2014 Biennial. The Biennial acts as a platform to present shows that illustrate the state of contemporary art in the country. He joins two additional curators who will also have creative control over their own floors. Elms, a 1995 MFA graduate, was selected by the museum’s director and staff members to participate in what Donna DeSalvo, the Whitney’s chief curator, calls an experiment: “By slicing the museum up like a layer cake and seeing how it will look collectively, it gives the curators the opportunity to express their own points of view, each on a different floor.” The 2014 Biennial will be a historic one for the museum, as it is the last time the event will take place in the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building before the museum moves to its new location in the meatpacking district.
Elms recently contributed to “Wall Text“, an exhibit that was on display throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
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Tagged with Alumni, Visual Arts.
Steven Rings, Associate Professor in Music, was recently awarded the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory for his book Tonality and Transformation. The Emerging Scholar Award is given to books or articles published within five years of the author’s receipt of their PhD. Rings, who received his PhD from Yale in 2006, focuses his scholarship on transformational theory, phenomenology, popular music, and questions of music and meaning. Tonality and Transformation uses transformational music theory to examine diverse aspects of tonal hearing, focusing on the listener’s experience.
For more information on the Society for Music Theory, please visit their site.
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Tagged with Awards, Faculty, Music, Steven Rings.
Shulamit Ran, Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music, Augusta Read Thomas, University Professor of Composition in Music, and Marta Ptaszynska, Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Music, recently shared what inspires them to create music and their composing processes. Ran, who recently composed a piece inspired by the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts which was performed at the building’s launch festival, said “Life informs my music in every possible way, through the people I meet, the sounds I hear, things I see or read, life’s events and passages, its awe and adventure. This feeds into everything I am, and thus everything I compose.”
Ptaszynka and Thomas both commented that ideas for their compositions usually come to them fully-formed, rather than in fragments. “I never start a piece if I don’t know how the piece will end,” Ptaszynska says. “It’s like buying a train ticket without knowing where you’re going.”
Thomas’ process echoes this theme of travel. “I usually draw maps—a timeline of the piece, the shapes it’s going to take, its harmonic fields,” she says. “If you’re going to build a huge building or cathedral, you can’t just go to the hardware store and start hammering nails. I actually draft the beginning, middle, and end of absolutely every sound. I want to know, what’s the inner life? Where is it going, why is it going there? How does it relate to what comes next, and why? Gestalt is everything to me.”
All three composers underscored that none of their creativity would be possible without diligent work, which makes the University of Chicago a particularly fruitful setting. “Many people have a talent but don’t develop their craft,” Ptaszynska says. “And talent without craft is nothing.”
Read the full article here.
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Tagged with Augusta Read Thomas, Department of Music, Faculty, Marta Ptaszynska, Shulamit Ran.
Many University of Chicago alumni who go on to publish fiction—such as Philip Roth, AM’55, Saul Bellow, X’39, Andrew Greeley, AM’61, PhD’62, Sara Paretsky, AM’69, MBA’77, PhD’77 , and Georg Mann, AB’35—find the University irresistible as a source of setting, conflict, or in some situations, character. Authors have chosen to use the University as a backdrop for characters stalled on dissertation work, as a site of social or political progress, and often as a comfort and inspiration to characters looking to live, in Philip Roth’s words, a life that is “enormous.” These “enormous” lives are fraught with a number of failures and successes, but for alumni, current faculty members, and even non-alumni, the University as a character or setting is a captivating concept. For some authors though, the captivation turns to intrigue as Alzina Stone Dale, AM’57, reveals in her 1995 book Mystery Reader’s Walking Guide: Chicago, which weaves readers in and out of the campus and the Hyde Park neighborhood to retrace the paths of fictional sleuths.
If you want to brush up on the fictional happenings at the University, consult this article and read the reflections of twenty-one novelists and poets with connections to the University in An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, by Molly McQuade, AB’81 For those simply hoping to tour the locations that inspired these authors, a literary map of campus can be found here.
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Tagged with Alumni.
The Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) recently launched the first issue of its digital magazine, Colloquium, which aims to showcase critical and creative work from current MAPH students as well as alumni and staff. The first issue focuses on the theme of “Chicago,” and features fiction, photography, critical essays, creative non-fiction, video, poetry, and more. Through its digital platform, Colloquium hopes to continue to feature multimedia content such as video, sound, and games, as well as writing.
Submissions to Colloquium are accepted on an ongoing basis from contributors with ties to the MAPH program. Students, alums, faculty and preceptors past or present are encouraged to submit.
For more information about the MAPH program including admissions, courses, and alumni news, click here.
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Tagged with Colloquium, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.
Schola Antiqua of Chicago, a professional vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of music composed before the year 1600, was recently awarded the 2012 Noah Greenberg Award by the American Musicological Society. The Artistic Director of Schola Antiqua, Michael Alan Anderson, earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in the History and Theory of Music in 2008. About the winning project, “Sounding the Neumatized Sequence,” he says, “The year 2012 marks the 1100th anniversary of the death of the most important sequence composer, Notker Balbulus of St. Gall, and scholars of the sequence have turned renewed attention to the curious, widespread musical practice of ‘neumatization’ in particular. Early music ensembles however have scarcely kept pace with these latest developments in medieval music scholarship.”
The Noah Greenberg award aims to “stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognizing and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices.” Schola Antiqua served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Music in 2006-2007, making this the second consecutive year that an artist connected to the University has won this prestigious award. Last year’s winner was the New Budapest Orpheum Society, an Ensemble in Residence in the Division of the Humanities, for their project “Representing the Holocaust, Resounding Terezín.”
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Tagged with Alumni, Awards, Department of Music.
The Civic Knowledge Project recently received the Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs for its program Winning Words: Thinking, Speaking, and Acting Philosophically. Winning Words introduces students on Chicago’s South Side to philosophical practices such as considered self-expression, reasonable and cooperative conversation, collaborative inquiry, and thoughtful self-examination through sessions with University of Chicago students who bring the program to local schools. By combining these sessions with on-campus opportunities for class discussions and theatrical performances, young students are able not only to expand their philosophical knowledge but also to interact with college students and the campus itself, illustrating the rewards of a college education.
The annual prize, sponsored by the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy Documentation Center, aims “to recognize programs that risk undertaking new initiatives and do so with excellence and success.” The winning institution receives campus-wide online access to a variety of philosophy resources in order to strengthen interest in the program.
For more information on the Civic Knowledge Project and its programs, including how to get involved, please visit the project’s website.
To learn more about the types of conversations students participating in Winning Words are having, be sure to read the excellent, in-depth article that appeared in The Core magazine.
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Tagged with Awards, Civic Knowledge Project, Winning Words.
A one-day exhibition of poetry, pictures, letters, and donated ephemera from campus veterans at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on Monday, October 12, seeks to encourage discourse among the University community while honoring veterans for their service. When asked to share items that illustrated their experience serving in the armed forces, many veterans added schrapnel, uniforms, and empty cartridges to the exhibition. Josh Cannon, a third-year PhD student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, assisted fellow veterans in submitting their stories to the exhibit by conducting story-telling workshops in the fall. “The stories are very eclectic,” Cannon said. “They are funny, happy and sad—they should display to the public the diverse ways that people experience their life in the military.”
Associate Provost Aneesah Ali, who organized the exhibition and a luncheon for the vets, explains, “This is the first time that we’re inviting the broader University community to recognize the veterans on campus. The long-term hope of outreach events like this is to attract more talented veterans to join our community.” The exhibition will be in the main lobby of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
For the full article, click here. To read more about campus veterans and their work in the Division of the Humanities, click here.
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Tagged with Exhibits, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.
Eleanor Hyun, a PhD candidate in Art History, shared her expertise in Korean and Chinese art during a lecture at the Smart Museum of Art on calligraphy and brush-and-ink painting from Korea’s Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910). The lecture was part of a Smart Museum exhibition titled “From the Land of the Morning Calm.”
From the article:
While Western artists frequently depicted the human figure, in East Asia calligraphy was considered the highest art form, Hyun said. But calligraphy did incorporate the body: the brush was thought of as an extension of the arm, and the precise strokes were likened to martial arts. Characters were often described in corporal terms, such as “meaty” or “skinny.” Referring to Yi’s calligraphy of a poem by renowned Joseon-dynasty writer Sin Heum, Hyun pointed out the vigorous, semicursive characters: “If anybody here has ever touched ink and brush, you know how easy it is to make a stray mark, a drop here or a drop there.” To achieve the sort of balance and rhythm displayed in Yi’s work required intense concentration and mastery of the discipline.
For more information about the Smart Museum and upcoming exhibitions, click here.
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Tagged with Art History, Smart Museum of Art.
In October at the Oriental Institute, several professors participated in the lecture series “Medicine and Magic in the Ancient World, A Search for the Cure”, which sought to explore the connection between the physical and the psychological aspect of healing within ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece.
Robert Ritner, Professor in Egyptology, opened the series with his talk titled “The Theory and Practice of Medicine and Magic in Ancient Egypt”, Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities, and the College, and Elizabeth Asmis, Professor in Classics, presented “Medical Healing in Ancient Greece”. Walter Farber, Professor of Assyriology, discussed how people came to understand and fight against contagious diseases in his lecture titled “Diseases and Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia: Medical Conceptualization and Responses”, while Robert Biggs, Professor Emeritus in Assyriology, focused on Mesopotamian religious practitioners and their approach to illness and misfortune in his talk “Religious and Magical Elements in Babylonian Medical Practice.” The series closed on October 27 with a presentation by John Wee, a postdoctoral scholar in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, titled “Mesopotamian Texts and the Knowledge Assumptions of Medical Diagnosis”.
To find out about upcoming lectures at the Oriental Institute, please visit their Events & Programs web page.
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Tagged with Faculty, Oriental Institute.
The University of Chicago recently received a £52,247 grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to preserve sixty rare and endangered Urdu periodicals through digitization. The digital images will be produced at the Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre in Karachi, Pakistan, and will be available through the University of Chicago Library as well as the British Library.
C.M. Naim, Professor Emeritus in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, will participate in the panel of Urdu scholars responsible for selecting the magazines and journals to be archived. “Thanks to the easy technology and low cost of litho printing, the only accepted form for Urdu script texts across South Asia, Urdu weeklies and monthlies began to appear in the 1870s,” Naim explains. “It was in the periodicals that all major modern writers and political and social figures made their debuts and gained popularity. And it is only in the periodicals that we can discover the full extent of many literary and political controversies that are only now beginning to gain the attention of scholars.”
To read the full article, click here.
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Tagged with C.M. Naim, Emeritus Faculty, South Asian Languages & Civilizations.
Michael Bourdaghs, Associate Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, reveals the history of previously unrecorded concerts of iconic Japanese artists such as Misora Hibari and Yamaguchi Yoshiko in his new book, Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop. As the article details, the source material for this work was discovered in 2009, when a Canadian collector contacted Bourdaghs after procuring unmarked wire recordings from eBay that they suspected were of Yamaguchi and Misora.
This discovery enriched Bourdaghs’s book, which tracks Japanese pop music from 1950–the first year Japanese performers were permitted to travel overseas since the end of World War II–to the early 1990s. In his work, Bourdaghs argues that pop music became a way of working through tensions between Japan and the United States. To listen to music clips or watch video samples, check out the book’s online companion.
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Tagged with East Asian Languages & Civilizations, Faculty, Michael Bourdaghs.
Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations studying Egyptology, curated “Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt,” which is on display at the Oriental Institute Museum until July 28, 2013. A variety of events accompany the exhibit, including a free public symposium on November 10 and a free guided tour with Bailleul-LeSuer on November 14.
From the article:
The exhibit includes several mummified birds along with 40 artifacts that emphasize how omnipresent birds were in ancient Egyptian culture. Those birds included ducks, ibises and other waterfowl as well as eagles, vultures and falcons, as well as more exotic birds such as ostriches. Some birds lived in the wild along the Nile while others were domesticated.
The exhibit primarily showcases objects from the Oriental Institute, many of which have never been exhibited, such as the legs for a folding stool that are beautifully inlaid in ivory in imitation of duck heads, the mummy of an eagle with remains of gilding, and a small bronze coffin topped with a figure of a falcon wearing a crown.
To learn more about the exhibit and register for affiliated events, please visit the Oriental Institute’s Special Exhibit Events website.
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Tagged with Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Oriental Institute.
Court Theatre won three awards at the 44th annual Equity Jeff Awards ceremony on October 15. From the theatre’s fifteen nominations, Invisible Man (in association with Christopher McElroen Productions) earned the New Adaption (Play) award, Larry Yando won the award for Actor in a Principal Role (Play) for his portrayal of Roy Cohn in Angels in America, and Timothy Edward Kane received the Solo Performance honor for his work in An Illiad. Ken Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in English, served as adviser to this first-ever stage production of Invisible Man.
From the article:
“I’m also thrilled that Court’s world-premiere adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, adapted by Oren Jacoby, was awarded a Jeff for Best New Adaptation. A product of close collaboration between Court Theatre’s artists and University scholars like Ken Warren, Invisible Man’s continuing success in Chicago and beyond is a testament to what Court and the University of Chicago can achieve in partnership,” Newell added.
Read the full article here.
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Tagged with Awards, Court Theatre, Faculty, Ken Warren.
The University of Chicago will host the 44th Annual Algonquian Conference at the Gleacher Center from Friday, Oct. 26 to Sunday, Oct. 28. Sixty-five papers on all aspects of the Algonquian peoples represent fields such as linguistics, language revitalization, history, anthropology, sociology, music, and art, and a third of the papers have an Algonquian author or co-author. Participants come from the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan.
The conference is sponsored by the Division of the Humanities, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Adolph and Marion Lichtstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology, the Division of the Social Sciences, the Department of Linguistics, the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Politics, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Cultural Resources Office. The Newberry Library and the Chicago Field Museum are also hosting affiliated events.
The full schedule and paper abstracts can be found here.
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Tagged with Conference.
Laura Letinksy, Professor in Visual Arts and the College, was recently featured in the New York Times discussing her work as it relates to “the problem of the illusion of perfection.” Letinksy’s food photography, which depicts meals and place settings in varying states of chaos and has been featured in magazines such as Bon Appétit and Martha Stewart Living, departs from the “perfectionist aesthetic” that viewers might expect designers such as Martha Stewart to promote.
From the article:
Ms. Letinsky, who grew up in Manitoba, said her interest in food sprouted from her fascination with still lifes, which she said were overlooked and considered as “B movies” of their time. Her book Hardly More Than Ever, which features photographs taken from 1997 to 2004, presents images of scattered cake crumbs; rinds of a blood orange whose juices have caked onto porcelain; and a chocolate bunny whose turquoise wrapping has been peeled off and his head bitten off. They are incomplete stories, and viewers are left longing to meet Ms. Letinsky’s missing revelers.
“I want the pictures to have a kind of tension,” she said.
Read the article here. Letinsky’s latest exhibition of photos will run at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City until October 20.
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Tagged with Faculty, Laura Letinsky, Visual Arts.
Clifford Ando, Professor of Classics and the College, has received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Winners of the €45,000 prize are invited to spend a year collaborating with a colleague in Germany. Ando is an expert on law, religion and government in the Roman Empire and plans to collaborate with Jörg Rüpke, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt’s Max Weber Kolleg.
From the article:
During his stay at the University of Erfurt, Ando plans to finish Roman Social Imaginaries, a book exploring cognition and metaphor in Roman social thought. In collaboration with Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College, and Chicago’s Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, Ando and Rüpke are also organizing a conference on the notion of public and private in ancient Mediterranean law and religion.
More about the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation can be found here.
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Tagged with Awards, Classics, Clifford Ando, Faculty.
Thirteen University of Chicago faculty members were recognized for their outstanding service with named professorships, including three from the Division of the Humanities.
- Frances Ferguson was named the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in English Language and Literature and the College. Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century literature, as well as 20th- and 21st-century literary theory. Ferguson, who comes to the University from Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on a project that explores the rise of mass education and how it affects our conception of both individuals and society.
- David J. Levin has been appointed the Addie Clark Harding Professor in Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College. His latest book, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Zemlinksy, (University of Chicago Press, 2007), explores how radical stagings impact one’s understanding of classic operas. Levin, an expert on German opera, theater, cinema and performance theory, serves as executive editor of Opera Quarterly and as the director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.
- Eric Santner, was named the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Germanic Studies and the College. Santner is a leading scholar of German literature, history and culture, and works at the intersection of literature, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious thought. His most recent book, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.
Read faculty biographies and learn about all of the named professorships here.
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Tagged with Cinema & Media Studies, English Language & Literature, Faculty, Germanic Studies.
Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law, Philosophy, Divinity, and the College, will give a talk Tuesday, Oct. 9 as part of the World Beyond the Headlines lecture series, a project of the Center for International Studies. The talk will focus on her book The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age, which explores how fears about terrorism in the United States and Europe have spiraled into irrational suspicion of Muslims in the West, and will take place at the International House from 6:30-8 p.m.
From the Center for International Studies’ website:
What impulse prompted some newspapers to attribute the murder of 77 Norwegians to Islamic extremists, until it became evident that a right-wing Norwegian terrorist was the perpetrator? Why did Switzerland, a country of four minarets, vote to ban those structures? How did a proposed Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan ignite a fevered political debate across the United States? In The New Religious Intolerance, Martha C. Nussbaum surveys such developments and identifies the fear behind these reactions. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, she suggests a route past this limiting response and toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society. Nussbaum challenges us to embrace freedom of religious observance for all, extending to others what we demand for ourselves. With this greater understanding and respect, Nussbaum argues, we can rise above the politics of fear and toward a more open and inclusive future.
More information about The New Religious Intolerance can be found here and here.
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Tagged with Center for International Studies, Faculty, Martha Nussbaum.
University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer recently discussed the ongoing integration of artistic practice and theory on campus in the Wall Street Journal, citing examples such as the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry to illustrate the “rich environment” available both to students and surrounding neighborhoods. “We have a great research university sitting in the middle of a great city,” he explained. “Arts are a natural place where a university can contribute to and benefit from the city.”
From the article:
Great American universities study art, they analyze and critique it, but do they take the creation of it seriously?
Several of our great universities are beginning to rethink their aloof attitude toward the making of art, but the University of Chicago may be ahead of the game. It has recently spent millions of dollars on recruiting top artists for its faculty and on a bricks-and-mortar project to support the integration of art into the curriculum. One coup was to attract artist and former Yale professor Jessica Stockholder. Although Yale’s School of Art was founded in 1869, and it has since added schools of drama, music and architecture, “those are graduate professional schools,” Ms. Stockholder explained to me. “They aren’t integrated into the liberal-arts curriculum in the humanities alongside philosophy, art, history and literature.”
Click here to read the full article.
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Tagged with Art, Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Logan Center, Robert Zimmer.
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