UChicago News

Yesomi Umolu, exhibitions curator at Logan Center, named artistic director of next Chicago Architecture Biennial

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:03 -0600

Yesomi Umolu, exhibitions curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, will serve as the artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019 edition, the Biennial and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced on March 6.

With a background in architectural design and curatorial studies, Umolu focuses her work on global contemporary art and spatial practices. Her recent projects—including the exhibitions Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts, The Land Grant: Forest Law, and The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal—have explored the politics of the built environment. A Chicago-based curator and writer, Umolu is a visiting lecturer, critic and speaker at a number of international universities and institutions.

“I am honored to be invited to serve as artistic director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial,” said Umolu. “Having my roots in the field of architecture, spatial questions have always been an important consideration of my work with contemporary artists, architects and urbanists from across the world. I am excited to embark on the journey of engaging the city of Chicago and it publics, as well as visitors to Chicago from across the country and around the world, in these conversations.”

Jack Guthman, chairman of the Biennial, said Umolu’s “broad curatorial experience makes her ideally suited to build upon the critical acclaim accorded to our 2015 and 2017 Biennials by our dual constituencies—the architecture profession worldwide, as well as Chicagoans and visitors to our city.”

In the coming months, Umolu will formalize and convene an international curatorial team of creative practitioners with strong knowledge of visual arts, architecture and design practices globally. The members of the curatorial team will be announced this spring. Umolu’s vision for the next Chicago Architecture Biennial features the exploration of emerging practices and global locations that are developing new approaches to architecture, urbanism and spatial practice. Through this process, she will use the Biennial as a forum to explore creative responses to shifting spatial conditions at local, regional and international levels.

“Yesomi is a visionary curator with strong roots in Chicago, and she will work tirelessly to cultivate an incredible cultural, educational and economic event for the city,” said Emanuel. “With Yesomi at the helm, the third Chicago Architecture Biennial is sure to secure its reputation as the most innovative architectural, art and design showcase of its kind.”

“We are delighted by Yesomi Umolu’s appointment as the next artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The appointment further testifies to the curatorial imagination and dexterity she has demonstrated so well at the Logan Center for the Arts,” said Daniel Diermeier, provost of the University of Chicago. “By consistently showcasing the best in architectural innovation—in a city renowned for its architectural achievements—the Biennial advances the conversation about the potential impact of design. That conversation is playing an increasing role at the University of Chicago, and it is vital, of course, to the future of Chicago’s South Side, as to cities around the world.”

Umolu was selected by a committee comprised of Chicago Architecture Biennial board members, as well as past artistic directors, who considered candidates from around the world and from a variety of disciplines. Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial artistic directors, said: “Umolu’s curatorial practice, which boldly, yet elegantly, traverses the fields of art and architecture, makes her uniquely situated for success in this role. The Biennial is a complex and multifaceted platform for exploring both the history and present-day challenges in the field, and we eagerly await the outcomes of Umolu’s curatorial inquiry and exploration.”

Now in its third edition, the Biennial will return Sept. 19, 2019 and run through Jan. 5, 2020.

Following a successful partnership in 2017, the opening of the 2019 edition will align with EXPO CHICAGO, the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, and the main site of the Biennial will once again be the Chicago Cultural Center.

—Adapted from a Chicago Architecture Biennial news release.

Dieter Roelstraete appointed curator of Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 12:45 -0600

Dieter Roelstraete, an internationally renowned curator of contemporary art, has been named the next curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

In his new role, effective November 10, Roelstraete will oversee all aspects of the Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions Gallery, working with the University arts community as well as with arts organizations in the city of Chicago and around the world.

Roelstraete joins the Neubauer Collegium after serving on the curatorial team that organized documenta 14, the international art exhibition that ran this past spring and summer in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Widely hailed as a significant statement about the relevance and aesthetic concerns of the contemporary art world, the show brought together work by 160 artists at more than 80 sites.

The move is a return to Chicago for Roelstraete. Prior to his work with documenta 14, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 to 2015. During his time there, Roelstraete organized and co-organized a number of highly regarded shows, including The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015), which told the story of a radical group of jazz artists from the South Side of Chicago; and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), a retrospective of the acclaimed Chicago-based artist that traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, where he organized large-scale group exhibitions as well as monographic shows.

“Dieter is one of the most creative and thoughtful curators at work today,” said Jonathan Lear, the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium. “His work exemplifies how artistic expression and humanistic research can meld together and support each other. I am looking forward to working with him, and I am eager to see how he’ll make use of the freedom our gallery affords.”

One of the Neubauer Collegium’s three key initiatives, alongside faculty-led collaborative research projects and a global visiting fellows program, the gallery presents both historical and contemporary art in support of the Neubauer Collegium’s mission to explore novel approaches to complex human questions. In its first two years of operation, the gallery has hosted 11 idea-driven exhibitions that reflect the productive interplay between visual arts practice and scholarly inquiry. Several shows have been curated as part of a campus-wide set of related exhibitions.

“After spending three years working on what is effectively the largest art exhibition in the world—a hugely complex and impossibly expansive affair—I am excited to start working in a much more concentrated, in-depth fashion. Curating in a beautiful, humanly sized space at the University of Chicago will both allow and require that,” Roelstraete said. “I am a long-standing advocate for the idea of art as a form of research and knowledge production, and I cannot think of a more welcoming home to further develop these intuitions in concert with the great minds that people the wilds of Hyde Park.”

In addition to joining the Neubauer Collegium, Roelstraete will co-teach a course this winter with acclaimed artist Assoc. Prof. William Pope.L. as Mellon Collaborative Fellow in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. The course, titled “Art and Knowledge,” will extend their documenta 14 collaboration (also supported by the Gray Center) to explore the different types of knowledge art can produce. Roelstraete will pursue further teaching within the Department of Art History in the Humanities Division starting in the 2018-2019 academic year.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled by Dieter’s appointment. He joins an extraordinary group of internationally known curators working across the arts institutions at the University of Chicago,” said Alison Gass, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art. “This hire will benefit UChicago Arts and further advance the University’s commitment to arts scholarship and practice and curatorial excellence.”

The exhibitions program at the Neubauer Collegium will continue to play a vital role in advancing UChicago Arts’ commitment to visual arts exhibition, alongside colleagues at the Arts and Public Life’s Arts Incubator, Booth School of Business’ Contemporary Art Collection, the University Library’s Special Collections Research Center, Logan Center Exhibitions, the Oriental Institute, the Renaissance Society and the Smart Museum of Art.

Roelstraete succeeds Jacob Proctor, the Neubauer Collegium’s inaugural curator, who is pursuing international opportunities from his new home base in New York City. “The gallery as it stands today is very much a reflection of Jacob’s extraordinary talent and vision,” Lear said. “He has given us a remarkable foundation on which Dieter can build.”

The Neubauer Collegium’s current exhibition, Terence Gower’s Havana Case Study, runs through Jan. 26. Roelstraete is conducting research for his first exhibition as curator, tentatively scheduled to open next spring.

Anne Walters Robertson named dean of the Division of the Humanities

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 10:30 -0500

Anne Walters Robertson, the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Humanities. President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier announced the appointment, which will begin April 1, 2017. Robertson has served as interim dean since July 2016.

In announcing the appointment, Zimmer and Diermeier wrote that Robertson has provided “vital leadership and sustained the momentum of the Division of the Humanities. We are confident that Anne will be an excellent leader for the Division of the Humanities in the years to come.”

Robertson joined the University in the Department of Music in 1984. She has held several leadership positions at the University, including serving as deputy provost for research and education and chair of the Music Department, in addition to external leadership roles, including her service as president of the American Musicological Society from 2011 to 2012.

“It has been a privilege working alongside students and faculty in the Division of the Humanities for over 30 years,” Robertson said. “And it is an honor to now serve as its dean and continue the academic advancement of the humanities.”

Robertson’s research is focused on the music of the Middle Ages and the interactions of liturgical and secular music. Her particular concentration is on 15th-century sacred polyphony, the 14th-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut, French medieval liturgical music, ceremony and architecture, and music and mysticism. Her books include The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the Middle Ages, which earned the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, and Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works, which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.

Robertson is the first scholar to win all three awards of the Medieval Academy of America: the Haskins Medal (2006), the John Nicholas Brown Prize (1995) and the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize (1987). In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2015 became a member of the American Philosophical Society. She holds a PhD from Yale University.

During Robertson’s tenure as interim dean, the College has announced several new curricular initiatives in the Humanities, including the Signature Courses and the Course Cluster initiatives, a new undergraduate major in creative writing and a new Humanities Core sequence exploring poetry.

The selection of the new dean of humanities by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by an elected faculty search committee, chaired by Bill Brown, the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture.

Alison Gass appointed Dana Feitler Director of Smart Museum of Art

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 09:41 -0600

Alison Gass, a leading curator of contemporary art and a senior leader at university museums, has been appointed the director of the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.

Gass will serve as the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum starting May 1, leading the University’s fine arts museum and its thought-provoking exhibitions, distinctive public and arts education programs, varied collaborations with students and faculty, and exquisite collection of more than 15,000 objects.

Gass has been the chief curator and associate director for exhibitions and collections at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University since 2014. Prior to that, she was a member of the leadership team that opened the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, including serving as the museum’s acting director.

“Ali is an accomplished curator with a strong understanding of the impact a university museum has on campus and in the broader community. Her appointment is essential to growing the arts at the University of Chicago and expanding their role in scholarship and public life,” Provost Daniel Diermeier said.

“I am excited by the University’s commitment to visual arts, interdisciplinary exploration and community engagement,” Gass said. “I look forward to shaping what it means to be a great art museum at a top research university, while helping to define the role of the Smart in the constellation of world-class art museums in Chicago and beyond.”

Gass has curated major exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center, Broad Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was featured in a 2010 New York Times article highlighting “the new guard of curators,” and is a fellow this year at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Gass has taught at institutions including the California College of the Arts and the City College of New York.

At the Cantor Arts Center, Gass led the development of an academically engaged exhibitions program, overseeing a re-installation of the museum’s permanent collection. She also organized a major public commission and exhibition project with Trevor Paglen set for later this month. While at the Broad Art Museum, Gass helped establish a global contemporary art program featuring Imran Qureshi, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Hope Gangloff, Teresita Fernandez, Sharon Hayes and others.

“Ali brings a global outlook and strong passion for art and learning to the Smart and its diverse and interesting collection. I look forward to seeing her elevate the museum and expand its impact at the University and in the community,” said Pamela Hoehn-Saric, MAT’81, chair of the Smart Museum’s Board of Governors.

While Gass has focused on contemporary art as a curator, her approach is rooted in putting art into context and viewing works through the lens of history. Gass traces her interest in curation to the first art history class she took as an undergraduate at Columbia University. In exhibitions, Gass said she focuses on making art feel vital to people’s perspectives on their place in the world. That includes pioneering a residency for artists at the Broad Art Museum focused on land, food, water and energy that connected to Michigan State University’s history as a land grant university and the continued role of agricultural studies.

“Beyond her impeccable taste and daring talent-scouting as a contemporary art curator, Ali Gass understands university art museums and their unique strength to draw on cutting-edge thinking and research done by students and faculty,” said Prof. Christine Mehring, chair of UChicago’s Department of Art History. “She will take the Smart—along with the visual arts that are now bubbling everywhere at the University—into an ambitious future.”

Gass earned her bachelor’s degree from Columbia and holds a graduate degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She began her curatorial career at the Jewish Museum in New York City, then became an assistant curator at SFMOMA. While there, Gass curated the New Work series and a Paul Klee Cubism exhibition.

Steve Coleman mentors aspiring musicians in Logan residency

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 14:30 -0600

Chicago-born jazz musician Steve Coleman will tell you that he’s had a handful of exceptional mentors during his decades-long career. So when the alto saxophonist and composer got a call near the end of 2014 informing him that he had received a MacArthur Fellowship, Coleman knew he wanted to do the same for the next generation.

In that spirit of mentorship and community building, Coleman, together with his Five Elements band, recently completed a two-week residency hosted by the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, with emphasis on teaching and performing the improvisational jazz that has defined his career. Coleman and bandmates Jonathan Finlayson, Anthony Tidd, Miles Okazaki and Sean Rickman led workshops for students at UChicago and worked with young musicians in the Chicago Public Schools.

Coleman and his colleagues also spent time at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, playing music and answering questions about their careers. “I think people respond better when they see people who look like them, or who maybe have come from the same type of situation,” Coleman said. “One kid told me he grew up right around where I grew up.”

Coleman first started playing music as a student at South Shore High School, not far from UChicago’s campus. That grew into a career that has spanned four decades and several continents, with Coleman in his work exploring philosophy, the relationship language has with music and improvisational computer software. He leads the nonprofit M-Base Concepts, Inc., and has received a Doris Duke Impact and a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Coleman’s time at UChicago is part of an expanding set of residencies at the Logan Center that bring artists together with students, faculty and the community, often around the creation of new work. Artists-in-residence have included composer and UChicago alumnus Philip Glass, actress/playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and French filmmaker and artist Agnès Varda. UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies’ residency program Chicago Performance Lab invites emerging and established ensembles to spend a month in residence at the Logan Center to develop new work and perform throughout Chicago. Jazz flutist Nicole Mitchell is currently in residence, and artist Kapwani Kiwanga’s site specific exhibition opens in January 2017 at the Logan Center.

A passion for music and helping others

Coleman first was a resident at Logan in 2015 and came back again this fall. His talents mesh well with the Logan Center, contributing to the cultural vitality of the South Side through community partnerships and through helping to grow the center’s emerging reputation as a hub for jazz, said Bill Michel, executive director of UChicago Arts and the Logan Center.

“Steve is passionate about both his music and helping others,” Michel said. “He brings a wonderful energy and willingness to explore different avenues and partnerships.”

The residency included partnering with M-Base, Free Write Arts and Literacy, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, the Rebuild Foundation, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, as well as the Jazz Institute of Chicago. The Reva and David Logan Foundation provided significant support for the residency.

Coleman’s residency culminated in a performance at the Logan Center Performance Hall. Of the band’s seven public performances during the two-week period, including appearances at venues like the Arts Incubator, Stony Island Arts Bank and the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, five were free; Coleman wanted to make sure that those who weren’t familiar with his music could have a chance to see him play.

“When you come and you try to have a sustained presence, that makes a different kind of impact than when you just come for one day and then split,” Coleman said. “If people know you’re coming back, it’s a big deal.”

Reflecting on his career, Coleman said he owes a lot to mentors of his own, like Thad Jones, Sam Rivers, Von Freeman and Doug Hammond. Community building is something he has pursued during his career, doing residencies since the mid-’90s, frequently without outside financial support. He says that a main goal of his MacArthur Fellowship is to draw attention to his outreach work, in hopes that he can keep securing financial backing to fund residencies and mentorship opportunities in the future.

During his Logan residency, Coleman said his work with youth at the juvenile detention center stood out. Coleman and his bandmates partnered with Free Write Arts and Literacy for a visit to the detention center, where they were joined by Grammy-nominated rapper and spoken-word artist Kokayi, a longtime collaborator and occasional band member with Coleman. The musicians encouraged youth to try out instruments like the drums and bass, and talked about their own lives and careers.

“At the end, they said they were really, really inspired, and they were really happy that we came,” Coleman said. “Sometimes one visit like that could change the whole thing around.”

Court Theatre establishes named directorship in honor of donors

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 08:00 -0500

Court Theatre is establishing the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director position, made possible through the support of longtime arts patrons and Court supporters David and Marilyn F. Vitale. Court created the named position in appreciation of the couple’s significant gift to the theater in June, as well as their previous giving to Court’s Center for Classic Theatre Campaign. Artistic Director Charles Newell will be named the inaugural Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre.

The naming honors Marilyn Vitale for her dedication to the theater’s mission and growth. She has served on Court’s board of trustees for more than 20 years, three as board chair, overseeing the theater’s 60th anniversary and solidifying the vision for The Center for Classic Theatre, which mounts theatrical productions and audience enrichment programs in collaboration with University of Chicago faculty. David Vitale continues to be a visionary force for arts education in Chicago, most notably through the groundbreaking Chicago Public Schools Arts Education Plan.

“Court Theatre has created an ambitious national model of what a professional theater at a major university can achieve, while providing a distinctive cultural resource for our community and the city of Chicago,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “I am deeply grateful to the Vitales for their generous support of Court’s mission, and their deep appreciation of the value of theater and its simultaneous connections to intellectual inquiry and community engagement. Marilyn’s leadership has contributed greatly to Court’s continued growth and flourishing.”

Marilyn Vitale said the gift reflects the couple’s support for outstanding artistic leadership.

“My leadership of the board helped me fully understand how critical the artistic leadership is to any theater,” Vitale said. “Our gift will provide support to the remarkably talented Charles Newell, whom I greatly admire, and I believe it will offer Court an unmatched platform to mount great productions, build a loyal audience and find new ways to serve the community.”

Newell has been the artistic director of Court Theatre since 1994. Under his artistic leadership over 22 seasons, Court Theatre has grown in size and national standing. He has directed more than 50 productions, guiding the theater toward a focus on re-envisioned classic plays that explore and add to the African American canon and American musicals. His directorial highlights at Court Theatre include “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” “Agamemnon,” “The Secret Garden,” “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “The Misanthrope,” “Tartuffe,” “Proof,” “Angels in America,” “An Iliad,” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Newell was awarded the Society of Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s Zelda Fichandler Award and the Theatre Communications Group’s Alan Schneider Director Award. He was nominated for 16 Joseph Jefferson Director Awards, winning four times. In 2012, Newell was honored by the League of Chicago Theatres with its artistic achievement award.

In addition to their support of Court Theatre, the Vitales also are actively engaged in other parts of the University. Marilyn is a member of the Women’s Board, and David continues to be involved with the Council on the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Visiting Committee to the School of Social Service Administration.

Newell noted that Marilyn Vitale’s leadership helped make the theater’s 60th anniversary season the most ambitious to date, marked by two world premieres, a reimagining of classic theater, a nod to American musicals and a commitment to the community.

“For more than 20 years, Marilyn has provided tremendous passion and loyalty for the work of Court Theatre,” said Newell. “Court Theatre grew during her tenure as board chair and will continue to thrive, thanks to her extraordinary generosity.”

Anne Walters Robertson named interim dean of Humanities

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 14:02 -0500

Anne Walters Robertson, chair of the Department of Music and the Claire Dux Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, has been named to serve as the interim dean of the Division of the Humanities until the next dean is in place. Her appointment was effective July 1.

“Anne’s appointment will foster the continued academic advancement of the Humanities Division while the search for the next dean is conducted,” said President Robert J. Zimmer.

Robertson joined the faculty in 1984 and has held several leadership positions at the University and in professional organizations, including serving as deputy provost for research and education and as president of the American Musicological Society.

“I have been privileged to teach and conduct research for more than 30 years in the Division of the Humanities, and I am honored now to serve as interim dean,” Robertson said. “The excellence of our faculty and students has always advanced the division, and I am eager to work with them to help continue to move us forward.”

Robertson’s research is focused on the music of the Middle Ages, with a concentration on 15th-century sacred polyphony, the 14th-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut, French medieval liturgical music, ceremony and architecture, and music and mysticism. She has received many scholarly honors and distinctions. In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2015 became a member of the American Philosophical Society.

The process for selecting the next dean of the Division of the Humanities is underway. Robertson succeeds Martha Roth, the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology, who has returned to her full-time work on the faculty after serving as dean since 2007.

“Anne enjoys tremendous respect among her peers as a scholar and as an academic leader,” said Provost Daniel Diermeier. “I am very pleased that Anne has agreed to serve as the interim dean. The Division of the Humanities will be in excellent hands under her leadership.”

UChicago faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 16:20 -0600

A total of 19 faculty members recently have received named professorships or have been named distinguished service professors. Graeme I. Bell, Philip Bohlman, Eric D. Isaacs and Konstantin Sonin have received distinguished service professorships; and Daniel Abebe, Sian Beilock, Diane Brentari, Kathryn A. Colby, Nicolas Dauphas, Justin Driver, Robert D. Gibbons, Melissa L. Gilliam, Gary Herrigel, Aziz Huq, Michèle Lowrie, David Meltzer, Andrey Rzhetsky, Amir Sufi and Gary Tubb have received named professorships.

Biological Sciences Division

Graeme I. Bell, the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics, has been named the Kovler Family Distinguished Service Professor.

Bell studies the genetics of diabetes mellitus and the biology of the insulin-secreting pancreatic beta-cell. He cloned and characterized many of the genes involved in the regulation of glucose metabolism, including insulin, glucagon, glucose transporters and others.

He has won many honors in the field, including the 2013 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement from the American Diabetes Association for his pioneering work in understanding the role of genetics in the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes. In 2012, he received the Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research. Bell is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As a core member of the University of Chicago Medicine’s diabetes genetics team, Bell works to personalize treatment based on a patient’s specific genetic defect. Many of these patients are children, and some can be treated with pills that compensate for the genetic defect, rather than with insulin shots. More than 1,500 patients and family members are now participating in genetic studies aimed at improving treatment through a better understanding of genetics.

Bell joined the UChicago faculty in 1986.

Kathryn A. Colby, Professor and Chair of Ophthalmology and Visual Science, has been named a Louis Block Professor.

Colby is an internationally renowned corneal surgeon, educator and researcher with expertise in a wide variety of corneal diseases, neoplastic diseases of the surface of the eye, and the implantation of artificial corneas. She has a longstanding interest in Fuchs’ corneal dystrophy, the most common cause for corneal transplantation in the United States and her studies in this area have run the gamut from basic science to clinical trials and novel surgical treatments to improve patient outcomes.

In addition, she has specific expertise in the management of ocular surface tumors, including conjunctival melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma. Colby spearheaded efforts to improve surgical techniques for a variety of implanted eye devices, including the Boston keratoprosthesis (artificial cornea) and the implantable miniature telescope, the only FDA-approved device to improve vision for patients with advanced macular degeneration.

Colby is an active teacher, who has trained hundreds of medical students, ophthalmology residents, clinical cornea and pediatric ophthalmology fellows, many of whom are leaders in ophthalmology. Colby was the founding director of the pediatric cornea service at Boston Children’s Hospital and is a member of the executive committee of the board of directors of the Cornea Society.

Colby joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2015.

Robert D. Gibbons, Professor of Medicine, Public Health Sciences and Psychiatry has been named the Blum-Riese Professor.

Gibbons is a nationally recognized authority on a range of statistical disciplines, including mental health statistics, environmental statistics, item-response theory and drug safety. Gibbons has led the Center for Health Statistics since it was established in 2010. From its beginning, the center has continuously earned federal funding and acclaim for its work applying complex statistical theory to inform public policy.

Gibbons has authored or co-authored nearly 300 peer-reviewed publications and six textbooks. In addition, he has served on several editorial boards, including the board of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Psychiatry.

Gibbons is a Pritzker Scholar, a fellow of the American Statistical Association and cofounder of its Mental Health Statistics section. He also is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and the National Academy of Medicine. Gibbons has earned numerous important accolades, including lifetime achievement awards from the American Statistical Association, the American Public Health Association, and Harvard University, as well as two W. J. Youden Awards for outstanding contributions to statistics in chemistry.

He joined the UChicago faculty in 2010.

Melissa L. Gilliam, Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Pediatrics, has been named the Ellen H. Block Professor in Health and Justice.

Gilliam is section chief of family planning and contraceptive research at the University and serves as dean for diversity and inclusion for the University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences Division.

As an authority on contraception and adolescent health, Gilliam addresses the gynecologic needs of girls and adolescents, especially youth of color, sexual minorities and young people at risk for poor sexual and reproductive health. Gilliam says her work focuses on “marginalized populations, reduction of health disparities through community-based interventions and efforts to increase diversity and improve health policy.” She heads the University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health, also known as Ci3. She cofounded the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, which develops games and digital media interventions for youth.

In October of 2015, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine, which honors those who have made major contributions to the fields of health and medicine and demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Gilliam joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2005.

David Meltzer, Professor of Medicine, Economics and Public Policy, has been named the Fanny L. Pritzker Professor.

Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis, and the cost and quality of hospital care. In his research, Meltzer uses economic analysis to address problems in health economics and public policy, focusing on the cost and quality of care, especially in teaching hospitals.

He is a national leader in the study of the relatively new specialty of hospital medicine. He heads the Hospitalist Scholars Program at UChicago, which provides training in this field and examines the economic forces that have fueled growth of this specialty. Meltzer also pioneered the development of the Comprehensive Care Physician model, in which physicians provide inpatient and outpatient care for patients who are at an increased risk for hospitalization. The model is designed to leverage the power of the doctor–patient relationship and improve outcomes while controlling costs.

Meltzer also directs the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and chairs the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science. Meltzer also is director of the University of Chicago Urban Health Lab. In October of 2015, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Meltzer joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1996.

Andrey Rzhetsky, Professor of Medicine, has been named the Edna K. Papazian Professor.

Rzhetsky is a pioneer in the development of novel computational strategies that shed light on the complex genetic, molecular and environmental interactions involved in human health and disease.

His research utilizes powerful approaches to extract insights from big data. To harvest as much information as possible, his group runs data-mining projects that involve mathematical modeling and analysis of disparate datasets, such as electronic medical records, scientific texts and high-throughput experimental data. His models require dynamic collaboration with a range of experts in disease phenotypes, genetics, statistical modeling, epidemiology and the sociology of science. Rzhetsky also developed in invented the first automated literature extraction program for the prediction of molecular interactions.

Rzhetsky is the director of the Conte Center for Computational Neuropsychiatric Genomics, and is a senior fellow of both the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and the Computation Institute.

He serves as associate editor for numerous high-profile journals, including Nature Scientific Reports and PLoS Computational Biology.

Rzhetsky joined the UChicago faculty in 2007.

Humanities Division

Philip Bohlman, the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and in the College, has been named the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History.

An ethnomusicologist, Bohlman studies a wide range of topics related to music and modernity, with a focus on Jewish music and the politics of religion and race in the music of the Middle East and South Asia. His other research interests include Song Loves the Masses (2016) a translation of the musical writings of the 18th-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Bohlman is the author of Revival and Reconciliation: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity (2013), Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (2011), Jewish Music and Modernity (2008), and World Music: A Very Short Introduction (2002). He also edited The Cambridge History of World Music (2013).

An active performer as well as a scholar, Bohlman is the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society. The eight-member Jewish cabaret troupe is the ensemble-in-residence of the Division of the Humanities at the University.

The group’s recent projects include As Dreams Fall Apart (2014), a CD that draws on music from Yiddish and German-Jewish films from the 1920s to the post-Holocaust generation of the 1950s, and for which the ensemble received a 2016 Grammy Award nomination. Bohlman and the New Budapest Orpheum Society were the recipients of the 2011 Noah Greenberg Award for Historical Performance from the American Musicological Society.

Bohlman joined the UChicago faculty in 1987.

Diane Brentari, Professor of Linguistics and in the College, has been named the Mary Werkman Professor.

Brentari, PhD’90, studies sign languages from around the world to better understand their similarities and differences and to illuminate the properties that all languages share. Her work has included projects on phonetics, phonology, morphology and prosody. She has developed the Prosodic Model of sign language phonology.

Currently, her work addresses cross-linguistic variation, particularly the differences and similarities among sign languages. She is also interested in the emergence of language, and is engaged in studies of the cognitive, social and cultural aspects of gesture, homesign systems and well-established sign languages.

Brentari is the author of Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey (2010) and A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology (1998), and editor of Foreign Vocabulary in Sign Languages: A Cross-linguistic Investigation of Word Formation (2001) and Morphology and its Relation to Syntax and Phonology (1998).

She is the director of the Sign Language Linguistics Laboratory and co-director of the Center for the Study of Gesture, Sign, and Language.

Brentari joined the UChicago faculty in 2011.

Michèle Lowrie, Professor of Classics and in the College, has been named the Andrew W. Mellon Professor.

A literary scholar with interests in ideology and forms of expression, Michèle Lowrie traces the history of political concepts and their transmission by figurative means. Her research focuses on Roman literature and political thought and ancient Rome’s continued resonance in modernity.

Her current projects include: the emergence of security as a concept in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Republic; the Roman tradition of representing civil war, in collaboration with Barbara Vinken; the exemplum and exceptional politics from Cicero to Augustus; “Thinking through Tropes,” a faculty seminar funded by the Neubauer Collegium that examines the representational methods for structuring traditions; and transformations in the public sphere between Cicero and Horace.

Lowrie has written two monographs and numerous articles, as well as edited four volumes. She is a recipient of the Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a visiting research professorship at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, a fellowship from the Research Center for Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the University of Konstanz, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilian’s University in Munich. Lowrie is currently in residence at the American Academy in Berlin as the Dirk Ippen Berlin Prize Fellow. Her sabbatical has received additional funding from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship.

Lowrie, who will become deputy dean for the Division of the Humanities on July 1, joined the UChicago faculty in 2009.

Gary Tubb, Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and in the College, has been named the first Anupama and Guru Ramakrishnan Professor.

A leading Sanskrit scholar, Tubb examines the tradition’s poetics, grammatical forms and commentarial traditions. In addition to his scholarship of Sanskrit language and literature, Tubb studies the literary, religious and philosophical traditions of India.

Tubb is the author of Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook for Students (2007). He is an editor and primary contributor in the book Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature (2014). Another book, On Poets and Pots: Essays on Sanskrit Poetry, Poetics and Philosophy, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Alongside his teaching and research, Tubb is the faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi.

He joined the UChicago faculty in 2007.

Physical Sciences Division

Nicolas Dauphas, Professor of Geophysical Sciences and in the College and the Enrico Fermi Institute, has been named a Louis Block Professor.

A leading isotope geochemist, Dauphas draws upon the analytical and modeling methods of his training as an engineer to develop novel strategies for solving important scientific questions using naturally occurring isotope variations. He founded and directs UChicago’s Origins Laboratory to examine questions pertaining to the early evolution of the Earth and what meteorites reveal about the formation of planets, asteroids and comets.

His research has included an examination of how the rapid formation of Mars makes it more akin to a planetary embryo than a fully grown planet, and the discovery of microscopic remnants in a meteorite of a nearby supernova that exploded before the solar system was formed.

Just last year, a paper Dauphas published was named an Editors’ Choice by Science Magazine. The paper addressed a longstanding problem regarding the origin of Earth’s depletion in silicon and the origin of Earth’s core density deficit. His research bridges the gap between planetary sciences and astrophysics, as attested by his invitation to deliver the 2015 Spitzer lecture in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.

Dauphas has received the American Geophysical Union’s Macelwane Medal, the European Association for Geochemistry’s Houtermans Medal, and the Meteoritical Society’s Nier Prize. He also is an American Geophysical Union fellow and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation fellow.

Dauphas joined the UChicago faculty in 2004.

Eric D. Isaacs, Provost and Professor of Physics and in the College, has been named the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor.

Isaacs’ distinguished research career as a condensed matter physicist has focused on quantum materials. His early research in developing synchrotron X-ray scattering techniques continues to play an important role in nanoscale scientific research.

Isaacs served as director of Argonne National Laboratory from 2009 to 2014. Under his leadership, Argonne researchers focused on solving the grand scientific and engineering challenges of our time—particularly the vital national priority of developing game-changing sustainable energy technologies. During that period he also played key roles in the creation of the Institute for Molecular Engineering and expanding the impact of the Computation Institute—two joint efforts of the University and Argonne.

From 2003 to 2008 he served as founding director of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials.

Isaacs has authored or co-authored more than 150 scientific papers and presentations. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on multiple national scientific advisory committees, including the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee.

Isaacs joined the UChicago faculty in 2004 and became University provost in 2014.

Social Sciences Division

Sian Beilock, Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives and Professor of Psychology and in the College, has been named the Stella M. Rowley Professor.

Beilock, whose research focuses on topics at the intersection of cognitive science and education, explores the cognitive and neural substrates of skill learning as well as the mechanisms by which performance breaks down in high-stress or high-pressure situations.

Beilock is one of the world’s leading experts on the brain science behind “choking under pressure” and the many factors influencing all types of performance: from test-taking to public speaking to one’s golf swing. In her laboratory, the Human Performance Lab, Beilock employs a wide range of methods such as measures of performance, physiological measures of stress, and neuroimaging techniques. She also conducts studies in the classroom with students from early elementary school through college.

She has authored two books: How The Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel (2015) and Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveals About Getting It Right When You Have To (2010).

Beilock joined the UChicago faculty in 2005.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Amir Sufi, the Chicago Board of Trade Professor, has been named the first Bruce Lindsay Professor of Economics and Public Policy.

In his research, Sufi focuses on finance and macroeconomics. His recent research on household debt and the economy has been profiled in The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He also has presented this work to policymakers at the Federal Reserve, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs, and the White House Council of Economic Advisors. This research forms the basis of his book co-authored with Atif Mian: House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014.

Sufi also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he serves as an associate editor for the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His articles have been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Sufi graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. As a PhD student in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he received the Solow Endowment Prize for Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching and Research.

He joined the UChicago faculty in 2005.

The College

Gary Herrigel, Professor of Political Science and in the College, has been named the Paul Klapper Professor.

Herrigel’s research interests include comparative political economy and alternative forms of governance in economic process and regulation throughout the developed and developing world. A common thread in his work has been an interest in the changing boundaries of firms and the political arrangements that govern them in Europe (particularly Germany), the United States and Japan.

Herrigel’s most recent book, Manufacturing Possibilities: Creative Action and Industrial Recomposition in the U.S., Germany and Japan, applies pragmatist theories of creative social action to contemporary industrial transformation processes.

Currently, he is completing a book on recursivity and governance in the globalization of German manufacturing. He also is beginning a project to explore the intersection of public and private governance architectures in environmental, health and safety regulation in the Norwegian offshore oil industry.

In the face of pessimism regarding the future of manufacturing in developed countries, Herrigel aims to understand and identify possibilities for continued growth and employment by conceiving of contemporary manufacturing in a globally interactive way.

In addition to the books Herrigel has authored and co-edited, he has written numerous articles and book chapters and has edited a special issue of the journal Enterprise and Society.

Herrigel joined the UChicago faculty in 1989.

Harris School of Public Policy Studies

Konstantin Sonin, Professor of Public Policy, has been named the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor.

A prominent scholar of Russian, Sonin’s research interests include political economics, development and economic theory and political economy. In recent years Sonin has focused on applying behavioral microeconomic concepts to an array of social and political phenomena, including corruption, dictatorship and the inequitable distribution of property.

His academic work has earned him three medals from the Global Development Network, best economist awards from the Russian Academy of Science in 2002-03, and the 2008 Ovsievich Memorial Prize in Mathematical Economics, given annually to a distinguished Russian scholar under 40.

Sonin’s papers have been published in leading academic journals of economics such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies and political science such as the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science.

Sonin joined the UChicago faculty in 2015.

University of Chicago Law School

Daniel Abebe, Professor of Law, has been named the Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of Law.

Abebe’s research interests focus primarily on the relationship between the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations, public international law and international politics; international courts and the structure of international organizations; and cyber warfare and presidential power.

He has taught foreign relations law, public international law, conflict of laws, international trade law, legal issues in international transactions, and refugee and asylum law, among other courses and seminars.

He is a contributor to a forthcoming book Why Comparative International Law Needs International Relations Theory, (Oxford University Press 2016) and two of his papers, “Cyber War, International Politics and Institutional Design” and “International Human Rights Law in Africa: Are Courts Effective,” will be published in the University of Chicago Law Review and the Virginia Journal of International Law respectively.

Abebe’s articles have appeared in the Chicago Journal of International Law, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Stanford Journal of International Law, the Supreme Court Review, and the Michigan Journal of International Law.

Abebe clerked for Judge Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

He joined the UChicago Law School faculty in 2008.

Justin Driver, Professor of Law, has been named the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law.

Driver’s principal teaching and research interests include constitutional law, constitutional theory, education law and the intersection of race with legal institutions.

His writing has appeared in publications such as the University of Chicago Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Supreme Court Review, Harvard Law Review, and the New Republic.

His paper, “The Constitutional Conservatism of the Warren Court” (published in the California Law Review), was awarded the 2012 William Nelson Cromwell Article prize for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar.

Driver served as a law clerk to Judge Merrick B. Garland, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Driver joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 2014.

Aziz Huq, Professor of Law, has been named the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law.

Huq’s teaching and research interests include constitutional law, criminal procedure, federal courts and legislation. His scholarship concerns the intersection of institutional design and individual rights and liberties.

He has been published in both leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. His recent research articles have won the Association of American Law Schools’ Junior Scholars Paper Competition Award in Criminal Law and have been selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. His co-edited volume “Assessing Constitutional Performance” is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press this year.

Prior to UChicago, Huq litigated cases in both the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court. He also was a senior consultant analyst for the International Crisis Group, researching constitutional design and implementation in Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka.

He clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Huq joined the UChicago faculty in 2009.

Ramakrishnan Professorship to support study of Sanskrit

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 09:00 -0600

As the University of Chicago prepares to celebrate two major anniversaries in South Asian studies, a new gift will help to ensure UChicago’s continued leadership in the study of the Indian subcontinent.

The Anupama and Guru Ramakrishnan Professorship in Sanskrit Studies, established by a $3.5 million gift from Guru and Anupama Ramakrishnan, supports a faculty member whose work focuses on the ancient classical language. Gary Tubb, professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations and faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, will be the first scholar to hold the new position.

The announcement of the Ramakrishnan Professorship comes as the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies marks its 60th year. An April 28-30 conference, “Sites of South Asian Studies,” will bring together top scholars in the field, including many distinguished UChicago alumni. A related exhibition, “Envisioning South Asia: Texts, Scholarship, Legacies,” is on view in the Library’s Special Collections Research Center throughout Winter Quarter.

“The University of Chicago is world renowned for its excellence in the scholarship of South Asia,” said Martha T. Roth, the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor and dean of the Division of the Humanities. “Guru and Anupama Ramakrishnan’s generosity allows us to sustain that tradition and makes possible continued rigorous study of the cultural heritage of South Asia through its literary, religious and philosophical texts.”

Sanskrit is the language of the scriptures of the Hindu religion, as well as much of the literature of the Jains and Buddhists. In addition, many important works of poetry, philosophy, science, history, law, political theory, medicine and aesthetics were written in Sanskrit, the oldest literary language of South Asia. Sanskrit is also the longest continuously taught South Asian language at UChicago, having been offered since the first classes were held at the University in 1892.

Tubb first encountered Sanskrit as an undergraduate at Harvard University. He said he was attracted to the language because it provided “access to a long and rich history of human thought. Sanskrit really stands out among the world’s languages—alongside other classical languages—as being a single language that provides access to an extraordinarily broad range of texts and histories.”

A leading Sanskrit scholar, Tubb examines the tradition’s poetics, grammatical forms and commentarial traditions, and draws insights across the culture’s philosophy, religion and literature. Tubb is the author of Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook for Students. He is an editor and primary contributor in the book Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature (Oxford University Press, Delhi). Another book, On Poets and Pots: Essays on Sanskrit Poetry, Poetics and Philosophy, is also forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Tubb praised the Ramakrishnan family for its support of Sanskrit scholarship. “It’s fortunate this professorship carries the name of people who have serious interest in and respect for the way Sanskrit is studied,” he said.

The Ramakrishnans’ gift is part of The University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact, which will raise $4.5 billion and engage 125,000 alumni by 2019. To date, the campaign has raised $2.82 billion and engaged more than 59,000 alumni.

Guru Ramakrishnan, MBA’88, is a founding partner at Meru Capital Group; Anupama Ramakrishnan is on the advisory board of the Agastya Foundation, a Bangalore-based NGO that funds and operates educational programs in rural India. The couple also supports a scholarship program for Indian students at Chicago Booth, the Guru and Anupama Ramakrishnan Endowed Scholarship Fund.

“We are delighted to fund this chair in Sanskrit—one of the oldest languages that has given the world the Vedas, Upanishads and other exceptional works of spirituality, poetry, music and dance. We are thrilled that Professor Tubb will be the first chair, especially in light of his lifelong dedication and passion for Sanskrit. Most importantly, the University of Chicago’s long-term commitment to scholarship in Sanskrit made it our institution of choice to partner with on this important initiative,” the Ramakrishnans said.

The University of Chicago is home to a rich array of resources for the study of the Indian subcontinent, including its Center in Delhi. Currently, more than 60 faculty members are engaged in the study of South Asian history, culture and language. The University offers instruction in nine modern and two classical Indian languages, including advanced instruction in less commonly taught languages such as Marathi and Telugu.

In 2012, a gift from the Indian Ministry of Culture established an annual one-quarter visiting professorship, the Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professorship, which brings to campus distinguished scholars in subjects such as Indian philosophy, politics and social movements.

The University of Chicago Library’s Digital South Asia Library provides access to research and reference materials on South Asia worldwide, and its celebrated South Asia collection holds more than 720,000 volumes.

Yesomi Umolu to lead Logan Center Exhibitions

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 12:20 -0500

After an international search, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago has appointed Yesomi Umolu as the Logan Center Exhibitions Curator. Umolu will begin on Aug. 3.

In her new role, Umolu will oversee exhibitions in the Logan Center Gallery and other spaces throughout the multidisciplinary arts building. She will also work closely with students and faculty in the Departments of Visual Art and Art History, as well as colleagues from across the University and the city, to develop innovative programs.

“In Yesomi, we have found a curator who will advance the adventurous, collaborative and inquisitive approach that has characterized Logan Center Exhibitions since its founding,” said Bill Michel, executive director of the Logan Center. “I look forward to experiencing the inspiring and thought-provoking work she will bring to the Logan Center in the years ahead.”

In its first three years, Logan Center Exhibitions has hosted more than 20 exhibitions featuring the works of Ricardo Busbaum, David Schutter, and Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, among many others. Previous shows include Szalon, AFRICOBRA: Philosophy, Diasporal Rhythms: A Ten Year Love Affair with Collecting Art of the African Diaspora and Yang Fudong: East of Que Village, as well as annual exhibitions of the work of Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture artists-in-residence.

“I look forward to continuing the ethos of experimentation and critical discourse around contemporary art and culture that the Logan Center Exhibitions program has established,” Umolu said. “I am thrilled at the prospect of collaborating with artists, scholars and community members who contribute so greatly to the Logan Center’s vibrant presence on campus and in the broader South Side cultural corridor.”

Umolu’s appointment comes at a time of growth for contemporary art on campus. Recent additions to the scene—among them the Arts Incubator, the Chicago Booth Art Collection, the Gray Center Lab and Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions—have joined established institutions like the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society, creating new opportunities for students, faculty and community members to experience new work.

“I am excited to welcome Yesomi to the University of Chicago,” said Jessica Stockholder, the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Visual Arts. “Her experience and interests are international in scope, and her passion for the visual arts will contribute to the lively culture of the arts here on campus. I’m looking forward to working with her.”

Previous Work

Prior to her appointment at UChicago, Umolu was assistant curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where she organized exhibitions, commissions and public programs focusing on global contemporary art.

She recently curated John Akomfrah: Imaginary Possessions (2014), the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to the recent work of British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah.

Her other curatorial projects at the Broad MSU include Focus: Pao Houa Her (2015); The Land Grant: Forest Law (2014), a newly commissioned research and film project by Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares; and Revelations: Examining Democracy (2013), featuring works from the Broad MSU collection. She was coordinating curator for the Broad MSU presentation of MCA Denver’s Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art (2013) and SFMOMA’s Lebbeus Woods, Architect (2013). She has also supported exhibitions of works by Mithu Sen, Trevor Paglen and Jessica Jackson Hutchins, among others.

Umolu was previously Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, where she curated Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s first U.S. museum solo show The Museum of Non Participation: The New Deal (2013). She also worked on numerous solo and group exhibitions including Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites (2013), Minouk Lim: Heat of Shadows (2012), The Living Years: Art after 1989 (2012) and Lifelike (2012).

Prior to joining the Walker, Umolu held curatorial positions at the European biennial of contemporary Art Manifesta 8, in the region of Murcia, Spain, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. She has also contributed to programming at the Institute of International Visual Arts and Tate Modern, London.

She has been a visiting lecturer, critic and speaker at a number of international universities including Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; Goldsmiths, University of London; Jagiellonian University, Krakow; and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, among others.

Her writing has appeared in numerous catalogues and journals, including ;Art in America and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism.

Umolu received an MA with honors in Architectural Design from the University of Edinburgh and an MA with Distinction in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.

Three the Hard Way, a group exhibition featuring the works of the University of Chicago’s 2014/2015 Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture artists-in-residence Ayana Contreras, James T. Green and David Leggett opened July 10. For more information on upcoming exhibitions, visit the Logan Center Exhibitions website.

Camille Ann Brewer named executive director for Black Metropolis Research Consortium

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 14:21 -0500

Camille Ann Brewer has been named executive director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, a Chicago-based association of libraries, universities and other archival institutions that document African American and African diasporic culture, history and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago.

“Our mission is to make accessible the holdings of our 11 BMRC member institutions to those who wish to conduct primary source research,” said Brewer. As the new executive director, Brewer brings 20 years of professional experience in the field of cultural heritage management. Her management expertise comes from experience in a range of areas, including museum and private fine art collections, artists’ papers and libraries.

For 15 years, Brewer operated her own business, CAB Fine Art, providing fine art advising and collection management services for individual, nonprofit and corporate clients. She also has worked on projects with the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Research for Arts and Culture at the National Center for Creative Aging, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Detroit Children’s Museum and the estate of Max Roach.

Brewer earned a BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Valdosta State University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Before she began her appointment as executive director of the BMRC, Brewer was an adjunct professor at Chicago State University, teaching weaving in the art department.

The University of Chicago has been the consortium’s host institution since 2006, when Danielle Allen, former professor of classics, political science, social thought and dean of Humanities, founded the BMRC. The Office of the Provost serves a fiduciary role for the organization, as it secures funding to assist its member institutions in making collections accessible.

The consortium has received generous support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which on Friday, March 13 announced renewed funding for its summer fellowship program.

Sian Beilock, vice provost for academic initiatives and professor of psychology, and Jacqueline Stewart, professor of cinema and media studies and the BMRC’s faculty adviser, support the organization’s goals and initiatives. Stewart serves as principal investigator on grant proposals. Susan Boone, director of administration and operations in the Office of the Provost, is a BMRC board member and treasurer.

“Chicago’s South Side plays an important role in African American history and culture,” said Provost Eric D. Isaacs. “The University of Chicago is proud to serve as the host to the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. We are delighted that Camille is leading this effort.”

Leroy E. Kennedy, BMRC board president, welcomes new leadership for the BMRC. “We are excited about Camille’s plans for engaging the community along with our member institutions and taking the BMRC to next level of public programming.”

As Brewer forges relationships with the consortium’s member institutions, she also is focusing the BMRC’s energies on its successful summer fellowship program. Since the program’s inception, 55 scholars have taken advantage of the opportunity to work with the consortium members’ repositories.

The BMRC will welcome 15 new fellows this summer based on its 2015 thematic cohorts. The Great Migration will be the subject of the first cohort. This year is the centennial of the beginning of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans migrated from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest and West. “Without the Great Migration, the Black Metropolis, as we know and understand it, would not exist,” said Brewer. “Therefore, we plan to begin this next cycle of fellowships investigating this important and pivotal aspect of Chicago’s history,” she added.

The second theme for 2015 is journalism, publishing and writing. This year is the 75th anniversary of Ebony magazine, the 110th anniversary of The Chicago Defender and the 65th anniversary of Gwendolyn Brooks receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The thematic cohorts for the summer fellowships in 2016 will focus on politics and on the medical arts. In 2017, the first cohort will explore the impact of Chicago gospel music on American pop, jazz and other musical genres, with the second cohort focusing on architecture, design and urban planning.

UChicago faculty members receive named, distinguished service professorships

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:00 -0600

Eleven UChicago faculty members—Andrew Cleland, Michael Greenstone, M. Todd Henderson, Ali Hortacsu, Wayne Hu, Jeffrey Hubbell, Jonathan Masur, John H. R. Maunsell, Larry Norman, David Rubin and Melody Swartz—have received named professorships, while five UChicago scholars—Victor Friedman, Lenore Grenoble, Chuan He, Ralph Weichselbaum and Luigi Zingales—have been named distinguished service professors.

Biological Sciences Division

John H. R. Maunsell has been named the Albert D. Lasker Professor in Neurobiology.

An internationally recognized neuroscientist, Maunsell has made fundamental contributions toward understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of vision and perception. Known for elegant, rigorous and technically demanding physiological experiments, he recently has focused on understanding how behavioral and cognitive factors, such as attention and learning, influence the way neurons process information in the visual circuits of the brain.

Since 2007, Maunsell has served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, one of the top peer-reviewed journals in its field and primary publication of the Society for Neuroscience, the largest neuroscientist organization in the world.

Maunsell’s honors include election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and appointment as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Maunsell joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2014.

David T. Rubin, section chief of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and co-director of the Digestive Diseases Center, has been appointed the Joseph B. Kirsner Professor in Medicine.

A nationally recognized authority on digestive diseases and investigational therapies, Rubin studies novel therapies for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, colon cancer prevention and clinical medical ethics. He is the principal investigator for multiple clinical research projects and trials of novel therapies, including the first Food and Drug Administration-authorized study of fecal microbiota transplantation for ulcerative colitis.

Rubin is a fellow of the American Gastroenterological Association, the American College of Gastroenterology, and American College of Physicians and an active national leader in the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America.

Rubin has earned many honors and awards in his field, including the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Clinical Research in 2003 and 2013 from the American College of Gastroenterology, and the Rosenthal Award in 2012 from the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America. He is an associate editor for the journals Digestive Diseases & Sciences and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Rubin earned his medical degree with honors from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine.

Ralph R. Weichselbaum, chairman of Radiation and Cellular Oncology and co-director of the Ludwig Center, has been named the Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor.

A nationally recognized authority on the effects of radiation and on radiation therapy for cancer, Weichselbaum has been a leader in research into the ability of certain types of tumors to resist the lethal effects of radiation, the combination of radiation therapy with chemo- or immune-therapy, and the use of precisely targeted high-dose radiotherapy for patients with a limited number of metastases.

Weichselbaum is a member of many scientific and medical societies, including the prestigious Institute of Medicine, and has served on national committees for the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology, the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology, and the Radiation Research Society. He serves on the editorial boards of several influential journals and on the advisory board of biotech companies.

Weichselbaum came to the University of Chicago in 1984 as professor and chairman of Radiation and Cellular Oncology.

Humanities Division

Victor A. Friedman, PhD’75, a linguist working on languages of the Balkans and Caucasus, has been named the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities. He is also director of the University’s Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies.

Friedman’s publications include more than a dozen books and edited works, as well as more than 300 scholarly articles and book reviews. In addition to his research on the Balkan languages, he has published extensively on Lak grammar, as well as on Georgian, and he has done field work in Daghestan in addition to more than 40 years of field work in the Balkans. His main research interests are grammatical categories, contact linguistics as well as sociolinguistic issues related to standardization, ideology and identity.

Friedman is president of the U.S. National Committee of the International Association for Southeast European Studies. He is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Albania, the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosova, Matica Srpska and has been awarded the “1300 Years of Bulgaria” jubilee medal. During the Yugoslav Wars of Succession he worked for the United Nations as a senior policy analyst in Macedonia and consulted for other international organizations.

He has taught at UChicago since 1993.

Lenore Grenoble, an expert on Slavic linguistics and language contact and attrition, has been named the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the College.

She specializes in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages, and is currently conducting fieldwork on Evenki (Tungusic) in Siberia, Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, Inuit) in Greenland, and Wolof (Niger-Congo) in Senegal. Her research focuses on the study of contact linguistics and language shift, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis and issues in the study of language endangerment, attrition and revitalization.

She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian and Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union and co-author of Saving Languages: An Introduction to Language Revitalization and a reference grammar for Evenki. Grenoble has co-edited multiple volumes such as Endangered Languages; Language Documentation: Practices and Values and, most recently, Language Typology and Historical Contingency.

Grenoble has taken an active role in promoting indigenous language vitality as coordinator of the Arctic Council’s Arctic Indigenous Languages Vitality project.

She joined the UChicago faculty in 2007.

Larry F. Norman has been named the Frank. L. Sulzberger Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies and the College. He is currently chair of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Norman’s research focuses on French and European literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, and theater across the ages. His interests include theater history, book history, intellectual and cultural history, literary criticism and theory, and the relation between the visual arts and literature.

He is the author of The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction, and The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France, which received the Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies from the Modern Language Association in 2012.

Norman was the University’s inaugural Deputy Provost for the Arts and held that position for two terms. His tenure was marked by the development of major new arts facilities, programs and initiatives. These include the planning, construction, programming and operation of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts; the creation of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry; and the launch of the Arts and Public Life initiative and its Arts Incubator in the Washington Park community.

He joined the UChicago faculty in 1995.

Physical Sciences Division

Chuan He, who brings a chemist’s perspective to biological problems, has been named the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry. He’s research contribution spans a broad range in epigenetic, RNA biology, chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, structural biology and microbiology.

With colleagues at UChicago, He’s group is mostly known for the discovery of reversible modification on RNA that significantly affects gene expression regulation analogous to similar effects on DNA. His laboratory also is known for developing enabling technologies to label and sequence recently discovered chemical modifications in mammalian DNA that are particularly important for cell differentiation and development. A particular modification is also highly abundant in the brain. He’s work also has shed light on the roles of metals in biological systems, identified bacterial regulators of virulence and antibiotic resistance, and illuminated mechanisms of DNA repair. He continues to work on understanding how the addition and removal of methyl groups on genetic material and RNA affect genetic regulation.

He, who directs the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, joined the UChicago faculty in 2002. He holds a joint professorship with Peking University, and guest professorship at several other universities. The recipient of numerous honors, last year he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Wayne Hu, whose research focuses on understanding structure formation in the universe, has been named the Horace B. Horton Professor in astronomy & astrophysics.

Early in his career, Hu gained recognition for his theoretical work on the temperature differences of the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang. His work has provided important insights on how to use the CMB temperature differences to test cosmological theories and to determine cosmological parameters.

Hu focuses his research on how structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies were seeded at the Big Bang and how they related to dark matter—an unknown force that causes the explanation of the universe to accelerate. Hu also uses gravitational lensing (and effect that distorts images of galaxies) to study the physics of dark energy at large scales.

Hu co-leads the dark energy portion of UChicago’s Physics Frontier Center, a $17 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation. He also is a member of the South Pole Telescope and Dark Energy Survey collaborations, and a senior member of UChicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. A member of the UChicago faculty since 2000, his many honors include elected membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Social Sciences Division

Michael Greenstone has been named the first Milton Friedman Professor in Economics.

His research focuses largely on the costs and benefits of environmental quality and energy policy. Over the years, Greenstone has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impacts on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices and infant mortality. He is currently engaged in a large-scale project to estimate the costs of climate change around the world.

Greenstone now heads the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC). Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, where he began his career as an assistant professor, he served as the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2014. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and editor of The Journal of Political Economy. From 2009 to 2010, he was the chief economist for the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisors and has been a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Economics Advisory Committee.

Greenstone joined the UChicago faculty in July.

Ali Hortacsu has been named the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor.

Hortacsu’s research focuses primarily on how supply actually equals demand and he develops mathematical and statistical methods to model, analyze, and optimize real-world market clearing mechanisms. His methods have been used in many contexts, including government securities auctions, central bank refinancing operations, and wholesale electricity markets.

Hortacsu has written or coauthored some of the first academic papers in leading academic journals on online auctions, online dating/matchmaking, and online consumer search behavior. A fellow of the Econometric Society, and research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Hortacsu is the co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He was elected an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2006, and was a recipient of an NSF CAREER grant.

Hortacsu joined the UChicago faculty in 2001.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Luigi Zingales has been named the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance.

His research has covered corporate governance, financial development, political economy, the economic effects of culture and the best interventions to cope with the aftermath of the financial crisis. He developed the Financial Trust Index, designed to monitor the degree of trust Americans have in their financial system, with Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Zingales’ recent works include “The Values of Corporate Culture,” written with Luigi Guiso, of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, and Sapienza and forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, and “Liquidity and Inefficient Investment,” written with Oliver Hart and forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association. He also has two working papers, “Diagnosing the Italian Disease,” written with Bruno Pellegrino of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and “Monnet’s Error,” written with Guiso and Sapienza.

Previous works have been published in the Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Financial Economics and Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others. He has published three books—Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, with Raghuram Rajan, also of Chicago Booth, A Capitalism for the People and Europa o No.

Zingales also serves as American Finance Association president, Control Committee and of the Nominating Committee of Eni Spa board members and American Academy of Arts and Sciences member, and is founding director of the Center for Economic Analysis of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. He joined Booth in 1992, and has been the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance since 2006.

University of Chicago Law School

M. Todd Henderson has been named the first Michael J. Marks Professor.

Henderson’s research interests include corporate law, securities and financial regulation, and law and economics.

With an engineering degree cum laude from Princeton University in 1993, Henderson worked for several years designing and building dams in California before matriculating at the University of Chicago Law School. He was an editor of the Law Review, and captained the law school’s all-university champion intramural football team.

Upon graduating magna cum laude in 1998, Henderson was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as clerk to the Hon. Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He practiced appellate litigation at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, D.C., and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company in Boston, where he specialized in counseling telecommunications and high-tech clients on business and regulatory strategy.

Henderson joined the UChicago faculty in 2005.

Jonathan Masur has been named the John P. Wilson Professor of Law.

Masur’s research and teaching interests include patent law, administrative law, legislation, behavioral law and economics, and criminal law.

Masur clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Masur taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law before joining the faculty as an assistant professor in 2007. He served as deputy dean from 2012 to 2014 and as the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar from 2011 to 2013.

Institute for Molecular Engineering

Andrew N. Cleland, who specializes in quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum sensors, has been appointed the first John A. MacLean Sr. Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise.

Cleland led the team that built the first quantum machine—a device whose motion can only be described with the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics. That feat earned Cleland’s team “Breakthrough of the Year 2010” honors from Science magazine. The same work was named a top-ten discovery of 2010 by Physics World.

He also has been developing a quantum computer based on superconducting quantum circuits. Such a computer would be able to process many complete sets of input data at the same time—far exceeding the parallel processing capabilities of modern classical computers.

In the quantum-communication arena, Cleland seeks to provide a means for the completely secure transmission of information, without relying on conventional encryption methods, instead relying on the principles of quantum mechanics.

A member of the UChicago faculty since July, Cleland formerly served as a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and as associate director of the California Nanosystems Institute at UCSB. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society.

Jeffrey A. Hubbell, who develops a variety of biomaterial and molecular therapeutics, especially for regenerative medicine and immunological interventions, has been appointed the first Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise.

Hubbell is an entrepreneurial chemical and biological engineer who has founded three companies based on his academic research: Kuros Biosurgery in Zurich, Switzerland; Anokion in Lausanne, Switzerland; and Focal Inc., of Lexington, Mass. Along with his associates, he holds 88 U.S. patents. Recently he has been designing biomolecules and biomaterials to turn on immune responses to fight infection and cancer, and on the other hand, specifically turn off immune responses in auto-immune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes. He coined the term “immune-modulatory materials” to describe this newly emerging field of research.

Hubbell formerly served as the Merck-Serono Chair in Drug Delivery and acting dean of the School of Life Sciences at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he also had served as founding director of the Institute of Bioengineering. He joined the UChicago faculty in July.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and an elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Melody A. Swartz, who studies how lymphatic vessels and their transport functions contribute to immunity and cancer, has been appointed the William B. Ogden Professor in Molecular Engineering.

Biomedical scientists typically regard the fluid drainage function of the lymphatic system as mostly important for maintaining tissue fluid balance. Cell transport functions, which regulate immunity, are considered separately. Swartz’s team has revealed new immune functions of lymphatic endothelial cells that are strongly linked to the transport functions of lymphatic vessels.

Her team also is trying to target lymphatic vessels for improved cancer immunotherapy because this is one aspect of the tumor microenvironment that seems to contribute to therapeutic failure. With these new insights, she is attempting to build a new picture of the lymphatic function in which the fluid and cell transport functions of the lymphatic vessels are intrinsically involved in regulating immune responses.

Schwartz previously held joint appointments as a professor of bioengineering and cancer research at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lusanne and served as director of its Institute of Bioengineering. A 2012 MacArthur Fellow, Schwartz also has received an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, and the Wenner Prize, Switzerland’s largest prize for cancer research. She joined the UChicago faculty in July.

Sian Beilock, Ron Thisted named to new Vice Provost roles

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 15:30 -0500

Provost Eric D. Isaacs announced appointments to two new Vice Provost roles to support faculty and students in their work.

Sian Beilock, professor of psychology and the College and a member of the Committee on Education, will serve as Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives. Ronald Thisted, professor of public health sciences, statistics, anesthesia and critical care and the College, will become the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.

In a letter to faculty, Isaacs said these new roles are envisioned as full-time appointments for faculty members.

“Sian and Ronald will work closely with the deputy and associate provosts to promote a culture of excellence in faculty and student recruitment and retention, while nurturing our core values, and supporting faculty as they pursue the most ambitious intellectual agendas” said Isaacs.

As Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives, Beilock will work with the deans, chairs, faculty and deputy provosts to help coordinate and implement academic programs that go beyond the prerogatives of a single division, school or institute. These include areas such as urban science and practice, energy and the environment, and the arts and culture, which involve many traditional academic fields and at the same time benefit from integration with other efforts on campus such as Civic Engagement and Global Engagement.

The Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives also will help support, on behalf of the Provost, the centers and institutes that report directly to the Provost, such as the Becker Friedman Institute, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Urban Education Institute, ensuring that they are well integrated into the overall academic structure.

Beilock, who joined the faculty in 2005, researches topics at the intersection of cognitive science and education. She studies the psychological and neural processes that influence performance, from test-taking to public speaking to professional athletics. She employs a wide range of methods in her work, such as measures of performance, physiological measures of stress, and neuroimaging techniques.

Beilock has authored two books and more than 80 peer-reviewed publications. She works extensively with educators and those involved in public policy, including recently serving on a National Research Council committee on decision-making and stress. Beilock received a BS in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego, and PhDs in both Kinesiology and Psychology from Michigan State University.

As Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Thisted will work with the deans and chairs on faculty appointments, promotions, recruitments and retention. He will provide leadership in navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment for research and publication, ensuring that key areas of compliance and policy do not detract from engaging in scholarship, innovation and education.

The Vice Provost for Academic Affairs will foster a service-oriented approach to the many roles in faculty life and academic affairs overseen by the Provost, Isaacs wrote. He will also take the lead, on behalf of the Provost, on key research, education, and individual issues.

Thisted’s research involves statistical computation, statistical methods for understanding and visualizing data, research reproducibility, and the design and analysis of clinical trials and epidemiologic studies, with particular attention to prostate cancer and to neurological diseases such as ALS, MS, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, and stroke.

Thisted’s writing includes 150 publications on a wide array of topics that include statistical methods, computation, public health, religion, and Shakespearean vocabulary.

Thisted served as chair of health studies (now public health sciences), co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program, co-director of the Clinical Research Training Program, director of the biostatistics core facility in the Comprehensive Cancer Center, and co-director of population sciences in the Institute for Translational Medicine.

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A recipient of the University’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Thisted received a BA in philosophy and mathematics from Pomona College and MS and PhD degrees in statistics from Stanford University.

Isaacs also thanked John Mark Hansen, the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the College and Senior Advisor to the President who, in addition to his other duties, has provided interim leadership in the Office of the Provost for academic integrity and compliance since July.

Jonathan Lear named Roman Family Director of Neubauer Collegium

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 15:50 -0500

Philosopher Jonathan Lear has been appointed the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Provost Eric D. Isaacs announced.

Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Philosophy and the College, has written on a broad range of topics that include the works of Aristotle and Freud, as well as Native American culture. He succeeds David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor in Social Thought and Medieval History, who has led the Neubauer Collegium from its founding in 2012, and was named dean of the Social Sciences Division in June.

“Jonathan Lear is an extraordinary scholar whose work reflects the breadth of interest and innovative approach to questions of importance that is at the heart of the Neubauer Collegium’s mission,” Isaacs said. “We are delighted that he has agreed to lead the Neubauer Collegium in its next chapter.”

Isaacs appointed Lear after receiving input from faculty across the University, as well as consultation with Nirenberg and Martha Roth, dean of the Division of the Humanities and the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology.

The Neubauer Collegium is currently home to 30 collaborative research projects that bring together scholars from across the University around the world. These projects, which range from one to three years, use the tools and methodologies of the humanities and humanistic social sciences to examine some of the most challenging questions facing contemporary society.

Projects so far have involved faculty members from every department in the divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences, and include a long-term study of a new government health insurance program in India to end-of-life care. Scholars associated with the Collegium have also investigated the fate of Iraq’s intelligentsia, the role of games in learning and the relationship between gesture and sign language.

Lear will build on that successful launch, according to Roth.

“In just two years, David and his staff worked with the faculty to make the Neubauer Collegium an international destination for scholars pursuing complex questions in the humanities and humanistic social sciences,” Roth said. “Jonathan is a remarkable scholar and leader, and I am confident the innovative work taking place at the Neubauer Collegium will deepen and expand under his care.”

Neubauer Collegium ‘in the finest traditions’ of UChicago

“The research projects of the Neubauer Collegium have never failed to surprise and fascinate me,” Nirenberg said. “If there is any consolation for leaving a job as intellectually exciting as the directorship of the Neubauer Collegium, it is leaving it in such good hands. Jonathan Lear’s expansive and agile intellect is the perfect match for Neubauer Collegium, whose ambitions stretch across so many questions, disciplines and methodologies.”

The Neubauer Collegium also offers a Visiting Fellows program to support short- and long-term collaborations between UChicago scholars and experts from other institutions. In addition, the Neubauer Collegium hosts public lectures, conferences and workshops aimed at sharing its work with the wider campus community and the public.

The Neubauer Collegium is named in honor of longtime UChicago supporters Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, currently vice chairman of the Board of Trustees, and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer. Their $26.5 million gift to the University in 2012 is among the largest in support of the humanities and social sciences in the institution’s history.

“The Neubauer Collegium is a new initiative in the finest traditions of the University of Chicago,” Lear said. “I look forward to working with colleagues throughout the University to shape it into a premier center for imaginative and deep research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.”

Lear studies philosophical conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates to the present. A graduate of Yale University, Cambridge University and the Rockefeller University, he also trained as a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Lear is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He has written extensively on the works of Aristotle, Socrates and Freud. He is also the author of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a study of the collapse of the Crow nation, and, most recently, A Case for Irony, which argues for the value and therapeutic benefits of irony in human life.

At UChicago, he has taught courses on psychoanalysis, the works of Kierkegaard and Lacan, Plato’s Republic, and the idea of the soul.

He is the second person to hold the title of Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. The title honors philanthropist and Man Group CEO Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87.

The 2014-2015 academic year will witness many significant lectures and milestones for the Neubauer Collegium. Economist Emmanuel Saez will deliver an Oct. 9 lecture inaugurating the Roman Family Directorship of the Collegium. The Neubauer Collegium’s new home at 5701 S. Woodlawn is expected to open this spring.

Gray Center to continue bold collaborations between artists, scholars

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:12 -0500

In its first three years, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry has made possible everything from a conference featuring the world’s leading cartoonists in dialogue with each other and a cross-section of faculty; to a monthlong alternate reality game involving students, a professor of English and an experimental phenomenologist from Montreal; to a yearlong collaborative exploration of low-level light undertaken by a distinguished physicist and an award-winning architect.

The tradition of fearless experimentation will continue at the Gray Center in years to come, thanks to the reappointment of David Levin as director and a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Levin, a dramaturg and scholar of German literature, opera, film and performance, has led the collaborative, arts-focused center since its founding in 2011. The Gray Center is named for prominent Chicago philanthropists Richard and Mary L. Gray in recognition of their $5 million gift to the University to found the experimental center that bears their name.

“In just three years, the Gray Center has redefined the ways artists and scholars collaborate at the University of Chicago,” said Provost Eric Isaacs. “David Levin’s vision has been essential to the program’s success, and his reappointment will allow the Gray Center to continue to grow and experiment in interesting and exciting ways for years to come.”

Levin’s reappointment comes on the heels of another major milestone for the center. In June, the Gray Center received $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to continue its signature program, the Mellon Collaborative Fellowships for Arts Practice and Scholarship. The program dates back to the founding of the Gray Center, when the Mellon Foundation awarded an initial grant of $1.35 million to inaugurate the program of experimental collaborations between artists and scholars.

The Mellon Fellowship program pairs accomplished artists and distinguished scholars from all fields for experimental collaborations that are designed to be transformative for all participants involved.

“At the University of Chicago, we believe the arts are not simply an object of scholarly study—the arts can themselves be a form of inquiry and as such can shape and reshape the research of our faculty members,” said Larry Zbikowski, deputy provost for the Arts at UChicago. “And yet, the possible forms that such inquiry might take remains very much an open question. The Gray Center has very quickly established itself as a place where that question is raised and addressed with energy, imagination and invention. The implications are profound—for a new understanding of the relationship between art and scholarship at our university, and far beyond.”

Over the course of the past two and a half years, the Mellon Fellowship program has produced a rich array of collaborative projects. These include sociologist Kristen Schilt’s collaboration with multimedia artist Chase Joynt on a set of multimedia installations, performances and events exploring public narratives about transgender identities; and artist Catherine Sullivan’s collaboration with director Sean Griffin and composer and musicologist George Lewis on an experimental opera based on Lewis’ book A Power Stronger than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music.

The coming year’s projects engage equally rich topics. Political scientist Cathy Cohen, New York-based filmmaker Orlando Bagwell and Chicago-based sculptor Garland Taylor will develop a project that investigates how representations of blackness, death and violence mark this particular neoliberal moment; cinema studies professor D.N. Rodowick and Paris-based artist and media theorist Victor Burgin will examine the relationship between memory and urban space on the near South Side of Chicago through the creation of site-specific audiovisual installations; and Hebrew literature scholar Na’ama Rokem, linguist Anastasia Giannakidou and award-winning Palestinian-Israeli novelist Sayed Kashua will explore the possibilities and limits of bilingualism.

These projects are selected and guided by an interdisciplinary advisory council comprised of faculty and arts professionals from across the University, as well as the Gray Center’s curator, Leslie Buxbaum Danzig.

Scholars and artists alike say they embrace the challenge of approaching their work in new ways. Patrick Jagoda and experimental phenomenologist Sha Xin Wei designed the final symposium for their collaboration on transmedia gaming, Play as Inquiry, as a series of immersive games.

“One of the aspects of the Gray Center that I find most admirable is the flexible and improvisational process it encourages,” Jagoda said of his experience as a Mellon fellow at the Gray Center. “Too many arts fellowships require a fully-formed project to be proposed at the outset. The Gray Center’s emphasis on ongoing process enabled my ‘Pervasive Play’ project team to be responsive to emerging circumstances. As a result, we were able to remain ‘experimental’ in practice—and not merely in name.”

Pushing scholars and artists towards that kind of adventurousness is one of Levin’s primary goals for the Gray Center.

“If we’re successful, what happens at the Gray Center today is not the same as what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow,” said Levin, the Addie Clark Harding Professor in Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College. “And that seems entirely in keeping with the experimental spirit that Richard and Mary Gray feel is so essential to the initiative.”

Last year, the Mellon Fellows had a new resource at their disposal—the Gray Center Lab. The 1,100 square foot space in Midway Studios can be reconfigured as a classroom, studio, collaborative workspace or exhibition and performance space. Newcity named the space Chicago’s best new venue for experimental arts.

Despite the diversity of teams and topics, the Mellon Fellowships have one thing in common—each features a team-taught course that serves as an exploratory forum for and extension of the collaboration. These courses enable University of Chicago students to participate in the collaboration and contribute to it: students in Jagoda and Sha’s course on transmedia games helped to design an alternate reality game that unfolded throughout April 2013.

Over the next three years, the Gray Center will create additional opportunities for students through the Mellon Fellows program. Beginning this year, the Gray Center will offer internships for graduate students, enabling them to provide artistic and research assistance to the scholar-artist teams.

As the Gray Center becomes more ingrained in the life of the University, Levin emphasized that he is committed to its continued evolution.

“How is it that the Gray Center and the University of Chicago have emerged, over the course of the past few years, as a creative incubator where artists and scholars experiment with new forms of collaboration, re-imagining and reinventing the relationship between scholarship and artistic practice?” he asked. “This has transpired thanks to the extraordinary vision and generosity of Richard and Mary Gray, the largesse of the Mellon Foundation and the concerted efforts of the Gray Center’s brilliant staff and our extraordinary advisory council. Just as this initiative represented an experiment when it began in 2011, the Gray Center and the Mellon Fellowship program remain very much an experiment and a work in progress.”

Gary Tubb named faculty director of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 04:30 -0500

Gary Tubb, professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, has been appointed faculty director of the new University of Chicago Center in Delhi.

With preparations underway to open the Center in March 2014, Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum appointed Tubb to a three-year term. Tubb served on the faculty committee that originally recommended the University create a center in India.

“Gary’s knowledge and long experience in collaborating with scholars and institutions throughout South Asia will enable us to establish the Center in Delhi as a model for international scholarly endeavors,” Rosenbaum wrote in announcing the appointment. “He will work with the faculty steering committee and the University community to develop and oversee the implementation of a broad and ambitious Center agenda, and at the same time, foster strong partnerships with Indian and regional colleagues and engage area alumni.”

Tubb has served as the chair of South Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as its director of Graduate Studies, and as the chair of the Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professor search committee.

He earned a PhD in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University (1979) and previously taught at Harvard University, where he was chair of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and editor of the Harvard Oriental Series. He also was taught at Brown University, Vassar College and Columbia University before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2007.

“The Center in Delhi will enable us to expand opportunities for UChicago scholars to partner with academics, institutions, and cultural organizations in India and throughout the region,” said Tubb. “With support from the Center, we believe these partnerships will spark important research collaborations, and generate new knowledge, for the benefit of present and future generations.”

A leading Sanskrit scholar, Tubb examines the tradition’s poetics, grammatical forms and commentarial traditions and draws insights across the culture’s philosophy, religion and literature. Speaking Sanskrit, German, Hindi and Urdu and familiar with Marathi, French, Latin, Spanish and Prakrit, Tubb is the author of Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook for Students. He is an editor and primary contributor in the book Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Sanskrit Kavya Literature (Oxford University Press, Delhi). Another book, On Poets and Pots: Essays on Sanskrit Poetry, Poetics, and Philosophy, is also forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

He has held visiting appointments as a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University and has been recognized as a Research Fellow of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies.

Faculty members recognized for outstanding scholarship with new professorships

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 15:58 -0500

Six UChicago faculty members—Elisabeth Clemens, Douglas R. Dirschl, Maryellen L. Giger, Susan C. Levine, Wenbin Lin and John Levi Martin—have received named professorships, while four faculty members— Lauren Berlant, Karin Knorr Cetina, Gregory Lawler and D.N. Rodowick—have been named Distinguished Service Professors.

Biological Sciences Division

An international leader in orthopaedic surgery, Douglas R. Dirschl, the founding chairman of Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine, has been named a Lowell T. Coggeshall Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery.

An orthopaedic surgeon, administrator, teacher and researcher, Dirschl specializes in the care of patients with musculoskeletal trauma and fractures, as well as other injuries and diseases of the bones, joints and muscles. His research identifies methods to improve precision and consistency in fracture diagnosis and classification.

He also has written extensively on traumatic shoulder, hip and ankle injuries and on emergency orthopaedic assessment and care. In 2011, as president of the American Orthopaedic Association, he spearheaded the association’s “Own the Bone” campaign, designed to increase awareness among the public and physicians of the serious consequences of bone loss and the growing prevalence of osteoporosis.

Dirschl has received multiple teaching awards for his work with medical students and residents. He has co-authored three books, 40 book chapters, and more than 75 peer-reviewed scholarly articles, and he has lectured all over the world. He serves on editorial and review boards for several notable scientific journals, including the Journal of Orthopaedic Research, Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma, and the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.

Dirschl joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 1993. In 2001, he served as a professor and chairman of orthopaedics at Oregon Health and Science University. In 2003, he returned to UNC as department chair and remained there until joining the UChicago faculty in January.

Professor and vice chair of Radiology Maryellen L. Giger has been named the A.N. Pritzker Professor in Radiology. Giger, who serves as director of the Imaging Research Institute, and is the immediate past director of the Graduate Program in Medical Physics and founding chair of the Committee on Medical Physics, was honored for her discoveries of new ways to use computers to help radiologists obtain quantitative information from medical images.

Giger and colleagues have refined the art of computer-aided diagnosis by designing computerized-image analysis systems to help radiologists better find and diagnose various cancers, which can translate to better patient prognosis and longer lives.

The author or co-author of more than 300 scientific manuscripts, Giger is the inventor or co-inventor on 25 patents. She is a fellow and former president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a prior vice-president of the Radiological Society of North America, and an elected board member of the SPIE.

In 2010, Giger was elected to the National Academy of Engineering—one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. In 2013, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine and the Internal Congress on Medical Physics selected her as one of the 50 medical physicists who have had a major impact on the field over the last 50 years.

She joined the UChicago faculty in 1986.

Humanities Division

Literature professor and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has been named the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature. Berlant’s work has focused on institutions of intimacy and belonging in the United States since the 19th century, as well as on the public circulation of political emotions like trauma, love, optimism and depression.

She is the author of Cruel Optimism, which examines the affective and aesthetic implications of the recent disintegration of the promise of the “good life” in the United States and Europe. Cruel Optimism received the 2012 Rene Wellek Award from the American Comparative Literature Association.

Her previous publications include a trilogy on national sentimentality—The Anatomy of National Sentiment, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, as well as the edited volumes Intimacy, Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State, and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Her most recent book is Desire/Love.

Berlant is the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality’s LGBTQ Studies Project, a fellow of 3CT, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a co-editor of Critical Inquiry.

Berlant joined the UChicago faculty in 1984.

Film scholar and filmmaker D.N. Rodowick has joined the University of Chicago faculty as the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies and the College. He comes to UChicago from Harvard University, where he was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Rodowick’s research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society.

Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as five books: The Virtual Life of Film; Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media; Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine; The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory; and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory.

He also edited the 2009 collection Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy. Rodowick has two books forthcoming, Elegy for Theory and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation.

Alongside his scholarly work, Rodowick is an experimental filmmaker and video artist whose short films have received numerous awards.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Rodowick taught at Yale University, where he founded the Film Studies program. In 2002 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named him an Academy Film Scholar.

Rodowick joined the UChicago faculty July 1.

Social Sciences Division

Economic anthropologist and sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina has been named the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology, Anthropology and the College.

Knorr Cetina’s research interests include financial markets, knowledge and information, globalization, and social theory. Her work explores the information architecture of financial markets and their “global microstructures,” the global social and cultural form these markets take.

She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach. In addition, she continues to be interested in laboratory studies, the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production, particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.

She is the author of The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science and Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Her current book project focuses on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies.

Knorr Cetina joined the UChicago faculty in 2010. She previously taught at the University of Bielefeld and the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Sociologist Elisabeth S. Clemens, who studies the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change, has been named the William Rainey Harper Professor in Sociology and the College. She also is chair of sociology.

Clemens' first book, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925, received best book awards in both organizational sociology and political sociology. She co-edited Private Action and the Public Good, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology, Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America's Past and Present, and the journal Studies in American Political Development.

Clemens, PhD’90, is now completing Civic Nation, which traces the entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in the development of the American nation-state.

Clemens also has served as chair of both the political sociology and the comparative historical sociology sections of the American Sociological Association, as a member of the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Third Sector, and as president of the Social Science History Association.

Clemens joined the UChicago faculty in 2002 as an associate professor in sociology.

Psychologist Susan C. Levine, who investigates the effects of variations in a child’s surroundings and nurturing on the growth of language and mathematical and spatial skills, has been named the first Rebecca Anne Boylan Professor in Education and Society. Her interests also include research into the plasticity of language and cognitive skills following early brain injury.

Her many publications include co-authorship of two books, Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood and Neural Plasticity and Cognitive Development: Insights from Children with Perinatal Brain Injury.

She is co-director of the University’s Center for Early Childhood Research, co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, and she has served as chair of psychology and as a member of the National Academies of Sciences Early Childhood Mathematics Committee.

Levine also serves on the board of Chapin Hall, which conducts policy research that benefits children, families and their communities, and on the board of the UChicago Laboratory Schools. She formerly consulted on early math for the PBS program “Sesame Street.”

Levine is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Levine has been a faculty member at UChicago since 1976.

Sociologist John Levi Martin, who has published work on social network analysis, the use of algebraic models for the analysis of dichotomous data and political psychology, has been named the first Florence Borchert Bartling Professor in Sociology and the College.

Martin’s publications include two books, both of which received the Theory Prize for Outstanding Book from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Theory. In The Explanation of Social Action, he critiques the conventional understanding of what it means to “explain” something in the social sciences.

His Social Structures brought together recent findings in sociology, anthropology, political science and history to trace how sets of interpersonal relationships become ordered into various structural forms. The book describes a range of social structures, from families and street gangs to communes and nation-states.

He is currently doing research on the role of aesthetics and judgment in neo-Kantian sociological theory.

Martin has held previous faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Rutgers University. He joined the UChicago faculty in 2009.

Physical Sciences Division

Physicist and mathematician Gregory Lawler, a specialist in probability and stochastic processes and in statistical physics, has been named the George Wells Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics, Statistics and the College.

He is the author or co-author of six books: Intersections of Random Walks; Introduction to Stochastic Processes; Lectures on Contemporary Probability; Conformally Invariant Processes in the Plane; Random Walk: A Modern Introduction; and Random Walk and the Heat Equation.

Lawler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Mathematical Society, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Lawler also is a co-recipient of the George Pólya Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

He served as editor-in-chief of the Annals of Probability from 2006 to 2008 and was an editor of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society from 2009 to 2013. He co-founded the Electronic Journal of Probability in 1995 and served as its co-editor until 1999.

Lawler joined the UChicago faculty in 2006, after teaching at Cornell University. He also has been a faculty member at Duke University.

Chemical scientist Wenbin Lin, who designs new materials for applications in catalysis, molecular sensing and nanomedicine, has been appointed the James Franck Professor in Chemistry and the College.

Some of Lin’s recent work has involved the construction of hybrid solids from molecular building blocks for wide-ranging applications in sustainability and human health. He has used this approach to prepare materials for solar-energy applications.

Lin also is attempting to apply these molecular materials at nanoscale levels for applications in biomedical imaging and anticancer therapy. This work includes the development of a new type of nanoparticle that shows potential for more effective delivery of chemotherapy.

Lin is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He appeared on various “top scientists” lists, which are based on citations per article, from 1999 to 2010.

Other honors include the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Lin previously was the Kenan distinguished professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he had served on the faculty since 2001.

He joined the UChicago faculty on June 1.

Lawrence Zbikowski appointed Deputy Provost for the Arts

Fri, 31 May 2013 13:32 -0500

Lawrence Zbikowski, Associate Professor in Music and the College, has been named Deputy Provost for the Arts, Provost Thomas Rosenbaum announced. Zbikowski’s three-year term begins July 1, 2013.

In his new role, Zbikowski will work with deans, chairs, faculty and staff to enhance and deepen links among the academic, co-curricular and professional arts institutions across the campus, as well as the University's cultural connections with the surrounding community and the city of Chicago.

He succeeds Larry Norman, Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College, who will return full time to the faculty.

“As the inaugural Deputy Provost for the Arts, Larry Norman defined the position and shaped it in a manner that allowed the arts to flourish as experimentation, multidisciplinary inquiry, teaching, performance and production,” Rosenbaum said. “I am confident that Larry Zbikowski will advance this vital work and forge new civic links, thereby enriching activities across campus and extending the role of the arts in an urban context.”

Norman’s two terms as Deputy Provost for the Arts were marked by the development of major new arts facilities, programs and initiatives. These include the planning, construction, programming and operation of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts; the creation of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry with its fellowship program for visiting artists and scholars; and, most recently, the launch of the Arts and Public Life initiative and its new Arts Incubator in the Washington Park community.

A music theorist, Zbikowski’s scholarship focuses on applying cognitive science to problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical syntax, relationships between music and movement, the connections between music and the emotions, text-music relations, and the structure of theories of music. In addition to his active research and teaching portfolios, Zbikowski currently serves as Chair of the Department of Music.

His book Conceptualizing Music: Cognition, Theory and Analysis won the 2004 Wallace Berry Award of the Society of Music Theory. That same year, Zbikowski was a fellow at the National Humanities Center, where his project explored cognitive approaches to musical grammar. That work took shape as his current book project, Toward a Cognitive Grammar of Music. Most recently, Zbikowski received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and was a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at McGill University.

Zbikowski holds a PhD in Music from Yale University. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1993.

“I am thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate with faculty, students and staff, as well as arts leaders across the city, and to build on the innovative programs and initiatives already underway at the University,” Zbikowski said.

To facilitate Zbikowski’s transition, Bill Michel will continue to manage and coordinate broader UChicago Arts operations, finances, communications, fundraising and collaborative programming through his central role as the Executive Director of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Pamela Hoehn-Saric appointed chair of Smart Museum of Art’s Board of Governors

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 11:37 -0600

The University of Chicago has appointed Pamela Hoehn-Saric chair of the Smart Museum of Art’s Board of Governors, Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced. Hoehn-Saric’s three-year term as chair began Oct. 30.

Hoehn-Saric, MAT’81, has served on the Smart Museum’s board since 2009, and succeeds outgoing chair Robert Feitler, Lab‘45. “I’m excited to take on this role,” said Hoehn-Saric. “The Smart Museum is in a great position, and I am confident we can continue to build support not only for its superb exhibitions and education programs, but also for new initiatives as the Smart looks ahead to its 40th anniversary in 2014 and beyond.”

During Feitler’s tenure as chair, the Smart Museum had many successes. It set attendance records in four of the past five years, highlighted by major projects including Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (2012) and Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (2010)—a multifaceted exhibition that met acclaim in Chicago before embarking on national tours. The Smart boosted support for its academic initiatives in 2011 with the establishment of a $1.75 million endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and matching gifts. A substantial landscaping project in 2008 revitalized the Smart’s sculpture garden.

“It has been an honor to have served as chair for the last several years,” said Feitler. “The Smart Museum does exciting and important work. It has been tremendously gratifying to be a part of it from the very beginning. I retire from the chairmanship knowing the Museum is on a solid path for further progress and success.”

In 2011, Feitler and his wife Joan, AM’55, were presented the University Medal—one of the highest honors that the University of Chicago can bestow—for their exceptional record of philanthropy and service at both the Smart and elsewhere on campus, including the Department of Art History, Court Theatre, the Divinity School and the University of Chicago Medicine.

Feitler’s relationship with UChicago dates to 1935, when he entered the Laboratory Schools. The Feitlers were instrumental in establishing the Smart Museum, which opened in 1974, in memory of Joan’s uncles, David and Alfred Smart. Bob is a trustee emeritus of the University and a life trustee of the University of Chicago Medicine.

“I am grateful to Bob for his selfless leadership, and I am delighted that Pam has accepted this appointment,” said Rosenbaum. “It is a privilege to know that we can count on such committed leadership during a period of great excitement for the arts at the University of Chicago and great promise and ambition at the Smart Museum.”

“No one cares more deeply about the Smart than Bob does; all those who enjoy what we can offer are in his debt,” added Anthony Hirschel, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum. “I am greatly looking forward to working with Pam in her new role as our board chair. She has already demonstrated her passion for the work of the Smart, and her determination to ensure that it continues to flourish will serve the Museum and its board very well indeed in the years to come.”

Hoehn-Saric is a member of the executive committee and chair of the academic affairs committee of the Kenyon College board of trustees, and she serves on the board of the Kenyon Review. She completed a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree from the University of Chicago and was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. She taught at the elementary level and served as the training director at the law firm Piper & Marbury.

A resident of Gibson Island, Md., Hoehn-Saric has been served as chair of the Gibson Island Country School and the Severn School boards. She is currently on the board of Mercersburg Academy and the Gibson Island Corporation.

Hoehn-Saric is married to Christopher Hoehn-Saric, a co-founder and senior managing director of the private equity and venture capital firm Sterling Partners as well as a trustee at Johns Hopkins University. They have four children: Gabriella, Christopher, Robert and Michaella.

Nancy Kawalek appointed distinguished fellow in arts, sciences, technology

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:00 -0500

The Institute for Molecular Engineering has appointed artist and innovator Nancy Kawalek to create and develop new theater work inspired by science and technology, as part of the University of Chicago’s continuing commitment to fostering artistic and scientific collaborations across campus.

Kawalek currently is a studio professor in the film and media studies department and the media arts and technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her appointment as professor and distinguished fellow in the arts, sciences and technology will take effect early next year.

“The Institute for Molecular Engineering plans to participate in activities that cross the boundaries of arts, sciences and technology, and we’re extremely fortunate to be able to attract an accomplished professional to campus who has a great track record in this area,” said Matthew Tirrell, the institute’s Pritzker Director. “Nancy’s work could really make the activities of the institute a lot more tangible to the broader community in Chicago.”

“Nancy is passionately interested in dramatizing our scientific and technological world,” noted Larry Norman, UChicago’s deputy provost for the arts. “Her interests, outstanding talents and approach to the arts will wonderfully complement programs already flourishing at the University of Chicago,” Norman said. “We are especially eager to explore collaborations with Nancy that potentially could involve the Institute for Molecular Engineering and our ongoing Arts | Science Initiative.”

One component of that initiative is the Arts | Science Graduate Collaboration Grants program, which encourages independent cross-disciplinary research between the arts and the sciences.

Another manifestation of interest in the arts-sciences crossover at UChicago is the work of Sidney Nagel, the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in Physics. The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry included Nagel in a recent exhibit on Modern-Day Leonardos because of his stunning photographs of dripping fluids and other phenomena of scientific interest.

Kawalek, a New York theater-trained actor, has 25 years of professional experience that includes acting on and off Broadway and in regional theater, roles in film, television and radio, and work as a director and writer. She also is the founder and director of STAGE — Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration at the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

“Certainly there are science programs and institutes that have artists-in-residence, but to have the Institute for Molecular Engineering embrace a program that is devoted to the development of new theater work is unique and extraordinary,” Kawalek said.

Although Kawalek gravitated toward theater and the arts as a child, “I always found the sciences interesting,” she said. “I was one of those arts people who actually liked math and science. I’m not a scientific or technical expert by any means, but I appreciate how much science and technology impacts our lives.”

A graduate of Northwestern University, Kawalek is well acquainted with Chicago’s lively theater community. She received her bachelor’s degree in theater and oral interpretation and also studied at Second City. As a senior at Northwestern she performed in her first professional show at what is today known as Northlight Theatre in Skokie and at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.

At UC Santa Barbara, STAGE’s primary activities include an international script competition and an arts laboratory. The STAGE International Script Competition awards a $10,000 prize to the best new play about science and technology. The STAGE Collaboratory, which Kawalek will move to Chicago, is a developmental lab for creating multimedia theater pieces in which science and technology play prominent roles in content and/or form.

The STAGE script competition, now in its fifth cycle, will culminate in an award ceremony in Dublin, the 2012 European city of science. STAGE is collaborating on these award festivities with the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices at Trinity College Dublin.

In the Collaboratory, an international array of professional artists and distinguished scientists come together in numerous residencies throughout the year at the California NanoSystems Institute to conceive and develop original theatrical work. The Collaboratory’s first creation, The Art of Questionable Provenance, presents a tale of perception that parallels the functions of the brain and explores critical themes emerging from modern neuroscience.

At UChicago, Kawalek will greatly expand the breadth and impact of the Collaboratory, as well as foster additional artistic and scientific collaborations. “I plan to cast a wide net over the city of Chicago. There’s a great deal of scientific and artistic talent here,” she said.

Faculty members recognized for outstanding research with new professorships

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:15 -0500

Thirteen UChicago faculty members — Mark Bradley, Marshall Chin, Juan de Pablo, Frances Ferguson, Ayelet Fishbach, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Holly Humphrey, David J. Levin, Robert McCulloch, Kathleen Morrison, Paul Nealey, Nicholas Polson and Kazuo Yamaguchi — have received named professorships, while six faculty members — Alex Eskin, Michael Fishbane, David Jablonski, Bruce Lincoln, Eric Santner and Rosanna Warren — have been named Distinguished Service Professors. The William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor Richard Shweder has been named the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor. Alan Kolata, the Neukom Family Distinguished Service Professor, has been named the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor. Two faculty members, Kenneth Pomeranz and Dam Thanh Son, have been named University Professor.

Biological Sciences Division

Marshall Chin has been appointed the Richard Parrillo Family Professor in Medicine. Chin is a general internist with a research focus on reducing racial and ethnic health disparities. As the director of Finding Answers: Disparities Research For Change, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation based at UChicago, Chin oversees the funding and evaluation of disparities reduction projects around the country. Chin is also co-principal investigator for Improving Diabetes Care and Outcomes on the South Side of Chicago, which is working with local clinics, patients and the community on innovative solutions to controlling and treating the chronic disease.

Holly Humphrey has been appointed the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in Medicine. Humphrey studies how the medical school curriculum can be reshaped to fit the modern health care system and place a greater emphasis on professionalism, diversity, doctor-patient relationships, research and scholarship. Her work has informed the implementation of The Pritzker Initiative and other programs at the Pritzker School of Medicine, which Humphrey oversees as dean of Medical Education. Under her supervision, the Pritzker School of Medicine reached the top 10 in national medical school rankings in 2012.

Humanities Division

Frances Ferguson has been named the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in English Language & 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, a leading scholar of German literature, history and culture, has been named the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Germanic Studies and the College. Santner 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.

Divinity School

Michael Fishbane has been named the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish Studies in the Divinity School and the College. His many works explore the ancient Near East, biblical studies and rabbinics, the history of Jewish interpretation, as well as Jewish mysticism and modern Jewish thought. He is presently completing a book that incorporates modern critical and traditional Jewish interpretations of the Song of Songs.

Bruce Lincoln has been named the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Committee on Medieval Studies and the College. He is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict, the violent reconstruction of social borders and ideological aspects of religion. Lincoln tends to focus on pre-Christian Europe and pre-Islamic Iran, with occasional excursions elsewhere. His Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions, which calls for a more critical approach to studying the role of religion in history and culture, was published in May by the University of Chicago Press.

Institute for Molecular Engineering

Juan de Pablo, who comes to UChicago from the University of Wisconsin, will become the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Theory and Simulations and the College, effective Sept. 1. de Pablo specializes in conducting supercomputer simulations to understand and innovatively design new materials and to find applications for them. He is one of the leading experts in simulating polymeric materials, substances that consist of long, flexible chains of identical molecules. de Pablo also develops computational simulations of molecular and large-scale phenomena, including DNA dynamics, protein aggregation and the latter’s poorly understood relationship to various diseases.

Paul Nealey, also formerly of the University of Wisconsin, will join the faculty as the Brady W. Dougan Professor in Molecular Engineering and the College as of Sept. 1. Nealey is a pioneer of directed self-assembly, a technique that is becoming important in microelectronics processing to create patterns for integrated circuits. He also is a world leader on patterning organic materials, which entails creating physical patterns of structure and composition in materials at the nanoscale, which affects the function of the materials. Nealey’s expertise in fabricating nanostructured surfaces extends to tissue engineering of corneal prosthetic devices.

Physical Sciences Division

Alex Eskin has been appointed the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics and the College. Eskin is generally interested in the aesthetics of mathematics, but his particular research interests include the dynamics and geometry of Teichmüller space, billiards in rational polygons, and geometric group theory. He also studies Lie Groups, discrete groups, ergodic theory, applications to number theory and geometric group theory.

David Jablonski has been named the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College. Jablonski is a paleontologist who studies macroevolution, which takes place above the species level and encompasses large-scale patterns of evolution, mass extinction, diversification and the origin of evolutionary breakthroughs. He also compares patterns of extinctions and survival during mass extinctions to better understand the evolutionary significance of extinction events. His methods emphasize the combining of data from living and fossil organisms to study the origins and fates of lineages and adaptations.

Dam Thanh Son has been appointed University Professor in Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute and the James Franck Institute, effective Sept. 1. Son currently serves as a professor of physics and a senior fellow in the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington. A theoretician, his research interests span nuclear, particle, condensed matter and atomic physics. Among his accomplishments, Son has borrowed ideas from string theory and black holes physics to explain some phenomena observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Social Sciences Division

Mark Philip Bradley has been named the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor in History and the College. His research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. international history, the global history of human rights politics and postcolonial Southeast Asian history. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, Vietnam at War and is completing a book that explores the place of the United States in the 20th-century global human rights imagination.

Alan Kolata has been named the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in Anthropology and the College. He is leading ongoing interdisciplinary research projects studying human-environment interactions over the past 3,000 years in South America and Southeast Asia, including problems of water sustainability and climate change in Cambodia. His new book, Ancient Inca, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

Kathleen Morrison has been named the Neukom Family Professor in Anthropology and the College. Her research examines the causes and consequences of agrarian transformations in southern India, especially the connections between power relations and environmental change. Morrison’s work indicated that these transformations, begun in ancient times, led to inequality and environmental degradation, including current construction of large dams and a current rash of farmer suicides. This work integrates data from archaeology, history and environmental sciences, including botanical and stable isotope analysis.

Kenneth Pomeranz, one of the nation’s leading scholars of modern China, joined the faculty July 1 as University Professor of History and the College. Pomeranz’s research is focused on three primary areas: reciprocal influences of state, society and economy in late Imperial and 20th-century China; the origins of a world economy as the outcome of mutual influences among various regions; and comparative studies of labor, family organization, and economic change in Europe and East Asia. His book, The Great Divergence (2000), won the John K. Fairbank Book Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association, one of the most important honors for a scholar of Asian studies.

Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist, has been named the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Human Development and the College. His recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies. He also is working with a group of scholars from a number of universities to look at the “equality-difference paradox”—the apparent tradeoff between equality and diversity, such that very few contemporary countries have achieved both; and the implications of the evidence that the most economically egalitarian countries are also the most ethnically and culturally homogeneous.

Rosanna Warren has been named the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College. An acclaimed poet, Warren examines poetry and translation, and the relations between classical and modern literature in her scholarship. Among her award-winning poetry are titles such as: Each Leaf Shines Separate; Stained Glass, which won the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Departure (2003). Her most recent book of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat (2011). She is also author of a book of literary criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008).

Kazuo Yamaguchi has been named the Ralph Lewis Professor in Sociology and the College. Yamaguchi is a prominent scholar of statistical modeling of family processes. A specialist in quantitative methodology, social stratification, the family and mathematical sociology, he is interested in statistical models for social data and rational choice theory. He also studies work-life balance and gender inequality in Japan, and is an advisor to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Gender Equality Bureau of the Cabinet Office, regarding the promotion of women in economic activities.

University of chicago Booth School of Business

Ayelet Fishbach has been named the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing. A member of the Booth faculty since 2002, Fishbach studies the process of self-regulation, specifically the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. A primary focus of her research is on the practice of self-control, especially how people protect their long-term goals from the influence of short-term motives or temptations.

Chang-Tai Hsieh has been named the Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, where his research is centered on growth and development. Several of his papers have been published in a number of top economic journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York and Minneapolis.

Robert McCulloch has been named the Katherine Dusak Miller Professor of Econometrics and Statistics. His research centers on applications of data mining and Bayesian statistical methods in business, statistical computing and machine learning. A member of the Chicago Booth faculty from 1985 to 2008, he rejoined the faculty this year after serving on the faculty of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin.

Nicholas Polson has been named the Robert Law Jr. Professor of Economics and Statistics. Polson is a Bayesian statistician who conducts research on financial econometrics and Markow Chain Monte Carlo methods. Inspired by an interest in probability, Polson has added a number of new algorithms to the field of financial econometrics, including the Bayesian analysis of Stochastic Volatility and sequential particle learning. He has published in a variety of disciplinary journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and the Journal of Finance.

Gil Stein appointed to third term as Oriental Institute director

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:00 -0500

Gil Stein, a leading scholar of ancient Mesopotamia, has been reappointed for a third five-year term as director of the Oriental Institute, a position he has held since joining UChicago in 2002.

“The Oriental Institute serves as a nexus for research on campus on the ancient Near East, with an extraordinary collection of objects recovered during OI excavations,” wrote Provost Thomas Rosenbaum in a message to faculty. “Under Gil’s leadership, the OI has implemented the first stage of the integrated Database, a long-term project to connect the Oriental Institute’s major archives including hundreds of thousands of objects, images and data records into a single searchable digital resource, and established the Public Education Department with a broad mission of outreach to the University community, elementary and secondary school students, and the public.”

The U.S. State Department recently chose the Oriental Institute to help inventory collections at the National Museum of Afghanistan (Kabul) and develop a bilingual English-Dari database of the museum’s holdings, Rosenbaum added.

Over the past five years, the Oriental Institute has made major strides in both archaeological and text-based scholarship. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has been completed after 90 years of work, and the Institute is now developing a new project to explore and document the early development of writing systems in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.

The Persepolis Fortification Archive project and the Epigraphic Survey are using advanced digital technology to document crucial written records of the Persian Empire and ancient Egypt. In the last five years the Oriental Institute has dramatically increased the scope of its archaeological research, initiating four new excavations in Egypt (Edfu), Syria (Tell Zeidan), Israel (Marj Rabba in the Galilee) and the first joint American-Palestinian excavations in the West Bank at Khirbet al-Mafjar (early Islamic Jericho)

“The Oriental Institute is a uniquely valuable resource for scholarship and for the University of Chicago. I deeply appreciate being given the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing work of strengthening the Institute and building its research capacity for the future,” Stein said.

He said his top two priorities are to expand the scope of Oriental Institute research, and to secure the resources to build a solid foundation in people, programs and infrastructure. “These are the crucial building blocks to maintain our position as one of the world’s leading centers of innovation and discovery in studying the civilizations of the ancient Middle East,” Stein said.

He noted that the region is sometimes unstable politically. “By ensuring the critical mass of scholarly expertise and resources at the Oriental Institute, we will be able to move rapidly and flexibly take advantage of these new research opportunities when they do arise — especially in key regions such as Iraq and Iran,” Stein added.

A professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Stein has been conducting fieldwork in Syria at Tell Zeidan, where he is investigating the earliest precursors of Mesopotamian urbanism in the Ubaid period — ca. 5300 B.C. He also has worked in Turkey, where he has overseen important excavations at Hacinebi, a 5,500-year-old Mesopotamian colony in the Euphrates River valley of southeast Turkey that is part of the world's first-known colonial system.

Stein is the author of Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia, edited The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters and The Uruk Expansion: Northern Perspectives from Hacinebi, Hassek Höyük and Gawra, and co-edited (with Mitchell Rothman) Chiefdoms and Early States in the Near East: The Organizational Dynamics of Complexity. He has been a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, a Fulbright scholar in Turkey, a resident scholar at the School of American Research, and has held a Howard Fellowship from Brown University.

Prior to joining UChicago, he was a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. He received his bachelor’s in archaeology from Yale University (1978) and his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (1988).

Martha Roth reappointed to second term as dean of Humanities

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:00 -0500

Martha T. Roth, the Chauncey S. Boucher Distinguished Service Professor of Assyriology, has been appointed to a second five-year term as dean of the Humanities Division, President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced. The term begins July 1.

In their message to Humanities faculty, Zimmer and Rosenbaum underscored the University’s “absolute commitment to humanistic discourse, research and education,” citing among Roth’s accomplishments in her first term the re-conceptualization of the Center for Jewish Studies, the creation of the Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Visiting Professorship and growing leadership in digital humanities.

During that period, the Humanities faculty grew by 12 percent, including the appointment of two University Professors: Augusta Read Thomas in Music and the College, and Haun Saussy in Comparative Literature and the College. Four Neubauer Family Assistant Professors also joined the division’s faculty.

“The Humanities Division has grown considerably over the last five years, and in filling this position, we were acutely aware of the need for a leader who would work with the faculty of the Division to refine the intellectual and educational directions of the Division for the future, and together with the other deans, the provost, and the president, help build and fulfill the highest aspirations of the University,” Zimmer and Rosenbaum wrote.

“It is an honor to serve as dean of the Division of the Humanities at this visionary institution,” Roth said. “Throughout the University, our work is supported and advanced by the administration and staff at every level, by the dedicated faculty, and by the outstanding students. I look forward to working with my colleagues during my next term to keep our culture of rigorous inquiry, scholarly debate, and inspiring pedagogy alive and vibrant.”

In a separate message to the Humanities faculty, Roth announced the creation of two new deputy dean positions, providing additional academic leadership in the division as it embarks on several ambitious initiatives. Bill Brown (English and Visual Arts) has been appointed deputy dean for academic and research initiatives; Mario Santana (Romance Languages and Literatures) has been appointed deputy dean for languages. They will join Thomas Christensen (Music), whose reappointment as master of the Humanities Collegiate Division was announced last year by John Boyer and Roth.

Roth earned her bachelor’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania before coming to UChicago as a research associate in 1979 and joining the faculty in 1980.

Roth worked for more than three decades on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the last 15 years as editor-in-charge, shepherding the massive, 90-year project to conclusion. In its first two months after the June 2011 news of its completion, more than 100,000 downloads were made of the dictionary from the Oriental Institute website.

Among her publications is Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, a comprehensive collection and translation of Mesopotamian laws, including the famous laws of King Hammurabi of Babylon. Roth received many fellowships and grants, including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Roth previously served as deputy provost, coordinating the Graduate Aid Initiative to increase support for graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences divisions. She coordinated the University’s participation in the National Research Council’s assessment of doctorate programs, and represented the Provost’s office on the Library Board, the University Press and the Graham School.

Amy Iwano named executive director of University of Chicago Presents

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:00 -0600

The University of Chicago Presents has named Amy Iwano to the role of executive director, effective April 2. Iwano comes to UChicago after 18 years as executive director of the Chicago Chamber Musicians.

Martha Feldman, chair of the University’s Music Department, said of the appointment: “Amy Iwano will continue to invigorate University of Chicago Presents in its mission of bringing Chicago the finest chamber music, early music, new music and jazz, and will do so with extraordinary leadership and innovation.”

Larry Norman, Deputy Provost for the Arts, added: “Amy brings inspiring vision and tremendous leadership skills to the University’s hallmark music presenting organization. As we look forward to this year’s opening of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, we are thrilled to welcome her to the helm of a true flagship for the arts on campus and in the city of Chicago.”

“I am both delighted and honored to join the University of Chicago at this extraordinary time for the arts on campus,” said Iwano. “I've been impressed by the enthusiasm and unanimity of support for growing the arts at the University and will look forward to ensuring great music has a critical and progressive role in its future offerings through University of Chicago Presents.”

Iwano was appointed executive director of Chicago Chamber Musicians in 1993. Under her leadership, CCM earned local and national recognition for its artistic excellence and organizational vitality. The organization expanded its artistic ensemble and programs and quadrupled its annual operating budget.

Prior to her position at CCM, Iwano served as executive director of the Japan America Symphony Association of Los Angeles, where she guided a chamber orchestra of 45 musicians. From 1984-89, Iwano was administrator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, a 100-member summer orchestral training program.

Among numerous arts appointments, Iwano has served on the board of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, and was a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. For Chamber Music America, she has served on the board and as a grant panelist, strategic advisor and speaker at national conferences.

She has been an active contributor to Chicago’s arts scene, serving on the Chicago Chapter Advisory Board of the American Composers Forum and on the Advisory Board for the Jane Addams Hull House Center for Arts and Culture. She also served on the Program Committee of the Arts & Business Council of Chicago and is a founding executive committee member of ChicagoClassicalMusic.org.

Iwano graduated with a BA from Pomona College, where she played harp in the orchestra. She also studied at the Goethe Institute in West Berlin and the University of Paris, La Sorbonne.

About University of Chicago Presents

The University of Chicago Presents boasts a tradition of classical music-making, which dates to the 1903 opening of Mandel Hall. The various series that UCP presents has grown to include Classic Concert, Howard Mayer Brown International Early Music, Artists-in-Residence (Pacifica Quartet) and Contempo, as well as a number of special events including jazz performances.

UCP also has expanded its mission in recent years to include collaborations that bridge different arts and disciplines, including its 2008 music festival honoring French composer Olivier Messiaen; its 2010 festival on Spanish modernism; and most recently, the Soviet Arts Experience, a 16-month festival of more than 100 events across Chicago exploring arts and culture. UCP also has partnered with cultural institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Chamber Musicians, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Smart Museum of Art.

Its 2012-13 performances will take place in a number of campus venues, principally Mandel Hall, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, and the new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, as well as other city of Chicago locations.

Seven UChicago faculty members receive named professorships

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:35 -0600

Seven members of the University faculty—Habibul Ahsan, Pete Angelos, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, Young-Kee Kim, Paul Mendes-Flohr, David H. Song, and Jerrold R. Turner—have received named professorships. All appointments are effective Jan. 1.

Habibul Ahsan, director of the Center for Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention at the University of Chicago Medicine and associate director of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, has been named the Louis Block Professor in Health Studies, Human Genetics and Medicine.

Ahsan studies the relationships between environmental and genomic factors in cancer and other diseases to understand the pathogenesis, prognosis and prevention of diseases of broad public health significance. He has published extensively on the large-scale epidemiology, genetic susceptibility and prevention of health effects of arsenic exposure, from contaminated wells in parts of Bangladesh, and also on the molecular and genetic epidemiology of breast and other cancers.

Since 2000, Ahsan has led the Health Effects of Arsenic Longitudinal Study, or HEALS, which examines the long-term consequences of arsenic exposure—a problem that affects nearly a third of the population of Bangladesh. In 2010, his team showed that the risk of dying from a chronic disease was nearly 70 percent higher for those with high arsenic levels. Those with moderate exposures had a 20 to 30 percent increased risk. A follow-up study found that the combination of arsenic exposure and smoking multiplied the risk.

Based on the scientific leads from HEALS, Ahsan and colleagues are testing whether inexpensive supplements of selenium and vitamin E can reduce rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease and death for those with elevated arsenic levels.

He is also principal investigator of two genome-wide association studies to identify novel genes for breast cancer risk and prognosis among 7,000 young women from the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia.

Born in Bangladesh, Ahsan received his medical degree from Dhaka University and a M.Med.Sc degree in epidemiology from the University of Western Australia. After completing his post-doctoral training in molecular epidemiology at Columbia University, he taught at Columbia for 11 years. He joined the UChicago faculty in 2006.

Peter Angelos, section chief of endocrine surgery and associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, has been named the Linda Kohler Anderson Professor in Surgery.

A highly regarded physician with extensive experience in surgery of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands, Angelos is an expert in the use of minimally invasive surgical techniques in the treatment of endocrine cancers. He is also an authority on issues of medical professionalism, new-surgeon training and surgical ethics.

A prolific author, Angelos has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on improving outcomes of thyroid and parathyroid surgery, minimally invasive endocrine surgery, best practices for thyroid cancer treatment and ethical decision making in health care.

He chaired the ethics committee of the American College of Surgeons oncology group for 13 years and currently serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons and the U.S. chapter of the international Society of Surgery.

Angelos completed his surgical residency at Northwestern University, with a year spent in an ethics fellowship at UChicago, and his PhD in philosophy at Boston University. After a second fellowship in endocrine surgery at the University of Michigan, he joined the faculty in surgery and medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University, where he was chairman of the ethics committee. He joined the UChicago faculty in 2006.

Included in multiple lists of “top doctors,” he has received many honors for his clinical skills, emphasis on professionalism and devotion to teaching.

Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenweiser Professor in Classics and the College, has been named the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and the College.

Bartsch-Zimmer, whose research focuses on Roman literature and culture, has been honored for her teaching and scholarship with a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

She is the author of The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (2006), which examines the understanding of the self in ancient Greece and Rome. Her other publications include Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian, Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War and Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius.

Among her edited volumes are Seneca and the Self, co-edited with David Wray (University of Chicago Press. 2009), Ekphrasis, co-edited with Jaś Elsner (Special issue of Classical Philology 102, 2007), and Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, co-edited with Thomas Bartscherer (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bartsch-Zimmer is a graduate of Princeton University and received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught before joining the UChicago faculty in 1998.

Young-Kee Kim, who has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of fundamental particles and their interactions, has been appointed the Louis Block Professor in Physics. Kim joined the UChicago faculty in 2003 and has served as deputy director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory since 2006. Previously she taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kim has devoted much of her work to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles, which manifests itself as weight under the force of gravity. She has studied the two most massive particles, the W boson and the top quark, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in order to better understand how particles acquire mass.

Kim is the former co-spokesperson (co-leader) of the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which completed data collection last September. Kim also participates in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland, and in an effort to develop the next generation of accelerators.

Kim’s many honors include the University of Rochester’s Distinguished Scholar Medal (2010), the South Korean government’s Science and Education Service Medal (2008), and the Ho-Am Prize (2005) for outstanding achievements in basic science.

Paul Mendes-Flohr, a leading scholar on modern Jewish thought and intellectual history, has been named the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor in the Divinity School and the Committee on Jewish Studies.

An expert on the works of the German-Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, Mendes-Flohr is currently at work on a biography of Buber.

He is the author of German Jews: A Dual Identity (1999), which explores the complex cultural loyalties of German Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mendes-Flohr’s other works include The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (with Jehuda Reinharz), Progress and its Discontents (in Hebrew), and Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity.

He is the editor of A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs, published by the University of Chicago Press. Mendes-Flohr also is editor-in-chief, with Bernd Witte, of the 21-volume critical edition of Martin Buber’s writings in German.

Mendes-Flohr joined the UChicago faculty in 2000, after teaching for 30 years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from Brandeis University.

David H. Song, vice chairman of surgery, section chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery and director of the plastic surgery residency-training program at the University of Chicago Medicine, has been named the Cynthia Chow Professor in Surgery.

An internationally recognized expert in plastic and reconstructive surgery, Song specializes in breast reconstruction and oncoplastic surgery—a multispecialty approach to tumor removal and tissue reconstruction. His research, including several current clinical trials, focuses on improving breast reconstruction after lumpectomy or mastectomy. He also has pioneered techniques for the repair of chest wall defects.

A fellow in the American College of Surgeons and past president of the Chicago Society of Plastic Surgeons, Song also has served as a board member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the Association of Academic Chairmen of Plastic Surgery. He serves on the boards of the UChicago Laboratory Schools and the Medical Aid for Children of Latin America, which provides free surgical care for children with congenital deformities in the Dominican Republic.

He edited two textbooks and is associate editor of Plastic Surgery, 3rd Edition, the definitive textbook in the field, to be published this year.

Song has received many honors, including the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of California, Riverside; and clinician of the year from Y-ME, a national breast cancer advocacy organization.

Song earned his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed his general surgery residency and fellowships in plastic surgery and microsurgery at UChicago Medicine. He then joined the Chicago faculty in 2001. He was named section chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery in 2004. In 2009, he completed an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and was named vice chairman for business and strategy for surgery.

Jerrold R. Turner, associate chairman of pathology, has been named the Sara and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor in Pathology and Medicine.

An active physician and scientist, Turner has primary clinical expertise in gastrointestinal pathology. His research interests relate to disorders associated with defective intestinal barrier function, including inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and graft versus host disease. Turner's research group integrates tools from diverse disciplines, including cell biology, electrophysiology, structural and molecular biology, and immunology to understand how barrier dysfunction drives disease.

Turner studies how the epithelial cells that line the digestive tract establish, maintain and regulate barriers to prevent uncontrolled exchange between the hostile environment of the gut lumen and the sterile internal tissues. His laboratory has focused on the biology and pathobiology of tight junctions, the structures that seal and regulate flux across the space between adjacent epithelial cells.

Turner's recent work has changed scientists' understanding of how tight junctions function, replacing an older model with a more dynamic one. Ongoing efforts of his lab include molecular characterization of these interactions and their roles in barrier regulation. Application of these data to preclinical models has allowed Turner to develop novel therapeutic approaches that restore intestinal barrier function and limit or prevent disease.

The author of nearly 200 articles, reviews and book chapters, Turner has been recognized with Outstanding Investigator awards from the American Society for Investigative Pathology and the American Physiological Society. He is presently associate editor of Gastroenterology, serves on several editorial boards, and holds leadership positions in major pathology, physiology and gastroenterology societies.