UChicago News

Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 12:44 -0500

Editor’s note: Playwright Martyna Majok, AB’07, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living. In the award, the play is described as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals.” The play appeared Off-Broadway in 2017 and was called ‘immensely haunting’ by The New York Times.

The Polish-born Majok spoke with UChicago News in 2014 about another of her works, a comedy entitled Ironbound that appeared at the Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as her experience as a performer and playwright while at the University. The original story appears below:

Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound” is the story of the relationship between Darja, a struggling Polish immigrant, and three very different men. The play, she says, was inspired by the work of Marxist theorist Slavoj Zizek.

It’s also a comedy.

Despite its weighty subject matter, the last thing Majok wants is “for the audience to sit there for the next hour and a half thinking this is just drama. You have to give them permission to laugh.”

“Ironbound” emerged as Majok was preparing to marry her then-fiancé and reflecting on “who has the privilege to marry for love.” Both Majok and her husband grew up poor and chose to pursue careers in the arts. Majok says they feared they would never have economic security. “We know how hard it is to get out of a cycle of poverty.”

She began to reflect on the romantic choices made by her mother—like Darja, a working-class immigrant from Poland.

“She would make what ended up being the wrong decisions for all the right reasons, trying to do the best thing that she could for her children and for herself,” Majok explains.

Around the same time, Majok was reading Zizek’s Violence during long commutes between a residency and teaching position at a theater in New Jersey and Connecticut, where her fiancé was in graduate school. “What I took away from that is that capitalism makes us treat each other as commodities,” she says. “‘What can you do for me, what can I do for you’ doesn’t exactly equal love.”

With Zizek’s writing, her mother’s experience, and her own impending marriage all simmering in her head, Majok dashed off the first draft of “Ironbound” in just a week. The play follows Darja over 22 years, depicting her at different points in her three marriages and showing her fierce struggle to survive and provide security for her son.

After two workshop productions, she submitted “Ironbound” to Steppenwolf at the suggestion of the company’s literary manager, who had mentored Majok during an internship after college.

“Part of our deal was that if I came to Chicago, I had to bring him Polish food, so I just brought him three pounds of kielbasa and some pierogi. Hopefully he liked it. I haven’t heard back from him, so maybe it was too much,” Majok jokes.

Becoming a playwright was never Majok’s plan, although she always showed a flair for writing. She didn’t see her first play until high school, when she won $45 playing pool and decided to treat herself to a production of “Cabaret” on Broadway.

As a University of Chicago undergraduate, she tried out for a play and fell in love with the strong bonds she created with her castmates. “I loved the communities that you form—these little ridiculous, inside joke-y families,” she says.

Her love of theater flourished as she studied with David Bevington and Nick Rudall at UChicago. She delved into playwriting during a quarter studying abroad in Paris.

She describes her first play as “the 22-year-old play that you write about your family. It was a super dark and ungenerous and emo play.” University Theater ultimately produced the piece, and Majok decided she wanted to make playwriting a career.

“It’s the thing that I found challenging and exciting and I felt it had worth,” she explains. “Leaving some sort of permanence was attractive.”

Supported by a fellowship from the Merage Foundation for the American Dream, Majok spent the first two years after graduating from UChicago immersing herself in the theater community by watching, studying, reading and writing as many plays as she could. She went on to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

Over time, she says, she’s worked to make her plays funnier and less self-serious than her earlier efforts, and to write rich, complex female characters. “Women with strong appetites and flaws—I would like to see these women on stage, and if I were an actor, I would want to play these women who go after something hungrily,” she says.

Her next project focuses on the women and families that continued to live near Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster, despite the risks to their health and safety.

Even when tackling the weighty topic of Chernobyl, Majok’s darkly comedic sensibility still shines through. “It’s a musical,” she says.

Four faculty members receive Guggenheim fellowships

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:40 -0500

Four UChicago faculty members and a visiting faculty member have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships: Alain Bresson, the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Classics; Lenore A. Grenoble, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics; Srikanth Reddy, associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature; and David Schutter, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Annie Dorsen, visiting assistant professor of practice in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, also was honored.

Chosen from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, the four UChicago faculty are among 173 Guggenheim Fellowship winners who will receive financial support to pursue a variety of projects, from endangered languages to the invention of money.

A scholar of the ancient economy, Bresson is the author of “The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy,” which won the 2017 James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association.

Bresson will use his Guggenheim prize, which he said came to him “as a wonderful surprise,” to work on a new book about the specific form taken by money in the ancient Greek world, with a central focus on the question of why the ancient Greeks “invented” coinage.

“The Greeks and the Lydians are famous for having invented a new means of payment, an instrument that we still have in our pockets in our daily life: coinage,” Bresson said. “But a frequent confusion is the idea that the Greeks invented money. Of course they did not. Their contribution was to give to money a political form. I have explored these questions in almost twenty articles which, hopefully, will constitute the foundation for the book I plan to write.”

Grenoble has been studying language endangerment for the last 20 years, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Guggenheim award will go towards supporting Grenoble’s research project on the relationship between language and well-being among Arctic Indigenous peoples in the face of rapidly changing social and environmental conditions, including urbanization and climate change.

“Linguists estimate that 50-90 percent of the world’s languages will be lost over the course of the next century due to a process called language shift, whereby speakers cease to use their mother tongue in favor of another language,” Grenoble said. “Receiving the Guggenheim is both recognition and validation of the importance of the project that I am working on.”

Reddy is a poet and scholar and currently serves as the interim director for creative writing & poetics. The author of two books of poetry, Reddy’s writing on contemporary poetry has appeared in various publications including The New York Times and The New Republic.

The award meant a great deal to Reddy, who says he sees it as a sign of “encouragement to pursue my creative inclinations, no matter how eccentric or foolhardy.”

Reddy will use the award to complete a new book of poetry, titled “Underworld Lit.” The poem, built from fragments of lecture notes from an imaginary college humanities course, will weave together a disparate range of subjects including academic satire and a journey through versions of the underworld from various cultures.

“Needless to say, it’s a very UChicago poem,” Reddy said.

Schutter is a visual artist who specializes in painting and drawing and his work often draws on historical works in these disciplines.

A former recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, Schutter has had exhibitions around the world, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Gemaeldegalerie Berlin, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Palazzo Poli, and most recently in the Frans Hals Museum and documenta 14.

Schutter will be working on a new project on Thomas Eakins, the late 19th-century American realist painter, utilizing Eakins’ archives at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The archives contain letters, studies, anatomical models and oil sketches—things of that sort that I’ll be using for an upcoming project,” Schutter said.

Dorsen is a director and writer whose work explores the intersection of mathematical algorithms and live performance. Her projects have appeared throughout the U.S. and Europe, and she is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange.

Dorsen, in the second year of an initial three-year appointment with TAPS, called the Guggenheim “an enormous honor” and will put the prize toward a new theater project.

“I’m working on a new theater project, as yet untitled, that has to do with forms of online social life, the kinds of virtual communities that we are constructing, and the ways of being together that the internet makes possible—for good or for ill,” Dorsen said. “The piece is part of my ongoing interest in how the technological tools we create end up re-creating us in all kinds of unforeseen ways.”

Lorraine Daston honored for research on the history of science

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 12:24 -0600

Lorraine Daston, a visiting professor in UChicago’s John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the Department of History, has been awarded the Dan David Prize for her achievements in the research of the history of science.

The annual award, which includes a $1 million prize, recognizes scholars for innovative and interdisciplinary research in technological, scientific, social or cultural fields covering the past, present and future. Daston said she was in “disbelief but delighted beyond measure” to be recognized.

“It is grand that the history of science, always a small, interstitial discipline lodged between the natural and social sciences and the humanities, has been recognized for its essential contributions to the understanding of the past,” Daston said.

Daston arrived at UChicago in 1992 and said she fell in love with the “intellectual earnestness” of the University, as well as the unique nature of the Committee on Social Thought, to which she returns to teach each year. Since 1995, she has directed the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and she now divides her time between Berlin and Chicago. She has written on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early-modern science, and the history of scientific objectivity.

Robert B. Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy and the College, commended Daston, calling her “one of the most influential and widely respected historians in the world today.”

“Professor Daston is the embodiment of the interdisciplinarity that the Committee and indeed the University have tried to foster,” Pippin said. “Her role in introducing our graduate students to the various relations between the sciences and the humanities has been absolutely indispensable, and her generosity with students is legendary.”

Daston said she is looking forward to putting the prize toward “many happy hours in various dusty archives” as she continues her research. Laureates also donate 10 percent of their prize to postgraduates in their respective field to foster a new generation of scholars. Daston will share her prize with a student at MIT and another at the University of Cambridge.

The Dan David Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. Past winners have included UChicago Prof. James Heckman, novelist Margaret Atwood and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Wu Hung honored for helping create field of contemporary Chinese art history

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:30 -0600

In recognition of a career spent helping to create the field of contemporary Chinese art history in higher education, Prof. Wu Hung will receive one of the highest academic honors from the world’s largest professional society for art historians and artists.

Wu, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations, will receive the College Art Association’s distinguished scholar award at its annual conference in February 2018.

“Wu Hung is joining an impressive group of individuals,” said Hunter O’Hanian, the association’s executive director. “The committee looks for someone who has a depth of scholarly accomplishment, and if you look at the depth of his work, especially under difficult circumstances at the time, it’s amazing.”

Wu is considered a giant in the field. While he began his career working on early Chinese architecture, he also in many ways became the father of modern and contemporary Chinese art history. His work began with a series of exhibitions staged at Harvard University in the mid-1980s, before arriving at UChicago as a faculty member. As a consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art, he has curated a series of exhibitions and he is currently at work on a large-scale exhibition of contemporary experimental art in China, “The Allure of Matter.”

“Wu Hung has long worked, in the very best UChicago ways, across entrenched disciplinary divides, looking at ancient art as much as contemporary practices,” said Prof. Christine Mehring, chair of the Department of Art History. “His scholarship and teaching have propelled our department’s, and the discipline of art history’s, turn to a global art history.”

Opening up Chinese art history

Despite his accomplishments, Wu is quick to recognize the contributions of all scholars in the field working to expand the cultures studied in art history, including China.

“Art history as a field was very compartmentalized by regions and nations, especially so-called Western art and non-Western art,” Wu said. “I feel like a lot of people have made efforts to open up art history.”

In his decades of study, Wu has witnessed firsthand that opening up of contemporary art in China, moving from underground and experimental works in the 1980s and 1990s to the establishment of major museums spaces today, but he still sees plenty of areas for work.

“Art is opening up, but you have to deal with a lot of challenges like censorship, and you have to negotiate with the different traditions and local sentiments of different areas,” Wu said. “And people in China still think of art as something ‘extra,’ but I feel it is essential to modern education. That’s something we have to make people see.”

In addition to his scholarship in contemporary Chinese art, Wu also works to preserve early Chinese art. He is the founder and director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at UChicago, which was established in 2003 to support groundbreaking scholarship and create related digital technologies to advance access to and preserve art, artifacts, and sites.

Wu is particularly proud of a project that uses digital imaging and 3-D technology to map ancient Buddhist caves pillaged in the early 20th century by foreign collectors. Wu and his colleagues spent years locating the scattered pieces around the world, making 3-D scans. They then worked with local archaeologists to scan and reconstruct the historical caves, offering images to scholars through an online database.

“In a way, it’s a healing process,” Wu said about the project. “There was a historical tragedy, and now we’re using new technology to heal in some ways. We’re also creating a model, because we can’t scan all these caves, so scholars in other countries can think about how to do similar projects.”

That openness extends beyond just sharing data. Jeehee Hong, PhD’08, one of his many former students, said that despite his stature in the field, Wu has always made time for his students, and his model of scholarship has shaped a new generation of art historians.

“His work and his manner of engaging with scholars is open, and it’s all about inclusiveness,” said Hong, now an associate professor in East Asian Art History at McGill University. “Given how busy he is, he still sees his students as people. I’ve been teaching for years, and now I see his influence.”

Fourth-year wins writing fellowship for fiction exploring emigration

Tue, 23 May 2017 16:20 -0500

Fourth-year Elinam Agbo began at the University of Chicago as a pre-med student majoring in Biological Sciences. But her plans began to change with each creative writing workshop she took.

“I’m in my sixth and seventh workshops now,” Agbo said. “I like the workshop environment. It makes me write and produce, and I learn quite a lot from my peers.”

Her commitment has paid off with Agbo being named the first recipient of the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. Her novel in progress, titled Canopy of Dreams, was the unanimous selection for the award, selected by UChicago faculty members who teach fiction.

Agbo will read from her work May 25 at the Creative Writing student reception. The event starts at 4:30 p.m. in the Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801.

"Canopy of Dreams is about a 12-year-old named June emigrating to the United States to join her mom who she hasn't seen since she was five,” Agbo said. “I was interested in trying to figure out what it's like to emigrate, especially at that critical age, without a solid knowledge of your origins.”

While the novel isn’t completely autobiographical, Agbo shares an immigrant story with her main character. Agbo moved to the United States from Ghana when she was ten, growing up in Kansas. Her parents now live in South Carolina, moving there just after she graduated from high school.

Agbo said home and belonging are important themes of the novel. “If you can’t trace where you’ve come from, or at least have firm footing in the past, how can you move forward?” she asked.

Agbo hasn’t been back to Ghana, but she has returned to it in her writing after being inspired during a workshop in her second year at UChicago. She had started working on a fantasy piece, but after an assigned reading evoked memories of Ghana, Agbo began working on more realistic stories, some of which evolved into what is now Canopy of Dreams.

Fiction lecturer Rachel DeWoskin, who nominated Agbo for the award, has gotten the chance to witness Agbo’s evolution as a writer as the two have worked together in four workshops over the last few years.

“Elinam is a uniquely brilliant person, and her work is ambitious and full of talent,” DeWoskin said. “The novel she’s working on is at once thematically deep, character-driven and propulsive.”

DeWoskin said one of the things that most impressed her about Agbo’s novel is her ability to give all her characters nuance and complexity.

“Modesty and humility are part of Elinam’s person, and they inform the humanity of her writing,” DeWoskin said. “She’s a person who is outward-thinking, and takes a lot of time considering other people, including her characters. Even the characters who behave badly in her novel are treated as fully-rendered human beings.”

For Agbo, DeWoskin’s encouragement has been a driving force in her work, especially in guiding her to think about the story she wants to tell.

“Rachel was encouraging in the beginning, just by the readings she had on the syllabus,” Agbo said. “I liked reading about immigrants, and I hadn’t done that intentionally before that first workshop. Since then, her sustained enthusiasm and support have definitely kept me writing. It’s a gift to have a mentor as versatile and accomplished as Rachel care so deeply about my work.”

The Les River Fellowship was established by Dorothy River in honor of her late husband, W. Leslie River, PhB’25. The $5,000 award is intended for “uninterrupted work or travel for research purposes.” Agbo will use fellowship to support her stay at two writing institutes this summer before starting the University of Michigan’s Master of Fine Arts program.

Musician and educator Steve Coleman to receive Jesse L. Rosenberger Medal

Mon, 22 May 2017 16:15 -0500

The University of Chicago will award the 2017 Jesse L. Rosenberger Medal to Steve Coleman, a composer, saxophonist, educator and native of the city’s South Side.

Coleman, who will receive the award at Convocation on June 10, is an artist known for his original, challenging compositions that draw inspiration not only from musical traditions around the globe, but from nature and scientific concepts. He has spent several decades conducting lengthy interviews with older jazz musicians in order to develop a deeper understanding of race relations and musical history and forms, among other topics.

Coleman is a leader in education and community building, providing instruction and opportunities for musicians to participate in workshops and collaborations across the country. He is founder of the M-Base Concepts, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to using music as a tool to aid in the expansion of consciousness.

Over the last two years, Coleman and M-Base Concepts, Inc. have partnered with UChicago’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and Arts + Public Life, along with the Rebuild Foundation, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and the Jazz Institute of Chicago to develop multi-week residencies focused on the importance of musical mentorship. His ensemble, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, focused on workshops, outreach on Chicago’s South Side and performances—the majority of which were free. They also led workshops with young musicians in the Chicago Public Schools and partnered with Free Write Arts and Literacy to visit a juvenile detention center, where the band talked about their lives and gave youth the opportunity to play various instruments.

Coleman has received a Doris Duke Impact Award and a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Coleman is the 53rd recipient of the Rosenberger Medal, established in 1917 by Mr. and Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger in recognition of achievement through research, in authorship, in invention, for discovery, for unusual public service or for anything “deemed of great benefit to humanity.”

Members of the UChicago faculty nominate candidates for the Rosenberger Medal. The faculty Committee on Awards and Prizes then evaluates the nominations, which are voted upon by the Council of the University Senate.

Rosenberger Medalists are invited to give a public lecture or workshop during the following academic year.

Three faculty members elected to American Philosophical Society

Thu, 04 May 2017 15:19 -0500

Three UChicago faculty members have been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States.

They are Lorraine Daston, visiting professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought; Neil H. Shubin, the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy; and Michael S. Turner, the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor.

Also among the 32 newly elected members, announced May 1, are alumni Barbara Newman, AM’76, professor at Northwestern University; and Beth A. Simmons, AM’82, professor at the University of Pennsylvania; as well as former President Barack Obama, a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School; and architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who designed the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and were selected to design the Obama Presidential Center.

Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science and an expert on early-modern European scientific and intellectual history who has written on the history of probability theory, objectivity and scientific observation. Her recent research has centered on the history of rules, including the rise of a rationality based in algorithms.

Daston is director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany, but spends a three-month period at UChicago, where she teaches seminars on topics at the intersection between the history of science, philosophy, and social theory.

She serves on the editorial board of the humanistic journal Critical Inquiry, in which a number of her scholarly articles have been published. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was inducted into the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010.

Neil H. Shubin has conducted landmark research on the evolutionary origin of anatomical features of animals. He has conducted fieldwork in much of North America, including Greenland, as well as China, Africa and Antarctica. One of his most significant discoveries, a 375-million-year-old fossil called Tiktaalik roseae, is an important transitional form between fish and land animals.

Shubin has written two popular science books: the best-selling Your Inner Fish (2008), named best book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences and made into an Emmy Award-winning PBS series; and The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body (2013).

He serves as associate dean for academic strategy in the Biological Sciences Division and a senior adviser to President Robert J. Zimmer. Shubin is also the co-interim director of the UChicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory, where he’s played a key role in supporting education and research programs. Shubin is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Michael S. Turner is a theoretical cosmologist who helped to pioneer the interdisciplinary field that combines particle astrophysics and cosmology. His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made seminal contributions to theories surrounding dark matter, dark energy and inflation. A former chair of UChicago’s Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Turner currently serves as director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics.

Turner chaired the National Research Council’s Committee on the Physics of the Universe, which published the influential report, “Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos.” He previously served as assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation, the chief scientist of Argonne National Laboratory and the president of the American Physical Society.

Turner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous honors, including the 2010 Dannie Heineman Prize for pioneering cosmological physics research from the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics, and was selected by the University of Chicago to deliver the 2013 Ryerson Lecture.

Tyehimba Jess, AB’91, wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 13:30 -0500

Tyehimba Jess, AB’91, has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Olio, his collection of original verse.

Jess’ poems examine the lives of African-American performers from the Civil War up to World War I, revealing the history of America’s blues, work songs and church hymns. Jess was praised by the Pulitzer committee “for a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”

A native of Detroit, Jess studied public policy while at UChicago and received his MFA from New York University. Jess is currently the poetry and fiction editor of African American Review and is an associate professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

This is Jess’ second book of poetry. His first, leadbelly, received the 2004 National Poetry Series award. Jess read from Olio this past December at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

Prof. Martha Nussbaum to deliver Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 11:15 -0600

World-renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, will deliver the 2017 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on May 1 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Her talk, “Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame,” will draw upon her years of work on the role of emotion in politics to explore the emotional dynamics at play in American and other societies, including the ways in which uncertainty leads to the blaming of outsider groups.

The lecture, established by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972, is considered the federal government’s highest honor in the humanities. Previous speakers include jurist and law professor Paul Freund, writer Saul Bellow, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., literary critic Helen Vendler and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Leon Kass, the Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and the College, was selected in 2009, joining former UChicago scholars Edward Shils (1979) and John Hope Franklin (1976) as past lecturers.

“I'm deeply honored to be invited to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, and happy to have this chance to speak for the humanities at a time when they are under threat—both in our nation and all over the world,” said Nussbaum, who last year was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for contributions that include developing a measure of global welfare that focuses on human capabilities rather than only on economic growth.

NEH Chairman William D. Adams said: “We are deeply honored that Martha Nussbaum has agreed to give the 2017 Jefferson Lecture, and we look forward to learning her thoughts on ‘Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame.’ Across her long and immensely productive career, Martha has been a tireless and peerless advocate for the role and utility of philosophy in our public life. With this honor, we celebrate at once her philosophical achievements and her example as an engaged and passionate public philosopher.”

Nussbaum has earned international acclaim for her work on moral and political theory, emotions, human rights, social equality, education, feminism, and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her Jefferson Lecture will draw from her latest book project, which brings a philosophical view to political crises in America, Europe and India by offering a deeper understanding of how fear, anger, disgust and envy interact to create a divisiveness that threatens democracy.

“It is urgent for us to understand ourselves better, to see why we have arrived at this state of division, hostility and non-communication,” Nussbaum said. “A philosophical approach, focused on a close look at human emotions, offers that understanding of ourselves … I believe it also offers us strategies of hope and connection.”

Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics, said he was pleased to see the NEH honor Nussbaum and her achievements.

“Martha joins an esteemed list of thinkers, writers, humanitarians and artists who have been chosen to deliver this important lecture,” he said. “It is a well-deserved recognition, given her influential contributions on a range of issues, including social justice, equality and human dignity. Martha’s longstanding and passionate support for humanities education makes her selection for the Jefferson Lecture especially fitting.”

Nussbaum is appointed in the Law School and Department of Philosophy. She also is an associate in the Department of Classics, the Divinity School, and the Department of Political Science, as well as a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a board member of the Human Rights Program.

Nussbaum, who has written and edited dozens of books and written more than 400 papers, received her MA and PhD from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, she was a University Professor at Brown University. From 1986 to 1993, while teaching at Brown, Nussbaum was also a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a branch of the United Nations University. She is a founding president of the Human Development and Capability Association, and she has received 57 honorary degrees from universities in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. In addition to the Kyoto Prize, Nussbaum has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2012, the Nonino Prize in 2015 and the Inamori Ethics Prize, also in 2015, among others.

Tickets will be available to the public beginning in April through neh.gov. The lecture is free and open to the public and will stream live online at neh.gov.

Prof. Martha Nussbaum wins Kyoto Prize

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 08:55 -0500

Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics and a world-renowned philosopher whose wide-ranging work often centers on questions of human vulnerability, has been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for achievements that include introducing “the notion of incorporating human capabilities ... into the criteria for social justice.”

The honor, bestowed annually by Japan’s Inamori Foundation but given only once every four years in the sub-category of thought and ethics, is among the most significant international accolades for scholarly work.

Nussbaum “led global discourse on philosophical topics that influence the human condition in profound ways, including contemporary theories of justice, law, education, feminism and international development assistance,” the foundation wrote in a release announcing the prize Friday. “She established a new theory of justice that ensures the inclusion of the weak and marginalized, who are deprived of opportunities to develop their capabilities in society, and has proposed ways to apply this theory in the real world.”

Nussbaum is one of three recipients of the Kyoto Prize this year; the others are Tasuku Honjo, a Japanese medical scientist, who won the basic sciences award; and Takeo Kanade, a Japanese roboticist who won the advanced technology award.

Nussbaum, who has earned international acclaim for her work on moral and political theory, emotions, human rights, social equality, education, feminism, and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, said she felt “deeply honored and humbled” by the award, which she will formally receive during a 10-day event in Kyoto in November.

“Martha Nussbaum has made extraordinary contributions to scholarship in philosophy, and she is an engaged intellectual who has made an impact on issues of equality, diversity and human dignity, among others,” said President Robert J. Zimmer. “I am delighted that her work has earned this important recognition.”

Added Law School Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics: “Martha is an extraordinary scholar whose insights and interdisciplinary approach seek to make the world a better place. We are tremendously proud.”

Often cited as one of the world’s leading public thinkers, Nussbaum worked with Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen to develop the Capabilities Approach—a measure of global welfare that examines what a nation’s individuals are actually able to be and do, rather than relying on the country’s Gross Domestic Product as a proxy. GDP, she argues, fails to account for inequality or the specific facets of a fulfilled life, such as health, education and religious liberty.

Nussbaum also has written extensively on emotions—including love, fear, disgust, shame and anger—and their role in politics, law, justice and society. In her most recent book, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, she argues that retributive desires can impede social progress. Currently, she and Saul Levmore, the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law, are co-authoring a book on aging that joins philosophical, legal and economic insights.

“Martha Nussbaum embodies the Greek ideal of philosophy as an art of citizenship,” said Prof. Gabriel Richardson Lear, chair of UChicago’s Department of Philosophy. “People around the world listen to her because she is able to make original contributions at the level of abstract thought and then show how they make a difference to the most important issues of our political and personal lives. The range of her influence is extraordinary—distributive justice, opera, political emotions, Plato's theory of love, the Aristotelian manuscript tradition ... to name just a few. She has also been an inspiration to women philosophers around the world and to all who care about justice. It is a privilege to be her colleague.”

The Kyoto Prize, which is awarded annually in each of three categories, was created in 1985 by Inamori Foundation founder Kazuo Inamori to honor those who have “worked humbly and devotedly, sparing no effort to seek perfection in their chosen professions” and have “sincerely aspired through the fruits of their labors to bring true happiness to humanity.”

Nussbaum, an outspoken advocate of humanities education, called the prize “particularly honorable and meaningful” because it celebrates humanistic contributions alongside scientific advancement.

“Mr. Inamori is a great scientist—and when a great scientist decides to dedicate a lot of attention and financial support to the humanities, that really means a lot to me,” Nussbaum said. “The best scientists understand the profound kinship between scientific creativity and humanistic and artistic creativity. I think we’re in an era where both profound science and humanistic creativity are being threatened by a short-term, profit-oriented mentality. We really need to make common cause, the scientists and humanists, because it’s the deep, searching thought, the power of imagination, and the power of rigorous, critical thinking that we really share.”

The prize, she said, is an opportunity to underscore these ideals. David Weisbach, the Walter J. Blum Professor of Law, who co-teaches an interdisciplinary global inequality class with Nussbaum, said it’s a message she is well-equipped to share.

“The humanities are under siege globally, and Martha is one of the leading voices fighting against that,” he said.

Previous winners in the thought and ethics field include Willard Van Orman Quine, an American philosopher known for contributions to epistemology, logic and metaphysics; Paul Ricœur, a French philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School between 1970 and 1985; and Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher known for his achievements in social philosophy.

As part of the prize, Nussbaum will receive a diploma, a gold Kyoto Prize medal and a cash gift of 50 million yen (about $472,000)—a good portion of which she plans to donate to the Law School and the University’s Department of Philosophy.

“I love and respect these two exemplary academic communities and the values they stand for, and am so grateful for the generosity of my colleagues," she said.

As a Kyoto laureate, Nussbaum will deliver lectures in Kyoto, Oxford and San Diego over the next year. At the November event in Kyoto, she also will lead workshops aimed at university, high school and elementary school students—an opportunity that Nussbaum said she is happily anticipating.

Nussbaum, who has written and edited dozens of books, has garnered many prizes, including the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2012, the Nonino Prize in 2015, and the Inamori Ethics Prize, also in 2015.

—Adapted from a story on the University of Chicago Law School website.

Prof. Emeritus Michael J. Murrin to receive Norman Maclean Faculty Award

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:13 -0500

Michael J. Murrin, the Raymond W. & Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Divinity School, has earned the Norman Maclean Faculty Award. This award, bestowed by the Alumni Association, honors emeritus or senior faculty for extraordinary contributions to teaching and to the student experience of life within the University community.

In conjunction with the University’s 527th Convocation, Murrin will accept his award on Friday, June 10 at the Honorands Dinner.

For more than 50 years, Murrin has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in the Departments of English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, the Divinity School and the College. Murrin’s research interests lie in two areas: the history of criticism, with a specialty in the history of allegorical interpretation; and the study of the genres of romance and epic. His teaching focuses on period courses in the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early modern period.

His publications include The Veil of Allegory; The Allegorical Epic; and History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic. His work Trade and Romance (University of Chicago Press, 2013) is a study of both the growth of Europe’s middle-class culture and its interests in aristocratic romance, and the simultaneous development of trade across Asia by merchants and initially made possible by the Mongol world system. It won the René Wellek Prize, the highest prize in the American Comparative Literature Association.

“Many scholars spend their lives in a comparatively narrow area, like Shakespeare. That is fine in its own right, but it is not what I do,” said Murrin. “Each of my books concerns different areas and issues, from the Allegorical Epic to History and Warfare, which had as much regular history (normally not a concern for literary scholars), to Trade and Romance, which ranged from the Mongols to the Portuguese in the east, and finally the English.”

Murrin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently he is at work on a short book about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Prof. Augusta Read Thomas receives prestigious composer and cultural awards

Thu, 05 May 2016 15:26 -0500

University Professor of Composition Augusta Read Thomas has won the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra Composer’s Award for 2015-16, the oldest award of its kind in the nation honoring contemporary composers who have made significant contributions to the field of symphonic music, and who are “effective personal advocates of new approaches to the broadening of critical and appreciative standards."

Thomas will be honored at three concerts held between May 20-22 at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Penn., during which the Lancaster Symphony will perform her orchestral works “Aureole” and “Prayer and Celebration,” conducted by Stephen Gunzenhauser.

“I am honored and humbled to receive this award and to join past recipients whom I have long admired and respected,” Thomas said. “Working with the members of the Lancaster Symphony will be a privilege and delight.”

In November, Thomas was awarded the Cultural Medal of Monaco, earning the honor Chevalier of the Order of Cultural Merit. Established in 1952 by Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, the award recognizes those “who have made a distinctive contribution to the arts, letters or science.” Thomas received the award at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco from Her Royal Highness Princess Caroline of Hanover, Princess of Monaco.

This fall Thomas is leading the Ear Taxi Festival, a six-day, first-of-its-kind new music festival celebrating the vibrant, classical contemporary music scene in Chicago. Running from Oct. 5-10 at six venues across the city, the festival will include performances by some of Chicago’s most innovative composers and performers in contemporary music.

For more information, visit http://www.eartaxifestival.com.

Professor Martha Nussbaum receives Inamori Ethics Prize for ‘exemplary ethical leadership’

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 11:22 -0500

Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, has been awarded the 2015 Inamori Ethics Prize by the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.

The annual prize, which will be presented to Nussbaum at a ceremony in October, honors an individual “who has demonstrated exemplary ethical leadership” and “whose actions and influence have greatly improved the condition of humankind.”

Nussbaum is one of the world’s leading philosophers, particularly on issues of moral and political theory, education, social equality, emotions, feminism, and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.

Along with economist Amartya Sen, Nussbaum reoriented conversations of international welfare efforts away from exclusive focus on GDP and toward the capabilities of a nation’s individuals.

“Martha's brilliant ‘capabilities approach’ has transformed the global conversation about human rights and what it means to treat other humans ethically,” said Inamori Center Director and Inamori Professor in Ethics Shannon E. French. “This approach looks at what each individual is actually capable of being and doing, and gives practical direction for seeking justice and positive change for those who cannot access opportunities or enjoy the basic freedoms they need to flourish and unlock their potential.”

In addition to her appointment in the Law School, Nussbaum also has appointments in Philosophy, Classics, the Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on South Asian Studies. She is a board member of the Human Rights Program, and a member of the faculty steering committee of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi.

Nussbaum’s longstanding connection with India includes a consultancy with the UNDP-Delhi on gender and governance, and she works on gender equality and law with The Lawyer’s Collective in Delhi. Nussbaum also has been a visiting professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and is an honorary professor of the Institute for Development Studies Kolkata.

Nussbaum received her MA and PhD from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, she was a University Professor at Brown University. From 1986 to 1993, she was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a branch of the United Nations University; it was there that Nussbaum and Sen started working together to establish the Human Development/Capabilities approach to the measurement of global welfare.

Nussbaum is frequently cited as one of the world’s top public thinkers, and her work has been at the forefront of the principal contemporary ethical issues. She is a founding president of the Human Development and Capability Association, and she has received 51 honorary degrees from universities in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Nussbaum also has garnered many prizes, including the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2012, and the Nonino Prize in 2015.

In 2014, Nussbaum presented the John Locke lectures at Oxford University on the theme of Anger and Forgiveness; a book of the same title will be published in 2016.

Among many other works, Nussbaum is the author of Sex and Social Justice (1999), Women and Human Development (2000), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), Frontiers of Justice (2006), Creating Capabilities (2011), and Political Emotions (2013).

Nussbaum will accept the award, present a lecture, and participate in a panel discussion on her work at free public events on Case Western Reserve University’s campus on Oct. 15 and 16.

The Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, founded in 2006 as the result of a generous gift from Dr. Kazuo Inamori and the Inamori Foundation of Kyoto, has presented the Inamori Ethics Prize annually since 2008. Previous winners include physician and activist Denis Mukwege, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and former president of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.

Edes Prize winner explores contrasts in Xilitla, Mexico

Tue, 09 Jun 2015 11:47 -0500

Composer, performer and multimedia artist Francisco Castillo Trigueros, PhD’13, refers to his winning proposal for the 2015 Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artists as a song cycle that will depict the town of Xilitla in the mountainous Huasteca region of Mexico.

The annual $30,000 prize will allow Castillo Trigueros to pursue his vision, which will in fact be a transmedia take on the form, incorporating electronically processed field recordings, live performance by the Fonema Consort and visuals ranging from the documentary to the fully abstract.

“The text of the songs is going to be a combination of quotations that we’re going to get from interviews [with] locals and my own writings,” he explains. “The interviews are going to serve a couple of purposes. One is just to get an idea of what this place is for the locals, but two, actually as source material for the songs.”

His field recordings will stand on their own as sonic representations of Xilitla and the surrounding area, from the nearby Convent of St. Augustine to the Cave of Swallows, a 1,100-foot-deep, open chasm filled with birds. “Now it’s full of eco-tourists,” Castillo Trigueros remarks.

He says he hopes to treat the recordings as source material that can be converted into musical passages. “Let’s say the bells in the convent are transcribed and used as melody, in the flute or even in the voice.”

The Music Emerges from the Place

In the public imagination, Xilitla is generally synonymous with Las Pozas, “a surrealist sculpture garden by [British poet] Edward James,” which Castillo Trigueros visited as a tourist when he was about 15. “This very interesting garden lives in this town that is quite different, this completely concrete-made town. It’s not a wealthy town at all.”

Las Pozas is a dreamscape of a garden, planted with the intent of its structures, including its rounded functionless buttresses, to become overgrown as quickly as possible—an artificial ruin. It’s the work of a cultural outsider, and also a work meant to look like it’s unstuck from time, and maybe even not of this world. Castillo Trigueros was struck by “the shocking contrast between this kind of utopia created by this European artist, [as] compared to the much rougher reality that Xilitla is, the actual town.”

“To me,” Castillo Trigueros reflects, “these contrasts that we’re discussing in this town—and that we’re going to be observing in this town, and sharing—are actually commonplace. I feel like the town is a synthesis of Mexico, which is a country where you can have a nightmare within a dream.

“I don’t want to observe it in a way that’s, like, tourist,” Castillo Trigueros explains. “I don’t want to do the same thing that I’m criticizing,” namely what James did, imposing an outsiders’ view onto Xilitla. “I guess a little bit, my ideal version of this piece is that all of the music emerges from the place,” he explains. “The piece will be my piece. There’s no doubt that in the end it’s going to be my observation. But I am going to make a huge effort to make sure that that observation is as informed as possible.”

A Transformative Effect

“An important criterion for the Edes Prize is the potential for the artist’s project to have a transformative effect on his or her own work, as well as that of the arts at large,” explains Anthony Cheung, assistant professor of music and an Edes Prize jury member. “Xilitla promises to engage with the medium of electro-acoustic and intermedia composition, for which Francisco already has had much recognition.”

“It’s an immense honor to get a prize like this, and it’s a huge privilege.” Castillo Trigueros reflects. “In order for young artists to be able to tackle ambitious projects that will actually help them grow and help their voice grow, you need to have generous grants, generous prizes. All of a sudden, next year, I can actually dedicate myself to composing one piece,” he continues. “All of a sudden, you have this possibility of turning to what your goal in life is, which is just to write music, or to make art.”

“He [Castillo Trigueros] has a masterful and natural way with combining recorded and digitally processed sounds with acoustic ensembles, and already has collaborated with filmmakers in the past to create multimedia experiences that are intertwined and multi-layered,” Cheung notes, adding that he was excited to see those skills being applied to a subject so clearly personal to the artist.

“I have pieces that have relationships with Mexico, but this will actually be this thing about Mexico, which is very meaningful to me,” Castillo Trigueros agrees, “and I just would not be able to do it without this kind of support.”

American Academy of Arts and Sciences elects 12 members with UChicago ties

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 15:30 -0500

The newly elected class of members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences includes five UChicago faculty members and seven additional University alumni, including University Trustee Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65.

One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the American Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts and education.

Members of the 2015 class include recipients of the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes; MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; and Grammy, Emmy, Oscar and Tony awards.

“We are honored to elect a new class of extraordinary women and men to join our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Each new member is a leader in his or her field and has made a distinct contribution to the nation and the world. We look forward to engaging them in the intellectual life of this vibrant institution.”

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Margaret Mead and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The full list of the new members is available at https://www.amacad.org/content/members/members.aspx.

The UChicago faculty members and alumni elected to the academy are:

László Babai, the George and Elizabeth Yovovich Professor in Computer Science and Mathematics, specializes in complexity theory, algorithms, combinatorics, asymptotic group theory, and the many interactions among these fields, including problems of pure mathematics motivated by questions in the theory of computing. His honors include the international Gödel Prize (1993) in theoretical computer science for developing the concept of interactive proofs, which helped reshape the landscape of the theory of algorithms. In 1994 he was a plenary speaker at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians, a coveted honor in the field. In an indication of potential applications of his foundational work to emerging technologies, so-called “Babai points” in n-dimensional grids have been widely cited in the area of mobile communications. Babai is one of the founders of the highly acclaimed study-abroad program “Budapest Semesters in Mathematics” (1985). In 2005 Babai launched the prominent open-access journal Theory of Computing. In the same year he received the University’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Matthew Gentzkow, the Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics, studies empirical industrial organization and political economy, with a specific focus on media industries. His work, which has been covered by major national media, has appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and Econometrica. In 2014 Gentzkow received the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, given to an American economist under the age of 40 who has made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He has also received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and also has been awarded several National Science Foundation grants for research on media, and won a Faculty Excellence Award for teaching.

Françoise Meltzer, the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, Divinity School, and the College, studies contemporary critical theory and 19th-century French, English and German literature. Meltzer’s publications include Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (1994), For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001) and Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity (2011). With her colleague Jas Elsner, she edited Saints: Faith Without Borders (2011). She has edited Critical Inquiry since 1982. In 2006, Meltzer received the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight in the Order of the Academic Palms) from the French government, the highest honor for academics in France. She began teaching at UChicago in 1975.

Ray Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences, has research interests that include the physics of climate, especially regarding the long-term evolution of planetary climates. Pierrehumbert is serving the current academic year as a King Carl XVI Gustaf Professor in Environmental Science at Stockholm University’s department of meteorology. The university will award him an honorary doctorate later this year. He was a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment (1997-2001). He has been recognized for his contributions to this work, for which the IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with Al Gore, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Pierrehumbert also is the author of Principles of Planetary Climate, and co-editor of The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he also is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Philip J. Reny, the William C. Norby Professor of Economics is an economic theorist who focuses on auction theory, game theory and the theory of mechanism design. Among his most important contributions are his results on the existence of Nash equilibrium in discontinuous games and his work on information aggregation in double auctions. Reny serves on the board of editors for American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and served as the head editor of Journal of Political Economy. He became a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory in 2012, a charter member of the Game Theory Society in 1999 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996.

Joseph Neubauer, MBA’65, will begin a three-year term as chairman of the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees on May 28. Neubauer, the retired chairman of ARAMARK Corporation, has served as a trustee since 1992. He serves as chair of The University of Chicago Campaign: Inquiry and Impact, which launched in October 2014 with a goal of $4.5 billion. After earning his MBA, Neubauer took positions at Chase Manhattan Bank and PepsiCo. In 1979 he joined ARAMARK, a worldwide provider of food, hospitality and other professional services, as chief financial officer. He served for nearly three decades as ARAMARK’s chief executive officer and later board chairman. During his tenure the company grew revenues from $2 billion to $14 billion and employed more than 250,000 people in 23 countries. Neubauer and his wife Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer received the University of Chicago Medal in 2013. Awarded by the Board of Trustees, the University Medal recognizes distinguished service of the highest order to the University by an individual or a couple.

Other University of Chicago alumni who have been elected members of the Academy this year are: Jane C. Ginsburg, AB’76, AM’77; Richard Kurin, AM’74, PhD’81; Teresa A. Sullivan, AM’72, PhD’75; David S. Tatel, JD’66; Peter C. Wainwright, PhD’88; and Iván Werning, AM’99, PhD’02.

UChicago Press honors Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo for book on history of Mexico City

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:26 -0500

The University of Chicago Press has awarded the 2015 Gordon J. Laing Prize to Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, professor of history, for his book, I Speak of the City.

President Robert J. Zimmer presented the award at a reception at The UChicago Quadrangle Club on April 21. The Press awards the Laing Prize annually to the UChicago faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.

“From art to city planning, from epidemiology to poetry, I Speak of the City challenges the conventional wisdom about Mexico City, investigating the city and the turn-of-the-century world to which it belonged,” the Press wrote in announcing the award. “By engaging with the rise of modernism and the cultural experiences of such personalities as Hart Crane, Mina Loy and Diego Rivera, I Speak of the City will find an enthusiastic audience across the disciplines.”

In addition to the Laing Prize, Tenorio-Trillo’s book, which focuses on Mexico City from 1880 to 1940, has been honored with the Spiro Kostof Book award by the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Bolton-Johnson Prize Honorable Mention Award from the American Historical Association. It was originally published in hardcover in February 2013.

Tenorio-Trillo said at one point, after several attempts, he had lost faith that the book would ever be published. His colleague, Prof. Emilio Kouri, told him to try the University of Chicago Press. “He said they do not normally publish Latin American history, but they publish what you do: history and thinking,” said Tenorio-Trillo. And so the manuscript was sent to Press Executive Editor Douglas Mitchell to review.

“My books in Spanish sometimes are catalogued as history, sometimes as essays, closer to literature. I was truly surprised to learn of this very prestigious prize,” said Tenorio-Trillo. “I do not know if my work has finally reached the maturity to deserve such a prize or if I have luckily arrived to the intellectual milieu where the idiosyncratic nature of my work is considered a true intellectual contribution. With or without prizes, it’s been a privilege to work here and to collaborate with the University of Chicago Press,” he added.

Tenorio-Trillo also is an associate professor of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, and has authored many books, including Mexico at the World’s Fairs.

Two faculty members receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 16:50 -0500

Two UChicago faculty members have received John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships: Thomas Christensen, the Avalaon Foundation Professor in the Humanities; and Kenneth W. Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in English.

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has always bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue the tradition with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do,” Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said in a news release.

Warren will use his Guggenheim fellowship to complete a new book project. Between Representation and Self-Expression: A Reconsideration of the Post-45 American Novel explores the relation between the American novel and the problem of ideology in the 1950s. It focuses on the way that point of view resurfaces during this period as both a problem and solution in novelistic practice and literary histories of the novel.

“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to pursue my research in the upcoming year,” Warren said of the fellowship.

Christensen, who recently received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for his project Fétis and the Tonal Imagination: French Discourses of Musical Tonality in the Nineteenth Century, plans to defer his Guggenheim Fellowship.

Three faculty members receive American Council of Learned Societies fellowships

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 14:50 -0500

Three University of Chicago faculty members have received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies. These prestigious fellowships allow scholars to spend six to 12 months on full-time research and writing.

The new fellows are Thomas Christensen, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities; Nadine Moeller, assistant professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; and David Simon, assistant professor of English Language and Literature.

Christensen will use his fellowship to complete a book titled Fétis and the Tonal Imagination: French Discourses of Musical Tonality in the Nineteenth Century. The project explores the idea of tonality—the system of organizing sounds that underlies most Western music—by focusing on the work of the 19th-century Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis, who was the first to articulate and theorize the idea of tonality.

“I’m essentially writing a kind of biography of musical tonality,” Christensen said of the project.

Nadine Moeller’s project examines urban society in ancient Egypt. Her project will investigate how political and social change had an impact on the development of the various towns and cities during the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1069 BCE). The new book is the second volume of a two-part project; the first volume is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

One area of particular interest to Moeller is Tell el-Amarna, which briefly served as the capital city founded by the pharaoh Akhenaton. Although it was abandoned only 20 years after its creation, the site is one of the best known urban settlements in Egypt of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Moeller said the fellowship will help to promote Egyptology within the wider field of urban studies in antiquity. “Getting a national fellowship makes a big difference,” she said. “I am extremely excited about the opportunity to really focus on this new research project.

David Carroll Simon is at work on a book about the relationship between literature and science in 17th-century England. In Light without Heat: Shades of Feeling in the Age of Scientific Revolution, Simon will examine the way poets, scientists, essayists, and devotional writers thought about the role of dispassion and indifference in the production of knowledge. Rather than seeing dispassion as an achievement of self-discipline, experimental scientists and likeminded intellectuals often described it as a state of effortless receptivity.

“The discovery that some of the key figures in the rise of modern science actually savor experiences of carelessness and inattention encourages a revision of our prevailing narratives of Enlightenment,” Simon explains.

Simon said he was “thrilled’ by the news of the fellowship, which will allow him to do additional research and finish writing the book in the year ahead.

MLA honors Steinberg for work on Dante

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 16:43 -0600

The Divine Comedy may not seem like a conventional legal thriller, but it shares with that genre a preoccupation with justice and structured systems of punishment and reward.

Prof. Justin Steinberg highlighted the previously unexamined legal aspects of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece in Dante and the Limits of Law, published by the University of Chicago Press. On Dec. 3, the Modern Language Association awarded the book the 22nd Howard R. Marrarro Prize. The prize will be presented at the MLA’s annual conference in Vancouver in January.

In its citation, the prize selection committee described Dante and the Limits of the Law as “an original and lucid account of the legal context animating and underwriting the Commedia.”

Steinberg’s work focuses on Dante’s interest in exceptions to and limits of the law. Steinberg, professor of Italian literature in Romance Languages and Literatures, argues that Dante saw exceptions to the law as an essential aspect of medieval legal order.

Steinberg, who in 2006 won the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglioni Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for his first book, was drawn to the topic because of present-day conversations around the limits of the law. “I was interested in seeing how questions of states of emergency, questions about torture and debates about judicial activism played out in an era without a strong state, where poetic discourse and literary imagination occupied to the place of political sovereignty,” he explained.

The active community of UChicago scholars interested in law and literature—both in the law school and in literature departments—provided important inspiration for Dante and the Limits of the Law. Their work, Steinberg said, helped him realize “this could be a rich inquiry.”

Steinberg was not the only member of the University of Chicago community honored by the MLA. Jason Grunebaum, senior lecturer in South Asian languages and civilizations, received an honorable mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for an Outstanding Translation of a Literary Work for his translation of Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol. The selection committee praised Grunebaum’s “thoughtfully conceived translation,” which “captures many of the tones and subtleties of the original language.”

David Nirenberg receives prestigious 2014 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50 -0500

The Phi Beta Kappa Society has announced that David Nirenberg, dean of the Social Sciences Division, will receive the 2014 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for his book, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought.

The Phi Beta Kappa society describes the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, which was established in 1960, as honoring scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity in the fields of history, philosophy and religion.

“I was very surprised to be on the short list for this award and I was even more surprised to win it,” Nirenberg said. “I think the impact of the book is to show us that the ways in which we think about the world are often shaped by how we have learned to think about Judaism. So many of our most important critical categories in so many different areas of culture—religion, philosophy, economics, poetry and art, even mathematics and physics—have had a long history of learning to distinguish between good and bad by thinking about Judaism.”

One member of the panel that chose Nirenberg’s book wrote, “Anti-Judaism is a depressing book in what it reveals, but it is genuinely elevating in its high moral purpose, in the power of scholarship, and in its marshaling of rhetorical and linguistic resources in services of its lambent argument.”

“I wrote the book because I felt that it is dangerous not to be aware of how history shapes how we can perceive the world,” Nirenberg said.

Dean Nirenberg has a new book, “Neighboring Faiths: Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. “The new book is much less ‘depressing’ in that it is all about how each of these three religions took shape by looking and thinking about the others,” Nirenberg said. “This ‘co-production’ of religious cultures is an ongoing process that’s really dynamic, whether for good or ill.”

The Phi Beta Kappa Society will present the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and a $10,000 prize to Nirenberg at a dinner at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in December. Also being honored that evening will be authors receiving the Christian Gauss Award and the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.

University to bestow seven honorary degrees at 519th Convocation

Tue, 27 May 2014 16:47 -0500

The University of Chicago will present honorary degrees to seven distinguished scholars during the 519th Convocation on Saturday, June 14 on the Main Quadrangle.

The honorary degree recipients are astronomer Wendy L. Freedman, microbial geneticist Jeffrey I. Gordon, philologist-linguist John Huehnergard, paleontologist Andrew H. Knoll, mathematician Grigoriy Margulis, linguist-philosopher Barbara Partee and statistician-geneticist Terence Speed.

Wendy L. Freedman, a world leader in astronomy and cosmology, will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree. Freedman is the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, Calif.

Freedman served as scientific leader for a team of 30 astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project to measure the current expansion rate of the universe. At the project’s start in the mid-1980s, the age and size of the universe ranged between 10 and 20 billion years. The project’s final results resolved this longstanding debate, determining the age of the universe as 13.7 billion years with an uncertainty of 10 percent. She served as co-leader of the Carnegie Supernova Project to study exploding stars to provide constraints on the nature of dark energy, a mysterious force that appears to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Currently, Freedman focuses on measuring both the current and past expansion rate of the universe, and on characterizing the nature of dark energy. She is leading a project to use the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the expansion rate to an accuracy of three percent.

Freedman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. She also is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Physical Society. Additional honors include the American Physical Society’s Magellanic Prize, as well as the Gruber Cosmology Prize.

Angela V. Olinto, the Homer J. Livingston Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and department chair, will present Freedman at Convocation.

Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD’73, a pioneer in the study of the genetics and metabolic contributions of beneficial microbes in the human gut, will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree. Gordon is the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Microbial communities in the human gut have been found to profoundly impact human health. They can shape postnatal development and affect physiological, metabolic and immunologic variations and disease predispositions.

Gordon’s studies have helped create a new field of research to better understand how microbes affect these functions. His work has provided an extended view of humans as a composite of species, where microbial genomes have contributed to our evolution.

His group has developed new experimental and computational approaches to identify the characteristics of human gut communities. He and his students now address how gut microbes impact nutrition, including obesity, childhood undernutrition and the metabolism of food. His findings have implications for 21st century medicine, including how changes in cultural traditions, lifestyles, diets, technology and biosphere are impacting human biology.

Gordon has been the research mentor to 120 PhD and MD/PhD students and postdoctoral fellows since he established his lab at Washington University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Godfrey Getz, the Donald N. Pritzker Professor Emeritus in Pathology, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and the College, will present Gordon at Convocation.

John Huehnergard, a widely admired scholar of Semitic languages and linguistics, historical linguistics, writing systems and ancient Near Eastern history, will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Huehnergard is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and professor emeritus of Semitic philology at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1979.

He is the author of several books and many articles on the history and grammar of the Semitic languages, his main area of research. He concentrates on ancient Semitic languages, especially Akkadian—the cuneiform language of ancient Mesopotamia—Aramaic and Hebrew. He is also interested in theoretical aspects of comparative and historical linguistics, and in the history of writing and literacy.

Among current research projects are a revision of the standard lexicon of biblical Hebrew, with his wife and colleague Jo Ann Hackett, and a book on comparative Semitic grammar.

Huehnergard teaches graduate courses on Semitic linguistics and various Semitic languages, and undergraduate courses on the world’s writing systems and on lost languages and decipherment.

His work was the topic of a 2012 Festschrift, Language and Nature, co-edited by Rebecca Hasselbach, associate professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and Na’ama Pat-El of the University of Texas at Austin.

Huehnergard was nominated by Dennis Pardee, professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Christopher Woods, associate professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the College, will present Huehnergard at Convocation.

Andrew H. Knoll, who, with his students, has provided much of the paleontological evidence for life in the early oceans, along with much of the data used to constrain environmental history in deep time, will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree. Knoll is the Fisher Professor of Natural History and professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University.

Knoll’s research focuses on the early evolution of life, the environmental history of the Archean and Proterozoic eons—which ended approximately 540 million years ago—and the interconnections between the two. His discoveries stem from field research conducted in Spitsbergen, Greenland, Siberia, China, Australia and Namibia. He has worked extensively on plant, animal and phytoplankton evolution, with particular emphasis on the evolution of physiology. He chaired the international committee that established the Ediacaran period, the first new period of the geologic time scale in more than a century. Knoll also serves on the science team for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Knoll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His honors include the Walcott and Thompson medals of the National Academy of Sciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science for Life on a Young Planet (2003), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society, the Paleontological Society Medal, the Oparin Medal of ISSOL (the International Astrobiological Society) and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London.

Michael J. Foote, professor of geophysical sciences, will present Knoll at Convocation.

Grigoriy Margulis, the 1978 Fields Medalist for outstanding mathematical achievement, will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree. Margulis is the Erastus L. DeForest Professor of Mathematics at Yale University.

Margulis earned the Fields Medal, widely regarded as the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize, for his work on discrete subgroups of real and p-adic Lie groups. He has made contributions to differential geometry, ergodic theory, dynamical systems, graph theory and number theory. Soviet authorities, however, opposed his travel to Helsinki to collect the award at the International Congress of Mathematicians. He finally received the medal in 1979 at a special ceremony in Bonn during his first trip to the West.

The son of a mathematician and a librarian, Margulis published his first paper as a graduate student in 1966, then won the Moscow Mathematical Society’s prize for young mathematicians two years later. He spent the first two decades of his career at the Moscow Institute for Problems in Information Transmission of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Margulis is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and a fellow of the Fields Institute and the American Mathematical Society. He has received the Medal of the Collège de France, Humboldt Research Award, Lobachevsky Prize, Wolf Prize, and the Dobrushin International Prize. In 2008, the Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly honored Margulis with a special issue.

Benson Farb, professor in mathematics and the College, will present Margulis at Convocation.

Barbara Partee is a pioneer in the field of semantics: the study of meaning in linguistics. She will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters.

Partee is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught from 1972 to 2004. She continues to teach part-time, including one course in formal semantics in Moscow each year.

She was in the first class of linguistics PhD students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with the legendary linguist Noam Chomsky. As a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Partee encountered the logician Richard Montague. Her research soon turned to the challenge of synthesizing Chomsky’s syntax with Montague’s semantics.

Partee’s subsequent research provided the foundation for, and contributed to advances in the field of formal semantics and stimulated collaboration among linguists, philosophers, logicians, computer scientists and cognitive scientists. She is now writing a history of the field, The History of Formal Semantics, for Oxford University Press.

She was president of the Linguistic Society of America, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Chris Kennedy, professor in linguistics and the College and linguistics department chair, will present Partee at Convocation.

Terence Speed, who combines mathematics and statistics to help solve computational problems in medicine and biology, will receive a Doctor of Science honorary degree. Speed heads the division of bioinformatics at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and is a professor emeritus of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Speed’s health issues as a child and subsequent recovery have influenced his career in biomedical research. His application of statistics to genetics and molecular biology has resulted in a large and influential body of work, both theoretical and applied.

Speed focused much of his work on the mapping of genes in mice and humans. His interests also have included the analysis of DNA and protein sequences microarrays, where he introduced the basic statistical tools that led to the flourishing of this methodology.

Speed is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Australian Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, of which he also is former president. He also has received the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation in the life sciences, the Achievement Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Research from Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Government Centenary Award Medal, Macquarie University’s Moyal Medal and the Statistical Society of Australia’s Pitman Medal.

Stephen Stigler, the Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor in Statistics and the College, will present Speed at Convocation.

Jurist Mikva, arts leader Lee to receive Benton, Rosenberger medals

Tue, 27 May 2014 12:48 -0500

The University will award the Benton Medal for Distinguished Public Service to jurist and public servant Abner Mikva, JD’51, and the Jesse L. Rosenberger Medal to choral director and arts leader Josephine Lee. The recipients will receive their honors at the University of Chicago’s 519th Convocation on Saturday, June 14.

Abner Mikva devoted his life to public service in all three branches of the federal government, and in state government as well. He spent 10 years in the Illinois House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. Congress in 1968.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Mikva to the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia. He was on the bench for 15 years, the last four as chief judge. He left the federal court in 1994 to become White House counsel for President Bill Clinton. He then returned to Chicago to teach at the UChicago Law School. In 1997, he and his wife, Zoe, PhB’47, AM’51, created the Mikva Challenge, a nonpartisan organization to encourage Chicago high school students to get involved in the democratic process.

In nominating Mikva, UChicago Prof. Charles Lipson wrote: “His volunteer efforts on behalf of Chicago and Illinois are manifold. In countless ways, Ab Mikva represents the highest level of honorable public service.”

Mikva is the 13th recipient of the Benton Medal, created in 1967 to honor Sen. William H. Benton on the occasion of his 25th anniversary as chairman and publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Benton Medal recognizes persons who have rendered distinguished public service in the field of education, which extends to include anyone who has contributed in a systematic and distinguished way to shaping minds and disseminating knowledge.

Presenting Mikva at Convocation will be Lipson, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in Political Science and the College.

Josephine Lee is the artistic director and president of the Chicago Children’s Choir, which serves more than 3,500 annually through programs in 65 Chicago schools, nine after-school neighborhood programs and the Voice of Chicago ensemble.

Under her leadership, the Chicago Children’s Choir has solidified longstanding partnerships with Chicago’s renowned arts institutions, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera and Ravinia Festival. She has also expanded the choir’s artistic breadth through celebrated collaborations with acclaimed theater and dance organizations.

In 2002, Chorus America named Lee the first Robert Shaw Conducting Fellow. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune named her a “Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts,” and in 2007, she was honored as a Distinguished Musician by the Union League Club of Chicago. In 2011, Lee was invited to serve on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Arts & Culture Transition Committee.

Lee received a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from DePaul University and a master’s degree in conducting from Northwestern University. She is the 50th recipient of the Rosenberger Medal, established in 1917 by Mr. and Mrs. Jesse L. Rosenberger. The medal recognizes achievement through research, in authorship, in invention, for discovery, for unusual public service or for anything “deemed of great benefit to humanity.”

Presenting Lee at Convocation will be Robert L. Kendrick, professor in Music and the College, and chair of the Music Department.

Nominations for the Benton and Rosenberger Medals are submitted by members of the faculty, evaluated by the faculty Committee on Awards and Prizes and voted upon by the Council of the University Senate.

The president of the University extends an invitation to both the Benton and Rosenberger nominees to receive their medals during the Spring Quarter Convocation. The nominees also are invited to give a public lecture or workshop the following academic year.

French foreign minister to present Prof. Robert Morrissey with Legion of Honor

Fri, 09 May 2014 12:46 -0500

Laurent Fabius, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, will bestow the French Legion of Honor upon Prof. Robert Morrissey during a special ceremony May 11 hosted by President Robert J. Zimmer.

Created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to reward extraordinary accomplishments and outstanding services rendered to France, the Legion of Honor is France’s highest distinction and one of the most prized in the world.

The special ceremony, which will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Quadrangle Club, will take place in the presence of François Delattre, French ambassador to the U.S., and Morrissey’s colleagues and students. It also will include a meeting between Fabius and students from the UChicago French Club.

“I am deeply honored to have been awarded the Légion d’honneur,” said Morrissey. “I have devoted my career to understanding the specific nature of French culture as it has unfolded over time, and this recognition is profoundly gratifying.”

Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor in Romance Languages and Literatures, also serves as executive director of the France Chicago Center. He is a senior fellow in the Computation Institute and is the director of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL).

Morrissey earned his PhD with honors in French literature from UChicago and began teaching at UChicago in 1981. Morrissey specializes in 18th- and 19th-century French literature, history and culture. His work concentrates on themes and cultural currents over the longue durée and includes The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon, published this year by the University of Chicago Press.

Fabius is the former prime minister of France (1984-86) and the author of six books. He is a specialist in economic and financial issues, European affairs, international relations as well as paintings and sculpture. In 2004, Fabius was a visiting senior lecturer at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies.

The France Chicago Center fosters and promotes fruitful exchange across the disciplines between UChicago scholars and their colleagues in France, while increasing awareness in the UChicago community of French culture, art and thought. To this end, it organizes conferences, public lectures, workshops, film series, art exhibitions, and visits to Chicago by distinguished scholars from France. The France Chicago Center also provides abundant travel grant and internship opportunities for Chicago students, and manages a unique University-wide initiative that supports laboratories at the University of Chicago and in France who engage in collaborative scientific research.

UChicago’s Arts|Science Initiative awards five graduate collaboration grants

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 14:27 -0600

The University of Chicago’s Arts|Science Initiative has awarded five Graduate Collaboration Grants with project topics ranging from “fiction addiction” to compositions modeled on melting glaciers to a physiological assessment of emotion during artistic performance.

The Arts|Science Graduate Collaboration Grants are intended to encourage independent trans-disciplinary research between students in the arts and the sciences. Each group consists of two or more graduate students, with at least one in the arts and one in the sciences, who work together over the course of two quarters to investigate a subject from the perspectives offered by their disciplines.

Funding for the Arts|Science Graduate Collaboration grants comes from the Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories and the Institute for Molecular Engineering. The form of the project is open-ended, and in past years grantees have included a data-driven digital history of nostalgia, sound sculptures and video installations, and even a new instrument called the Chromochord that employs protein nanotechnology.

The Arts|Science Initative connects artistic practice with scientific inquiry through student and faculty grants, events and exhibitions, and cultivating dialogue to explore new modes of production and investigation around common themes. This UChicago Arts initiative was established in partnership with the Office of the Provost, with the support of the Institute for Molecular Engineering, the Biological and Physical Sciences divisions, the Division of the Humanities, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories.

Graduate Collaboration Grant 2013-14 projects, recipients and faculty advisors:

Breaking Ice is an environment-inspired project that will culminate in a multimedia composition, incorporating live cello, interactive electronics and video projection. The project will speak to the increasing rate of melting and disintegrating glaciers by creating a laboratory-controlled model of the much larger-scale phenomenon. Iddo Aharony (Department of Music), Ivo Peters (Department of Physics), and Qin Xu (Department of Physics) will examine ice as it is crushed and melted, and the scientific data and footage obtained will then be transformed into the core material and inspiration for the musical/visual piece.

Faculty Advisors: Heinrich Jaeger, professor in physics and the James Franke Institute, and Howard Sandroff, director of the Computer Music Studio and senior lecturer in music.

"Shaping the Mind’s Stage" will examine how human experience shapes the way people perceive the world. The project will address this question through a live installation of a piece of chamber music performed by live vocalists. Turning an opera into an experiment and using audience members as subjects, the student collaborators, Tom Gijssels (Department of Psychology) and Debra Dado (Department of Visual Arts), will study the responses to particular kinesthetic staging choices. This study will provide an opportunity to examine the human mind in the creative wild and investigate how psychological findings can inform an audience’s perceptions of the artistic process.

Faculty advisors: Daniel Casasanto, assistant professor in psychology and Katherine Desjardins, lecturer in visual arts.

"Hearts Beating as One: Emotions and Physiology during Artistic Performance" will investigate how people infer the emotions of others, with particular attention to the role that empathic accuracy has in creating a compelling artistic performance. In a set of experiments, the researchers will measure the physiology of actors and musicians while they simulate positive and negative emotions during a performance. The emotional and physiological reactions of audience members also will be recorded and compared to those of the performers to assess the emotional experiences of each group. The project team, the largest yet awarded a grant, is wide-ranging in discipline and includes Heather Harden and Carly Kontra (Cognitive Psychology), Elizabeth Necka (Social Psychology), Patrick Fitzgibbon (Music Theory), Greg Poljacik and Sara Arnold (Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences) and Elizabeth Hopkins (Music History).

Faculty advisors: Greg Norman, assistant professor in psychology; Berthold Hoeckner, associate professor in music, and Howard Sandroff, director of the Computer Music Studio and senior lecturer in music.

"NeuroSonics: Rhythmic Stimulation of Epileptic Cell Cultures," a project of Andrew McManus (Department of Music), Tahra Eissa (Department of Neurobiology) and Albert Wilderman (Computational Neuroscience), will explore a feedback loop between epileptic neurological processes and music with the objective to assess how rhythms affect pathological, neurological processes and neural plasticity, how the data from these processes might be translated back into musical sound, and what the musical results reveal about the original processes. The results of the experiment will provide a potential solution for the ongoing challenge of “humanizing” computer-generated sounds as well as provide insight on how a developing, epileptic neural network interacts with rhythmic stimulation.

Faculty advisors: Wim van Drongelen, professor in neurology; Howard Sandroff, director of the Computer Music Studio and senior lecturer in music.

"Fiction Addiction" will examine the conceptual overlap of the notion of “bingeing” on media intake and other modes of addiction. In this project, Bill Hutchison (Department of English) and Anya Bershad (Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience) will question how humans’ neurobiological brains and literary minds interact with “addictive” works of fiction. Through discussions with scholars from the humanities and sciences and by undertaking original research and investigations, the researchers hope to better understand humans’ compulsive relationship with fictional worlds. They will present their research via a website and a videotaped documentary.

Faculty advisors: Harriet de Wit, professor in psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience; and Maud Ellmann, professor in English Language and Literature.

National Endowment for the Humanities supports digital project focused on 18th-century intellectual history

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 13:48 -0600

Long before iPhones, Twitter and text messages, 18th-century thinkers already were worried about information overload. How, they wondered, could anyone possibly keep up with the surfeit of new books and ideas making their way into the world?

Commonplace books—a kind of hybrid of an encyclopedia and a dictionary of quotations—were one way 18th-century thinkers answered this concern. Commonplace books gathered excerpts and quotations from many different works and organized them by subject, allowing readers to keep tabs on new thinkers and ideas. Many 18th-century writers incorporated these commonplaces into their own work, allowing them to be read and reused anew by other writers.

A pioneering new project at the University of Chicago and Oxford University, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, will use data analysis techniques to develop a massive digital “commonplace book.” Identifying and analyzing these commonplaces will shed light on how knowledge spread and transformed in the early modern period, according to Robert Morrissey, one of the leaders of the “Commonplace Cultures” project.

Commonplace books were “a way of managing information that made texts, ideas, and words accessible,” explained Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Studying commonplaces “allows you to understand how culture circulates, and how creation interacts with reuse—that reuse and creation are intertwined,” added Morrisey, director of ARTFL, the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language.

Last month, “Commonplace Cultures” received a “Digging Into Data” award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now in its third year, “Digging Into Data” is an international effort to develop new insights, tools and skills in innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.

The interdisciplinary team working on “Commonplace Cultures”—which includes 18th-century literary scholars Morrissey and Nicholas Cronk, digital humanities experts Mark Olsen and Glenn Roe, PhD’10, and computer scientists Ian Foster and Min Chen—will begin by assembling an enormous database of 18th-century texts from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database, the HathiTrust public domain collection, and 34,000 titles from Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

From there, the team will use a technique known as sequence alignment, which searches for similar strings of text, to identify commonplaces. The process will produce a digital database of commonplaces that will be freely available to scholars of literature and history worldwide. This assemblage of commonplaces will allow the team to study how ideas and citations emerged and circulated, and how 18th-century authors modified them.

In partnership with the University of Chicago’s Computation Institute and the Oxford e-Research Centre the team will develop visualization capabilities that will enable users to explore the relationships between different kinds of commonplace groupings (by authors, book, time periods, and language, etc.).

“Commonplace Cultures” builds on ARTFL’s long tradition of digital humanities research. Its database boasts a growing collection of digitized texts in multiple languages. The collaboration’s flagship project is a digitized version of philosopher Denis Diderot’s massive Encyclopédie. The ARTFL team also developed PhiloLogic, a powerful search engine designed for humanities research now used by researchers at institutions across the world.