Presenters

Shadi Bartsch (Classics)

Shadi Bartsch is the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of Classics; she also teaches in the Program in Gender Studies. Her research involves Roman literature and culture, especially the writer Persius. She has taught courses on the Roman novels and comedies, Greek thought and literature, and the history of rhetoric. Professor Bartsch has been the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Quantrell Teaching Award (2000), the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2006), and the Distinguished Visiting Scholar Award from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland (2010). She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. The author of numerous articles and books, she most recently published The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago 2006) and is currently working on a book entitled Persius: The Satirist out of Joint.

Orit Bashkin (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations)

Orit Bashkin is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her publications include articles on the history of Arab Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history, and on Arabic literature. Her book, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq was published in 2009 by Stanford University Press and her forthcoming book, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq will be published by Stanford next year.

David Bevington (English Language & Literature/Emeritus)

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature; he also serves as chair of the undergraduate Theater and Performance Studies program. His work centers on Shakespeare and other authors of Renaissance and medieval drama, and he serves as senior editor of the Revels Plays, critical editions of the work done by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Recently, he updated his 29-volume edition of all Shakespeare’s plays and published Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages (Oxford 2011), a history of Hamlet.

Robert Bird (Slavic Languages & Literatures)

Robert Bird is Associate Professor of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, with additional appointments in the Divinity School and Cinema and Media Studies. His fields of study include modern Russian literature and cinema, aesthetic theory, and intellectual history. He has authored, edited, or translated numerous works; his books include The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov (Wisconsin 2006), Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (Reaktion Books 2008), and Fyodor Dostoevsky (forthcoming in 2012).

Diane Brentari (Linguistics)

Diane Brentari, Professor in Linguistics, studies Sign Language, phonology, and morphology. In addition to both American and Italian Sign Language, Professor Brentari speaks fluent Italian and reads both French and German.

James K. Chandler (English Language & Literature/Cinema & Media Studies)

James K. Chandler is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies; he is also the Director of both the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Disciplinary Innovation. Chandler has published widely on literature since the eighteenth-century, on topics in Irish Studies, and more recently on cinema. He is currently completing a book tentatively titled: Sentimental Souls: Capra, Dickens, Sterne, and Others.

Ted Cohen (Philosophy)

Ted Cohen is a Professor in Philosophy, the Committee on Art and Design and the Committee on General Studies. His interest in humor began as a hobby and has since become a full-blown academic pursuit: he began studying jokes after publishing essays on figurative speech. Cohen has lectured on the nature of humor and jokes, as well as on sports, photography and art. Among his recent publications are the book Jokes, (Chicago 2001) and the essays “Identifying with Metaphor,” “Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative,” and “Three Problems in Kant’s Aesthetics.” His most recent publication is Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (Princeton 2008).

Steven Collins (South Asian Languages & Civilizations)

Steven Collins is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities; he teaches in South Asian Languages and Civilizations. His current research interests include gender in the civilizational history of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia and Pali Buddhist accounts of madness. He is the author of Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (Cambridge 1982), Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge 1998), A Pali Grammar for Students (Silkworm 2006), and Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative (Cambridge 2010).

Daisy Delogu (Romance Languages & Literatures)

An Associate Professor of French Literature, Daisy Delogu’s research centers on the political literature of the 14th and 15th centuries. She is the author of the recent Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (Toronto 2008) and is currently working on a new book titled Power, Gender, and Lineage in Late Medieval France: ‘douce France’ and the University of Paris, ‘fille du roy'. In addition to her work on political texts, Professor Delogu studies late medieval lyric works. She has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including the Residential Fellowship of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, and the Jacob Javits Fellowship.

Daniel Desormeaux (Romance Languages & Literatures)

Daniel Desormeaux, Associate Professor of French Literature, is a native of Haiti. He pursued an education in the United States and Canada studying the anthropological and historical ties between French and Caribbean literature and culture after the Haitian Revolution. More broadly, he is interested in the history of 19th century thought, comparative analysis of French art and literature, the development of new French cultural institutions in the 19th century, and the historical role of Slavery in the Haitian Revolution. His most recent book - a critical edition of Toussaint Louverture’s memoirs - appeared in August 2011 in France. He is currently writing a monography on Alexandre Dumas, and a collection of essays on French Caribbean novels.

Sascha Ebeling (South Asian Languages & Civilizations)

Assistant Professor Sascha Ebeling was trained in South Asian Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and General Linguistics at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. He was the recipient of the 2007 Forschungspreis (Research Award) of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) for his work on 19th-century Tamil literature; he also received the 2008 Whiting Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Core teaching at the University of Chicago. His book, Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India was published by SUNY Press in 2010.

Jacob Eyferth (East Asian Languages & Civilizations)

Jacob Eyferth, Associate Professor in Chinese History, studies 20th-century Chinese social history, especially the history of the Chinese countryside and how work, technology, and gender affected everyday life in rural 20th-century China. Much of his work focuses on the transitions to and from socialism during the 1950s and ’60s and again during the 1980s and ’90s. His recently published first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots (Harvard 2009), serves as a history and ethnography of rural papermakers living in a remote area of Sichuan. He is currently writing a second book, tentatively entitled Cotton, Work, and Gender in Revolutionary China.

Philip Gossett (Music/Emeritus)

Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Emeritus Professor of Music, studies the history of 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (to be published by the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan in 2015) and of The Works of Gioachino Rossini (Baerenreiter-Verlag, Kassel 2007). His book Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago 2006) won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. Gossett is the first musicologist to win the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, and has been awarded the Italy’s highest Civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce. He is also the former President of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Textual Scholarship, and currently serves as lecturer and consultant to Opera houses across America and Italy. A former Dean of Humanities Division, Gossett has been with the University of Chicago since 1968.

Donald Harper (East Asian Languages & Civilizations)

Donald Harper is Centennial Professor in Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is also Director of Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago and a member of the Creel Center for Chinese Paleography. In 1998, he published the first Western language translation of the corpus of ancient medical manuscripts from Mawangdui tomb 3, Hunan (burial dated 168 B.C.): Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (London: Kegan Paul International). His research continues to focus on ancient and medieval Chinese manuscripts. Currently he is collaborating with Professor Marc Kalinowski of the Sorbonne, Paris, on the project “Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China,” which is a comprehensive survey of popular almanacs and their place in everyday life in China between the fourth century B.C. and second century A.D.

Michèle Lowrie (Classics)

Michèle Lowrie is Professor in the Department of Classics. Her primary focus is on Roman literature and culture, and she has published numerous volumes, most recently Performance, Writing, and Authority in Augustan Rome and Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace's Odes and Epodes (ed.), both with Oxford in 2009. Professor Lowrie’s teaching includes classes on Caesar, Security in Latin Literature, and Greek Thought and Literature.

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (Romance Languages & Literatures)

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is Associate Professor in Latin American Literature; the Center for Latin American Studies; the Center for Gender Studies; the Center for Race, Culture and Society; and the Project Towards a New Americas Studies. She specializes in 19th-century Latin American Literature and the history of 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean culture. Primarily focusing on the relationship between culture and modern socio-political identities, her work includes Identidades Imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860–1898), published by University of Puerto Rico in 1998, and an ongoing book-length project entitled Riddles of Modern Identity: Biography and Visual Portraiture in Slaveholding Cuba (1760–1886). Since 1994, she has served on the advisory board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.

Armando Maggi (Romance Languages & Literatures)

Armando Maggi is Professor of Italian Literature in the department of Romance Languages & Literatures and also teaches in the Committee on the History of Culture. A scholar of both Renaissance and contemporary culture, Maggi recently published the first modern edition of L’innamorato by Brunoro Zampeschi (1565), as well as The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago 2009). He is also interested in Italian baroque prose and poetry. In addition to his books, he has authored over 70 essays. His current projects include an analysis of fairy tales, a study of early modern Italian and Spanish views on the apocalypse, and translations of major texts by Girolamo Cardano, an Italian Renaissance philosopher.

Rochona Majumdar (South Asian Languages & Civilizations)

Assistant Professor Rochona Majumdar is a historian of 19th- and 20th-century India. Her book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, 1870–1956 (Duke 2009) analyzes the changing configuration of the “joint family” in the context of shifts in the institution of arranged marriage and the marriage market in Bengal. She is a co-editor of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford 2007). Majumdar’s newest book, Writing Postcolonial History, analyzes ways in which postcolonial theory has influenced the historian’s craft and was published by Bloomsbury Press in November 2010. She is currently engaged in a long-term research project on the history film societies and the rise of art cinema in India.

Françoise Meltzer (Comparative Literature)

Françoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Literature, as well as Department Chair, with an additional appointment in the Divinity School. Her scholarship includes work on contemporary critical theory and 19th-century French literature. Her book For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (Chicago 2001) explores the gendering of subjectivity from within the context of Joan of Arc’s trial. As a comparatist, Meltzer integrates German and English literature into her work, as well as French. She has been a co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry since 1982 and her new book, Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, was published in June 2011 by the University of Chicago Press.

Presentation:

William Michel (Logan Center)

Bill Michel, AB'92, MBA'08, served as director of University Theater (1992–96) and the Office of the Reynolds Club and Student Activities (1995–99). In 2010 Michel was appointed executive director of the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts, which had its official groundbreaking May 12, 2010. He was the first recipient of the Mary Lee Behnke Prize, awarded in recognition of exceptional commitment to mentorship, teaching, and support of students in the College.

Michael Murrin (English/Comparative Literature)

Michael Murrin is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature; he also holds an appointment in the Divinity School. He has published three books: The Veil of Allegory (1969), The Allegorical Epic (1980), and History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (1994). He is currently finishing a fourth book, which concerns the impact of trade into Asia, by land or sea, and its effect on heroic stories in Western Europe from Marco Polo to Milton. For his next project, he will study medieval heroic literature including Beowulf.

Marta Ptaszynska (Music)

Marta Ptaszynska is the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Music and the Humanities. An internationally known composer, she received the Award of the Polish Television Broadcasting Company for her first opera, Oscar of Alva. Among her very successful four operas, the most recent on Chopin commissioned for the Chopin Bicentennial 2010, The Lovers of the Valldemosa Monsatery, premiered with great success in Poland in December 2010 and received a special award from the Polish Minister of Culture. Her children’s opera, Mister Marimba, has been featured in the program of two opera houses, with over 160 performances in Warsaw and Cracow since 1998. Her work has been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Sinfonia Varsovia, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the National Opera in Poland. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Republic of Poland’s Officer Cross of Merit.

Daniel Raeburn (Creative Writing)

Daniel Raeburn is a lecturer in the Committee on Creative Writing. In April 2011, he received the prestigious Howard Foundation Fellowship for Creative Non-Fiction for his work in progress: Vessels: A Memoir. Other works include The Imp, a series of booklets about underground cartoonists. He also wrote the book Chris Ware. His essays and memoirs have appeared in The Baffler, Tin House, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He earned his BA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Bennington College.

Presentation:

Jason Riggle (Linguistics)

Jason Riggle is an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics, as well as the Director of the Language Modeling Laboratory. His areas of specialization are phonology, morphology, and computational linguistics.

Bart Schultz (The Civic Knowledge Project)

Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy), Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Director of the Humanities Division’s Civic Knowledge Project. He has taught in the College at the University of Chicago for 24 years, designing a wide range of courses for the College Core as well as courses on John Dewey, Political Philosophy, and Happiness. He has also published widely in philosophy. His book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge 2004) won the American Philosophical Society’s prestigious Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for 2004. Other publications include Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge 1992), and Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington 2005). Schultz has worked extensively in adult education and community connections. He has been instrumental in helping the University develop affordable, high-quality educational programs for disadvantaged communities on Chicago’s South Side.

David Schutter (Visual Arts)

David Schutter, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts, creates paintings that are performative reenactments of canonical works, frequently drawing inspiration from the Dutch masters. Locating his practice within the traditions of philosophical inquiry, Schutter’s works are a form of phenomenological study that discusses the distances and problems encountered when making a painting. He has had solo exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Gemäldegalerie Berlin; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland; the Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, among other venues.

Michael Silverstein (Linguistics)

Michael Silverstein is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. His theoretical contributions range from modeling the flow of communicated meanings during verbal interaction to examining language as a medium and symbol of cultural ideologies. In addition to his own widely published technical papers, Silverstein, along with his students and other collaborators, has published a series of works based on his research, including Natural Histories of Discourse (Chicago 1996).

Eric Slauter (Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture)

Eric Slauter is Associate Professor in English Language and Literature and Director of the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Specializing in the cultural, intellectual, and literary history of early America, his scholarly work examines transformations in 18th-century thought and behavior. His current projects include A Cultural History of Natural Rights in America, 1689–1789, which seeks to explain how and why ordinary people came to believe they had rights, and an edited collection of essays on comparative colonial American studies. He serves as the faculty sponsor for the American Cultures Workshop and is the author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago 2009).

Justin Steinberg (Romance Languages & Literatures)

Justin Steinberg, Associate Professor of Italian literature, focuses his scholarship on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, the early lyric, manuscript culture, and literary historiography. His interests include the intersection of legal and literary culture and the history of the book. His book Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy (Notre Dame 2007) won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Manuscript in Italian Studies awarded by the Modern Language Association (MLA). He has also published articles on the Compiuta Donzella (the first female poet of Italian literature), Dante's dreams in La Vita Nuova, and Petrarch's uncollected poems. He is currently writing a book about Dante and the law.

Matthew Stolper (Near Eastern Languages & Civilization)

Matthew W. Stolper (Professor of Assyriology, John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute) has worked primarily on Achaemenid Babylonian texts and secondarily on Elamite history and texts. His work on Babylonia when it was a province of the Achaemenid Persian empire mostly treats legal and administrative texts as evidence of social, economic and political history c. 450-300 B.C., the time between the consolidation of Achaemenid control and the consolidation of Seleucid control. His work on Elam and Elamite includes a survey of Elamite political history (out of print), a sketch of Elamite grammar, and publication of Proto-Elamite and Elamite texts from ancient Anshan. His main effort now is on Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Aramaic administrative texts excavated by the Oriental Institute in 1933 at Persepolis, the imperial residence in the Persian homeland to be published in electronic and conventional forms.

Theo van den Hout (Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations)

Theo van den Hout is Professor of Hittitie and Anatolian Languages and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Beginning his research in Linguistics, his work gradually began examining cultural historical issues, especially those concerning the Hittite empire of the 13th century B.C. His studied languages include Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Carian, and more recently Hurrian. His most recent project involves new findings on the Royal Hittite Death Ritual. He serves as the co-editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, and is managing editor of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions.

Candace Vogler (Philosophy)

Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. She is the author of John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard 2002). She has also published numerous essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant’s ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.

Presentation:

Christina von Nolcken (English Language & Literature/Medieval Studies)

Christina von Nolcken is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and Chair of the Program in Medieval Studies. She is especially interested in Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and in late-14th- and 15th-century devotional texts. Much of her writing has been on texts prepared by the followers of John Wyclif (d. 1384) as part of their program to bring education—and especially religious education—to the people.

David Wellbery (Germanic Studies)

David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature and the Committee on Social Thought; he is also Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. His books are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s ‘Laocoön’: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge 1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford 1996). His current projects include a book on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as well as a broad-based study of Goethe and philosophy.

Ming Xiang (Linguistics)

Assistant Professor Ming Xiang works in sentence processing and experimental syntax and semantics. Her current research investigates the relationship between subjects’ language-processing abilities and their reaction to subtle nonsensicalities in example sentences.

Alan Yu (Linguistics)

Alan Yu is an Associate Professor and Director of the Phonology Laboratory. His work focuses on phonological theory, language variation and change, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, Native American languages and Cantonese.