Presenters

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.