Presenters

Orit Bashkin is 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, Iraqi history, and Arabic literature. She is the author of The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2009) and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012).

Anya Bershad is a graduate student in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature and B.S. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from Stanford University in 2010. 

Will Boast is a lecturer in the Committee on Creative Writing. His story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, and The New York Times, among other publications. He’s been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia.

Diane Brentari is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and is a scholar of Sign Language phonology and morphology. Currently her work addresses cross-linguistic variation, particularly in the differences and similarities among sign languages in the formation of complex classifier predicates. She is also interested in the relationship between gesture, homesign systems, and well-established sign languages. Author of A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and editor of Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey (Cambridge University Press, 2010), she is also director of the Sign Language Laboratory at UChicago.

Benjamin Callard is Lecturer in Philosophy. His areas of specialization are ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. He also has strong interests in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

Peter Cook is Associate Professor in the Department of ASL-English Interpretation at Columbia College Chicago and a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago. An internationally known Deaf performing artist, his work incorporates American Sign Language, pantomime, storytelling, acting, and movement. Since 1986, Cook has traveled extensively both nationally and internationally with Kenny Lerner to promote the Flying Words Project and ASL literature. Cook has been featured nationally in numerous festivals and was invited to the White House to join the National Book Festival. Cook has worked with Deaf storytellers/poets in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Japan.

John Eaton is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Music. He is a composer with special interest in opera, and has penned over fifteen operas and garnered international acclaim as a composer and performer of electronic and microtonal music. Notable works include his television opera, Myshkin, and the operas The Cry of Clytaemnestra and The Tempest. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in 1990. His music was chosen to represent the United States at the International Rostrum of Composers a quarter-century ago; since then, he has received a citation and award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, three Prix de Rome Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and commissions from the Fromm and Koussevitsky Foundations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Eaton was also Composer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

Christopher Faraone is Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Department of Classics. He specializes in Ancient Greek poetry, religion and magic. He is the co-author of The Getty Hexameters: Poetry, Magic and Mystery in Ancient Greek Selinous (Oxford University Press, 2013) and author of The Stanzaic Architecture of Archaic Greek Elegy (Oxford University Press, 2008). 

Theaster Gates is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts. He has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance, and critical engagement with many publics. Recent exhibition and performance venues include Locust Projects, Miami, FL; the Seattle Art Museum; Art Basel Miami Beach; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and the Whitney Biennial and Armory Show in New York. In Fall 2012, he debuted in London with his solo show My Labor is My Protest at White Cube Bermondsey. Gates was recently awarded the inaugural Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, honored by the Wall Street Journal as Arts Innovator of the Year 2012, and commissioned as the Armory Show Artist 2012. USA Artists named him as the USA Kippy Fellow 2012. He was also a 2012–13 Creative Time Global Resident. A Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2011, he has received awards and grants from Creative Capital, the Joyce Foundation, Graham Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Artadia.

Philip Gossett is Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures. He is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He is author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of the year. He serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (Baerenreiter-Verlag, Kassel). One of the world's foremost experts on Italian opera, he is the first musicologist to be awarded the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award; he also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the Italian government's highest civilian honor.

Neil Harris is Preston and Sterling Morton Professor in the Departments of Art History and History. He works on the cultural life of Chicago as well as the rest of the United States. His research interests center on the evolution of American cultural life—high, popular, and mass—and on the formation and sustenance of its supporting institutions. His latest book, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (University of Chicago Press, 2013), provides a wide-ranging look at the growth of museum cultures in the late-20th century.

Bill Hutchison is a graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature. He is interested in animals in Victorian literature and science, and their role as figures of marginalization. 

Alice Kain is the Campus Art Coordinator for the Smart Museum of Art. Alice (a native Londoner) moved to the United States in 2009, previously she worked at a number of museums in the UK and Ireland, including the V&A (London), Henry Moore Institute (Leeds), and National Museum (Dublin). Her current position at the Smart Museum involves the collections care and management of the artwork around the University of Chicago, such as the sculptures by Henry Moore, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Wolf Vostell, and Antoine Pevsner. She has curated a number of independent shows around Chicago; her first exhibition for the Smart Museum, Interaction: British and American Modernist Design, opens in Winter 2015. She received her M.A. in Museum Studies at the University of Leeds.

Robert Kendrick is Professor in the Department of Music. He works largely on early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, and the visual arts. He is currently engaged in a book project on music and ritual in early modern Catholicism, and recent papers include work on 17th-century opera, Latin American colonial music, and the uses of litanies. In 2006, he won UChicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His books are The Sound of Milan, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Celestial Sirens (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Alison LaCroix is Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar at the Law School. She is also an associate member of the University of Chicago Department of History. She is the author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (Oxford University Press, 2012). LaCroix’s teaching and research interests include legal history, federalism, constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, civil procedure, law and linguistics, and law and literature.

David Levin is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies and Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. His research is organized around questions of performance and spectatorship, especially in the institutional and ideological histories of absorption. He is the author of Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton University Press, 1998), and the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Saar Magal is an internationally renowned choreographer who has taught dance and choreography at the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University, the Peridance Scholarship Program in New York, Yoram Loewenstein’s Performing Art Studio, the Bat Dor Dance School in Tel Aviv, and the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem, among others. Her video dance Cell Fish premiered at Lincoln Center, and was also featured at the Video Dance Festival at Tel Aviv Cinematheque. One of her latest creations, Hacking Wagner, was commissioned by the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and premiered in July 2012. 

Miguel Martínez is Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Spanish and Portuguese Undergraduate Adviser. His research focuses on the cultural and literary histories of the early modern Iberian world, with a special emphasis on the global dimensions of cultural production and circulation. He is currently working on his first book exploring the relation between military culture and the writing and reading of Renaissance epic poetry by plebeian and hidalgo soldiers in a context of constant imperial war.

Jason Merchant is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Deputy Dean for Languages in the Division of the Humanities. His research explores the syntax-semantics interface. His primary languages of investigation are the Germanic languages and Greek, and he has also worked on Slavic and Romance languages. He is the author of The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis (University of Oxford Press, 2001) and editor of Sluicing: Cross-linguistic explorations (Oxford University Press, 2012). His honors include UChicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Foreigner Fellowship.

WJT Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Art History, as well as the editor of Critical Inquiry. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the College Art Association’s Teaching Award in Art History, and the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Recently, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. His book What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005) won the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press. His recent publications include Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Seeing Through Race (Harvard University Press, 2012).

John Muse is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. His research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary theater and performance. His current book project unearths the history of the modernist microdrama, short plays that stretched the boundaries of theater and performance. He was selected as a Franke Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellow for 2013–2014.

Sarah Nooter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics. She has written articles and reviews on Greek tragedy and modern reception. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and is currently writing a book on comparative drama in Athens and in parts of Africa in the 20th century. Her interests include Greek drama, archaic poetry, literary theory, and contemporary poetry and theater. She is book review editor of Classical Philology.

Dan Raeburn is Lecturer in the Committee on Creative Writing. He is the author of The Imp, a series of booklets about underground cartoonists, and Chris Ware (Yale University Press, 2004). His other essays and memoirs have appeared in The Baffler, Tim House, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Na’ama Rokem is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. She has published Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and is currently writing a book about the encounter between Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai. Her honors include a Franke Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship and Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Director of the Civic Knowledge Project, and Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. He has published widely in philosophy, including Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004), which won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. Through the Civic Knowledge Project he has developed a number of public ethics programs affording opportunities for UChicago students, staff, and faculty to get involved in educationally relevant ways with the larger South Side community. He also serves on the editorial board of Utilitas, the leading professional journal of utilitarian studies, and on the board of directors of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), which is the main professional group in the United States devoted to pre-collegiate philosophy.

Jacqueline Stewart is Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. She directs the South Side Home Movie Project, is co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and also serves as an appointee to the National Film Preservation Board. Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005), which received recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her work explores African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, as well as “orphan” media histories—including nontheatrical, amateur, and activist film and video—and the archiving and preservation of moving images.

Yuri Tsivian is the William H. Colvin Professor in the Departments of Art History and Cinema and Media Studies. He has published numerous works on Russo-Soviet and world cinema including Silent Witnesses: Russian Films, 1908-1919 (British Film Institute, 1989), Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Ivan the Terrible (British Film Institute, 2008). One of his current projects is "Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage," funded by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. His research interests include the history of film and film styles, film and Russian/Soviet art, and gesture and performance.

Anubav Vasudevan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is a Franke Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellow in 2014–2015. His research areas include epistemology and the philosophy of science and his current work focuses on the foundations of probability. His teaching interests span from algebraic logic in the nineteenth century to contemporary issues in the philosophy of probability. 

David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature, as well as the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. He is also Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. He is the author of  two works considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 1996). His honors include fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, and the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in recognition of his scholarly achievement. 

David Wray is Associate Professor in Classics. He is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge University Press,  2001) and is currently writing Phaedra's Virtue: Ethics, Gender, and Seneca's Tragedy. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics program.