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. 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).

Michael Bourdaghs is Professor in Modern Japanese Literature and Chair in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research interests include modern Japanese literature, culture, and intellectual history, as well as popular music and literary and critical theory in Japan. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop (Columbia University Press, 2012).

Benjamin Callard is Lecturer in Philosophy, Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), and the Philosophy/MAPH Coordinator. 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. He teaches the Core Course and the Analytic Philosophy Core Seminar for MAPH students and is responsible for coordinating the interface between MAPH and the Philosophy Department.

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).

Associate 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 nineteenth-century Tamil literature; he also received the 2008 Whiting Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Core teaching at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India (SUNY Press, 2010).

Frances Ferguson is Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her research focuses on the literary field of the eighteenth century and Romanticism and its changes over time (the rise of criticism and reviewing, the changes in the relationship between poetry and the novel), the history of reading and practical criticism, the rise of mass education, and the importance of dissent in educated and educational thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (Routledge, 1992), and Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (Yale University Press, 1977).

Dr. Melissa Gilliam is an expert in pediatric and adolescent gynecology, helping teens and women age 25 and younger who have complex problems or need routine care. She focuses on providing a youth-friendly atmosphere and is interested in the use of new media and technology. She was named one of the "100 Women to Watch in 2012" by Today's Chicago Woman due to her advocacy for women's health. Dr. Gilliam's research focuses on contraception, family planning, youth development, and sexually transmitted infections. Specifically, she focuses on contraceptive use among teens and women who are at risk for unintended pregnancy. She is the director of The Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), which unites researchers across the University to examine issues surrounding reproductive health and underlying disparities in access that affect physical, emotional, social, and economic well-being.  

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, and the College. He works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work comprises approximately one hundred publications and has concentrated on early cinema from its origins to WWI, as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. He has written on the Avant-Garde film, both in its European pre-WWI manifestations and the American Avant-Garde film up to the present day. He has also written on genre in Hollywood cinema and on the relation between cinema and technology. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator's experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work.

Dorothea Hoffmann is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Linguistics. Her work focuses on Australian Languages and Linguistics, in particular Jaminjung, Kriol and MalakMalak. Hoffmann is currently working on a thorough description and documentation of MalakMalak, a highly endangered language with eleven identified remaining speakers based in the Daly River Region in Australia. She aims to complement existing sketch grammars with audio-visual recordings that document traditional stories and culturally significant processes, and by compiling a 2,000-word dictionary.

Patrick Jagoda is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. His research focuses on new media studies and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture, particularly digital games, electronic literature, virtual worlds, television, cinema, the novel, and media theory. With Melissa Gilliam, Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics, Jagoda created the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, a transdisciplinary initiative that works to create digital stories and transmedia games exploring issues related to health and social justice.

Laura Letinsky is a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Her still life photography often focuses on questions of materialism and consumerism, as well as transformation and sensation. Her color photographic series have been shown at museums and galleries including the Yancey Richardson Gallery and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Nederlands Foto Institute, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Shine Gallery in London. Her work has received support from the Richard Driehaus Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the Canada and the Manitoba Arts Council. Letinsky received her B.F.A. from the University of Manitoba and her MFA from Yale University.

Françoise Meltzer is Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Literature. Her scholarship includes work on contemporary critical theory and nineteenth-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 book, Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, was published in 2011 by the University of Chicago Press.

W.J.T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College, and he is 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 and the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His book What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005) won the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize. 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).

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 twentieth century. Her interests include Greek drama, archaic poetry, literary theory, and contemporary poetry and theater. She is Book Review Editor of Classical Philology.

Gina Olson is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and Project Director for "Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles: A History of LGBTQ Life at the University of Chicago." She manages the administration and operation of CSGS and oversees the organization of the Center's conferences, series, seminars, lectures, and other programs. Her interests include gender and racial justice, sexual liberation and reproductive justice, community building and world making, film and media, human rights, and Latin American politics and culture. She is a cofounder of the activist group Queer to the Left and for several years was president of the board of directors for Women in the Director's Chair. 

Thomas Pavel is the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Social Thought. His scholarship includes works on the theory of fiction, the history of the European novel, Renaissance literature, and French seventeenth and twentieth-Century literature and intellectual life. A native of Romania, he earned his Ph.D. at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and has taught at various schools in Europe, Canada and the U.S. His books Fictional Worlds and Le Mirage linguistique have been translated into several languages. Professor Pavel also writes fiction in French (Le Miroir persan, La sixième branche).

Srikanth Reddy is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the College. He works primarily in the field of poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on creative writing. He is particularly interested in the intersection of critical and creative practice, and in the institutional history that has come to segregate those endeavors. His scholarly work focuses on Modernism and contemporary poetry and poetics. Related interests include ekphrasis, lyric genres, and various historical approaches toward the epic. His book-length poem Voyager was published by the University of California Press in 2011.

Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. His interests include Classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, ethnography, and ethics of medical care. His books and articles touch on topics such as the imaginary universal languages of Athanasius Kircher, Chinese musicology, the great Qing-dynasty novel Honglou meng, the current situation and theoretical perplexities of comparative literature, the history of the idea of oral literature, Haitian poetry, health care for the global poor, and contemporary art. He is currently working on a book about the concept of rhythm in psychology, linguistics, literature and folklore.

Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy), Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Executive Director of the 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 of Chicago develop affordable, high-quality educational programs for disadvantaged communities on Chicago’s South Side. 

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 eighteenth-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 (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

University staff will lead these tours.

Jessica Stockholder is Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts. She works at the intersection of painting with sculpture. Her work sometimes incorporates the architecture in which it has been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, idiosyncratic, and formal—tempering chaos with control. She orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical experience, probing how meaning derives from physicality.

William Tait is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy. His research focuses on logic and the philosophy of mathematics and its history. He is the author of The Provenance of Pure Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Its History  (Oxford University Press, 2005) and editor of Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein (in honor of Leonard Linsky) (Open Court, 1996). He has taught at Stanford, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Aarhus University in addition to the University of Chicago, and continues to teach classes and lead workshops in his retirement. 

Vu Tran is a Lecturer with the Committee on Creative Writing. His fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, A Best of Fence, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and other publications. He has received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2011 Finalist Award for the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.  His first novel, This Or Any Desert, is forthcoming from WW Norton. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow in fiction at the Black Mountain Institute.

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-fourteenth- and fifteenth-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.

Rebecca West is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Italian Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Italian literature, with a concentration on poetry and prose fiction, and on cinema. Her film courses have included “Women Mystery Writers from Page to Screen,” analyses of film adaptations of such novels as Strangers on a Train, Laura, In a Lonely Place, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as comparative screen representations of masculinity focusing specifically on the types of the “Latin Lover” and the “Tough Guy.”

John Wilkinson is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English Language and Literature. He has published seven collections of poetry and several works of literary criticism dealing with the peculiar properties of lyric poetry. His teaching interests include the theory and practices of close reading and of glossing, relationships between poetry and visual arts, New York School poetry (Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, James Schuyler), and other mid-twentieth century American poets.