Arts & Humanities at Research@Chicago (audio)

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, human beings are essentially rational animals. According to psychoanalysis, much of our mental lives are taken up with unconscious mental activity. The usual way of understanding unconscious mental activity has it that the unconscious is either a sea of irrationality or an aspect of mental life so distant from the operations of reason as to be a-rational—a view that tends to treat manifestations of unconscious activity as significantly pathological. This talk explores a strong sense in which reason and the unconscious are not contraries, even though unconscious mental activity does not bear the hallmarks of self-conscious thought or feeling. Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. 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.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Bob Dylan’s voice is at once one of the most recognizable and most polarizing sounds in Western music, simultaneously iconic and inscrutable. More even than his words, Dylan’s voice is the most potent material signifier of his mercurial persona. As an early Columbia Records advertising campaign put it, “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan.” But does he even sing like himself? Over the last five decades Dylan has adopted a bewildering range of voices, from laconic dust-bowl drawl to smooth country croon, from gospel shout to guttural Delta-blues bark. What is Bob Dylan’s “real voice”? And why does this problematic question seem to have such urgency in his case? This talk considers these questions by surveying Dylan’s diverse voices, illustrating some of their differences through spectrographic imaging and speculating on their stylistic and physiological origins. The talk also considers the ways in which his voices act as agents of meaning and identity, bringing his celebrated words—and equally celebrated personae—to sonic presence. Steven Rings is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on transformational theory, phenomenology, popular music, and questions of music and meaning. Animating all of his work is an abiding interest in the relationship between music theory and broadly humanistic inquiries into music as a cultural practice.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. One feature of human language that is crucial to its role in communication is the systematic relation between linguistic symbols (words, phrases, sentences) and the information they express in different contexts. For example, the sentence, “The Quad Club is currently serving tripe for lunch” conveys the same information about the world at the time of utterance no matter who utters it. As a result, if Anna says “The Quad Club is currently serving tripe for lunch,” and Beatrice says “No, the Quad Club is not currently serving tripe for lunch,” then clearly one must be wrong, and we can simply look at the menu to discover the facts. However, the information content of many kinds of linguistic expressions appears to vary according to the perspective, attitudes, or subjective viewpoint of the individual who utters them. If Anna says “The Quad Club tripe is delicious,” and Beatrice responds, “No, the Quad Club tripe is not delicious,” we can no longer say with confidence that one must be right and the other wrong; instead, what each says can be in some way “true for her.” Expressions of taste are a fairly benign example of such “subjective predicates.” Other examples, such as expressions of aesthetic or moral judgments, play a more significant role in thinking about the relation between language and the world. Chris Kennedy, Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics, examines subjectivity from the perspective of linguistic semantics, showing that subjective predicates have a number of shared grammatical features, and explains how a close examination of these features can help us better understand what subjectivity consists in and how it is encoded in the linguistic system. Chris Kennedy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His research addresses issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language. He is also engaged in work on language processing and acquisition. In addition to publishing numerous journal articles on these topics, he is Associate Editor of the Oxford University Press series Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics. His publications include Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse (with Louise McNally, Oxford, 2008).

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. How is the digital changing the way that humanities scholars look at the past? This forum showcases several ongoing projects by faculty that utilize network visualization, text-mining, geo-spatial mapping, and other digital techniques to augment and/or reframe more traditional lines of humanistic inquiry. How have these techniques changed the kinds of questions that scholars are asking? How should they be integrated with established methods of interpretation? Presenters consider these issues as they exhibit their work on network analysis and the sociology of literary modernism and on the sonic landscapes of Renaissance Florence. Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a project that considers postal technologies of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan as forms of “new media.” He is focusing on the ways these technologies impacted practices of writing—literary or otherwise—and how they may or may not have altered established patterns and ideas of social association and communication. His first book, On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines the ways in which artistic and literary activity intersected with ideas about place and locality in Japan’s prewar period. Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research focus on modern American literature in an international context. He is interested in American, Asian American, and East Asian cultures, including the circulation of people, texts, and ideas across the Pacific, the literary exchange between American and East Asian writers during the interwar period, modern U.S. democratic theory, and Chinese Communist cultures. Niall Atkinson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. As an architectural and urban historian focusing on the late medieval and Early Renaissance in Italy, Atkinson studies the reception of buildings and spaces to determine what residents thought about their city. The historical urban soundscape is central to his investigation and led to an even more complex project on the phenomenology of architecture through the entire sensorial apparatus of the body, where taste, touch, and smell, as well as hearing and sight, also have an architectural history. Peter Leonard is Associate Director of Research Computing in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His background is in contemporary Nordic literature, specifically new ‘post-ethnic’ figurations of national belonging in Scandinavian fiction. He is broadly interested in digital and quantitative methods in the humanities, including text mining, network analysis, image analysis and corpus query engines. In 2010 he was awarded a Google Digital Humanities Research Award for the Automated Literary Analysis of the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice are two of Shakespeare’s most controversial and least loved (though very often performed) plays. While both of them are, by genre and intention, comedies, they often do not strike modern and contemporary audiences as such. The aim of this talk is not to dismiss concerns with misogyny and anti-Semitism as historically inappropriate or anachronistic, but to see what difference to our judgments some historical contextualizing and close reading can make. The plays will look rather different after these operations are performed on them, though they may still remain—as they probably should—potentially disturbing. Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the College and an associate member of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He edits the journal, Modern Philology. His life-long project is to bring together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas. Courses taught by Strier range from “Renaissance Intellectual Texts” to “Society and Politics in Shakespeare’s Plays” to “The Religious Lyric in England and America from the Renaissance to the Present.” His most recent book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011), was recently awarded the 2011 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. His previous books include: Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1995) and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1965).

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Jessica Stockholder, Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, shares images of her work and discusses its relationship to context. Her presentation focuses particularly on the “Color Jam” installation that was on view on the corner of State and Adams this past summer, describing the process of its construction and how its meaning is in part derived from its location. She shares images of other works that relate to this one and gives an overview on how she arrived at this way of working. Jessica Stockholder 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.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. James Sparrow, associate professor of History at the University of Chicago, discusses the history of the United States during World War II.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Alison Bechdel, Dedmon Writer-in-Residence 2010, discusses her work.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute, explains the importance of the groundbreaking archaeological expedition he co-directed at Hamoukar in Northern Syria. Until recently, archaeologists believed that urban civilization first arose in Southern Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq. Work at Hamoukar has revealed a separate and equally ancient urban movement to the north of the area that has been traditionally regarded as the birthplace of "the city."

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Law professor Cass R. Sunstein talks about his book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and brings back from obscurity an important speech: FDR's State of the Union Address of 1944, in which he articulates the idea that human beings have inherent economic and social rights. Copyright 2004 The University of Chicago.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology and Dean of Humanities, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In 'Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood' University of Chicago sociologist Omar McRoberts explores the relationships between urban 'storefront' churches and the community in which they are situated. Copyright 2003 The University of Chicago.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Martin E. Marty, Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the Divinity, discusses his new book, The Mystery of the Child, and the origins of his interest in the subject of children. Departing from literature on children that regards the child as a problem to be controlled, Marty's new work--emanating from his involvement in Emory University's three-year study of "The Child in Law, Religion and Society"--calls for us to foster wonder in children, asking that we rediscover what it means to be a child as well as to care for one.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. In Renaissance demonology, the relationship between humans and fallen angels is essentially a dialogue. Armando Maggi examines this rhetorical interaction--how demons seduce humans into speaking their language--and reconsiders an impossible question that concerned church fathers: What happens when demons and humans mate? Copyright 2004 The University of Chicago.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. University of Chicago fossil preparator, Tyler Keillor, discusses the iterative process of creating the model for Tiktaalik, the fossil discovery by paleontologist Neil Shubin that fills in the evolutionary gap between fish and land animals.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Film historian Tom Gunning examines an important precursor to modern film: the magic lantern. He considers the eighteenth and nineteenth century's fascination with this new, very modern way of experiencing images and how this form of visual media ushered in the era of motion pictures. Copyright 2005 The University of Chicago

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Wendy Doniger explores the cultural fascination with pretending to be another version of oneself, a popular theme in film, theater, and literature.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. University of Chicago Professor David Bevington discusses the process of publishing the comprehensive new electronic and print editions of Ben Jonson's work, which will feature modernized language and will include secondary materials such as costume and set sketches.