Arts & Humanities at Research@Chicago (video)

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. Philosopher Anselm Mueller considers the traditional opposition between acting well and faring well, and the kinds of steps that thinkers in different cultural settings have taken to address it. Mueller is a visiting scholar with the Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life project. He gave this talk at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago on April 11, 2016.

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. This video contains the proceedings of a symposium given in honor of Richard Strier, the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago. The symposium, “Forty Years of English Renaissance and Poetry Studies with Richard Strier: Religion, Politics, and Close Reading,” took place on May 24, 2013.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Lawrence Rothfield, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and co-founder of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, delivers a lecture titled "Antiquities Under Siege: Baghdad, Cairo, and Libya," at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing on June 7, 2012. Rothfield uses three recent examples of looting at archaeological sites and museums to highlight the growing threat to cultural heritage as a world market for artifacts emerges. The event was sponsored by Alumni Education. Rothfield has published extensively on the topics of looting and the market for illicit antiquities. His publications on these topics include an edited volume, Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War and his 2009 book, The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum.

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. This spring's groundbreaking "Comics: Philosophy and Practice" conference, sponsored by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, was the first conference held in the newly opened Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. The conference brought together 17 legendary cartoonists for three days of discussion about the past and future of graphic narrative. Conference participants included cartoonists Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Robert Crumb, among other notable artists.

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 Professor Haun Saussy delivers his inaugural lecture entitled “Askance from Translation” on Friday, May 18, 2012, in Harper. Saussy examines interlinguistic exchange in such forms as loanwords, creoles, misunderstandings, and transliterations that constitute the awkward double of traditional translation. Saussy stresses that translation is not the only channel for communicative exchange and an investigation of the role of translation’s double is worthwhile in critical scholarship. Saussy was appointed University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the College in July 2011. He specializes in classical Chinese poetry, the comparative study of oral traditions, and translation issues, among other subjects. His books include The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, Great Walls of Discourse, and new editions of modernist touchstones such as Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and the Fenollosa/Pound essay On the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.

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 an ambitious initiative designed to expand the boundaries of humanistic study, the University of Chicago is establishing a center devoted to addressing questions that transcend any single field or methodology.The Neubauer Family Collegium on Culture and Society will create a destination for outstanding visiting scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from around the nation and the world, who will come to collaborate with their peers in Chicago. The Neubauer Collegium will fund research into large-scale questions that require the expertise and perspectives of many disciplines, while pioneering new efforts to share that work with a wider public. The Collegium is named in honor of Joseph Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, whose landmark $26.5 million gift to the University is among the largest in support of the humanities and social sciences in the institution's history.

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 an event hosted by the University of Chicago Library Society at the Quadrangle Club on October 13, 2010, Christina von Nolcken, Associate Professor in English Language and Literature and the College and Chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies, presents a lecture entitled “Two University of Chicago Humanists and a Landmark Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” Professor von Nolcken’s lecture centers on the eight-volume edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales meticulously prepared and published in 1940 by Professors John Manly and Edith Rickert in the English Language and Literature department. Both professors worked as code-breakers during World War I, and their language abilities proved invaluable in the intensive research required for the Canterbury Tales project. In light of her work with the extensive Manly-Rickert archive housed in the Regenstein Library, Professor von Nolcken speaks about the importance of the Manly-Rickert edition and on the considerable financial and personal challenges faced by the editors throughout the sixteen-year process of compiling the edition. Professor von Nolcken’s lecture was followed by a reception and formal dinner.

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. Lives in Linguistics: an interview with Lila Gleitman, May 11, 2009. Funded in Part by The Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and The University of North Texas. Interviewed by John R. Ross and John A. Goldsmith.

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. Larry Norman, deputy provost for the arts and associate professor in Romance languages and literature, theater and performance studies, and the College, and Steven Wiesenthal, University architect and associate vice president for facilities services, cordially invite you to celebrate Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects at the unveiling of their design for The Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts.Scheduled to open in Spring 2012, the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts will embody the experimentation and multidisciplinary inquiry, teaching, performance, and production inherent in the University's vision for the arts through the innovative design of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The Logan Arts Center will become an architectural and cultural destination in Chicago, opening the creative and critical core of the University to the neighborhood and the city as never before. It will serve as a southern gateway to campus where distinguished local and international artists and scholars will create, debate, exhibit, and perform

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. Larry Norman, deputy provost for the arts and associate professor in Romance languages and literature, theater and performance studies, and the College, and Steven Wiesenthal, University architect and associate vice president for facilities services, cordially invite you to celebrate Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects at the unveiling of their design for The Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts.Scheduled to open in Spring 2012, the Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts will embody the experimentation and multidisciplinary inquiry, teaching, performance, and production inherent in the University's vision for the arts through the innovative design of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The Logan Arts Center will become an architectural and cultural destination in Chicago, opening the creative and critical core of the University to the neighborhood and the city as never before. It will serve as a southern gateway to campus where distinguished local and international artists and scholars will create, debate, exhibit, and perform

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. A nearly life-size red dinosaur looms over Millennium Park a toy-like, yet ominous, figure with Made in China stamped prominently on its belly. A summer breeze blows through the open-grid construction of Windy City Dinosaur, which serves as a visual riff on Chicago's nickname.In its shadow stands Wu Hung, a giant in the world of contemporary Chinese art, who inspired longtime friend Sui Jianguo China's most prominent sculptor to create the piece for an exhibit of Chinese sculpture in Millennium Park.A Beijing native who has deep roots in the city's artistic avant-garde, Wu, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages & Civilizations, has known many of his country's most important artists for decades. He visited them in China and was crucial in bringing four monumental pieces by the country's most famous sculptors to Chicago.One of the foremost champions of Chinese modern art since the 1980s and a curator who has introduced China's bold aesthetic to the West, Wu was the obvious choice when the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs needed an exhibit co-curator for a new downtown exhibit called A Conversation with Chicago: Contemporary Sculptures from China.He is the star curator of contemporary Chinese art, says co-curator Lucas Cowan, Millennium Park's visual arts coordinator. It would have been shameful if I didn't have him do this.

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. Readings of original poetry and fiction by two leading South Slavic authors, Igor Stiks from Croatia and Ales Debeljak from Slovenia, both of whom currently reside in Chicago. The readings are followed by a discussion of the creative atmosphere and trends in contemporary literature in Southeast Europe, with time devoted to the experience of writing away from ones home country. Sponsored by the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, International House, and the Arts Planning Council.

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 his current project, with the working title By Crystal Fountains: Music, Language, and Grammar, Professor Larry Zbikowski tries to illuminate the difference between music and language. Professor Larry Zbikowski's work is at the forefront of the emerging field of "cognitive musicology", a term that's been in circulation only for the last year or two.

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. 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. 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.