Presenters

Orit Bashkin is a historian who works on the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East. Her publications deal with Iraqi history, the history of Iraqi Jews, the Arab cultural revival movement (the nahda) in the late 19th century, and the connections between modern Arab history and Arabic literature. Her books are Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel, Stanford University Press, 2017; New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Stanford University Press, 2012; and The Other Iraq–Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, Stanford University Press, 2009. Bashkin is Professor of modern Middle Eastern history in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Will Boast is a writer and journalist working in multiple forms: the short story, the novel, memoir, and long-form reporting. His 2018 novel, Daphne, is in part about the physiology of emotion, and recent articles have examined the European migration crisis, traditional sports in Kazakhstan, and witchcraft in West Africa. Currently, he is working on a second short story collection, largely concerned with the ways political and technological shifts in the 21st century are changing our ideas about travel and migration. He is Assistant Professor of Practice in Creative Writing in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Benjamin Callard is a philosopher with interests in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. His recent work has focused on the problem of the freedom of the will. Callard is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy.

Patrick R. Crowley specializes in Roman art and archaeology. His research interests include ancient concepts of the image and theories of vision, Roman portraiture, and the role of photography in archaeological methodology. His forthcoming book, provisionally titled The Phantom Image: Visuality and the Supernatural in Ancient Rome, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Crowley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History.

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of four novels: Second Circus (Penguin, 2019); Blind (Penguin, 2014); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); and Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). DeWoskin’s work explores the transnational experience, particularly questions of how human beings communicate across linguistic and national boundaries. DeWoskin is a Lecturer in fiction in the Department of English Language and Literature and is an affiliated faculty member in the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.

Virginio Ferrari is an internationally acclaimed contemporary sculptor who has exhibited his work in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and throughout the United States. His monumental sculptures can be found on street corners and public parks, at universities and libraries, corporations and in private collections in Chicago, and all over the world.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas, primarily during the 20th century. Winner of the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award, his collection of poems and anthropological essays on hemispheric migrations—Skins of Columbus: Ethnography of Colonial Dreamlands—will be published by Fence Books in 2019. His book of scholarship on the contemporary life of the seemingly antiquated sign-systems of the Americas—Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictographs, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu—is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Garcia is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Jordan Johansen is a Classics PhD candidate, specializing in the social, political, and economic history of the Hellenistic period, primarily Ptolemaic Egypt. Her research interests include papyrology, epigraphy, numismatics, ancient geography and ethnography, and ancient music.

Kara Keeling works in the areas of Film and Media Studies, Black Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies, and specializes in film and media theory. She is author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, coeditor with Josh Kun of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, and coeditor with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead titled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing. Her most recent book manuscript, Queer Times, Black Futures, is forthcoming in spring 2019. Keeling is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

Christopher Kennedy’s research is geared toward discovering and describing the principles that are involved in relating linguistic forms to meanings. He delves deeply into how this mapping is achieved through language, cognition, communication, and context. Kennedy is the William H. Colvin Professor of Linguistics.

Ling Ma is the author of Severance, published by FSG this past August, which has been described as “part workplace novel, part young-woman-comes-of-age-in-New York City, part post-apocalyptic nightmare,” (Vulture) and alternately, as “a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism” (Kirkus). Her work focuses on genre fiction, work narratives, and first-person testimonies in the age of globalism. Ma's fiction has been published in Granta, Vice, Playboy, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Benjamin Morgan’s areas of research include science and literature in 19th-century Britain and the environmental humanities. His first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how early scientific studies of the human mind transformed ideas about the human experience of the arts. His current book project, In Human Scale: The Aesthetics of Climate Change, traces how literature and the visual arts have depicted vast and complex ecological systems since the early industrial moment of the climate change era. Morgan is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature.

Sarah Nooter is a classicist who works on ancient Greek poetry, particularly tragedy, from a literary and affective perspective, as well as on modern poetry and performance. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and is coeditor with Shane Butler of Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2019). Nooter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics.

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian examining radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She focuses on the history of science, religion, heresy, free thought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She has written Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2014) and the award-winning science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (beginning with Too Like the Lightning). Palmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, is co-founder of UChicago's new Renaissance Studies Program, and is affiliated with the Classics Department, the Gender Center, and the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

Rik Peters is a PhD candidate in the joint program in Social Thought and Classics, specializing in ancient philosophy and the intellectual history of the Hellenistic Greek world. His research interests include the relations between post-Aristotelian science, philosophy, and literature; aesthetics and ethics as they relate to the pursuit of knowledge; and materialist conceptions of the mind in Greek antiquity. His dissertation will focus on the ambivalent relation between wonder and knowledge in Aristotle, Epicureanism, and Stoicism.

William Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. The goals for his work are several—joy, money and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order. Some of his most recent projects include ‘One Thing After Another’, La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2018); 'Brown People Are The Wrens In The Parking Lot', University of Chicago (2017); 'Flint Water', What Pipeline, Detroit, Michigan (2017); 'Whisper Campaign', Documenta 14, Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany (2017); and 'Claim', Whitney Biennial, New York City, for which he was awarded the Bucksbaum Prize (2017).

Olga Sánchez-Kisielewska is a music theorist who studies musical meaning and expression, with a focus on the late 18th century. Her research interests include music cognition, music and dance, and music theory pedagogy. She has published in Theory and Practice and the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and is writing a chapter on Beethoven’s Fidelio for the forthcoming volume Singing in Signs: New Semiotic Explorations of Opera. Sánchez-Kisielewska is a Lecturer in the Department of Music.

Anna Schultz is an ethnomusicologist whose research in India and beyond addresses music’s power to activate profound religious experiences that in turn shape other identities. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and her second book, Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Gender and Textual Orality, is under contract with Oxford University Press. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Music.

Chris Taylor is a scholar of Caribbean and African-American literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries. His research interests include black political thought, the cultures of slavery and antislavery, and the history of freedom. His first book, Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, was published in 2018 (Duke University Press). Currently, he is working on a new book project, titled The Voluntary Slave: Atlantic Modernity’s Impossible Subject. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

University staff from campus organizations will lead various tours.

Christina von Nolcken is a medievalist specializing in Old and Middle English Literature. Her research has mostly been on reformist works by the followers of John Wyclif (d. 1384). She is currently writing the biography of UChicago professor Edith Rickert (1871–1838), who helped break an important part of the German code in World War I. Von Nolcken is an Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Program in Medieval Studies.

John Wilkinson is a poet whose latest collection, Ghost Nets, appeared in 2016. As a critic, his research interests include event and object in relation to lyric, and lyric’s multiple temporalities. His forthcoming book, Lyric in its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath and Stone, explores these concerns in relation to verse from Petrarch to Cody-Rose Clevidence, and visual art from Veronese to Ian Hamilton Finlay. A new collection of poetry, My Reef My Manifest Array, will be published in early 2019. Wilkinson is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and Director of Creative Writing.