Session 1

Judith T. Zeitlin’s work combines the study of Chinese literature with other disciplines, particularly music, visual and material culture, gender studies, medicine, and film. The many books that she has written or edited include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture (2014), and The Voice as Something More (forthcoming, 2019).

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.

Theo van den Hout is the author of several books, most recently The Elements of Hittite (Cambridge UP 2011) and many articles.  A new book, A History of Hittite Literacy: Writing and Reading in Late Bronze Age Anatolia, is expected to be published in 2019. Currently, he is the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Western Civilization and of Hittite and Anatolian Languages in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and at the Oriental Institute of UChicago and chief-editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary.

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.

James Osborne is an archaeologist who works in the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages (ca. 3500–500 BCE). He focuses especially on Anatolia, a region that is today within the Republic of Turkey, during the late second and early first millennium BCE. His work in progress, Diaspora and Mobility: The Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex, examines the nature and organization of an Iron Age culture in southern Turkey and northern Syria that existed from roughly 1200 to 700 BCE.

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.

William Nickell is a cultural historian focused on the study of Russia from the 1840s to the 1940s. His award-winning book, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, examines the events around Tolstoy’s death, which became Russia’s first media spectacle, as a means of measuring Russian values and politics between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. His current course on “Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump” brings many of these same concerns to the present.

Robert L. Kendrick teaches music history and ethnomusicology in the Department of Music and has worked at length on Baroque oratorios. He is the William Colvin Professor of Music in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Kristen Schilt is the author of Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, and her work has appeared in journals such as Gender & Society and the Annual Review of Sociology. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UChicago. Currently, Schilt serves as the director for the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.