Session 2

Augusta Read Thomas is a Grammy-winning musical composer, who The New Yorker has described as “a true virtuoso composer.” In addition to teaching students at UChicago, she has recent and upcoming musical commissions from such diverse organizations as the Boston Symphony, Utah Symphony, Tanglewood, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. In fact, a 2015 New York Times article states her distinction of having her work performed more during 2013–2014 than any other living ASCAP composer has. Thomas is a University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music.

Pamela Pascoe has been a professional actor for 40 years. During the last 20 years at UChicago, she has transferred the skills and techniques of an actor to create her own performance pedagogy, which she has used in a wide variety of courses, as well student productions and experimental performance projects. Pascoe is a Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies.

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.

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.

Janet H. Johnson is Editor of the Chicago Demotic Dictionary and has written numerous articles on the role of women in Egyptian society. She is Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Lynn Xu is the author of the poetry collection Debts & Lessons, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and June, a chapbook. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at UChicago.

Augustus Rose’s debut novel The Readymade Thief, about urban exploration, avant-garde art cults, and the shotgun marriage of Marcel Duchamp and quantum physics, came out from Viking Books in 2017. His screenplay Far From Cool was a finalist in the 2015 Academy Nicholl Fellowships. He is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing in the Department of English Language and Literature.

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.