Session 3

John D. Kuhns is an author, artist, businessman, venture capitalist, and investment banker. His third and most recent novel, South of the Clouds, was released in July 2018. He has founded and taken five companies public. A sculptor, Kuhns graduated in 1975 with a Master of Fine Arts degree from UChicago.

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.

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.

Philip V. Bohlman has most recently published Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Song Loves the Masses (University of California Press, 2017). Bohlman is the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History in the Department of Music at UChicago. The New Budapest Orpheum Society, a self-styled Jewish cabaret, is ensemble in residence in the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. The Society has recorded four CDs, the most recent of which, “As Dreams Fall Apart” (Cedille Records, 2014) was nominated for a Grammy Award.

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.

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.

Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. She has three new books coming out in 2018: a collection of poems, Elevated Threat Level, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award; a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 (Oxford UP); and Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo, co-translated from the Spanish with Harris Feinsod.

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.

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.

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.