News from the Humanities Division

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and of Art History, has rescued some Chicago history. The Chicagoan, a New Yorker-style magazine of editorials, society news, and reviews of books, theater, and the “talkies” was published in the Second City for nine years during the Great Depression. Says the Sun-Times:

A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age is the product of Harris’ years of thorough and thoughtful research, now fashioned into a fantastically hefty volume, a treasure-trove of our city’s cultural history.

See sample pages of the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

The New York Times has made mention of the fact that archaeologists at the Oriental Institute discovered an inscribed stone monument at the Syrian border that refers to the concept of the “soul.”

The inscription on the monument was translated by Dennis Pardee, professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. It reads in part:

“I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.”

The culture’s Semitic contemporaries considered the body and soul inseparable. This discovery could shed light on the cultural dynamics of the eighth century. Read more at the New York Times.

Project Bamboo, an 18-month initiative to develop web services for scholarly research, was featured in the Chicago Sun-Times. The article quotes Arno Bosse, senior director of technology for the Humanities Division:

Computers are already good at finding patterns, particularly in text…It would be great if computers could also recognize people and place names in ancient Chinese texts or the types of shots made in a silent movie.

Project Bamboo is an effort to develop software that would expand the abilities of computers to include such tasks. The project, which involves over 100 museums, libraries and schools, is being led by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. It is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For more information, see the Chicago Sun-Times article and the Project Bamboo website.

On Saturday, October 25, from 11am – 6pm the Open Practice Committee and the Department of Visual Arts join the Museum of Contemporary Art to present Disruptions: The Political in Art Now.

Exploring the many ways artists inspire political action and social change, and how art can be socially useful, this day of discussion asks pertinent questions about the intersection of art and politics. How does art function politically? What is activist art? What forms of dissent are possible today, and how do artists manifest political perspectives in their practice? Speakers include artist and educator Doug Ashford; cultural theorist and activist Brian Holmes; artist and member of Colectivo Cambalache Carolina Caycedo; writer and videomaker Gregg Bordowitz; artist and member of Otabenga Jones and Associates Robert Pruitt; artist and curator Mark Tribe; as well as dramaturge, curator, and writer Eda Cufer, among others.

For more information, visit the OPC website.

Saturday, October 25, 2008, 11am – 6pm

Museum of Contemporary Art
MCA Theater
220 E. Chicago
Chicago, IL 60611

On Thursday, October 30, and 5:30 pm the Open Practice Committee in conjunction with Chicago Artists Month will present “Current Concerns: Contemporary Artists and Issues.”

Inspired by the themes in the exhibition Displacement, artists Geof Oppenheimer, Deb Sokolow, and Tony Tasset will discuss their approaches to contemporary social and political topics. Their strategies differ: Geof Oppenheimer’s diverse artistic practice addresses the formal manifestation of political values (ranging from fascism vs. democracy, boutique vs. homespun and detention vs. agency); Deb Sokolow constructs labyrinth-like, text-driven drawings that mix politics with humor (and an excessive amount of paranoia); and Tony Tasset makes gallery and public art in a variety of populist artistic languages to slyly critique and memorialize the current American condition

The program will be moderated by Stephanie Smith, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.

Thursday, October 30, 5:30 pm

Cochrane Woods Art Center
5540 South Greenwood Avenue
Room 157

Jacques Rancière, the 2008 Critical Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, will lecture on Friday, October 24, at 4 pm on the role of images in radical democracy. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Jacques Rancière is emeritus professor of aesthetics and politics at the University of Paris VIII and one of Europe’s most prominent philosophers. A student of Louis Althusser, Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading Capital before breaking with his teacher. Since then, he has authored many books of philosophy about topics ranging from democracy to film to aesthetics. In this lecture, he will examine the role of images in the project of radical democracy, considering how art and politics are intertwined.

This lecture, which serves as the keynote for the symposium “Disruptions: the political in art now”, is sponsored by the journal Critical Inquiry in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the University of Chicago’s Open Practice Committee/Department of Visual Art.

More information can be found at the Open Practice Committee website.

Friday, October 24, 2008, 4 – 6pm

Critical Inquiry
Swift Hall – 3rd floor
1025 East 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

The Civic Knowledge Project, the community connections branch of the Division of the Humanities, is drawing notice.

The network of CKP’s newest program,  “Partnering for a Sustainable Chicago,” recently won one of the “Champions of Sustainability in Communities” awards from the Sustainable Endowments Institute. Eric Heineman, the Sustainability Council’s Project Manager, recognized the work the CKP was doing and with the help of Kathleen Fabiny, Director of Data Research in the office of the president, submitted the nomination to the Institute. Special mention was made, in the nomination, of the new network’s support for and co-sponsorship of the recent Woodlawn Youth Solutions Project, under the direction of master gardener Dorothy Pytel, a project that produced the beautifully decorated and planted containers now sited around the Woodlawn area. And the work continues. The Sustainability Partners (as it is called, for short) is in fact continuing to develop new and ongoing programs as part of Woodlawn Youth Solutions. Watch for more announcements soon!

The CKP was founded five years ago by MacArthur “genius” grant winner and former Dean of the Humanities Danielle Allen, its mission is to develop and strengthen community connections, helping to overcome the social, economic, and racial divisions among the various knowledge communities on the South Side of Chicago. The CKP provides an extraordinary array of ways for people to learn more about their city and to get involved in actively working to make it a better place, advancing the forms of civic friendship that matter most. Visit it online at http://civicknowledge.uchicago.edu/.

On Friday, October 17 at 3:00 pm the Max Palevsky Cinema will screen Thumbsucker. The movie was adapted from the novel of the same title written by Walter Kirn, the University of Chicago’s Vare Writer-in-Residence. He will be present for a question and answer session.

Starring Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn, and Tilda Swinton, Thumbsucker is the story of a 17-year-old who sucks his thumb. With the help of his new-agey dentist (played by Reeves), Justin breaks the habit and throws his obsessive personality into other endeavors, namely ritalin, the debate team, and girls. A coming-of-age search for identity. Visit the film’s website here: http://www.sonyclassics.com/thumbsucker/.

The Department of English at the University of Chicago presents the 2008-2009 Frederic Ives Carpenter Lectures.

JACQUELINE ROSE, Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London presents a lecture series, “PROUST AMONG THE NATIONS.”

LECTURE 1
Monday, November 3rd, 4:30 p.m.
PARTITION, PROUST, AND PALESTINE
Swift Hall, 3rd-Floor Lecture Room, 1025 E. 58th St.

LECTURE 2
Wednesday, November 5th, 4:30 p.m.
THE HOUSE OF MEMORY
Social Science Research Building, Room 122, 1126 E. 59th St.

LECTURE 3
Friday, November 7th, 4:30 p.m.
ENDGAME: BECKETT AND GENET IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Social Science Research Building, Room 122, 1126 E. 59th St.

Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact the English Department at (773) 702-8536.

JACQUELINE ROSE is the author of The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Why War?: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (1993), States of Fantasy (1995), Albertine, a novel (2001), On Not Being Able to Sleep: Essays on Psychoanalysis in the Modern World (2003), The Question of Zion (2005), and The Last Resistance (2007).  Professor Rose is also a coeditor of A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish Identity (2008).

Frederick Ives Carpenter (1861-1925) was for many years an eminent professor of medieval and Renaissance literature in the Department of English. The Carpenter lectureship was endowed in 1925 to memorialize Professor Carpenter’s personal commitment to the highest excellence in scholarship and teaching, and to perpetuate that commitment in a broader way. The Carpenter lecturer generally spends two weeks at the University, with the centerpiece of the visit being a series of three lectures. The lecturer will, in addition, visit graduate workshops, hold office hours, and spend time informally engaged with faculty and students. Previous Carpenter Lecturers include Edward Said, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Catherine Gallagher, and Michael Warner.

For more information on this and other English Deparment events, visit their online calendar.

Wu Hung, Professor of Art History and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art, is featured in in the latest issue of Newcity Chicago. The publication’s art section examines his work on the Smart Museum’s exhibit Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, saying it offers “nuanced, thought-provoking perspectives on a project of great social, environmental, and global concern”

The Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangzi River will, when completed, supply the nation with the equivalent power of fifty million tons of coal. It has also already displaced over one million people and submerged over one thousand towns and villages. Displacement presents work that four leading contemporary Chinese artists—Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhuang Hui—have created in response to the dam.

It’s a complicated issue that Professor Wu Hung approaches with care. Newcity Chicago explains that he “has fashioned his curatorial career […] as a cultural diplomat.”

Thanks in part to Wu Hung, viewers are equipped to understand contemporary Chinese art in the context that it is made, so an exhibition such as Displacement, which focuses on a very specific time and place, has relevance for a Chicago audience. In many ways the world is already attuned to China’s pull on life, from the Olympic spectacle to the objects we touch and digest daily. “Actually,” says Wu Hung, “we know so little about each other.”

Newcity Chicago goes on to mention that Wu Hung will soon publish a source book with the Museum of Modern Art on Chinese art and literature,  and he will also work with artist Shen Shaomin to install public sculptures in Millennium Park.

For more information on Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, visit the Smart Museum’s website.