The latest media mentions, quotes, profiles, and writings from Division of the Humanities faculty, students, staff, and alumni. Visit us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook for more updates

No longer ‘the place where fun goes to die’: The dean who changed University of Chicago steps down
Chicago Tribune
Eric Slauter (English Language and Literature) Comments on Dean Boyer's leadership in transforming UChicago's Core curriculum in the 1990s and how it helped sustain a place for liberal arts.

Individual variability in subcortical neural encoding shapes phonetic cue weighting
Nature
Alan C.L. Yu (Linguistics), Ming Xiang (Linguistics), and Jinghua Ou (Postdoctoral scholar in Linguistics) published this article in Nature, Scientific Reports showing that the nature of neural encoding at the sub-cortical level affects listeners' responses to vowel contrasts.

“Read it for restoratives”: Pericles and the Romance of Whiteness
Early Theatre
Noémie Ndiaye (English Language and Literature) wrote this essay that reads Pericles (1608) through the lens of early modern critical whiteness studies, underlining the relevance of Pericles’s quest through Shakespeare’s cultural moment.

The Case Against Travel
The New Yorker
Agnes Callard (Philosophy) questions people's belief that travel is a means to experience personal transformation. She offers her "own solution to the puzzle of why travel is endowed with mystical transformative powers, even by those it evidently fails to transform."

Why You Can’t Get That Terrible The Idol Song Out of Your Head
Vulture
Paula Clare Harper (Music) discusses the song “World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak” and possible reasons why it's a song that can get stuck in your head, including its similarity to an existing song, chord progressions using aeolian mode, the pause, and its memorability.

Jason Salavon: TODEM (Tapestry of Decadent Meritocracy)
Artsy
Jason Salavon (Visual Arts) featured for his recent NFT artwork TODEM being shown in the Mark Moore Fine Art gallery opening, June 28 through September 24, 2023.