Alumni

Humanities Scholar Receives Prestigious Donnelley Fellowship to Cambridge College

Sam Lasman

While Sam Lasman (PhD’20) works primarily in the Persian, Arabic, French, and Welsh languages, he dabbles in Latin, Irish, and old English. But it’s not only the multiple languages that intrigue him, it’s the access to medieval literature concerning the supernatural from the primary sources in different languages.

To further pursue medieval literature and languages, Lasman recently received the Gaylord and Dorothy Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral exchange program for recent PhDs at the University of Chicago and Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College. The three-year fellowship allows Lasman to focus exclusively on his research, although he has leeway to teach courses at Corpus Christi College.

February 17, 2021

Prominent Alumnus Inspires New UChicago Humanities Endowment in Islamic Studies

Jonathan A. C. Brown

Renowned for educating scholars in Islamic studies, UChicago has luminary professors, such as Professor Emeritus Fred M. Donner and Professor Emerita Wadad Kadi, to serve as its teachers and mentors. Now one of their protégés, Jonathan A. C. Brown (PhD’07), has emerged as a prominent voice in this field.

In honor of Brown, a new $100,000 endowment in Islamic Studies has been established in the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. While the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations will manage the Jonathan A. C. Brown Islamic Studies Research Award Fund, annual applications are open to both UChicago master’s degree and PhD students researching Islamic studies across many disciplines.

February 5, 2021

Building Ideas: Students Help Reimagine Core Texts in Renowned Alum Jenny Holzer's Innovative Artwork

Photo by Christopher Dilts. YOU BE MY ALLY, 2020, Augmented reality app. Texts © 1998 by Anne Carson, © 1952 by Éditions du Seuil, © 2008 by Richard Philcox, © 1998 by Antjie Krog. Reprinted by permissions of the authors, Aragi Inc., Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Penguin Random House South Africa. © 2020 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

For University of Chicago student Zahra Nasser, this October marks the culmination of months of hard work—and the chance to see it shared not only on campus, but around the world.

A fourth-year College undergraduate studying art history and philosophy, Nasser is one of 10 current and former students involved in YOU BE MY ALLY, a groundbreaking public art commission from acclaimed artist and alum Jenny Holzer, EX’74.

October 21, 2020

UChicago Alum Tim Cassedy Receives the MLA First Book Award

Tim Cassedy

Tim Cassedy (AM’05) is fascinated with the role language played at the turn of the 19th century, and how language served to identify and differentiate people. For his cultural study of early America, Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolution (University of Iowa Press, 2019), Cassedy recently received the Modern Language Association’s annual First Book Award, which recognizes his contribution to linguistics, the history of the book, and the cultural history of British imperialism.

February 4, 2020

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