Faculty

NEH Recognizes Three UChicago Humanities Scholars

Allyson Nadia Field is writing a transformative book about Black love in early American cinema, while Steven Rings is analyzing Bob Dylan’s overlooked musical sound. Through translation, Judith Zeitlin is capturing the literary merit of nearly 500 ghost tales written by a renowned Chinese author.

For their work, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Field and Rings as the first Public Scholar recipients at UChicago’s Division of the Humanities to each receive $60,000 grants and Zeitlin and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to obtain a Scholarly Editions and Translations award of $298,954.

“These three humanities scholars are undertaking work that reverberates outside of academic circles and will enrich broader audiences,” said Deborah L. Nelson, dean of the Division of the Humanities and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English Language and Literature and the College at UChicago.

Four Questions with Robert Morrissey

Robert Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, teaching in a classroom

As construction continues on the University of Chicago’s John W. Boyer Center in Paris, slated to open in autumn 2024, preparations to get its operations up and running on day one are well underway.

To wit, Robert Morrissey, the original Center in Paris’s inaugural director, is knee-deep in his new role as executive director of the International Institute of Research in Paris (IIRP).

“[When planning for the first Center], we were building on a robust study abroad program that [former dean of the College] John Boyer did so much to foster,” Morrissey said. “It quickly became a place where faculty from a diverse range of disciplines could organize conferences and workshops, and where students could challenge themselves academically.”

Humanities and History Scholar Elected Fellow of the British Academy

Renowned historian and Humanities scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the British Academy—the highest honor for an academic not based in the United Kingdom. Much of his career has focused on rethinking working-class history in Bengal, considering how postcolonial thought has provincialized Europe, and examining the habitations of modernity through subaltern studies.

Since 2009, however, in several published articles and books, Chakrabarty has written about a fundamental problem: Why is it so difficult for human beings to respond to climate change?

“It is very interesting and puzzling that we are not doing enough to combat climate change,” Chakrabarty said. “It is a tragic problem that human beings cannot change their attachments and respond more adequately to a dire problem."

'The Classics Are Everywhere; Most of Us Are Likely Just Not Looking for Them'

The Weeknd and Metro Boomin sit near a statue of the Three Graces in Las Vegas in the “Heartless” video. "In my classes on classical reception in modern and contemporary society, my students find classical references across music, literature and theater, and video games, and inquire into their significance," Prof. Patrice Rankine says.

Patrice Rankine is a professor in the Department of Classics and the College and a writer. In addition to the reception of classics in current times, Rankine is interested in reading literature with insights from various theoretical approaches, including race and performance, queer theory and social history. His forthcoming book is “Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning in America, 1964-2020.” The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: As a classics professor, how do you make the classics accessible and relevant for students?

Locating the classics might be like the game we play as children on summer road trips or long car rides: Find a red car. You might not normally notice red cars, but once they are raised to your awareness, they’re everywhere. The same goes for what we might call the relevance or accessibility of the classics. Once we realize that they are everywhere, we cannot unsee them.

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