Faculty

How Lauren Berlant's Cultural Criticism Predicted the Trumping of Politics

Lauren Berlant photographed by Whitten Sabbatini for The New Yorker

The followin was first published in The New Yorker online on March 18, 2019.

In October, 2011, the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant published “Cruel Optimism,” a meditation on our attachment to dreams that we know are destined to be dashed. Berlant had taught in the English Department at the University of Chicago since 1984. She had established herself as a skilled interpreter of film and literature, starting out with a series of influential, interlinked books that she called her “national sentimentality trilogy.” A sense of national identity, these books argued, wasn’t so much a set of conscious decisions that we make as it was a set of compulsions—attachments and identifications—that we feel.

How Jewish Refuges Found a Wartime Home in Shanghai

Karin Zacharias (right) and her brother Hans Peter Zacharias, pictured in 1941 on the day of his bar mitzvah in Shanghai.

Asst. Prof. Rachel DeWoskin has visited Shanghai every summer for nearly a decade, walking along streets that more than 18,000 Jewish refugees once called home. Her years of research culminated in the January publication of Someday We Will Fly, her fictionalized account of a young Jewish girl fleeing war-torn Poland. In writing her novel, DeWoskin also relied in part on the family possessions of UChicago staff psychiatrist Jacqueline Pardo, whose German mother Karin Pardo (née Zacharias) lived in Shanghai as a child. A selection of those objects and photographs are displayed on the third floor of Regenstein Library.

Frank E. Reynolds, Leading Scholar of Buddhism and Revered Teacher, 1930-2019

Prof. Emeritus Frank E. Reynolds, who died on Jan. 9 at age 88, was a leading expert in Theravada Buddhism, a religion predominantly practiced in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. He is remembered not only for his lasting impact on the field, but for his work as a teacher and mentor during his 34 years on the UChicago faculty.

Miguel Civil, World’s Leading Scholar of Ancient Sumerian, 1926-2019

Miguel Civil, an expert on ancient Sumerians, examines documents in the Oriental Institute.

Miguel Civil, the world’s leading expert in the earliest known written language, died on Jan. 13 at age 92. The scholar at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute was described as understanding Sumerian better than anyone since the beginning of the second millennium B.C.

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