Faculty

UChicago Cinema Expert Helps Identify 1898 Film as Earliest Depiction of African-American Affection

UChicago Associate Professor Allyson Nadia Field assisted in identifying the African-American actors, director, and historical significance of Something Good–Negro Kiss, the newly discovered silent film from 1898 that is believed to be the earliest example of African-American affection on-screen. “It was remarkable to me how well the film was preserved, and also what the actors were doing,” Field said. “There’s a performance there because they’re dancing with one another, but their kissing has an unmistakable sense of naturalness, pleasure, and amusement as well.

UChicago Professor To Receive the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for His Transformative Scholarship

In writing a book that develops a new vocabulary for black and trans life, C. Riley Snorton delves into the past 150 years of American history. Recognizing the UChicago scholar’s inventiveness and depth of research and analysis, his widely celebrated book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) has notched another significant accolade. The Modern Language Association will award the William Sanders Scarborough Prize to Snorton for his groundbreaking scholarship on January 5 in Chicago. “In his inaugural year at UChicago, Riley has brought new perspective to our research and teaching in literature, race, gender, and sexuality,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities.

UChicago Professor to Receive the MLA's Prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize

Selecting six distinctive 20th-century women for her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press, 2017), UChicago scholar Deborah Nelson examines how each woman responded to suffering in unsentimental ways, and how their unconventional responses reflect their active, expansive, and transformative relationship to the traumas of the 20th century. For her broad look at how their toughness reshaped the cultural landscape, Nelson will receive the 2018 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association on January 5 in Chicago. "Debbie’s Tough Enough is a highly accessible book that is reaching audiences both within and outside academia,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. “The breadth of its appeal is, in part, what the premiere prize of the MLA honors, and this breadth corresponds to Debbie’s far-reaching impact at the University of Chicago.”

UChicago Professor Wins 2018 Lewis Lockwood Award

Music scholar Seth Brodsky takes the momentous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as an opportunity to re-evaluate modernism through psychoanalysis and music in his first book, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017), which received the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society for 2018. Every year the Lewis Lockwood Award honors a musicological book of exceptional merit published during the previous year by scholars in the early stages of their careers. “In studying and analyzing the events of the remarkable year 1989, Seth offers a wholly new and exciting way of thinking about modern music,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities.

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