The following was published in UChicago News on January 6, 2025.

Five University of Chicago Humanities faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Josephine McDonagh, Sianne Ngai and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart have received distinguished service professorships.

Profs. Hans Thomalla and Ming Xiang have received named professorships.

The appointments were effective January 1.

Humanities Division

Josephine McDonagh has been named the Randy L. and Melvin B. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of the Development of the Novel in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.

As a scholar of 19th-century British literature, McDonagh’s work ranges across authors, genres and print forms to explore questions about the types of knowledge that literature produces. She seeks answers to questions like: How and when do literary texts intersect with works in history, the law or political economy? And what happens when they do?

McDonagh’s first two books examine the work of two British authors—De Quincey’s Disciplines (1994) and George Eliot (1997). Subsequent studies have taken a more thematic approach. Child Murder and British Culture, 1720‒1890 (2003) explores ideas about child murder that occur in 18th- and 19th-century literature and political ideas. 

Currently, her scholarship focuses on migration. For her book Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876 (2021), McDonagh discusses the ways in which novels responded to, and helped to shape, a transcontinental migratory culture during a time of mass emigration from Great Britain to settle colonies. McDonagh is also concerned with the commodity culture of the British colonial world.

Since 2021, McDonagh has served as the director of the Nicolson Center for British Studies, which specializes in the multidisciplinary study of the history and culture of the British isles and its former colonies. From 2020‒2023, she was an editor of the journal Modern Philology.

Sianne Ngai has been named the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.

A distinguished cultural theorist, Ngai uses philosophy, literature, art, economics, and humor to define American culture. She has centered her work on unspooling the social and political histories that form the aesthetic judgments of novels, movies and photographs, as well as the lesser art forms of show tunes, YouTube videos, rubber duckies, stainless-steel banana peelers and emojis.

The author of three serious, philosophically dense books with deceivingly innocent titles, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), and Ugly Feelings (2005), she taps into American’s ordinary use of language to uncover political complexity and ambivalence. Our Aesthetic Categories won the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize, while the Theory of the Gimmick was a finalist for the Christian Gauss Book Prize, a co-winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year.

Currently, Ngai is working on a book project called “Inhabiting Error” about the affective dimensions of dialectical thinking and how it moves through negation. She is interested in why authors such as Georg Wilheim Fredrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Lauren Berlant write in a way such that the reader often ends up phenomenologically lingering, with them, in a state of being wrong.

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart has been named the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College.

Stewart is the author and editor of several influential books, including: Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005); William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission (2021), co-edited with Scott MacDonald; and L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015), co-edited with Jan-Christopher Horak and UChicago colleague Assoc. Prof. Allyson Nadia Field. Among her many honors, she received a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and the 2024 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This fall, Stewart returned to UChicago after serving for four years as the chief artistic and programming officer and then as director and president at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Her work on the museum’s inaugural exhibitions, programs and publications bridged the gap between academic and public realms and continued her focus on lesser-known film histories.

Since 2019, she has served as the first scholar and African American host on Turner Classic Movies, where she presents silent films and emphasizes works by women and filmmakers of color.

The founder of the South Side Home Movie Project in 2005, Stewart has worked to preserve, digitize and exhibit an understudied cultural resource: home movies from the Chicago neighborhoods where she was born and raised. Currently, Stewart is working on a book focused on the South Side Home Movie Project and the alternate histories and archival practices it has developed during the last 20 years.

Hans Thomalla has been named the Helen A. Regenstein Professor in the Department of Music and the College.

A composer of music for the stage, Thomalla has written four operas: Fremd performed by the Stuttgart Opera in 2011; Kaspar Hauser premiered at the Freiburg and Augsburg Opera in 2016; Dark Spring performed at the Mannheim Opera in 2020; and Dark Fall premiered at the Mannheim Opera in 2024. Additionally, he has written music for many ensembles and soloists, including the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Münchener Philharmoniker, SWR- and SR-Radiosinfonieorchester, The Crossing, Talea, ICE, Ensemble Modern, Musikfabrik, Ensemble Recherche, Arditti Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Nicolas Hodges, Irvine Arditti and Sarah Sun.

Among many awards and fellowships, Thomalla received the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Christoph Delz Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitsky Commission. During the academic year 2014‒2015, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and in 2024‒2025, he is a fellow at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. Thomalla is the co-founder of the Chicago-based record label Sideband Records.

Ming Xiang has been named the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College.

Xiang’s research aims to better understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support the rapid, real-time construction of complex linguistic representations. As the director of the Language Processing Lab at UChicago, she uses behavioral and neurophysiological methods to investigate how structural representations are formed during language comprehension and production across different languages. Her research also examines how context influences semantic and pragmatic interpretations. Recently, her lab has started exploring how language processing contributes to language change in multilingual communities.

Xiang has received several awards from the National Science Foundation to study sentence processing mechanisms across languages. She collaborates with linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists at UChicago and other universities worldwide, contributing to numerous journal articles and conference presentations on a wide range of topics in her field.