Crossing Sonic Borderlands
Visit by William Kentridge Celebrates Launch of Neubauer Collegium
In honor of the launch of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, internationally acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge will deliver a public lecture exploring the relationship between sound and image in a talk titled "Listening to the Image." The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society is an ambitious initiative launched by the Division of the Humanities and the Division of the Social Sciences designed to expand the boundaries of humanistic inquiry and focus resources on questions that transcend any single individual, discipline, or methodology.
New Distinguished Service Professorships Recognize Outstanding Scholars
Two faculty members from the Division of the Humanities were named Distinguished Service Professors. Lauren Berlant has been named George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature and the College. Berlant’s research focuses on institutions of intimacy and belonging in the United States since the nineteenth century, as well as on the public circulation of political emotions like trauma, love, optimism, and depression. She joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1984.
D. N. Rodowick has joined the UChicago faculty as the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Cinema and Media Studies and the College. His research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Before coming to UChicago, Rodowick was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Prior to that, he founded the Film Studies program at Yale University. Rodowick joined the UChicago faculty on July 1.
Read about all of the new professorships here.
Library Digitizes Jazz Age Magazine
The University of Chicago Library launched a website last month allowing visitors free access to The Chicagoan, an arts and culture magazine fashioned after The New Yorker. Neil Harris, Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History and Art History, discovered the nearly complete run of the magazine in the Regenstein Library in the late 1980s. He later edited a book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, exploring the magazine’s ambitions and situating it in the historical context of 1920s Chicago.
The magazine was digitized using the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library’s Digitization Laboratory’s new Zeutschel overhead scanner, which allowed the library to scan bound volumes in house, in a face-up position. “As an online, searchable resource, the Chicagoan facilitates new avenues of study and the ability to zoom in and out on images, while preserving the original print volumes from excessive handling,” said Alice Schreyer, Assistant University Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences & Special Collections and Curator of Rare Books.
Digital copies of The Chicagoan, which lasted from 1926 to 1935, can be found here.
Visual Arts Alumna to Publish Work on Cloistered Nuns
While researching Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns, Abbie Reese, MFA'13, spent six years learning and recording the individual stories of a community of cloistered monastic nuns living in a 25,000-square-foot enclosure outside Rockford, Illinois. Those stories and Reese's accompanying photographs will be published in November as part of the Oxford University Press's Oxford Oral History series, and mark one of the first times an author has been allowed access to an enclosure where nuns observe monastic silence. Reese graduated from the Department of Visual Arts in 2013, and has included photos and video from the project on her website. Her photos were also shown in the 2013 MFA Thesis exhibition, which can be found here.
