Two Perspectives on Video Games
From the Forbidden City to UChicago, Art Historian Searches for 'a Human Perspective'
When Prof. Wu Hung lived in the Forbidden City as a young scholar in the 1970s, he felt the constant presence of history. The palatial compound was quiet and empty after visiting hours, and Wu could contemplate its ancient art and architecture.
In the evenings, Wu often spent time in the largest open space within the palaces. Surrounded by the ancient architecture, he could see the vast sky and watch the seasons unfold.
“It was like living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, only these palaces are even more immense and wonderful,” said Wu, a longtime University of Chicago faculty member. “Art was my next-door neighbor. The Forbidden City’s enormous art collections made me want to pursue a career in art history. I sensed a strong continuity in its art and architecture to our time.”
UChicago Film Scholar Jacqueline Stewart Awarded MacArthur Fellowship
Prof. Jacqueline Stewart, a leading film scholar known for her work on silent films and African American cinema, has been awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.
Given each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the prestigious grants recognize individuals from across disciplines who “show exceptional creativity in their work.” As a MacArthur Fellow, Stewart will receive a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000 over five years to support creative pursuits.
Make Film History More Inclusive. That's Jacqueline Stewart's Mandate at Academy Museum
Jacqueline Stewart was already one of the nation’s leading film scholars before she took the job of chief artistic and programming director at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Now she’s helming the presentation of perhaps the most significant museum dedicated to movies in the country.
While Stewart is on leave from the University of Chicago’s department of cinema and media studies, where she taught American film history, she will continue to appear on Turner Classic Movies, where she was the cable channel’s first Black host. She also participated in TCM’s series “Reframed Classics,” which recontextualized long-beloved movies now seen as problematic by some contemporary audiences, such as “Gone With the Wind” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
UChicago Scholar Receives ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship
For UChicago Humanities Teaching Fellow Michele Kenfack, the apocalypse means new beginnings, not destruction. Her scholarship delves into an apocalyptic pattern of renewal that she discovered among prominent Francophone novelists from Africa and the Caribbean.
As result of her work, Kenfack (PhD’20) recently received the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship for 2021. She is one of 48 fellows and will pursue her postdoctoral work in comparative literature at Harvard University.
“Through a stunningly wide-ranging, interdisciplinary probing of apocalyptical fictions in the late 20th-century Francophone Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean literature, Michele Kenfack’s dissertation makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of colonial and post-colonial traumas,” Larry Norman said.
