Two Perspectives on Video Games
Humanities Scholar Wins the Prestigious Sheikh Zayed Book Award
Tahera Qutbuddin embarked on a 10-year journey researching and writing the first study in English of seventh-century Arabic oration, which strongly influenced its literature and culture. The result was Arabic Oration: Art and Function (2019), which recently received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arabic Culture in Other Languages and reveals similarities between Arabic and Greek oral traditions.
“Tahera is a master translator; many of the sermons and speeches in her book were translated into English from Arabic for the first time,” said Ahmed El Shamsy, associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). “Her analyses are so insightful. The coming generations of students will use her pathbreaking work as a foundation for further study.”
UChicago Humanities Professor To Be Honored as Commandeur by the French Government
For his exceptional contribution to teaching and promoting French thought and culture, Arnold I. Davidson has received the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Palmes académiques and will be honored at the French Consulate in Chicago in the fall of 2021. This achievement is the highest-ranking academic honor of the French Republic and is available to both French and international academics who make major contributions to French national education and culture.
“Throughout his career, Arnold has thoroughly immersed himself in French culture and thought without regard to disciplinary boundaries,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities.
Eight UChicago Faculty Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Eight members of the University of Chicago faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. They include Profs. Zeresenay Alemseged, Benson Farb, Jeffrey Hubbell, Karin Knorr Cetina, Anup Malani, Angela Olinto, Eric Santner and Amie Wilkinson.
These scholars have made breakthroughs in fields ranging from human evolution and cancer immunotherapy to cosmic rays and geometric group theory. They join the 2021 class of more than 250 individuals, announced April 22, which includes artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors.
Humanities Alum Receives 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction
Kate Zambreno (AM’02) crosses the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction with remarkable ease. She is the author of eight books, most recently the novel Drifts to be published in paperback in May 2021 and her study on Hervé Guibert, To Write as If Already Dead, forthcoming in June. Zambreno received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction and is at work on an essay collection, The Missing Person.
“From the start, Kate Zambreno was a creative, experimental, and rigorously focused thinker whose writing refused conventional academic modes of reference and explanation, but which also tried to connect to people’s ordinary lives, fantasies, desires, and habits,” said Lauren Berlant, the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
