undergraduate student

UChicago fourth-year student named 2025 Rhodes Scholar

UChicago student Francesco Rahe named 2025 Rhodes scholar

Francesco Rahe, a fourth-year student in the College at the University of Chicago, has been selected as a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. He will pursue a master’s degree in classical Indian religions at Oxford University this fall and is particularly interested in translating Sanskrit texts.

He is the 55th student from the University of Chicago to be named a Rhodes Scholar. Fourth-year College student Anqi Qu was named a Rhodes Scholar for South Africa last week.

“It means an immense amount to have received this opportunity,” said Rahe, who is majoring in fundamentals and religious studies. “I’m honestly a little stunned, but I also am trying to focus on making good on this opportunity. It’s a gift, but it also comes with responsibilities. I want to make sure what I do in the future is able to repay this thousand-fold.”

Unraveling the ancient past one tablet at a time

Fourth-year student Danielle Levy said her work studying cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian and Sumerian helped her learn about the ancient languages--and the stories and people associated with them. Photo by Jason Smith

In the half-dark of a third-floor office, Danielle Levy lifted a clay tablet out of its box. Carefully examining it with gloved hands, she explained how 3,500 years ago, a student in the ancient city of Nippur had copied a teacher’s cuneiform script—and smudged any mistakes smooth with their fingertips.

Ancient objects each tell their own unique stories, the University of Chicago undergraduate has learned. Through her work on Akkadian—the language of ancient Babylonia—the fourth-year student has discovered her passion for uncovering and sharing its unique history.

Werewolf books and movies that make us more human

Actor Lon Chaney Jr. on the set of The Wolf Man (1941) Photo by Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

A full moon rises. A howl pierces the air. At the University of Chicago, a new course explores how scary stories of wolfish transformations can spring from our deepest anxieties about being human.

In “The Werewolf in Literature and Film,” a new College course offered by the Department of Comparative Literature, students explore the fuzzy boundaries between animal and human across time and media. The class is taught by seventh-year doctoral candidate David Delbar, a self-described “amateur lycanthropologist.”

Summer Program Expands Humanistic Research

Sam Remondi researches the Taschenbücher Collection in the University’s Special Collections

The College Summer Institute in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CSI) provides UChicago undergraduate students with a research community and mentors like what their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) peers experience in the laboratory. In 2023, CSI paired 23 undergraduates with faculty research mentors for its immersive nine-week summer research program. The students presented a wide range of research projects during a celebratory closing symposium on Aug. 17, 2023.

“When I started my work with the CSI this summer, I had already conducted a fair bit of research at UChicago, though never related to the field of Assyriology,” said Sarah M. Ware, a rising fourth-year student majoring in Classics and Medieval Studies. During the summer, she worked with a team of Assyriologists at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), conducting research in preparation for their upcoming exhibition Back to School in Babylonia, which opens on Sept. 21.

“I had the rare opportunity of stepping completely outside my field and examining how those at the top of their field of Assyriology use text, media, and research archives, both differently from and similar to how I use them,” Ware said.

Tags

Recent News