Session 2

Erik Zyman is a theoretical syntactician. He investigates the principles and fundamental operations that determine how the atoms of syntax can and cannot be combined to form larger structures; how those operations and atoms vary (and don’t vary) across languages; and where they come from. His work has been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, among other venues. Zyman is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Instructor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.

Rebecca West taught courses and wrote scholarly books and articles on modern Italian literature, literary texts by women authors, and film adaptation, among other cinema topics, for 40 years until her retirement in 2013. One of her current projects focuses on Patricia Highsmith's novels that are set in Italy. West is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

David Wellbery extensively studies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and other renowned German authors such as Thomas Mann. This year he received the Gold Medal of the Goethe Society in Weimar, Germany, in recognition of his career-long groundbreaking scholarship on Goethe. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Victoria Saramago’s book manuscript, Fictional Environments: Mimesis and Deforestation in Latin America, is under contract with Northwestern University Press. She is also the author of O duplo do pai: o filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (É Realizações, 2013) and several articles on Latin American literature and culture with a focus on Brazil. Her research interests include ecocriticism, fiction theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to environmental studies.

Benjamin Saltzman is author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) and co-editor of Thinking of the Middle Ages: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Medieval forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Saltzman is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Sofia Torallas Tovar’s area of specialization is Greek and Coptic papyrology, and the study of Greco-Roman and late-antique Egypt. She works at the crossroads between the material study of written objects—papyri, ostraca, mummy labels, and inscriptions—and the analysis of the information provided by the wealth of Egyptian documentation. Torallas Tovar is Professor in the Department of Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Associate Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

Stefanos Katsikas’s scholarship focuses on the modern and contemporary history of Greece and southeastern Europe. He has published three books, has written many book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, and has given presentations at academic conferences in the US, Canada, and Europe. Currently, Katsikas is working his fourth book entitled Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821–1941, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Jonathan M. Hall is currently working on issues of cultural heritage in modern Greece. He is the author of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2002), A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200–479 BCE (Wiley-Blackwell, second edition, 2014), and Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Alain Bresson specializes in the study of economics in ancient Greece. He is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History, and the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.

Anastasia Giannakidou focuses on linguistic meaning, the relationship between meaning and form, and the relation between meaningfulness and truth. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including Polarity Sensitivity as Nonveridical Dependency (John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1998), Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Mood, Aspect, and Modality Revisited (University of Chicago Press, 2016).