Speakers

Catherine C. Baumann specializes in reading comprehension and language testing. She is a certified language proficiency tester and trainer. Baumann is Director of the University of Chicago Language Center and Director of the German Language Program.

Claudia Brittenham’s research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015); co-author of The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013); and co-author of Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009). Brittenham is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago.

Alyssa Brubaker is Exhibitions Manager at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, where she supports the curator in planning exhibitions and programming of global contemporary art. She also supports the production and presentation of student art in the Logan Center Gallery.

Agnes Callard is the author of one book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford University Press, 2018) and many academic articles in ancient philosophy and contemporary ethics. She writes a column on public philosophy for The Point Magazine. Callard is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

James Chandler's research interests include British and Irish literature since the early Enlightenment, American cinema, the history of disciplines, and the relationship of literary criticism to film criticism. His books include England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (University of Chicago Press, 1998), his study of literary historicism and its limits that won the Laing Prize at University of Chicago Press in 2000, and An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which traces the formal foundations of modern narrative cinema to the early sentimentalist moment of literature and moral philosophy. Currently, he is finishing a book about practical criticism in literature and cinema. Chandler is the William K. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago.

Nadine Di Vito has taught all levels of French language, theories, and methodologies of foreign language teaching, cross-cultural communication, and sociolinguistics. She wrote Patterns Across Spoken and Written French: Empirical Research on the Interaction Among Forms, Functions, and Genres (Houghton Mifflin,1997), has contributed to multiple articles and book chapters in sociolinguistics and foreign language teaching, and is the co-author of Comme on dit (Georgetown University Press, 2018) and C'est ce qu'on dit (Georgetown University Press, 2019). Di Vito is a Senior Lecturer of French and served as the Director of Romance Language Programs from 1992 to 2018 in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is the author of Drown/Sever/Sing (Anomalous Press, 2015) and Don’t Come Back (Mad Creek Books, 2017), as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay from Mad Creek Books. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation work has been featured in various journals, including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She was the recipient of the Best of the Net award and of the Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices award, and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. Ferreira is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Sarah Fredericks’s research on religious environmental ethics has explored sustainability, energy, geoengineering, the Anthropocene, environmental guilt and shame, and environmental justice. She is the author of Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability: Ethics in Sustainability Indexes (Routledge, 2013) and numerous articles and book chapters. Fredericks is currently working a new book, Environmental Guilt and Shame, about the ethical dimensions of experiencing and inducing environmental guilt and shame particularly about climate change. She is Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics and Director of Doctoral Studies in the Divinity School 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). Giannakidou is working on a book “Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought,” where she looks at the category of mood (indicative, subjunctive) in Greek and Italian as a window to the relation between language, truth, and our perception and understanding of reality. She is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College, Director of the newly established Hellenic Studies Center, and Co-Director of the Center for Gesture, Sign and Language at the University of Chicago. She also serves as a collaborator with the Bilingualism Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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). Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History and Classics and the College at the University of Chicago.

Matthew Jesse Jackson is the editor and co-translator from the Russian of Ilya Kabakov: On Art (University of Chicago Press, 2018), author of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and co-author of Vision and Communism (The New Press, 2011). He is Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History, Visual Arts, and the College, and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts 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. In 2012, he was involved in the BBC and NBC TV Program “Who Do You Think You Are” that explored the family history of the Greek-American Hollywood actress and producer Rita Wilson. Katsikas is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago.

Noel Blanco Mourelle is working on his first book, about the intellectual legacy of Majorcan preacher and philosopher Ramon Llull. His work has appeared in Cuadernos de historia moderna and is scheduled to appear in postmedieval and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

William Nickell is a cultural historian focused on the study of Russia from the 1840s to the 1940s. His award-winning book, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, examines the events around Tolstoy’s death, which became Russia’s first media spectacle, as a means of measuring Russian values and politics between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. His current course on “Media and Power in the Age of Putin and Trump” brings many of these same concerns to the present. Nickell is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Tina Post’s creative work has been published in ImaginedTheaters.com, The Appendix, and in Stone Canoe, where it won the S. I. Newhouse School Prize for Nonfiction. Her scholarly work can be found in TDR/The Drama Review, and is forthcoming in Modern Drama and Time Signatures (Duke University Press). She is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

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.

Haun Saussy’s most recent books are Translation as Citation (Oxford University Press, 2018), When the Pipirite Sings: Selected Poems of Jean Métellus (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Are We Comparing Yet? On Standards, Justice, and Incomparability is forthcoming in fall 2019 from Bielefeld University Press. Saussy is a University Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Kristen Schilt is the author of Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and her work has appeared in journals such as Gender & Society and the Annual Review of Sociology. She is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.

Stephanie Soileau's collection of short stories LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Co. in 2020, and she is working on a novel about oil, land rights, and the disappearing Louisiana coast. Her work has also appeared in Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, and New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Soileau is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Laura Steward is co-curator of the Smart Museum.

Richard Strier is the author of The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011)—winner of the Warren-Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism—as well as Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (University of California Press, 1997), and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983). He has coedited several interdisciplinary collections, including Shakespeare and the Law:  A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Vu Tran’s first novel, Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015), was a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and an National Endowment of the Art Fellowship, and his short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, he is currently a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review and an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Creative Writing.

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.