Humanities Day 2019 - Session 1

Ashlyn Sparrow

sspatterson — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 18:07:22 +0000

Presentation:

Session:

UChicago Media Center

Ashlyn Sparrow works with students, faculty, and youth to lead in the development of serious games, interactive learning experiences and digital media. She is the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab at the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center at the University of Chicago.

Guided Tour of "Discovery, Collection, Memory: The Oriental Institute at 100" at Special Collections in the Regenstein Library

sspatterson — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:00:18 +0000

Presenter:

Anne Flannery

Session 1

On the University of Chicago's Campus at 58th Street and University Avenue is one of the world's premier institutions for the study of the Ancient Middle East, the Oriental Institute. The OI has its roots alongside the very founding of the University of Chicago when President Harper mentored a young scholar named James Henry Breasted to pursue a degree in Egyptology. Breasted went on to direct the Haskell Museum around 1900 and secured funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in May 1919 to begin the Oriental Institute. The OI has conducted 100 years of excavation, research, and scholarship. Focusing on the geographical areas of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan, OI scholars have worked rigorously to discover cultural heritage, decipher ancient languages, and to reconstruct the histories of long-lost civilizations. This exhibit remembers the OI's past through a collection of archival fragments, artifacts, and ephemera.

**This tour is sold out.**

Anne Flannery

sspatterson — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 15:58:24 +0000

Session:

Session 1

Museum Archives at the Oriental Institute

Anne Flannery’s current projects include working with the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries on a pilot project for the Association of Research Libraries and the Oriental Institute’s Cultural Heritage Experiment.. She has held the position of Head of Museum Archives of the Oriental Institute since 2016. She is a Provenance Research and Exchange Program Fellow (2018) with the Smithsonian focusing on antiquities provenance during the Nazi era.

Beyoncé vs. Jay-Z, or Art Between Regimes

sspatterson — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 13:49:57 +0000

Presenter:

Seth Brodsky

Session 1

When the video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s single “Apeshit” dropped in June 2018, it divided its audience. One side marveled at the couple’s solo evening tour through the Louvre, its “masterpiece theater” overturning a millennial taboo on Black bodies centered by White museum exhibition frames. At the same time, another faction emerged, for whom the video was an epic act of capitalist triumphalism. In this talk, this presenter suspends this canonical pop antagonism and considers “Apeshit” emblematic of current “interregnum art” in the sense famously articulated by Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Kristen Schilt

sspatterson — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 13:47:13 +0000

Presentation:

Imagining Climate Change Futures

Session:

Session 1

History

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.

Sarah Fredericks

sspatterson — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 18:28:16 +0000

Presentation:

Imagining Climate Change Futures

Session:

Session 1

History

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.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

sspatterson — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 19:46:45 +0000

Presentation:

Imagining Climate Change Futures

Session:

Session 1

South Asian Languages and Civilizations

Dipesh Chakrabarty is completing a book manuscript on how climate change affects narratives of human history. One of his most recent publications is The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the 2019 Tagore Memorial Prize from the Government of West Bengal. Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago.

Imagining Climate Change Futures

sspatterson — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 14:07:38 +0000

Presenter:

Climate change has quickly become one of the most important and urgent issues of our time. This panel gathers humanities researchers who are seeking to better to understand and combat climate change. Patrick Jagoda (Cinema & Media Studies and English) moderates this multidisciplinary conversation of experts Dipesh Chakrabarty (South Asian Languages & Civilizations and History), Sarah Fredericks (Divinity School), Kristen Schilt (Sociology), and Ashlyn Sparrow (Weston Game Lab at the UChicago Media Arts, Data, and Design Center). In addition to their respective research projects, these panelists discuss their collaboration on the Terrarium project, which was designed for the incoming UChicago class of 2023 to address the futures of climate change across multiple media platforms.

**This presentation is full.**

Patrick Jagoda

sspatterson — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 14:05:25 +0000

Presentation:

Imagining Climate Change Futures

Session:

Session 1

English Language and Literature

Patrick Jagoda is executive editor of Critical Inquiry, faculty director of the Weston Game Lab, and co-founder of both the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is the author of Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-author of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016). His next book, Experimental Games, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Jagoda is Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.

Locating Landscape in Ancient Maya Painting

sspatterson — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:23:35 +0000

Presenter:

Claudia Brittenham

Session 1

This presentation examines the ways that the ancient Maya of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize understood and represented their surroundings during the first millennium CE. While there was a rich hieroglyphic vocabulary for talking about local, foreign, and supernatural places, surprisingly few images of landscape are to be found in Classic Maya art. What are the reasons for this absence? And what changed in the 10th century CE, when painters at Chichén Itzá developed an entirely new vocabulary for representing the surrounding world?