Humanities Day 2023

This presentation is sold out. In person and live streamed: What is an aesthetic category? In what sense is it a historical product enabling us to think more deeply about other historical phenomena, including our contemporary moment? How are its two components, spontaneous judgment and the perception of form, brought together into a distinctive experience? While drawing on philosophers to think about these questions, this keynote presentation will also explore them through a problematic example specific to capitalist culture: the extravagantly impoverished, simultaneously overperforming and underperforming, fundamentally compromised gimmick.

Engage with three distinct exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art through a guided exploration of a selection of artworks on view. Attendees will learn more about the exhibitions “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity,” “Poetry is Everything,” and “Calling on the Past” and participate in looking closely at ceramics, paintings, and mixed-media works. May Peterson and Kirsten Lopez will lead the tours. Peterson and Lopez are academic engagement graduate fellows within the Smart Museum’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. After the tours, visitors are encouraged to continue their own exploration in the galleries.

This tour is sold out. Visit our current special exhibition, “Back to School in Babylonia,” at ISAC (formerly Oriental Institute) and explore a 3,700-year-old school excavated in Iraq. The exhibition covers teaching materials and related objects found in the school building and sheds new light on one of the oldest curricula in the world. Topics of education for ancient scribes include mathematics, literature, religion, law, and rhetoric. Associate Professor of Assyriology and Tablet Collection Curator at ISAC, Susanne Paulus leads the tour. After visiting the special exhibition, attendees will explore related artifacts in the permanent galleries.

This tour is sold out. Thousands of objects housed in the ISAC Museum (formerly the Oriental Institute) museum tell the history of Ancient Mesopotamia, and no category of object tells this story in greater detail than the cuneiform tablets. For more than 3,000 years, this writing system was used and transmitted by scribes, who played an important role not only as literati but above all as accountants, administrators, and bureaucrats. Join Ryan Winters on a tour through the permanent gallery and discover how the tablets on display demonstrate the ways in which scribes shaped Mesopotamian history and were shaped by it. From the archaic lexical lists and administrative accounts, through the earliest votive “historical” inscriptions, to later letters and legal documents, and tablets recording literature, and mythology, scribes maintained and guarded their socioeconomic position by creating and curating various kinds of written knowledge. The tour concludes with a visit to the special exhibition “Back to School in Babylonia,” where a school excavated at ancient Nippur demonstrates how scribes were educated during the Old Babylonian period.

This tour is sold out. The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is a multidisciplinary arts center at the University of Chicago, which provides a collaborative environment for students, faculty, and community partners to present, create and engage with the arts. Join Bill Michel, executive director of the Logan Center and artists from the Sapphire & Crystals collective for a tour of the Logan Center’s fall exhibition "Freedom’s Muse." The exhibition explores the intersection of art and freedom of expression to celebrate the 36th Anniversary of the collective and the launch of the university’s new Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Initially conceived by Marva Pitchford Jolly and Felicia Grant Preston, Sapphire & Crystals has brought together more than 40 African American women artists in Chicago since 1987. Exhibiting artists include Rose Blouin, Dorothy Carter, Arlene Turner Crawford, Makeba Kedem-DuBose, Juarez Hawkins, Candace Hunter, Malika Jackson, Renee Williams Jefferson, Kee Merriweather, Yaoundé Olu, Felicia Grant Preston, Patricia A. Stewart, Dorian Sylvain, Pearlie Taylor, Shahar Caren Weaver, Shyvette Williams, Trish Williams, and past members Venus Blue, Mary Reed Daniel, Pitchford Jolly, JoAnne Scott, Rene Townsend, and Anna Tyler.

This tour is sold out. In the fall of 2023, the Neubauer Collegium gallery hosts an exhibition by the Viennese artist collective Gelitin, presented as part of the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial. Founded in 1993, the quartet first met in 1978 “when they all attended a summer camp”—and they have been “playing and working together” ever since. Known internationally for their ambitious public art projects and transgressive performances, Gelitin are indefatigable partisans of the ludic impulse in art, forever honoring Friedrich Schiller’s claim that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” For their exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium, Gelitin will construct a room-size sculpture that makes a series of brief appearances at select Chicago Architecture Biennial sites this fall.

This tour is sold out. Engage with three distinct exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art through a guided exploration of a selection of artworks on view. Attendees will learn more about the exhibitions “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity,” “Poetry is Everything,” and “Calling on the Past” and participate in looking closely at ceramics, paintings, and mixed-media works. May Peterson and Kirsten Lopez will lead the tours. Peterson and Lopez are academic engagement graduate fellows within the Smart Museum’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. After the tours, visitors are encouraged to continue their own exploration in the galleries.

What was it like to go to school in Babylonia more than 3,500 years ago? Who went to school? How did they learn to read and write cuneiform? These and other questions concerning the topics and aims of ancient education will be addressed in this presentation and illustrated with examples currently on display at the ISAC Museum as part of the exhibition. The curator will also discuss the educational experience of curating an exhibition at UChicago with a team of students and allow glimpses behind the scenes.

The "classical utilitarianism" of Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, which in the 18th and 19th centuries famously promoted "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," continues to have a profound impact on Anglo-American ethical and political philosophy, with such celebrated philosophers as Peter Singer and the late Derek Parfit calling attention to the significance of Sidgwick's work. In particular, it shaped their views on justice for future generations, the nature of objective normative reasons, and the possibilities for philosophical hedonism. Such philosophical reconstructions of classical utilitarianism, however, have all too often proceeded without benefit of a critical, decolonizing process of "unlearning" the stock Enlightenment narratives of progress and development that erase the complicity of the classical utilitarians in the expansion of the British Empire and the forms of racism at work in its "civilizing mission."  This discussion will highlight how some of the current reconstructions of classical utilitarianism risk replicating the insidious complicities of utilitarians in the age of empire.

This presentation has a few remaining seats. In person and live streamed: "From Robots to iBots: An Iconology of Artificial Intelligence" will explore the current wave of utopian and dystopian speculation about the impact of General Artificial Intelligence on human affairs. Focusing on ChatGPT and the Large Language Models that make it possible to have conversations with a machine in ordinary language, the presentation will explore the implications of this new technology for education, business, politics, and the whole relation of the human species to its inventions.

This presentation is sold out. Giftbooks, or in German, Taschenbücher, were a distinctive feature of the 19th-century cultural landscape. With some features reminiscent of today's smart phone, it was a high-end book that could literally fit in your pocket, a literary miscellany that could be read on the move. It was also a publication intended for reader interaction; often it included pages for notes, pencils, pockets, puzzles, dance instructions, and even mirrors. This presentation will feature items from UChicago's expansive collection of approximately 1,650 German almanacs and Taschenbücher. These arrived in Chicago through a scholarly collection acquired in 1928, which included 19th-century purchases from a popular Leipzig lending library. Leipzig is one of the most important locations, along with Berlin and Vienna, for the new wave of Taschenbuch publications.

This presentation is sold out. Recent events across the globe have provoked a flood of excellent work on the condition of contemporary democracies. Diagnosis: not good. The presenter recently taught a class that used this literature to shed light on moments of crisis in the two most famous ancient democracies, those of Athens and Rome. The session will discuss that class and present some of the student research that arose from it.

Toward the end of the 19th century, increasing scholarly attention was focused on analyzing contemporary customs—especially religious beliefs and practices—to identify “survivals” from the pre-Christian Greek past. For Greek folklorists, such instances provided tangible legitimation for the transhistorical continuity of the Greek people. Whereas, for foreign scholars, they offered potential insights for reconstructing the mentality and behavior of the ancient Greeks. In recent years, however, claims for the survival of ancient religious practices have been subjected to more critical scrutiny. This presentation will examine the issue through the lens of a specific case-study—the monastery of the Concealed Virgin in the Peloponnesian town of Argos.

Aliens in science fiction often look strange, want to eat humans, or take over our world. In that sense, they embody crude prejudices and fears about human migrants. But they can also offer more creative responses to difference. Take the concept of alienation, which Karl Marx diagnosed as estrangement of the worker from his labor and even from his species. How is that complicated by being a newcomer to a society? John Sayles’s film “The Brother from Another Planet,” with its mute black alien entering the informal economy of 1980s New York, can help us view alienation more realistically.

This presentation is canceled as of October 18. This session seeks to reflect on the dual rise of labor precarity and literary nonfiction in China over the last two decades. The presenter focuses on two authors: Hu Anyan, whose I Am a Delivery Man in Beijing (2023) has attracted widespread attention, and Quan Guirong, whose diaristic account of his work in textile factories in Southern China is still unpublished. These narratives shed light on labor conditions and experiences that would otherwise remain concealed, while also inviting critical reflections on the conditions of inclusion in the contemporary literary market.

The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is a multidisciplinary arts center at the University of Chicago, which provides a collaborative environment for students, faculty, and community partners to present, create and engage with the arts. Join Bill Michel, executive director of the Logan Center and artists from the Sapphire & Crystals collective for a tour of the Logan Center’s fall exhibition "Freedom’s Muse." The exhibition explores the intersection of art and freedom of expression to celebrate the 36th Anniversary of the collective and the launch of the university’s new Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Initially conceived by Marva Pitchford Jolly and Felicia Grant Preston, Sapphire & Crystals has brought together more than 40 African American women artists in Chicago since 1987. Exhibiting artists include Rose Blouin, Dorothy Carter, Arlene Turner Crawford, Makeba Kedem-DuBose, Juarez Hawkins, Candace Hunter, Malika Jackson, Renee Williams Jefferson, Kee Merriweather, Yaoundé Olu, Felicia Grant Preston, Patricia A. Stewart, Dorian Sylvain, Pearlie Taylor, Shahar Caren Weaver, Shyvette Williams, Trish Williams, and past members Venus Blue, Mary Reed Daniel, Pitchford Jolly, JoAnne Scott, Rene Townsend, and Anna Tyler.

Engage with three distinct exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art through a guided exploration of a selection of artworks on view. Attendees will learn more about the exhibitions “Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity,” “Poetry is Everything,” and “Calling on the Past” and participate in looking closely at ceramics, paintings, and mixed-media works. May Peterson and Kirsten Lopez will lead the tours. Peterson and Lopez are academic engagement graduate fellows within the Smart Museum’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. After the tours, visitors are encouraged to continue their own exploration in the galleries.

Information is the blessing and the curse of our digital age. How do writers adopt, and adapt, literary forms to manage information in novels, poetry, and literary nonfiction? Several University of Chicago faculty members in Creative Writing will discuss the many forms that information assumes in their art, in the lives of their characters and creations, and in their classrooms. They will discuss how new forms of information during the course of human history have shaped great works of literature from the past and present—and all of us will think about how information may shape the literature of the future.

The relation between language and thought is central to linguistics. For the ancient Greek thinkers, logos refers to both thought—specifically, the ability of humans to think rationally—and language. As a result, symmetry is projected in the relation of the two, and language functions descriptively: it describes reality. A more modern view, on the other hand, proposes that language constrains thought and can be used to create reality. This presentation compares these two approaches and suggests that in the digital spaces, which are disembodied and lack the physical dimension of proof, there is a real risk of language itself taking up the space of reality. This shift bears in it the hallmark of deception and can become a Platonic cave that traps thought and produces increased normativity and inability to distinguish between sophistry and valid argument.

This tour is sold out. Visit our current special exhibition, “Back to School in Babylonia,” at ISAC (formerly Oriental Institute) and explore a 3,700-year-old school excavated in Iraq. The exhibition covers teaching materials and related objects found in the school building and sheds new light on one of the oldest curricula in the world. Topics of education for ancient scribes include mathematics, literature, religion, law, and rhetoric. Associate Professor of Assyriology and Tablet Collection Curator at ISAC, Susanne Paulus leads the tour. After visiting the special exhibition, attendees will explore related artifacts in the permanent galleries.

This tour is sold out. Thousands of objects housed in the ISAC Museum (formerly the Oriental Institute) museum tell the history of Ancient Mesopotamia, and no category of object tells this story in greater detail than the cuneiform tablets. For more than 3,000 years, this writing system was used and transmitted by scribes, who played an important role not only as literati but above all as accountants, administrators, and bureaucrats. Join Ryan Winters on a tour through the permanent gallery and discover how the tablets on display demonstrate the ways in which scribes shaped Mesopotamian history and were shaped by it. From the archaic lexical lists and administrative accounts, through the earliest votive “historical” inscriptions, to later letters and legal documents, and tablets recording literature, and mythology, scribes maintained and guarded their socioeconomic position by creating and curating various kinds of written knowledge. The tour concludes with a visit to the special exhibition “Back to School in Babylonia,” where a school excavated at ancient Nippur demonstrates how scribes were educated during the Old Babylonian period.

This presentation is sold out. In person and live streamed: There is no doubt that Joan of Arc—15th-century heroine or heretic, depending on your point of view—led an extraordinary life. No less compelling are her seemingly countless, often contradictory, cultural afterlives. How can one person mean so much? This session will examine some of the ways in which the figure of Joan has been invoked and deployed over the centuries since her execution to serve a dizzying array of religious, political, cultural, and artistic ends, from symbol of France, to figure of resistance, to model of personal integrity and courage.

This presentation has only a few seats left. In the autumn of 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein gave a “Lecture on Ethics” to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University. He discusses what Ethics is really all about, the difference between absolute value and relative value, between meaningfulness and nonsense, and what it is for human beings to take the whole world into account. During this presentation, Professors Matthew Boyle (Philosophy) and Jonathan Lear (Social Thought and Philosophy) will discuss what this all means. A copy of Wittgenstein's short essay will be circulated ahead of time to all participants, and the session will include a close reading of the text.

We are all familiar with cases of moral conflict. The abolitionist thinks that slavery is morally wrong, the defender of slavery thinks it isn’t, and, as a result, of this disagreement they fight each other. But in that case, the abolitionist is correct, and the defender of slavery incorrect. Are there—could there be—cases of moral conflict in which *both* sides are correct? On the face of it the answer is no. This appearance notwithstanding, during this session, the presenter will argue that there are cases in which—in one important sense, at least—both sides in a moral conflict are right.

How do you breathe correctly? How often should you take a deep breath? What if the air that surrounds you is polluted? Contaminated by uranium and asbestos from the mining industry? Poisoned by history? By hate and violence? What if breathing makes you dizzy? What if it makes you sick? What if the air carries bacteria? What if it carries death? Imperialism has always functioned through the suppression and exploitation of breath. In Franz Fanon’s words, "Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing." But what if we take Fanon’s conjecture not as a diagnosis but as an aspiration? A conspiracy? What is the potential of both breath and breathlessness to share and create knowledge? What would a breathing machine designed by Fanon look like? How can we build it together? 

This presentation delves into two compelling case studies that illuminate the dynamic interactions between UChicago students and the diverse, vibrant Chicago community, emphasizing the power of meaningful community connection and engagement. The first case study examines how to foster meaningful and enduring cross-cultural understanding between the Latinx and the University of Chicago communities. It focuses on El Cafecito, a culturally immersive activity series at the University of Chicago, which engages with target language enclaves within the Latinx community. The second case study describes an initiative in which students of the German language at UChicago facilitate after-school sessions at Bret Harte Elementary School. The director of this initiative, Nicole Burgoyne, will explain how she leads students in editing lesson plans created by a non-governmental organization to suit the specific situation at this public school.

This presentation will examine the origins of two types of instruments, the long-necked plucked lute and the long-necked two-stringed "fiddle" in Central Asia and Siberia, and their possible common ancestor. The session also looks at the various uses of these instruments in the hands of performers such as bards and healers, explore modern iterations of these instruments among various Central Eurasian peoples, and discuss the influences these instrument types may have had on other related instruments elsewhere in the world.

Electronic sound pervades our experiences: A sci-fi thriller opens with electronic whirrs, clicks, and hums; teenagers lose themselves in the trance-inducing loops of DJ-produced electronic dance music; hip hop producers create sick beats from the mechanical thumps of drum machines. How did electronic sound become so ubiquitous? Culturally speaking, why does electronic music matter? The presenter investigates the cultural flow of electronic sound through musical technologies—synthesizers, studios, turntables—which enable the circulation of raced, gendered, and classed sounds, as well as the production of social capital. Though synthesizers might appear to be black boxes, electronic music instruments are porous in both their design and their use. Heterogeneity is the structure of electronic music production and distribution. The presenter explores liminal moments, exposing complex stories of appropriation, off-label use, and misuse. Porous instruments, and their ubiquitous sounds, mediate the social formation of race, gender, class, prestige, and value.

In person and live streamed: The ancient Greeks thought that the future was to be found in the space behind (opisthe). To see what is in store for us, we must crane our necks and take a backwards glance. This session examines the work of both modern authors Frank Bidart, Thom Gunn, and Joe Brainard and ancient ones, including Catullus, Plato, and Homer, to suggest that the stance of classical study itself, in looking back to the past, echoes the queer stance of the backward glance to a lost loved one and to one’s own lost past that we find in both ancient and modern poetry.

This presentation is sold out. The Qur’ān’s complex literary form has long impeded Western engagement with the sacred scripture of Islam. Despite containing many of the same characters, stories, and themes as the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Qur’ān does not read like the scriptures with which many Western audiences are familiar. This session investigates this tension and outlines the most productive ways for new readers to engage with the Qur'ān.

This presentation is sold out. This session examines how Indigenous people in Mesoamerica—the region corresponding to modern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras—conceptualized and represented the spaces and places around them, both prior to and in the century after the Spanish invasion. Attendees will meet in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center for a hands-on look at facsimiles of handpainted-screenfold books (codices) and maps made between 1400 and 1600, paying attention to the social and political circumstances in which they were made as well as the landscapes that they represent.