Presentations

Asked what the primary goal of their teaching and research is, many music scholars, and ethnomusicologists in particular, may answer simply: “to do good in the world.” The goodness that motivates music scholars, however, is anything but simple. Rather it takes shape as intersecting experiences of knowledge and practice in the humanities. It is the pursuit of those experiences that leads scholars to empower musical practice through the force of moral imperative. Philip V. Bohlman joins with members of the "New Budapest Orpheum Society" and special guest, Asst. Prof. Jessica Baker, and members of the "Taraf Ensemble" with special guests to give voice and sound to goodness for the sites and moments of precarity in today’s world.

Watch a video recording of this presentation on our YouTube channel. 

Come meet the MFA Graduate students and see some of their recent artworks on view throughout their shared cluster space and individual studios in Rooms 204 and 209.

Have you ever wondered how UChicago faculty and graduate students research and document ancient objects? In this rare behind-the-scenes tour, you will explore the Tablet Collection of the Institute for the Studies of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum, housing more than 6,000 inscribed objects from ancient Iraq and beyond. You will learn about the materiality of writing on clay, see our photographers at work, and chat with our experts, cataloging everything from the Epic of Gilgamesh to daily receipts. The tour will highlight objects typically not on display as
well as modern technologies bringing history to light.

Engage with the Smart Museum of Art through a guided exploration of the newly commissioned installation Give the Drummer Some!, by South Side artist Robert Earl Paige, and the institution’s 50th anniversary exhibition, which traces the layered, sometimes hidden histories that have made up the Smart’s history. Drawn from the permanent collection, the exhibition presents more than 100 works from across the breadth and depth of the Museum’s holdings, including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and archival materials. Graduate Fellows 2024‒2025 within the Smart Museum’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry will lead the tour. After the tours, visitors are encouraged to continue their own exploration in the galleries. 

Visit vanessa german’s Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition: At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s. The exhibition features a new body of monumental rose quartz and precious gemstone sculptures as part of a multi-disciplinary installation developed during her 2023‒2024 Fellowship with the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry supported by the Joyce Foundation. Her Fellowship was centered on the principle of paraäcademia—a term coined by the artist to break down distinctions between art, magic, knowledge, and spirituality. The works german created during this time embody the site of Chicago as an energetic locus for production and are composed of the artist’s interpersonal connections, spiritual spells, love, healing, politics, and histories. The exhibition’s curators, Zachary Cahill, and Stephanie Cristello, and Mike Shuh will lead the tour.

In this presentation, artist Jason Salavon will explore his evolving art practice, which navigates the interplay between autonomous computational processes and traditional creative methods. He will present a range of projects, with a focus on his recent efforts to push AI models to create imagery "off-manifold," challenging the boundaries of generative AI. Salavon will also consider the broader impact of new technologies on visual culture, including the rapid rise of AI-driven digital art, and discuss how these innovations are reshaping the creative landscape.

Bob Dylan is best known for his songs in verse-refrain form. Think of the many tunes with long, florid verses that end with a refrain line, which often includes the song’s title. “Desolation Row” and “Tangled Up in Blue” are two famous examples. However, a significant number of his songs follow different formal outlines, among them 12-bar blues, verse-chorus, and 32-bar song form. In this presentation, the presenter is interested in exploring songs that include a bridge. What role do bridges play in Dylan’s songs? What does the presence or absence of a bridge say about the song's genre? How does Dylan mark a bridge lyrically through changes in prosody, subject matter, tone, or literary register? And how do these lyrical shifts relate to musical ones that mark the bridge, especially as regards harmony and melody? 

The presenter argues that Dylan’s bridges sometimes open new interior spaces within a lyric, like an affective hidden chamber; at other times, they mark a registral downshift into the colloquial or mundane; in still others, they are spaces of play and concentrated wit. The session will explore bridges in “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965, his first song to include one), “Just Like a Woman” (1966), “Sign on the Window” (1970), “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” (1974), and “Moonlight” (2001).

Most of us seek to be reasonably good people leading reasonably good lives. There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that almost none of us live up to our own standards. This presentation will focus on the place of ongoing character development in helping us narrow the gap between the people we'd most like to be and the people we are, no matter what sort of vision we have of what it takes to live well.

To commemorate 50 years of collecting photography at the Smart Museum of Art, we invited renowned UChicago Professor Emeritus Joel Snyder to discuss noteworthy objects, artists, and inquiries in the field of photography since 1974. The program features an intimate presentation of photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, displayed in the Feitler Center Education Study Room (ESR).

Like many holidays, Halloween is often treated as empty fun; its content—which plainly concerns death and its place in life—is dismissed as irrelevant to the meaning of the holiday as it is now practiced although it is conceded that this macabre content may be part of the historical origins of Halloween. In this session, the presenter will argue that this "nothing to see here" attitude should be rejected, and that Halloween can give us the opportunity to think through the central question facing all of us: How should we live? In this presentation, Benjamin Callard will offer a philosophical tour of Halloween, focusing on one important element in the story of Halloween: the idea of a ghost.

This presentation will examine the pivotal role of ancient pottery in archaeological research, focusing on the methodologies archaeologists use to analyze ceramic vessels and providing insights into the socio-cultural and economic aspects of past civilizations. By using actual pottery artifacts from the ISAC Museum's collection that offer tangible connection to historical contexts, attendees will gain an understanding of the analytical techniques used to study pottery, underscoring the importance of ceramics in reconstructing human history and cultural interactions.

Watch a video recording of this presentation on our YouTube channel. 

This presentation offers an introduction to the book cultures of Spain and Latin America in the early modern period. Working hands-on with books printed between 1500 and 1700, attendees will view original examples of works of anatomy, botany, devotion, law, fiction, and poetry from the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library as well as authors such as Miguel de Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, and María de Zayas. Considered together, this varied array of printed objects provides a unique window into the daily lives, creative accomplishments, and knowledge-making ambitions of early modern people in different regions of the world. 

In the 2020s, we have seen an unprecedented expansion of transmedia storytelling (a narrative technique in which a story is told across multiple platforms and formats). While the constellation of “Web 3.0” is arguably more of a buzzword than a present reality, new or expanded technologies and forms have emerged, including augmented reality, virtual reality, artistic applications of AI and machine learning, play-to-earn games, and more. 
 
This presentation turns to the case study of “Encounter” (2023-2024): a hybrid media performance piece, which was created by UChicago’s Fourcast Lab to explore the medium-specific qualities of and theories underlying live transmedia performance. “Encounter” is a storytelling platform and improvised multiplayer live-action performance. The replayable interactive experiences that make up this project combine the narrative improvisation of a tabletop roleplaying game with real-time and responsive performance via a live-streaming platform. Instead of telling stories that depend on preset branching trees ⁠— a common technique in interactive storytelling and video games ⁠— this experience offers a more open-ended premise that can adopt any genre, depending on the types of responses offered by the audience. This emergent artistic form questions how live performance changes when it brings together the transmedia, improvisational, and interactive dimensions of digital media aesthetics. 
 

What is the Humanities Core? Why is it foundational to the University’s educational mission? How did it come to be? And how has it changed over time? This hands-on session enables participants to experience just one of the many ways that the Humanities Core Curriculum extends beyond the classroom, to appreciate changing approaches to the Humanities over the past century, and to learn about the depth of undergraduate research engagement with the University’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library. We will examine rare books and manuscripts associated with the texts studied in the Humanities Core sequence “Human Being and Citizen,” including a papyrus fragment of The Iliad, a famous edition of Plato from the 1570s purchased by the first president of the University in 1891, a newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence from 1776, original posters from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 speech on campus, and much more.

Watch a video recording of this presentation on our YouTube channel. 

While games are often associated with frivolous fun, game designers are increasingly exploring whether play can be a productive force to tackle our world’s problems. This presentation will discuss different ways that video games are being deployed to “serious” ends: educating players about tough social or scientific problems like climate change, inviting the public to volunteer to be a part of research projects, and helping people make necessary lifestyle changes. In the session, the attendees will test a range of example games and discuss how their design choices balance seriousness and playfulness to achieve a real-world purpose.

Multi-species commingling and augmented reality come together in Untidy Objects, a gardened site, where we are invested in revealing the untidiness of property, rights, and obligations, in proximity to joy, survival, play, dirt and code. 

Untidy Objects is a living sculpture situated behind the Logan Center for the Arts. The living sculpture has introduced terraforming and hugelkultur, thousands of plants and their co-evolved companions both flora and fauna, soil enrichment, a pond, and two bio-swales. From this we have seen rapid growth and multi-species co-mingling. Beyond a sculptural proposition, Untidy Objects is also a political proposition. The work asks its audience to consider that humans are the only living organism in the site that benefits from legal and political rights. The autonomy and the human exceptionalism we take for granted is a cultural and legal fiction. When one expands their sense of self to include what surrounds and co-constitutes them, questions of who is deserving of legal and political rights and who also holds obligations, grows complicated. Every seed, every tree, and each new plant or emergent relationship suggests such an obligation–but not so cleanly through a human lens. We are responsible for one another in ways that precede and underlie our basic existence, and that are not currently captured by rights or law. But if we experience ourselves as co-constituted with other “untidy objects,” we have grounds for the making of an alternative political and legal framework: A Co-Constitution.  

How do singers cast spells on listeners? And why does singing carrying such special powers to cause deliriums and entrancements, even beyond preaching, acting, or rallying the masses? This presentation looks at the circuitry that operates between singers-as-spell-casters and target-listeners. It finds provocative evidence for causing deliriums in listeners in accounts of falling in love, especially as they relate to self-loss, longing, memory, and feelings of bittersweetness, or what the Greeks call feelings of “sweetbitter.” The evidence adduced comes from Stendhal as well as a cluster of writers circa 1870‒1900 who enlarged on their experiences of hearing otherworldly and divine sounds in the transporting voices of late Vatican castrati.

In this session, the presenter will address one of the most important and least understood periods in the development of the ancient “global economy.” About 1,200 years ago, at a time when the early Islamic empire of the Abbasids in the Middle East and Tang China were the two global superpowers, daring merchant seafarers began—for the first time in history—sailing from the Middle East to China. These individuals, about whom we know almost nothing, are exemplified through Sinbad the Sailor, from the famous story of “One Thousand and One Nights.” The speaker will explore what we know about these ancient sailors and their world-changing adventures using the archaeological evidence that still litters the shores of the Indian Ocean. 

With the flourishing of new arts programs in theater, creative writing, and media arts and design at the University, the Humanities is now reimagining itself as a place not only for thinking about art but also for making art. In this session, five UChicago faculty members will discuss how their “Arts Labs” initiative at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society seek to shape a culture of experimentation and critical analysis around arts research. Their projects include conceptual and practical workshops in opera; a Movement Theory Lab; a dance-theater adaptation of a classic dramatic text; workshops for a new musical with Court Theatre; diversity initiatives in contemporary literary publishing; and renewed operations of the Black Cinema House. This Arts Lab brings UChicago faculty and visiting artists into conversation at the intersection of scholarly inquiry and artistic making on our campus. 

Watch a video recording of this presentation on our YouTube channel. 

The University of Chicago teaches more than 50 languages each year, many of which are less commonly taught languages. Join us in the Chicago Language Center to learn more about these diverse languages and experience what it is like to learn some of them. During this session, you will be able to experience 15-minute mini-courses about the following languages: Catalan, Portuguese, Basque, Turkish, Persian, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian. Attendees become not just less commonly taught language learners, but also gain an introduction to their historical, academic, and global importance. 

While the University of Chicago is colloquially known as “the place where fun comes to die,” ironically, its faculty, programs, and students routinely push boundaries in the fields of gaming and often prove UChicago is “the place where fun comes to play.” The study of video games is a young, exciting, and growing field, and the UChicago Library is actively developing a video game collection to support video game studies and research on campus. Join us for a hands-on game session and learn more about UChicago Library’s growing game collection.