Presenters

Clifford Ando is an historian of Rome, specializing in the histories of religion, law and government. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011) and Roman Social Imaginaries (2015).  Currently, he is leading a National Endowment for Humanities project to publish a new text, translation, and commentary on all extant Roman laws. Ando is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and in the College.

Kağan Arık has investigated pre-Islamic elements in the culture of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Turkey, and has published on the culture of the Kazakhs in China, the oral literature of the Kyrgyz, and on traditional healing among various Turkic peoples. He also has a background as an anthropologist (socio-cultural, linguistic, medical) of Central Asia and has studied the region since 1987. Arık is the Ayaslı Instructional Professor in Modern Turkish and Turkic languages, and coordinator for the Modern Turkish and Turkic language program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago.

Matthew Boyle works primarily in the philosophy of mind—especially on issues about self-knowledge and the difference between rational and nonrational minds—and in the history of philosophy, where his scholarship has focused primarily on Immanuel Kant and later German philosophy and on Jean-Paul Sartre.  His book “Transparency and Reflection: A Study of Self-Knowledge and the Nature of Mind” is forthcoming in 2024 from Oxford University Press. Boyle is the Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. 

Claudia Brittenham’s research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, with interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica (2023), The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (cowritten with Mary Miller, 2013), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (cowritten with Stephen D. Houston and colleagues, 2009). Her next book focuses on the interconnectedness of the ancient Mesoamerican world. Brittenham is Professor in the Department of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago.  

Suzanne Buffam is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently A Pillow Book (2016), named of the 10 Best Books of Poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her work has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and A Public Space, among others, and has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Heian Ballard Writers’ Trust, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has taught Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Banff Center, and in the University of Guelph's Summer Mentorship program, and currently serves as Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Nicole G. Burgoyne develops and implements intermediate and advanced German language courses. She teaches topics ranging from fairy tales and folklore to contemporary politics, and the culture of German-speaking countries from the Cold War to the present. A participant in a working group studying translation as a professional field, she develops a variety of internship opportunities for students of German. She is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Benjamin Callard is a philosopher with specializations in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. He also has strong interests in the philosophy of mathematics ("Can math move matter?" Inquiry, October 2018), philosophy of the mind, and the philosophy of language. In June 2017, he received the Division of the Humanities’ 2017 Janel M. Mueller Award for Excellence in Pedagogy, and in 2022, he received the Glenn and Claire Swogger Award for Exemplary Classroom Instruction. Callard is Instructional Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago.

Daisy Delogu is a specialist of medieval French literature and political thought. Her research focuses on how literary practices of figuration such as metaphor and allegory shape individual identities and social relations. Editor or co-editor of several volumes, Delogu is the author of Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France (2015) and Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign: The Rise of the French Vernacular Royal Biography (2008). Delogu is the Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.

Adam Flowers is a scholar of the text, history, and interpretation of the Qur’ān and a historian of early Islam. His research and teaching interests include: the text, history, and interpretation of the Qur’ān, early Islamic history, thought, and literature, the literary traditions of Late Antiquity, Arabic papyrology, and literary theory. Flowers is  a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago.

Anastasia Giannakidou studies linguistic meaning from formal semantic and philosophical perspectives. With background in ancient Greek philology and philosophy of language, she is interested in how meaning is represented in language, and what the relationship is between meaning and syntactic form.  While her main focus is the Greek language, Giannakidou has also worked on Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, and Basque. She is a specialist on negation, polarity, definiteness, temporal semantics, and modality, and has written more than 150 articles and book chapters on topics in these areas. In her most recent book, Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought (2021), Giannakidou and co-author Alda Mari  develop a linguistic and philosophical framework for how judgments about truth are formed by speakers, and how beliefs and other attitudes differ from knowledge. She is the Frank J. McLoraine Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, and Co-Director of the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language at the University of Chicago.

Jonathan M. Hall focuses on the cultural and social history of ancient Greece, with a particular emphasis on the construction, meaning, and functions of ethnic identity among Greek communities. He is the author of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997), Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (2002), A History of the Archaic Greek World (2007; 2014), Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian (2014), and Reclaiming the Past: Argos and its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era (2021), as well as numerous articles and contributions on the social, cultural, and political history of ancient Greece and issues of archaeological heritage in the modern era. Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of History and Classics and in the College at the University of Chicago.

Stacy Hardy is a writer, researcher and editor whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, the individual, and society. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals including the New Orleans Review, New Contrasts, The Evergreen Review, Black Sun Lit, and many more. Her first short fiction collection, Because the Night, was published by Pocko, London in 2015, and An Archaeology of Holes, was released in translation by Rot-Bo-Krik in France in 2022, with the English version forthcoming through Bridge Books, Chicago, in November 2023. Her plays and librettos have been performed globally. Hardy is also a lecturer in creative writing, an editor at pan-African platform Chimurenga, a partner in African creative writing teaching initiative Saseni, and a founder of Ukuthula, a project that develops new writing from and against gender-based violence. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, where she is collaborating with anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan, poet Daniel Borzutzky, and musician Neo Muyanga to build “breathing machines,” new multi-and-interdisciplinary forms and forums for the expression of collectivity through the act of conspiring together.

Paola Iovene is a specialist of modern Chinese literature and film, with broad interests in translation and media. Her current research focuses on the intersections between literature, labor, and social inequality; the uses of actual locations in cinema; radio literary adaptations; and documentary film. She is the author of Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Stanford UP, 2014) and guest editor of a special issue of positions: Asia critique titled “Cultures of Labor in Contemporary China” (2023). Iovene is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago.

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (2015), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, Etisalat Prize for Literature, and National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Recent critical work appears in the Journal of Black Studies.  Her second novel, “A Season of Light,” is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2024. She is Assistant Professor in the Program of Creative Writing in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago.

Jennifer Iverson is a scholar of electronic music, sound studies, and disability studies. She is currently writing a book about synthesizers, which explores the complex histories and (mis)uses of instruments such as the vocoder, Moog, the DX7, and the TR-808. Her first book is Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (2019). Iverson is Associate Professor in the Department of Music and the College at the University of Chicago. 

Jonathan Lear studies the human psyche, both in the philosophies of the ancient world—Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—and in the modern—Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. He is also a fully trained psychoanalyst. His books include Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (2022); (2008); Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2008); Freud (2015); and Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (1988). Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. 

Kirsten Lopez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, focusing on medieval studies. Her work engages with memory and literature in her dissertation, which proposes installation art theory as a framework for understanding medieval commemorative monuments. Currently, Lopez is an academic engagement graduate fellow working within the Smart Museum of Art’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry.

Catriona MacLeod is a specialist in German 18th- and 19th-century literature, aesthetics, and the visual arts. Her recent publications have focused on various aspects of intermediality, including narrative theory, ekphrasis, and description; the materiality of texts; and “minor” and “miniature” genres. MacLeod is the author of Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (1998), and Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Northwestern, 2014), and has just completed a book on Romanticism and paper scraps. In addition to co-editing several volumes on word and image topics and translation theory, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Word & Image. MacLeod is the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.

As the inaugural Executive Director of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Bill Michel works with academic departments, University of Chicago-presenting organizations, and many Southside and citywide artists and organizational partners to ensure that the Logan Center is a home for artistic practice and the creative life of the University of Chicago and the city. For the past 10 years, the Logan Center has contributed to Chicago’s vibrant cultural scene, while encouraging creativity in the next generation through youth and family programs.

W. J. T. Mitchell is known for his books on the theory of images across the media, including Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1994), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), and Image Science (2012).  His 40-year editorship at Critical Inquiry featured special issues on race, gender and sexuality, comics and media, the politics of interpretation, and historic debates about the stakes of critical theory in the humanities and social sciences.  His latest book is Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia (2020). He is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Professor in the Departments English Language and Literature, Art History, and Cinema and Media Studies and in the College at the University of Chicago as well as the Senior Editor of Critical Inquiry. 

Verónica Moraga designed and implemented the "Latinx and Spanish Language for Social Workers" course at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. This Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) course aims to equip future social workers with the necessary language skills to engage effectively with diverse Spanish-speaking communities. In addition, she is the creator and coordinator of El Cafecito, a Spanish Club that connects UChicago students with the Latinx community. Her current research and practice focus on developing language curricula for specific purposes, theme-based learning, and interculturality. Moraga is Associate Instructional Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the College at the University of Chicago.

Sianne Ngai is a cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005) and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), winner of the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize. Her most recent book is Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), which was a Christian Gauss Book Prize finalist, winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and a Literary Hub Book of the Year. Ngai is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

Sarah Nooter writes about Greek poetry and its modern receptions, especially about questions of language, sound, voice, embodiment, and performance. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (2012), The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus ( 2017), and Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality (2023). She is co-editor of Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2018) and Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical (Bloomsbury, 2024), and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Classical Philology. Nooter also has a volume of translation forthcoming from Princeton University Press entitled How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality. She is Professor in the Department of Classics and the Program in Theater and Performance Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.

Susanne Paulus is a specialist of cuneiform tablets from ancient Iraq. Studying some of the oldest written documents, she focuses on social, legal and economic questions reconstructing life in ancient Babylonia. Paulus is Associate Professor of Assyriology at Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and ISAC (formerly OI) and curator of its extensive collection of cuneiform tablets at the University of Chicago. Together with a team of undergraduate and graduate students, she curated the special exhibition "Back to School in Babylonia" currently on display at ISAC Museum.

May Peterson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, working on the art and architecture of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She is interested in the borders of Christianity and its sacred spaces, the disciplinary boundary between art history and archaeology, and in the historiographies of conversion and ethnogenesis as they play into European national identities. Currently, Peterson is an academic engagement graduate fellow working within the Smart Museum of Art’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry.

Andrei Pop is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century European art and modern popular culture. He has written books on how neoclassical artists conceived antiquity in the globalizing world of the French and American Revolutions, and on how symbolist art challenged scientific positivism. His essays analyze individuals as different as Plato, Henry James, and Francisco Goya. He is writing a book about the alien in science fiction and modern migration discourse, drawing also on his own biography. Pop is the Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor in the Department of Art History and Committee on Social Thought and in the College, and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago.

Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy is a poet, critic, and literary editor, who studies poetry across a range of forms, historical periods, and regions.. His latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, (2020) was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize in Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2021. A former guest editor at Poetry magazine, he is currently the poetry editor of The Paris Review and a co-editor for the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. Reddy is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago.

Dieter Roelstraete is the curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was a member of the curatorial team of Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and Athens. Prior to that, Roelstraete served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Recent exhibitions at the Neubauer Collegium include solo presentations by Ida Applebroog, Arnold J. Kemp, Pope.L, Martha Rosler, Cecilia Vicuña, and Rick Lowe.

Bart Schultz researches utilitarianism and has developed multiple public ethics programs for UChicago students, staff, and faculty to engage in educationally relevant ways with the larger South Side community. His publications include the books Essays on Henry Sidgwick ( 1992); Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (2004); Utilitarianism and Empire (edited by Schultz and Georgios Varuxakis, 2005); and The Happiness Philosophers (2017). He is on the Editorial Board of Utilitas, the leading professional journal of utilitarian studies and is currently working on a new book on decolonizing utilitarianism. Also known for his extensive community engagement work with the Civic Knowledge Project, he won the 2013 PUSHExcel Excellence in Teaching Award from the RainbowPUSH Coalition and worked closely with South Side civil rights activist Timuel D. Black, editing Black's memoir, Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black (2019).  Schultz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and the College and has taught at the University of Chicago since 1987. 

Vu Tran is a novelist and a short story writer who teaches fiction writing and other topics like migration narratives, Gothic fiction, and film adaptation. His fiction primarily concerns the Vietnamese diaspora in America and the ongoing and inherited effects of displacement—specifically its muddling of memory and the self, of domestic and interracial bonds, and of the Vietnamese as well as American identity. His first novel, Dragonfish (2015), was a New York Times Notable Book, and his second novel, “Your Origins,” is forthcoming from WW Norton. Tran is Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago.

Ryan Van Meter is the author of the essay collection If You Knew Then What I Know Now (2011). His work has also appeared in journals such as Iowa Review, The Normal School Magazine and Fourth Genre and has been selected for anthologies including The Best American Essays. He is the Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at the University of Chicago.

Ryan Winters is a postdoctoral researcher in the Tablet Collection of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures West Asia and North Africa. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago in 2009 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2019. From 2018–2022, Winters was a postdoctoral researcher at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Germany. His primary research interests include the socioeconomic history of the Ancient Near East and Sumero-Babylonian religion.