2024

Amber Ginsburg is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Her site-generated projects and social sculptures blend historical scenarios with contemporary issues, envisioning alternative futures. Ginsburg explores the continuities and disruptions in material and social histories. Collaborating with communities and experts in fields like botany, political activism, and science fiction, she focuses on human survival and feminist strategies. Her large-scale sculptures invite audience participation, examining the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman agency.

Marc Downie’s pioneering approach to digital art combines three signature elements: non-photorealistic computational imagery; the incorporation of body movement by motion-capture; and the autonomy of artworks directed by artificial intelligence. His collaborative works have responded to an ever-expanding range of materials—drawing, film, dance, photography, music, architecture—and his work has been exhibited, commissioned, and collected by film festivals, museums, and performance venues worldwide.

Heidi Coleman is a director, dramaturg, and game designer. She has positioned herself at the intersection of games and performance and serves as a co-director of The Fourcast Lab, a transmedia design collective based at the University of Chicago, which creates Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), pervasive games, cross-platform stories, and networked performances. Coleman is a Senior Instructional Professor for Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.

Patrick Jagoda’s research focuses on media theory, game studies and design, science studies, and 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture. He designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game “Terrarium” (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design.

Eric Slauter is a specialist in early American cultural, intellectual, legal, and political history. He has published The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009) and a series of essays on the language of rights and equality in early America.

Miguel Martínez's research and teaching focus on the cultural and literary histories of early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, and the Philippines. He is the author of Front Lines. Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World ( 2016; trans. Las líneas del frente, 2024), Comuneros.

Martha Feldman's research ranges from the early modern to present-day Italian music and other parts of Europe.

Katherine Buse’s research focuses on digital media, technoscience, science fiction, and the environment. Her book in progress, “Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture and the Building of Model Worlds,” discusses how the world building of popular science fiction media is related to the work of planetary and climate scientists. She also uses video game design and criticism to think about questions of science, technology, and the environment. Buse considers how can game design help imagine better environmental futures.

Candace Vogler's research focuses on moral philosophy, with special interest in metaphysics, moral psychology, and the foundations of the ethical.

James Osborne is an archaeologist who works in the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Middle East during the Bronze and Iron Ages (ca. 3500‒500 BCE). He focuses especially on Anatolia, a region that is today within the Republic of Turkey, during the late second and early first millennium BCE. Most of his publications have concentrated on the intersection of space and power, using analysis of Anatolian monumental buildings, cities, and settlement patterns during the Iron Age as his primary subject matter.