Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”
Paula Clare Harper is an Assistant Professor in UChicago's Department of Music and The College. Her current book project, Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, documents the early 21st-century rise of ubiquitous social media platforms through an understanding of them as mechanisms for virality. In addition, Paula’s research interests in music, gender, and digital fandom intersect in ongoing work on pop divas including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.
Stephanie Burt is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her work appears in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, among others. Her other books of poetry and literary criticism — fourteen in all — include We Are Mermaids, Advice from the Lights, and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems.
David Levin is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, and the College. From 2011-2016 he served as the founding Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. From 2005-2015, he served as executive editor of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press.
Deborah L. Nelson is Dean of UChicago's Division of the Arts & Humanities and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature and the College. She is a renowned scholar whose research focuses on late 20th-century U.S. culture and politics. Nelson’s research interests include American literature and plays, gender and sexuality studies, photography, and Cold War history.
Stephen J. Dubner is the host of Freakonomics Radio and co-author of the Freakonomics books, which have won many awards and sold millions of copies around the world.
Laura Letinsky has been a Professor at the University of Chicago since 1994. She shows with Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, and Document, Chicago and Lisbon, and exhibits internationally including PhotoEspana, Madrid, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Mumbai Photography Festival, Mumbai, India, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Basel Design, The Photographers Gallery, London, and Denver Art Museum, CO.
Sally Mann is a Guggenheim Fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time in 2001. In 2021, she received the Prix Pictet and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2006), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary.
Benjamin Morgan is an Associate Professor in UChicago’s Department of English Language and Literature. His research and teaching focus on literature, science, and aesthetics in the Victorian period and early twentieth century. His first book, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature(University of Chicago Press, 2017), explores how nineteenth-century sciences of mind and emotion generated new and controversial explanations of the human experience of the arts.
Amitav Ghosh is a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. His newest collection of nonfiction is Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment.
