BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ON PRESENTERS
Shadi Bartsch is the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Committee on the History of Culture. Her areas of expertise include the history of classical rhetoric, the ancient novel, and Roman Stoicism. She has won numerous awards for her teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Her latest book was The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (2006), and she is currently working on a book on the use of metaphor in antiquity.
Orit Bashkin is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. Her publications include articles on the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history, and on Arabic literature. She has also edited a book Sculpturing Culture in Egypt (1999) with Israel Gershoni and Liat Kozma, which includes translations into Hebrew of seminal works by Egyptian intellectuals. She is currently working on a book dealing with intellectuals in Hashemite Iraq titled The Other Iraq—Intellectuals, Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, 1921-1958.
Robert Bird is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures and the College, an Associate Faculty Member in the Divinity School, and a Resource Faculty Member in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, the Committee on Medieval Studies, and the Poetics and Poetry Program. His main area of interest is the aesthetic practice and theory of Russian modernism. His books include Russian Prospero (2006), a comprehensive study of the poetry and thought of Viacheslav Ivanov, and two books on the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev (2004) and Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (2008).
Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, and in the Committee on Jewish Studies. His wide-ranging teaching and research include such topics as music and modernity, music and colonialism, and Jewish music. He is also an active translator, a pianist, and the Artistic Director of the University of Chicago ensemble-in-residence the “New Budapest Orpheum Society,” a seven-member cabaret.
Christine Wilkie Bohlman is a Lecturer in Piano and Chamber Music. Her special interests include chamber music and the keyboard music of the 18th and 20th centuries. She has studied with Menachem Pressler, Carroll Chilton, Howard Karp, Kenneth Drake, Aiko Onishi, and Russell Sherman.
Garin Cycholl's recent work has appeared in the Seneca Review, Exquisite Corpse, Free Verse, and PFS Post Avant. He is author of Blue Mound to 161 (winner of the 2003 Transcontinental Prize), Nightbirds (selected prose), and Rafetown Georgics (selected short poems). Since 2002, he has been a member of Chicago's Jimmy Wynn fiction collaborative.
Chelsea Foxwell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the College. She is an expert in 19th-century Japanese painting and visual culture and specializes in the effects of Japan’s “opening” to the West on painting production and modern “Japanese-style” painting (Nihonga). Her research interests include early modern practices of image circulation, exhibition, and display; the relationship between image-making and the kabuki theater; “export art”; Japanese artistic interactions with the rest of East Asia; landscape traditions; and the depiction of place.
Norman Golb is the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor of Jewish History and Civilization in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. His research interests include the history of the Jews, Judaeo-Arabic studies, and Hebrew manuscript study--particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls and Cairo Genizah MSS.
Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music, the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, and the College. He is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. Prof. Gossett is the author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (2006), and he serves as General Editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi and of The Critical Edition of the Works of Gioachino Rossini.
Joshua Harker is a Chicago artist and sculptor who specializes in historical and archaeological digital forensic reconstructions.
Donald Harper is Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations. He is particularly interested in Early Chinese civilization, with a focus on philosophy, religion, and the history of science. He is currently working on a book-length study of early Chinese religion based primarily on recently excavated manuscripts dating to the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods. Among his publications is the book Early Chinese Medical Literature (1997), a collection of translations of ancient manuscripts.
Berthold Hoeckner is Associate Professor in the Department of Music and the College. He is a music historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music. His research interests include aesthetics, Adorno, music and literature, music and visual culture, and the psychology and neuroscience of music. His awards and fellowships include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1998), a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2001/2), and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2006/7). His book Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment was published in 2002.
Armando Maggi is Professor in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, the Committee on the History of Culture, and the College. His scholarship includes works on Renaissance and baroque culture, literature, and philosophy, with particular focus on treatises on love, religious texts, and the relationship of word and image. He is also an expert of Christian mysticism, with works on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque women mystics. His latest book, The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (2009), offers an original interpretation of the final works of the Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker.
Kaley Mason is Assistant Professor of Music in Ethnomusicology. His areas of interest include political economy approaches to musical production, social mobility, tourism theory, semiotics, affect, subaltern identity politics, and musical anthropologies of South Asia and Aboriginal Canada. Currently, his research focuses on the distribution of musical agency in regional Indian film industries and the social uses of cinematic songs in Kerala and South Asian diasporas. He has published articles in the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music and the Annals of Tourism Research, and contributed reviews to The World of Music. In addition to his training in classical piano, he has studied the sitar, Karnatak voice, and the chenda, a cylindrical temple drum played in South India.
Christine Mehring is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the College. She is an expert in 20th century art, contemporary art, and art theory and criticism. Her areas of interest include abstraction, art and design, postwar Western Europe, German art, and relations between new and traditional media. Her recent book is entitled Blinky Palermo, Abstraction of an Era (2009), and she has written several forthcoming essays on Palermo and Gerhard Richter.
W.J.T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College, and he is the editor of Critical Inquiry. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics, the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, and the College. He has spent over 20 years studying the characteristics of Gullah, African American English, Jamaican Creole and English. Prof. Mufwene currently works on language evolution, focusing on language speciation. His latest book, Language Evolution: contact, competition, and change (2008), applies the concepts of evolutionary theory to the birth and death of languages.
Christina von Nolcken is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature and the College, and Chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies. She is especially interested in Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and, in the later period, late 14th- and 15th-century devotional texts. Much of her writing has been on texts prepared by the followers of John Wyclif (d. 1384) as part of their program to bring education, and especially religious education, to the people.
Srikanth Reddy is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the College. He works primarily in the field of poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on creative writing. He is particularly interested in the intersection of critical and creative practice, and in the institutional history that has come to segregate those endeavors. His scholarly work focuses on Modernism and contemporary poetry and poetics. Related interests include ekphrasis, lyric genres, and various historical approaches toward the epic. His current creative project is a book-length poem called Voyager.
Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy), Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of General Studies, and Director of the Humanities Division's Civic Knowledge Project. He has taught in the College at the University of Chicago for twenty years, designing a wide range of core courses as well as courses on John Dewey, Political Philosophy, and Happiness. He has also published widely in philosophy, and his books include Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992), Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004), and Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington, 2005). He is currently developing a public ethics program that will involve multiple service learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to get involved, in educationally relevant ways, with the larger southside community.
Ed Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor of Early China in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, and the Director of the Creel Center for Chinese Paleography. He is an expert in the cultural and literary history of China’s Zhou period, with a special interest in archaeologically recovered textual materials such as oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions and bamboo-strip manuscripts. His books include Ancient China: Life, Myth and Art (2005), a popular overview of China to the mid-Tang; Gu Shi Yi Guan (2005), a collection of his Chinese essays; and Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (2006), an exploration of how editors have fashioned texts, especially those originally written on bamboo strips.
Michael Silverstein is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. His theoretical contributions range from modeling the flow of communicated meanings during verbal interaction to examining language as a medium and symbol of cultural ideologies. In addition to his own widely published technical papers, Silverstein, along with his students and other collaborators, has published a series of works based on his research, including Natural Histories of Discourse (1996).
Ulrike Stark is Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations. Her research focuses on Hindi literature, South Asian book history and print culture, and North Indian intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 1858-1895 (2007) and is currently at work on a biography of Raja Shivaprasad of Benares, a public intellectual and eminent educator in 19th-century North India.
Megan Stielstra is a writer, storyteller and Director of Story Development for 2nd Story storiesandwine.com, an urban storytelling series held in wine bars around Chicago. She has performed for The Chicago Poetry Center's No Love For Love show featuring Ira Glass, Looptopia at The Goodman Theatre, Neo-Solo at the Neo-Futurarium, Storyweek Festival of Writers, Literary Gangs of Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Dollar Store, WBEZ's Writer's Block Party and 2nd Story, among others; her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Other Voices, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Perigee, In the Fray and Punk Planet; and her first play was recently produced at Chicago Dramatists by Theatre Seven. She earned her MFA from Columbia College, where she currently teaches in the Fiction Writing Department and serves as an associate in the Center for Teaching Excellence. Visit her personal website at meganstielstra.com.
Matthew W. Stolper is Professor of Assyriology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations and the John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute. He has worked primarily on Achaemenid Babylonian texts and secondarily on Elamite history and texts. His main effort now is studying and publishing the Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Aramaic administrative texts excavated by the Oriental Institute in 1933 at Persepolis. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, and ARTA.
Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature and the College and an Associate Member of the Divinity School. An expert in Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Prof. Strier’s scholarship brings together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas, but is interested not only in the ideas themselves but how they find their way into English and American literature in the period. Among his many publications are Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1995) and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983). He is also the editor of Modern Philology.
Emily Teeter is an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. She served as curator for the Meresamun exhibit. She has been involved with mummy studies for more than two decades.
Michael Vannier is a Professor of Radiology at the University of Chicago Medical Hospitals and a pioneer in biomedical computer graphics. He serves as the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computer Aided Radiology and Surgery.
David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College, as well as Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies. He is also the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. Prof. Wellbery is the author of two studies that are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996). His current projects include a book on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as well as a broad-based study of Goethe and philosophy.
Rebecca West is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in Romance Languages & Literatures, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the College. Her major field is modern and contemporary Italian literature and culture, with a secondary teaching and research interest in medieval studies, specifically Dante and early lyric poetry. She also focuses on Italian and Italian American cinema. Her books include Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge (1981, winner of the MLA's Marraro Prize) and Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling (2000, winner of the MLA's Scaglione Publication Prize).
Jennifer Wild is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College and an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Gender Studies. Her research and teaching encompass the areas of early American and European cinema and culture, classic and contemporary film theory, theory of the avant-garde, and the cinema’s relationship to the other arts. Her current projects concern a theory and history of the “arrival” of the moving image into the gallery, specialized cinema theaters of the 1920s and 1930s, and the history of darkness and the experience of light volumes.
Tamra Wysock-Niimi is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and the College. Her current interests are in creating electronic and web-based materials for teaching about Georgia and the Georgian language. She just returned from a trip to Georgia funded by CEERES and CIS during which she recorded video and audio materials relating to Georgian monasteries, church chant, folk music, art, and history, and she is working on turning those materials into something useful for learners of the Georgian language as well as the general public.
