Session 1

8:30 to 9:30 a.m. CDT

Edgar Garcia

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas, primarily during the 20th century. Winner of the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award, his collection of poems and anthropological essays on hemispheric migrations—Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (which also received an award from the Illinois Arts Council)—was published by Fence Books in 2019.

"And From the Ruins of Time They Blossom": Jewish Music in Times of Exile

This session looks back at great art accomplished under extreme duress. The presenters will discuss and then perform the final musical work for stage by Viktor Ullmann entitled “The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flag Bearer Christoph Rilke.” Based on Rainer Maria Rilke’s great prose-poem about the futility and finality of war, the “Chronicle” was conceived for dramatic speaker and piano as a Liebestod, in which love as an external force conquers death.

Richard T. Neer

Richard T. Neer has published widely on art and aesthetics in ancient Greece, early modern France, and world cinema. His next book, Painting as a Way of Life: Art Practice and Spiritual Exercise in the Age of Poussin, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Neer is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College and Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Larry Norman

Larry F. Norman is a specialist in 17th– and 18th–century French literature, theater, and intellectual history. Specifically, his research focuses on how individual works play with social norms and literary expectations.