Humanities Day 2020 - Session 1

Edgar Garcia

sspatterson — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 14:33:13 +0000

Presentation:

Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Session:

English Language and Literature

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. His book of scholarship on the contemporary life of the seemingly antiquated sign-systems of the Americas—Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictographs, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu—was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2019 (a selection of this work received honors from the Modern Language Association in 2020). He also co-edited an anthology on the transnational contexts of American literature, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2016). Currently, he is working on two books: one is a rethinking of risk and migration in humanistic frameworks (as opposed to statistical ones); the other is a collection of essays on the K’iche Mayan story of creation the Popol Vuh. Garcia is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

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

sspatterson — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 19:53:21 +0000

Presenter:

Philip V. Bohlman

Christine Wilkie Bohlman

Session 1

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. Ullmann composed these musical sketches during autumn 1944 when he was in the Terezín concentration camp before being deported and murdered at Auschwitz. They weave the haunting music into a discussion about themes of exile and diaspora in modern Jewish history.

Richard T. Neer

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:39:40 +0000

Presentation:

Arts and the Academy, Then and Now

Session:

Session 1

Art History

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

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:37:21 +0000

Presentation:

Arts and the Academy, Then and Now

Session:

Session 1

Romance Languages and Literatures

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. Editor or co-editor of several volumes, Norman is the author of The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and The Public Mirror: Moliere and the Social Commerce of Depiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999). Norman is the Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies.