Talk description forthcoming. Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University. His book The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received the Mary Douglas Award for best book in the Sociology of Culture (2012) and Honorable...
Talk description forthcoming. Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death...
Talk description forthcoming. Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and...
Models of the passage from midlife to old age—from Freud, Proust, and Simone de Beauvoir to contemporary conversations about how old is too old to be an American president, disclose the ageism, including internalized ageism, rampant in our culture, with aging figured overwhelmingly as decline....
In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid's poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid's themes of sexual...
Over the last decade, the persecution of Uyghurs in China has attracted global attention. When Uyghur was officially banned from education by the Chinese government in September 2016, Uyghur editors were arrested and heavily sentenced, and books were collected and burned. Private bookstores were shut...
March 14, 2023 marked the beginning of a new era: Chat GPT-4 was released, fundamentally changing the way humans relate to language. In this talk, Professor Park will explore the implications of this pivotal moment. She will consider AI’s impact on the production of works...
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, a violent birth onto unknown shores that separates orphaned twins on a journey to nowhere. The turbulent sea visualizes an environment of passages–into adulthood, towards sexual identity, and in search of new attachments and communities of belonging. Twelfth...
The IHC’s 2024-25 public events series will explore Key Passages: processes of transition and experiences of transformation—historical events, social movements, global dislocations, and journeys undertaken—that have altered thought, shifted cultural paradigms, or sparked other forms of consequential change. The series will also examine temporal passages,...