Presenters

Seth Brodsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. A musicologist by training, his research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and the intersection of music and philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of the forthcoming book, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017).

James Chandler is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and English Language and Literature; he is also the Director of both the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Disciplinary Innovation. Chandler has published widely on literature from the eighteenth century onwards on topics in Irish studies, the Romantic Movement, and more recently on cinema. His current research includes a study of the works of Maria Edgeworth—a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adult and children's literature—and a forthcoming book, How to Do Criticism.

Ahmed El Shamsy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. El Shamsy studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research interests include themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He is the author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research investigates race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is African American film, both silent-era and more contemporary filmmaking practices. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015).

Ghenwa Hayek is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her research spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Arab Middle East, focusing on the relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation. Hayek is also a translator whose works have appeared in the literary magazine Banipal and the anthology Beirut 39: New Writing From the Arab World, as well as in mainstream publications like The New York Times and The International New York Times.

Chrysanthi Koutsiviti is Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics. Her areas of study include Modern Greek language, linguistics, and literature.

Laura Letinsky is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts. Her still life photography often focuses on questions of materialism and consumerism, as well as transformation and sensation. Her color photographic series have been shown at museums and galleries worldwide including the Yancey Richardson Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nederlands Foto Institute, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Shine Gallery in London. A recent collection of her photographs, Ill Form and Void Full (Radius Press, 2015), was nominated by The New York Times as one of the Best Photo Books of 2015.

Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She is a specialist in Italian autobiography and studies the relationship between memory and narrative, specifically the theme of trauma and survival. She is the author of Sull’autobiografia contemporanea: Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi [On Contemporary Autobiography] (Carocci, 2012), and co-author of a history of Italian literature for upper-level secondary students, LiberaMente: Storia e antologia della letteratura italiana.

Christine Mehring is Professor in the Department of Art History. Her research interests include abstraction, art and design, postwar Western Europe, German art, and relations between new and traditional media. She is the author of Blinky Palermo, Abstraction of an Era (Yale University Press, 2008) and editor of Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972 (Getty Publications, 2010). 

Sam Pluta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. He is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, improvisation, audio-visuals, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and installation-like soundscapes. Since 2009, he has served as Technical Director and composing member of Wet Ink Ensemble, one of the premiere new music ensembles in the United States. In addition to his work with Wet Ink, Sam has received commissions and written music for groups like Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Mantra Percussion, and Spektral Quartet. 

Steven Rings is Associate Professor in the Department of Music. His wide-ranging research incorporates transformational theory, phenomenology, popular music, and voice. He is the author of Tonality and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2011), which received the Society for Music Theory’s 2012 Emerging Scholar Award, and his current book project explores Bob Dylan’s fifty-year performing career.

Edward Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Shaughnessy is a scholar of ancient China who studies China's archaeologically recovered texts as well as the literary traditions in which they were born. His research interests lie heavily in bronze inscriptions and the Zhou Yi, both of which reached their full maturity toward the end of the Western Zhou period (1045 to 771 B.C.E.).

Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature. His life-long project is to bring together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas. His most recent book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011), was awarded the 2011 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. Strier is also editor of the journal Modern Philology.

Theo van den Hout is the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor of Hittite and Anatolian Languages in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Oriental Institute. Interested in all aspects of Late Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia, van den Hout focuses his research on Hittite culture, history, and language. The author of several books, most recently The Elements of Hittite (Cambridge University Press, 2011), he is also Executive Editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary.

Lisa Zaher is the UChicago Arts Conservation Research Fellow and a member of the Concrete Traffic research team. Her writing and teaching focus on the history of modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on photographic media (still and moving images, as well as proto-cinematic devices, video and new digital platforms for distribution and display), historiography, and the conservation of fine art and media. She is interested in how Concrete Traffic­—as a singular work of art—provides alternative and shifting models for art historical interpretation as a result of the research surrounding its conservation.