Presenters

Will Boast is the author of a short story collection, Power Ballads (2011), and a best-selling memoir, Epilogue (2014), in addition to his writings in The New Republic, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. His debut novel, Daphne, will be published in 2018. Boast is Lecturer in the Program in Creative Writing. 

Adrienne Brown studies American and African-American cultural production in the twentieth century. Co-editor of Race and Real Estate (2015), Brown’s forthcoming book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (2017), explores the influence of architecture and urban planning on literary form, and analyzes how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Thomas Christensen is a musicologist with a special interest in the history of music theory. He has written on the musical theory of French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, the writings of seventeenth–century savants Marin Mersenne and Seth Calvisius, problems in the historiography of music theory, and many more. Several of these articles were reprinted in The Work of Music Theory (2014). Currently the Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Christensen is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Department of Music.

Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting (2005) and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (2013). In her work she draws on biography, art history, literary criticism, and the lyric essay. In addition to her two books, Cohen has written for publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, Apollo Magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books, among others. Cohen is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Program in Creative Writing.

Phillipe Desan studies Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and the history of ideas in sixteenth–century France. General Editor of the journal Montaigne Studies, Desan has also edited numerous sixteenth–century texts, including the first color reproduction of Montaigne’s Bordeaux Copy of the Essais. His most recent publication is the authoritative biography, Montaigne: A Life (2017). Desan is the Howard L. Willett Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Virginio L. Ferrari is an internationally-acclaimed contemporary sculptor who has exhibited his work around the world. He has more than thirty monumental public sculptures in Chicago alone, including Dialogo (1971) and several others located on the University of Chicago campus. From 1966 to 1976 Ferrari was Assistant Professor of Art and Sculptor in Residence at the University of Chicago and since then has remained in Chicago where he has devoted his full energies to sculpting. In 1992, Ferrari was awarded the Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, and was elected Corresponding Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Humanities, in 2005.

Paola Iovene is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first Chinese literature and film, with additional interests in Chinese opera film, translation, and media studies. She is the author of Tales of Future Past: Literature and Anticipation in Contemporary China (2014), which traces how feelings about the future have shaped literary institutions, genres, and texts in socialist and post-socialist China. Iovene is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. 

Mannat Johal researches the archaeology of the medieval in southern India. She focuses on the corpus of medieval ceramics from the region and studies relationships between practices of making routine objects and experiences of time. Mannat is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology.

Robert L. Kendrick studies early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, and the visual arts. Author of articles and books ranging from seventeenth-century opera to Latin American colonial music, his most recent book is Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (2014). He also advised or worked with a range of early music performers, including Chicago’s Newberry Consort, Bologna’s Cappella Artemisia, and Boston’s La Donna Musicale. Kendrick is Professor in the Department of Music. 

Deborah Nelson is a scholar of late twentieth-century United States culture and politics, with specific interests in American literature (including poetry, novels, essays, and plays), gender and sexuality studies, autobiography and confessional writing, and Cold War history. A founding member of the Post45 collective, which publishes an online journal and a book series with Stanford University Press, her latest book is Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017). Nelson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Larry F. Norman is a specialist in seventeenth– and eighteenth–century French literature, theater, and intellectual history. Specifically his research focuses on how individual works paly 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 (2011) and The Public Mirror: Moliere and the Social Commerce of Depiction (1999). He most recently co-curated the exhibition Classicisms at the Smart Museum of Art. Norman is the Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies.

Susanne Paulus is an Assyriologist with a research focus on the social, legal, and economic history of the Ancient Near East, especially of the Middle Babylonian Period/Kassite Period (1500–1000 BC). She combines traditional methods of archival reconstruction with newer instruments like Historic Social Network Analysis to reconstruct family structures, administrative organization, and the socio-political and economic landscape of Babylonia. Paulus is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Augustus Rose is a novelist and screenwriter. His debut novel, The Readymade Thief, was published in August 2017. His screenplay, Far From Cool, was a finalist in the 2015 Academy Nicholl Fellowships. Rose is Lecturer in the Program in Creative Writing.

Foy Scalf is Research Associate, Head of Research Archives, Head of the Oriental Institute Integrated Database project, and Principal Investigator for the Oriental Institute Demotic Ostraca Online project. He received his PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago in 2014. His publications include studies of ancient Egyptian grammar, religious practices, textual transmission, as well as editions of Demotic and hieratic texts. Scalf is guest curator of the Oriental Institute special exhibit, Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt, and editor of the accompanying catalog.

Laura Steward is the Director of the Open Practice Committee and Curator of Public Art at the University of Chicago. Previously she served as director of arts programming at the Santa Fe Institute, Director and Chief Curator of SITE Santa Fe, and Senior Curator at MASS MoCA.

Christina von Nolcken studies Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and in late-fourteenth and fifteenth-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. Von Nolcken is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of English Language and Literature.

John Wee is an expert in the scientific, medical, and mathematical traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece. He has written several journal articles on these topics and and is editor of a volume on The Comparable Body: Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine (2017), and author of the forthcoming Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (2018) and Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Series Sa-gig (2018). Wee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Oriental Institute.

Jennifer Wild is a scholar of experimental film, modernism and the avant-garde, French cinema, and cinema’s relation to the other arts. Wild is currently researching a history of the arrival of the moving image into galleries as art works. She is the author of The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1923 (2015). Wild is Associate Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures.