Session 1

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.

Bart Schultz is a philosopher with wide interests in philosophy and social justice. As Exectuive Director of the Civic Knowledge Project, he has developed an array of public ethics programs for building community connections on Chicago’s South Side, including the award-winning Winning Words Precollegiate Philosophy Program.

Martha T. Roth is an Assyriologist whose research and publications focus on the legal and social history of the ancient Near East, with primary interests on family law, women’s legal and social issues, and on the compilation and transmission of legal norms. She was the Editor-in-Charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, bringing the 26^th and final volume in the series to publication in 2011. Roth is the Chauncey S.

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.

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).

Christopher Faraone studies Ancient Greek poetry, religion, magic, and Near Eastern influences on early Greek culture. His forthcoming book, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times (September 2017), further explores these research interests. His next two projects are on ritual genres in the Homeric epic and another on the catalogs in the Hesiodic Theogony.

Margareta Ingrid Christian studies German literary and cultural history from the eighteenth century to the present. Her current book project is a cultural history of air around 1900, drawing on poetry, dance, art historical writings, and occult photography to analyze air as a concept in this period.

Claudia Brittenham is a scholar of ancient Mesoamerican art whose research focuses on how the materiality of art and the politics of style contribute to our understanding of the ontology of images. Her current book project, “Unseen Art: Vision and Memory in Ancient Mesoamerica,” explores problems of visibility and the status of images in Mesoamerica. Her latest book is The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Mexico (2015).