Session 2

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.

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.

Lynn Xu is a poet whose collection Debts & Lessons (2013) was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. In 2008 her work was featured in Best American Poetry and in 2013 she was selected as a New American Poet at the Poetry Society of America. Xu is Lecturer in the Program in Creative Writing.

Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting (2005) and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (2013).

John Wee is an expert in the scientific, medical, and mathematical traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Greece.

Srikanth Reddy is a poet and scholar whose creative work falls within a broad paradigm of Asian American, diasporic, and transnational poetics. He is the author of two poetry collections, a book-length poem entitled Readings in World Literature (2011), and a critical study of poetry, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry (2012).

Diana Palenzuela's research is focused on the status and revival of minority languages and the development of pedagogical innovations in language teaching. Palenzuela is Lecturer of Basque language and culture in the Department of Linguistics.

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.

Steven Collins is a scholar of the social and cultural history of Buddhism in premodern and modern South and Southeast Asia, and an expert in Pali language and literature. His current research interests include the varieties and civilizational place of wisdom and the Buddhist practices of self. Author of many books and articles, his most recent publication is Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka (2016).