Session 3

Join the staff of UChicago Arts for a tour of public art on the campus of the University of Chicago.

For the past year we've been transfixed by the news—but also by the way the news has been reported. Longstanding practices have been questioned or abandoned as our media have grappled with how to cover a changing political landscape.  A similar situation unfolded in late and post-Soviet Russia, where regime change was accompanied, but also anticipated, by radical questioning of the validity of the news. 

What can an anthropologist, a literary scholar, and a sociologist tell us about material culture and technology in India? This panel of three advanced PhD students will discuss how everyday objects like cars, ceramics, or literary texts are not simply markers of culture but determine and shape how we view India’s past and contemporary life in India. Learn how archaeologists and philologists read the remains of ceramic wares, how modern India’s energy needs inform popular culture, and about the fascinating relations people have with their automobiles.

Over the last 30 years, I have interviewed hundreds of survivors of the Cultural Revolution in order to uncover the victims who have been systematically neglected in China’s historical literature. Violent attacks were particularly common against teachers and occurred in every school without exception, for example, 14 Chinese scholars who studied at the University Chicago between 1913 to 1950 were tortured to death. Though these narratives come from Chinese history, I believe the injustice and death that the Cultural Revolution caused can serve as a lesson for the world beyond China. 

The Smart Museum has two masterpieces of illustration in its collection, one by the German artist Peter Cornelius, one by the great French romantic artist Eugene Delacroix. Both are devoted to Goethe's greatest play, his Faust. In this lecture from one of the world's leading scholars on Faust, learn how the illustrations illuminate the play by providing a unique visual rendering of key scenes. Both prove to be interpreters of keen insight and their contrasting styles of depiction enrich our understanding of the drama. 

From fiction to poetry, from the ghettos of Shanghai during World War II to the homeless underground in contemporary Philadelphia, from Marcel Duchamp conspiracies to rare medical conditions to poems about war reporting and natural disasters: Creative Writing faculty Rachel DeWoskin, Rachel Galvin, Will Boast, and Augustus Rose will read from and discuss their fascinating new books. Moderated by novelist Vu Tran, the panel will also consider the balance between teaching and pursuing creative work and how these two aspects of a writer's career complement and complicate each other.

Living in a world of fake news and counterfeit documents, it is fascinating to see that forgeries existed already long before our time. This talk will discuss how people protected themselves from forgery and identity theft more than 3000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). I will show the methods scholars use nowadays to discover antique and modern forgeries of cuneiform tablets.

After World War II ended, people tried to find their ordinary life again through the ruins. The Greeks, however, continued the war, and this time the enemy was in the same country. What made the United States intervene in this remote country? This presentation follows briefly the events and focuses on the American intervention and the outcomes for Greece until 1974, when democracy was finally established in the country that gave birth to it.

**This presentation is full**