Presentations

Most Haitians are monolingual in Kreyòl, their native language. However, Kreyòl is not the primary language of education and administration in Haiti. Instead, French remains the main language used in those contexts, which has led to many negative consequences in Haitians’ lives from persistent low literacy levels to stratification in the society. Drawing on empirical data, the presenter will explain the discrepancy between the current language policy and language attitudes and language identity among Haitians. The session also examines an improved language policy, which would prioritize mother tongue literacy and could lead to biliteracy development.

How would you describe how you look to a complete stranger? Today, we would use the familiar metrics of height, weight, and eye color. But in 4th century BC Egypt, these metrics were quite different, defining physical appearance through face shape, hair texture, location of scars on the body, among other characteristics. This session serves three purposes: first, exploring the use of physical descriptors in Egypt during this time  as one of the world's first biometric systems; second, diving into self-perception of the physical form; and lastly, humanizing the past through re-created portraits of ancient people according to the ways they described themselves.

At a time before the advent of a rationalized system of numbered addresses, people in cities understood the places in which they lived as a network of integrated spatial and social relationships between streets, people, institutions, and activities. This was true in 1427 in the case of the first “modern” tax census carried out in Florence. Known as the catasto, this massive experiment in developing a demographic portrait of the city required each household to declare where they stood, literally, in relation to the state and their immediate neighbor. By processing these relational stems of address, digital technologies now allow us the ability to build a social map of every Florentine household precisely at a moment when it was transforming, experimenting with, and inventing forms of cultural production, economic innovation, and political practices that have had lasting effects on the history of the West. The visualization of this map will help us to understand the way in which Florentines understood their collective identity, who they were, as a function of where they were: where they lived, where they worked, where they prayed, and even where they died.

***THIS PRESENTATION IS NOW SOLD OUT***

Explore the global resonance and creative possibilities of “the monochrome” during this guided tour of Monochrome Multitudes at the Smart Museum led by UChicago graduate students. This exhibition offers an expanded history of 20th and 21st century art through more than 100 monochromatic works.

This tour will be led by graduate student Mary Huber (MAPH 2022)

***THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT***

The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, opened in 2012, is a multidisciplinary arts center at the University of Chicago. Designed by renowned architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the building integrates classroom, performance, and exhibition spaces to create a dynamic collaborative environment for arts and scholarship. It is a space for academic and artistic work by UChicago students, faculty, visiting artists and scholars, professional organizations, and community partners. Logan Center Exhibitions celebrates 10 years of former students with its Fall 2022 DoVA Alumni Exhibition titled Passing Through: Artists from DoVA 2012–2021. This broad survey gathers recent works by artists who have passed through UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts. The exhibition is organized by guest curator Scott Wolniak.

***THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT***

Exile was a standard professional risk for poets in dynastic China, who were almost always officials and administrators required to speak out on matters of public concern. Incurring the displeasure of the emperor or his court meant having to spend a period of years—conceivably the rest of one's lifetime—in a remote region of the empire, dealing with inhospitable climates, diseases, predators, and native peoples resistant to being converted to the Chinese way. How different poets responded to these challenges, as reflected in their verse and letters home, tells us a great deal about their personalities, and about the range of imaginative possibilities available to Chinese literati between the Tang and Qing dynasties, i.e., the 8th to 19th centuries.

Explore the global resonance and creative possibilities of “the monochrome” during this guided tour of Monochrome Multitudes at the Smart Museum led by UChicago graduate students. This exhibition offers an expanded history of 20th and 21st century art through more than 100 monochromatic works.

This tour will be led by graduate student Claire Rich (MAPH 2023)

The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, opened in 2012, is a multidisciplinary arts center at the University of Chicago. Designed by renowned architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the building integrates classroom, performance, and exhibition spaces to create a dynamic collaborative environment for arts and scholarship. It is a space for academic and artistic work by UChicago students, faculty, visiting artists and scholars, professional organizations, and community partners. Logan Center Exhibitions celebrates 10 years of former students with its Fall 2022 DoVA Alumni Exhibition titled Passing Through: Artists from DoVA 2012–2021. This broad survey gathers recent works by artists who have passed through UChicago’s Department of Visual Arts. The exhibition is organized by guest curator Scott Wolniak.

Russian state media have presented an entirely different picture of the war in Ukraine to their viewers. The presenter looks closely at footage from early days of the invasion and at key moments in the spring such as Easter, when the Russian campaign was depicted as a righteous struggle to preserve sacred values and the Victory Day celebration, which highlighted the Immortal Battalion movement in linking the events of today to those of the fight against Nazi Germany. The talk closes with consideration of problems in media representation of the war on both sides of the conflict.

Classics scholars and casual readers have many options on the internet to find their favorite texts, ranging from large-scale projects to smaller niche sites. This is as true today as it was a decade ago. So why jump in and learn a whole new set of skills to build your own? In this session, the presenter gives a brief tour of the projects developed in collaboration with her students during the past decade, and how they can support scholars and teachers, but also casual readers of Greek and Latin.

This presentation has been cancelled.

This session focuses on the life of Mildred Bryant-Jones, an African American woman who taught music at two South Side high schools from 1920 to 1945. She taught theory, composition, and voice to many young African American students who became historically important performers in several Black music genres such as Von Freeman, Johnny Hartman, and Roberta Martin. Incredibly and, unfortunately, typically. she is another African American woman who has been erased from African American cultural historiography. This presentation reviews Bryant-Jones's manifold contributions to South Side and broader African American culture and explores her personal life, particularly her three-decade friendship and romance with W. E. B. Du Bois.

Destroying books has a very strong symbolic power. However, sometimes an individual just has to dispose of a text—even a sacred one—so what is one to do in that situation? This presentation provides a window into Muslim practices and debates on the question of what the acceptable ways are by which to retire, recycle, or destroy a sacred text, and trace these practices from the beginning of Islam to today and compare them to similar ones among Jews.

Monochrome Multitudes, an exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023, revisits a notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and conceive pedagogical strategies that make abstraction accessible from multiple perspectives. The exhibition aims to expand existing histories of “the monochrome” in three ways: articulating cultural, social, political, racial, or gendered meanings of monochrome art; emphasizing the hermeneutic significance of materials and media; and engaging North American art in a global dialogue. This session reflects on the exhibition through art historical, curatorial, and artistic points of view.