Session 1

Maria Cecilia (Nené) Lozada researches Spanish-speaking communities in Chicago, examining the history of Pilsen, La Villita, and Humboldt Park. She identifies demographic and language trends, the effects of gentrification, festivities, and gastronomy. Lozada is the Co-Director of the Spanish Language program and Senior Instructional Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Ella Karev is a social and economic historian of the Late and Ptolemaic periods in Egypt. Her research focuses on slavery, forced labor, and body modification as a part of the lived experience of slavery. More specifically, Karev's research explores the definition and social implications of enslavement in ancient contexts, with an overarching goal of humanizing and realizing the enslaved individuals of the past. She is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and the BA Preceptor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

James Chandler’s books include England in 1819 (University of Chicago Press, 1998), a study of literary historicism and its limits that won the Laing Prize at University of Chicago Press in 2000; An Archaeology of Sympathy:  The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which traces the formal foundations of modern narrative cinema to the early sentimental mov

Carmen Jaramillo Caswell assists faculty in using digital technologies to enhance humanities research. Their focuses include the creation of text corpora, text processing, optical character recognition, digital mapping, data management, and digital curation. They have also assisted in the creation of web-based archives and resources, including the South Side Home Movie Project and the East Asian Scroll Paintings Project, and served on the committee for the Chicago Colloquium in Digital Humanities and Computer Science.

Niall Atkinson’s research focuses on the experience of architecture and urban space in early modern Italy to understand the build environment as a collective social construction of the body’s sensorial apparatus. His recent work has explored the relationship between sound, space, and architecture, and their role in the construction of civic society, culminating in the publication of The Noisy Renaissance: sound, architecture, and Florentine urban life (Penn State University Press, 2016).

Gerdine M. Ulysse’s research focuses on language variation and language attitudes and factors influencing multilingualism and literacy development in Creolophone communities. She is Assistant Instructional Professor of French and Kreyòl in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.