The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

“Handwork”—broadly construed to include farm work, construction, as well as other crafts and skills that produce material objects—relied on forms of knowing in order to train the hand to perform the work. This “knowing,” which may be tacit or explicit, individually embodied or widely shared, constitutes the focus of our investigation. We apply the concept of “text” to the patterns and conventions that fix the processes by which work is accomplished.

This project aims to strengthen and consolidate an emerging program cluster on Health and Human Rights by engaging faculty in the humanities and the Pritzker School of Medicine to address fundamental questions underlying the notion of health as a human right.

Self-sacrifice, suicide, conversion, the exile, the founder, the internal enemy – these tropes and their ilk structure the social and political imaginary across the tradition. They change over time, but come back in surprisingly resilient forms. This project will be devoted to exploring methods for tracing such figurations over the longue durée.

Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab is an initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at The University of Chicago.

This project aims to refine a long-term research agenda to develop new engagements with voice that encompass equally theories and practices of voice and put them into productive dialogues.

Building upon an unusual data set of social networks among approximately 60,000 Florentines over two centuries, this Neubauer research project seeks to document and explain the tumultuous political history of Florentine republicanism over the period 1350-1530, both from the social-network and from the rhetorical perspectives.

Bringing together historians, geographers, anthropologists, environmental artists, and security and science studies experts, the three-year Engineered Worlds project offers a significant re-theorization of security in light of the cumulative global environmental effects of industry.

In postindustrial, knowledge-driven societies, where symbols replace widgets, we need new concepts about consumption and lifestyle, in addition to work. Scenes are one such concept. Scenes build on aesthetics, which we incorporate with social science concepts and methods.

By engaging Chinese scholars through an on-going series of short-term visiting scholarships, this project will sharpen understanding of humanities and social scientific research being conducted in China today and help UChicago scholars reflect on the protocols and implicit frontiers of their own arguments.

An exploration of how the methods of “big science” might elucidate and facilitate the humanistic understanding of music, speech, and other audio expressions, the one-year Audio Cultures of India project will deploy data mining and computational pattern analysis techniques common to the physical and biological sciences to produce a sound history of modern India.

Our project explores the relationship between people and things in motion in order to shed light on both the dynamics of migration and the historical transformation of material culture.

This project explores the variable forms and semantics of history and historical consciousness in the Occident, based on a synergistic dialogue between Classics and Renaissance studies.

Global Literary Networks is a two-year digital humanities research project that examines the production, diffusion, and reception of literature on a macro-interpretative scale using tools of network analysis and network visualization.

The Past for Sale brings together archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, social scientists, public policy experts, and legal scholars, in hopes of finding better answers to one of the most intractable problems facing those who care about culture: how to stem the worldwide epidemic of looting of archaeological sites and shrines.

The Body’s Role in Thinking, Performing, and Referencing

This collaborative research project relies on ethnography, archival research, interviews, historical narratives, and textual analysis to develop a local understanding of “the state”.

Since Pablo Picasso’s inclusion of oil cloth and rope in his Still-Life with Chair Caning (1912), and Marcel Duchamp’s attachment of a bicycle wheel on a stool for his first assisted ready-made (1913), the diversity of materials used in art making has exploded. Nothing, perhaps, distinguishes 20th-century art more from prior art than its materials. Yet their significance – if, when, and how these materials matter and mean – has not been seriously addressed in art history.

University of Chicago faculty in history, law, political science, and sociology will cohere as a group around the year-long visit of Steve Sawyer from The American University of Paris, who will help sharpen and focus the group’s efforts to produce a new political theory of the democratic state.

The Living Mortal Project is a broad interdisciplinary collaboration intended to engage with the profound questions surrounding death and catalyze substantive change in both scholarly investigation and cultural reception of mortality.

This project brings faculty from classics, political science, sociology, anthropology, divinity, Germanic studies, and English together with invited visiting scholars for bi-weekly workshops to define and refine a coherent agenda for a long-term, trans-disciplinary research project on political theology.

Signs of Writing is a three-year research project designed to investigate, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, the cultural and social contexts and structural properties of the world’s oldest writing systems – the world’s first information revolution.

The aim of the Art and Public Life project is to work through some of the most advanced thinking on ideas about publics and their relation to questions of community, politics, society, culture, and the arts.

Emerging around a coalescence of research interests in the comparative economic analysis of historical societies from ancient times to the modern period, the project for a Working Group on Comparative Economics brings together faculty from Classics, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, Anthropology, Economics, History, Political Science, and the Booth School of Business for a two-year program of activities.

Current trends in post-colonial studies, indigenous archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and in the anthropology/history border-zone, indicate the emergence of an as-yet unarticulated new research orientation: the anthropology of history.

The aim of this project is to build pedagogic, critical and aesthetic infrastructures through which the comic can be engaged as a living concept, an aesthetic mode, and a form of life.

This 2014-2016 project will augment a large social experiment in India that seeks to understand the value of health insurance, specifically India’s large public insurance expansion, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).

The Cinemetrics project will involve face-to-face gathering of regular Cinemetrics contributors and principal collaborators in statistics and cultural production to thoughtfully study the place of the Cinemetrics website in the field of Humanities. The website is an open-access interactive website designed to collect, store, and process scholarly data about films.

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has taught at five different universities on two continents and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. She is most interested in topics where humans and nature meet, including subjects in early American history, intellectual history, the history of science, and environmental history.

Ge Zhaoguang is the director of the National Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Fudan University, Shanghai. His work includes many studies of Daoism and Buddhism in the mid-imperial period, and a two-volume synthesis entitled History of Chinese Thought: Knowledge, Thought and Belief (volume one, origins to seventh century; volume 2, seventh to nineteenth centuries). He has been a Global Scholar at Princeton, among other appointments and honors. His scholarship raises questions of the nation and the meaning of “China.” Ge Zhaoguang is one of four collaborators involved in Judith Farquhar and Haun Saussy’s Neubauer Collegium project, History, Philology, and the Nation in the Chinese Humanities.

Issam Eido will be Visiting Instructor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Divinity School during the 2013-2014 academic year.

Mathieu Caesar is maître assistant in medieval history at the University of Geneva and member of the Editorial board of the Glossary on the medieval taxation. As a 2013-2015 Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, Mathieu Caesar will begin his new research on European urban factions and their political languages during the 15th and 16th centuries. This study aims to examine the ideological motives of partisanship and the urban political society through the in-depth analysis of Geneva’s factional struggles on the eve of the Reformation (1513-1536).

Wang Min’an is Professor of International Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he teaches literary and social theory. He has published interpretive books in Chinese on the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Nietzsche, and is the author of many essays of commentary on literature, the visual arts, and Chinese urban popular culture. He is one of four collaborators involved in Judith Farquhar and Haun Saussy’s Neubauer Collegium project, History, Philology, and the Nation in the Chinese Humanities.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University.

Founding editor of Zhongguo xueshu (China Scholarship), the first blind-peer-reviewed academic journal in China for humanities and social sciences; Professor of Chinese and Philosophy, and Vice Dean of the Guoxue yuan (Academy of Traditional Chinese Learning) at Tsinghua University, Beijing

An Authors-Meet-Readers Conference

A two-day conference presented by the Global Literary Networks, a project of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

From May 1-3, 2015 the University of Chicago will host the International Conference “Cinemetrics across Borders.”

A NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM DIRECTOR'S LECTURE