The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

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.

This project, organized by University of Chicago professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Orit Bashkin in partnership with Walid Saleh from the University of Toronto, explores the ways in which Jewish political thought and literature were transformed in the medieval and modern periods as a result of their interactions with Muslim and Arab cultures.

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.

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.

A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī (1414-1492) in the Dar al-Islam and Beyond

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Three decades of war and external pressure in Iraq have led to the decimation of its university system and its intellectuals. What does it mean to be a scholar at war? Is humanistic inquiry during wartime possible? How has this downfall of Iraq’s domestic university-level intellectual class – professors and university researchers – affected the country’s social, military, and political spheres?

Peter S. Cook is Associate Professor in the Department of ASL-English Interpretation at Columbia College Chicago and an internationally known Deaf performing artist whose work incorporates American Sign Language, pantomime, storytelling, acting, and movement.

Celia López Alcalde is an assistant professor in Latin Philology at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, as well as member of the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM) at this University. Her PhD activities, finished in 2012, were focused on the study of both philosophical and religious polemical texts produced in Spain in the thirteen and fourteen century, writings mostly produced in the Crown of Aragon. While doing research at the Neubauer Collegium as a visiting fellow (via the CASB Fellows Program) Celia wants to delve in religious polemics between Jews and Christians in the end of the thirteen century, through the edition and analysis of the complete anti-Jews work by Ramon Llull (1232-1316), a key figure to the topic. She also aims to establish definitive conclusions, based on textual proofs, on the real relationships between Llull and Judaism as well as with Jewish Philosophy.

A leading conservator of contemporary art, New York based Christian Scheidemann is the only one in the world who has built his expertise on art made from non-traditional materials. A scholar who, in his publications, draws on his art historical training, intellectual breadth, and conservation experiences, Scheidemann is also a practitioner in the sense that he restores art, halts or slows its aging process, or advises not to intervene, but also in the sense that he consults and collaborates with artists who work with unusual materials. As part of the two-year Neubauer Collegium project, Material Matters, Scheidemann will visit the University of Chicago for a series of engagements with a growing number of local scholars interested in the materials of modern and contemporary art.

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.

Mike Baxter is Emeritus Professor of Statistical Archaeology and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). He has written several papers on the subject of Cinemetrics and contributed to discussions on the Cinemetrics website about such applications. He will collaborate with UChicago faculty member Yuri Tsivian and Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow Daria Khitrova on the project, Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage.

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

Daria Khitrova is a specialist in poetry and dance with more recent stakes in film studies. During the 2012-2013 AY, Daria will collaborate with UChicago faculty member Yuri Tsivian and Michael John Baxter from Nottingham Trent University (UK) on the project, Cinemetrics Across Boundaries: A Collaborative Study of Montage. Specifically, Daria will contribute knowledge from meter-driven arts such as music, poetry, and dance.

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

Xie Shaobo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. Focusing particularly on twentieth-century literary theory, he has research and teaching interests in postcolonial theory and literature, neo-Marxism, cultural studies, globalization, Chinese Canadian literature, and Chinese modernity. 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.

Stephan Sawyer is chair of the History Department, founder of the Urban Studies program and co-founder of the History, Law, and Society program at The American University of Paris. As a 2013-2014 Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow Sawyer will collaborate with Elisabeth Clemens, Bernard Harcourt, and James Sparrow on their project, The State as History and Theory.

Keynote Address of the Crisis of Humanitarianism / Humanitarianism in Crisis Conference

This one-day symposium is part of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society project, The Working Group on Comparative Economics.

The Global Literary Networks Spring 2014 Conference