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Events

Intellectual collaborations thrive in environments where ideas are shared, freely and respectfully, among people representing different backgrounds and perspectives. This is why the Neubauer Collegium regularly opens its inquiries and conversations to the public.

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Out Here at Court Theatre

Two seated women holding hands and smiling at each other romantically.
Performance

Out Here at Court Theatre

The new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, premieres at the Court Theatre this spring.

Out Here is a new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, about a family reconfiguring itself and rediscovering joy.

Dawn has a house, a husband, and a family, but she wants more. She wants her ex-girlfriend, Robin. She wants nothing to change and she wants everything to change, and she wants to control all the terms. As she’s caught between what’s been and what’s next, Dawn must learn to reimagine her expectations, harmonize with loved ones, and trust the process. If she can do all that, she might just learn a new song. Strikingly original, Out Here explores the unexpected freedom in relinquishing control, and how, sometimes, you have to break something apart to create something better.

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Court Theatre

The new musical, developed in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium's Arts Labs initiative, premieres at the Court Theatre this spring.

Learn More Watch

Amit Chaudhuri: Music as a Non-Universal Language

Lecture

Amit Chaudhuri: Music as a Non-Universal Language

This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire.

At this series of lectures with performances, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri (Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, 2025–2026) will explore how North Indian classical musical forms like the khayal as well as his own experiments with the raga, the blues, and the soundscapes of the contemporary world emerge from, and express, complex philosophical shifts and departures. Chaudhuri will also consider how the everyday, in India, is situated in philosophical positions that are unwritten, and “in the air.”

Organized by the Sonic Borderlands of South Asia research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the International Balzan Prize, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.

Monday, May 4
The Raga as Investigation of Song
This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies, but investigations into them.

Monday, May 11
Music as a Non-Universal Language
This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire, which disposes of cultural categories like “East” and “West” not in order to embrace universality but to address a constant provisionality.

Monday, May 18
The High Philosophies of Orality
We associate the “oral” today with the vital, the raw, and the multivocal. Chaudhuri looks, instead, at how, in India, orality has often been the domain within which sophisticated philosophical lineages have been disseminated.

Neubauer Collegium

This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire.

Register

Dead End Host

Performance

Dead End Host

This event features a showing of new work by the Chicago-based artist and performer Courtney Mackedanz.

This event features a work-in-progress showing of Chicago-based artist and performer Courtney Mackedanz’s Dead End Host. The piece, which traces how the body emerges from and within ecological conditions, is shaped by the artist’s experience since contracting the tick-borne illness Lyme disease. The performance is presented by the Movement Theory Lab, part of the Arts Labs initiative at the Neubauer Collegium. The Movement Theory Lab is a forum for faculty and graduate students interested in dance and movement studies. It consists of a reading group and a series of workshops at which members focus on embodied experimentation in partnership with professional dancers.

About the Artist
Courtney Mackedanz is an experimental dance maker working across embodied research, expanded choreographic practices, and multimedia performance installations. Meandering gradually through cumulative iterations, their movement based performance practice gravitates toward the quiet complexity of the post-natural landscape while pursuing embodiment as a method of sensing toward technological systems, beyond-human beings, and the scalar complexities of such relational entanglements. In 2025 they pursued their research in collaboration with the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid) and with the support of the 2025 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Award (Chicago). They were a 2024 DanceWEB Scholar with mentor Isabel Lewis (Vienna) and a finalist for the 2024 Artadia Award (Chicago). They have presented their work at The Arts Club, Links Hall, and High Concept Labs (Chicago), amongst others, and have performed within the work of Alexandra Pirici (Chicago Architecture Biennial), Otobong Nkanga (MCA Chicago), and Tino Sehgal (MCA Chicago), amongst others. Mackedanz earned their BFA in Performance and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute (Chicago) a long time ago.

This event features a showing of new work by the Chicago-based artist and performer Courtney Mackedanz.

Register

Amit Chaudhuri: The High Philosophies of Orality

Lecture

Amit Chaudhuri: The High Philosophies of Orality

This talk looks at the oral tradition of philosophical discourse in India.

At this series of lectures with performances, writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri (Professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University; Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, 2025–2026) will explore how North Indian classical musical forms like the khayal as well as his own experiments with the raga, the blues, and the soundscapes of the contemporary world emerge from, and express, complex philosophical shifts and departures. Chaudhuri will also consider how the everyday, in India, is situated in philosophical positions that are unwritten, and “in the air.”

Organized by the Sonic Borderlands of South Asia research project at the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with the International Balzan Prize, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.

Monday, May 4
The Raga as Investigation of Song
This talk incorporates a North Indian classical music performance and explores Chaudhuri’s belief that ragas are not based on melodies, but investigations into them.

Monday, May 11
Music as a Non-Universal Language
This talk is organized around a performance of Chaudhuri’s “non-fusion” repertoire, which disposes of cultural categories like “East” and “West” not in order to embrace universality but to address a constant provisionality.

Monday, May 18
The High Philosophies of Orality
We associate the “oral” today with the vital, the raw, and the multivocal. Chaudhuri looks, instead, at how, in India, orality has often been the domain within which sophisticated philosophical lineages have been disseminated.

Neubauer Collegium

This talk looks at the oral tradition of philosophical discourse in India.

Register