Plato and Aristotle lived in societies that took human beings to differ according to the region in which they lived, their culture, language, and also their skin color and other phenotypic markers. These differences – whether labeled as "racial," "proto-racial," "ethnic," or otherwise – were often associated with cognitive, emotional, and moral dispositions and traits. Yet there has been little engagement with the ways in which representations of race and ethnicity shaped the philosophical views of Plato and Aristotle. This project will fill that gap by producing an edited volume of essays that maps, systematically, the treatment and significance of race and ethnicity in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The volume will contain accessible, cutting-edge research that will make the topic of ancient Greek philosophy of race and ethnicity more available to teachers, students, and researchers, and it will set up debate for years to come.

This research project seeks to understand the process of becoming urban at a critical time in Cambodian history. Combining traditional and distributed ethnographic methods, the research team will explore and analyze the lived experiences of migrants from rural villages to urban centers; the economic, environmental, and social factors that drove the decision to migrate; and the changing connections to place, space, and people that result from becoming urban. Ultimately, the project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites.

Women did science at Yerkes Observatory in the early twentieth century. These women were not merely calculators, assistants, or secretaries. They got degrees, collaborated with peers of both sexes, and worked on papers, albeit ones for which they were rarely listed as authors. (Husbands or deceased men more often received the credit.) But while their lives and labor are all but invisible in public records, their contributions to science – and their voices – remain preserved in archives across the country. The interdisciplinary team on this project will begin reconstructing the scientific work and lived experiences of approximately fifteen women in their own words through new archival research. The team will focus on four topics: (1) women’s networks anchored at women’s colleges; (2) women’s research and contributions to observatory operations; (3) Yerkes’s role as a unique place for women in science; (4) women’s personal and professional relationships with their male colleagues.

Investigating the dynamic ways these women contributed to the advancement of science and their varied experiences as women in science will open a new chapter in the history of astronomy and astrophysics that foregrounds the importance of hitherto invisible labor. It will also contribute to a larger reevaluation of scientific progress, which de-prioritizes the work of so-called great men or exceptional women in favor of a more holistic and inclusive conception of scientific research. Our key question is: In what ways can the study of scientific practices, research collaborations, and professional networks transform our understanding of women’s contributions to astronomy and astrophysics?

Through the long twentieth-century a series of imperial, social, and ecological collapses and reformations have registered in the fabrics and fashions we use to form and transform our bodies and social environments. Textiles and wearable costumes have at once structured imperial formations and their ordering of ecological, racial, and gendered regimes. However, they have also materialized alternate ways of being, refashioning conceptions of identity, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as they transform the shape of the body and our interaction with lived space and environment. Comparing the Soviet and French Orientalist imaginaries of its southern and eastern colonies in North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia exposes a common preoccupation with costume and textiles as both modes of exoticization and imperial capture and revolutionary forms of anti-colonial resistance. This includes the ways in which French orientalist photographs of women in North Africa exoticized dress, bodily ornamentation, and textiles to mediate colonial desires, as well as how costume and textile served the Soviet orientalist creation of distinctive "nationalities" and their assimilation into the multinational imperial project. The collapse of these two empires renders legible how self-fashioning through forms of wearable art and textiles—as indigenous semiotics shared by both regions and interconnected through overlapping migratory histories of textile production and circulation—provided a means of evasion, disguise, and play. This project turns to costumes, textiles, and wearable art as forms of anti-colonial and queer resistance at the interfaces of embodiment, materiality, ecology, and affect. Activities include a series of reading groups, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that will travel from Chicago (2024) to Tbilisi (2025) and Paris (2026). Reinterpreting traditional clothes, parodying uniforms, or queering garments against a backdrop of imperial, social, and ecological collapse, the project addresses the formation of new modes of politics and aesthetics fashioned through wearable art.

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the strategy of governing the macro economy primarily through the management of money and financial markets while ceding most of society’s investment to the private sector has been in retreat. Again and again, governments and central banks have aggressively intervened in the economy to backstop runs on financial institutions, prevent the collapse of various asset markets, bolster purchasing power in the economy through direct payments to citizens, maintain the solvency of intensely pandemic-disadvantaged businesses, and stimulate employment (Tooze 2018). Perhaps even more remarkably, this revival of state and fiscal intervention has not simply been an emergency response to a series of crises. The accumulation of longer term economic, social, and environmental externalities, widely believed to be generated by policies privileging private-sector investment and market freedom, also has given rise to impatience with the use of market mechanisms to achieve social goals or redress imbalances. Political demands from society have already generated moves to use the state to redistribute income, forgive specific forms of debt, restructure industry, engineer “energy transitions,” encourage investment in “green tech” and otherwise redirect investment toward ends that appear to be, or are alleged to be, in line with the will of the demos (Allen 2022, Aronoff 2019).

Dramatic in itself, this re-politicization of investment and consumption comes at a time when our confidence in the institutions of liberal democracy is being challenged. The contemporary demos, wherever it is, often feels alienated, underserved, or excluded from the institutions that are there to represent and serve it. With the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental goals intentionally displaced to the market for half a century, the non-market, deliberative, political mechanisms for the democratic transmission of citizen will into investment and consumption policies have atrophied, or, worse, become instruments of economic and social interests favored by the market (Fishkin & Forbath 2022, Philippon 2019). Core institutions in the incumbent order (parliaments, parties, corporations, markets, unions, nonprofit entities) are being attacked, their authority and effectiveness as governors of economic process delegitimized and their claim to be channelers of democratic will called into question. Many once powerful movements and organizations that traditionally represented broad social interests in macroeconomic policy formation, such as those for workers and farmers, have nearly disappeared altogether (Andrias 2016). Other crucial governance institutions that continue to exist – in particular, central banks and corporations – are being continually recomposed by new social, economic, and environmental dynamics in ways that are dramatically recasting their boundaries and forcing a reconsideration of their social roles and the way in which they formulate and pursue investment goals (Omarova 2021; Herrigel 2018, Baldwin 2016,). Old norms, such as an understanding of economic growth as an unadulterated good capable of creating social harmony and overcoming material division and conflict, are losing their appeal in the face of worsening inequality and climate crises (Daly 2007, Kallis et al 2018). To be sure, there is no shortage of new ideas about alternative social ends – involving different ways of relating to nature, to work and production, or to community life and solidarity – but the existing political economic arrangements for converting those ideas into investment seem often inadequate to the task.

We believe that this confluence of mounting state intervention into key social processes of investment and consumption combined with growing disarray and disillusionment with the incumbent political and economic institutions and organizations of will formation and governance is the defining political economic dilemma of our age. Our proposal to the Neubauer Collegium is to convene a series of workshops that gather different groupings of scholars (from an array of disciplines) to discuss the relationship between the market, the state and democracy in both historical and contemporary contexts.

The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. The project pairs each of these issues with a crossroad moment in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that determined the course that the study of the Indian past would take: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for a past that mirrored his commitments to justice and equality in the present, Muni Jinavijaya’s efforts to free Indian thought from the limitations of manuscript textuality, and Georg Bühler’s vision of recovering the history of a country that, according to a commonplace, “has no history.” Each of these moments reveals the intensity of political commitment, and the depth of vision, involved in studying the Indian past. This project will attempt to answer where such scholarship might go in the future.

This interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists will enhance ancient DNA research at the University of Chicago and spur the development of a curriculum in archaeogenetics to bridge the gap between these two disciplines. An “ancient DNA revolution” is occurring in archaeology and ancient history because of new laboratory and statistical methods for extracting and analyzing DNA from ancient skeletal remains. These new methods have enabled the reconstruction of thousands of complete genomes from ancient specimens found in a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts. These genomes provide striking evidence of ancient population migrations, often challenging archaeologists’ long-held ideas about cultural change. The project will analyze DNA from ancient human remains excavated in the Middle East in order to reconstruct population movements and assess the prevailing explanations for cultural change in the Bronze Age civilizations of this region. This requires close collaboration and frequent discussions between geneticists and archaeologists of the kind the research team intends to demonstrate in this project. A series of workshops and an international conference will foster discussions of how ancient DNA results can best contribute to the construction of historical narratives. In light of concerns about biological reductionism and what some see as the implied racism of genetic studies, the project will seek viable ways of conceptualizing the relationship between genetic variation, cultural and linguistic similarities and differences, and the social construction of ethnicity and group solidarity.

Data flows in enormous quantities from individuals to companies, as the use of basic products including search engines, social platforms, health products, entertainment services, and others is conditioned on the surrender of biographical, biometric, behavioral, and experiential data. The accumulation of individual data on such a large scale has given rise to elaborate markets for individual data that generate immense value for firms and platforms but create a complex of risks for the individuals whose data these markets trade. This collaborative project between law and computer science aims to focus for the first time on the advent of parallel public data markets. Federal, state, and local governments, who have privileged access to intimate data at enormous scale and range about their constituents, have followed the template developed in the private sector and learned to expand, aggregate, and increase the value of their data stores by sharing and consolidating data across levels and institutions of government. These intergovernmental data markets are no less sizable or consequential than those established by private-sector firms; and they introduce risks to individuals not always present in private data sharing. This project aims to develop an integrated legal and technical understanding of how data flows between governments; to study the unique risks these data flows pose to individuals in areas ranging from privacy to discrimination to accuracy to power; and to develop and test tools to improve the fairness of intergovernmental data sharing that are alert to both legal and technical realities.

This interdisciplinary research project investigates the relationship of cultural practices to episodes of disaster in the modern period. Cultural practices such as art-making, storytelling, memorializing, and collecting are vital fields through which communities make sense of disastrous events, register their impact, and envision recovery. However, disasters also call in to question the relevance of cultural practices to urgent matters of bare survival. While much scholarship is premised on the first claim, less work has taken up the second challenge. We ask: Is culture useful in disastrous times? If so, how and why? In what ways have cultural practices contributed to disaster? In what ways have they forestalled it? We seek to address these questions historically, assembling a group of scholars across fields working on historic episodes of cultural production in times of crisis to generate robust frameworks for articulating the significance of cultural life where it is often assumed. We also seek to understand these questions historiographically, drawing from the insights of historical narratives to develop strategies for the future of our own work as cultural historians in the face of the disasters that bear on the contemporary world. The centerpiece of this project are two workshops that take on the historical and historiographical dimensions of these questions in turn. These workshops will form the basis of a new network of cultural historians, not currently manifest as such, devoted to historically informed experimentation with how cultural history might develop as the conditions in which we do our scholarship continue to transform.