The Arts Labs project is designed to identify and explore new frontiers of artistic collaboration across a range of media, technologies, and scales. Now in its second phase at the Neubauer Collegium, the project is comprised of five discrete labs: the Opera Lab, which is devoted to preparing the new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in 2028-30, examining the tetralogy’s production history and aesthetic politics (on hiatus during the 2025–2026 academic year); the Movement Theory Lab, studying theories and practices of embodiment in dance through a variety of conceptual perspectives and choreographic workshops; the Dance-Theater Creation Lab, a partnership with Lucky Plush Productions to create a dance-theater production inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (FACING); the Un-Musical Lab, exploring the dissolution and recomposition of a family told through the dissolution and recomposition of musical theater form; the New Directions in Contemporary Publishing Lab, which convenes editors and writers from distinguished literary publications to collaborate on identifying emerging futures for translation and publishing; and an Arts Labs seminar, which meets regularly to workshop the concepts undergirding the larger initiative.

The use of dyes extracted from plants and insects has a complex history in multiple communities in Mexico. Organisms such as indigo plants, cochineal insects, and cempazuchitl are ingredients in artisanal practices, local cuisine, and traditional medicine that in many cases predate Spanish contact. Recent international interest in these natural resources is putting pressure on their management, but scientific and educational opportunities would allow local communities to study these culturally significant organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use. We propose an interdisciplinary project to collect histories and taxonomies of the organisms used in natural dye production, addressing their identities, their ecologies, their cultural uses, and their manifold significance to colorant makers. Although the colorant uses have been previously documented, many of these studies rely on partial taxonomic classifications, where only the genus of the plant but not the species has been identified. We hypothesize that scientific documentation of the species used will provide new insights into the uses of these organisms and their dyes. A more precise description of the plants and organisms used for dye extraction will also facilitate the communities’ efforts to manage their own resources; their request for a collaboration is what gave rise to this proposal. In addition to a series of workshops, we will publish our findings in a bilingual general audience book and project website, as well as peer-reviewed journals. We will also organize six conferences in Mexico and twin exhibits in Chicago and Oaxaca.

The vocation of health care is often framed in universalist terms: clinicians are pledged to uphold core ethical commitments—beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and autonomy—irrespective of patients’ identities or circumstances. This project interrogates how “universal” health care ethics are interpreted and enacted when clinicians care for “others” in contexts of inequality. We explore the dynamics of compassion, justice, and professional duty in settings where advantaged and disadvantaged populations live in close proximity yet experience radically different life conditions. The central research questions investigate which ethical obligations are understood as universal in medicine, how these obligations come under pressure in encounters with frequently stigmatized groups, and whether clinicians apply them consistently across lines of race, class, nationality, and conflict.

Employing a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach that integrates philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and public health, the research combines conceptual analysis with preliminary empirical work in two paired case studies: Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories and the North/South Sides of Chicago. We will examine how health care providers rationalize inconsistencies in clinical ethics; how they think about justice in their relationships with patients, colleagues, and institutions; and whether they express optimism or pessimism about the possibility of a just medical system.

A key focus is on initiatives designed to improve care for “others,” especially those that incorporate humanistic education—history, literature, film, and related media—to cultivate cultural and structural competency. We will assess the perceived effectiveness of these efforts and ask whether they expand clinicians’ “moral circles” or mitigate “compassion collapse.” Anticipated outcomes include a shared interdisciplinary lexicon, a cross-disciplinary methodological framework, and concrete proposals for future interventions that can strengthen compassion and justice in divided health care landscapes.

Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from differing perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two remains rare. The Case of the Human is an ambitious collaborative project aimed not merely at translating existing theory across humanities and medical epistemologies, but rather at co-producing new, plural knowledge of the human that transcends epistemological boundaries. The project addresses the core questions: “What is the human?” and “What does the category of the human do?” The research team aims to create novel, multidisciplinary, and pluralistic knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We will achieve this goal through three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing novel, plural knowledge on the human through two working conferences (one of which was held during the first phase of the project), with distribution as a case-series in The Lancet; 2) establishing the University of Chicago as a hub in global medical humanities networks through a medical humanities institution-building conference, and convening Visiting Fellows to implement, refine, and disseminate, our novel interdisciplinary methodology; and 3) a visual artistic exploration the human and the case form through student artistic workshops and a graphic medicine exhibition. We seek to advance this project’s innovative scholarship that began with the Neubauer Collegium by scaling up its successes of interdisciplinary collaborations and centering artistic understandings of the human.

Thanks to archaeological and epigraphic discoveries in the last century, we know that alphabetic writing—one of the most important technological innovations in human history—emerged over 4,000 years ago within the context of Egyptian-Levantine cultural contact. Yet many questions remain: What cultural practices led to the rise of the alphabet? Who invented it? When, where, and for what purpose(s)? How and why was it transmitted? This project will create an interdisciplinary community of inquiry at the University of Chicago centered on these questions. We will bring together an international group of collaborators working in archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics, and digital humanities, promoting discourse through a symposium hosted at the Neubauer Collegium. Our goal is to advance the study of alphabetic origins by (1) producing a new digital edition of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions based on state-of-the-art images; (2) creating a database to trace the transmission of alphabetic writing; and (3) drawing on parallels from more recently invented writing systems to better understand the social forces that drive the creation of new scripts. We anticipate the project to fill critical gaps in scholarship on the invention and transmission of the alphabet, publishing findings via diverse media for wide scholarly and public reach. We will make our digital edition and database freely available through UChicago’s CORPUS platform, enabling future research on the alphabet while placing UChicago at the forefront of humanistic inquiry on the rise of a writing system still in global use today.

The housing crisis looms large across the contemporary United States and the city of Chicago. Our interdisciplinary and multi-method project centers the role of imagination in addressing the crisis, asking how housing is imagined and how imagination might be a crucial tool for confronting the housing crisis. We will draw on conversations, interviews, and cultural archives to organize and illuminate the housing imaginaries of housing practitioners, advocates, dreamers, and residents, past and present. The project will culminate in academic and public-facing publications as well as a public convening. By uncovering and disseminating housing imaginaries, this project promises to push beyond an impasse among social scientists, who are hindered by their focus on critique, and a trepidation among humanities scholars to engage with contemporary social issues. Overall, our project will advance scholarship and advocacy on housing but also demonstrate the intellectual and civic value of collaborative, cross-disciplinary research at the nexus of culture and society.

With the emergence of large language and other generative AI models, every field of study is having to wrestle with their impact on its established disciplinary habits and practices. In humanities fields, the task is especially urgent given how rapidly these technologies have embedded themselves in the processes and systems that mediate creative activity and knowledge production. The Humanistic AI project starts from the premise that the most productive response to these technologies is to address them head on. The project will bring together specialists from multiple domains of intellectual inquiry (literature, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, computer science) to collectively identify the challenges generative models present to these domains. Participants will seek to articulate a strategic vision for how to evaluate these models on our own disciplinary terms; to potentially enlist them as collaborators in humanistic research; and to inform their development and deployment beyond academia. In a series of meetings held over two years, we will produce a set of case studies that model this vision, and thus help to lay the conceptual and methodological ground for a rethinking of humanities research and humanistic pursuits in the wake of generative models.

Language mediates our relationships to our past and the rapidly changing world around us. However, our understandings of linguistic mediation have been limited by widespread spoken-language bias. Social scientists have demonstrated that language is not limited to one modality and that it couples prolifically with gesture and other modes of expression. Since 2007, a new, tactile language has been emerging in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. called “Protactile Language.” This language is produced on the body of the listener, or what protactile theorists aj granda and Jelica Nuccio call “contact space.” In contact space, there are stories that open onto large, expansive fields, extending across your chest and down your arm. There are corn stalks that grow up your arm and through your fingers. There is the warmth of the sun at sunset, slowly receding over your shoulder and slipping away behind your back. There are histories that start at your right shoulder and proceed in detailed stops toward your left. There are even wind storms, coming straight from the storyteller’s mouth and billowing down your shirt. This project brings together a team of linguists, anthropologists, media scholars, and DeafBlind people with special expertise in protactile storytelling traditions to find new multimodal ways of generating and circulating cultural and historical knowledge. While multimodality is commonplace in visual channels (think of a history book with pictures in it), this project will explore the ways that tactile, olfactory, and thermal channels can shape our impressions of the past and open up new possibilities for the future.

Recent decades of political activism to revitalize endangered languages have created linguistic change, and a new linguistic future. These developments challenge mainstream (socio)linguistic theory, which has long sidelined languages that undergo shift as showing mere “deficit,” decay, and irregularity. Our goal is to mobilize this new evidence, paired with current and new methods, to put shifting languages at the center of (socio)linguistic theory and thereby rethink some of its core questions, specifically: the nature of language community and its boundedness; complexity in language change; regularity in social meaning; the category of “native speaker.” We aim to develop these issues in a collaborative project that brings together twenty scholars who study shifting languages and their contexts. In two seminars over two years, with papers rewritten in between, we aim for a volume of linked, theoretically integrative essays.