Events
Jan 2 - Apr 19, 2024
Bibliosaurus! Dinosaurs in the Popular Imagination
Sixty-six million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs became extinct. Yet look around, and they are everywhere: on billboards, company logos and cereal boxes. They leap out of the pages of children’s pop-up books, appear in editorial cartoons and dominate comic strips, television and film. They are the subject of countless books, journal articles, toys and video games. Bibliosaurus! Dinosaurs in the Popular Imagination draws on the recent gift to the University of Chicago Library of the Edward Valauskas Collection of Dinosauriana to explore how dinosaurs transformed from objects of intense scientific inquiry into outsize figures in everyday life.
Using children’s books, field guides, journal articles, movie posters, lobby cards, original artwork and even Barbie dolls, Bibliosaurus! investigates subjects from the enduring legacy of Godzilla to the lasting contributions of amateur fossil hunters. The exhibition also illustrates how paleontology has been presented to and captured the public imagination during the past two hundred years.
Feb 8 - Apr 19, 2024
Christopher Williams: Radio/Rauhfaser/Television
Radio / Rauhfaser / Television offers a provisional summation of Christopher Williams’s ongoing research into contemporary mutations of social realism. The exhibition is centered in part on the politically engaged theater of the German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. Williams recently recorded Kroetz’s 1972 radio play Inklusive using vintage audio equipment from both East and West Germany, and the play will be broadcast on Chicago’s Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM) at several points during the show’s run. The strong sense of class consciousness in Kroetz’s work is hinted at in Williams’s use of Rauhfaser, a brand of German wallpaper steeped in social semantics. A single photograph and four hand-painted glass signs hang in the gallery alongside historical documents displayed in six purpose-built vitrines. Its modest scale notwithstanding, the exhibition has an almost manifesto-like quality to it, outlining Williams’s abiding interest in interrogating the way our visual culture is both staged and seen.
This exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours: M–F, 9–4.
Mar 28, 2024
Office of Sustainability Regenstein Tabling
Join the University of Chicago Office of Sustainability on the first floor of Regenstein Library to learn more about their work on campus.
Mar 28, 2024
CEAS Lecture Series ft. Janet Y. Chen
“The Sounds of Mandarin”
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.
March 28, 5:00 pm
Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637
Part of the CEAS Lecture Series, this lecture is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and features Princeton University’s Janet Chen. Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world today. In China, a country with a vast array of regional and local vernaculars, how was this national language created – and how did people learn to speak it? The Sounds of Mandarin traces the surprising social history of a spoken standard, from its creation as the national language of the early Republic in 1913, to its journey to postwar Taiwan, and its reconfiguration as the “common language” of the People’s Republic after 1949. Janet Chen is Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, where she has taught since 2006.
Mar 29, 2024
CAS Workshop - APEA ft. Jianqing Chen
Please join us at APEA next week on Friday, March 29 from 11am to 12:30pm at Cobb 311 for a joint session with the Digital Media Workshop. Professor Jianqing Chen will present a paper titled “Play, Rewind, and Swipe Forward: The Emergence of Horizontal Flow in the Age of Streaming Media.” This workshop will focus on pre-circulated materials and will be largely discussion-based. The paper can be found HERE with the password horizontal. Please do not circulate the materials without the author’s permission. Food and refreshment will be served at the workshop. We hope to see you there!
Play, Rewind, and Swipe Forward: The Emergence of Horizontal Flow in the Age of Streaming Media
Presenter: Jianqing Chen Ph. D., Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis
Time: 11am-12:30pm, Friday, March 29
Location: Cobb 311
Please note the unusual time and place for APEA!
★Co-hosted by the Digital Media Workshop★
★This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.★
Abstract: Known alternatively by various names such as the seek bar, the progress bar, or jindu tiao in Chinese, the playback bar is a standard graphical control element in the (haptic) graphic user interface of streaming media today. It is the major tool for video streaming and simultaneously the key metaphor for the progression of time and life in our media-saturated societies. The playback bar is pervasively presented in our streaming experiences – so pervasive that its techno-cultural connotations are often unnoticed. This paper focuses on the often-ignored playback bar with the aim of exploring the streaming interfaces and serial narratives in contemporary China. It traces the replacement of media control buttons with the progress bar in the virtualization and computerization of the audio/video playback process. The paper further examines the emergent design of seek-able playback bars controlled by swipe gestures with the advent of the touch-based streaming interface. I argue that the playback bar that stretches itself horizontally from left to right solidifies a visual representation of the hitherto abstract concept of progress. It subtly transforms the time spent or consumed watching videos into time used or invested in accumulating information, knowledge, and capital. Through a comparative study of the playback bar and interface design strategies of American streaming services providers (YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu) with their Chinese counterparts (iQiyi, Tencent video, and Mango TV), I show how Chinese streaming platforms develop a distinct (tactile) interface design – swiping left and right across the touchscreen to rewind and fast-forward videos. This design bifurcates from the default designs that American media players stipulate: the quick 10-second rewind and fast-forward icons. This distinction underscores a divergence in interface design philosophies: unlike American interface design’s desire to retain older media experience hinging on control buttons, the Chinese approach creates a new perception of “streaming,” which envisages streaming as a continuous, horizontal flow of moving images across the screen. This perception reimagines how users interact with and engage in streaming videos and reshapes the contemporary experience of streaming time.
Presenter: Jianqing Chen (PhD in Film and Media, the University of California, Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St Louis. Her fields of research and teaching cover cinema and media culture in China, Hongkong, and Taiwan, new media technologies and aesthetics, surveillance, global techno-capitalism, post-socialist culture and critique, and feminist media theory.
Discussant: Thomas Lamarre (PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago) is a scholar of media, cinema and animation, intellectual history and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and on television infrastructures and media ecology (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018). Current projects include research on animation that addresses the use of animals in the formation of media networks associated with colonialism and extraterritorial empire, and the consequent politics of animism and speciesism.
Please feel free to contact Danlin (danlinz@uchicago.edu), James (kennerly@uchicago.edu), Lilian (lkong168@uchicago.edu), or Ziyi (ziyilin@uchicago.edu) with any questions you might have, and we look forward to seeing you at the workshop!
Mar 29, 2024
HHS/HPS Workshop - Melanie Jeske (Chicago) - “Human enough? Organ chips, biomedical models, and the scientific negotiation of humanness.”
Mar 29, 2024
Gender Experiences and Discourses in Israel’s Genocidal War on Gazans with Rema Hammami
Gendered assumptions, tropes and narratives have been constantly invoked in the representational battles over Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s ongoing war on Gazans. The gender of victims and perpetrators, as well as charges and counter-charges about the targeted use of gendered violence have often taken (or been given) front stage on the continuing (high stakes) rhetorical battlefield. This talk seeks to unpack the problematic ways in which gender talk has been enlisted by Israel’s defenders, as well as by its critics. By shifting our focus onto Gazans embodied experiences of Israel’s genocidal violence, we might better understand how gender is both central in the dynamics of this war and in what ways it has been made irrelevant to it.
We will be joined virtually by Professor Rema Hammami (Anthropology, Birzeit University). Rema Hammami is a founding member of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University where she is Associate Professor of Anthropology and currently directs the University’s PhD Program in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. She is founder and former chair of the University’s Right to Education Campaign and co-founder and former director of the Women’s Affairs Centre in Gaza. She has been a Mahmud Darwish visiting fellow at Brown University; a Carnegie Centennial Scholar at Columbia University; and held the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She is a founding member and current co-president of Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. Her most recent publication is the co-edited book (with Lila Abu Lughod and Nadera Shalhub-Kevorkian), The Cunning of Gender Violence: Feminism and Geopolitics (Duke University Press 2023). Her chapter in the volume is entitled: “Catastrophic Aid: GBV Humanitarianism in Gaza.”
Presented by Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago and co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality Student Advisory Board.
Mar 29, 2024
CMES Friday Lecture with Omnia El Shakry: “Psychoanalysis and the Calligraphy of Invention”
Omnia El Shakry is professor of History at Yale University. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, with a particular emphasis on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt. El Shakry is the author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. She is also the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East and Gender and Sexuality in Islam. Prior to Yale, she taught in the History Department at the University of California, Davis.
Mar 29, 2024
East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks ft. Thomas Kelly
“The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China”
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.
Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Series, Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.
This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.