Events

“Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland”

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

Tuesday, May 7 - 5:00 pm

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Series, Ruth Rogaski uncovers how natural knowledge, and the nature of Manchuria itself – a site of war and environmental extremes - have changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation. Hear Professor Rogaski talk about her book “Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland” (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

This event is co-sponsored with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless, the laboring body absent? Works By attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor drawing by Tony Lewis, performatively produced on site. A sculpture by Devin T. Mays features pallets collected during his wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a 2012 photograph by Bethany Collins, captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. A large photo by Ellen Rothenberg depicts a work boot; another captures a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Barbara Kruger mural. The fruits of these artists’ labors will be on view from May 1 (International Workers’ Day) through July 14 (Bastille Day)—two dates that commemorate landmark events in the history of the working class.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

On Wednesday, May 8, 2024, the Chicago Center on Democracy will host a conversation on how countries decide to go to war. We will discuss questions such as: Who in a government makes such decisions, and what is their process for doing so? How can voters hold such decision-makers accountable? What factors are considered when making decisions to go to war. How has this process changed over time?

For this discussion, we will welcome Tanisha Fazal (University of Minnesota; author of Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War) and Elizabeth Saunders (Columbia University; author of The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace), who will be joined in conversation by Austin Carson (University of Chicago; author of Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics).

Please RSVP, lunch will be provided to those registered. 

Spring 2024 CLAS Tinker Lecture

Brazilian Portuguese as a transatlantic language: African Contact and Multilingualism in colonial Brazil Esmeralda Negrão - Universidade de São Paulo

It is well known that Brazilian Portuguese exhibits several grammatical characteristics that distinguish it from European Portuguese and other Romance languages, but how did it come to be this way? This talk will examine how population structure in the multilingual ecology of colonial Brazil - African, Indigenous, and European - has affected language change and evolution, thus providing a nuanced perspective on the creole origins of Brazilian Portuguese. Lunch will be served upon registration for the event.

Speaker: Christian Wolf, MIT Topic: TBA

Alfred Galichon, NYU Topic: TBA

“Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Modern Chinese Media”

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

Wednesday, May 8 · 5:00 pm

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

Part of the East Asia by the Book! CEAS Author Talks series, the University of Michigan’s S.E. Kile discusses his book that argues that the maverick cultural entrepreneur, Li Yu’s cultural experimentation exploits the seams between language and the tangible world. He draws attention to the materiality of particular media forms, expanding the scope of early modern media by interweaving books, buildings, and bodies. Within and across these media, Li Yu’s cultural entrepreneurship with the technology of the printed book embraced its reproducibility while retaining a personal touch. His literary practice informed his garden design and, conversely, he drew on garden design to transform the vernacular short story. Ideas for extreme body modification in Li Yu’s fiction remade the possibilities of real human bodies in his nonfiction writing. Towers in the Void calls for seeing books, bodies, and buildings as interlinked media forms, both in early modern China and in today’s media-saturated world, positioning the Ming and Qing as a crucial site of global early modern cultural change.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.

Join us on the second Wednesday of the month as we welcome Korshi Doosoo, leader of the project The Coptic Magical Papyri: Vernacular Religion in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. Dosoo will present the lecture: Christian Egypt and its Pagan Past: Perspectives on Pharaonic Civilization from Coptic Magic. Dooso’s research focuses on magical and lived religion in Egypt from the Ptolemaic to the Mamluk periods as revealed by papyrological and epigraphic sources.

People in pre-modern cultures wore many objects on their bodies as amulets, such as roots, seashells, or carved images. But at different points in time all of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean began to inscribe prayers and charms on linen, papyrus, gold foil, or gemstones, and to use them as amulets. At this conference, a group of international scholars will ask and try to answer numerous questions about what happens at this point of transition and why. Does the more permanent nature of a text imply its continual presence, ever repeating? Were textual amulets created and used by literate elites alone? What is the relationship between text and image on amulets? If gods previously listened to prayers, when did they learn to read? This conference stems from a larger project to publish a representative collection of textual amulets from across the Mediterranean and throughout antiquity, facilitating the study of the various traditions, their connections, and transformations.

This conference will be available on livestream via Zoom.

Participants

Clifford Ando (University of Chicago)

Anke Ilona Blöbaum (Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig)

Korshi Dosoo (University of Würzburg)

Rivka Elitzur-Leiman (Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago)

Christopher Faraone (University of Chicago)

Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago)

Carolina López-Ruiz (University of Chicago)

Margaret Mitchell (University of Chicago)

Árpád Nagy (University of Pécs, Hungary)

Megan Nutzman (Old Dominion University)

Madadh Richey (Brandeis University)

Joe Sanzo (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago)

Panagiota Sarischouli (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Sofia Torallas Tovar (University of Chicago)

Erin Walsh (University of Chicago)

Michael Zellmann-Rohrer (Macquarie University / Freie Universität Berlin)

This conference is presented by the Textual Amulets of the Mediterranean World research project at the Neubauer Collegium with the support of the Divinity School and Classics Department at the University of Chicago.

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless, the laboring body absent? Works By attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a floor drawing by Tony Lewis, performatively produced on site. A sculpture by Devin T. Mays features pallets collected during his wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a 2012 photograph by Bethany Collins, captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. A large photo by Ellen Rothenberg depicts a work boot; another captures a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Barbara Kruger mural. The fruits of these artists’ labors will be on view from May 1 (International Workers’ Day) through July 14 (Bastille Day)—two dates that commemorate landmark events in the history of the working class.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.