Presenters

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E. Annamalai is Visiting Professor in Tamil in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. A linguist by training, he primarily focuses on modern and traditional Tamil grammar. His research interests include the development of indigenous languages of India, language use in the Tamil society, and language conflicts. In addition to instructing, he currently serves as Chair of Terralingua, an international non-profit organization that promotes bio-cultural diversity, and as Secretary-General of International Association for Tamil Research.

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Niall Atkinson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the College. As an architectural and urban historian focusing on the late medieval and Early Renaissance in Italy, Atkinson studies the reception of buildings and spaces to determine what residents thought about their city. The historical urban soundscape is central to his investigation and led to an even more complex project on the phenomenology of architecture through the entire sensorial apparatus of the body, where taste, touch, and smell, as well as hearing and sight, also have an architectural history.

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Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor in Classics and the Program in Gender Studies. She is the author of Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Princeton, 1989), Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge MA, 1994), Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s “Civil War” (Cambridge MA, 1998), and The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire (Chicago, 2006). She has also edited volumes on the history of rhetoric, Eros, ekphrasis, and Seneca. Her teaching is primarily devoted to Roman literature and culture, and her current research addresses the reception of the Classics in modern China.

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Orit Bashkin is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Her publications include articles on the history of Arab Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history, and on Arabic literature. Her books include The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, 2009) and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq, which was published by Stanford University Press in September 2012.

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Philip Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College. He is also artistic director of the Jewish cabaret troupe and the ensemble-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities, The New Budapest Orpheum Society. His current research includes books on Johann Gottfried Herder and nationalism, Hanns Eisler as a Jewish composer (with Andrea F. Bohlman), and the aesthetics and politics of silence in music. Ongoing fieldwork includes studies of music in the Muslim communities of Europe and of religion and the arts in India.

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Michael Bourdaghs is Professor in Modern Japanese Literature and Chair in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research interests include modern Japanese literature, culture, and intellectual history, as well as popular music and literary and critical theory in Japan. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop, also published by Columbia University Press in February 2012.

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Diane Brentari is Professor in the Department of Linguistics; she studies Sign Language, phonology, and morphology. Currently her work addresses cross-linguistic variation particularly in the differences and similarities among sign languages in the formation of complex classifier predicates. She is also interested in how the mental lexicon emerges in historical time, which includes the relationship between gesture, homesign systems, and well-established sign languages. She is the author of A Prosodic Model of Sign Language Phonology (Cambridge, MA, 1998) and editor of Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey (Cambridge, UK, 2010) and Foreign Vocabulary in Sign Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Word Formation (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001). 

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Alain Bresson is Professor in the Department of Classics. A historian of the ancient world, his particular interests lie in the ancient economy, the Hellenistic world, and the epigraphy of Rhodes and Asia Minor. He is the author of La cités marchande (Bordeaux, 2000), L'économie de la Grèces des cités (2 volumes; Paris, 2007-2008), and Recueil des inscriptions de la Pérée rhodienne (Paris, 1991), and editor of an additional five books on matters of economics, civic life, writing and public power, and the history of the family.

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Benjamin Callard is Lecturer in Philosophy, Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), and the Philosophy/MAPH Coordinator. His areas of specialization are ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. He also has strong interests in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He teaches the Core Course and the Analytic Philosophy Core Seminar for MAPH students and is responsible for coordinating the interface between MAPH and the Philosophy Department.

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Ted Cohen is Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He has lectured on the nature of humor and jokes, as well as on sports, photography, and art. His interest in humor began as a hobby and has since become a full-blown academic pursuit: he began studying jokes after publishing essays on figurative speech. Among his recent publications are the book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago 2001) and the essays “Identifying with Metaphor,” “Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative,” and “Three Problems in Kant’s Aesthetics.” His most recent publication is Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (Princeton 2008).

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Raúl Coronado is Associate Professor in the Department of English. His teaching and research interests are in Latina/Latino literary and cultural history, from the colonial period to the 1940s. His book, A World Not to Come: A History of 19th Century Latino Writing & Print Culture will be published by Harvard University Press in spring 2013.

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Rachel DeWoskin is Visiting Lecturer in the Committee on Creative Writing. She is the author of Big Girl Small: A Novel (New York, FSG: 2011), the award-winning novel Repeat After Me (New York: Overlook, 2009), and a memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), which has been published in six countries and is being developed as a television series by HBO. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her awards include a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship, American Library Association’s 2012 Alex Award, and an American Academy of Poets Award. Her next novel, Blind, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2013.

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Christopher A. Faraone is the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College. His books include Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Early Greek Myth and Ritual (Oxford, 1992), Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard, 1999), and The Stanzaic Architecture of Early Greek Elegy (Oxford, 2008). His teaching focuses on archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, magic and religion, and Near Eastern influences on early Greek culture.

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Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Music. He studies the history of nineteenth-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (to be published by the University of Chicago and Casa Ricordi of Milan in 2015) and of The Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag). His book Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006) won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. Gossett is the first musicologist to win the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and has been awarded Italy’s highest civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce. He is also the former president of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Textual Scholarship. He serves as lecturer and consultant to opera houses across America and Italy, and this past summer advised the production team at the Santa Fe Music Festival in the performance of Maometto Secondo. A former dean of the Humanities Division, Gossett has been at the University of Chicago since 1968.

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Lenore Grenoble is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Slavic Linguistics and Chair in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is interested in Slavic, Tungusic and languages of the North, discourse and conversation analysis, deixis, contact linguistics and language endangerment, attrition, and revitalization. She currently serves on the Advisory panel of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Project, housed at London University School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her fieldwork focuses on languages of Siberia and she is currently engaged in research on the interrelations between language, culture and environment in the North. 

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Jason Grunebaum is Senior Lecturer in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is the translator of Uday Prakash's Hindi novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (Yale University Press/Penguin India) and a trio of Prakash novellas entitled The Walls of Delhi (UWA Press). He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation for his translation, with Ulrike Stark, of Manzoor Ahtesham's The Tale of the Missing Man, and a PEN Translation Fund Grant. He is also a member of the University Creative Writing Advisory Committee and has fiction published in One StoryWeb ConjunctionsSouthwest Review, and Third Coast. Salman Rushdie selected his Maria Ximenes da Costa de Carvalho Perreira as a distinguished short story in 2007.

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Matthew Jesse Jackson is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Visual Arts. His research interests include the theory and practice of the Euro-American historical and neo-avant-gardes, conceptual art, management and performance art, and the collaborative and the collective in the contemporary art world. His book The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Chicago, 2010) won the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (formerly the AAASS). 

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Alison James is Assistant Professor of French Literature and the College. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth and twenty-first century French literature, with a particular focus on postwar experimental writing (both poetry and prose), the Oulipo group, representations of everyday life, and the connections between literature and philosophy. Her book Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Northwestern, 2009) analyzes the formal and thematic functions of chance in the works of Georges Perec, a major figure of postwar French literature. Her current book project traces a documentary tendency in twentieth-century French literature via a study of key works that place the relationship of fact and fiction into question.

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Chris Kennedy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics. His research addresses issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language. He is also engaged in work on language processing and acquisition. In addition to publishing numerous journal articles on these topics, he is Associate Editor of the Oxford University Press series Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics. His publications include Adjectives and Adverbs: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse (with Louise McNally, Oxford, 2008).

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Gabriel Lear is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Committee on Social Thought whose work focuses on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her book, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, 2004), is about the relationship between morally virtuous action and theoretical contemplation in the happiest life. She is currently writing about Plato's aesthetics and the status of beauty as an ethical concept in the work of several philosophers.

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Peter Leonard is Associate Director of Research Computing in the Division of the Humanities. His background is in contemporary Nordic literature, specifically new ‘post-ethnic’ figurations of national belonging in Scandinavian fiction. He is broadly interested in digital and quantitative methods in the humanities, including text mining, network analysis, image analysis and corpus query engines. In 2010 he was awarded a Google Digital Humanities Research Award for the Automated Literary Analysis of the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.
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Anne Leonard is Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Curator and Associate Director of Academic Initiatives at the Smart Museum of Art. She co-curated (with Chelsea Foxwell) the exhibit “Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints.” Her research interests include French and Belgian art of the 19th century; symbolism and Wagnerism; music in relation to the other arts; attention and modes of aesthetic experience; and nationalism and internationalism.

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Ana Maria Lima is Senior Lecturer and Portuguese Language Coordinator in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Born in Brazil, she is interested in Portuguese language and literature, particularly Brazilian culture. Her research encompasses pedagogy, multimedia use, and language acquisition. She instructs beginners, intermediate, and advanced Portuguese language classes and is currently working on a project funded by the College and the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning to develop unscripted, authentic, audio materials with a variety of accompanying activities.

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Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College. He is currently working on a project that considers postal technologies of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan as forms of “new media.” He is focusing on the ways these technologies impacted practices of writing—literary or otherwise—and how they may or may not have altered established patterns and ideas of social association and communication. His first book, On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), examines the ways in which artistic and literary activity intersected with ideas about place and locality in Japan’s prewar period.

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Michèle Lowrie is Professor in the Department of Classics. Her primary focus is on Roman literature and culture, and she has published numerous volumes, most recently Performance, Writing, and Authority in Augustan Rome and Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s Odes and Epodes (ed.), both with Oxford in 2009. Her teaching includes classes on Cicero, Caesar, and civil war literature.

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Kaley Mason is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. His research and seminars have focused on the interaction between creative agents and material constraints in culturally specific performance contexts. Although his fieldwork has centered primarily on South India, he is generally interested in how music can serve as a vehicle for social change.

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Alice McLean is Lecturer of French and Portuguese in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She teaches first- and second-year French, and has co-authored award-winning articles on the use of technology in teaching foreign languages and modes for instructing survey literature courses. She also teaches beginning Portuguese at the University, and has developed several Portuguese pedagogical projects with Ana Lima.

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Salikoko Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics; he also teaches in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Study of Science. He studies language evolution, with special attention to creole language varieties, African-American English, and colonial Englishes. He has also worked on semantics, lexicography, pragmatics, and Bantu morphosyntax.

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Deborah Nelson is Associate Professor of English and Deputy Provost for Graduate Education. Her research interests include late 20th-century American literature, gender studies, American ethnic literature, poetry and poetics, autobiography, photography, and Cold War history. Her book, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, was published by Columbia University Press, 2002. She is currently completing her manuscript Tough Broads, which explores the unsentimental, rigorous, and often “heartless” view of pain (borrowing a term from Hannah Arendt) in the work of some of the twentieth-century's most prominent women artists and intellectuals.  

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William Nickell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His research concerns Russian cultural history, but has often focused on Tolstoy. His first book, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910 (NY: Cornell University Press, 2010) received honorable mention for the Scaglione Prize of the Modern Language Association.

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Miller Prosser received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2010. He currently works as a Research Database Specialist for the OCHRE Data Service at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and his research interests include Northwest Semitic Languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic) and Late Bronze Age Mediterranean economy.

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Jason Riggle is Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics, as well as the Director of the Language Modeling Laboratory. His areas of specialization are phonology, morphology, and computational linguistics.

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Steven Rings is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Music. His research focuses on transformational theory, phenomenology, popular music, and questions of music and meaning. Animating all of his work is an abiding interest in the relationship between music theory and broadly humanistic inquiries into music as a cultural practice.

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Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on the way that humanistic research and other cultural activities are caught up within larger political struggles and economic or social agendas. He is the former director and co-founder of the Cultural Policy Center, which brings together faculty whose research—whether in economics, law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, public policy, history, art history, or cultural studies—touches on or could help inform policies affecting the arts and humanities. He is the author of The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (Chicago, 2009) and he edited Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

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Haun Saussy is University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. His interests include Classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, ethnography, and ethics of medical care. His books and articles touch on topics such as the imaginary universal languages of Athanasius Kircher, Chinese musicology, the great Qing-dynasty novel Honglou meng, the current situation and theoretical perplexities of comparative literature, the history of the idea of oral literature, Haitian poetry, health care for the global poor, and contemporary art. He is currently working on a book about the concept of rhythm in psychology, linguistics, literature and folklore.

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David Schloen is Associate Professor in the Oriental Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He specializes in the archaeology and socioeconomic history of ancient Syria and Palestine. He has been involved in archaeological excavations at sites in Israel and southeastern Turkey for more than twenty years. Drawing upon his initial training in computer science, he has a longstanding interest in developing improved methods of managing and analyzing research data, especially in archaeology and ancient textual studies.

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Bart Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy), Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Executive Director of the Civic Knowledge Project. He has taught in the College at the University of Chicago for 24 years, designing a wide range of courses for the College Core as well as courses on John Dewey, Political Philosophy, and Happiness. He has also published widely in philosophy. His book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge 2004) won the American Philosophical Society’s prestigious Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for 2004. Other publications include Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge 1992) and Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington 2005). Schultz has worked extensively in adult education and community connections. He has been instrumental in helping the University of Chicago develop affordable, high-quality educational programs for disadvantaged communities on Chicago’s South Side. 

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Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature.  His teaching and research focus on modern American literature in an international context.  He is interested in American, Asian American, and East Asian cultures, including the circulation of people, texts, and ideas across the Pacific, the literary exchange between American and East Asian writers during the interwar period, modern U.S. democratic theory, and Chinese Communist cultures.

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Olga Solovieva is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought. Her work focuses on the history of rhetoric, performance, and media studies, particularly in their corporeal and material aspects. She is writing a book on Thomas Mann's political writings.

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Ulrike Stark is Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her research focuses on Hindi literature, South Asian book history and print culture, and North Indian intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently working on a biography of Raja Shivaprasad of Benares (1823-1895), a public intellectual, man of letters, historian and eminent educator in 19th-century North India.

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Malynne Sternstein is Associate Professor of Slavic Studies. She has written about Czech historical avant-gardes and the Czech community in Chicago. Much of her work focuses on the intersection of art and literature, film and politics. Her books include The Will to Chance: Necessity and Arbitrariness in the Czech Avant-garde (Slavica Publishing, 2008) and Czechs of Chicagoland (Arcadia Publishing, 2008), a photographic history that was part of a larger series, Images of America.

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Megan Stielstra is Visiting Lecturer in the Committee on Creative Writing. She is also the Literary Director of 2nd Story and editor of their forthcoming print anthology (Chicago: Elephant Rock Books, 2012). Her story collection, Everyone Remain Calm (Toronto: Joyland/ECW, 2011), was a Chicago Tribune Favorite of 2011, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Pank, Make Magazine, F Magazine, Other Voices, The Nervous Breakdown, Fresh Yarn, Pindeldyboz, Swink, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and performance at Columbia College as well as The University of Chicago.

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Jessica Stockholder is Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts. She works at the intersection of painting with sculpture. Her work sometimes incorporates the architecture in which it has been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, idiosyncratic, and formal - tempering chaos with control. She orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical experience, probing how meaning derives from physicality.

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Matthew W. Stolper is Professor of Assyriology and the John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute. He has worked primarily on Achaemenid Babylonian texts and secondarily on Elamite history and texts. His main effort now is on recording the Persepolis Fortification Archive, a large cluster of administrative records excavated by the Oriental Institute in 1933.  Stolper's courses have dealt mostly with Akkadian historical and legal texts of the late first millennium, with forays into Old Persian and Elamite language and Achaemenid history. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies and ARTA.

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Hilary Strang is Associate Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH) and Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature. She is primarily interested in nineteenth-century British literature, Marxism, the novel, radical culture, and science fiction.

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Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the College and an associate member of the Divinity School. He edits the journal, Modern Philology. His life-long project is to bring together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas. Courses taught by Strier range from “Renaissance Intellectual Texts” to “Society and Politics in Shakespeare’s Plays” to “The Religious Lyric in England and America from the Renaissance to the Present.” His most recent book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), was recently awarded the 2011 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism.  His previous books include: Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

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Augusta Read Thomas is University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music and the College. From 1997 through 2006, she was the Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her music is played around the world, and her many awards include recognition from the Siemens Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007, her Astral Canticle was one of the two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2009, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, considered to be the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

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Gary Tubb is Professor and Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research interests include Sanskrit poetry and poetics; Sanskrit grammatical and commentarial traditions; connections between philosophy, religion, and literature in Sanskrit culture; and the Mahabharata epic.

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Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. She is the author of John Stuart Mill’s Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard 2002). She has also published numerous essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant’s ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.

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David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies with additional appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Committee on Social Thought; he is also Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. His books are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s ‘Laocoön’: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge 2009) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford 1996). His current projects include a book on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as well as a broad-based study of Goethe and philosophy.

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Rebecca West is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Italian Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Italian literature, with a concentration on poetry and prose fiction, and on cinema. Her film courses have included “Women Mystery Writers from Page to Screen,” analyses of film adaptations of such novels as Strangers on a Train, Laura, In a Lonely Place, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as comparative screen representations of masculinity focusing specifically on the types of the “Latin Lover” and the “Tough Guy.”

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Jennifer Wild is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College, and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her research focuses on the history and theory of modernism and the avant-garde, experimental film, French cinema, the history of exhibition, and the cinema’s relation to the other arts. Her book, The Film Stripped Bare: The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1926, is forthcoming from The University of California Press.

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Leila Wilson is Visiting Lecturer with the Committee on Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, The Canary, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. She received her MFA from Indiana University and her MA from University of Chicago. A former editor at Chicago Review, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her book, The Hundred Grasses, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.

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David Wray is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH). His teaching and research addresses Greek epic and tragedy, Hellenistic and Roman poetry, Roman Philosophy, gender, the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, and twentieth century American poetry and poetics. He is a member of the University’s Poetry and Poetics program and the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and a co-editor of Seneca and the Self, along with Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Ming Xiang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics. She works in sentence processing and experimental syntax and semantics, and her current research investigates the relationship between subjects’ language-processing abilities and their reaction to subtle nonsensicalities in example sentences.

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Alan Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Director of the Phonology Laboratory. His work focuses on phonological theory, language variation and change, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, Native American languages, and Cantonese.