Session I

This behind-the-scenes tour of the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library will take visitors through the Grand Reading Room as well as Mansueto’s underground automated storage and retrieval system. The tour will conclude at the Special Collections Research Center.

Join Oriental Institute docents for guided tours featuring our world-renowned collection of art and artifacts from the ancient Near East, as well as a guided viewing of Between Heaven and Earth: Birds of Ancient Egypt. This new special exhibit explores how the millions of migratory birds that filled the ancient Egyptian skies every spring and fall influenced every aspect of ancient Egyptian life and culture.

Nothing about the early life of Rodolfo Guglielmi in the small southern town of Castellaneta, Italy would indicate that in his future Rodolfo would become the world's most famous “Latin Lover,” known as Rudolph Valentino. Nor that we would still be talking about him more than eighty years after his tragically premature demise in 1926.

Jessica Stockholder will share images of her work and discuss its relationship to context. Her presentation will focus particularly on the “Color Jam” installation that was on view on the corner of State and Adams this past summer, describing the process of its construction and how its meaning is in part derived from its location. She will share images of other works that relate to this one and give an overview on how she arrived at this way of working.

By the time the Elementary Education Act was introduced in Britain in 1870, India had for decades been a site of pioneering experiments in popular education. This talk explores the beginnings of the modern project of mass primary education in colonial India. It focuses on the perspective of the agents in the field and depicts the uphill struggle of British and Indian educational officials to implement state education at the grassroots level. Imperial policies, hatched in London and Calcutta, were frequently at odds with the on-the-ground realities of the Indian countryside.

Thomas Mann, the 1929 laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was Nazi Germany’s most prominent political-literary exile. His sojourn in the United States (1938-1952) is usually associated with Princeton, New Jersey where he lectured in 1938-39, and with Pacific Palisades, California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus. However, Mann’s American exile was also anchored by personal and intellectual connections to Chicago, where his youngest daughter Elisabeth lived with her husband Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Chicago.

The great French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, author of two groundbreaking books on the structures of collective memory, was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1930. He had a desk in the brand-new Social Sciences Research Building, experienced exotic American food in the Quad Club and downtown cafeterias, worried about Al Capone pumping him full of lead, and went motoring with Hyde Park society matrons. Like most Europeans at the time, he felt that Chicago was an inhuman environment but an indication of things to come.

The looting of the Baghdad Museum in the wake of the 2003 American invasion, the break-in at the Cairo Museum in January 2011, and the threats to Libya's fabled archaeological sites in the fall of 2011 offer three vignettes of cultural heritage in moments of peril. What lessons can we learn from what went wrong, and what went right, in each case?

Bob Dylan’s voice is at once one of the most recognizable and most polarizing sounds in Western music, simultaneously iconic and inscrutable. More even than his words, Dylan’s voice is the most potent material signifier of his mercurial persona. As an early Columbia Records advertising campaign put it, “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan.” But does he even sing like himself? Over the last five decades Dylan has adopted a bewildering range of voices, from laconic dust-bowl drawl to smooth country croon, from gospel shout to guttural Delta-blues bark. What is Bob Dylan’s “real voice”?

Music and the culinary arts frequently intersect in cross-cultural human sensory experience. Language about music often relies on gastronomic analogies to elucidate aesthetic concepts and creative processes. Songs reference food culture in narratives and poetry. Musical events are also culinary events, from life cycle occasions like weddings and funerals, to rituals of faith, entertainment, and labor in everyday life. Tastes in music and cuisine regularly serve to reinforce social boundaries.