Bios
DAVID BEVINGTON is Phyllis Fay Horton Professor in the Humanities, the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, and the College. Professor Bevington is currently working on an essay about patronage of masques and court entertainments in Tudor and Stuart England, and he is one of three senior editors of The Complete Works of Ben Jonson, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
JASON BRIDGES is an assistant professor in the department of Philosophy. His primary research and teaching areas are the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He also has serious interests in metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of action, the later work of Wittgenstein, and political philosophy. Prof. Bridges’ current projects concern the logical and structural difficulties in the 'naturalization' of content, the relationship between content externalism and the rationality-involving character of psychological explanation, the dependence of thought on language, and issues concerning the attribution of mental states to animals. Prof. Bridges has recently offered courses on the mind-body problem, the theory of meaning, and semantic naturalism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and his B.A. from Harvard University in 1994.
JAMES CHANDLER is the director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, as well as the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke professor in the department of English Language and Literature. Since joining the faculty in 1978, he has taught courses in English and in the Committees on the History of Culture, Cinema & Media Studies and General Studies in the Humanities. His best-known publications, all published by the University Press, include his critically acclaimed England in 1819: the Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism and Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of Poetry and Politics. Together with Chicago colleagues Arnold Davidson, Professor in Philosophy, and Harry Harootunian, the Max Palevsky Professor Emeritus, Chandler co-edited Questions of Evidence, published by the University Press in 1994. He is recognized as an authority on the Romantic Movement in England and the relationships between politics and literature, history and criticism.
STEVEN COLLINS is a professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations studying the social and cultural history of Buddhism in pre-modern and modern South and Southeast Asia His current interests include the translation of Pali texts and the history of nuns in the modern period. D. Phil., Wolfson College, Oxford University, 1979.
DAISY DELOGU is an assistant professor and the French undergraduate advisor in the department of Romance Languages and Literature. Her scholarship focuses on the political literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and also includes articles on late medieval lyric works. Prof. Delogu earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, and has also taught at Bowdoin College.
NADINE O. DI VITO is a senior lecturer, director of the Romance Language Program, and French Coordinator in Romance Languages & Literatures. Di Vito received a Maîtrise and a DEA in Sciences de l’Education from the Université de Bordeaux II in 1984 and 1985 respectively, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. At Pennsylvania, she studied with a group considered the most important sociolinguists of the 20th century: Dell Hymes, William Labov, Irving Goffman and Gillian Sankoff. Di Vito has published Patterns Across Spoken and Written French: Empirical Research on the Interaction Among Forms, Functions, and Genres, which challenges prevalent notions about the relationship between spoken and written French and the ways French is evolving.
NORMA FIELD is the Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in Japanese Studies in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her teaching and research interests include modern Japanese literature with a specific interest in the dialectical pursuit of structural and historical analyses, "naïve" and "scholarly" responses, translation as interpretive, creative, and scholarly activity, feminism, and all of the above in the context of contemporary capitalism.
HERBERT GEORGE has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 1986. His sculpture has received support and recognition from the New York State Council on the Arts (1978), and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1984). Exhibitions include the Robert Freidus Gallery, New York (1980, 1981), the Walter Bischoff Gallery in Chicago (1987), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1987). He edited and published the journal TRACKS, A Journal of Artists' Writings from 1974-1977. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
ANASTASIA GIANNAKIDOU is an associate professor in the department of Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division. Prof. Giannakidou works on formal semantics, syntax, and their interface, with emphasis on Greek, Germanic, and Romance.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in 1997, and has taught at Chicago since 2001.
GREGORY GOLLEY is an assistant professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His teaching and research interests include the cultural and literary history of Japan with special interest in modernity and its critique, the relationship between the technologies of mass culture and literary modernism, the early twentieth century transformation of time and space -- as theory and as experience -- and the role of this transformation in reshaping notions of ethnic and national identity.
DONALD HARPER is a professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His teaching and research interests include early Chinese civilization, focusing on philosophy, religion, and the history of science. In 1998, he published a translation and study of the Mawangdui medical manuscripts (early second century B.C.). Currently, Prof. Harper is working on a book-length study of early Chinese religion based primarily on recently excavated manuscripts dating to the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods. He is also at work collaborating with colleagues in Paris to analyze Dunhuang manuscripts that treat various divination traditions, including comparative research on early Chinese divination and science.
ANTHONY HIRSCHEL is the Dana Feitler Director of the University of Chicago’s David & Alfred Smart Museum of Art. He previously served as the director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art from 2001 to 2004 where he oversaw a $220 million capital campaign and the ambitious expansion of the museum’s facilities. Over this same period, the museum organized several national and international touring exhibitions including Asia in America: Views of Chinese Art from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (2004-05); Giovanni Bellini and the Art of Devotion (2004); and The Fabric of Moroccan Life (2002). During his tenure, Hirschel was an advocate for museum accessibility and audience diversity and fostered the museum’s relationships with community organizations and schools. Prior to moving to Indianapolis, Hirschel served as the Director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University (1997-2001). While there, he led a successful effort to acquire the most important collection of ancient Egyptian funerary art to come on the market in the last half century and then guided its reinstallation in collaboration with the museum’s architect Michael Graves. At Emory University and previously as Director of the Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia (1991-1997), Hirschel worked in consultation with faculty, administrators, and student groups to expand and integrate the museum’s activities with University life.
BERTHOLD HOECKNER, associate professor of Music and the Humanities, is a music historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music. His research interests include aesthetics, music's relationship to literature, Adorno, music and visual culture. Prof. Hoeckner’s book Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment was published by Princeton University Press in 2002, and his 1998 article, "Schumann and Romantic Distance," won the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1994, and has taught at Chicago since 1994.
ALISON JAMES, Alison James is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and in the College. Her work focuses on the modern and contemporary French novel. Her interests include the Oulipo group, experimental writing, the connections between literature and philosophy, and the relationship between literature and the other arts. She has published articles on the myth of Icarus in Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Romanic Review, 2000) and on the theoretical problems posed by the Oulipian constraint (Théorie, littérature, enseignement, 2004)..
WADAD KADI, the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Studies, has taught in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago since 1988. She is associate editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an, and co-editor for the series Islamic History and Civilization at the publishing house E. J. Brill, in Leiden, the Netherlands. Her publications include ten books, among them a number of editions of Arabic classical texts from manuscripts, and over fifty articles in various areas of Islamic thought and classical Arabic prose, mainly in the first four centuries of Islam (7th-10th centuries CE).
ROBERT KENDRICK, department chair and associate professor of Music, is a music historian specializing in music of early modern Europe and its intersections with religion, politics, gender, urban culture, and fine arts. He is author of Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Music in Early Modern Milan (1996, Oxford) and The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650 (forthcoming, Oxford). Professor Kendrick has held fellowships at the Harvard University Society of Fellows (1993-96) and at the National Humanities Center (1998). He received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1993, and has taught at Chicago since 1997.
GABRIEL RICHARDSON LEAR, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, works 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 the status of beauty as an ethical concept in the work of several philosophers, (e.g. the role of beauty in Plato's theory of moral education) as well as issues in Aristotle's Poetics. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University (2001).
ANTONIA LOGUE was born in County Derry, Ireland. She was raised in Brussels and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Her debut novel, Shadow-Box (Grove), was the winner of The Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Hawthorden Prize. Shadow Box has been translated into French, Italian, German, Danish, Dutch, Spanish and Greek. Logue has been recognized as one of The (London) Observer's 21 Writers for the 21st Century. She has held four Yaddo residencies, is a recipient of a Royal Society of Authors (London) Award and an Arts Council of Ireland Award and is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Iowa's Writing Program. For the past decade, Logue has also been a freelance journalist and literary critic for such publications as The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The Scotsman, The Sunday Tribune, The New York Times, Fortnight, and others. She was recently commissioned to write a new play for the Irish Repertory Theatre of Chicago, and is working on an opera in collaboration with composer and 2004 Rome Prize winner, Harold Meltzer. Her second novel, Say of What You See in the Dark, will be published in early 2006.
ARMANDO MAGGI is a professor in the department of Romance Languages and Literature. His scholarship includes works on Renaissance and baroque culture, literature and philosophy with particular focus on treatises on love, books of emblems, and religious texts. Prof. Maggi is also an expert of Christian mysticism, with works on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque women mystics. A native of Italy, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His latest books are Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology (U of C Press, 2001) and a critical edition of Guido Casoni's treatise (1591) Della magia d'amore (Palermo: Sellerio, 2003). He is also the author of Uttering the Word (SUNY, 1998) on the mystic Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, and Identità e impresa rinascimentale (Longo, 1998). He is currently working on a book on the poet Iacopone da Todi and has completed a second book by the title Beings Against Nature (advance contract, U of C Press) on the concept of 'familiar spirits' in Renaissance culture. Prof. Maggi also has a keen interest in Italian baroque prose and poetry. He is writing a series of essays on self-commentaries written by late Renaissance poets, including Torquato Tasso. His next project is a book on the modern poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prof. Maggi has published more than 50 essays.
JASON MERCHANT is an associate professor and undergraduate advisor in the department of Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division. His scholarly interests are in syntax, semantics, and typology, with particular emphasis on English, Dutch, German, and Greek. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1999 and has taught at Chicago since 2001.
SALIKOKO MUFWENE is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Linguistics. Mr. Mufwene studies creole language varieties and African-American English (especially their genesis and structures), syntax and semantics, lexicography, and Bantu morphosyntax. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1979, and has taught at Chicago since January 1992.
CHARLES NEWELL has been artistic director of Court Theatre since 1994, where he has directed over 20 productions. He made his Chicago directorial debut in 1993 with The Triumph of Love, which won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Production. Directorial credits at Court include The Romance Cycle, James Joyce’s "The Dead," Hamlet, Piano, The Invention of Love, The Little Foxes, The Cherry Orchard, Nora, Misanthrope, and Travesties. Mr. Newell has also directed at the Guthrie Theatre (Resident Director: The History Cycle, Cymbeline), Arena Stage, John Houseman’s The Acting Company (Staff Repertory Director), the California and Alabama Shakespeare Festivals, Juilliard, and New York University; he is the recipient of the 1992 TCG Alan Schneider Director Award and is a multiple Jeff Award Recipient/Nominee. He sits on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group and has served on several panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. He will make his directorial debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago this fall with Marc Blitzstein’s Regina.
MARK PAYNE is an assistant professor in the department of Classical Languages and Literature. He is revising a dissertation on Theocritus for publication, tentatively entitled “Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction”. He is the author of several articles on Greek poets from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods, and his teaching focuses on Greek poetry and literary theory. He is the book review editor for Classical Philology and a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics program.
SRIKANTH REDDY's first collection of poetry, Facts for Visitors, was published by the University of California Press in Spring 2004. His poems have appeared in various journals, including APR, Grand Street, Fence, and Ploughshares, and his critical writing has been featured in publications such as The New Republic, The Chicago Tribune, and American Literature. He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation (in the Humanities) and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Reddy is an Assistant Professor in English and the College.
SETH RICHARDSON is an assistant professor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Seth Richardson received his Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern History from Columbia University in 2002. The first volume of his dissertation was a historical study of the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the First Dynasty of Babylon, “The Collapse of a Complex State: A Reappraisal of the End of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 1683-1597 B.C”. The dissertation’s second volume published almost seven hundred Late Old Babylonian texts, increasing the available published material in this time by about 50%. After occupying a post-doctoral research fellowship at Columbia for a year, he came to Chicago to teach history. He is responsible for NELC’s graduate program in Ancient Near Eastern History, and is the Mesopotamian Faculty Advisor to the Oriental Institute Museum. He is now continuing work on research projects related to Old Babylonian economic and administrative texts, Assyrian political history, an intellectual history of early Babylonian liver divination, and Ancient Near East labor history, state collapse, and chronology.
LISA RUDDICK is an associate professor in the department of English Languages & Literature, where she teaches courses in modern British fiction, literature and psychoanalysis, and poetry and poetics. She is currently writing a book on the ways in which professional training in the humanities, conducted with the best of intentions, can thwart the feeling of aliveness by partially dissociating practitioners from their intuitions and their deep affective resources.
DAVID SCHLOEN specializes in the archaeology and socioeconomic history of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant (Syria-Palestine). Until recently, his archaeological fieldwork has been done at two sites in Israel: at the ancient seaport of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv (as associate director of the Leon Levy Expedition directed by Prof. Lawrence Stager of Harvard University), and at the Early Bronze Age village site of Yaqush (ca. 3300-2300 B.C.), in the northern Jordan Valley not far south of the Sea of Galilee. He is currently involved in a new project to reexcavate the second-millennium B.C. city of Alalakh in the Amuq Valley in southern Turkey, in collaboration with Prof. Aslihan Yener of the University of Chicago. During the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.), Alalakh was the capital of a kingdom whose neighbor to the south, the kingdom of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, has been studied by Schloen in some detail. Ugarit has yielded a wealth of archaeological and textual evidence and it serves as a primary case study in Schloen's recently published book The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2001). Prof. Schloen has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (1983) and received his Ph.D. in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology and the Hebrew Bible from Harvard University (1995).
ERIC SLAUTER is an assistant professor in the department of English Language and Literature. He specializes in American cultural, intellectual, and literary history, with additional research and teaching interests in law and political thought, art and material culture, and the history of the book. He is currently completing a book entitled The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution. In recent years, Prof. Slauter has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on “American Literature and Culture, 1542-1865” (English), “Enlightenment and Revolution in America” (English and History), and “The Language of Rights in Eighteenth-Century America” (English and The Law School). In 2005-06, he will offer “The American Revolution: Culture and Politics” (English and History) and “The Social Life of American Literature: Studies in the History of the Book” (English).
LINA STEINER is an assistant professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her areas of interest include Russian and European literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the history and theory of the novel, literary theory, aesthetics, and the history of music and musicology. She has taught the courses “Pushkin and His Age”, “19th Century Russian Literature and the Enlightenment”, and “Human Being and Citizen”. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2003.
CHENXI TANG joined the department of Germanics Studies in 2000. He is working on a book project entitled "The Geographical Subject: Geography, Literature and Philosophy in German Romanticism". His current teaching and research interests focus on European Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kierkegaard, and history of science. He is one of the Chinese translators of Kierkegaard's works. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
DAVID THOMPSON
Bio coming soon.
HANS THOMSEN is an associate professor in the department of Art History. His interests include early modern salon culture, rituals and functions of religious objects, Japanese reception of Chinese and Korean art, contemporary ceramic art, issues of connoisseurship and patronage, word and text relationships, and the history of museums and collections. He is curator of the show “The Poetry of Shijô Surimono Prints”, currently on display at the Smart Museum, and received his Ph.D. in Japanese Art from Princeton University (2005).
ROBERT von HALLBERG is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor in the department of English Language and Literature. He has written about avant-garde American poetry (Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art [1978]) and more generally about U.S. poetry since 1945 (American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 [1985] and Poetry, Politics, Intellectuals [1996]). His interests include the culture of intellectuals, especially literary intellectuals (Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State [1996]), and the sociology of literature, particularly in the institutions that mediate its production and reception (Canons [1984]). My theoretical interests derive from concern about the relations between political history and literary culture and focus on particular critical problems, such as evaluation (Politics and Poetic Value [1987]). Prof. von Hallberg also teaches courses in German poetry (“Rainer Maria Rilke,” “Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson”) and in theories of modernity (“Bloch, Benjamin, Bataille,” “Benjamin and Simmel”) in the Comparative Literature Department. He is beginning to explore the relations between poetry and song and expect to teach courses in song lyrics as a genre of popular poetry, and also directs an ongoing graduate workshop in Poetry and Poetics and participates in the Program in Poetry and Poetics.
CHRISTINA von NOLCKEN studied in England at Oxford University, where she specialized in Medieval English language and literature. She came to the University of Chicago in 1979, where she is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English and the College, Chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies, and Chair of the Committee on Creative Writing. She regularly teaches courses on Old and Middle English language and literature, and is especially interested in Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. Most of her writing has been on texts prepared by the followers of John Wyclif (d. 1384) as part of their program to bring education, and especially religious education, to the people.
LAWRENCE ZBIKOWSKI, associate professor of Music, is a music theorist whose research focuses on applying work in cognitive science to various problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical syntax, text-music relations, musical ontology, and the structure of theories of music. His research is drawn together in his recent book, Conceptualizing Music: Cognition, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford, 2002), which won the 2004 Wallace Berry Award of the Society of Music Theory. Zbikowski has also worked on the theory of popular music, and he is the director of the Humanities Division's project on Creativity and Cognition. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1991, and has taught at Chicago since 1993.