Neubauer Collegium 2022-23 Report

2022–2023 REPORT

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

It has been a thrilling first year serving as Faculty Director of the Neubauer Collegium. I have consistently been inspired by the imagination of University of Chicago faculty members as they propose new ways to tackle critical intellectual and social questions through collaboration. This special report highlights several of the exciting research projects that we supported during the 2022–23 academic year, which included faculty from across the University and beyond. As the world, our campus, and our building fully reopened in the aftermath of Covid, it was particularly gratifying to see and hear the unique spaces of the Collegium filled with visitors, events, and conversation.

This year we put a special focus on integrating our gallery exhibitions, curated by Dieter Roelstraete, more fully with the research life of the University. We began the year with a conversation about history and the contemporary conflict in Ukraine, deepening intellectual engagement around Slavs and Tatars’s MERCZbau exhibition, which closed last fall. A second discussion circled around Rick Lowe’s exhibition, Notes on the Great Migration. A sociologist, an economist, and a historian came together to discuss the relationship between art and community development on Chicago’s South Side, inspired by Lowe’s social practice. This forum also represented a continuation of Lowe’s ongoing collaborative research project Black Wall Street Journey, which began at the Neubauer Collegium. Finally, we were thrilled to host the choral group The Crossing under the rubric of our Director’s Lectures series. The Crossing presented a spectacular and thought-provoking program of original music on contemporary themes, including climate change, monuments, and technology. The following day, we hosted a workshop on “The Aesthetics of Catastrophe.”

That workshop included Crossing director Donald Nally, artist Jenny Kendler, composers Shara Nova and Ayanna Woods, along with University of Chicago scientists, historians, and scholars of performance. The workshop converged around both the performance of The Crossing and the final Collegium exhibition of the year, The Chicago Cli-Fi Library, which was an investigation of climate change in contemporary art. The discussion only further highlighted the urgent need for humanists, artists, and scientists to engage in cross-cutting conversations that will enable us to understand and address the existential issues of our time.

In the coming year, we are excited to develop our new Global Solutions Initiative. We hope to build on our longstanding aim to be a global center on campus as well as foster greater cooperation with campus centers abroad, including in Paris and Delhi. This will include hosting our first Global Solutions Visiting Fellow, opera director Yuval Sharon, who will collaborate with faculty on campus, exploring the possibilities represented by experimental performance as a form of collaborative research. We launched Sharon’s fellowship with a viewing and discussion of his new opera, Proximity, which premiered at the Lyric Opera in March, as well as a manuscript workshop on his forthcoming book about opera. Finally, I hosted my first Director’s Lecture, with the writer and political theorist Lea Ypi, whose book Free is a genre-bending amalgam of history, political theory, and memoir, and speaks to the contemporary crisis of democracy in Europe in relation to the Socialist past.

I am extremely grateful to all of the staff, faculty, students, visitors, and members of the public who energized and supported our activities this year, and I hope that you will join us again in 2023–24 for another exciting year.

Tara Zahra

Roman Family Director

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

I have consistently been inspired by the imagination of University of Chicago faculty members as they propose new ways to tackle critical intellectual and social questions through collaboration.

NEW PROJECTS

Neubauer Collegium research projects bring together teams of experts to address questions that can only be answered through partnership. These collaborations often cross disciplinary boundaries and identify new areas of inquiry. The following projects will launch on July 1, 2023:

ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY

John Proios (Philosophy), Patricia Marechal (University of California, San Diego)

A new volume of essays on Plato and Aristotle’s understanding of racial and ethnic differences will bring fresh insights to the topic, sparking debate among teachers, students, and scholars.

CAPTURING THE STARS

Richard G. Kron (Astronomy and Physics), Kristine Palmieri (Institute on the Formation of Knowledge), Andrea Twiss-Brooks (The University of Chicago Library), Emily Kern (History)

This project will reconstruct the work of fifteen women who conducted research at Yerkes Observatory in Illinois in the early twentieth century. Will studying their scientific practices and networks help transform our understanding of women’s contributions to astronomy and astrophysics?

COSTUMES AND COLLAPSE

Leah Feldman (Comparative Literature), Hoda El Shakry (Comparative Literature), Payam Sharifi (Slavs and Tatars)

What is the relationship between imperial collapse and material culture, specifically textiles and clothing? The research team will explore this question by focusing on two diverse post-imperial spaces – the Soviet Union and the Middle East.

ECONOMIC PLANNING AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

Gary Herrigel (Political Science), Joel Isaac (Committee on Social Thought), Matthew Landauer (Political Science), Aaron Benanav (Syracuse University)

Interventions by governments and central banks since the 2008 financial crisis have coincided with growing mistrust of institutions. What are the new relations between markets, states, and democracy in this new, “post-neoliberal” period?

GOVERNMENT DATA MARKETS: MAPPING AND EVALUATING PROBLEMS IN INTERGOVERNMENTAL DATA FLOWS

Bridget Fahey (Law), Raul Castro Fernandez (Computer Science)

Every day, a vast amount of sensitive personal data flows across local, state, and federal government agencies without individuals’ awareness or consent. What are the risks to U.S. citizens, and what technical and legal instruments can reduce such risks?

HISTORIES OF CULTURE IN DISASTROUS TIMES

Alice Goff (History), Jennifer Allen (Yale University)

Is culture useful in disastrous times, or does the urgent matter of survival render cultural practices irrelevant? How should the study of cultural history evolve in the face of contemporary disasters? This project will foster a network of cultural historians to take up these complex questions.

PHYTOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

Thomas Lamarre (Cinema and Media Studies), Stacy Moran (Arizona State University), Michael Fisch (Anthropology), Zach Yost (Cinema and Media Studies), Yangquiao Lu (Cinema and Media Studies), Isabel Kranz (University of Vienna), Vicki Kirby (University of New South Wales), Christina Jauernik (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Adam Nocek (Arizona State University), Jun Mizukawa (Lake Forest College)

Can research on plant intelligence transform contemporary thinking about human memory, perception, movement, and cognition?

THE POWER OF WOMEN IN EASTERN NIGERIA

James Robinson (Harris School of Public Policy), Maria Angélica Bautista (Harris School of Public Policy), Sara Lowes (University of California, San Diego), Chima J. Korieh (University of Nigeria), Andrea Velasquez (University of Colorado, Denver), Francis Njoku (University of Nigeria, Nsukka)

What is the nature of Nigerian “dual sex” political institutions? How do they reinforce and disrupt traditional male-dominated power structures?

SILK ROAD IMAGINARIES

Richard G. Payne (History), Ariel Fox (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Can new theories and representations of premodern economic and cultural networks in Asia reinvigorate the “Silk Road” as a useful concept?

TEXTUAL AMULETS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

Christopher A. Faraone (Classics), Carolina López Ruiz (Divinity), Sofía Torallas Tovar (Classics), Joseph Sanzo (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), Rivka Elitzur-Leiman (Harvard University)

An international group of scholars will translate the most important and best-preserved textual amulets of the ancient Mediterranean region, as well as drawings and recipes for them.

TOWARD A GLOBAL HISTORY OF MUSIC THEORY

Thomas Christensen (Music), Carmel Raz (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics), Nathan Martin (University of Michigan), Lester Hu (University of California, Berkeley)

This project will support the first-ever attempt to compile, translate, and digitize an anthology illustrating the rich diversity of the world’s musical theories over two millennia.

TRANSPERFORMATIONS: BREATHING MACHINES ACROSS WORLDS

Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Anthropology), Stacy Hardy (Independent Writer and Researcher), Neo Muyanga (Independent Composer), Daniel Borzutzky (University of Illinois at Chicago)

How has imperialism suppressed and exploited the “collective breathing” of colonized peoples, and what forms and forums may enable such breathing to be liberatory? The international team on this experimental project will combine creative performance, ethnography, and theoretical inquiry to address these questions.

UNTIDY OBJECTS

Amber Ginsburg (Visual Arts), Marc Downie (Cinema and Media Studies), Sara Black (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Samantha Frost (University of Illinois)

Can a “living sculpture” that includes water and vegetation function as a social intervention, prompting viewers to consider the fact that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights? How will “augmented reality” technology alter viewers’ responses to the sculpture?

BY THE NUMBERS

13 PROJECTS LAUNCHING JULY 1 21 ACTIVE PROJECTS IN 2022–23 12 VISITING FELLOWS IN 2022–23

85 VISITING FELLOWS FROM 21 COUNTRIES

130 TOTAL PROJECTS

253 FACULTY FELLOWS

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHTS

FOSSIL CAPITALISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Elizabeth Chatterjee (History)

Ryan Cecil Jobson (Anthropology)

Victoria Saramago (Romance Languages and Literatures)

On October 28, UCLA Anthropology Professor Hannah Appel discussed her ethnographic research on U.S. oil companies in Equatorial Guinea with Ryan Cecil Jobson. Photo by Max Herman.

This one-year project fostered an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to consider how paradigmatic theories and histories of “fossil capital” are unsettled by colonial and postcolonial narratives. Most academic inquiries into the relationship between capitalism and fossil fuels have focused on the energy systems of industrialized nations in the West. By widening the frame to include Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the project introduced a broader range of case studies through which to study the complex links between carbon energy and socioeconomic power, the legacies of colonial extractivism, neocolonial labor relations in the global oil and

gas sector, and more. The project convened a reading group at which scholars and graduate students discussed key texts. A lively lecture series brought three distinguished guests to campus: Hannah Appel (UCLA), who shared insights on racial capitalism gleaned from her ethnographic research on U.S. oil companies in Equatorial Guinea; Diana J. Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis), who explored the romanticized narratives that drew international attention to Mexico’s hydroelectric industry in the early 1900s; and Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia University), who theorized the uneven distribution of climate risk across the globe. Bookending these activities was a symposium on September 30 that set the terms for the year’s discussions and an international conference on May 5 at which scholars from ten institutions interrogated the purported North Atlantic origins of fossil capitalism and examined the various forms of opposition that emerge from its “peripheries.”

How do developing nations balance economic growth and ecological harm, and what paths may lead to a post-fossil future?

PAN-AFRICA: HISTORIES, AESTHETICS, POLITICS

Antawan Byrd (Northwestern University) Adom Getachew (Political Science)

Elvira Dyangani Ose (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art)

Matthew Witkovsky (Art Institute of Chicago)

Pan-Africanism is predominantly understood as a political concept – a call for equality, self-determination, and solidarity among Black peoples. It has guided independence movements and anticolonial struggles in dozens of countries where the majority of inhabitants are of African descent, and it has shaped the terms of advocacy and protest in many countries where they are not. Although the influence of Pan-African thought can be traced through various strands of intellectual history, its cultural appeal remains elusive. The international cohort of academics, curators, and artists collaborating on this project ask: What is the relation of Pan-African politics to cultural production? A series of workshops in cities with important private or institutional archives is clarifying salient research themes and informing

the development of a major exhibition on PanAfricanism at the Art Institute of Chicago, slated to open in the fall of 2024. In the first year of the project, the team convened a virtual workshop to study the circulation of Pan-African ideas and organized a research trip to Dakar, Senegal, during which they led a workshop on Negritude in the context of vernacular modernism and toured the city’s major cultural collections. In March 2022 they traveled to São Paolo, Brazil, to meet with local researchers and cultural leaders and familiarize themselves with the city’s most significant archives and art collections. The research trips continued during the 2022–23 academic year, with visits to Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates, where the team visited several museums and met with artists participating in the Sharjah Biennial, whose work will figure in the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition. Upcoming activities include trips to Rabat, Morocco; a convening in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; and a trip to Fort-deFrance in Martinique. A capstone conference that will synthesize the research and review the way it shaped the exhibition is being planned for the 2024–25 academic year.

Kerry James Marshall, Africa Restored (Cheryl As Cleopatra), 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

Why is Pan-Africanism so elusive? Its cultural appeal seems always to be fading in one place while ascending elsewhere.

MAKING ASYLUM

How do the interactions between state agencies and civil society organizations shape the experiences of asylum seekers?

A record 1.3 million migrants applied for asylum in European states in 2015, many fleeing the wars in Syria and Afghanistan. Annual figures have remained historically high in recent years, with tens of thousands of people continuing to flee war, persecution, poverty, and climate disasters. The arrival of so many migrants on European shores has prompted significant changes to state laws and policies while placing enormous strain on the state agencies and nongovernmental organizations that serve these vulnerable populations. The research team on the Making Asylum project conducted extensive ethnographic research at select sites in Sweden and Denmark to gain a deeper understanding of the everyday realities of

asylum seekers in Europe. Their unique research perspective combined close analysis of three interlocking components: state strategies for managing asylum; the struggle of “street-level” agencies to support asylum seekers despite significant legal and budgetary constraints; and the migrants’ reflections on navigating this complex terrain with limited autonomy. Having engaged asylum seekers to learn about their experiences while they are waiting to integrate into society, the project aims to inform policy and public discussion on an international scale. The team co-edited a special issue for the Journal on Comparative Policy Analysis on “The Global Challenge of Mass Migration and Asylum.” They have also supported knowledge exchange among local NGOs, advocacy groups, government agencies, policymakers, and research institutes across Europe. A seminar in December in Copenhagen will bring together leaders from these groups to share research findings and foster conversation among people who are engaged in the issue at all levels.

The Refugee Ship, a floating art installation by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, in port at Strandvägen, Sweden. Photo by Ulf Bodin via Flickr.

Karen Nielsen Breidahl (Aalborg University) Evelyn Z. Brodkin (Crown Family School) Staffan Höjer (University of Gothenburg)

DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

James Sparrow (History)

Jon Levy (History)

Chiara Cordelli (Political Science)

William Novak (University of Michigan)

Kate Andrias (University of Michigan)

Stephen Sawyer (American University of Paris)

Cécile Roudeau (Université de Paris)

Bernadette Meyler (Stanford University)

Dan Edelstein (Stanford University)

Are democratic institutions and capitalist economies symbiotic, or do they act as antagonists toward each other? How have the dynamics between democracy and capitalism shifted in the United States from the revolutionary era to the present, in which the neoliberal order is being challenged by surging populism? The diverse group of scholars who convened for this one-year seed project are trying to identify the contours of a new paradigm for understanding this complex relationship. At a two-day conference in December, nine speakers presented talks on a range of topics, from early American models of self-government to the future of neoliberalism. In January the team welcomed economic historian Luca Fantacci (University

of Milan) for a monthlong visit that included a public talk on the future of cryptocurrency, which purports to be a tool enabling democracy and economic freedom but which is defined by volatility and opacity. A panel discussion on April 25 considered viewpoints on the politics and ethics of philanthropy and the historical role philanthropy has played in the development of the U.S. state. The project culminated with a May 18 lecture by economic historian David A. Kirsch (University of Maryland), who compared the cases of Henry Ford and Elon Musk to explore how entrepreneurship produces celebrity as part of its dynamic of economic and technological transformation.

Cécile Roudeau and William Novak discussing their research on early American models of selfgovernment, December 2, 2022. Photo by John Zich.

In what ways are democratic governments and capitalist economies interdependent, and how do these dynamics shift over time?

VISITING FELLOWS

The Visiting Fellows program supports the University’s commitment to global engagement and international research collaboration. Each year a select group of scholars, practitioners, and artists are appointed to work on Neubauer Collegium research projects as well as other projects on campus. Twelve fellows representing five countries were in residence throughout the 2022–23 academic year.

MARILYN BOOTH

Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford

Marilyn Booth studies early feminism and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Her research associated with the Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948 project concerns debates on gender rights in Ottoman Egypt and Syria, and on translation as a vector of language reform in the late nineteenth century.

JOHN E. CORT Professor Emeritus of Religion Denison University

John E. Cort is an American Indologist who has studied Jainism and the history of Jain society for over four decades. During his residency he focused on the work of Ācārya Vijay Dharmsūri (1868–1922), who established a school for training monks and lay scholars that produced some of the most important Jain scholars of modern times, as part of the Entanglements of the Indian Past project.

LYNNA DHANANI Assistant Professor of Religious Studies University of California, Davis

Lynna Dhanani’s research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debate, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated Svetambara Jain Hemacandra, a twelfth-century court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. While in residence as a Visiting Fellow, she collaborated on the Entanglements of the Indian Past project.

PHOTOS BY ERIELLE BAKKUM

JONAS GERLINGS

Marie Curie Global Fellow University of Göttingen

Jonas Gerlings is an intellectual historian whose research focuses on global Enlightenments in the Baltic Sea Region. During his residency he is working on a monograph reassessing Kant’s cosmopolitanism. The project explores the growing globalization of Kant’s hometown, Königsberg, and the influence of the changing political situation on Kant’s thought.

CHARU GUPTA Professor of History University of Delhi

Charu Gupta studies gender, sexuality, masculinity, caste, religious identities, and vernacular literatures in twentieth-century India. As a collaborator on the Entanglements of the Indian Past project, she gave two lectures on the making and meanings of caste, Dalit and Bahujan identities, and the challenges of teaching caste. She also led a workshop on the writings of Santram B.A., an anti-caste reformer.

JOHN LIZZA Professor of Philosophy Kutztown University

John Lizza explores the role that the concepts of humanity and personhood play in the analysis and evaluation of issues in bioethics, such as the moral status of the human embryo and the definition of death. As a Visiting Fellow, he helped organize and moderate a biweekly series of discussions on the definition and determination of death as part of the Death: From Philosophy to Medical Practice and the Law project.

On April 13, Marilyn Booth presented a paper and led a discussion on “Sexuality, Authenticity, and the ‘Problem’ of Women’s Voices” in late nineteenth-century language reform in Egypt. The presentation opened a two-day conference on “The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea,” which Booth helped organize during her residency in the Fall Quarter.

ABEL ARCINIEGA

RICK LOWE Professor of Art University of Houston

Rick Lowe’s pioneering “social sculptures” have inspired a generation of artists to explore socially engaged forms of art-making in communities across the country and internationally. Lowe was in residence as a Visiting Fellow from 2018 to 2021, during which time he collaborated on the Black Wall Street Journey project. For his current residency, he is extending the project into new areas of exploration.

ALBERTO NODAR DOMÍNGUEZ

Associate Professor in Classics

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

As a member of the research team on the Transmission of Magical Knowledge project, Alberto Nodar Domínguez helped to finalize a translation of magical handbooks from ancient Egypt and an edited volume about the corpus. His talk on October 13, part of a two-day conference, focused on insights he has gleaned from handwriting variations in a key text known as the “Great Paris Magical Codex.”

FELIPE ROJAS

Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University

Felipe Rojas’s research deals with the archaeology and history of the eastern Mediterranean between the Iron Age and Late Antiquity, and with the comparative history of archaeology and antiquarianism worldwide. During his residency he worked with the research team on the Invisible Landscapes project to study and visualize data from recent excavations and surveys in Petra, Jordan.

Transmission of Magical Knowledge Visiting Fellow Alberto Nodar Domínguez at the reception following the October 6 panel on art and human rights in Ukraine.

ABEL ARCINIEGA

John E. Cort, a leading scholar of Jain traditions of South Asia, presented two talks during his residency as a Visiting Fellow. On January 25, he discussed the many translations and commentaries of the thirteenth-century Jain text Sasti Sataka. On March 24 he shared insights on the scholar Vijay Dharmsūri and his influence on the Banaras School of Jain Studies, part of a two-day conference sponsored by the Entanglements of the Indian Past project.

NINA SANDERS

Independent Curator and Cultural Consultant

Nina Sanders (Apsáalooke) lectures widely on Indigenous conservation and consults with organizations including the Chicago Blackhawks. During her first Visiting Fellowship (2018–21), she curated the Apsáalooke Women and Warriors exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium and the Field Museum. For her current residency, she collaborated with research partners as part of the Native Chicago project.

STARLA THOMPSON

Independent Curator and Scholar

Starla Thompson (Forest Band Potawatomi) has consulted for numerous institutions, including the Chicago Blackhawks, Lake Forest College, the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee, the Burpee Museum of Natural History, and more. In 2022 she curated Of This Place, an exhibition at the Burpee Museum that showcases contemporary and traditional artworks by Native peoples. She is a member of the research team on the Native Chicago project.

ABIGAIL WINOGRAD

Independent Curator and Scholar

Abigail Winograd recently served as curator-at-large at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry and MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the Smart Museum of Art. She was a member of the research team on the Black Wall Street Journey project at the Neubauer Collegium (2020–21). During her residency, she is helping to develop the next phase of the project by fostering new research-focused partnerships.

ABEL ARCINIEGA

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

The Neubauer Collegium Gallery, supported by the Brenda Mulmed Shapiro Fund, functions as a laboratory for innovation and a hub for research discovery. The gallery is also a crucial site for civic engagement, providing space for scholars, artists, practitioners, and the public to reflect on art as a form of knowledge. Curator Dieter Roelstraete organized three exhibitions and related programs throughout the 2022–23 academic year.

SLAVS AND TATARS

MERCZBAU

May 5 – October 7, 2022

Plans for this exhibition were under way months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The core concept – to explore the intertwined histories of Ukraine and Poland by staging an imaginary gift shop in the Ukrainian city of Lviv – remained intact after the war broke out. But as Lviv became a gateway to the West for millions of refugees, the exhibition became painfully urgent. The Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars playfully riffed on Kurt Schwitters’s famous Dadaist work Merzbau with an installation that featured a custom line of “merchandise” supporting the defunct Department of

Oriental Studies at the University of Lviv.

Gallery visitors were invited to purchase the items on display, with all proceeds benefiting Scholars at Risk, an international organization that protects academics under threat.

Slavs and Tatars were in residence at the University’s Gray Center in the Spring Quarter, collaborating with faculty member Leah Feldman. The team will extend their work on the Neubauer Collegium research project Costumes and Collapse, launching July 1.

LEARN MORE WATCH THE VIDEO

ROBERT HEISHMAN

Visual and linguistic puns on Slavs and Tatars’s custom line of “merch” called attention to the shifting meanings of East/West divides.

On October 6 the Neubauer Collegium and the Pozen Center for Human Rights co-hosted a discussion at which an international panel reflected on the intersection of art and human rights in Ukraine. Panelists included Leah Feldman (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago), Markian Prokopovych (Associate Professor of Modern European Cultural History, Durham University), and Boriša Falatar (Head of Kyiv Office, 2020–2022, OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine), pictured here.

The exhibition opening included a multimedia presentation at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), co-sponsored by the Renaissance Society, in which Slavs and Tatars’s Payam Sharifi introduced the show in its historical context.

MAX HERMAN

ABEL ARCINIEGA

MAX HERMAN

RICK LOWE

NOTES ON THE GREAT MIGRATION

October 25, 2022 – February 10, 2023

For well over three decades, Rick Lowe’s name has been closely associated with the practice of “social sculpture.” He has earned widespread acclaim for pioneering a model of socially engaged arts initiatives that foster community and economic development. More recently, Lowe has returned to painting as a mode through which he reflects on his social sculptures and the histories with which they engage. Notes on the Great Migration, Lowe’s first solo exhibition in Chicago, took shape in the wake of Black Wall Street Journey, a community-engagement project he launched as part of the citywide Toward Common Cause exhibition in 2021. (That project, in turn, was informed by the Black Wall Street Journey research project at the Neubauer Collegium.) The centerpiece of Notes on the Great Migration was an installation in which two large paintings were segmented across eight rolling tables;

a complement of eight scroll-like paintings adorned the walls around the tables. The paintings include hieroglyphic marks layered over paper collages featuring fragments of books about diasporas and migrations. Their gridded, cartographic aesthetic calls to mind the historical movement of African Americans to northern cities, and the recurring motif of the domino stone hints at the importance of the domino table as a site for social gathering in Black communities. The intention was to examine and spark conversations about the legacy of Black migration to Chicago. As Lowe explains in a monograph about his career that will be co-published by the Neubauer Collegium and Gagosian this fall, “When I’m painting, I understand the bigger picture.” LEARN MORE WATCH THE VIDEO

ROBERT HEISHMAN

On January 18, Rick Lowe joined an interdisciplinary panel including Kathleen Cagney (Director, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan), Adam Green (Associate Professor of American History), Derek A. Neal (William C. Norby Professor of Economics), and Dieter Roelstraete (Curator, Neubauer Collegium) to consider his recent paintings in the context of broader historical, economic, and sociological concerns. Below: Guests at the opening reception, October 25.

MAX HERMAN

MAX HERMAN

THE CHICAGO CLI-FI LIBRARY

February 22 – June 11, 2023

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT HEISHMAN

Clockwise from top left: Dan Peterman, Archive for 57 People (1998 – Ongoing); Jenny Kendler and Andrew Bearnot, Whale Bells (2020); Iñigo ManglanoOvalle, 8 West 11th Street, March 6, 1970 (2006), and Dan Peterman, Archive (One Ton) (2012); Demetrisu and Demorris Burrows reading from Geissler & Sann’s How Does the World End (for Others)?; Michael Zerang performing on Whale Bells; Jenny Kendler, Underground Library (2023).

Climate change is a great existential crisis for humanity, yet the apocalyptic prospect of global warming and other consequences of this great disruption hardly make themselves felt in the mainstream of cultural production. Whether we consider art, film, literature, or music, the specter of climate change has yet to produce the Anthropocene’s defining masterpieces. One could make the case that the enormity of the challenge of imagining the unimaginable causes a sort of creative paralysis. The Chicago Cli-Fi Library was a modest attempt to make sense of this paralysis, suggesting that art’s response to the complexity of the climate crisis can only ever be piecemeal, ad hoc, and hyperlocalized – all of which must be understood as virtuous. Named after the emerging literary genre of “climate fiction,” or “cli-fi,” and accordingly bookish in both conception and outlook, this exhibition

featured the work of Chicago-based artists Geissler & Sann, Jenny Kendler in collaboration with Andrew Bearnot, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Dan Peterman. In honor of Earth Day on April 22, the Neubauer Collegium presented an afternoon of programming inspired by the show. A screening of Alain Resnais’s short film Le chant du Styrène offered a poetic meditation on the plastic industry. The screening was followed by an improvisatory performance by percussionist Michael Zerang and a dramatic reading of Geissler & Sann’s score How Does the World End (for Others)? On May 20 Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete opened a large-scale version of the exhibition, Everybody Talks about the Weather, at the Fondazione Prada in Venice.

LEARN MORE WATCH THE VIDEO

MAX HERMAN

DIRECTOR’S LECTURES

The Neubauer Collegium regularly opens its inquiries and conversations to the public. The Director’s Lecture series, supported by Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87, welcomes distinguished scholars and artists to share their insights with faculty, students, and the broader community.

LEA YPI

DIGNITY AND HISTORICAL INJUSTICE

February 7, 2023

Political theorist Lea Ypi (London School of Economics) discussed her forthcoming book on dignity, which fuses a memoiristic narrative about her family’s history with political analysis about the legacy of Communism in contemporary Albania. As Ypi explained, the book is intended to be a prequel to her previous book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, an award-winning memoir that explored Albania’s transition to democracy and philosophical conceptions of freedom through a series of personal vignettes. The reading was followed by a discussion with Neubauer Collegium Faculty Director Tara Zahra in which the two probed the moral and political meanings of dignity – both individual and collective – in connection to questions of truth, reconciliation, injustice, and the relationship between literature and history.

WATCH THE VIDEO

AN EVENING WITH THE CROSSING

February 26, 2023

This event, a first-of-its-kind performance in the Director’s Lecture series, featured contemporary choral works by the Grammywinning chamber choir The Crossing. The program included original compositions by Ayanna Woods, Caroline Shaw, Edie Hill, Shara Nova, and Jennifer Higdon on the themes of racial injustice, historical memory, and climate change. A discussion with conductor Donald Nally, Ayanna Woods, and tenor James Reese followed. The performance was organized by the Neubauer Collegium in partnership with UChicago Presents, the Humanities Division, the Provost’s Office, and the Department of Music. The second component of the program took the form of a workshop on “The Aesthetics of

Catastrophe.” Nally, Woods, and Nova joined an interdisciplinary panel of scientists, humanistic scholars, artists, and practitioners for a wideranging discussion about research-based and artistic representations of catastrophe and the implications for human experience. The workshop, linked to the previous evening’s performance as well as The Chicago Cli-Fi Library exhibition in the Neubauer Collegium gallery, was part of an ongoing effort to “expand our thinking about the arts as a site of research in collaboration with other disciplines,” noted Faculty Director Tara Zahra in her introductory remarks.

WATCH THE VIDEO

YUANJIAN LIU