Notions 2024
The Solution Is Human
×It’s hard to believe, but the Neubauer Collegium is now in its tenth year. A decade ago, the University of Chicago launched a bold experiment to catalyze and sustain collaborative research that transcends all divides. We undertook this work with the conviction that solving complex problems requires bringing together this kind of diversity of thought and practice. Indeed, the Collegium’s 10-year-milestone mantra is “The Solution Is Human.” But so are the problems, and getting people to work and think in new ways is no easy task. This is where humanistic research is key, and where universities are positioned to step forward in collaboration with partners who sit outside the academy.
One of our most enduring challenges has been to demonstrate the value of our work in an environment that prizes proof in numbers. As part of our 10-year-milestone activities, we have been reflecting on where we have been and where we hope to go next. Has the Collegium succeeded? By what measures? In a step toward answering these questions, we partnered with the Neubauer Family Foundation to enlist NORC, an independent social science research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, to evaluate the impact of our research to date. The survey confirmed that the Collegium is an effective catalyst, instilling an interdisciplinary mindset among faculty and improving the quality of collaborative practices, particularly among disciplines where collaboration is rare.
We hope this special issue of Notions invites further reflection on the legacies of our work by showcasing research themes that have been particularly significant. These include efforts to address the climate catastrophe; intersections between medical and humanistic understandings of health; the challenges of cultural and linguistic
translation and preservation; and humanistic responses to artificial intelligence.
We are also reflecting on our ongoing effort to integrate the arts and research. One highlight is the Panafrica project, a five-year global research initiative undertaken in partnership with the Art Institute of Chicago. The project culminates this year in the Project a Black Planet exhibition at the Art Institute; exhibitions featuring the Otolith Group and Betye Saar in our gallery; and a major international gathering of artists, scholars, and curators this spring. We are particularly excited to be incubating the Arts Labs at the University of Chicago, which consist of five projects that bring together arts practice and research in theater, dance, creative writing, and opera.
I hope you enjoy this edition of Notions, and that it inspires you to visit our gallery and attend our events. But more importantly, I hope it provides you with optimism about the power of humanistic thinking to transform the world for the better.
Tara Zahra Roman Family Director Neubauer
Collegium for Culture and Society
Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title, p. 20
These projects integrate the arts into broader research inquiries – in part through gallery exhibitions that provide space to reflect on art as a form of knowledge.
The Art of Inquiry
The Collegium is unique among research incubators in its commitment to integrating the arts into larger research inquiries. Established to cultivate interdisciplinary collaboration and open up academic inquiries to the broader public, the Collegium recognizes the vital role of artistic expression in deepening our understanding of complex societal issues.
A central component of these activities is the Neubauer Collegium gallery, which presents art in the context of scholarly research. The gallery inspires new ways to visualize and think about important research questions from a variety of perspectives. It is a laboratory for collaboration, opening up opportunities for creative partnerships within the University of Chicago and with other institutions. It is also a site for crucial conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. The gallery provides space for scholars, artists, practitioners, and the public to reflect on art as a form of knowledge, driving research forward in unexpected directions.
By embedding art within scholarly discourse and inviting community participation, the Collegium encourages an expansive exploration of the human experience, prompting researchers and those who care about research – including the public – to engage with the pressing questions of our time.
Betye Saar, Antigone: Blue Dress (1969–1970), on view in Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, Neubauer Collegium, Jan. 30 – April 27, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects.
Ebony G. Patterson, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories (2014). Installation view, Project a Black Planet, Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025. Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics
In July 2021 the Neubauer Collegium launched a multi-year research project to explore the lasting influence of Pan-African politics and culture. The team organized workshops and site visits in eight countries during which they convened groups of scholars, artists, curators, and civic leaders to discuss local expressions of Pan-African thought. In December 2024, they gathered as co-curators to celebrate the opening of Project a Black Planet, a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago that includes more than 350 objects from across the world. The show examines the central role of visual culture in animating 20th-century anticolonial struggles – and the ongoing legacy of Pan-African ideals. As part of its support for the project, the Collegium organized two complementary exhibitions in its gallery during the 2024–25 year. The Otolith Group’s film Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy (Fall Quarter) accompanied a mural of the same title installed at the Art Institute. Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar (Winter Quarter) looks at the early influence of costume design on Saar’s pioneering work with assemblage. The Collegium also cosponsored Panafrica Days (March 5–8, 2025), a constellation of exhibitions and events at sites across Chicago, including a daylong symposium about the influence of PanAfricanism in contemporary art.
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Reimagining Cosmopolitanism
What does it mean to be a citizen of the world today? The international group of scholars and artists collaborating on this ambitious project, a partnership between the Collegium and the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, are addressing this question from a wide range of historical and theoretical perspectives. Papers developed over the course of a workshop series will be published in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism, and the team will synthesize their insights during a capstone conference in May 2025. The Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective will inform research discussions at that event with the premiere of Cavalcade, a new film that imagines contemporary life as a rapturous procession of humans, ghosts, gods, and machines.
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Arts Labs
Experimentation is an essential part of the creative process. But what forms of experimentation are most useful for nurturing creative expression? The Arts Labs initiative brings together leading arts scholars and artists to design and test environments where their ideas can incubate and thrive. The team is also making use of these insights to develop arts programming on campus and beyond, producing works of opera, dance, theater, literature, film, and more.
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Our collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium on the Apsáalooke Women and Warriors exhibition was unexpected, surprising, and joyous. What the Collegium brought in terms of the artful exhibition, the opening celebration, and the publication really completed our project. The two institutions are a complement to each other, and we are looking for other projects to develop together.
Jaap Hoogstraten Head of Exhibitions, Field Museum
Ben Pease, Keeper of Medicine from Above: Thunderbird Protector (2019), on view in Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, Neubauer Collegium, March 12 – Dec. 18, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
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Collegium research on climate change highlights the need for solutions that harness the complexity of interactions between humans and the natural environment.
The Planetary Age
Science has offered clear remedies to the climate crisis, yet global emissions from fossil fuels continue to rise. The problem here is the need to change human behaviors. The solution begins with interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together the diverse ideas and strategies needed to address this pressing global threat. Collegium projects on climate change close the gap between theory and practice by focusing on how people actually think and behave in the face of existential risk.
Over the past decade, the Collegium has sponsored 15 faculty-led research projects on the topic of climate change, each of which carves new pathways for academic research and, perhaps more importantly, leads to practical strategies for solving the crisis. Fittingly, the projects are global in scope, broadening the lens to include not only large industrial economies but also the economic trajectories and energy systems of postcolonial societies – as well as considering the impact on societies themselves.
As part of its collaborative approach, the Collegium regularly engages the public on this crucial issue. An ongoing series of exhibitions, film screenings, musical performances, and public dialogues between artists and scientists on “the aesthetics of catastrophe” makes clear that the arts can play a crucial role in translating complex concepts into relatable forms, raising awareness and inspiring action. To ensure a more sustainable planet, we may need to expand our capacity to imagine alternative futures. This is where art, science, and humanistic research intersect in ways that lead to solutions.
Jenny Kendler, Underground Library (2023), on view in The Chicago Cli-Fi Library, Neubauer Collegium, Feb. 22 – June 10, 2023. Photo by Robert Heishman.
Visualization of global weather conditions using forecast data from NOAA. Presented by the Logic and Politics of Climate Change project. Via Earth Nullschool.
Fossil Capitalism in the Global South
This project fostered an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to consider how theories and histories of “fossil capital” are unsettled by colonial and postcolonial narratives. By focusing on Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the project introduced a broad range of case studies. The team investigated links between carbon energy and socioeconomic power, the legacies of colonial extraction, neocolonial labor relations in the global oil and gas sector, and more. They also convened a reading group to discuss key texts, organized a series of public talks, and culminated with a conference at which scholars examined the forms of opposition to fossil capitalism that have emerged from the Global South.
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Climate Games
The hypothesis for this project was that humanistic knowledge – especially linked to storytelling, games, and media – can strengthen science learning and STEM pathways. The team developed an alternate-reality game for seventh-grade students about climate change and piloted it in three Chicago schools. Initial results from a post-game survey suggested that the intervention was effective. The research team now aims to create a scalable model that can be adopted by Chicago Public Schools as a citywide intervention.
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Engineered Worlds
What political, economic, and legal practices would help states and multinational organizations grapple more effectively with human impacts on the natural world? The goal of this initiative, comprising three related projects stretching from 2014 to 2021, was to create new theoretical frameworks and social science methodologies to address this urgent question. The research team fostered a network of anthropologists, historians, geographers, and environmentalists looking at the ways industry is irrevocably altering ecologies and social relations. A collectively authored book by the lead investigators is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
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Hidden Abodes of the
“Great
Acceleration”
Widely advocated by proponents of the Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration thesis posits that the inflection point for today’s climate crises occurred during the postwar golden age of capitalism. This project elaborates an alternative account of the historical genealogy and infrastructural anatomy of planetary environmental crises. The team is focusing on the “hidden abodes” of the Great Acceleration – veiled yet essential dynamics associated with the role of largescale infrastructural systems in capital’s appropriation, operationalization, and degradation of nature.
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It has been clear for years that ever more convincing climate science does not generate meaningful climate action. The obstacles to such action are overwhelmingly political, cultural, and even philosophical. This is why collaborative humanistic research is so urgently needed: both to provide critical analyses of the forces that lock carbon-intensive systems in place, and to help us imagine our way towards fairer and more sustainable futures.
Elizabeth Chatterjee
Assistant Professor of Environmental History
The
University of Chicago
Conceptual illustration for the Climate Games project by Sarah Gavagan, courtesy of the Fourcast Lab.
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Research teams are collaborating, often with communities, to develop and implement strategies for improving human health, patient outcomes, and overall well-being.
Case Studies on Human Health
Medical researchers and practitioners are well aware of the limits of medicine when treating the whole patient. The Collegium supports a growing cohort of interdisciplinary research collaborators interested in exploring how to integrate other forms of expertise, including the patient experience, into more comprehensive approaches to health at the levels of individuals, families, and society. The goal is not only to improve health outcomes in ways that benefit society, but also to integrate medically informed methods of health management in ways that improve people’s lives beyond the medical realm.
Collegium projects have addressed questions made much more complex with advancing medical technologies. How do we know when a person is legally dead? How does medical care rank as a household financial decision? What policy instruments and economic incentives effectively promote healthier choices? How can we maintain physical and mental health in societies with structural inequalities and inequities of access?
The Collegium’s practice of incorporating the visual and performance arts into research inquiries has proven particularly generative in this area, where established methodologies are in question. Project leaders sometimes invert the role of the patient from object of research to research partner, or consider forms of health care expertise that lie outside the medical establishment. Such innovative approaches to research hold considerable promise for advancing new knowledge about what it means to be fully human.
Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. © Damien Hirst & Science Ltd. DACS, London / ARS, NY.
The Unpacking the Value of Health Insurance in India project conducted ethnographic research in Karnataka, India.
The Case of the Human
In order to synthesize medical and humanistic understandings of health and well-being, we need to build consensus on a holistic definition of “the human.” In September 2024 the Collegium hosted a group of about 60 clinicians and scholars representing 15 countries for a four-day workshop at which they presented case studies from their areas of expertise and regions of the world. Adapting a method developed for creative writing workshops, the organizers allowed time for revision, and groups reshuffled each day to increase the range of editorial feedback. Writers followed standard guidelines to make their case studies uniform and broadly accessible. Select papers will be published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal with global reach.
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Unpacking the Value of Health Insurance
in India
This project combined ethnographic and cultural research with statistical analysis to measure the effectiveness of a program to expand India’s public health insurance. Interdisciplinary dialogue between policy analysts, economists, psychologists, and epidemiologists catalyzed a complex effort to study and improve enrollment rates. The research team has published several papers documenting their findings, including on the impacts of pricing and ways to optimize premiums for public funding.
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Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title
Visitors who saw this 2021 exhibition – and there were very few of them – entered the gallery under a cloud of disposable face masks, signifiers of the Covid pandemic that was raging at the time. An arrangement of medicine cabinets afforded glimpses of recent works from Pope.L’s Skin Set Project, a series of drawings that make absurdist claims about skin tone. At a moment when the rates of infection, hospitalization, and death were disproportionately high among minority groups, the show offered a somber, oblique comment about the racial politics of access – to medical care and to art as a source of meaning. Pope.L, a worldrenowned artist and beloved faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts, died in December 2023 at age 68.
Making Progress on Death
How should we determine when a human life has ended? This project brought together experts in medicine, law, and bioethics to examine longstanding disagreements within the medical community about the definition of death. In March 2021, nearly 400 experts from around the world came together via Zoom for a conference on the topic. Ongoing work aims to inform a legal debate about the neurological standard for declaration of death.
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VIEW PHOTOS
My Kingdom for a Title is hands down the most important exhibition I have ever seen at the University of Chicago. This will be one for the history books.
Christine Mehring
Mary L. Block Professor of Art History
Pope.L, My Kingdom for a Title (2021). Installation view, Neubauer Collegium, Jan. 21 – May 16, 2021. Photo by Robert Heishman.
The University of Chicago
Using cutting-edge tools and methods, research teams are gaining new insights about the transmission of ideas, cultural practice, and historical knowledge across divides.
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Translation: Languages and Landscapes
Successful interdisciplinary collaboration involves constant translation. Disciplines develop codes that can appear similar but in fact have different meanings. These divergences can lead to misunderstanding. Or they can prompt critical conversations that lead to more comprehensive understanding, fostering relationships of trust that make collaboration on more challenging problems possible.
Collegium projects go far beyond the conversion of meaning from one language to another. New theories and practices of translation have great potential to deepen insights about how knowledge circulates within and between societies. Collaborators from diverse fields – including history, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy, and the computational sciences – are developing new understandings about the transmission of ideas, cultural forms, and historical knowledge across time and space.
Many of these projects are piloting the use of cutting-edge methodologies. Advanced imaging techniques, digital mapping, and sophisticated database platforms allow scholars to study texts and artifacts in ways that were previously unimaginable, let alone attainable. Ancient manuscripts, often damaged or incomplete, can be restored and analyzed with precision, revealing lost knowledge and new perspectives on historical civilizations while preserving material integrity. Likewise, satellite imagery and geospatial technologies have transformed the way we comprehend human interactions with the natural environment. Such innovations enrich contemporary discussions about globalization, identity, and the complex links between the world’s cultures.
The “Giant” compound microscope from Rene Descartes’s Dioptrique, 1637. Wellcome Library via Wikimedia Commons.
The Textual Optics project demonstrated the potential of literary scholarship at the intersection of computation and humanistic inquiry.
Invisible Landscapes
How can we study human manipulations of the environment that we can’t see? This project convened a group of archaeologists, computer scientists, architects, and artists to investigate previously hidden cities and overlooked traces of human cultivation. The team conducted extensive fieldwork in Jordan, applying cuttingedge drone technologies and exploring new methods of residue analysis to study the ancient city of Petra in ways that go beyond traditional archaeological surveys. Ongoing work will look at areas of the Amazonian rainforest hidden by the jungle canopy and a string of islands built by the ancient Maya.
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SummerSALT
In August 2024, a group of writers and translators working in South Asian languages gathered in Colombo, Sri Lanka, for a series of workshops at which they explored questions about translation theory and craft. The weeklong program focused on a key question: To what extent does the inclusion of the writer of the text during the process of translation shape the methodology and outcome? This first-of-its-kind gathering put into practice both the theoretical and craft-based strands of translation studies, allowing participants to explore translations as simultaneous texts that are versions of the same work rather than as hierarchies between translation and original.
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Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity
Thanks to the climatological conditions and scribal practices of Graeco-Roman Egypt, a large number of Greek, Demotic, and Coptic handbooks have survived – including more than 40 that concern magical knowledge. These texts provided the research team with insights on the practices by which knowledge was taught and transmitted in an otherwise lightly documented period. The project produced a new text and translation of the corpus in a twovolume, multi-lingual edition – a resource long awaited by scholars – and carried out the first large-scale study of the handbooks as material objects and media of cultural transmission.
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Textual Optics
The research team on this project, including Visiting Fellows from four countries, pioneered a data-driven approach to literary research centered on practices associated with new scalable reading methods. Many of these are borrowed from recent software innovations like data mining, visualization, machine learning, and network analysis. By integrating pattern detection tools with traditional methods of textual analysis, the team developed a system of scalability that allows for both close reading and large-scale data analysis. Ultimately, the project demonstrated the extraordinary potential of literary scholarship at the intersection of computation and humanistic inquiry.
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The Collegium has been hugely helpful to a series of projects on ancient magic that I co-organized with my colleague Sofía Torallas Tovar. These projects deal directly with the problem of translation, and all of them have succeeded because of the Collegium’s interest in and support of complex international projects.
Christopher A. Faraone
Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics The University of Chicago
Tantalus magical gem CBd-754, 3rd c. AD. Photo by Christopher A. Faraone. © Trustees of the British Museum CampbellBonner Magical Gems Database.
Can humanistic research help ensure advances in artificial intelligence make a positive social impact?
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AI: The Place for the Human
The Neubauer Collegium is at the forefront of integrating humanistic perspectives into the study and development of artificial intelligence. Recognizing that AI’s rapid advancement raises complex ethical, societal, and philosophical questions, the Collegium fosters interdisciplinary research and public dialogue in a bid to ensure that technological progress aligns with – and enhances – human values.
Interdisciplinary research initiatives at the Collegium bring computational experts working on AI into dialogue with scholars who approach the issue from humanistic and social scientific perspectives. These projects underscore the importance of humancentered interventions in areas of research more typically dominated by science and engineering. The approach helps to ensure that pioneering efforts to advance AI technology include rigorous consideration of social impacts. Central to these considerations is the ethical imperative to preserve human agency along with those most human of qualities: creativity and imagination.
Conceptual illustration for the Organon for the Information Age project by Benjamin Ransom.
University of California, Berkeley, computer scientist Stuart Russell delivering the Neubauer Collegium Director’s Lecture, April 25, 2024.
Photo by Max Herman.
An Organon for the Information Age
The unlikely partners on this project – an archaeologist, a philosopher, and a physician –share an interest in the potential and pitfalls of data integration. In theory, analysts have the means to merge multiple sets of data efficiently. In practice, the process is often riddled with complexity and error, hampering efforts to automate queries and analysis. The team organized a series of events focused on the use of artificial intelligence in streamlining data integration. The talks inspired a new AI project sponsored by the UChicago Center for Data and Computing and helped shape a graduate-level curriculum at the new Forum for Digital Culture.
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Yuval Sharon’s Così fan tutte
Detroit Opera Artistic Director Yuval Sharon, the inaugural Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium, is developing a body of work that revitalizes traditional forms, inviting audiences to rethink their expectations about what opera can be. In February 2024 he hosted a multi-day workshop at the Neubauer Collegium with a group of scholars and artists to develop concepts for a bold interpretation of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. The production, which will premiere in Detroit in April 2025, reimagines the opera through the lens of AI. In Sharon’s hands, the comedy of mistaken identities becomes a parable about one man’s obsessive quest to build a robot capable of love.
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Government Data Markets
Every day, a vast amount of sensitive personal data flows across government agencies and between private and public networks without individuals’ awareness or consent. This seed-stage project brought together a legal scholar and a computer scientist to develop an integrated understanding of these rapidly expanding “data ecologies.” The team studied the risks of unchecked flows of data and considered the technical, legal, ethical, and economic frameworks that can help ensure the socially beneficial use of data. A paper on initial findings is forthcoming, and the project is expanding as part of a major research initiative at the University’s Data Science Institute.
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Director’s Lecture with Stuart Russell
On April 25, 2024, the Neubauer Collegium welcomed University of California, Berkeley, computer scientist Stuart Russell to campus for a Director’s Lecture titled “AI: What If We Succeed?” One of the world’s foremost experts on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Russell is co-chair of the World Economic Forum Council on AI and co-author of a textbook on AI that is used at universities around the world. His talk addressed the growing gap between AI innovation and policies to ensure that AI tools are “provably beneficial to humans,” with particular focus on the existential risks of autonomous weapons.
WATCH THE VIDEO
We don’t want intelligent machines. We want beneficial machines, and those are machines whose actions can be expected to achieve our objectives.
Stuart Russell Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley “AI: What If We Succeed?,” Neubauer Collegium Director’s Lecture, April 25, 2024
AI-generated image created by Genmo, an application developed as part of the Critical Computation project. Courtesy Jason Salavon.
I reflected in last year’s Notions on how interdisciplinary collaboration disrupts the big cultural push toward information bubbles –marketing algorithms that tailor information to a person’s known inclinations, instead of challenging them. And challenging presumptions is what a great liberal arts education is all about, particularly at the University of Chicago.
Universities can be their own kind of information bubble. Key to the Collegium’s commitment to open-ended interdisciplinary collaboration, one way to pop that bubble, has been our frequent partnerships with institutions, communities, and individuals outside the university. Over the last 10 years we have partnered with a number of institutions, each partnership sparked by mutual interest to advance ideas and share them with others. Our first such experience was a yearlong working relationship with the Research Council of Norway, which led to the first humanitiesfocused Transatlantic Forum in 2016. An immediate result was the Norwegian minister of education’s decision to include a distinctively UChicago emphasis on the humanities as key to liberal arts education in Norway moving forward. We also have an ongoing relationship with the Field Museum that emerged from a Collegium research project studying the decision-making behind the redesign of the Field’s North American wing. Over a 14-month period the Collegium and the Field, together with members of the Crow tribe, co-designed complementary linked exhibitions on Indigenous futures from aesthetic and historic perspectives.
This approach to relationship building undergirds our 10-year milestone programming, which showcases the impact of the arts as part of larger research inquiry on important societal questions. All three of our gallery exhibitions this
year intersect with long-term research projects and involve enduring institutional partnerships, both with the Field Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, that have been years in the making. The year is far from over and already we see new levels of community engagement developing and new possibilities emerging.
Why do this? Why pursue partnerships that are not revenue generating, require huge amounts of time and effort, and are frequently uncomfortable? We do it for the same reason we support collaborative research in the first place: together we can do things that we cannot do in isolation. There is tremendous power in a true working partnership. That is the guiding principle for collaboration at every level, and it holds true when the partnership is institutional. We are facing issues that pose a profound risk to society, including the challenge to knowledge itself. The argument in favor will be most resounding if made by a diverse cohort that includes but is not confined to universities. The thing about stepping out of our bubble is the realization that we are not alone.
Elspeth Carruthers Executive Director
Neubauer
Collegium
for Culture and Society
p. 1: Reena Saini Kallat, Woven Chronicle (detail), 2011–19. Installation view, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston. Photo by Charles Mayer. © Reena Saini Kallat.
pp. 2 and 31:
Participants at recent Neubauer Collegium events, including: “A New Philosophy of Opera” discussion with Yuval Sharon, Dec. 10, 2024; The Case of the Human conference, Sept. 5–8, 2024; Migrations in Literature conference, July 29–30, 2024; “Projections of
Panafrica” screening and performance, June 1, 2024; Textual Amulets conference, May 10, 2024; “The Silk Road and the Rhetoric of Connected History” discussion, May 2, 2024; Costumes and Collapse discussion and performance by CHAOS, April 13, 2024; Fikret Adaman lecture on “Eco-Socialist Planning,” April 12, 2024; Government Data Markets workshop, April 3, 2024; “What Can the Silk Roads Be?” lecture, Feb. 16, 2024; Betye Saar visit to Gelitin’s Democratic Sculpture 7 exhibition, Oct. 17, 2023; Opening receptions for gallery exhibitions including The Otolith
Group’s Mascon (Sept. 27, 2024), WORKS BY (May 1 & May 23, 2024), Rick Lowe’s Notes on the Great Migration (Oct. 25, 2022). Photos by Max Herman.
pp. 3 and 30: Photos by Erielle Bakkum.
p. 4: Kawira Mwirichia, To Revolutionary Type Love, 2017. Installation view, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
p. 5:
Soundproof room for acoustical research, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.
p. 6: Oil slicks from leaks in the various oil production and storage platforms located on Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, June 11, 2003. Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.
p. 7:
Pope.L, Ah-Af (detail), 2020. Photo by Robert Heishman, courtesy of the artist.
p. 8:
Magical gem no. 290, 3rd century AD. Photo by Christopher A. Faraone. © Trustees of the British Museum.
p. 9: Artist rendering of facial recognition technology. Anonymous via Flickr.
p. 10: Betye Saar, Saar Hand Banner, 1968. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Paul Salveson.
p. 14:
Michael Light, Barney’s Canyon Gold Mine, Near Bingham Canyon, Looking South, UT, 2006. © Michael Light.
p. 18:
Paul Klee, A Woman for Gods, 1938.
p. 22: Study of Ras al-Silaysil, Jordan, courtesy of Sarah Newman.
p. 26: Facial recognition system’s scan and rendering of Michaelangelo’s David W-C Hsu et al., Nano Letters, 2024.
p. 34: Still from The Otolith Group, Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy, 2024. Courtesy of the artists. Design: Raventype
Arts Labs 2024–2025
Leslie Buxbaum Theater and Performance Studies
Theaster Gates Visual Arts
David Levin Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies
Tina Post English, Creative Writing, and Theater and Performance Studies
Projects Cited
Brian Callender Medicine
E. Summerson Carr Social Work and Anthropology
Michele Friedner Comparative Human Development
Jeremy A. Gottlieb University of California, San Francisco, and University of California, Berkeley
Seth Holmes University of California, Berkeley
Eugene Raikhel Comparative Human Development
Mayssa Rekhis University of Gothenburg
Scott Stonington University of Michigan
Climate Games: Transforming
Middle School
STEM Education Through Transmedia Play 2021–2022
Heidi Coleman Theater and Performance Studies
Engineered Worlds 2013–2014 2016–2017 2019–2022
Timothy Choy University of California, Davis
Jake Kosek University of California, Berkeley
Joseph Masco Anthropology and Social Sciences
Michelle Murphy University of Toronto
Government Data Markets: Mapping and Evaluating Problems in Intergovernmental Data Markets 2023–2024
Bridget Fahey Law
Sarah Newman Anthropology and Social Sciences
Felipe Rojas Brown University
Making Progress on Death: Towards an Updated Normative Framework 2020–2021
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Srikanth Reddy English and Creative Writing
Julia Rhoads Theater and Performance Studies
The Case of the Human: Co-Producing Plural Knowledge on the Body, the Social, and the Subject
2024–2025
Zoe Boudart University of Michigan
Julie Orlemanksi
English
David Meltzer Medicine, Public Policy, and Economics
Theodore Michaels University of California, San Francisco, and University of California, Berkeley
Mirko Pasquini University of Gothenburg
Patrick Jagoda English and Cinema and Media Studies
Ben Kolak Independent Filmmaker and Cinematographer
Kristen Schilt Gender and Sexuality Studies
Ashlyn Sparrow Weston Game Lab
Sandor Weisz Puzzle Design
Fossil Capitalism in the Global South 2022–2023
Elizabeth Chatterjee Environmental History
Ryan Cecil Jobson Anthropology
Victoria Saramago Romance Languages and Literatures
Raul Castro Fernandez Computer Science Hidden Abodes of the “Great Acceleration”: Fossil Metabolism, Infrastructure, and the Climate/ Nature Crisis 2024–2025
Neil Brenner Sociology
Aaron G. Jakes History
Jason W. Moore
Binghampton University
Invisible Landscapes 2020–2024
Eduardo Góes Neves
University of São Paulo
Fernando D. Goldenberg Neurology
Christos Lazaridis Neurocritical Care
Lainie Friedman Ross Clinical Medical Ethics
An Organon for the Information Age 2018–2021
David Schloen Syro-Palestinian Archaeology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Malte Willer Philosophy
Samuel Volchenboum Pediatrics
Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics
2021–2025
Antawan Byrd Northwestern University
Adom Getachew Political Science
Elvira Dyangani Ose MACBA Contemporary Art Museum
Matthew Witkovsky
Art Institute of Chicago
Reimagining Cosmopolitanism 2022–2025
Mohammad Al Attar Playwright
Prathama Banerjee
Center for the Study of Developing Societies
Dipesh Chakrabarty History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Sanjay Seth University of London
Lisa Wedeen Political Science
SummerSALT: Translation Theory, Translation Practice 2024–2025
Rachel Galvin English and Comparative Literature
Jason Grunbaum
South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Daniel Hahn South Asian Literature in Translation
Annie Janusch
Creative Writing
Daisy Rockwell Princeton University
Daniel Gordon University of Massachusetts
Amherst
Jo Guldi
Emory University
Hoyt Long
Japanese Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Katherine McDonough
The Alan Turing Institute
Robert Morrissey French Literature
Marine Riguet University of Reims, ChampagneArdennes
Transmission of Magical Knowledge in Antiquity: The Papyrus Magical Handbooks 2015–2019 2020–2022
Alberto Nodar Domínguez
Pompeu Fabra University
Christopher A. Faraone Classics
Janet Johnson Egyptology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Sofía Torallas Tovar
Kosuke Imai Harvard University
Cynthia Kinnan Tufts University
Vani Kulkarni
Yale University
Ramanan Laxminarayan Princeton University
Anup Malani Law and Medicine
Anuj Shah Behavioral Science and Business
Alessandra Voena Stanford University
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Arunava Sinha Ashoka University Textual Optics 2017–2020
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia Sorbonne University
Clovis Gladstone Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language
Haun Saussy Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations
James Sparrow History
Zhao Wei Capital Normal University, Beijing
Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Unpacking the Value of Health Insurance in India: Fostering Dialogue Amongst Methodologies 2014–2016
Gabriella Conti University College London
Stefan Ecks University of Edinburgh
