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Tableau THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AUTUMN 2006 | WINTER 2007 IN THIS ISSUE | HUMANITIES DAY ’06 | EXCELLENCE IN THE WORLD | ART ON THE SOUTH SIDE Editor’s Corner riting this note to you in September The range of intellectual programs created by our achieved an elegant design with ample flexibility for I am full of expectation for the debut faculty, our various commitments to community proj- adding news of current projects and programs as they Wof the Division of the Humanities’ ects, and the services provided by the Division have are launched. I hope the calendar of events will be Web site (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/). Since also grown, due to a larger staff and better funding of special interest to our alumni, as it gathers notices November 2005 we have been reflecting on how best from institutional, public, and private sources to sup- of lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and performances to clarify and deepen the narrative of our scholarship port major capital and research projects. from many of our departments. The calendar should and creativity, to share this rich story with a wider Together with presenting our scholarship in a clear provide many reasons for planning a return to campus. audience, and to introduce state-of-the-art design and and welcoming fashion, we wanted the site to cele- Do stop in and say hello! technology. Much has changed within the Humanities brate the unique and compelling reasons for studying since the previous site was designed in 2001. At that at Chicago. To help us achieve these aims, we selected Joanne M. Berens time, prospective students based their first impressions Studio Blue as our designer after reviewing over ninety Editor of Tableau of the University of Chicago on paper brochures and firms. Studio Blue, a Chicago firm established in 1993, Director of Communications submitted paper applications; now these students works exclusively with educational and cultural insti- Division of the Humanities exclusively use the Web site as their gateway to depart- tutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the mental sites and the online application procedures. School of the Art Institute, and our Law School. They contents 1 LETTER FROM THE DEAN FEATURES ON CAMPUS 6 New Leadership in the Arts 16 Honor Roll 2 HERE & NOW Interview with the Directors of Court 19 Alumni Publications Humanities Day, Summer, Inc., Theatre and the David and Castrato as Myth, DEASC Alfred Smart Museum 14 IN MEMORIAM Celebrates Ten Years, A Nonprofit By Kristian C. J. Kerr, English Gwin Kolb, AM 1946, PhD ‘49 Primer, Drawing in Contemporary Art Doctoral Student Joseph O’Gara 8 The Center for Creative and Tikva Frymer-Kensky 7 DONOR PROFILE Performing Arts Placing Excellence in the World: A New Home for the Arts at the 20 PALIMPSEST The Neubauer Family University of Chicago Art and the Art of Scholarship at Presidential Fellowships 10 South Side Story the University of Chicago By Joanne M. Berens, MFA 1993, New Faces and Places for the Arts By David M. Thompson, PhD 1997, Editor of Tableau By Jennifer Carnig, AMRS 2004, and Associate Dean for Planning & Programs Joanne M. Berens, MFA 1993 21 HAPPENINGS Tableau, Autumn 2006/Winter 2007, Volume 8, Number 2—Tableau is published biannually with Division of the Humanities funds for our alumni and friends. Editor: Joanne M. Berens, MFA 1993; Copy Editor: Kristian C. J. Kerr; English Doctoral Student. To Contact Tableau: The University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, 1115 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, [email protected] FROM THE DEAN 1 involved in the worlds of contemporary art (visual, musical, theatrical, and textual), whether as practi- tioners, curators, or critics. The versatility of our faculty gives artists an opportunity to work side-by- side with colleagues in their respective departments who devote all of their time to scholarship, and also with scholars who bridge theory and practice. Thomas Pavel, knighted by the French government for his work on the novel, is also a published novelist in France. dear alumni Jennifer Scappettone, a junior scholar of modernism in the English Department, is also an actively pub- and friends lishing poet. And last year Cinema and Media Studies sponsored a lecture by painter William Kentridge in a packed Max Palevsky Theater that got rave reviews LAST SPRING I WROTE TO SAY that in the from scholars and MFA students alike. Humanities art is in the mix now too. This raises a In some cases, the only road to completion of a critical question. How do our arts programs connect scholarly investigation passes through art-making. to our master’s and doctoral programs in the world’s Philip Bohlman, the Mary Werkman Professor of linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions? Music, has been researching midcentury Jewish &After all, although we have had an MFA program cabaret music as well as music written in concen- in visual arts for over three decades and have offered tration camps, and has made significant archival a PhD in music composition since 1933, the Division discoveries. But how to understand the music com- of the Humanities at the University of Chicago is most pletely without ever hearing it? Bohlman started famous as the national leader in critical investigation a cabaret ensemble, the New Budapest Orpheum of the world’s cultural traditions. Our journals, Classical Society, a revival of the longest-running Jewish Philology, Modern Philology, and Critical Inquiry, all cabaret in Vienna, which existed from the 1880s represent scholarly firsts and consistently set the through the end of World War I. They are excellent. standard for humanistic research. Moreover, of the In addition to traveling around the world to lecture, country’s top graduate programs, only the University of Bohlman now also leads his cabaret ensemble for Chicago and Berkeley (not Harvard, not Princeton, not performances in major cities, for instance at the Yale) preserve a commitment to study the humanities Neue Galerie in New York. comprehensively. Our twenty-one degree-granting In this issue you will find stories that underscore programs include “core” programs (that is, those which my central point: at the University of Chicago, where every major institution offers: Art History, Classics, we tackle big problems, we never expect a single Comparative Literature, English, Germanics, Music, disciplinary perspective to solve things entirely on Philosophy, and Romance), as well as “common” its own. Our visual artists, musicians, thespians, programs (those which a majority of major institutions and writers therefore often find themselves working offer: East Asian, Near Eastern, Slavic, and South together to solve problems, whether they are aes- Asian literatures, as well as Linguistics and Visual thetic, technical, critical or even ethical, social, or Arts), and we also mount a remarkable number of new hermeneutic. They work equally well with scholars or interdisciplinary doctoral programs (for instance, —from literary critics to philosophers, from historians Cinema and Media Studies and Jewish Studies). of art and culture to scientists at Argonne National The short answer to how art and scholarship Laboratory. And vice versa. Scholarship is enriched mix is that we hire faculty who merge criticism and through engagement with making. ■ creativity in their own work and thought. There are presently twelve faculty in the Division with arts Sincerely, appointments (three in musical composition, seven in the visual arts, and two in creative writing); we are also lucky to have a remarkable group of lecturers and artists-in-residence. These faculty artists pursue creative projects that fit well with the demands of theory and criticism. For example, the artist Tania Bruguera is at work on a scholarly project about the history of performance art. In addition to these twelve arts faculty, another twenty-eight of the Division’s 170 faculty are actively 2 HERE & NOW Humanities Day Keynote Michael Murrin shared his interest in the genres of romance and epic in his keynote address entitled “The Marvelous Real: Marco Polo’s Legacy to European Romance.” Murrin argued that Marco here &now Polo and the other travelers who wrote about the wonders of Asia had a profound and long-lasting effect on European romancers, from popular story- books to the temptations Milton described in Humanities Day Honors Annette Cronin Paradise Lost. He described how European writers still wrote about the land of wonders they imagined For twenty-six years the Division of the Humanities has showcased the wide variety of intellectual in the East long after the Silk Road became inacces- and artistic expression practiced by our faculty at our own Humanities Day (formerly sible—this very inaccessibility would fix the East for centuries to come as a sort known as Humanities Open House). This year, that variety was brought to the fore of spectacular memory. by using the Silk Road as a starting point for considering the larger themes of Michael Murrin is the exploration and cultural exchange. Over thirty-five speakers delivered lecturers, Raymond W. and Martha gave readings, led campus tours, and discussed films throughout Hyde Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor of English, Park on Saturday, 28 October 2006. Comparative Literature, the Divinity School, and By Stephen Lund, AB 2001 the College. Murrin is also a 2006 inductee into the Humanities Day has long with Michael Murrin’s keynote American Academy of Arts been a part of the Division address, Humanities Day guests also and Sciences. An independent since 1979 when Dean Karl heard doctoral candidate Ilya Yakubo- policy research center, the acad- J. Weintraub, AB ’49, AM ’52, Avich, AM ’03, speak on pre-Islamic emy undertakes studies of complex PhD ’57, inaugurated the day-long marriage rituals across Central Asia and Donald and emerging problems.