The South Asia Language Resource Center is a collaborative effort funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's International Education and Graduate Programs Service. The Language Resource Center at the University of Chicago is one of fifteen nationwide that exist to improve the capacity to teach and learn foreign languages effectively. SALRC primarily focuses on the needs concerning South Asian language pedagogy in American universities.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ON PRESENTERS
Michael I. Allen is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, and an associate in the Department of History. His work includes an edition of the works of ninth-century historian Frechulf of Lisieux and numerous articles on medieval Latin historiography and poetry. His teaching is focused primarily on the Latin literature of the Middle Ages and on Latin palaeography.
Karlos Arregi, Assistant Professor in Linguistics, specializes in syntactic theory, especially the interface of syntax with morphology, phonology, and semantics. Drawing mostly on data from Basque and Romance languages (mostly Spanish), Arregi investigates grammatical properties of linguistic expressions to see if they can be explained in terms of syntactic rules or in terms of principles that regulate the interface of syntax with other modules of grammar.
Orit Bashkin is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. Her publications include articles on the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq, on Iraqi history, and on Arabic literature. She has also edited a book Sculpturing Culture in Egypt (1999) with Israel Gershoni and Liat Kozma, which includes translations into Hebrew of seminal works by Egyptian intellectuals. Her most recent book, The Other Iraq - Intellectuals, Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, 1921-1958, was published in 2009 by Stanford University Press.
Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, and in the Committee on Jewish Studies. His wide-ranging teaching and research include such topics as music and modernity, music and colonialism, and Jewish music. He is also an active translator, a pianist, and the Artistic Director of the University of Chicago's ensemble-in-residence the “New Budapest Orpheum Society,” a seven-member cabaret. His current research includes books on Johann Gottfried Herder and nationalism, Hanns Eisler as a Jewish composer (with Andrea F. Bohlman), and the aesthetics and politics of silence in music. Ongoing fieldwork includes studies of music in the Muslim communities of Europe and of religion and the arts in India.
James K. Chandler is the Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in English Language & Literature and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, the Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the director of the Center for Disciplinary Innovation. Chandler is currently writing The Sympathetic Eye: A Brief History of Sentiment, a project that aims to set the work of Frank Capra and the "golden age" of Hollywood in the much longer perspective of cultural and intellectual history than is currently present in existing scholarship. The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, a 300,000-word volume revised for the first time since the first edition early in the 20th-century, was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2008.
Ted Cohen is Professor in Philosophy, the Committee on Art and Design and the Committee on General Studies. His interest in humor began as a hobby and has become a full-blown academic pursuit. He began studying jokes after publishing essays on figurative speech. He has lectured on the nature of humor and jokes, as well as on sports, photography and art. Among his recent publications are the book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, (University Of Chicago Press, 2001) and the essays, "Identifying with Metaphor," "Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative," and "Three Problems in Kant's Aesthetics." His most recent publication is the book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor.
Steven Collins' current research interests include gender in the civilizational history of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia and Pali Buddhist accounts of madness. He is the author of Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (1982), Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (1998), A Pali Grammar for Students (2005), and Nirvana: Concept, Imagery, Narrative (2010).
Fred Donner's research has dealt with the role of pastoral nomadic groups in Near Eastern societies, the early Islamic conquests and the relationship between pastoral nomads and the state. His books include The Early Islamic Conquests (1981) and Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (1998). More recently, Donner's interests have shifted to the intellectual or ideological factors at play in the early expansion of Islam, particularly the significance of militant piety, possibly rooted in an apocalyptic outlook. His latest book, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam was released in May of 2010.
Sascha Ebeling was trained in South Asian Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and General Linguistics at the University of Cologne, Germany, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Professor Ebeling was the recipient of the 2007 Forschungspreis (Research Award) of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) for his work on nineteenth-century Tamil literature, and of the 2008 Whiting Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Core teaching at the University of Chicago. His book, Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India was recently published by SUNY Press.
Christopher Faraone is the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College. He is co-editor of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (1991), Masks of Dionysus (1993), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (2003), Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (2005), and Animal Sacrifice Revisited: Issues of Violence, Solidarity, and Centrality in a Greek and Roman Religious Practice (2011). He is author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Early Greek Myth and Ritual (1992), Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999), and The Stanzaic Architecture of Early Greek Elegy (2008). His teaching focuses on archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, magic and religion, and Near Eastern influences on early Greek culture.
Martha Feldman is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Music. Her many honors include the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association in 2001, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Ruth A. Solie Prize of the American Musicological Society in 2007. She was the Ernst Bloch Visiting Professor and Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. Her latest book, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007) won the Laing Prize for 2010. Other books include City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995, winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth Century Conference), The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (coedited, Oxford University Press, 2006), and various musical editions. She is currently working on two books. The Castrato in Nature (forthcoming from University of California Press) investigates different relationships of castrati to nature, non-nature, and innate kinds. A second book, The Castrato’s Tale, is planned as a study of the interplay of myth and narrative in castrato autobiography.
Jonathan M. Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and the youngest scholar ever to win the Charles J. Goodwin Award for Merit from the American Philological Association for best book in the field. Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1997) investigates the question of what it meant to be ethnically Greek. Hall also is the author of Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (University Of Chicago Press, 2002) and A History of the Archaic Greek World, 1200-479 BCE (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Hall has been at Chicago since 1996.
Alison James focuses on modern and contemporary French literature. Her teaching and research interests include the Oulipo group, experimental poetry and prose, the connections between literature and philosophy, and representations of the everyday. Her book Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo has been recently published by Northwestern University Press (2009). She has edited a special issue of L'Esprit créateur on the theme of literary formalism (Summer 2008) and has published articles on Louis Aragon, Jacques Roubaud, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, and the philosopher Clément Rosset.
Robert L. Kendrick works largely in early modern music and culture, with additional interests in Latin American music, historical anthropology, and early modern literature and theater in relation to music. He is the author of The Sound of Milan, 1580-1650 (2002) and Celestial Sirens (1996) and he has edited the motets of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani for A-R Editions (1998). His most recent project is a book project on music and ritual in early modern Catholicism, and recent papers include work on 17th-century opera, male religious orders and music, and the historiography of 17th-century sacred repertories. He is also one of the co-editors of the forthcoming collected works of Alessandro Grandi.
Chris Kennedy is Professor and chair in the Department of Linguistics. Professor Kennedy's research addresses issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics and the philosophy of language, and he is also engaged in work on language processing and acquisition.
Rochona Majumdar is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century India. Her book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1956 (Duke University Press, 2009) analyzes the changing configuration of the "joint family" in the context of shifts in the institution of arranged marriage and the marriage market in Bengal. She is a co-editor of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford University Press, 2007). Majumdar is currently completing a book Writing Postcolonial History, which analyzes ways in which postcolonial theory has influenced the historian's craft. She is also engaged in a longer-term research project on the history of Indian cinema.
Françoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Literature, as well as Department Chair. She is also a professor in the Divinity School and the College. Her scholarship includes work on contemporary critical theory and 19th-century French literature. Her most recent book, For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity, explores the gendering of subjectivity from within the context of Joan of Arc's trial. As a comparatist, Meltzer integrates German and English literature into her work as well as French. She has been a co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry since 1982 and her new book, Seeing Double: Baudelaire's Modernity, will be out this spring with the University of Chicago Press.
Jason Merchant is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and author of The Syntax of Silence, a seminal work on the linguistics of ellipsis. His primary research areas are syntax and semantics and their interface; he has worked on more than 40 languages, especially the Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Greek languages.
W.J.T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College, and he is the editor of Critical Inquiry. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the University of Chicago's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His book What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images won the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize and his forthcoming book Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present will be published in 2010.
The Oriental Institute is a research organization and museum devoted to the study of the ancient Near East. Founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted, the Institute, a part of the University of Chicago, is an internationally recognized pioneer in the archaeology, philology, and history of early Near Eastern civilizations.
Mark Payne is the author of several articles on Greek poets from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. His first book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His second book, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. He is a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics program.
Jason Riggle is Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics. He is also the Director of the Language Modeling Laboratory. Mr. Riggle works in phonology, morphology, and computational linguistics.
Bart Schultz is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy), Special Programs Coordinator for the Graham School of General Studies, and Director of the Humanities Division's Civic Knowledge Project. He has taught in the College at the University of Chicago for twenty-three years, designing a wide range of core courses as well as courses on John Dewey, Political Philosophy, and Happiness. He has also published widely in philosophy. His book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe (Cambridge, 2004) won the American Philosophical Society’s prestigious Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for 2004. Other publications include Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992), and Utilitarianism and Empire (Lexington, 2005). Schultz has worked extensively in adult education and community connections. He has been instrumental in helping the University develop affordable, high-quality educational programs for disadvantaged communities on Chicago’s South Side.
Ed Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor of Early China in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College, and the Director of the Creel Center for Chinese Paleography. He is an expert in the cultural and literary history of China’s Zhou period, with a special interest in archaeologically recovered textual materials such as oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions and bamboo-strip manuscripts. His books include Ancient China: Life, Myth and Art (2005), a popular overview of China to the mid-Tang; Gu Shi Yi Guan (2005), a collection of his Chinese essays; and Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (2006), an exploration of how editors have fashioned texts, especially those originally written on bamboo strips.
Michael Silverstein is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. His theoretical contributions range from modeling the flow of communicated meanings during verbal interaction to examining language as a medium and symbol of cultural ideologies. In addition to his own widely published technical papers, Silverstein, along with his students and other collaborators, has published a series of works based on his research, including Natural Histories of Discourse (1996).
As the art museum of the University of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art takes a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the collection, display, and interpretation of art. Founded in 1974, the Smart is home to acclaimed special exhibitions and a permanent collection that spans five thousand years of artistic creation. Working in close collaboration with scholars from the University of Chicago, the Smart has established itself as a leading academic art museum and an engine of adventurous thinking about the visual arts and their place in society.
Justin Steinberg’s scholarship focuses on medieval Italian literature, especially on Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, the early lyric, manuscript culture, and literary historiography. His interests include the intersection of legal and literary culture and the history of the book. His 2007 book Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy, won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Manuscript in Italian Studies awarded by the Modern Language Association (MLA). He has also published articles on the Compiuta Donzella (the first female poet of Italian literature), Dante's dreams in the Vita Nuova, and Petrarch's uncollected poems. He is currently writing a book about Dante and the law.
Katherine Fischer Taylor is Associate Professor in Art History. She received the Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism presented by the Society of Architectural Historians for her book In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris (1993). Her interests include 19th and 20th century architecture and urbanism, with an emphasis on the reception and social use of buildings. She teaches the history of modern architecture and urban planning, with an emphasis on the social history of buildings. Her current research deals with the representation of power in post-revolutionary France.
Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002) and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.
Christina von Nolcken is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature and the College, and Chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies. She is especially interested in Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and late 14th- and 15th-century devotional texts. Much 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.
Tom Weisflog has been the University organist since 2000. He has played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Grant Park Symphony and Chorus, the William Ferris Chorale, and Italy’s Orchestra Sinfonica di Bolzano e Trento.
David Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College. He is also Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture. His books are considered classics in the field of German literary history: Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (1984) and The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996). His current projects include a book on Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as well as a broad-based study of Goethe and philosophy.
Ming Xiang is assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics. Before joining UC, she was an assistant professor at University of Victoria, BC. Xiang works in sentence processing and experimental syntax and semantics.
Alan Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Humanities Collegiate Division. He is also the Director of the Phonology Laboratory. Mr. Yu works on phonological theory, language variation and change, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, Native American languages, and Cantonese.
