Faculty

The following was published and broadcast by Chicago Tonight on WTTW on December 2, 2019.

by Angel Idowu

For years, beatboxer Nicole Paris and her dad Ed Cage have awed audiences with their beatboxing battles as Nicole and Popz. Paris recently broke from that duet to take on a feat of her own: beatboxing in an opera. When composer and University of Chicago professor Augusta Read Thomas had the idea to incorporate nontraditional sounds into her opera, Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun, she knew just who to reach out to: beatboxer Nicole Paris.

In defiance of traditional cultural history, Humanities scholar Christopher Taylor discovered that the people in the British West Indies considered themselves citizens of the British Empire. For his groundbreaking work, Taylor has received the prestigious 2019 American Studies Association Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize for the book Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2018). “Empire of Neglect’s vast and original archival research provides a history of the British West Indies that sets the promise of political liberalism and emancipation against the actual effects of economic liberalism and free market policies,” said Deborah L. Nelson, the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor and Chair in the Department of English Language and Literature. “Scholars of the Caribbean have called it ‘field-making’ for its transformative arguments and methodological innovation.”