The Humanities in Difficult Circumstances
Saturday, May 31, 2008
1:30 – 4:30pm
The Franke Institute for the Humanities, JRL S-118

Please join us for a unique opportunity to learn about the conditions of cultural life in Darfur/Sudan from some of the leading representatives of the humanities in that region. This conference will feature members of the faculty from the Darfur/Sudan Clemente Course in the Humanities, which is offering free humanities courses to persons displaced by the conflict in Darfur. These distinguished guests will engage in a dialogue about the role of the humanities in difficult circumstances with members of the faculty teaching in the Clemente Course/Odyssey Project on the south side of Chicago. Members of the University community and the larger south side community are encouraged to join the conversation.

Co-sponsored by Civic Knowledge, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, and Clemente Course in the Humanities. Please call 773-702-8274 in advance if you require assistance to fully participate in this event.

Chicago Humanities Forum
May 7, 2008
Thomas Pavel, “Why Novels Written Long Ago Are About Us”
The introduction is given by Michael Murrin.
Click here to listen to this talk.

April 9, 2008
Julie Saville, “American Slaves and Their Properties”
The introduction is given by Norma Fields.
Click here to listen to this talk.

March 5, 2008
Robert J. Richards, “Darwin's Natural Theology”
Click here to listen to this talk.

Big Problems Lecture
January 23, 2008
Mary Fabri, “Rape & HIV: Weapons of War, Tools of Torture”
Click here to listen.
Click here for more information about this lecture series and for links to student and community organizations.

More information:
- Locations and Map
- Interactive Project Map
- Official Press Release
- Listen to Helen Mirra speak about The Disciplines and the Arts, recorded on April 29, 2006 at "The Fate of Disciplines"

As part of a three-year Mellon Project that concludes with the conference, “The Fate of Disciplines,” The Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago is announcing a public artwork, Instance the determination, by Helen Mirra. The artwork will be up from April 27, 2006 through June 2009.

Mirra's project, Instance the determination, takes the form of 30 brief segments of text, each painted directly on the wall in locations dispersed throughout the academic buildings on the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago campus. These texts are derived from indexes that Mirra has created from two books by authors closely connected to the histories of the University of Chicago and the City of Chicago: John Dewey's Experience and Nature (1925) and Jane Addams' Newer Ideals of Peace (1907). Dewey and Addams were colleagues and close friends. Addams founded the Hull House on Chicago's Near West Side in 1889, and Dewey taught at the University of Chicago from 1894 until 1904.

By turning the index form into a kind of poetry, as well as taking it off the page, Mirra produces an interaction between the practices of art and the practices of scholarship. Recontextualized and architecturally integrated, the mined texts behave not as signifiers back to the source texts, but instead point out into the world at large. They are located in stairwells and hallways in order to be encountered within ordinary movement through the University, and are thereby references for everyday experience. The entries, in their textual isolation and particular sites, come across variously as enigmatic, germane, anomalous and poignant.