The Catherine Mouly & Anthony and Leo Carlson Professorship in Media, Arts, and Design will build on UChicago’s historical leadership in humanistic research and teaching to catalyze and propel emerging fields of interactive media.

By Rivky Mondal

The University of Chicago has received a milestone gift to create the Catherine Mouly & Anthony and Leo Carlson Professorship in Media, Arts, and Design—also known as the Mouly Carlson Chair. Established by Catherine Mouly and Ted Carlson, and named in honor of Mouly, AM’76, PhD’86 and her sons, Anthony, LAB’05, and Leo Carlson, LAB’07, the gift advances the Arts & Humanities Division’s historic excellence in humanistic inquiry while providing leadership in new and emerging media.

The Mouly Carlson Chair will support an eminent faculty leader in the fields of media arts, design, and game studies, marking the first endowed professorship in this area at UChicago. Catherine Mouly, a Comparative Literature alumna, has long engaged with the arts and humanities, serving on the Division of the Arts & Humanities Advisory Council beginning in 1991, and as chair from 2023-2025,  and through leadership on numerous boards, including the Goodman Theatre Board and the American Writers Museum.

"The Mouly Carlson Chair will empower faculty-driven innovation in exciting ways,” said Provost Katherine Baicker. "Building on our rich tradition of rigorous inquiry across fields from the arts and humanities to the sciences and beyond, this chair gives us the opportunity to lead in field-defining research in media and design. I look forward to the new insights that this will yield, supporting pathbreaking work grounded in humanistic approaches to scholarship and emerging culture.”

Interactive media is central to contemporary culture and will grow in influence for generations to come. The Mouly Carlson family views the timing of this gift as pivotal and recognizes UChicago’s unique role as a humanistic anchor in shaping this field. The distinction marks a major milestone in the University’s rapidly growing ecosystem in interactive media—one of the most dynamic artistic and scholarly frontiers of the twenty-first century.
 
“At UChicago, critical scholarship and creative intelligence have long ascended in tandem, driven by our remarkable faculty and students.” said Deborah Nelson, dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities, and Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and the College. “The gift establishing the Mouly Carlson Chair is visionary. It leverages the scale and excellence of UChicago’s research and teaching in humanistic fields to ensure that emerging knowledge and art across new forms of digital and interactive media will be propelled by—and made more impactful because of—the capacious intelligence of the arts and humanities.”

“The University of Chicago has long been seen as a leader in the field of humanistic studies,” said Catherine Mouly and Ted Carlson. “The recent combining of the arts and humanities indicates the development of the visual arts such as movies and online gaming as essential art forms and expressions of humanistic experience—and a heightened recognition of the intersection of literary and visual effects through the continued development of games, especially in the online world.”

Leo and Anthony Carlson—both alumni of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools—bring generational and firsthand experiences that complement this vision. Anthony reflected on his experiences at Lab, including Model UN simulations, and later at business school, noting how structured play and narrative immersion in games teach critical thinking, strategy, and global awareness. Leo, writing from Seoul, emphasized how games—whether chess, Axis & Allies, or cooperative computer games—can reveal insights about human behavior, collaboration, and problem-solving.

“Games are a core part of many people’s lives, whether they play them, watch them, design them, referee them, study them, or otherwise engage with them,” noted Leo. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Together, the Mouly Carlson family hopes to empower game design, interactive storytelling, and creative uses of digital media across campus.  An affirmation of UChicago’s recently expanded and renamed Division of the Arts and Humanities, the endowed professorship positions the University well to ensure that humanistic knowledge remains essential to shaping the media systems that structure everyday life. 

Expanding humanities education with MADD

The University’s Media Arts, Data & Design (MADD) program provides the academic infrastructure to maximize the impact of the Mouly Carlson Chair. Rather than replace traditional disciplines, MADD amplifies them—bringing UChicago’s historic strengths in interpretation, theory, and creative practice into dialogue with emerging media. Since launching its Media Arts and Design major in 2021, following the runaway success of the minor in 2018, students and researchers have converged around clusters such as games, algorithmic music, creative computing, media performance, design thinking, and expanded cinema. The Mouly Carlson gift will accelerate the Division’s plans for a forward-looking media arts curriculum firmly rooted in humanistic wisdom and creativity.

Changing how students and scholars view media and culture

For many students, that unique UChicago experience has transformed their scholarly and career outlook. Avery Kirschbaum, AB’23, a MADD minor who now works in consulting after obtaining a Master’s degree in Behavioral and Decision Science at the University of Pennsylvania, said the program fundamentally changed how he approached media.

“MADD taught me to critically engage with media, rather than being a passive consumer of it,” said Kirschbaum. “The courses I took allowed me to see theory and creation as deeply intertwined.” His thesis on early Nintendo game history, told in the form of video essays, sparked an ongoing commitment to independent preservation work and analysis—an area Kirschbaum hopes to one day develop into a college course on game history, consumer psychology, and marketing. Fueled by research methods learned at MADD, Kirschbaum values the opportunities the program afforded non-majors to think across disciplines, and to practice and fail.

Other alumni echo this experience, describing MADD as a training ground for interdisciplinary thinkers and unconventional creatives who merge technical skill with artistic imagination. Graduates hold roles at leading game companies, like Riot Games, Electronic Arts, and Roblox, as well as tech companies including Apple, Spotify, ngrok, and Razorfish.

Among them is Noor Amin, AB’23, one of the program’s earliest majors and now a designer at Riot Games, the company responsible for the multi-billion-dollar League of Legends. Working on titles with audiences in the millions, Amin credits MADD with giving her a rare combination of research fluency and cross-disciplinary literacy. Coupled with her neuroscience degree, Amin described MADD’s approach to new media as a “participatory system,” one that examines players’ motivations, behaviors, and modes of engagement. Audience desires, she noted, range from competition to social connection to decompression. “Learning to reason through another person’s psyche has allowed me to design,” said Amin.

Amin has since delivered talks at Brown University and the Game Developers Conference, drawing on her MADD thesis on games that interface directly with the brain and nervous system. In an age where everyone is a creator—many working without a rule book—Amin emphasized how MADD helped her speak the languages of other disciplines. With peers across the arts taking the same courses, she now collaborates easily with artists and engineers at Riot. “Innovation comes from understanding technology, but also from understanding people.”

For current students, MADD continues to be a site where traditional humanities meet emerging modes of expression. Mack Minter, a fourth-year double majoring in English and MADD, is developing a senior thesis that establishes fantasy as a critical form—a genre that Minter argues has received less scholarly attention than speculative fiction such as sci-fi. Minter’s narrative interests in games were shaped by their work on Haven, the pre-orientation video game for incoming undergraduate class, where they advised on narrative elements.

For Minter, the meeting of English and MADD is especially important. “Critical methods, because they are so seasoned, are applicable to other forms of media,” they said. “Media studies frameworks as a discipline grew out of literary studies, but MADD gives us the tools to be medium-specific and attuned to online fan communities, where important analytical discussions are held.”

Minter’s senior project, “This Thesis is an Act of Magic,” analyzes worldbuilding, racial and class identity, and collaborative storytelling through tabletop role-playing games. They plan to present their research as a video essay so that popular means of consuming information may become viable in the academy, joining several fourth-year students creating video games and other media projects.

UChicago’s emerging leadership in game design

The Mouly Carlson Chair positions UChicago to shape the next era of game studies and creation—including the possibility of developing the University’s first MFA in Media Arts and Design with an emphasis on Game Design. Such a program would place UChicago among the earliest research universities to offer a graduate degree in the field, establishing benchmarks for humanistic inquiry in what is otherwise a science-centered field.

The investment aligns with the expansion of creative entrepreneurship on the South Side. Much like the Polsky Center shaped innovation in businesses and STEM fields, the MADD Center and its partners are continuing to build a hub for media makers and game designers in the local creative scene. As the industry expands and diversifies, UChicago aims to create a pipeline that brings neighborhood talent into its arts initiatives.

“In the age of AI, employers are looking for talent with both technical and creative thinking skills,” noted Meredith Daw, Executive Director of Career Advancement. “The MADD program gives students an interdisciplinary skillset that prepares them for a wide range of careers, including the arts, technology, consulting, and more.”

Building the Arts & Humanities of the 21st Century

The Mouly Carlson Chair is designed to support not only a new faculty position, but also to seed innovation in the arts & humanities. Building on prior investments—such as the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professorship—this endowed chair underscores the long-term importance of investing in faculty leadership: ensuring continuity across generations, attracting visionary scholars, and giving emerges fields the institutional traction require to grow and lead.

The family hope the Chair will inspire and advise the faculty, students, and collaborators who will define the next decades of gaming design and media arts—and welcome others to join this forward-looking effort.