Alumni

Prominent Alumnus Inspires New UChicago Humanities Endowment in Islamic Studies

Renowned for educating scholars in Islamic studies, UChicago has luminary professors, such as Professor Emeritus Fred M. Donner and Professor Emerita Wadad Kadi, to serve as its teachers and mentors. Now one of their protégés, Jonathan A. C. Brown (PhD’07), has emerged as a prominent voice in this field.

In honor of Brown, a new $100,000 endowment in Islamic Studies has been established in the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. While the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations will manage the Jonathan A. C. Brown Islamic Studies Research Award Fund, annual applications are open to both UChicago master’s degree and PhD students researching Islamic studies across many disciplines.

Building Ideas: Students Help Reimagine Core Texts in Renowned Alum Jenny Holzer's Innovative Artwork

Photo by Christopher Dilts. YOU BE MY ALLY, 2020, Augmented reality app. Texts © 1998 by Anne Carson, © 1952 by Éditions du Seuil, © 2008 by Richard Philcox, © 1998 by Antjie Krog. Reprinted by permissions of the authors, Aragi Inc., Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and Penguin Random House South Africa. © 2020 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

For University of Chicago student Zahra Nasser, this October marks the culmination of months of hard work—and the chance to see it shared not only on campus, but around the world.

A fourth-year College undergraduate studying art history and philosophy, Nasser is one of 10 current and former students involved in YOU BE MY ALLY, a groundbreaking public art commission from acclaimed artist and alum Jenny Holzer, EX’74.

UChicago Alum Tim Cassedy Receives the MLA First Book Award

Tim Cassedy (AM’05) is fascinated with the role language played at the turn of the 19th century, and how language served to identify and differentiate people. For his cultural study of early America, Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolution (University of Iowa Press, 2019), Cassedy recently received the Modern Language Association’s annual First Book Award, which recognizes his contribution to linguistics, the history of the book, and the cultural history of British imperialism.

UChicago Fellow Adam Singerman Receives the SSILA's Mary R. Haas Award for His Groundbreaking Dissertation

Adam Singerman’s dream was to research and document an endangered language in Brazil. His journey began in 2012 when his admiration for the scholarship of UChicago Professor Lenore Grenoble drew him to the Department of Linguistics doctoral program. Grenoble’s studies of indigenous languages in Siberia have inspired his own quest.

Now his years of immersive fieldwork and scholarship for the indigenous Brazilian language of Tuparí have been recognized. Singerman’s 2018 dissertation “The Morphosyntax of Tuparí, a Tupían Language of the Brazilian Amazon,” recently received the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas’ Mary R. Haas Award for significant contribution to the world’s knowledge of Native American Languages.

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