Faculty

From 'Dune' to Climate Change, UChicago Scholar Draws from Unique Experiences in New Course

Katherine Buse

University of Chicago undergraduate students will soon have a new opportunity to delve into the wondrous world of video games, guided by a game designer who consulted on one of the biggest films of the past year.

This spring, postdoctoral researcher Katherine Buse will help bring a creative blend of science and technology to the College curriculum. An expert on digital media, science fiction and environmental humanities, Buse’s scholarship draws from a range of theory and practice—including her recent work on “Dune,” the Oscar-nominated adaptation of the acclaimed novel.

March 10, 2022

What Does 'Drawing' Mean? Gray Center Exhibition Explores Interdisciplinary Possibilities

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Gray Center’s signature fellowship program, “On Drawing Drawing On” includes artworks such as handmade pencils and a chalkboard that invites visitors to add their own illustrations.

In 2016, artists Amber Ginsburg and Sara Black harvested a tanoak tree on the California coast that was dying from sudden oak death, a disease caused by an accidentally introduced pathogen. After drying the tree in a high-temperature kiln to remove any trace of the pathogen, they gave it new life by turning it into 7,000 handmade pencils: works of art that could be used to produce more art.

Those pencils are now part of “On Drawing Drawing On,” a new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Running through March 13 in the Logan Center Gallery, the exhibition celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Gray Center’s signature initiative: the Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship.

“The show is a riff on the double meaning of drawing,” said Seth Brodsky, director of the Gray Center. “It obviously designates the act of creating art with pencil and paper. But it also involves pulling, dragging, drawing out, selecting too. It speaks to the way Gray Center fellows select each other, draw from and on each other, find things in each other’s work neither knew was there in the first place.”

March 8, 2022

The Overlooked History of Black Cinema, with Jacqueline Stewart

Jacqueline Stewart

Prof. Jacqueline Stewart’s career has examined the histories of overlooked Black filmmakers and Black audiences. Last year, the University of Chicago film scholar Stewart won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for “illuminating the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to cinema’s development as an art form.”

Stewart also serves as the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies and is chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, Stewart explores the history of Black cinema and explains how preservation and archiving are not neutral acts, but contribute to how we contextualize and understand Black history.

January 7, 2022

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