Faculty

What UChicago Faculty and Staff Want You to Read Over Winter Break

Catriona MacLeod, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor of Germanic Studies

As 2021 draws to a close, many are looking forward to a well-deserved winter break. It’s a great time to cozy up next to the fire with a book, so we asked University of Chicago scholars and staff what they would recommend reading.

The list includes books that weave together many different threads of human experience—family, history, science, government, nature and more—and one book that explores an intelligent robot’s experience of the human world. From the possibility of transformative justice to the prospect of nature rebounding after a crisis, there is something to match every sensibility.

Humanities Scholar to Receive the Friedrich Katz Prize in History

Larissa Brewer-Garcia photo by Erielle Bakkum

By examining previously untapped sources, Larissa Brewer-García has discovered fresh insights about the lives and culture of enslaved and free Black men and women in 17th-century Latin America. For the rigorous scholarship in her first book Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada, she will receive the 2021 Friederich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History from the American Historical Association on Jan. 6 in New Orleans.

In Humanities Day Keynote, Wu Hung Explores the Rehabilitation of Damaged Art

Prof. Wu Hung presented the Keynote Session at Humanities Day 2021.

What would it mean to rehabilitate Buddhist artworks pillaged by art dealers from grottoes in China a century ago? And what can art history as a discipline learn from such efforts? Prof. Wu Hung explored these topics in his Humanities Day keynote address on Oct. 16 at the University of Chicago.

An annual tradition at the University, Humanities Day celebrates the research of UChicago humanities scholars through lectures, discussions and performances that are open to the University community and the public.

From the Forbidden City to UChicago, Art Historian Searches for 'a Human Perspective'

Wu Hung shows students details of a sculptural relief. Published in 2020, his award-winning book "First Class" uses 24 of his opening class lectures to illustrate how he structures the study of Chinese art history.

When Prof. Wu Hung lived in the Forbidden City as a young scholar in the 1970s, he felt the constant presence of history. The palatial compound was quiet and empty after visiting hours, and Wu could contemplate its ancient art and architecture.

In the evenings, Wu often spent time in the largest open space within the palaces. Surrounded by the ancient architecture, he could see the vast sky and watch the seasons unfold.

“It was like living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, only these palaces are even more immense and wonderful,” said Wu, a longtime University of Chicago faculty member. “Art was my next-door neighbor. The Forbidden City’s enormous art collections made me want to pursue a career in art history. I sensed a strong continuity in its art and architecture to our time.”

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