Faculty

Amid pandemic, UChicago scholar launches program for international artists

Early last year, Assoc. Prof. Ghenwa Hayek signed on to become the interim director of the University of Chicago’s Gray Center. A month after she accepted the interim directorship, the COVID-19 crisis was officially declared a pandemic.

Uncertain times call for certain decision-making, and Hayek quickly embraced the challenge. The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry has long convened scholars and artists in the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration—but without in-person events, it would have rethink the nature of its mission.

Drawn from Music: Art Exhibition Opens Window into Composers' Creative Process

Map of Form by University Professor Augusta Read Thomas; Image courtesy of UChicago Arts

For composers, drawing a “map” of music can give shape to a new work and articulate its overarching ideas. As evocations of the composer’s intentions—from sweeping curves to stars, birds and brightly-colored dots—such maps capture the ebbs and flows within a musical piece and complement musical scores, serving as guides for performers.

MAPS OF FORM, a new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, presents a collection of these musical illustrations as works of art in their own right. Drawn by UChicago faculty and graduate composition students, the maps vary from abstract representations of operatic arias in numbers and letters to contemporary works illustrated with chariots and drawings of hanging mobiles.

Humanities Scholar Receives Prestigious Donnelley Fellowship to Cambridge College

While Sam Lasman (PhD’20) works primarily in the Persian, Arabic, French, and Welsh languages, he dabbles in Latin, Irish, and old English. But it’s not only the multiple languages that intrigue him, it’s the access to medieval literature concerning the supernatural from the primary sources in different languages.

To further pursue medieval literature and languages, Lasman recently received the Gaylord and Dorothy Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral exchange program for recent PhDs at the University of Chicago and Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College. The three-year fellowship allows Lasman to focus exclusively on his research, although he has leeway to teach courses at Corpus Christi College.

Humanities Lecturer to Receive Prestigious Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

Humanities Lecturer Kay Heikkinen thrives on the challenges of translating Arabic novels into English. “It’s like playing music: you have a score and you bring it to life,” said Heikkinen, the Ibn Rushd Lecturer of Arabic in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at UChicago. “Many people do not realize that the translation of a literary work requires an artistic sense and imagination. It’s not mechanical.”

In recognition of her translation of the Arabic novel Velvet (2019) by Huzama Habayeb into English, Heikkinen will receive the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation from the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and the Society of Authors on Feb. 11. “Without translations, we don’t talk to each other,” Heikkinen said. “Even the best literature in another language is invisible to us unless it’s translated.”

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