Faculty

Modern Language Association and College Art Association to Honor W. J. T. Mitchell with Lifetime Achievement Awards for English and Writing on Art

Freida High's painting "Hypericons: Homage to W. J. T. Mitchell," 2007. © Freida High. Photo by Jim Escalante.

By Sara Patterson

Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell may be the only living iconologist on the planet. He draws on ideas from ancient and modern mythology that treat pictures as living things. As a historian of cultural images, Mitchell studies the relationship between words and images, cultivating visual and verbal literacy.

For his immense scholarly work in iconology and his 42 years as the editor of UChicago’s well-known humanities journal, Critical Inquiry, Mitchell will receive the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement on Jan. 5, 2024, in Philadelphia. He will be given the 2024 CAA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art on Feb. 14, 2024, in Chicago. It is also a fitting finish to his teaching career at UChicago, which officially ends in January 2024. He has promised, however, to hang around Hyde Park, showing up for lectures, teaching an occasional course, and skating on the Midway.

Two UChicago Scholars to Receive Scaglione Prizes from the Modern Language Association

Noemie Ndiaye (left) photo by John Zich and Maria Anna Mariani

For their books, Assoc. Prof. Noémie Ndiaye and Asst. Prof. Maria Anna Mariani respectively will receive the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies and for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association on Jan. 5, 2024.

Ndiaye’s book "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (2022) examines how early modern theater and performance culture helped turn Blackness into a racial category and how that cultural decision still resonates today.

Mariani’s book "Italian Literature in the Nuclear Age: A Poetics of the Bystander" (2023) explores the position of the bystander in the atomic age by focusing on Italy as an example of paradoxical power and powerlessness. Her comprehensive study of Italian literary intellectuals’ engagement with the existential and political questions raised during the nuclear era shows its broader relevance.

UChicago Scholar Receives ASAP Book Prize

Asst. Prof. Tina Post became intrigued with how the gesture of expressionlessness operated in the 20th-century Black performances across literature, visual and performance art, film, theater, dance, the boxing ring and everyday life. For her original insights, she recently received the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Best Book Prize for her first book, “Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression” (2023). The ASAP Prize recognizes the book that has made the most significant contribution to the study of the arts of the present.

Post contends that deadpan—dead is for inanimate, and pan is slang for face—is an investigation of the aesthetic affects at work at the intersection of Blackness and embodied expression.

“This book motivated by questions about the phenomenon I see,” said Post, assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at UChicago. “I had not read satisfying explorations about expressionlessness and its intersection with Blackness.”

Two Humanities Scholars to Receive the Charles J. Goodwin Award

Sofia Torallas Tovar and Christopher Faraone

Profs. Christopher Faraone and Sofía Torallas Tovar will receive the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit by the Society for Classical Studies as co-editors of the book, The Greco-Egyptian Magical Formularies (2022) in January 2024. It is rare for this prestigious award to be given for a co-edited volume or for one concerned with papyrological texts, a subfield of classics, according to Faraone and Torallas Tovar.

“With their project, Professors Faraone and Torallas Tovar have established the study of ancient magic on an entirely new footing,” said Clifford Ando, David B. and Clara E. Stern Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and the College and chair of Classics at UChicago. “It's not just that their edition observes the best modern principles of textual criticism. Their project advances new ways of treating any texts, in which format and medium also play a fundamental role in interpretation.”

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