Faculty

Humanities and History Scholar Elected Fellow of the British Academy

Renowned historian and Humanities scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty was elected as a Corresponding Fellow to the British Academy—the highest honor for an academic not based in the United Kingdom. Much of his career has focused on rethinking working-class history in Bengal, considering how postcolonial thought has provincialized Europe, and examining the habitations of modernity through subaltern studies.

Since 2009, however, in several published articles and books, Chakrabarty has written about a fundamental problem: Why is it so difficult for human beings to respond to climate change?

“It is very interesting and puzzling that we are not doing enough to combat climate change,” Chakrabarty said. “It is a tragic problem that human beings cannot change their attachments and respond more adequately to a dire problem."

'The Classics Are Everywhere; Most of Us Are Likely Just Not Looking for Them'

The Weeknd and Metro Boomin sit near a statue of the Three Graces in Las Vegas in the “Heartless” video. "In my classes on classical reception in modern and contemporary society, my students find classical references across music, literature and theater, and video games, and inquire into their significance," Prof. Patrice Rankine says.

Patrice Rankine is a professor in the Department of Classics and the College and a writer. In addition to the reception of classics in current times, Rankine is interested in reading literature with insights from various theoretical approaches, including race and performance, queer theory and social history. His forthcoming book is “Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning in America, 1964-2020.” The following interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: As a classics professor, how do you make the classics accessible and relevant for students?

Locating the classics might be like the game we play as children on summer road trips or long car rides: Find a red car. You might not normally notice red cars, but once they are raised to your awareness, they’re everywhere. The same goes for what we might call the relevance or accessibility of the classics. Once we realize that they are everywhere, we cannot unsee them.

Two Humanities Faculty Receive Named Professorships

Spring on the University of Chicago campus

Sixteen University of Chicago faculty members have received distinguished service professorships or named professorships.

Profs. Michael Franklin, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Dan Nicolae, Lubos Pastor, Robert Shimer and Lisa Wedeen have been named distinguished service professors. Profs. Scott Ashworth, Orit Bashkin, William Baude, Sarah Hammerschlag, Julia R. Henly, William Hubbard, Jonathan Lyon, Jennifer Nou, C. Riley Snorton and Tara Zahra have received named professorships.

UChicago Teaching Award Winners Share their Summer Reading Recommendations

Looking for your next summer read? Look no further. Here's the books the University of Chicago faculty who were honored in the 2023 Quantrell and Graduate Teaching Awards found interesting, useful, or meaningful. Two Humanities Division scholars, Paola Iovene and David Wellbery, recommend books as varied as a memoir, poetry collections, and canons in literary criticism.

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