Faculty

Two UChicago Scholars Awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships

Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded this year to two University of Chicago scholars, chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Prof. Orit Bashkin and Prof. William Howell are among the 171 Fellows selected in this year’s class from nearly 2,500 applicants to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Their respective fellowships will support projects on the history of Middle Eastern Jews and how U.S. political institutions shape our democracy.

UChicago to Expand English-Language Translation of South Asian Literature

Less than 1 percent of all translated literature published in the U.S. during the past 10 years comes from a South Asian language while the region is home to more than 20 percent of the world’s population. To reverse this trend, the UChicago Humanities Division is launching the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) project with substantial funding over five years by Dipak Golechha to support and promote English-language translation of literature written in the major languages of South Asia.

“With this project, we aim to bring some of the extraordinarily rich literature of the subcontinent to publishing markets where it has thus far been severely underrepresented,” said Jason Grunebaum, co-director of the SALT project, a Hindi translator and instructional professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at UChicago.

UChicago Humanities Scholar Receives NEH Fellowship

For her rigorous research and original approach to connecting electrical energy and culture production in Brazilian literature and art from 1930s to the present, Assoc. Prof. Victoria Saramago received a $60,000 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on Jan. 10. Her book project “Against the Current: Electrification and Cultural Production in Brazil Anthropocene” will investigate the multiple ways in which Brazilian artistic practices have shaped perceptions of the production and consumption of electrical energy, and how electricity has enabled, affected, and, sometimes, destroyed cultural objects.

Saramago contends that modern Brazilian artists have addressed electrification critically, skeptically, and ironically, countering the narrative of progress found in 20th- to early 21st-century Brazilian politics. Their critical views question one of the most basic assumptions from post-World War II to today: that a reliable and growing supply of energy is vital for modern life.

“Victoria Saramago’s scholarship is at the cutting edge of the contemporary environmental humanities and in particular Latin American ecocritical studies,” said Alison James, professor and chair in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at UChicago. “More broadly, Victoria’s scholarship challenges us to reflect on the complex entanglements of representations and reality.

UChicago Humanities Professor Receives Honorary Doctorate from the Universite Jean Monnet

Larry Norman accepts an honorary doctorate from the Universite Jean Monnet de Saint Etienne.

For his rigorous research illuminating French literature, theater, and history, promotion of the arts, and emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, Prof. Larry F. Norman received an honorary doctorate from the Université Jean Monnet de Saint Etienne on Dec. 7, 2022. This achievement comes in same year as Norman’s award-winning book The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early-Modern France (2011) was translated into French.

“From his historical research on theater and aesthetics in 17th-century France to his leadership in making the University of Chicago a global center for the arts, Larry Norman embodies the combination of rigor and openness that makes this institution great,” said Richard Neer, the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College and Director of Franke Institute for the Humanities. “His intellectual, professional, and personal generosity are inspiring, and this honor is richly, richly deserved.”

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