Graduate Students

While many still wore masks, graduates celebrated their first Division of the Humanities Convocation ceremony on June 3 in Rockefeller Chapel since 2019 with unequaled joy. It was finally time for the graduates, faculty members, families, and colleagues to move back to a familiar arena, which their pandemic experiences made the celebration more poignant.

“We were delighted to be back in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel commemorating the accomplishments of our graduates and looking toward their bright futures,”
said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities. “In my experience, the excitement, appreciation, and gratitude of this year’s graduates was unparalleled.”

In addition to celebrating the achievements of more than 150 graduating students with master’s and doctoral degrees, four leaders in the Humanities Division, including Dean Robertson and Dean of Students Shea Wolfe, recognized nine students and faculty members for their achievements.

Spencer Caro, ’23, and Kate Petroff, a UChicago graduate student in philosophy, each have been awarded an Ernst Freund Fellowship in Law and Philosophy to develop novel interdisciplinary research projects. Caro will draw on philosophical ideas from epistemology as well as law and statistics to argue for higher standards for scoring consumers’ creditworthiness. Petroff will advocate for a clearer definition of human exploitation in hopes of closing a gap that has stymied efforts to deal with human trafficking.

The fellowship, designed to encourage advanced law and philosophy scholarship among graduate students, was established in 2016 after Professor Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, donated a portion of the proceeds from her Kyoto Prize to the Law School and the University’s Department of Philosophy. The $5,000 award is typically given to either a law student or graduate student in philosophy, but this year the committee chose two recipients.

“We were delighted to have an unprecedented number of proposals, all of high quality, so the selection was difficult,” said Nussbaum, who was part of the selection committee, along with Brian Leiter, the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence. “Fortunately, an additional gift made it possible for us to give two prizes, and these two really stood out.”