Publications

Visual Arts Alumna to Publish Work on Cloistered Nuns

While researching Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns, Abbie Reese, MFA'13, spent six years learning and recording the individual stories of a community of cloistered monastic nuns living in a 25,000-square-foot enclosure outside Rockford, Illinois. Those stories and Reese's accompanying photographs will be published in November as part of the Oxford University Press's Oxford Oral History series, and mark one of the first times an author has been allowed access to an enclosure where nuns observe monastic silence. Reese graduated from the Department of Visual Arts in 2013, and has included photos and video from the project on her website. Her photos were also shown in the 2013 MFA Thesis exhibition, which can be found here.

New Book Examines Legal Issues in Shakespeare

The University of Chicago Press recently published Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions, edited by Bradin Cormack, Professor in English Language and Literature, Richard Strier, the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in English Language and Literature, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics. The book's four sections examine the relationship between law and literature, Shakespeare's awareness of the law, his attitude toward law, and how law enters into politics and community both in the plays and in our world. It closes with a transcript of a 2009 conference that inspired the collection, wherein Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Richard Posner, Nussbaum, and Strier discuss the legal themes in HamletMeasure for Measure, and As You Like It. To read excerpts from the conference and learn more about Shakespeare and the Law, visit The University of Chicago Magazine.

Jessica Burstein, AM'90, PhD'98, Publishes Work on Fashion and Modernism

Jessica Burstein, AM'90, PhD'98, published Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art as part of the Refiguring Modernism series. The book proposes a new understanding of modernism: cold modernism, which "operates on the premise that 'there is a world in which the mind does not exist, let alone matter.'" Burstein wrote about the experience of publishing her book in the latest issue of The University of Chicago Magazine.

David Nirenberg on Anti-Judaism in 'The Chronicle of Higher Education'

David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of History and Social Thought, wrote an article titled "Anti-Judaism as Critical Theory" for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nirenberg, who studies "the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by inter-relating with or thinking about each other," echoes Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism when he asks in the article, "How and why do ideas about Jews and Judaism become convincing explanations for the state of the world in a given time and place?" Utilizing theorists like Arendt, Marx, and Hegel, Nirenberg traces the history of thinking about Judaism and how that thought has shaped our view of the world.

Read the full article here, and find his latest book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition here.

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