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During the pandemic, English professors Edgar Garcia and Timothy Harrison began to notice connections between two seemingly different texts also written in moments of crisis.

John Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost” was written after the English Civil War once the poet had lost his vision. The “Popol Vuh”—sometimes called “the Mayan Bible”—was written by Maya scholars while living under Spanish colonization and forced religious conversion.

Both tell creation stories, narratives about how the world and its inhabitants formed. And both were written within the same historical moment—though on either side of the Atlantic.

Mufwene is among 269 new members, which includes four other UChicago faculty, honored this year from a range of academic disciplines and selected from more than 1,300 nominations.

The Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the College, Mufwene is a leading expert on the emergence of creoles and on globalization and language. He received this honor for his breakthrough research in the evolution of language.

Blind or colorblind people can describe colors and use expressions like “green with envy” or “feeling blue.” A hearing-impaired person can also say those same vibrant hues are “loud.” But many linguists and cognitive neuroscientists have assumed that somatosensation—touch, pain, pressure, temperature, and proprioception, or the sense of where your body is oriented in space—is fundamental for understanding metaphors that have to do with tactile sensations. Understanding expressions like “she is having a tough time” or “that class was hard,” it was believed, requires previous experience with those sensations to extend their meaning to metaphors.

Now, research from the University of Chicago with a unique, perhaps one-of-a-kind individual, shows that you can comprehend and use tactile language and metaphors without relying on previous sensory experiences. These findings challenge notions of embodied cognition that insist that language comprehension and abstract thought require direct memory of such sensations.

UChicago faculty member Ling Ma’s first book “Severance” (2018) received multiple accolades and funding, including the Kirkus Prize, the Whiting Award and the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award as well earning her a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her second book, “Bliss Montage” (2022) has won three significant awards in rapid succession: the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize, the Story Prize, and the Windham Campbell Prize for her collection of short stories.

“I am drawn to this form of writing and always wanted to write a book of short stories,” said Ling Ma, AB’05, assistant professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at UChicago. “A novel is a more forgiving format. In a short story, the reader sees the writer’s craft more easily.”

For revealing how the Romani people of Europe and sub-Saharan Africans were similarly racialized from the 17th century onwards, Noémie Ndiaye received the 2022 William Nelson Prize from the Renaissance Society of America for the best article annually published in the journal Renaissance Quarterly/. Her article “Black Roma: Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)” focuses on performance practices in English and French settings showing the same legacy of bondage, enslavement, and human trafficking in theatrical representations for the Romani people and sub-Saharan Africans.

“In plays such as Molière’s Imaginary Invalid, Romani performers were performing Black dances,” said Ndiaye, the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language. “The connection is consistent, and I got curious about this. What if this is not a coincidence?”