NELC and Oriental Institute Excavation Team Discovers Ancient Urban Villa with Shrine for Ancestor Worship in Egypt
A Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Oriental Institute team unearthed a large urban villa at the site of Tell Edfu in southern Egypt dating back to the New Kingdom, about 1500–1450 B.C.E. The excavation includes a large hall containing a rare, well-preserved domestic shrine dedicated to family ancestors. “It has been more than 80 years since such a shrine for the ancestors was discovered in Egypt, and the ones we did have were rarely within an undisturbed context,” said Nadine Moeller, associate professor of Egyptian archaeology in NELC, who leads the Tell Edfu Project excavation with Oriental Institute research associate Gregory Marouard.
Humanities Graduate Student Earns Kudos as a Poet
Emily Jungmin Yoon has more on her mind than earning her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. The fourth year UChicago graduate student is an accomplished poet who writes about gender, race, and violence against women, primarily through intertwining the histories of her native Korea and the United States. Her first poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Harper Collins, 2018), is earning rave reviews.
Scholarly Associations for Middle East Studies Laud NELC Researchers for Illuminating Recent and Ancient History
Scholars in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations have discovered and excavated new archaeological sites and uncovered new perspectives about history in the Middle East that brought new understanding about the civilizations, daily life, and religious and scientific practices of the region. In recognition of their significant contributions to the field, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and Middle East Medievalists (MEM) recently honored NELC faculty members Donald Whitcomb and Orit Bashkin, as well as NELC alumnus Ahmet Tunç Şen, MA’10, PhD’16. Whitcomb received the MEM Lifetime Achievement Award for his pivotal fieldwork in historic Islamic archaeology. As the co-winner of MESA’s 2018 Nikki Keddie Book Award for her book Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford University Press, 2017), Bashkin explores the difficult transition for Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1950s, especially of the women and children. For his 2016 dissertation on “Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court, 1450s–1550s,” Şen received MEM’s Inaugural Dissertation Award.
Meet the Staff: Amanda Young
Amanda talks about NELC and her goals for 2019 in this month's edition of Meet the Staff.
Media Mentions: December 2018
The latest media mentions, quotes, profiles, and writings from Division of the Humanities faculty, students, staff, and alumni.
UChicago Cinema Expert Helps Identify 1898 Film as Earliest Depiction of African-American Affection
UChicago Associate Professor Allyson Nadia Field assisted in identifying the African-American actors, director, and historical significance of Something Good–Negro Kiss, the newly discovered silent film from 1898 that is believed to be the earliest example of African-American affection on-screen. “It was remarkable to me how well the film was preserved, and also what the actors were doing,” Field said. “There’s a performance there because they’re dancing with one another, but their kissing has an unmistakable sense of naturalness, pleasure, and amusement as well.
UChicago Scholar Writing about Space and Race Wins Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize
When Adrienne Brown was studying modernism at Princeton, she wasn’t sure if there was still room for her to write about it. Fortunately, Brown, associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, was able to find unexplored territory by analyzing the connections between skyscrapers and race in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. This research proved so fruitful that the resulting book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (John Hopkins University Press, 2017), recently received the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize.“Adrienne Brown is a stellar young scholar whose originality and breadth of learning are fully on display in The Black Skyscraper,” said Deborah Nelson, the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in English and department chair.
UChicago Professor To Receive the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for His Transformative Scholarship
In writing a book that develops a new vocabulary for black and trans life, C. Riley Snorton delves into the past 150 years of American history. Recognizing the UChicago scholar’s inventiveness and depth of research and analysis, his widely celebrated book Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) has notched another significant accolade. The Modern Language Association will award the William Sanders Scarborough Prize to Snorton for his groundbreaking scholarship on January 5 in Chicago. “In his inaugural year at UChicago, Riley has brought new perspective to our research and teaching in literature, race, gender, and sexuality,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities.
Two UChicago Graduate Students Receive Coveted AMS Fellowships
In celebration of their musicological scholarship, two UChicago doctoral students recently received fellowships from the American Musicological Society, reinforcing the University’s prominent presence among award winners. Jessica Gabriel Peritz and Tommaso Sabbatini were the recipients of the 2018 Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Award. Their two dissertation awards represented half of the four AMS dissertation awards given in 2018. Peritz also received the AMS Paul A. Pisk Prize.
UChicago Professor to Receive the MLA's Prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize
Selecting six distinctive 20th-century women for her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press, 2017), UChicago scholar Deborah Nelson examines how each woman responded to suffering in unsentimental ways, and how their unconventional responses reflect their active, expansive, and transformative relationship to the traumas of the 20th century. For her broad look at how their toughness reshaped the cultural landscape, Nelson will receive the 2018 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association on January 5 in Chicago. "Debbie’s Tough Enough is a highly accessible book that is reaching audiences both within and outside academia,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. “The breadth of its appeal is, in part, what the premiere prize of the MLA honors, and this breadth corresponds to Debbie’s far-reaching impact at the University of Chicago.”