vanessa german knows how it sounds. Her metaphysical manner of speaking. Talking about magic. She feels eyes rolling.

“One of the things that people would say to me is they're not going to take you seriously; Black artists can't talk this way,” german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI), who spells her name in all lowercase letters, told Forbes.com. “They can't talk about love and their spirit because quote-unquote, they–the all-present, all-powerful ‘they’–will not take me seriously.”

Humanities Assoc. Prof. Niall Atkinson is spearheading a comprehensive, collaborative, multi-university digital research platform called Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society. The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting this crucial scholarship with a grant of $349,969. It’s one of 238 humanities projects in 2024 to “help preserve and expand public access to important historical records and humanities collections at archives, libraries, museums, and universities” nationwide, according to the NEH.

The NEH grant for this project will provide a model for other digital collaborations, which will allow individual projects in the digital humanities to grow and expand on their own while also seamlessly integrating scholarship. Through a public web-based interface, the Florence Illuminated project will consolidate data from five digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late-medieval and early-modern Florence, supporting even more research in many fields and prompting questions that scholars haven’t even considered yet.

Prof. Emeritus George Haley, renowned University of Chicago author of many books and articles about Miguel de Cervantes and Vicente Espinel, passed away on June 6 at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

Known for his scholarship on Spanish and Portuguese literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, Haley covered the work of obscure poets to the enigmatic Don Quixote by Cervantes. His famous article “The narrator in ‘Don Quixote’: a discarded voice,” was published in the Modern Language Notes journal in 1965, has been translated in several languages and is still taught in classrooms today. The article was the first one on Spanish literature that embraced the New Criticism of the Chicago School.

One could think of gender and sexuality in very contemporary terms—or that the terms relate only to a small fraction of the population. But for Prof. Daisy Delogu, the faculty director of UChicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality—it’s a misconception that she and the Center’s interdisciplinary approach aim to correct.

“In my opinion, there’s no realm of experience, or endeavor, or inquiry that remains untouched by questions of gender and sexuality,” said Delogu, a scholar of medieval French literature who took over as faculty director last July.

The Center was founded in 1996 after a decade of faculty and student self-organization. Over the course of its nearly 30 years of consolidating work and creating curriculum on gender and sexuality and in feminist, gay and lesbian, and queer studies, the Center also has engaged the campus and local communities with guest lectures, conferences, and other programming. This past year, the CSGS saw its largest undergraduate class with 19 fourth-year majors, and awarded 15 graduate certificates.