Creative Misuse
Amid pandemic, UChicago scholar launches program for international artists
Early last year, Assoc. Prof. Ghenwa Hayek signed on to become the interim director of the University of Chicago’s Gray Center. A month after she accepted the interim directorship, the COVID-19 crisis was officially declared a pandemic.
Uncertain times call for certain decision-making, and Hayek quickly embraced the challenge. The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry has long convened scholars and artists in the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration—but without in-person events, it would have rethink the nature of its mission.
Drawn from Music: Art Exhibition Opens Window into Composers' Creative Process
For composers, drawing a “map” of music can give shape to a new work and articulate its overarching ideas. As evocations of the composer’s intentions—from sweeping curves to stars, birds and brightly-colored dots—such maps capture the ebbs and flows within a musical piece and complement musical scores, serving as guides for performers.
MAPS OF FORM, a new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, presents a collection of these musical illustrations as works of art in their own right. Drawn by UChicago faculty and graduate composition students, the maps vary from abstract representations of operatic arias in numbers and letters to contemporary works illustrated with chariots and drawings of hanging mobiles.
Humanities Scholar Receives Prestigious Donnelley Fellowship to Cambridge College
While Sam Lasman (PhD’20) works primarily in the Persian, Arabic, French, and Welsh languages, he dabbles in Latin, Irish, and old English. But it’s not only the multiple languages that intrigue him, it’s the access to medieval literature concerning the supernatural from the primary sources in different languages.
To further pursue medieval literature and languages, Lasman recently received the Gaylord and Dorothy Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral exchange program for recent PhDs at the University of Chicago and Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College. The three-year fellowship allows Lasman to focus exclusively on his research, although he has leeway to teach courses at Corpus Christi College.
Prominent Alumnus Inspires New UChicago Humanities Endowment in Islamic Studies
Renowned for educating scholars in Islamic studies, UChicago has luminary professors, such as Professor Emeritus Fred M. Donner and Professor Emerita Wadad Kadi, to serve as its teachers and mentors. Now one of their protégés, Jonathan A. C. Brown (PhD’07), has emerged as a prominent voice in this field.
In honor of Brown, a new $100,000 endowment in Islamic Studies has been established in the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. While the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations will manage the Jonathan A. C. Brown Islamic Studies Research Award Fund, annual applications are open to both UChicago master’s degree and PhD students researching Islamic studies across many disciplines.
