Humanities Scholar Edgar Garcia to Receive MLA's William Riley Parker Prize Honorable Mention

Edgar Garcia

Edgar Garcia’s scholarship focuses on cultural practices and literatures of indigenous people in the Americas, which historically have not been considered literature. For his article “Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich” published in the March 2019 issue of PMLA, the Modern Language Association’s literary journal, he will receive the William Riley Parker Prize Honorable Mention at the MLA Conference in Seattle on January 11, 2020.

Humanities Scholar Lauren Berlant to Receive 2019 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature

Lauren Berlant photographed by Whitten Sabbatini for The New Yorker

Driven by an immense pedagogical curiosity, Lauren Berlant has spent more than three decades studying, analyzing, and writing about what sentimentality means in American culture for gender, sexuality, and politics. For her perceptive interpretations of American literature, politics, and culture, Berlant will receive the 2019 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association at the MLA Conference in Seattle on January 11, 2020.

Beatboxer Finds New Sound in Opera by UChicago Composer

Augusta Read Thomas (left) and Nicole Paris (right) rehearse for the opera "Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun."

The following was published and broadcast by Chicago Tonight on WTTW on December 2, 2019.

by Angel Idowu

For years, beatboxer Nicole Paris and her dad Ed Cage have awed audiences with their beatboxing battles as Nicole and Popz. Paris recently broke from that duet to take on a feat of her own: beatboxing in an opera. When composer and University of Chicago professor Augusta Read Thomas had the idea to incorporate nontraditional sounds into her opera, Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun, she knew just who to reach out to: beatboxer Nicole Paris.

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