Like many other musicians, Sam Pluta can get lost in performance—head bobbing, fingers flying, shoulders shimmying. But on stage, he isn’t strumming a guitar or pounding a drum set. His instrument of choice is a computer. This unusual approach helps explain the popularity of Pluta’s classes at the University of Chicago: Unconstrained by genre, they provide students a fitting creative outlet on a campus that blurs the lines between disciplines.

Darby English’s scholarship defies easy categorization, combining teaching, researching, and writing about art, artists, culture, and history, as well as curating. He studies artists and their media without assigning them the tidy labels that would unjustifiably pigeonhole them.