New Faculty Fall 2024
Florence Illuminated project to receive generous NEH grant
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.
George Haley, acclaimed critic of the Golden Age of Spanish Literature, 1927‒2024
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.
How UChicago's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality 'is here for everyone'
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.
Humanities Division Honors Graduate Students, Faculty, and Staff at 538th Convocation
Division of the Humanities graduates, faculty members, and the graduating students’ families and friends celebrated the 538th Convocation ceremony in Rockefeller Chapel from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. on May 31, 2024. This is the first year that Deborah L. Nelson is serving as Dean of the Division of the Humanities and the inaugural year for the academic excellence and leadership awards for graduates of master’s degree programs.
“At each convocation, we are proud to celebrate the achievements in scholarship and teaching of our faculty and students,” said Deborah L. Nelson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College at UChicago. “I am immensely pleased that we are inaugurating new awards to honor the excellent scholarship of graduates with master’s degrees.”
