Session 1

Join co-curator Eric Powell for a guided tour of Poetic Associations, the fall exhibition at UChicago's Special Collections Research Center.In the period between the French Revolution and the start of World War I, often called “the long nineteenth century,” English poetry enjoyed enormous popularity and respect. The Romantics and the Victorians, as we know them today, were celebrities and, often, close friends, part of a literary community that influenced their professional and personal lives. Dr. Gerald N.

What is the relationship between innovation and repetition? Are the two diametrically opposed or intimately related? This presentation will consider these questions through the lens of the art and architecture of Chichen Itza, one of ancient Mexico’s most cosmopolitan and creative cities.

The University of Chicago’s vast Campus Art Collection includes outdoor and indoor sculpture, paintings, prints, and more. During this tour, we will visit various sites on campus and discuss issues of campus history, conservation, and art historical significance. Key works include Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy, Lorado Taft’s Shaler Memorial Angel, and Ruth Duckworth’s Earth, Water, Sky.

Rene Descartes remains best known as the founder of modern philosophy and science who broke decisively with his Scholastic and, thus, religious predecessors. This talk challenges this conventional view by taking seriously the title of his opus magnum Meditations on First Philosophy and examining the role of meditative thought and practice in his philosophy.

Jessica Stockholder is an artist whose work bridges painting, sculpture, and installation. She will present and discuss her recent work currently on view at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and at Kavi Gupta Gallery in the West Loop, 219 N. Elizabeth Street, Chicago. She will dwell on the range of different kinds of work presented in the solo exhibition Door Hinges, the installation Rose's Inclination, and Assisted, an exhibition she curated at the Kavi Gupta Gallery.

As Liang Qichao observed in 1920, the first “age of translation” in China occurred with the introduction of Buddhism in the third and fourth centuries of our era; the next such “age” had to wait until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What did translation mean to Chinese during the long interval between the two “ages”? What was its value, how and by whom was it performed? What are the consequences of living in an “age of translation,” as opposed to an age when this art is deemed secondary or insignificant?

Since the Enlightenment, thinkers, writers, and artists have been preoccupied with the emotion of disgust, asking whether our expressions of revulsion are learned cultural responses or rather signs of an innate animal nature. Are emotional reactions—and disgust in particular—distinct from the capacity to reason, or do they form the basis for it?

From Sumeria, Egypt, Phoenicia, and Greece to China and the Mayan empire, writing has been central to civilization and has been invented several times independently around the world, using just four basic models. In this class, we explore the four types of writing and their histories, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages for particular languages and age groups, as well as the challenges for learners and the prospects for orthographic reform and degradation in English.