Bios
David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, as well as a professor emeritus of English and comparative literature. He is in the process of updating the 29-volume paperback edition of all of Shakespeare's works originally published by Bantam Books in 1988. He is also one of three senior editors of a forthcoming Cambridge edition of The Works of Ben Jonson and is currently trying to write a book on how Shakespeare's plays were staged in their own day and in performance history.
Robert Bird is an assistant professor of in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. He joined the faculty in 2001, and his interests include Russian modernist literature and thought, contemporary aesthetic theory and hermeneutics, and Russian spiritual history.
Jason Bridges is an assistant professor of philosophy.He works in the philosophy of mind and related areas in the philosophy of action, the philosophy of language, and moral philosophy.His main current research project concerns reasons for action.He has also written or is writing on the 'naturalization' of mental content, animal cognition, and Wittgenstein's treatment of understanding and related phenomena.
Robert Buch has been assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Studies since 2003.He is currently working on a comparative study titled "The Legacy of Laocoon.Spectacles of Violence in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art".Other areas of interests include genre theory, Realism, aesthetics, and contemporary German literature.
Kevin Davey received his Ph. D from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003, and also has Master's degrees in both physics and mathematics. His main area of interest is philosophy of science, and more specifically, philosophy of physics. Much of his current research revolves around statistical mechanics and the arrow of time. He also has interests in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of religion.
Fred Donner is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization.Donner's interests have shifted recently to the intellectual or ideological factors that were at play in the early expansion of Islam, particularly the significance of militant piety, possibly rooted in an apocalyptic outlook. He is currently at work on a general study of Islamic origins that will attempt to sketch the outlines of this epochal historical process. His teaching at the University of Chicago focuses on early Islamic history, Islamic social history, and aspects of Islamic law.
Christopher A. Faraone is the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College. He has written Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Early Greek Myth and Ritual, Ancient Greek Love Magic and (with David Dodd) Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge 2003). Prof. Faraone has forthcoming articles on Hesiod, Hipponax and the wandering womb and he is currently at work on two books, one on early hexametrical incantations and another on the poetic form of Greek elegy. He is also the co-editor of Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, and Masks of Dionysus. His teaching focuses on archaic and Hellenistic Greek poetry, magic and religion, and Near Eastern influences on early Greek culture.
David Finkelstein is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College. He received his A.B. in philosophy and psychology from Harvard and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Prof. Finkelstein works and teaches principally in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. His book, Expression and the Inner, offers an account of the authority with which we speak about our own thoughts and feelings and of the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states.
Theodore N. Foss is the associate director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University.
Sam Guard attended the College of the University of Chicago on the GI Bill following service in WWII.Since then he has been a practitioner of the building trades in Chicago
working on the construction of skyscrapers, bridges, highways, tunnels and Millennium Park, until his alleged retirement in 2002.Mr. Guard lectures at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and at the Construction Specification Institute.
Philip Gossett, Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music, is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. Author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (forthcoming, Chicago), he serves as General Editor of The Works of Verdi and of The Critical Edition of the Works of Rossini. His edition of Rossini's Semiramide was published in 2001. One of the world's foremost experts on Italian opera, Gossett is the first musicologist to be awarded the Mellon Distingushed Achievement Award; he also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the Italian government's highest civilian honor. Professor Gossett has served as President of the American Musicological Society and of the Society for Textual Scholarship, as Dean of Humanities at Chicago, and as lecturer and consultant at opera houses and festivals in America and Italy. He was the musicological consultant to the Verdi Festival in Parma during the Verdi centennial year (2001).
Donald Harper is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research interests include early Chinese civilization, focusing on philosophy, religion, and history of science. In 1998, he published a translation and study of the Mawangdui medical manuscripts (early second century B.C.). Prof. Harper is currently working on a book-length study of early Chinese religion based primarily on recently excavated manuscripts dating to the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods. He is also collaborating with colleagues in Paris to analyze Dunhuang manuscripts that treat various divination traditions, including comparative research on early Chinese divination and science.
Beth Ann Johnson is a native of Chicago.She holds academic degrees in economics, Spanish, interior design and historic preservation.Her professional experience includes work in the public and private sectors.She intends to continue her work by pursuing her preservation interests in African-American heritage.
Robert Kendrick, department chair and associate professor of Music, is a music historian specializing in music of early modern Europe and its intersections with religion, politics, gender, urban culture, and fine arts. He is author of Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Music in Early Modern Milan (1996, Oxford) and The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650 (forthcoming, Oxford). Professor Kendrick has held fellowships at the Harvard University Society of Fellows (1993-96) and at the National Humanities Center (1998). Ph.D., New York University; 1993; at Chicago since 1997.
Janice Knight is an associate professor in the Department of English. Her research and teaching interests are localized with respect to historical period-Early American Cultures-but broad with respect to interest in discourses, peoples and cultures of the colonial period, and with respect to scholarly method. Prof. Knight's current research focuses on what might be called the "culture of religious emotion" in the context of women's experience in Early America. Her recent publication, "Telling it Slant: The Testimony of Mercy Short," (Early American Literature, 2002), gives a sense of her current interests.
Armando Maggi is an associate professor of Italian Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Prof. Maggi's scholarship includes works on Renaissance and baroque culture, literature, and philosophy with particular focus on treatises on love, religious texts, and the relationship of word and image. Prof. Maggi is also an expert of Christian mysticism, with works on medieval, Renaissance, and baroque women mystics. A native of Italy, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His latest books are Satan's Rhetoric, A Study of Renaissance Demonology (U of C Press, 2001) and a critical edition of Guido Casoni's treatise (1591) Della magia d'amore (Palermo: Sellerio, 2003).
Rochona Majumdar is an assistant professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is presently finishing a manuscript called "Rearranging Family Values: Marriage and Modernity in India", a book on the history of arranged marriage in India. She is also interested in colonial and postcolonial politics and has edited a book (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori) which is coming out shortly from Oxford University Press called "From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition." She teaches classes on the history of Indian cinema and on gender issues in India.
Salikoko Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics. He has been at the University since 1992, and studies creole language varieties and African-American English (especially their genesis and structures), syntax and semantics, lexicography, and Bantu morphosyntax.
Kenneth Nebenzahl is an internationally recognized authority on antiquarian cartography and one of the most prominent dealers and appraisers in the United States in rare books, manuscripts, and maps. He served as a consultant on the history of cartography to Rand McNally from 1966 to 1998, is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, and serves on the boards of the Newberry Library and the University of Chicago. Nebenzahl is the author of four books, including Maps of the Holy Lands and The Atlas of Columbus and the Great Discoveries.
Pedro Pereira is a Mellon Portuguese Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He specializes in Portuguese and Brazilian literatures, with a focus on the relationship between philosophy and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. His current research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of friendship in Portuguese and Lusophone literatures and cultures.
Seth F. C. Richardson is an assistant professor of Ancient Near Eastern History. He received his Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern History from Columbia University in 2002. The first volume of his dissertation was a historical study of the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the First Dynasty of Babylon, The Collapse of a Complex State: A Reappraisal of the End of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 1683-1597 B.C. The dissertation's second volume published almost 700 Late Old Babylonian texts, increasing the available published material in this time by about 50%. After occupying a post-doctoral research fellowship at Columbia for a year, Prof. Richardson came to Chicago to teach history. He is responsible for NELC's graduate program in Ancient Near Eastern History, and is the Mesopotamian Faculty Advisor to the Oriental Institute Museum. Prof. Richardson is now continuing work on research projects related to Old Babylonian economic and administrative texts, Assyrian political history, an intellectual history of early Babylonian liver divination, and Ancient Near East labor history, state collapse, and chronology.
Steven Rings, assistant professor in music, is a music theorist whose research focuses on the application of transformation theory to tonal music, music phenomenology and cognition, Schenkerian theory, and hermeneutics. Rings's dissertation, "Tonality and Transformation," is a methodological study of recent transformational approaches to tonal analysis, with a special focus on the music of Franz Schubert. He has previously taught at Yale University, the University of Minnesota, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and the Conservatório de Angra do Heroísmo in Portugal. Rings has performed as a classical guitarist in the United States and Portugal, including appearances on Minnesota Public Radio and RDP (Portuguese Public Radio). Ph.D., Yale, 2006.
Valerie Ritter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. She researches in Hindi literature, specializing in poetry and the early twentieth century. She teaches courses on South Asian literature generally, as well as Hindi.
Ed Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Professor in Early Chinese Studies. He is committed primarily to the study of China's archaeologically recovered textual materials, while at the same time not neglecting the received literary tradition. Prof. Shaughnessy usually keeps the two types of texts separated in his teaching, regularly offering graduate seminars on oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, and bamboo-strip manuscripts, on the one hand, and on the Yi jing, Shi jing and Shang shu, on the other.
Mark Slouka is the author of three books: a critique of the digital revolution, War of the Worlds, a collection of stories, Lost Lake, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the novel, God's Fool. A contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, his essays "Hitler's Couch," "Listening for Silence," and "Arrow and Wound" were selected for inclusion in Best American Essays of 1999, 2000, and 2003, respectively. His story, "The Woodcarver's Tale," won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. A National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has taught at Columbia, the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard, where he twice received the Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching.
Lisa Voigt is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Prof. Voigt joined the faculty in 2000, after earning her Ph.D. from Brown University. She is the 2005-2006 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, which she was awarded to revise her book manuscript, Writing Captivity in the Iberian Empires: Transatlantic Transformations. Her teaching and research on colonial Latin American literature and culture address transatlantic and comparative issues, and include such topics as captivity and shipwreck narratives in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, mestizo historiography in New Spain, and Baroque festivals and creole identity in the Andes and Brazil. She has published on these and other topics in recent and forthcoming issues of Colonial Latin American Review, Early American Literature, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and Romance Notes.
Christina von Nolcken is a professor in the Department of English, where she teaches courses on Old and Middle English language and literature, and the history of the English language. Prof. von Nolcken's interests include Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and, in the later period, late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century devotional texts. Her research has mainly been on the Wycliffite attempt to bring education, and especially religious education, to the people and is currently writing on Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," as well as some late nineteenth-century popularizations of the Canterbury Tales.
Peter White is a professor in the Department of Classics.
Ilya Yakubovich is a lecturer in the College and has received a Mellon Fellowship for 2006-07. His research areas include Anatolian and Iranian philology and historical and Indo-European linguistics.