If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Bob Dylan’s voice is at once one of the most recognizable and most polarizing sounds in Western music, simultaneously iconic and inscrutable. More even than his words, Dylan’s voice is the most potent material signifier of his mercurial persona. As an early Columbia Records advertising campaign put it, “Nobody sings Dylan like...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice are two of Shakespeare’s most controversial and least loved (though very often performed) plays. While both of them are, by genre and intention, comedies, they often do not strike modern and contemporary audiences as such. The aim of this talk is not to dismiss concerns with...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, human beings are essentially rational animals. According to psychoanalysis, much of our mental lives are taken up with unconscious mental activity. The usual way of understanding unconscious mental activity has it that the unconscious is either a sea of irrationality or an aspect of mental life...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. One feature of human language that is crucial to its role in communication is the systematic relation between linguistic symbols (words, phrases, sentences) and the information they express in different contexts. For example, the sentence, “The Quad Club is currently serving tripe for lunch” conveys the same information about the...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. How is the digital changing the way that humanities scholars look at the past? This forum showcases several ongoing projects by faculty that utilize network visualization, text-mining, geo-spatial mapping, and other digital techniques to augment and/or reframe more traditional lines of humanistic inquiry. How have these...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Jessica Stockholder, Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, shares images of her work and discusses its relationship to context. Her presentation focuses particularly on the “Color Jam” installation that was on view on the corner of State and Adams this past summer, describing the...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. James Sparrow, associate professor of History at the University of Chicago, discusses the history of the United States during World War II.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Alison Bechdel, Dedmon Writer-in-Residence 2010, discusses her work.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute, explains the importance of the groundbreaking archaeological expedition he co-directed at Hamoukar in Northern Syria. Until recently, archaeologists believed that urban civilization first arose in Southern Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq. Work at Hamoukar has revealed...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Law professor Cass R. Sunstein talks about his book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and brings back from obscurity an important speech: FDR's State of the Union Address of 1944, in which he articulates the idea that human beings have inherent economic and social rights. Copyright 2004 The University of Chicago.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology and Dean of Humanities, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. In 'Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood' University of Chicago sociologist Omar McRoberts explores the relationships between urban 'storefront' churches and the community in which they are situated. Copyright 2003 The University of Chicago.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. In Renaissance demonology, the relationship between humans and fallen angels is essentially a dialogue. Armando Maggi examines this rhetorical interaction--how demons seduce humans into speaking their language--and reconsiders an impossible question that concerned church fathers: What happens when demons and humans mate?...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Martin E. Marty, Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the Divinity, discusses his new book, The Mystery of the Child, and the origins of his interest in the subject of children. Departing from literature on children that regards the child as a problem to be controlled, Marty's new work--emanating from his...

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. University of Chicago fossil preparator, Tyler Keillor, discusses the iterative process of creating the model for Tiktaalik, the fossil discovery by paleontologist Neil Shubin that fills in the evolutionary gap between fish and land animals.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. Film historian Tom Gunning examines an important precursor to modern film: the magic lantern. He considers the eighteenth and nineteenth century's fascination with this new, very modern way of experiencing images and how this form of visual media ushered in the era of motion pictures. Copyright 2005 The University of Chicago

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Wendy Doniger explores the cultural fascination with pretending to be another version of oneself, a popular theme in film, theater, and literature.

If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to [email protected]. University of Chicago Professor David Bevington discusses the process of publishing the comprehensive new electronic and print editions of Ben Jonson's work, which will feature modernized language and will include secondary materials such as costume and set sketches.