Laura Demanski, AM’94

Time after time

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“Welcome to Vienna!” The Dean Boyer Salon at Alumni Weekend 2023. (All photography by Jason Smith, Anne Ryan, and John Zich)

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/23

In May Alumni Weekend–goers enjoyed lasting traditions and a few new twists.

With apologies to Tolstoy, all Alumni Weekends are alike and each Alumni Weekend is different in its own ways.

This year’s celebration was surely the first where cries of “Welcome to Vienna!” rang out on the main quadrangle. In addition to setting the stage for all the expected joyful reunions, formal and informal, this Alumni Weekend was a chance for attendees to celebrate John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, on the eve of his transition to a new role after more than 30 years leading the College as dean. And so, in the heart of Chicago’s Hyde Park, the Habsburg Empire was just a short stroll away from all points on campus.

Modeled after a Viennese salon, the eponymous Dean Boyer Salon tent paid homage to the imperial era that Boyer, a historian, studies. Wine, tea, and coffee (Julius Meinl, naturally) flowed and strudel flaked, both in abundance. Servers in crisp white shirts and black ties lent elegance. China cups and saucers gently clinked, and visitors skied the Austrian Alps (with help from virtual reality headsets). Just across the way from these novel attractions, the Alumni Beer Garden—new 11 years ago, a timeless tradition today—abided, as festive and popular as ever.

Also time-tested: Saturday evening’s double feature of the 115-year-old Interfraternity Sing Competition at Reynolds Club and the UChicaGO Party in Ida Noyes Hall, this year with pinball and a flower cart in addition to dancing and dining.

Time to feast: The brand-new Food Truck Festival on University Avenue Saturday afternoon served up lobster rolls, empanadas, pizzas, Dutch mini pancakes, and more.

Strictly timed: The Three Minute Thesis competition, now in its second year, gave alumni a glimpse of graduate students’ research achievements (see “Three-Minute Eggheads”to find out which ideas prevailed).

Time-honored: The Alumni Awards recognized the achievements of yesterday’s students, with honors bestowed on composer Philip Glass, AB’56, and 14 other alumni and faculty in a ceremony for recipients and their families, friends, and nominators.

Time flies: Many current students took part for the first time, trying on their alumni hats a year or more before the designation becomes official.

Time and again: Many attendees, yours truly among them, had been there before, were there this year, and will inexorably be drawn back—see you May 16–19, 2024.

Overheard at Alumni Weekend. View a PDF of the map. (Illustration by Matthew Insalata)

“Welcome to Vienna!” Swarmed by alumni, the Dean Boyer Salon (top two photos) offered food, drink, and photo ops. Saturday’s Food Truck Festival (bottom two photos) fed the hungry almost everything but Weiner schnitzel.

Clockwise from top left: The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts celebrated 10 years with a birthday bash; Professional Achievement Award recipient Ken Ono, AB’89, with Alumni Medal recipient Philip Glass, AB’56; Interfraternity Sing; getting down at a reunion after-party.

Clockwise from top left: UChicaGO Party people; sunny vibes at the Alumni Beer Garden; International House’s annual wine tasting; Alumni Scavenger Hunt.

A poet walks into a bar

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Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Summer/23

On verse and voices that stick.

What lines of poetry get stuck in your head? That’s one of the questions we asked poet and English professor Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy in “Well Versed.” Poetry lovers and likers will enjoy his answer, plus the whole Q&A—and will find a few grace notes in Alumni News and in “Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap: An Oral History,” about the Hyde Park watering hole that, over 75 illustrious years, has watered professors, plumbers, at least one president, and, yes, poets.

Some of the first poetry Reddy remembers loving is that of Shel Silverstein, whose Where the Sidewalk Ends (Harper and Row, 1974) was also a staple of my childhood library. The sheer clever silliness of Silverstein’s rhymes (and drawings) acted as an irresistible invitation to a lifetime of poetry reading. A fifth-grade teacher raised the bar, assigning us to memorize and recite “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Casey at the Bat,” “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and more.

“The sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might,” my mind still talks back at me now at times when, some 45 years later, I look out at Lake Michigan. I returned to the habit in college, learning by heart the accommodatingly musical “Kubla Khan,” and went from there. “Caverns measureless to man”; “season of mists”; “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”; “the state with the prettiest name”; “our almost-instinct almost true.” A small solitary luxury, to burrow into and store away such indelible lines, like a squirrel with a particularly delicious nut, for when they’re needed. Which is often.

And sometimes those nuts are where you happen upon them, such as in the unvarnished voices of 20 Jimmy’s habitués recalling a place they love. No varnish wanted—here is pure poetry.

Such sweet sorrow

This spring we parted ways with two colleagues who are now off on their next adventures. Maureen Searcy, associate editor for science, joined the University’s Physical Sciences Division, where she’ll focus her talents squarely on her greatest interests. And after seven stellar years at the Magazine, senior associate editor Susie Allen, AB’09, migrated north to report on faculty research at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. This issue was the last for both. We look forward to soon introducing the editors who will pick up where Maureen and Susie left off.

University News

Poetry

Editor's Notes

Stimulus package

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Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Spring/23

A UChicago feast for the senses.

This morning, like most Sundays, I sipped coffee to the harmonious reverberations of the Rockefeller Chapel carillon. On any given day in the neighborhood, UChicago Medicine helicopters chuff overhead, while on the ground an ever-growing flotilla of campus shuttles squeak to their stops and rev again. This time of year, birds sing and leaves rustle under the scampering of that alternate school mascot, Sciurus carolinensis (aka the eastern gray squirrel).

Two features in this issue got me thinking about signature sounds of UChicago, past and present. “Some Drum” recounts a tragicomic chapter in the century-plus-long life of the world’s largest drum, with its singular boom. And “Sounds Reborn” traces the continuing story of the UChicago Folk Festival, from opening bagpipes to closing applause, and a bit of the lore attached to it.

What sounds, sights, smells, textures, or tastes serve as your own Proustian reminders of the University? You may find some evoked in this very issue: delicate pages in an aging book, or the heft of a whole stack lugged to a Regenstein carrel. Period costumes at a University Theater performance, or the hairspray cloud hanging backstage. The buzz and toastiness of coffee being ground and brewed in a campus hangout, or buttery flakes of Medici pastry. A ska and soul band playing in a basement, or Bach emanating from a neighboring dorm room.

Look for those within, then reach out to let us know what sensory memory moves you at uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

Fitting tributes

As this issue went to press, the UChicago community came together to celebrate John W. Boyer, AM’69, PhD’75, who will take on a new role at the University after more than three decades leading—and transforming—the College. So profound is the native South Sider’s influence on the institution and its students that Mayor Lori Lightfoot, JD’89, declared Friday, April 21, 2023, to be John W. Boyer Day in Chicago.

Three days later, word came that the University’s new Paris center will be the John W. Boyer Center in Paris, named for its greatest champion. Boyer, a premier historian of the Habsburg Empire and of the University of Chicago, spoke to the Magazine for “Peerless.” Joining all who made the Chicago and Paris tributes possible, we thank him, for everything.

University News

Editor's Notes

Tomorrowland

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(All photos courtesy UChicago News)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/23

The past, present, and future of UChicago discoveries.

This past autumn, the University debuted a multimedia series delving into the histories behind UChicago ideas and discoveries that changed the world. The first three installments of The Day Tomorrow Began—on black holes, ancient civilizations, and quantum technology—highlight intellectual throughlines connecting yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Black holes

1930: Just 19 years old, future UChicago professor and physics Nobelist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar theorizes the existence of black holes while traveling by steamer from India to England.

1935:Chandrasekhar presents his idea at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting and is publicly ridiculed by a Cambridge mentor.

2019: After six decades of mounting evidence that black holes exist, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration releases the first image of a black hole.

Today: Astrophysicists Daniel Holz, SM’94, PhD’98, and Andrea Ghez, LAB’83, are building on Chandrasekhar’s discovery to answer fundamental questions about the universe: What is the universe really made of? What is the precise age of the universe? “These are all things we think we’ll be able to answer,” Holz says. (Read a profile of Chandrasekhar, “It Was Written in the Stars.”

Ancient civilizations

1894: On his honeymoon, Oriental Institute (OI) founder James Henry Breasted first visits Egypt.

1905: UChicago president William Rainey Harper appoints Breasted the first US professor of Egyptology.

1914: In Ancient Times, his textbook for high school students, Breasted popularizes the term Fertile Crescent—and the idea that civilization began in the Middle East, not in Europe.

Today: Scholars including the OI’s Gil Stein and Augusta McMahon, AM’86, PhD’93, are filling out our knowledge of ancient civilizations and our inheritance from them. For instance, we are now realizing, McMahon says, “that a lot of Mesopotamian cities didn’t just grow from internal people getting together and doing their thing, but also through migration, much like now.”

Quantum technology

1930s–40s: Arthur Holly Compton, Enrico Fermi, and other physicists make critical discoveries in quantum mechanics.

2011: As quantum science evolves, UChicago establishes the Institute for Molecular Engineering (today the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering or PME) with a unique problem-driven approach and a focus on science at the smallest scales, including quantum technology.

Today: PME, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Chicago Quantum Exchange are helping usher in a quantum tomorrow, with implications for the future of encryption, artificial intelligence, drug treatments, and far more. “The emergence of quantum technology,” says PME professor David Awschalom, “is a little like moving from a digital world in black and white to a quantum world in color,” and the world ahead is emerging in tantalizing glimpses.

Learn more at the UChicago News website.

University News

Discoveries

Faculty research

Doc at 90

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(Alexander_Fagaulin/iStock)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/23

The nation's oldest student film society, by the numbers.

23 Times Doc has screened its most-shown film, Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967)

16 Times it has shown runner-up Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

3 Number of Fritz Lang films shown 12 or more times

129 Films shown eight or more times

1989

Latest release year of a movie shown at least eight times (Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing)

61 World, US, Midwest, and Chicago premieres held at Doc

8 1/2

Movie first shown at Doc April 5, 1968, in the series “Recent Italian Cinema”

1 1/2

Years until Federico Fellini’s classic was shown again, in “Masterpieces of Italian Cinema”

Updated 02.15.2023 to correct the release date for Do the Right Thing to 1989.

Arts & Humanities

Doc Films

William Rainey Harper's Index

Humanities Day, recapped

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Ahmed El Shamsy, Kaneesha Parsard, and Kenneth Warren. (Photos courtesy of the subjects)

Susie Allen, AB’09

Chandler A. Calderon

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/23

Did you miss this year’s Humanities Day? We’ve got you covered.

If you couldn't make it to the Division of the Humanities’ annual celebration of its discipline, we'll bring it to you. Here are capsules of three presentations from the October 15, 2022, event. Hungry for more? Videos from these and previous years’ talks are available on YouTube.

The afterlife of the written word

“How do you guys dispose of books?” Ahmed El Shamsy asked the audience gathered in Stuart Hall. “Try not to,” one attendee offered.

Trashing books feels uncomfortable, a sentiment shared by our premodern counterparts. The challenge was particularly acute for Jews and Muslims, who faced logistical and theological challenges when deciding how to get rid of written material that might contain the name of God, explained El Shamsy, a professor of Islamic thought in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, in his talk “How Muslims Disposed of Books.”

Both traditions, he said, assign “a particular value of sacredness to written material,” perhaps because Arabic and Hebrew are scriptural languages. As a result, the simple question of what to do with unneeded documents, ranging from worn-out copies of religious texts to property records, prompted serious theological thought.

Jews found a solution in genizot, repositories for civil and sacred writings often held in synagogues. Among Muslims, the question provoked much debate but no resolution. In the early eighth century, some scholars proposed burning texts while others objected to the practice. Washing texts emerged as another option, with 14th-century handbooks citing the practice as preferable to burning. “But then of course you have jurists—and jurists always come up with a counterexample,” El Shamsy said. “Like, what do you do with water that flows off?”

In the 13th century, early Sunnis uncomfortable with burning written material proposed that it be buried instead. The document tombs that resulted bore a remarkable resemblance to genizot—hardly a coincidence. Jews and Muslims “lived side by side,” El Shamsy said. “It is very likely that there was a crossover in the attitudes towards these texts and preserving these texts.”

Of course, El Shamsy noted during the postlecture Q&A, scholars don’t know how scrupulously ordinary people followed any of this guidance. “The theoretical discussions we have access to are among elite thinkers,” he said. “How far that trickled down is similar to our discussions today, like, how many people actually do recycling?” —S. A.

Among friends

Pressured to marry and work as housewives, some Caribbean working-class women in the 1920s and ’30s turned instead to friending, a Caribbean English term Kaneesha Parsard defines as “casual romantic and sexual relationships with the expectation of support and sometimes explicitly for pay.” In her talk “The Friending Plot,” Parsard, an assistant professor of English, framed this rebellion against marriage as “a means of survival and not merely scandalous.”

What Parsard calls the “friending plot”—a nod to the Austenian “marriage plot”—appears in fiction by the Beacon Group, a collective of Trinidadian writers and social critics in the ’20s and ’30s. The friending plot is circular, Parsard explained: “It typically begins with seduction, is sustained by the exchange of sex for money, and ends, often temporarily, with a breach of contract, when the woman is suspected to be unfaithful.” Though friending exposes women to insecurity—even violence—they can choose partners who satisfy their immediate needs and desires.

As an example, Parsard offered the 1929 short story “Triumph” by writer and activist C. L. R. James, the Beacon Group’s most prominent member. Mamitz, the protagonist, initially destitute and abandoned by a friend, attracts the attention of two new men who pay her debts and provide food and gifts. Mamitz’s jealous neighbor Irene tells the men about one another, threatening to unravel everything. But Mamitz triumphs, reconciling with both men.

Parsard emphasized that the friending plot depends on friendship (in a traditional sense) among women: women offer one another stability that friending does not provide. Mamitz’s best friend, Celestine, supports her when her friend leaves her and advocates for her after Irene’s betrayal. Mamitz in turn shares gifts from her male friends with the other barrack-yard women (except for Irene). As Parsard explained, Mamitz’s “triumph is not only in [her] gain, but also that hers are wages for friends.”

Working together, these women enjoy pleasure and freedom they cannot imagine finding in marriage. Concluding her talk, Parsard quoted Celestine’s reaction when asked whether she plans to marry: comparing marriage to slavery, Celestine affirms, “I all right as I be.” —C. C.

The gilded page

Calling the present a “new gilded age,” Humanities Day keynote speaker Kenneth Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English, examined how contemporary novels portray social relations under conditions of extreme inequality. In his talk “Wealth, Inequality, and the Novel,” Warren questioned whether our capitalist reality is subject to the techniques and ambitions of the classic novel.

Writers in the realist tradition, he said, have aspired to a “super vision” describing life at all levels of society and the connections between levels. But the books he discussed draw an “absolute disjuncture” between the experience of the ultrawealthy and that of the rest. In such a world, novelists have little hope of grasping the totality of society, even as success could transport them to the other side.

In Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020) and John Lanchester’s 2012 novel Capital (W. W. Norton), Warren showed, the lives of characters who reside outside “the country of money” are neither seen nor seeable by the very rich. Smitty, a wealthy artist in Capital, wishes he could call all his assistants “Nigel” to smooth out their pesky individuality. A newly rich character in The Glass Hotel stops seeing her bodyguards at all. For St. John Mandel, Warren added, “the barrier goes both ways”: the unrich understand the rich as “avatars of extreme wealth” rather than as people.

Warren, who studies American and African American literature from the 19th century on, is the author of So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Comparing social invisibility in Ellison’s Invisible Man (Random House, 1952) with that in The Glass Hotel and Capital, he noted that the invisibility of Ellison’s unnamed narrator to the White world is based on the perceivers’ prejudices about the perceived—it “has an act of refusal at its core.” In the later novels, the fog envelops entire social positions. It’s arguably bleaker, a systematic unseeing of entire social positions, whether prejudice comes into it or not. In “a world fractured by a dramatic upward distribution of wealth,” Warren reflected, the novel form itself appears diminishingly able to offer “the possibility of a commonality of experience.”—L. D.

Arts & Humanities

Humanities Day

Division of the Humanities

Everything but the statuette

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Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Winter/23

These award recipients bleed maroon.

From MacArthur season to Nobel season to the Golden Globes and Oscars, the awards cycle churns on and begins again—and sometimes that’s great news for alumni magazine editors. This past October, you could feel a zip in the campus air when the news struck of Chicago Booth professor Douglas Diamond’s economics Nobel Memorial Prize. “A Cut Above” looks at Diamond’s foundational work clarifying the role of banks in the economy, now recognized with the loftiest of honors.

One awards season commands this publication’s UChicago-centric attention year in and year out. In this issue read about the individuals chosen to receive this year’s UChicago Alumni Awards and Norman Maclean Faculty Awards.

Since the awards were launched in 1941, some world-famous alumni have added these laurels to long lists of them. There was Benjamin Mays, AM’25, PhD’35, in 1967 and 1978; Susan Sontag, SB’51, in 1981; Lien Chan, AM’61, PhD’65, in 1991; and Mildred Dresselhaus, PhD’59, in 2008. Household names or not, as a nominator said of one of this year’s recipients, all of the honored Maroons bleed maroon.

As we were preparing the award notices, a handwritten card reached our mailbox. It contained news, too late to be included in this issue, from Marjorie Sullivan Lee, AB’43. She wanted to update readers on her longtime advocacy for Americans with disabilities and to hear from classmates.

Lee, we found in the Magazine’s archives, received the UChicago Public Service Award in 1993 for the work she described in her note—work she remains deeply engaged with 30 years later. Read more about her in Alumni News in the Spring/23 issue. For now, appreciate, as we do, her demonstration of the uncommon passion driving alumni awardees from every era. Do you know someone just as driven? Nominate them for a 2024 award.

Drumroll, please

In November we welcomed Chandler A. Calderon to the Magazine as the Alumni News editor. Chandler comes most recently from Yale University, where she interned for Yale’s magazine while earning her PhD in French literature. As lead editor of the Peer Review section, she will work closely with the College class correspondents and all of you who have news to share, while also contributing to every part of the publication. We’re impressed already by her editing and research chops and her eye for detail, reflected in this very issue.

Greetings, Maroons!

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(Illustrations by Jackson Gibbs)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/22

Ringing in the New Year in rhyme.

Taking a page from the New Yorker and its year-end tradition, we offer season’s greetings in light verse to all of you, our cherished readers. These lines may be silly, but our wishes for your good health and happiness in 2023 are sincere.

Hallo, Maroons! Let’s bid adieu,
With vim, to twenty twenty-two.
Turn month and day again to one;
Await the next weeks’ waxing sun.
But first attend a fond look ’round
At some who made last year profound.
Happy next one, President Paul,
And Nicole—Alivisatoses all.
For those preceding him, a word
Of gratitude and praise be heard:
From Rockefeller and Will Harper—
Their plans in focus ever sharper—
To present heights of rigor, thought,
And ever-rarer Scav grails sought.
The toast extends to every veep
And other very important peeps:
To dean of deans a joyful din—
John Boyer, plus his trusty Schwinn.

With ardor not a trifle less,
Let’s cheer our colleagues who profess:
Cathy Cohen, Karin Krause,
William Howell, David Strauss,
Tiktaalik and its finder Shubin,
GI doctor David Rubin,
And all med campus denizens:
Nurses, PAs, techs, and residents;
Phlebotomists and neurosurgeons
Who treat the chronic and the urgent;
Doctors Fisher, Miller, Landon:
We hip-hip-hooray them with abandon!
For Ada Palmer, New Year hopes
To mock elect a bunch more popes,
And pen more novels! Ling Ma, hear?
Eve Ewing, feed poetic ears.
The muse be at all writers’ backs
To swell the well-lit Reg’s lit stacks.
Ring! Nobel bells for Heckman, Thaler,
Myerson—making econ haler—
Plus Diamond, Kremer, Hansen, Fama
(this sentence lately gained a comma).
At institutes—OI to EPIC,
Labs, museums, synergetic,
Countless centers and one collegium—
Let insights burst from every cranium.

In spots all ’round this verdant sphere,
Alumni, heartfelt wishes hear.
To Philip Glass, “Paperboy” Reed,
Ana Marie Cox, and Bruce Freed.
Justine Nagan, Kimberly Peirce,
Gordon Quinn: keep indies fierce.
To class scribes Stein, McDermott, Egan,
The one and only Korean Vegan,
Comics maestra Jessica Abel:
Lift glasses and set festive tables.
Good health to you from head to toes,
Bonnie Jo Campbell, Haroula Rose.
GM Ng and commish Silver,
We will you seasons rife with thrillers—
May you relish all life’s Ws
Without a single L to trouble you.
College, university presidents rise—
Santa Ono, Thomas Krise—
Chris Eisgruber, Anne F. Harris—
May your academic groves be fairest.
A clarion call for joie de vivre
To Koenig, Sarah; Cicala, Steve;
Plus Sybil Hampton, Matthew Dean,
(Not that) Ken Burns, and Katie Skeen;
Tyehimba Jess, doc Karen Tang,
John Paul Rollert, Hilary Strang,
Leon Botstein, Brinton Ahlin,
Yuval Levin, Aliza Levine.

Thanks, Fred Niell and Justin Kasper
For memories of a dorm reactor
That won’t soon dim, much less go poof,
And nor will David Auburn’s Proof—
Hey! Tony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves!
A brief honorary nod to these
Not-quite Maroons flown in to be
Mere actors of our reality.
To true Maroons, the real McCoys,
That nod plus further heaped-on joys:
Carla Hayden, Matt Martell,
Danny Lyon, W. Kamau Bell.
Andrea Ghez, John Goodenough,
Make space and batteries the stuff
Of better knowledge, ever growing
’Til our minds are overflowing.
Dear Sens. Sanders and Klobuchar:
To auld lang syne, add au revoir,
For next year, each with our obsessions,
We’ll meet again with brand-new questions.
Crescat scientia, let knowledge grow;
Vita excolatur, there are miles to go.

University News

Poetry

Preserve and connect

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According to new UChicago Library director Torsten Reimer, ”Others can shift all their resources into digital, but that’s not a sensible approach for us. After all, libraries are custodians of cultural heritage and historical material in print." (Photography by John Zich)

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/22

With an eye on digital and traditional resources alike, Torsten Reimer is leading the UChicago Library into a complex future.

For Torsten Reimer, the potential of libraries in our digital age is unbounded. At Imperial College London in the 2010s, Reimer led the development of a cross-campus data infrastructure that vastly increased access to faculty research. As head of content and research services at the British Library, he focused his attention on the revered institution’s legion of users from around the world and their evolving needs. This April Reimer moved to Hyde Park with his wife and young child to become University librarian and dean of the University of Chicago Library.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Why the University of Chicago?

Having studied and worked at universities that take pride in advancing society through research, I found the University of Chicago’s research focus very appealing. Together with its location in a vibrant city, the proud history, terrific collections, and impressive buildings of the library were a strong draw too. In Germany [where Reimer earned his history PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich], university library systems often consist of small independent libraries, so leading a library that brings its services and collections together was another strong point. There’s a very solid foundation but also the opportunity to have a conversation across campus about what we want the role of the library to be in five, 10, 15 years—and then to build on what is already here.

What are some of the new roles you foresee the library playing?

Historically the role of university libraries has been to collect material, mostly from the outside world, and then to make it accessible within the organization. In an environment where more is published online and most people go to search engines to find it, our role expands. It includes supporting the creation of knowledge in digital form and helping faculty and students push that knowledge out to the world. Libraries can help make publishing processes easier and make the exciting fruits of research at UChicago widely findable and usable. In addition, we need to think not just about our local collection but also about the global collection of knowledge and how we can ensure transparency, reproducibility, and equitable access to information.

Libraries face challenges different from those of other organizations going through the digital transformation. Others can shift all their resources into digital, but that’s not a sensible approach for us. After all, libraries are custodians of cultural heritage and historical material in print. In humanities research in particular, print continues to have a key role. So it’s not digital replacing physical, but thinking about how both can support each other, and about the spaces that will facilitate this. If you’re a musicologist, for instance, you might want to see original printed sheet music and historical writings, you might want to listen to different recordings, and you might want to do computational analysis of that music. Libraries can be the space to do that.

On the computational research side, there’s a drive to make the research process more transparent and reproducible. That means making available not just publications but also the data that went into the research: the collection materials used, the protocols, the code. These are all becoming part of the scholarly record, and librarians need to help users track those materials and make sure they remain usable in the long term. It’s a classic preservation challenge made much more complex by dynamic digital objects.

Can you give an example of how the library can more actively support the creation of knowledge in digital form?

One topic on many people’s minds is climate change, where much of the work is built on complex simulations using large-scale data and specialized software. The more the world talks about the impact of climate change and how to deal with it, the more we’ll want to look not just at the data but also the models and code, which you need to properly assess the data. Libraries can facilitate the preservation of digital research, assuring persistent access.

Or, if a historian wants to understand how decisions have been made or how communication has circulated in, say, early modern Europe, one way to track this is through letters. You can create helpful visualizations if you look not at individual letters, but at who’s written to whom and how knowledge flowed across the continent. If you want to do network analysis on how thinking evolved over time among European elites, you can make the letters machine readable, and then trace the concepts that are mentioned in them—or do the same on a larger scale if you have digitized newspapers and maps. These types of research would have been impossible before. And by the end you’ve created a data set of digitized material for use by other scholars.

At the British Library you were focused on users and their experiences. How do you think about different users with different needs at UChicago—for example, undergraduates?

A few years ago, there was a perception that undergraduates would start coming to college super digitally savvy, more so than faculty. We’ve since learned that knowing how to be a creator on TikTok is not the same as understanding the back-end machinations of the internet or being able to critically evaluate sources. Universities and libraries have provided research training for centuries, and we need to keep evolving our offer to give undergraduates a first-class grounding in the challenges and benefits of working with digital information.

What about users and partners in the community?

The library has done interesting work with the community before. We’ve been in a project with public libraries across the South Side to train librarians to help patrons who are looking for medical advice. We work with public schools by, for instance, bringing items from Special Collections to teach about. I would like for us to develop a strong civic engagement strategy that develops joint programming and provides information resources and training.

I’d also like to see the library raise funds to set up apprenticeships in library information management aimed at South Side residents. Like other parts of higher education, libraries struggle to recruit from a pool of applicants as diverse as we wish; we should train more people to come into librarianship from different backgrounds.

These partnerships work both ways. I am continually impressed by public libraries and how on a shoestring budget they manage to be very creative. We can help them in many ways, and also we have things to learn from them.

What is most on your mind right now, several months into the job?

Staff recruitment and organizational development is first. We lost a lot of staff in the “great resignation,” so we have to recruit and build a new team.

Then we are looking at spaces, the services we offer, and the future needs for collection development and storage. What services can best be provided where, how we can respond to users’ needs for more and more flexible spaces for solitary study, group study, group work and teaching, and so on. For the Regenstein in particular, we also need to improve spaces for staff and think more about users’ journeys through the building.

In parallel, we are investing in digital services—for example, around open access and research data. We have also just submitted a multimillion dollar bid in partnership with the Humanities Division to improve access to digital collections, data, and research tools—not only library collections but also faculty research. In the long run, I envision a space to explore all the exciting work that comes out of the University of Chicago.

Can you describe your PhD work in history?

As an undergraduate I spent a lot of time on digital projects, which I really enjoyed. But as a historian I wanted also to do something that built on an archival collection. Over time I developed a strong interest in history, not so much as it happened, but how it was remembered and how the received memory of what happened then shaped current and future events. I looked at how, over about 260 years, public discussion in early modern England constructed the idea of England, and later Britain, as a maritime nation.

I looked at everything I could find: early historical descriptions of England, 16th-century pamphlets about the fishing industry, navigational manuals, newspapers, theater, music, pageantry and court ceremonies, government publications, debates in parliament. By tracing these discourses over a long period, you could see that the English invented their own mythology and every generation added something to it, taking the previous discussions and using them for particular political interests. I saw a lot of this reflected in the debate on Brexit.

Did you consult both physical and digital resources?

I used more physical collections, partly because not everything was digitized at the time. But I also feel there was something about the materiality of sitting in the English wing of the Bodleian Library surrounded by 16th-century pamphlets and prints—an experience we have not found a way to re-create in the digital realm. If purely from an emotional perspective, that really mattered to me. It also emphasized the need to think about print and digital together. One is not going to replace the other. We want to preserve both and make them available to our users in the way that fits their research purposes best.

Which libraries have meant the most to you as a user?

One of the libraries I feel most attached to is the Bavarian State Library in Munich. It has terrific collections, it’s located right next to the university, and I found the librarians willing to treat an undergraduate student seriously—which was not my experience at all libraries. I am also closely attached to the British Library in London, although I wish its humanities reading rooms had more windows. The British Library was built partly to preserve the books; it’s a closed environment where you step out of the world to just focus on your research. But after a long winter in the rare books reading room I was dying to see daylight again!

I love the old reading rooms at the Bodleian Library. Reading early modern materials in a room that existed at the time they were written is a wonderful experience. Maybe two years into my PhD, when I had lots of separate ideas, I remember sitting there and having one of those click moments when I felt, there’s a story emerging here. I’ve always looked at history as essentially storytelling—a story based on good research and evidence and reasoned argument, but still a story. It was the first time that I felt I really knew what the story of my PhD would be. To an extent it was the environment that helped me get to that point. I can’t point to a single book that provided that; it was having all these materials around me and engaging with them in those surroundings every day.

What do you read for pleasure?

I still have an attachment to the weird and wonderful world of 16th- and 17th-century pamphlets and books, though I don’t read them on a daily basis. Currently I enjoy a subgenre of fantasy/sci-fi literature called urban fantasy: stories that are set in a world that’s not quite ours. My favorite series is Rivers of London, which tells the story of a young policeman who discovers that the supernatural world is real and that the Metropolitan Police have a small unit investigating supernatural crimes. The author spent much time in archives in London digging up historical anecdotes. He takes the city that I love and its history and writes witty stories about supernatural beings interacting with everyday London life. The creative use of history, crime fiction storytelling, fantasy, and contemporary issues combine to make me very happy.

What else would you like readers to know?

Being new here, I really appreciate talking to people who use the library—but also to those who don’t use it because it may not serve their needs very well. I want to put out an invitation to all who read this. If you have strong views on the library, or feel we could do better, then I would like to have a conversation with you and learn what we could do.

Write to Torsten Reimer at reimer@uchicago.edu.

University News

Library

Glimpses

Fresh ink

rsmith — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 23:37:05 +0000

rsmith Wed, 11/02/2022 - 18:37

Laura Demanski, AM’94

The University of Chicago Magazine

Fall/22

A selection of recent books by UChicago faculty members.

Casanova’s Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance

By Stephen M. Stigler, Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of Statistics

In 1994 a curious Stephen M. Stigler ordered a book by mail. Published in 1834, the gambler’s guide to France’s state Loterie was, he writes, “dirty, worn, and falling apart at the seams”—and drew him into a years-long investigation of the government betting game. Far from the first such contest, the Loterie was nonetheless of particular significance. Active for almost 80 years, except for a brief pause during the French Revolution, it introduced risk (calculated but real) into a national government’s financial management to a degree not seen before or since. For the public, too, the Loterie had lasting consequences, causing citizens to view risk in new ways and changing attitudes toward novel financial instruments.

New Mexico’s Moses: Reies López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement

By Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Department of History

Texas-born activist Reies López Tijerina began as a preacher who, with his family and a small group of other families, set up a cooperative village he called the Valley of Peace in the southern Arizona desert in 1955. By the 1960s, Tijerina had become an impassioned advocate for the descendants of dispossessed New Mexico landowners and an important leader in the Mexican American civil rights movement. In New Mexico’s Moses, historian Ramón A. Gutiérrez examines how Tijerina’s activism was shaped by his Pentecostal beliefs, and the religious origins of the movement as a whole. Among his sources are sermons from Tijerina’s preaching days, translated into English for the first time here.

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

By Lorraine Daston, Visiting Professor, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought

A thorough history of rules, writes historian of science Lorraine Daston, would amount to “little short of a history of humanity.” From that “cat’s cradle of complexity,” her book identifies three consistent types of rules our species has used since ancient times: algorithms, models or paradigms, and laws. Having established these lasting categories, Daston—who has long taught at UChicago in full-time and visiting faculty positions—demonstrates how many forms rules take within them. For instance, they can fall anywhere along three axes: thick or thin in formulation; flexible or rigid in application; and general or specific in domain.

On the Inconvenience of Other People

By Lauren Berlant, The late George A. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English Language and Literature (1957–2021)

In their final book, completed shortly before their death in 2021, cultural critic Lauren Berlant elaborated the concept of inconvenience, what they call “the affective sense of the familiar friction of being in relation”—especially with other people, whether in passing on the street or half a world away. That sense of inconvenience, they write, “may not achieve significance, consciousness, politics, or clarity,” but it attends our attachments and shapes our experiences—and, in Berlant’s vision, has revolutionary potential. The ubiquitous frictions Berlant analyzes—looking to sources as far-flung as Last Tango in Paris and the Occupy movement—Interfere with the fantasy of sovereignty over our own worlds and feelings, they argue. Grappling with the inconvenience of other people may offer a path to new forms of social being.