The Twitterati
When I was in college, it was the local custom to assign all the undergraduates into one of two categories: techies and fuzzies. It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I was in the latter. Not only did I major in the ultimate humanistic discipline (what could be more pertinent, after all, than anthropology – literally the study of the human?), but I was supremely maladapted to handle any of the new electronic gizmos that were making the rounds in the...
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Posted Wednesday, April 25 by Matti Bunzl
Fall 2012: America
America.
It’s a loaded word. It’s geography as well as terra firma; it’s history, memory, aspirations, a destination—a physical place as well as a repository of dreams and beliefs that tug at people from all over the world.
But when we at CHF say America, what do we mean?
As you have probably noticed, we are approaching a presidential election. In fact, it will occur right during our festival. Early November, after all, is our time of the year. But it happens to...
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Posted Monday, April 09 by Matti Bunzl
Marina Abramovic: Total Presence
It’s not often that I find myself sitting in church and loving every minute of it.
Actually, having grown up Jewish and secular at that, I don’t find myself in church much at all. Sure, there’s the occasional wedding, to say nothing of the conscientious traipsing through the various instantiations of Europe’s ecclesiastical culture. But the fact remains: church is not really me.
Well, that might change after the transcendent experience I had at First United Methodist Church at...
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Posted Tuesday, February 21 by Matti Bunzl
Classical Music and the CHF
What is the place of classical music – or any form of performance art, really – in a Humanities Festival? We think about this question a lot when we are programming the CHF – and it has resulted in a series of events that are truly exciting to us.
So where do we begin in the process? Our starting point is a desire to present as all-compassing a Festival as we can imagine. To that end, we extend the notion of Humanities beyond the narrow academic definition. Yes, we do present literary...
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Posted Monday, September 19 by Matti Bunzl
Anna Clyne and My Grandfather
Vienna's Staatsoper
Growing up in Vienna, classical music was always in my life. It was on the radio and television as well as at school, where I had music instruction from grade one (all of us could choose between lessons in piano or violin – free of charge). Most importantly, though, I had my grandparents, who had fled Vienna for London in 1938, but returned in 1946, mainly because they missed Austrian culture, which is to say classical music.
Grosser Sall at the...
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Posted Sunday, September 18 by Matti Bunzl
Emily Osborn and the History of African Studies
Africa has long held a place of intellectual curiosity in the “West.” The Sub-Saharan part of the continent, in particular, has been an object of fascination, space of projection, and general site of “Otherness” for the European self. This is to say that the West has a long and rather dubious history of imagining what Africa is “really” like, from intense speculations to outright fantasies.
It was not until the late 19th century that the study of Africa started to be undertaken with...
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Posted Tuesday, August 23 by Matti Bunzl
Michael Bérubé – The Best of the Big 10
When I arrived at the University of Illinois as a newly minted PhD in the fall of 1998, a figure towered over the intellectual landscape of the campus. It was Michael Bérubé, who had just been appointed the founding director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The IPRH, as it is called for short, was our version of a national phenomenon – the emergence of the interdisciplinary humanities institute.
Michael Bérubé
Across the country, these institutions...
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Posted Monday, August 15 by Matti Bunzl
Shakespeare by the Numbers
Last year, I wrote a blog about Ania Loomba’s lecture “Shakespeare and the Black Body” (check it out here). There, I said that no humanities festival would be complete without an event on the Bard. I meant it then, and I mean it now. With that, let me tell you what we have installed for tech•knowledgē. It’s a doozy – is that a term from Shakespeare…?
This fall, we will welcome Michael Witmore to discuss his work on digital Shakespeare. Now what does that mean? Mike, as he is...
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Posted Monday, August 15 by Matti Bunzl
The State of the Humanities: Conversations with National Leaders
The Chicago Humanities Festival is the premiere event of its kind in the country. We take this position seriously. For 22 years, we have brought the world’s leading thinkers, writers, and artists to Chicago, providing an unparalleled forum for exchange, education, and edification.
But it’s not just the creative types who populate the CHF stage. We regularly hear from key figures in the world of politics and higher education – the folks who set the larger parameters for the humanities in...
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Posted Monday, August 15 by Matti Bunzl
Michael Taussig – Anthropology’s Shaman
At its best, anthropology confounds us. It confronts and defamiliarizes, using its global, comparative purview to bring us face-to-face with the exotic only to reveal our own strangeness.
No contemporary anthropologist practices this maxim with greater verve than Michael Taussig. In a career spanning 40 years, the Columbia University Professor has produced some of the most startling and influential writings to ever come out of the discipline.
Michael Taussig, One of...
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Posted Friday, August 12 by Matti Bunzl
The Big 10 at the CHF
While I’m not a Midwesterner by birth, I’m very much one by choice. Having grown up in Vienna, my first foray into the US took me to California, where I went to college. But I never felt at home there. Somehow, the place didn’t seem real. The weather was too perfect and the people around me too convinced that they were in the happiest place on earth. Maybe it’s the neurotic Viennese in me – but I need some doubt it my life, even a little bit of misery.
University of Chicago
...
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Posted Friday, August 12 by Matti Bunzl
Art by Telephone and Other Adventures in Conceptualism
Conceptual art is one of those terms that is thrown around a lot, but rarely explained or explicated. Sometimes, it seems to denote a specific art movement that originated in the late 1960s; at other times, it appears to cover all relevant art of the last forty years or so; in yet other contexts, it is said to have originated with Marcel Duchamp in the 1910s.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
As is sometimes the case when we talk about the cultural creations of our...
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Posted Tuesday, August 02 by Matti Bunzl
Gay Pride at CHF
It’s that fabulous time of the year again when queers and their friends celebrate Gay Pride!
Chicago Gay Pride
The festivities commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, when a bunch of courageous drag queens, immensely saddened by Judy Garland’s untimely death, decided to no longer take the harassment that was part and parcel of queer life. Rounded up in a raid at the Stonewall Inn, they famously resisted, inaugurating the modern lesbian/gay...
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Posted Friday, June 17 by Matti Bunzl
CSI: Picasso
I love my job! Here is one of the many reasons why. A few weeks ago, our Executive Director Stu Flack and I found ourselves in one of the most fascinating spots on Chicago’s cultural landscape. We were at the Art Institute, but not just anywhere in that phenomenal institution. No, we were in the museum’s department of conservation, where executive director Frank Zuccari gave us a guided tour of the premises. We saw x-ray machines, bulky scanners, and all kinds of other tech equipment. But I...
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Posted Friday, June 03 by Matti Bunzl
A Flintknapper for Our Times
So what in the world, I hear you groaning, is a flintknapper? And what would such a person have to do with the Chicago Humanities Festival? To answer in order – a flintknapper is a person who makes tools through the process of lithic reduction, with is a fancy way of saying that they use stones to chip away on other stones in order to create flat surfaces and sharp edges. Yes, that’s right. We are talking about the archaic tools built by our ancestors thousands...
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Posted Tuesday, May 24 by Matti Bunzl
The Magical World of Stages, Sights, and Sounds
Last night, I had one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life. I was at the invited dress rehearsal (which is a fancy way of saying the “final test run”) of TPO’s Kindur, one of the productions playing as part of CHF’s Stages, Sights, and Sounds. It was truly galvanizing, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I left the MCA. It’s avant-garde theater, cutting-edge performance art, and high-tech spectacle all rolled into one breathtaking hour.
...
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Posted Wednesday, May 04 by Matti Bunzl
The Breakup 2.0
One of the great things about being an anthropologist, what drew me to the discipline in fact, is that no subject is off limits. After all, anthropology is the study of humanity in all its aspects, a proposition at once grandly dignified and ludicrously ambitious. I was hooked on it the moment I realized that it would give me the freedom to study whatever I was interested in, now or in the future. And over the years, I have taken advantage of this freedom, roaming across such varied fields of...
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Posted Thursday, March 17 by Matti Bunzl
The Past, Present, and Future of the Book
For those of us who care passionately about the humanities, there are few questions more pressing than the future of the book. Coming generations, it seems today, may well live without them, consuming text on various electronic devices networked, in turn, to infinitely large digitized data bases. To some of us, this appears like a techno-utopia, having the entire library of world culture at our fingertips. To others, it is a more depressing vision, centered on the loss of the iconic artifact of...
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Posted Thursday, March 17 by Matti Bunzl
Viking Myths, Then and Now
For a small, remote island uncomfortably close to the Arctic Circle, Iceland has a remarkable place on the map of global culture. This is due to its fascinating tradition of literature and folklore, a body of texts – the Eddas and Sagas – that serves as a veritable repository of Scandinavia’s rich mythological and historical corpus. Having been settled by Norse seafarers in the 9th century, Iceland’s location aided in the preservation and eventual collection of these stories...
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Posted Thursday, February 24 by Matti Bunzl
Climate Change and the Humanities: A New Frontier
There are some folks who believe that humanists deal exclusively in arcana, obscure texts and artifacts that are of interest to few and relevance to none. But nothing could be further from the truth. As those attending the CHF with any regularity know, humanists are front and center when it comes to addressing the pressing issues of the day, from the philosophical underpinnings of geopolitics to the conceptual ramifications of our era’s technological revolutions.
Few issues are more urgent...
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Posted Thursday, February 24 by Matti Bunzl
