"It is a day when we open our classrooms to the public, offering a unique opportunity to sample the riches that the University of Chicago has to offer in the wide field of humanities,” says Dean Martha T. Roth.
Drawing up to 1,000 people each year, Humanities Day has become a pivotal event for alumni, Hyde Parkers, and other Chicagoans. The day proved so popular that in 1990 the University of Chicago participated in planning the citywide Chicago Humanities Festival, which now spans several weeks.
Many alumni and humanists continue to travel to campus from beyond the city because of the breadth of topics and depth of scholarship offered on Humanities Day.
Gary Strandlund, AB’83, MBA’96, was a philosophy student in 1979 and attended the first Humanities Open House, beginning a long tradition. “I made it a point to go back every year to keep in touch with my Humanities professors,” says the Batavia, Illinois, resident. “When my kids were old enough, I would take them so they would get a feeling for the kinds of things they could pursue when they entered college as well as get a flavor of the U of C experience. I look forward to it each year.”
"Humanities Day offers me the opportunity to engage with some of the greatest minds of our time,” said one past attendee.With approximately 40 lectures, exhibits, and tours planned this year, Humanities Day 2011 is appropriately themed “See. Hear.” Participating scholars represent virtually every department in the Division. Visitors can learn about recording Persian antiquities in a time of crisis from Matthew Stolper (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations), explore the Freudian unconscious with Candace Vogler (Philosophy), hear about the newest edition of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory from one of the world’s foremost opera experts, Philip Gossett (Music/Emeritus), or join David Wellbery (Germanic Studies) to discuss the most beautiful story in the world.
Visitors can also see the newest physical improvements to the campus as well as exhibitions at the Oriental Institute (Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization) and the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library (Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary). Robert Bird (Slavic Language and Literatures) will lead the talk on the library exhibit, which focuses on Soviet children’s literature, and then give introductory comments at the Vision and Communism show at the Smart Museum of Art. Both exhibitions are part of the citywide Soviet Arts Experience festival.
Other highlights include a tour of the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library and a hard-hat tour of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, which is still under construction and slated to open in May 2012.
Classics professor Shadi Bartsch will deliver the keynote address, “The Wisdom of Fools: Christianity and the Break in the Classical Tradition,” at 11:00 a.m. in Mandel Hall. (See below.)
High school English instructor Kate Pavlou has traveled to Chicago from Normal, Illinois, every Humanities Day but one since 1997. She usually has several students as well as her own children in tow. “As an intellectually curious individual for whom learning is a lifelong pursuit, Humanities Day offers me the opportunity to engage with some of the greatest minds of our time,” she says. Over the years, she adds, several of her students were so “hooked” that they went on to attend the University.
Admission to Humanities Day is free, but registration is required. Online registration and a complete schedule are available here. Visitors can also register on the day of the event beginning at 8:30 a.m. in Stuart Hall.
The 2011 Keynote
Bartsch ponders “The Wisdom of Fools”
“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” thundered the church father Tertullian at the end of the second century AD, and the answer implied was: Nothing.
This year’s Humanities Day keynote address by Shadi Bartsch, the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor in Classics and the College, offers an intriguing look into the impact Christianity has had on our relationship with classical texts. Bartsch’s lecture, “The Wisdom of Fools: Christianity and the Break in the Classical Tradition,” will take place at 11:00 a.m. in Mandel Hall.
Spanning late antiquity to the Renaissance, Bartsch’s talk will examine the clash of classical philosophy and Christian doctrine and its long-lasting effects. “I think one could argue that there is an effect on the individual as well as the history of society,” says Bartsch. “One of the things Christianity brought about was an obscuring of our relationship to ourselves and the idea of self-knowledge.”
Within the ancient philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, most of what humans did was motivated by reason, says Bartsch. However, Christianity introduced not only faith but also the idea of “a grace or will that comes from God.” Hence, people are not necessarily guided by reason alone and may base their actions on what they believe is God’s will. “The whole idea that we were rational creatures and that reason is our greatest attribute — the thing that makes us more like gods and not animals — was discarded.”
Further, some of what we find in classical philosophy was not only disowned but even considered by some zealots to be a form of temptation held out by the Devil. Bartsch points out that other societies did not experience this break in tradition and therefore have a different relationship with their own classics. “In China, the religious, intellectual, and ethical tradition existed in more or less an unbroken line from the time of Confucius [551–479 BCE] until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911.” The result is that in China it was more or less expected that people have a thorough knowledge of the Chinese classics.
Bartsch has been a Chicago faculty member since 1998 and teaches courses on Roman novels and comedies, Greek thought and literature, and the history of rhetoric. The author of five books, she is currently working on a book entitled Persius: The Satirist out of Joint.
A winner of both the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2000 and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2006, Bartsch received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. She served as chair of the faculty board of the University of Chicago Press from 2006 to 2008 and was editor in chief of Classical Philology from 2000 to 2004.
