The Division of the Humanities welcomes 16 faculty members to campus, as the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations is renamed the Department of Middle Eastern Studies.
Ray Briggs joins Philosophy as professor following faculty appointments at Stanford and the University of Queensland. A major figure in analytic metaphysics and epistemology, they also work on philosophy of language and gender, using philosophical and mathematical tools to address questions about rationality and the nature of the world. In addition to more than two dozen articles, they are the coauthor of What Even Is Gender? (Routledge, 2023). Their PhD is from MIT, where their dissertation was entitled “Partial Belief and Expert Testimony,” and their BA (also in philosophy) is from Syracuse University.
Briggs discussed What Even Is Gender? in an interview on the YouTube channel Friction and wrote a collaborative essay with their coauthor, B. R. George, for Aeon entitled “Words for Every Body.” They were the cohost of the National Endowment for the Humanities–funded podcast Wise Women: A Philosophy Talk Series on Female Philosophers Through the Ages and have appeared twice on UChicago’s philosophy podcast Elucidations. Their current projects include “Science Fiction Double Feature: Trans Liberation on Twin Earth” (with B. R. George) and “Sovereign: A Defense of the Modified Body.” They have also published two poetry collections and were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Gregory Maxwell Bruce, assistant professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, studies Islam in South Asia. His first book, Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (Syracuse University Press, 2020), is an annotated English translation of a significant Urdu- Persian-Arabic-Turkish work by philosopher, Islamic theologian, literary critic, and historian Shibli Numani (1857–1914). The book traces and documents scholarly networks connecting India to the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s. Before coming to UChicago, Bruce lectured in Urdu at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Stanford. His PhD, in Asian cultures and languages, is from the University of Texas at Austin, and his BA, in philosophy with a minor in ethnomusicology, is from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the editor in chief of the Journal of Urdu Studies (Brill), which he cofounded.
Bruce has given interviews about Turkey, Egypt, and Syria on a number of podcasts: South Asian Studies at Stanford (SASSPod), New Books Network, Islamic Circles, and Ottoman History. He is also the author of Urdu Vocabulary: A Workbook for Intermediate and Advanced Students (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and helped create a free digital archive of Urdu learning materials hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. He has contributed extensively to several encyclopedias, including more than a dozen entries to the Third Edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam. His two forthcoming books are Rājnīti – Politics: Braj Bhāṣā Wisdom Literature in Colonial India (Primus) and Mirqāt – Steppingstone: An Indian Primer in Arabic Logic (Brill).
Jonathan Flatley, professor in English Language and Literature, joins UChicago from Wayne State University; he was previously on the faculty at the University of Virginia. He is a comparativist who works on American, African American, and Russian literature and culture. Most broadly, his research concerns collective emotion as it takes shape in aesthetic and political forms. His most recent book, Like Andy Warhol (University of Chicago Press, 2017), argues for Warhol’s enthusiastic commitment to liking as a coherent organizing principle running through his enormous body of work across several media. He is also the author of Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard University Press, 2008), which considers modernism’s preoccupation with loss. It argues that not all melancholias are depressing, and it pursues this claim through its examination of a group of texts in which an attachment to loss becomes the very mechanism for being interested in the world and in others.
He is also the coeditor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke University Press, 1996); two special issues of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (“Andy Warhol,” 2014, and “Disco,” 2008), which he edited from 2007 to 2012; and “1968 Decentered,” a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2020) with late Slavic Languages and Literatures professor Robert Bird. He completed his BA at Amherst College and was a research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy before receiving his PhD in literature from Duke University.
Flatley is currently finishing a book called Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter-Moods Are Made. This book is about the formation of Black revolutionary moods, those moments when otherwise discouraged, alienated, depressed, or isolated people come together to form energetic, hopeful, and demanding collectives for whom victory against white supremacy feels possible. It identifies a particular Black radical tradition, which, in addressing the problems of group formation and collective feeling, picked up on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and made use of them within existing Black political protocols. Flatley began to work on a new research project about liking and being like trees with the support of a Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellowship in 2022–23.
Jennifer Fleissner is professor in English Language and Literature and an expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American novels, with interests in theory and method as well as in contemporary fiction. Her book Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (University of Chicago Press, 2004) has become a touchstone in the field; her follow-up, Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem (University of Chicago Press, 2022), weaves together early Christian thought, natural philosophy, and German idealism as backdrops to the nineteenth-century American novel’s engagement with dramas of the will. She joins UChicago from the faculty of Indiana University—where she had the rare honor of receiving the Trustees’ Teaching Award twice, in 2019 and 2022—and, before that, UCLA. Her PhD is from Brown and her BA is from Yale.
Fleissner’s writing has been supported by several awards, including a fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She has published some two dozen articles and book chapters on authors such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker, most of which are considered standard reading on key methodological questions of literary analysis. She plans to collect some of these, joined by new work, into a forthcoming edition that argues for the historic recursivity of literary studies. Her other project is a study of repetition in philosophy and literature, using historical fiction and thought to intervene in contemporary discussions of literary theory. Beyond her scholarly writing, she also—as a graduate student—contributed several entries to The Spin Alternative Record Guide (Vintage, 1995).
Margaret Geoga, assistant professor of Egyptology in Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, is a scholar of ancient Egyptian literature—its production, transmission, and reception throughout history. She holds a PhD in Egyptology and Assyriology and a concurrent MA in comparative literature from Brown; her BA, from Harvard, is in Romance languages and literatures. Her latest book, currently under contract, is Receptions of a Middle Egyptian Poem: A Textual and Material Study of “The Teaching of Amenemhat,” ca. 1550–500 BCE (Brill, forthcoming). She was previously an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania Wolf Humanities Center.
Geoga’s work on the reception of ancient Egyptian literature and culture has led to a project on the 1731 novel Séthos, about a fictional prince in ancient Egypt and his initiation into a secret society. The depiction of Egypt in Séthos had a profound impact on other eighteenth-century works, and its legacy still influences beliefs about ancient Egypt to this day. Geoga’s scholarship has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, and she is a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (2023–25). Her publications include articles in Middle Eastern Literatures, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, and Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur, as well as the coedited volumes Looking Beyond the Text: New Approaches to Scribal Culture and Practices in Ancient Egypt (Brill, forthcoming) and The Allure of the Ancient: Receptions of the Ancient Middle East, ca. 1600–1800 (Brill, 2022). Before joining UChicago she held teaching positions at Brown and Providence College.
Cassandra X. Guan joins Cinema and Media Studies as assistant professor following a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology Program and a faculty position at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. She holds a PhD and MA in modern culture and media from Brown and a BFA in art from the Cooper Union. Her dissertation and book project, “Maladaptive Media: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility,” reinterprets the aesthetics of animation in the early twentieth century through the philosophy of technology. She is also working on a book entitled “Imagine There’s No Human” about mass mobilization and automation in Chinese state media from the 1950s through the present.
A filmmaker as well as a scholar, Guan has been involved with five film productions, most recently serving as the director, scriptwriter, and film editor for Tender Comrades—on representations of female friendship in early twentieth-century cinema from mainland China from a contemporary queer perspective—which is currently in postproduction, supported by an Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds Award from the New York State Council on the Arts. She has received a number of other travel and research grants, as well as a Presidential Fellowship from Brown, a Joanne Casullo Fellowship from the Whitney Independent Study Program, and a Josephine de Karman Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She also held a Dean’s Faculty Fellowship in Brown’s Program for Science, Technology, and Society, and additional teaching positions at Brown and Yale.
Carlos Gustavo Halaburda is assistant professor in Romance Languages and Literatures. He holds a PhD in Luso-Hispanic studies and critical theory from Northwestern; he earned both his MA and BA from the University of British Columbia. He specializes in cultural productions about queerness and disability, with a focus on Argentina, as well as Uruguay and Brazil. Prior to arriving at UChicago, he was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Cologne and a postdoctoral fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the University of Toronto. His book project, “Argentina’s Sentimental Underworlds: Slum Theatre and the Staging of Queerness and Disability—1880–1930,” studies how fin de siècle sexology and genetic theory informed the dramatic repertoire of the Río de la Plata.
In addition to Halaburda’s journal articles and book chapters, he has coedited two critical editions of novels: with Daniel Balderston, Luxuria: la vida nocturna de Buenos Aires (1936) by Otto Cione (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2022); and with Nathalie Bouzaglo, Débora (1884) by Tomás Michelena (Himpar, 2020). His writing has been recognized with a Carlos Monsivais Best Article Award from the Sexualities Section of the Latin American Studies Association as well as a Best Article Award from the Canadian Association of Hispanic Scholars, and his research has been supported by institutional grants from the University of Toronto, Northwestern, and the University of British Columbia. Halaburda’s work on performance and staging is informed by his undergraduate training as a musician, for which he received a Certificate of Music from the National University of Tucumán in Argentina.
Derek Kennet is the Howard E. Hallengren Professor in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf States Archaeology in Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. His research areas include the rise of Islam, economic responses to arid environments, and the interactions between the Arabian Peninsula and nearby societies. He was formerly the resident archaeologist at the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah in the UAE and spent 25 years at Durham University before coming to Chicago. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and his PhD is from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He has coauthored several books, the most recent of which—Southeast Arabia at the Dawn of the Second Millennium: The Bronze Age Collective Graves of Qarn al-Harf, Ras al-Khaimah (UAE)—is forthcoming from Oxbow Books in 2024.
Kennet’s other coauthored books include Sasanian and Islamic Settlement and Ceramics in Southern Iran (4th–17th century AD): The Williamson Collection Project (Oxbow, 2023), Excavations at Paithan, Maharashtra: Transformations in Early Historic and Early Medieval India (De Gruyter, 2020), and Archaeological Atlas of Samarra (British Institute for the Study of Iraq, 2015). He has done fieldwork throughout the Arabian Peninsula—Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia—as well as in Italy, Bulgaria, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Egypt, and Libya, and he has also directed archaeological expeditions in India and China. His professional background includes a faculty position in the Department of Archaeology at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.
Pamela Klasova, a scholar of classical Arabic literature, joins Middle Eastern Studies as assistant professor following a faculty appointment at Macalester College. Her PhD (in Arabic and Islamic studies) is from Georgetown University, and she completed bachelor’s and master’s equivalent degrees in Arabic and Dutch philology from Charles University in the Czech Republic, as well as an MA in Arabic from Leiden University in the Netherlands. In her first book, The Eloquent Tyrant: Speech and Empire in Umayyad Iraq under al-Hajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, 694–714, under contract with University of California Press, she explores how al-Hajjāj, the powerful governor of Iraq under the Umayyad dynasty, used oratory in his efforts to strengthen the early Islamic empire.
Klasova’s work on al-Ḥajjāj uses orality studies to analyze early Islamic speech, an area that has been underexamined because its history has been filtered through the documentary efforts of subsequent societies that did not prioritize oratory. Her other projects include “The Lives of the Arab Poets,” which uses selected writers to tell the story of the Islamic empire’s rise, and “Wonder and New Worlds in Medieval Islam,” which uses her proficiency in Persian, Syriac, Greek, and Latin to explore how wonder was discussed in literary, religious, and scientific texts from the seventh to the fourteenth century CE. She also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Arabic at Bowdoin College, and taught at Bowdoin as well as at George Washington University and Georgetown.
Maya Krishnan, assistant professor in Philosophy, is a scholar of German idealism whose work focuses on the theological views of Kant and Hegel. One overarching aim of her work is to reconstruct and defend metaphysically and theologically demanding conceptions of knowledge and freedom. Her dissertation, “The Totality of the Thinkable,” uses Kant’s theological texts to offer a new perspective on his accounts of knowledge, reference, and self-deception. She is currently researching the accounts of the divine will in Kant and Hegel and their implications for our interpretations of each philosopher’s understanding of freedom. Her work on German idealist theology is the basis for her contemporary work on autonomy and intelligibility. She has additional interests in Michel Foucault and Gillian Rose.
Her doctorate is from the University of Oxford, where she was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College and a Rhodes Scholar. She completed the BPhil in philosophy at Oxford, for which she was awarded the Gilbert Ryle Prize, and a BA in philosophy at Stanford.
Krishnan was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at Princeton University, where she was a visiting fellow at the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion and an exchange scholar at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She also participated in the philosophical theology program at Oxford’s Balliol College and was awarded Oxford’s Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.
Jana Matuszak, assistant professor of Sumerology in Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, specializes in Sumerian language and literature. In her research on humor, rhetoric, law, and gender, she combines philological research with theoretical approaches derived from literary, cultural, and historical studies. She received her PhD in Ancient Near Eastern philology/Sumerology from the University of Tübingen, and her prizewinning dissertation was published with De Gruyter in 2021. She is currently working on one book about Sumerian mock hymns and another entitled “Defining Femininity: The Construction of Ideal Women in Sumerian Didactic Literature at the Dawn of the 2nd Millennium BCE.”
Matusak’s dissertation and first book—whose title (“Und du, du bist eine Frau?!”) translates to “And you, you are woman?!”—focuses on the Sumerian literary disputation Two Women B, for which she provided the first critical edition and analysis. She helped produce a theatrical staging of this rhetorical contest for the Being Human festival, as well as a film production supported by outreach grants from the London Centre for the Ancient Near East and the Institute for Classical Studies London, and has discussed her research on the podcasts The Know Show and Digital Hammurabi. She was also the guest on the podcast Thin End of the Wedge: Exploring Life in the Ancient Middle East for their second episode, “Misogyny and the Ideal Sumerian Woman.” In addition to her work on the construction of womanhood, she has published articles on disputations between scribes, satires at the intersection of law and morality, and early Sumerian mythology. Before coming to UChicago, she held faculty positions at the University of Jena, SOAS University of London, and the University of Tübingen.
Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek is assistant professor of Egyptian Archaeology in Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. Her scholarship explores ancient cultural encounters and their impact on sociocultural transformations. She is the author of Rise of the Hyksos: Egypt and the Levant from the Middle Kingdom to the Early Second Intermediate Period (Archaeopress, 2015) and The Enigma of the Hyksos, Volume II: Transforming Egypt into the New Kingdom. The Impact of the Hyksos and Egyptian-Near Eastern Relations (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021). Her PhD and BA—in ancient history—are from Macquarie University in Australia.
Mourad-Cizek is especially interested in the movement of concepts, objects, and people across geographic, social, and cultural borders, and the changes that arise as a result of these processes. Her research integrates archaeological, textual, and artistic evidence with current theoretical understandings of social identities, cultural encounters, and sociocultural transformations. Her archaeological fieldwork includes projects at Saqqara and Beni Hassan in Egypt, and she is currently a member of the ongoing Beni Hassan Project. Her other research interests include network dynamics, funerary art and architecture, digital epigraphic and archaeological technologies, and the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage.
Nikhita Obeegadoo joins Romance Languages and Literatures as a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor following a faculty appointment at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD from Harvard, as well as a BS in computer science and a BA in comparative literature from Stanford. Her research revolves around contemporary literatures of oceans, archipelagoes and migrations, with a special focus on the Indian Ocean. Obeegadoo’s work has previously been funded by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, as well as by a major Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant. She is at work on a book project titled “Submarine Complicities: Mapping Archipelagic Studies Through Multispecies Perspectives.”
Obeegadoo twice received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard’s Derek C. Bok Center for Teaching and Learning; among other awards from Harvard and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, she also received a public humanities grant from the University of British Columbia. Her public-facing work includes an interview for Catapult—“Race is a construct, yet the impact of it on human beings is very real”—and “Where Disease Meets Literature,” an opinion piece for L’Express in her native Mauritius. Her next project, tentatively titled “Mosquitoes and Morphine: Exploring Nature and Disease in Contemporary Francophone Novels,” examines literature that engages with the body, illness, and nature to explore the connections between human bodies and the broader natural world.
Austin O’Malley, AB’07, MA’09, PhD’17, returns to Middle Eastern Studies as an assistant professor after serving on the faculty at the University of Arizona. A scholar of Sufism and narrative poetry, O’Malley researches reading practices and the reception of Persian poetic texts, both by their historical readers and as imagined or anticipated by their authors. His first book, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ‘Attar and Persian Sufi Didacticism (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), explores a major figure in classical Persian literature, and his next will focus on forgeries and misattributions—the practice of falsely attributing works to revered authors.
O’Malley’s work on ʿAṭṭar—a penname that translates to “the pharmacist”—discusses how the Sufi poet imagined his audience literally consuming and being transformed by his writings as a form of medicine. This interest in the later reception of classical texts is reflected in his next project, tentatively titled “Poetic Interlopers: Forgery and Misattribution in the Persian Literary Tradition,” which notes that so-called “inauthentic” works nevertheless had a wide readership and significant cultural impact. At the University of Arizona, O’Malley was instrumental to the development of the Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian and Iranian Studies, and while in graduate school he also taught Persian (Farsi) language classes at Northwestern.
Senem Pirler is an assistant professor of Composition in Music who was previously on the faculty of Bennington College. Born in Turkey, she completed her undergraduate studies in classical piano at Hacettepe State Conservatory and studied sound engineering and design at Istanbul Technical University. She went on to receive a master’s in music technology from NYU Steinhardt and PhD in electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with the dissertation “Disruption, Dis/orientation, and Intra-action: Recipes for Creating a Queer Utopia in Audiovisual Space.” Her work—often collaborative, with audiovisual components—has been performed at venues including Carnegie Hall and Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Pirler’s artistic process is informed by the idea of “deep listening”—a sound practice, developed by composer Pauline Oliveros, that is intended to expand one’s consciousness and attentiveness to sounds around us—as well as queer feminist methodologies. Her work is interdisciplinary, encompassing sound, video, movement, installation, and performance, and utilizes improvisation as a research method. Other venues where she has performed and exhibited are the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Roulette Intermedium, the Kitchen, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Collar Works, all in New York; Southbank Centre in London, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Montalvo Arts Center in California, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF). She has been recognized by institutions such as the New York State Council for the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Institute for Electronic Arts, PACT Zollverein, Signal Culture, the Hermitage, and Elektronmusikstudion EMS. Her projects, performances and sound engineering projects can be experienced on her website.
Darya Tsymbalyuk, assistant professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, is an interdisciplinary researcher who is also engaged in creative practice. Her work explores the cultures of Ukraine and Eastern Europe through the lens of the environmental humanities. Her PhD is from the University of St Andrews, and she holds a dual BA from Kenyon College in modern languages and literatures and studio art. Before joining UChicago, she was a fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford; IWM (Institute for Human Sciences), Vienna; School of Advanced Study, University of London; and New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. Her work has appeared in Narrative Culture; Journal of International Relations and Development; Nature Human Behaviour; and Region: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, among others. Her first monograph, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, is forthcoming from Polity in 2025.
Tsymbalyuk received the Principal’s Medal from her PhD alma mater, the University of St Andrews, and she was recently awarded the Mary Zirin Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. In addition to her scholarship, Tsymbalyuk draws, paints, and makes film essays; see, for example, “Botanical Documentation of Existence” (2023) and an interview in which she talks about it. For her comments on Ukraine, in particular in relation to environmental destruction, see her article for BBC Future Planet. You can find more of her work on her website.