The Division of the Arts & Humanities welcomes 10 new faculty members, representing a wide range of disciplines and ranks.
James Burgin, AB’06, AM’10, PhD’16, returns to UChicago as an assistant professor in Middle Eastern Studies (MES) and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. Previously a research group leader at the University of Würzburg and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, Germany, he studied Hittitology in MES for his graduate studies and Sanskrit in the College. A firm advocate for combining philology and archaeology whenever possible, he analyzed the economic, religious, and administrative history of the Hittite kingdom through its textual and material culture in his first books. He is the author of Functional Differentiation in Hittite Festival Texts (Harrassowitz, 2019) and the two-volume Studies in Hittite Economic Administration (Harrassowitz, 2022).
His current work turns to historical memory and historiographical techniques in the ancient Near East as an outgrowth of the research group The Hittite Annals: Origins, Purpose, and Afterlife, which he led at Würzburg. In this group, he and his collaborators incorporated structuralist, poststructuralist, and narratological perspectives to compare historiographical texts from different cuneiform cultures. He is eager to incorporate resources from the digital humanities, including AI modeling, as a future path of research to continue his investigations into the Hittite language, as well as other ancient languages such as Hieroglyphic Luwian.
Yoonbin Cho, assistant professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, completed her PhD and MA in comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania and her undergraduate studies in comparative literature and culture at Yonsei University in Seoul. Her scholarship explores the interplay between aesthetics, society, and technology. In her dissertation, “Transnational Affects Reprised: Korean Cinema’s Negotiations with Systems of World Cinema,” she studies recent Korean film adaptations and remakes to examine the affects that emerge from the contact between disparate media forms. Her work brings affect theory into conversation with the film industry and uses Korean filmmaking to reconsider global cinema.
As she expands her dissertation into her first book, Cho will consider the relationship between nations, regions, and transboundary affinity networks to reveal how those dynamics influence film production and reception. Drawing on her ongoing study of the byeonsa—narrators whose sonic performances were integral to the interpretation of silent films in colonial Korea—her next project will examine the connections between audiovisual media and the human body through the use of AI in contemporary Korean media.
Alexander Cowan, assistant professor in Music, comes to UChicago from the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at Jesus College. All his degrees are in music, including a PhD from Harvard, a master’s from King’s College London, and a BA from the University of Oxford. In his dissertation and current book project, “Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics,” he examines the relationship between eugenics and musicology through their shared investment in the idea of talent, often thought to be innate and heritable. His work considers music’s capacity to be imbued with political meaning.
Highly interdisciplinary, Cowan’s research engages with history, political theory, and cultural studies in addition to musicology to consider the interconnections between race, class, and music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has contributed essays to two edited collections—The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past, Imagining the Future (MIT Press, 2023) and Sonic Circulations: Music and Disciplinary Knowledge, 1900–1960 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). His public-facing writing includes “Listen to Yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century,” published on the sound studies blog Sounding Out! in 2020, and he recently appeared on the Sound Expertise podcast. In future projects, he plans to study the reception, circulation, and political meaning of the blues from the postwar period through the present, as well as the musical theater collaborations of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden.
Sean Kelsey, professor in Philosophy, previously taught at the University of Notre Dame. He also held faculty appointments at UCLA and Iowa State University and semester-long visiting appointments at the University of Michigan as well as UChicago. A specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato and Aristotle, he studies their conceptions of nature, soul, truth, goodness, science, and philosophy. His latest book, Mind and World in Aristotle’s De Anima (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. His PhD is from Princeton and his BA is from Thomas Aquinas College in California.
Kelsey has also written on the theologian John Henry Newman, addressing his perspective on certitude. He was involved in a volume of essays on Plato’s Philebus (Oxford University Press, 2019), contributing the chapter “Revelations of Reason: An Orientation to Reading Plato’s Philebus,” which he wrote in collaboration with his departmental colleague Gabriel Richardson Lear, the Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization. Kelsey also coedited Aristotle: On Generation and Corruption Book II; Introduction, Translation, and Interpretative Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Other recent publications include essays in Aristotle’s On the Soul: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Science of Life in Aristotle and the Early Peripatos (Brill, 2025), and the journals Philosophia (2018) and Phronesis (2018).
Amanda Lanzillo joins South Asian Languages and Civilizations as an assistant professor following a faculty appointment at Brunel University of London. Her PhD is from Indiana University, and she holds a BS in international history from Georgetown University. Her first book, Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2024), draws on Urdu and Persian technical manuals to illuminate the construction of religious and class identity in early twentieth-century India. Two new book projects explore mobility between Afghanistan and India. The first, “Out of Empire: The India-Afghanistan Hijrat of 1920,” tells the story of Indian Muslims who sought to reject life under colonial rule by migrating to Afghanistan. The second, “Peripheral Subjects: Pashtun Migration, Islam, and Subjecthood Across the British Empire,” examines how communities of Pashtun migrants in India engaged Islam as a way of navigating British imperial control.
Her work on the “Peripheral Subjects” project was supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as well as the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, and the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. She has also received research awards from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Library of Congress, and the American Historical Association. In addition to her scholarly work, she has published on Indian labor history and Islam in a number of public-facing venues in India: The Wire, Scroll, and Himal Southasian.
Ling Ma, AB’05, rejoins English Language and Literature as an associate professor of Creative Writing, where she previously taught as a lecturer and assistant professor of practice, and concentrated in English as an undergrad. Her MFA is from Cornell, where she also served as a lecturer. Her work has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Her debut novel, Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), received the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, among others. Her story collection, Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Story Prize. For her achievements as an author, Ma was honored with a Whiting Award, the Windham Campbell Literature Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Both Severance and Bliss Montage were listed as Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her short stories have been anthologized in two O. Henry Prize anthologies and in The Best American Short Stories 2023 (Mariner Books). She is currently working on another book.
Sarah Edmands Martin joins the Media Arts and Design program within Cinema and Media Studies as an associate professor with expertise in both media production and media studies. She was previously on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame and, before that, Indiana University. She holds an MFA from Notre Dame in visual communication design and two BAs, in English and studio art, from the University of Maryland. She also received a Fulbright Scholar award for a fellowship at the Center for Digital Narrative, hosted by the University of Bergen in Norway. Her solo or group exhibitions have included interactive games, poster design, and book design and have shown nationally in the US and internationally in South Korea, Poland, the UK, Mexico, and Norway.
She has published widely on design, technology, and popular culture, including articles and book chapters such as “DialecTikTok: The Dynamic Semiotics of Amateur Visual Trends on TikTok” in Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices (Transcript Academic Press, 2024) and “Ongoing Matters: Government Document Design in the Public’s Interest” in Design as Common Good: Framing Design Through Pluralism and Social Values (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, 2021). Her first coauthored book, Beautiful Bureaucracy: A Design Brief for Civic Life, will be published by MIT Press in 2026.
Soyoon Ryu, assistant professor in Art History, recently completed her PhD at the University of Michigan; she also holds an MA in contemporary art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a joint BA in history of art and in government from Cornell. In her dissertation, “We Live Here, Now: Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul and a Communal History of East and Southeast Asian Art, 1967–1995,” she discusses three artist groups that retreated to nonmetropolitan regions and their art’s engagement with the social, natural, and built environments surrounding them. As a practicing artist, Ryu also uses her creative work to explore ideas of regionality, collectivity, and environmental artmaking.
Ryu’s work has been supported by several prestigious awards, including a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a yearlong Chester Dale Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; for her artistic practice, she received an Artist Research Support Grant from Arts Council Korea. From 2019 to 2025 she was a member of the artist collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club, which explores the idea of “social fermentation.” The group’s work has been featured throughout Asia as well as in Europe and Australia, and they were selected as finalists by the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) in Hong Kong for the ANTEPRIMA x CHAT Contemporary Textile Art Prize. Her writing includes “‘The Only Art Form That Works’: Reflection on Collectivity from South Korea,” forthcoming in Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking from ICI Berlin Press, and—for a public audience—an analysis of Yee I-Lann’s Picturing Power #6… for the Center for Public Art History.
Hans Thomalla, Helen A. Regenstein Professor of Composition in Music, is a composer with a background in dramaturgy whose work has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and, most recently, a fellowship from the Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo. He joins UChicago from Northwestern, where he cofounded the Institute for New Music. He holds a DMA from Stanford and an undergraduate diploma in composition (with instrumental minor in piano) from the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt. He has written four operas—Fremd, Kaspar Hauser, Dark Spring, and Dark Fall—and was formerly the assistant dramaturg and musical adviser for the Stuttgart Opera. He also cofounded the Chicago-based record label Sideband Records.
Thomalla has composed music for solo and ensemble performers, including Spektral Quartet, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Münchner Philharmoniker, SWR- and SR-Symphonieorchester, the Crossing, the Talea Ensemble, ICE, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Recherche, Arditti Quartet, Nicolas Hodges, Irvine Arditti, and Sarah Sun; several of these have been featured in concerts put on by UChicago Presents. Thomalla is the recipient of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Christoph Delz Prize, a Koussevitzky Commission, and a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His compositions have been featured at music festivals and institutions throughout Europe and the United States, including Germany’s Darmstadt Summer Course.
Anna Martine Whitehead joins Visual Arts as an assistant professor from the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a former member of the Education Collective of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) and continues to collaborate with PNAP. Their MFA, in social practice, is from California College of the Arts, and they hold a BA in fine art and a certificate in black women’s studies from the University of Maryland. Drawing on experimental interdisciplinary performance and collaborative improvisation, her practice is centered on themes of queer and gendered embodiment, black temporality, carceral surveillance, and speculative narratives. Their most recent project, FORCE! an opera in three acts, is the recipient of numerous national awards, including a NEFA National Theater Project award and several National Performance Network awards.
FORCE!, a surrealist opera meditation on black women and femmes waiting to enter a prison, reflects Whitehead’s interests in marginalized embodiment within structures of hegemonic power and bureaucratic control. The opera toured nationally throughout 2024. The musical film Cadenza, codirected by Whitehead, “extends and documents” FORCE! Their other awards include a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists, two MAP Fund grants, and a grant and fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; they were also selected for a United States Artists Fellowship, a Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists, and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency. Her solo and collaborative work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT in Los Angeles, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York.