Graduate Student Workshops in the Humanities and Social Sciences

This workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty whose work concerns the material and sociocultural lives of people of the African continent and its discursively constituted diasporas, present and historical. Student participants tend mostly to come from the anthropology department, but the workshop also has active members in the fields of history, [...]

This workshop discusses projects by graduate students, faculty, and guests relating to the broadly defined fields of American literary and cultural studies.

This workshop explores the role of religion in American history, culture, and society from the colonial period to the present day.

This workshop will discuss a wide range of issues concerned with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.

The theme for the Ancient Societies Workshop in 2011-12 will be “Law, Society and the Economy.”

This workshop explores current research in the anthropology of Europe and treats ongoing ethnographic fieldwork—local, regional, national, and transnational—in all areas of Europe.

This workshop provides a common intellectual forum for students and scholars of diverse fields investigating the interaction of aesthetics with political economics as reflected in textual, visual, and performance media in East Asia.

We explore social sciences and humanities research on the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean.

The social organization of urban environments has always held a prominent place in the social sciences and at the University of Chicago in particular.

In particular, we seek to explore the intersection between ethnographic practice and other methodological commitments that form clinical and institutional practices.

This workshop will explore fundamental topics in cognitive psychology such as attention, memory, learning, problem solving, and language, and how cutting-edge research in these areas can be used to enhance performance in a variety of contexts.

Jointly sponsored by the Institute for Mind and Biology and the Department of Comparative Human Development, this workshop brings together individuals broadly interested in how biology and environment influence social behaviors and the environment in turn influences genetic change.

The workshop builds upon the reemergence of cultural psychology as the comparative study of the way culture and psyche are constitutive of one another.

The common thread running through the research presented at our workshop is the search for broad theoretical propositions and fresh empirical insights through the comparative study of politics.

The Contemporary Art Workshop provides a context for the consideration of history as an indispensable component of work on contemporary art.

The Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop is an interdisciplinary forum that seeks to promote sustained advanced research in the field of European philosophy at the University of Chicago and to foster a local community of scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.

Please visit the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop’s blog for more information.

The purpose of the Early Christian Studies Workshop is to provide a venue for students and scholars of the New Testament, Greco-Roman religions and literatures, and the early history of Christianity to present their creative work on primary texts and other evidence for the early Christian movement and the world in which it grew.

This interdisciplinary workshop focuses on every aspect of the early modern experience, circa 1350-1800.

This workshop focuses on current social science research on East Asian societies, particularly the People’s Republic of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

This workshop invites students, faculty, and scholars from other academic communities to present creative and original work that speaks across the national lines of East Asia as well as the disciplinary lines of the academic community.

The Workshop on Education is an interdisciplinary workshop supporting the advancement of education related research and theory among members of the university community in two types of sessions: 1) “Methodology” and 2) “New Findings in Education.”

During the years 1660-1900 cultural production achieved unprecedented heterogeneity throughout Britain, its colonial possessions, and Western Europe. The goal of this interdisciplinary workshop will be to interrogate the tensions between this diversified production and the unifying narrative of modernity often imposed on this two-hundred-and-forty-year span.

The workshop contributes to a growing interdisciplinary discourse on music and its cultural context, establishing an interchange between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Explores explosion in the use of mathematical and symbolic techniques to address philosophical problems in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for the development of critical perspectives on gender and sexuality.

Examines German Idealism and its precursors, Nineteenth-century Germany philosophy, Twentieth century (especially the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions), the elucidation and development within the Anglophone tradition of central concepts, methods, and concerns from the German tradition, and more.

The History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science Workshop is a forum devoted to interdisciplinary approaches to the sciences.

This workshop responds to a growing need to examine and discuss human rights and to present research and discussion on relevant contemporary human rights issues.

The purpose of the Immigration Workshop is to stimulate and promote the development and discussion of theoretical and empirical research related to international migration and immigrants’ experiences.

This workshop provides a forum for faculty and students from different departments in the social sciences and the humanities who share a common interest in France from the mid-seventeenth century to the present.

The primary objective of the workshop is to forge a lively and respectful dialogue on aspects of method and theory that cut across the field’s diverse disciplinary locations.

This workshop provides a forum for Chicago faculty and students conducting research in Paris to share and discuss their work with their colleagues.

PIPES is a center for research and training in international studies at the University. Weekly workshops provide a forum for graduate students and faculty to present their research.

The workshop provides a forum for faculty and students to present original unpublished research papers, commonly a draft of a journal article or dissertation or book chapter. Topics include all aspects of the causes of war and peace, American national security policy, and international security affairs.

This workshop looks to engage students and faculty interested in Jewish studies while stretching them to think beyond the strictures that currently typify their sub-disciplines.

The Language, Cognition, and Computation Workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty whose work addresses human language from a variety of perspectives: cognitive, computational, experimental, theoretical, and their intersection.

The Language, Variation, and Change Workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty to discuss the motivations and consequences of language change. This is conducted from diverse perspectives including linguistic, historical, social, cognitive, and computational.

We study all aspects of the peoples, cultures, histories, and religions of the late antique and Byzantine world, including the Near Eastern and Slavic regions and endeavor to create a forum for communications about recent archaeological discoveries in the region.

The workshop is a forum for discussion of novel approaches to Latin American history.

The goal of this workshop is to facilitate the study of law as a cultural and social institution in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Topics of interest to the workshop include (but are not limited to) the philosophy of literature and vice-versa, the overlap of philosophy and literature in the intellectual imaginary, intellectual and/or literary exchange between philosophers and literary figures.

The Mass Culture Workshop is a forum for recent and ongoing academic research on the historical, theoretical, and practical dimensions of modern mass (commercial, consumer, or popular) media, including cinema, television, journalism, popular music, photography, advertising, fashion, public amusements, and computer technology.

This workshop focuses on the material and discursive practices characteristic of various worlds of medicine, with an emphasis on understanding entailed and contingent forms of embodiment.representation, on the other.

The workshop focuses on the literature, history, and culture of the Middle Ages, defined roughly as 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. The Middle Ages is a vast period that witnessed profound social, political, religious, cultural , linguistic, and artistic transformations.

This workshop serves as a multidisciplinary platform where University students in the humanities and social sciences can discuss a wide array of academic questions related to the history, culture, societies and politics of the Middle East.

Explores the interplay of large scale post-colonial migration, and transnational diaspora in constructing new forms of community.

The Money, Markets, and Consumption Workshop emphasizes the role of ethnographic fieldwork and historical findings to critically analyze economic assumptions.

This workshop provides a forum for graduate students, faculty, and other scholars to explore contemporary approaches to music history, music theory, and the ways in which these two disciplines intersect. Allowing for a variety of disciplinary perspectives and multiple modes of presentation, the workshop aims to foster scholarly dialogues on involving music history and theory across a broad community of scholars.

The New Media Workshop provides a forum for faculty and graduate students to discuss the innovation and obsolescence of media, where these overlapping, asynchronous events are understood through social practices and lived experience.

The Perception and Understanding of Music Workshop aims to bring together graduate students and faculty members from both the psychology and music departments to discuss current research and theoretical frameworks in this interdisciplinary field.

The Poetry and Poetics Workshop provides a forum for all those members of the University devoted to the practice and study of poetry, be they graduate students, faculty, or poets.

The Political Psychology Workshop focuses on how psychology informs the study of political behavior and how the political world provides useful ways of studying psychological phenomena.

This workshop is a forum for the critical discussion of new research in all varieties of political theory, political philosophy, and moral, social, and legal theory and philosophy, historical and contemporary.

This workshop is a forum for those interested in ethics, conceived broadly to include normative moral philosophy, meta-ethics, action theory, moral psychology, political philosophy, and the theory of practical reason.

Addresses the ideas, meanings, and practices of the sacred within racially marginalized communities.

Explores the intersections of religion with the modern day ethical domains, and historically engages with influential thinkers.

The emphasis of the workshop is on a cross-disciplinary study of English and Continental culture during the Renaissance, in areas such as literature, politics, theology, and natural science.

This workshop addresses the different processes of racialization experienced within groups as well as across groups in sites as diverse as North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Asian Pacific, and Europe.

The Rhetoric and Poetics Workshop is concerned with the literature of classical Greece and Rome, considered whether on its own terms or in relation to the literature and poetry of other cultures.

Interdisciplinary study of Russia and of successor states of the former Soviet Union, with emphasis on the nexus between history, anthropology, and the study of literature and visual media.

Investigates the subject of meaning in natural language from philosophical and linguistic perspectives, focusing on the theme, “Alternatives.”

This workshop seeks to advance research based on a semiotic framework. Presentations will come from a variety of fields including, but not limited to linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, literary theory, history, and anthropology.

This workshop provides a forum to discuss and develop work that takes seriously social history methodology the history of everyday life and people who have been excluded from dominant historical narratives.

This workshop explores in a sustained fashion the social theoretical implications of participants’ work in the social sciences and humanities.

This workshop focuses on the clarity and cogency of social theories and the logic and effectiveness of evidence in social research.

Systematically reflects on the longstanding divide between theories and praxes of performance.

This workshop aims to sustain an ongoing conversation about meaning and religious discourse and practice.

This workshop is an important part of the fabric of intellectual activity in South Asian studies at the University of Chicago.

The Transnational Approaches to Europe Workshop offers a forum to discuss and critique works in progress concerning the history, culture, and societies of Modern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, East Central Europe, Germany, and France.

This workshop explores ethnographic research in Canada and the United States within social scientific fields engaging core cross-disciplinary anthropological problems.

This workshop is focused on the study of material or visual objects from East Asia. It explores the possible uses of recent theories of art, history, and material and visual culture in the study of East Asia.

This workshop is dedicated to the study of all aspects of Western Mediterranean culture from 1200 to 1700.

This workshop aims to foster a variety of forms of interdisciplinary research that take their point of departure from a shared interest in Wittgenstein’s intellectual achievement.