Dear Emeriti Colleagues,

As the second half of Autumn Quarter unfolds, campus remains busy with opportunities to engage with UChicago Arts and more! The Seminary Co-op also is bustling with author events throughout the remainder of the calendar year (both in-person and virtual); they also recently released their latest gift guide full of ideas for fall reading.   

You can always find more information about events at the Emeriti Center on the emeriti website, too. 

During Thanksgiving Week, we will be open Monday (11/21) and Tuesday (11/22) 9am-5pm as usual. The Center will be closed Wednesday (11/23) through Friday (11/25). We will resume our normal 9am-5pm, Monday-Friday schedule on Monday (11/28) for the remainder of the Autumn Quarter.

You will need your UChicago ID card to access the building and the Center, which is located in the Klowden Family Library (Room 106) to your left as you enter. For more information about the Emeriti Center and events, please visit the emeriti faculty website.

Desktop Support Specialist Gordon Dickson will be on hand at the Emeriti Center to answer questions and provide technology support on Thursday, December 1, from 1-2pm; or attend virtually through zoom. 

Academic Technology staff will be at the Center on alternating Tuesdays from 2:00-3:30pm to answer any questions you may have about the different technological tools you use in your pedagogy. Office hours are a chance for emeriti faculty to ask questions about Canvas, Zoom, Panopto, or other tools for teaching with technology. Attend in person or virtually through zoom on Tuesday 11/22 and 12/6.

The 2023 Retiree Medical Plan Guide, open enrollment letters, forms, and information on the plans are available online at the Benefits Office Retiree Medical Plan site. Any new elections and all changes will become effective January 1, 2023 and continue through December 31, 2023. Enrollment forms for any changes are due November 30, 2022 for emeriti and other retirees.  

If you have not received your materials or have any questions, please contact the Benefits Specialists at 855.822.8901 or retiree@uchicago.edu. 

Torsten Reimer, University Librarian and Dean of the University Library, recently detailed the Library's plans for the future, focused around five key priorities: organizational development, space and collection development, academic engagement, research services, and community engagement. 

The Library also announced the publication of a new bibliography that emerged from a research collaboration with librarians at UChicago, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Tokyo: The Bibliography of East Asian Periodicals (Colonial Korea 1900-1945). Additional information about the bibliography, the priorities and planning efforts, and much more is available on the Library’s website.

Ramón Gutiérrez, Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History Emeritus, has authored New Mexico’s Moses. Reies López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (University of New Mexico Press, 2022). From the Press:

“In New Mexico’s Moses, Ramón A. Gutiérrez dives deeply into Reies López Tijerina’s religious formation during the 1940s and 1950s, illustrating how his Pentecostal foundation remained an integral part of his psyche even as he migrated toward social-movement politics. An Assemblies of God evangelist turned Pentecostal itinerant preacher, Tijerina used his secularized apocalyptic theology to inspire the dispossessed heirs of Spanish and Mexican land grants fighting to recuperate ancestral lands throughout northern New Mexico and the Southwest. Using Tijerina’s collected sermons, Gutiérrez demonstrates the ways in which biblical prophecy influenced Tijerina throughout his life from his early days as a preacher to his leadership of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes.

"Tijerina sought justice for those who had lost their lands and was determined to eradicate the most egregious forms of racism and to valorize the language and culture of mexicanos. Translated into English for the first time here, Tijerina’s sermons serve as a blueprint for the religious origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.”

A new book by Elizabeth Helsinger, John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of English, Art History, and Visual Arts, has come out with Cambridge University Press: Conversing in Verse: Conversation in Nineteenth Century English Poetry. From the Press:

“Conversing in Verse considers poems of conversation from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries – the very period when a more restrictive conception of poetry as the lyric product of the poet's solitary self-communing became entrenched. With fresh insight, Elizabeth Helsinger addresses a range of questions at the core of conversational poetry: When and why do poets turn to conversation to explore poetry's potential? How do conversation's forms and intentions shape the figures, rhythms, and prosody of poems to alter the reader's experience? What are the ethical and political stakes of conversing in verse?

Coleridge, Clare, Landor, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, Michael Field, and Hardy each composed poems that open difficult or impossible conversations with phenomena outside themselves. Helsinger unearths an unfamiliar lyric history that produced some of the most interesting formal experiments of the nineteenth century, including its best known, the dramatic monologue.” 

Richard Strier, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, has written Shakespearean Issues, published this fall by UPenn Press. From the Press:

“In Shakespearean Issues, Richard Strier has written a set of linked essays bound by a learned view of how to think about Shakespeare’s plays and also how to write literary criticism on them. The essays vary in their foci—from dealing with passages and key lines to dealing with whole plays, and to dealing with multiple plays in thematic conversation with each other. Strier treats the political, social, and philosophical themes of Shakespeare’s plays through recursive and revisionary close reading, revisiting plays from different angles and often contravening prevailing views.”

Smart Museum
The Smart Museum’s Monochrome Multitudes, featuring 120 works drawn primarily from its own collections, as well as loans from alumni, and Chicago area collections, runs through January 8, 2023. Monochrome Multitudes “traces ‘the monochrome’ as a fundamental if surprisingly expansive artistic practice. Revisiting classic modernist ideas about flatness, idealized form, and colors, Monochrome Multitudes opens up this seemingly reductive art to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities while working toward a more expansive narrative of 20th and 21st century art.” Full details and description available on the Smart Museum’s website.  

Rockefeller Chapel
This week kicks off a busy season of events! Rockefeller Chapel will host an Interfaith Thanksgiving Celebration on November 24th at 11am, with an the address delivered by the Rev. Shaundra Cunningham and featuring Uniting Voices Chicago (formerly the Chicago Children's Choir). On Sunday, December 4, the annual performance of Handel's Messiah will take place at the Chapel, featuring the Rockefeller Chapel Choir, the University of Chicago Motet Choir, and the Rockefeller Chapel Orchestra. For more information and tickets, please visit the UChicago Arts Box Office online.

The Council on Advanced Studies
A mainstay of academic life at the University since 1982, the Council on Advanced Studies now supports over 50 workshops that bring faculty and students together for regular lectures, talks, and events across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Divinity School. A complete list of the 2022-23 workshops is available on the Council’s site; each workshop maintains their own site with information on upcoming and recent talks and meeting times.  

If you have news or information about publications, accolades, or upcoming lectures and events, we would love to hear about them. Please contact us at emeritifaculty@uchicago.edu.