ASCI graduate collaboration examines the complex history of Chicago’s water cribs

2022–23 Grad Fellows’ research plans for the summer

A member of the 2020-21 cohort of the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative Graduate Fellows, Maria Kaoutzani is a fourth-year PhD candidate in music composition.

Jenny and I bonded over our fascination with plant-life. I wanted to witness a photographer’s process, and I think she wanted to have the experience of interviewing and centering the experiences of others who she didn’t know beforehand.

Marissa Fenley is a PhD candidate in English and TAPS (Theater and Performance Studies), as well as an ASCI Graduate Fellow. Lee Jasperse, ASCI’s Graduate Management Fellow, interviews Marissa on what puppets teach us about intimacy, how play and silliness enter into her scholarly process, and how a lifelong engagement with puppets inspired her dissertation project.

Ted Moore’s music is eerie. It drones, it rumbles, slowly picking up steam before plunging you into the ravages of random sound, the noise of a demonic algorithm: inhuman but not inanimate.

This past summer I used my Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative Fellowship funding to travel to the West-Midlands of England where I played Just a Little Lovin’ (JALL). JALL is a Nordic-style live-action roleplay (larp) game designed by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo in which participants reinhabited the 1980s AIDS crisis in New York City.

Tien-Tien Jong is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies; she is concomitantly fulfilling a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Arianna Gass is an Arts, Science, + Culture Initiative (ASCI) Graduate Fellow and a second-year student in the joint English and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) PhD program. She joins the University of Chicago from Vassar College, where she earned her BA in English and Drama (2013).

Nestled up in the piñon and juniper of the foothills of Northern New Mexico, the Santa Fe Institute seems like it could be imaginary, or perhaps the sort of place that materializes out of the desert once every hundred years or so.

After a year of diving into one another’s disciplines over monthly dinners of pad thai and probing questions, the 2017–2018 Arts, Science + Culture Initiative graduate fellows will soon be heading off to a diverse set of conferences, archives, and other adventures.

Right now, there’s a team at the University of Chicago at work on an experiment like no other in its history: a human particle detector. To clarify, it’s a particle detector, made of humans, that detects human particles.

Erick was an Arts, Science + Culture Initiative Graduate Fellow in 2016–17 and is a PhD Candidate in Integrative Biology in the Kronforst Lab at UChicago. Part of his ASCI fellowship grant will fund a trip to South America to work with his butterflies in their natural habitat. What he sees by the dozens in greenhouse tents today, he’ll see by the thousands in open, green spaces in the coming months.

Jittery and sepia-tinted, the 90-year-old film tells the story of Maya the Bee’s adventures in the world beyond her hive. She encounters caterpillars, wasps, grasshoppers, and a feisty beetle who rescues her from a spider’s web. But of course, the beetle doesn’t really rescue her. Once the spider has killed Maya, her umpteenth replacement steps in to star in the escape. To contemporary audiences, Junghans’s movie looks a lot like bugs doing bug stuff while someone films, with some intertitles suggesting a rough narrative. But it’s so much more.

“I think it probably started with Corinna,” says Allison Turner. Turner is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Chicago. She’s also one of the Arts Science Culture Initiative’s fellows for 2016–2017.