Why We Dig Up the Past
Many of the mysteries of the past cannot be decoded by theorizing or lab work alone; they must be unearthed. At a panel organized for the University of Chicago's reunion weekend, leading scholars discuss what motivates them to dig for answers in desert...
Why It Helps to Read Great Books: Texts, Society and Time
The great works of Western literature, from the Bible through St. Augustine's City of God and forward in time to Karl Marx's Capital, furnish ample room for readers to reflect and analyze. Constantin Fasolt, professor of medieval and early modern hist...
Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I
England's Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603), publicly grappled with issues of gender and authority throughout her reign. In her early speeches to Parliament, she confronted a tangle of personal and political questions: Could a queen wield auth...
Turning the Century with Thomas Hardy
December 31, 1900, marked the eve of the twentieth century and also the date Thomas Hardy assigned to his poetic work 'The Darkling Thrush.' James Chandler, professor of English and the humanities, reads this poem in the context of its nineteenth-cent...
Toward Global Justice
One's life expectancy and access to freedoms (such as freedom of speech) can depend on the distance of a mile--if that mile includes a border dividing one nation from another. Martha Nussbaum, the Ernest Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law a...
Therapeutic Cloning: Hope or Hype?
The President's Council on Bioethics was established in 2001 to advise President George W. Bush on ethical issues in biomedical science and technology, such as human cloning and stem cell research. Dr. Janet D. Rowley, one of the 17 experts named to t...
The Theatrical Baroque: European Plays, Painting and Poetry, 1575-1725
The Baroque period was the Age of Theater, a time when Shakespeare, Jonson, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Racine and Dryden were at the height of their powers. Playwrights were joined by painters and poets in seeking new responses to a world that w...
Shakespeare Faces Retirement
In the film Shakespeare in Love, the romantic adventures of the young Will Shakespeare provide the fledgling playwright with the inspiration for his plays. But how much can we really decipher about the Bard's personal life from his writings? Universit...
The Scientific Article: From Galileo's New Science to the Human Genome
From its modest beginnings in seventeenth century Paris and London to its central role in today's online world, the scientific article has been essential to the development of modern science. This article traces the rise of scientific journals, the de...