The Chicago Blog

Mark Feeney, arts writer for the Boston Globe and author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief, has won the Pulitzer prize in criticism for ten of his recent essays on visual culture. In an article posted to the Globe's website Monday afternoon Don Aucoin writes:

Feeney won the Pulitzer for 10 critical essays that suggest the fluency and brio of his writing style, and the range of interests on which he brings that style to bear.

He wrote of the "unheroic loneliness of everyday people'" reflected in the paintings of Edward Hopper, the "pure visual kapow" of aerial photos by Bradford Washburn and Frank Gohlke, the collision between art and celebrity in the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz, the artistic trajectory traveled by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and the sense of community in the work of photographer Charles (Teenie) Harris.

The essay on Hopper bears one of Feeney's trademarks, namely, the ability to see connections among disparate works, from high art to low. Feeney alludes to John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexis de Tocqueville, but then goes on to describe an artistic kinship between Hopper (or at least the world he created) and such figures as lyricist Lorenz Hart, Willy Loman from "Death of a Salesman,'" Elisha Cook Jr. in "The Maltese Falcon,'" Thelma Ritter in "Pickup on South Street,'" and even the Beach Boys.

The Globe has posted links to Feeney's Pulitzer nominated stories on their website.

Also be sure to check out Nixon at the Movies and experience for yourself Feeney's unparalleled ability to draw together seemingly incongruous subject matter into a fascinating critique of American arts and culture.

See a special web feature for the book.

Archived in Awards | Politics and Current Events
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Stuart Dybek, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University is one of twenty four academics to be awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. Dybek, born and raised in the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, is the author of several books of poetry and three short story collections. We re-printed his first collection of stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a short piece this morning giving more details about the award:

MacArthur fellows were called out of the blue and told they each will receive a $500,000 no-strings-attached grant over five years.

Dybek, 65, said the grant "couldn't have come at a better time." By freeing him from having to take side jobs, the money will give Dybek time to finish three books.… A book of poems set in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories set in Chicago and other places, and a memoir.

We can't wait to see more work from one of Chicago's best homegrown authors!

Find out more about Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods on the press website.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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The American Academy of the Arts and Sciences has announced the selection of their 2007 fellows. We were pleased to note that eleven University of Chicago Press authors and editors were honored with this impressive distinction. A press release on the Academy's website quotes the organization's president Emilio Bizzi saying: "Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large." This year's recipients include:

Michael Christ, lead editor of Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations: Essays in Honor of Alberto P. Calderon

David M. Cutler, editor of The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions and coeditor of Medical Care Output and Productivity.

John A. Goldsmith, coauthor of The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure and editor of The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections on Constraints and Derivations.

Robert Pogue Harrison, author of The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Mary Power, coeditor of Food Webs at the Landscape Level.

N. Gregory Mankiw, editor of Monetary Policy.

Anna J. Schwartz, author of Money in Historical Perspective.

John L. Sullivan, coauthor of Political Tolerance and American Democracy.

Bruce Winstein, coeditor of Kaon Physics.

Wu Hung, author of Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, and The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting.

Robert Jeffrey Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago and author of Essential Results of Functional Analysis.

Archived in Awards
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Two University of Chicago Press authors were honored last Tuesday at the Society of Midland Author's annual awards ceremony. Roger Ebert's Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert received the top prize for adult non-fiction books, while Timothy J. Gilfoyle's Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark also weighed in as a finalist in the same category.

The awards contest is described on the Society's website as a "competition … open to authors and poets who reside in, were born in, or have strong ties to the twelve-state Midwestern Heartland." Ebert is an Illinois native while Gilfoyle is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. The winners will receive cash prizes, plaques, and of course, recognition from one of the Midwest's most distinguished literary societies.

Back in November we reprinted Ebert's interview with Robert Altman on this blog. Our website also features “A Millennium Park Trivia Quiz” based on Gilfoyle's book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Film and Media
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At its award ceremony on Monday, April 30, the University of Chicago Press awarded the 2006 Gordon J. Laing Prize to W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, for his book What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.

Awarded annually since 1963 by the Press, the Laing Prize is given to the Chicago faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the Press's list.

In What Do Pictures Want? Mitchell explores the idea that images are not just inert objects that convey meaning but animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. The book highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting.

Mitchell becomes only the third faculty member to win the Laing Prize twice; he also won the 1996 prize for Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.

What Do Pictures Want? was also the co-winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Literature | UCP News
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According to a recent press release from the U.S. Postal Service, David Henkin, author of The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America will receive the first ever Rita Lloyd Moroney Award for scholarship on the history of the United States postal system. The press release states the award is "designed to encourage scholarship on the history of the United States postal system and to raise awareness about the significance of the postal system in American life." And certainly Henkin's nuanced history of the burgeoning nineteenth-century postal network does just that. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how the postal network transformed nineteenth-century American society, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.

We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Awards | History
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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has released its list of 2007 Fellows and we are pleased to find that ten University of Chicago Press authors have received fellowships. According to the Guggenheim website, "the Guggenheim Fellowship program helps to provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible." Recipients include:

Shadi Bartsch, author of The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire, and co-editor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature

Michael Gorra, author of After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Last Fine Time

Margaretta M. Lovell, author of A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860-1915

Michael McCann, author of Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization

Mary Louise Roberts, author of Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, and Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

Laurie Shannon, author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, author of Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews

David Gordon White, author of Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, and Myths of the Dog-Man

Our warm congratulations! View the complete list of 2007 Guggenheim fellows.

Archived in Awards
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Last year we published Anthony C. Yu's The Monkey and the Monk, his abridged translation of Hsi-yu Chi, a renowned classic of Chinese literature. The Monkey and the Monk chronicles the adventures of Xuanzang, a seventh-century monk, over the course of his sixteen-year journey in search of Buddhist scriptures. Rich with allegory, humor, fantasy, and satire, the book is an exciting foray into the Hsi-yu Chi and the ancient Chinese world.

But even at 528 pages The Monkey and the Monk is but a distillation of a larger project Yu began over thirty years ago to create a full English translation of this ancient Chinese epic.
Yu's Journey to the West is a four-volume translation of the complete Hsi-yu Chi—the only English translation available. We published the four volumes between 1977 and 1983. Now Yu will have the opportunity to revisit and revise his translation, thanks to a $55,000 award from the Mellon Foundation. An article in the University of Chicago's Chronicle details the award saying:

In 1984, Yu was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University Press for his four-volume translation of The Journey to the West, the first complete version in English. The Mellon fellowship will support a thorough revision of that translation, featuring the conversion into the now standard Romanization of Chinese characters, a new scholarly introduction and updated annotations.

The Mellon support will enable Yu to reconcile the old full-length edition with the format, style and scholarly substance with the new abridgment.

Professor Yu's work has already contributed immensely to the West's understanding of ancient Chinese culture. With a Mellon grant to bolster his new revisions, Journey to the West will remain an unsurpassed achievement.

Archived in Awards | Literature
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On November 9, President Bush awarded Meryle Secrest the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House, one of ten writers and scholars so honored for 2006. Secrest is noted for her biographies of some of the seminal figures of modern art and music including architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Joseph Duveen—the premier art dealer of the twentieth century. Secrest's biographies combine her comprehensive and detailed historical research with engaging narrative that reviews in publications like the Economist and New Republic have praised for expertly drawing out the connections between the lives and the art of her subjects. Bringing her readers into intimate contact with the rich history of the arts, Secrest's work is an invaluable contribution to the scholarly study of modern art.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | History
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An article in today's New York Times reports that historian John Hope Franklin has been awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. The Times calls the million dollar award "the prize that Alfred Nobel forgot … specifically intended for areas that the Nobel Prizes do not cover like history, political science, sociology, and philosophy." Franklin, currently emeritus professor of history at Duke University, will split the prize with Yu Ying-shih, a professor of Chinese history at Princeton.

The New York Times writes that "Franklin is widely regarded as among the first scholars to explore fully the role of African Americans in the nation's history." Some of that scholarship was published by the University of Chicago Press. We published Racial Equality in America (1976), George Washington Williams: A Biography (1985), and Reconstruction after the Civil War, now in a third edition.

This is the third year that the Kluge Prize has been awarded by the Library of Congress. Franklin is the fourth UCP author to receive the prize; previous winners include Jaroslav Pelikan, Paul Ricoeur, and Leszek Kolakowski.

Archived in Awards | Black Studies | History
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The Press is pleased to announce that several of its authors have been named Academy of Arts and Sciences fellows for 2006. Fellowships recognize "individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large." The induction ceremony will take place on October 7 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Press authors receiving the honor include:

Ian Ayres, author of Optional Law and Pervasive Prejudice?

Alberto Alesina, editor of Politics and Economics in the Eighties

Charles Bernstein, author of several Press titles

Michael Dawson, author of Black Visions

Reid Hastie, co-author of Punitive Damages

Ha Jin, author of Between Silences

Michael Murrin, author of History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic

Anne L. Poulet, author of Jean-Antoine Houdon

William B. Provine, author of several Press titles

David H. Romer, co-editor of Reducing Inflation

James H. Stock, co-editor of Business Cycles, Indicators, and Forecasting

Rosmarie Waldrop, translator of The Book of Margins and The Book of Shares

View the complete list of 2006 fellows.

Archived in Awards
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We are pleased to note that several Press authors have been awarded Guggenheim fellowships for 2006. The Guggenheim Foundation supports "the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions and irrespective of race, color, or creed."

Recipients include:

Douglas Biow, author of Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy

Julia V. Douthwaite, author of The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment

David Garland, author of The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society and Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory

Arthur Goldhammer, translator of several Press titles

Mark Halliday, author of Jab and Selfwolf

Joseph Leo Koerner, author of The Reformation of the Image and The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

Donald S. Lopez Jr., author and editor of several Press titles.

Deidre Shauna Lynch, author of The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights

John David Skrentny, author of Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America and The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America

Anne Winters, author of The Displaced of Capital and The Key to the City

View the complete list of 2006 Guggenheim fellows.

Archived in Awards
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Walter H. Calvin has received the 2006 Walter P. Kistler Book Award for his book A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change. The award, presented by the Foundation For the Future, recognizes authors of science-based books that contribute to society's understanding of the factors that may impact the long-term future of humanity.

Mankind has recently come to the shocking realization that our ancestors survived hundreds of abrupt and severe changes to Earth's climate. In A Brain for All Seaons, William H. Calvin takes readers around the globe and back in time, showing how such cycles of cool, crash, and burn provided the impetus for enormous increases in the intelligence and complexity of human beings—and warning us of human activities that could trigger similarly massive shifts in the planet's climate.

On April 6, at 7:00 p.m., the University of Washington will host an award ceremony for Calvin. He will be interviewed, participate in a Q&A session, and sign books. The event is free and open to the public.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Events | Awards | Biology | Books for the News
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Yesterday, nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were announced. We are happy to report that Gail Mazur's Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems is a nominee in the poetry category. Winners will be named on April 28.

Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur's poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo's First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur's four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur's explorations of "this fallen world, this loony world" are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized "Baseball," a stunning bird's-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.

Gail Mazur's books include Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, They Can't Take That Away from Me, and The Common, all published by the University of Chicago Press

Read an excerpt from Zeppo's First Wife.

Read an excerpt from They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Read an excerpt from The Common.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Poetry
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History Today's March 2006 issue features a review of Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957, winner of its Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. Julian Jackson praised the book: "Superb…. This is scholarly history, but it is also the best kind of engaged history. Houlbrook clearly feels something was lost with the 'respectable' homosexuality of the 1950s although he is too good a historian to tell any black-and-white story. He sees the evolution he describes as 'simultaneously liberating and exclusionary.' If for some men the emergence of more private spaces after 1945 was 'unequivocally affirmative, offering them opportunities to socialize in a safe, respectable and semi-private place,' this process made things harder for those who wished—or were forced—to remain more visible. This is a book, finally, as much about London as about sexuality, demonstrating with empathy and subtlety both how sexuality was played out in the city and how it was shaped by it."

History Today editor Peter Furtado calls the book "[An] example of modern 'queer history' is an account of how gay people lived in London, which everyone, gay or straight, can relate to. Not written (as it might have been) as a tale of suffering, it is a lucid, sane and jargon-free account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves, physically, socially and emotionally, and draws on police records, memoirs, letters and newspaper exposés, as well as the first queer guidebook ever written. It deals with issues of policing, housing, geography, identity and politics faced by gay men in this period. It is also a book that will make anyone who reads it look at London and its public spaces through new eyes."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
Posted by at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 has received the Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. History Today Editor Peter Furtado described it as "not a story of persecution, but a lucid, sane and fascinating account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves within a hostile cultural environment, dealing with policing, housing, geography, identity and politics."

The current edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement features a review of Queer London by Matt Cook: "A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London.… There is a nostalgia here for a world lost. This brings a rare warmth to the book: Houlbrook has a genuine affection for the men and places he describes. Occasionally his spectacles feel just a little too rose (or lilac) tinted. He is right to suggest that some of our understandings of queer life have narrowed since the war, but I find it difficult to regret the passing of certain other interwar constraints. A small qualm, though, about a great book and a worthy winner."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
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