The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts

President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Katherine Baicker sent a campus-wide message on April 9 announcing the unification of UChicago Arts and the Humanities Division into one division: the Division of Arts & Humanities. The email called the union “an important milestone in the University of Chicago’s academic evolution.”

Dean Deborah Nelson, who has been selected to lead the new division, said, “The re-naming of our division formally articulates the longstanding relationships among our scholars and artists, whose research and arts practice create life-changing examinations of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become—both individually and collectively.”

According to the email, members of the University community can expect to see departments previously under the Division of the Humanities begin to function alongside programs within UChicago Arts, which encompasses entities such as the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Logan Center for the Arts. Two exceptions are the Smart Museum of Art and Court Theatre. The email cited their public-facing roles within Hyde Park and “distinct governance and accreditation requirements” as reasons why they will continue to report to the Office of the Provost. 

The Maroon spoke with Mark Temelko, the executive director of strategic communications for the Division of the Arts & Humanities, who detailed what shaped this decision and what members of the University community might expect to see as a result.

“It is sort of an intentional vision to create new kinds of artistic research, humanistic thinking, scholarship, and teaching. It’s really a sort of way to lead the way, to capture the ways that these traditional departments have been evolving, or to capitalize on the way that they’ve been evolving,” he said.

When asked what students might notice about the change, Temelko said, “There’s a goal, which is to make this hopefully visionary capitalization on the historical humanities excellence and the emerging arts excellence a visible thing for prospective students. We have a very visible Chicago school of economics.…There is increasingly a sort of UChicago Arts thing happening, and it is uniquely grounded in the intellectual community and the academics and the research [and goes] hand in hand with the South Side of Chicago.”

He mentioned specific ways where the overlap between the arts and humanities might be more visible to students, citing the work of Patrick Jagoda, a professor of English and of cinema and media studies at UChicago, as an example.

“Patrick led the design of the game that first-years may have played this fall called Haven, which is a video game meant to allow incoming students to explore the ideas of free expression,” Temelko said. “So, media arts and design, game design, and game study are these areas where you need all the historical excellence of multiple languages, cultures, narrative theory, right? We want to emphasize how interpretive theory, textual analysis, visual analysis—all these things that the humanities historically do really well—work with the creativity and the generative talent of the arts.”

The Maroon also spoke with Niall Atkinson of the Department of Art History. Atksinson noted the change’s relevance to the current atmosphere in higher education.

“I think… especially at a time when the humanities themselves are under such attack throughout academia in this country… [where] they’re losing funding, and places get shut down—this is a way, I think, to bolster it, because you can make more streamlined or efficient or informed decisions when there are more people involved.”

Changes in federal funding have only magnified the uncertainty surrounding the humanities division. According to Atkinson, who recently had his federal grant terminated, “The humanities division, last year, had a deficit, and we’re not supposed to run deficits… but the University has a pretty [large] deficit, too. And now, who knows about finances—it’s going to be a complete mess depending on what happens in the federal government.”

Atkinson suggested that most of the changes that follow from the renaming will be unseen by students. “I don’t think it’ll really be that noticeable to students. I think it’s really mostly administrative,” he said.

Bill Brown of the Department of English language and literature provided a more enthusiastic reaction in an email to the Maroon.

“I’m thrilled by this announcement. As a new divisional rubric, ‘The Arts & Humanities’ names the longstanding role of the arts within the division, even as it signals a newer recognition of how art—poetry, music, photography, etc.—provides a paradigm for the creative intelligence on which all path-breaking inquiry depends. The humanities at UChicago has always fostered research imperatives and pedagogical imperatives that are committed to the kind of rigorous experiment and innovation that is most visible and audible within the arts. The more energetically we foster the integration of scholarly and artistic pursuits, the more robustly we will emerge in this century as a leader across fields and disciplines.”

In another statement to the Maroon, Bill Michel, executive director of the Logan Center for the Arts, expressed optimism.

“I am excited about the opportunities that are possible now that the Logan Center is part of the Division of the Arts & Humanities,” he said. “The Logan Center is excited to continue working closely with faculty, staff and students across the Division to support their artistic practice and scholarship and connect their work to the many artists and arts organizations we work with across the University, South Side of Chicago[,] and beyond.”