Annual Lectures
Iris Marion Young Distinguished Faculty Lecture
Each year, CSGS hosts the Iris Marion Young Distinguished Faculty Lecture featuring University of Chicago faculty doing innovative interdisciplinary work. On Wednesday, January 22 at 4:30pm, Martha Feldman, Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music and the Humanities in the College, and author of The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, delivered the 2020 lecture, “The Castrato Phantom: Masculinity and the Sacred Vernacular in Twentieth-Century Rome”:
This paper explores what I call the sacred vernacular to puzzle out the conditions in twentieth-century Rome that mark the uncomfortable anomaly of the castrato, a man castrated for singing, the last of whom, Alessandro Moreschi, died there in 1922. The “sacred vernacular” refers to the peculiar Italian and especially Roman tendency to domesticate the sacred by means of the everyday. Among the consequences of this cultural formation is the figure of the sacred monster. The castrato is a marked instance of it, but Moreschi’s death, coincident with the rise of fascism, initiates a decades-long period of masculinist tropes and obliteration of the castrato’s memory.
As part of its tenth anniversary celebration in 2006, the Center renamed this annual lecture to honor Iris Marion Young. Young was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center and the Human Rights program. She was a widely known and well-respected contemporary political and feminist social theorist, concerned with normative analysis of public policy. Learn more about Iris Marion Young.
Past speakers include: Jennifer Wild (Cinema and Media Studies and Romance Languages and Literatures), Linda Zerilli (Political Science), Daisy Delogu (Romance Languages & Literatures), Martha Nussbaum (Law/Philosophy), Jennifer Cole (Comparative Human Development), Deborah Nelson (English), Susan Gal (Anthropology), Leora Auslander (History), Cathy J. Cohen (Political Science), Mary Anne Case (Law), Lauren Berlant (English), Christine Stansell (History), Martha McClintock (Psychology/Comparative Human Development), Jean Comaroff (Anthropology), Amy Hollywood (Divinity), George Chauncey (History), Wendy Doniger (Divinity), Jacqueline Bhabha (Human Rights), and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology.)
Distinguished Alumnae/i Lectures
Each Spring, the CSGS welcomes a UChicago alumnae/i working in the field of gender and sexuality back to present their work.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our 2020 Distinguished Alumni Lecture--originally scheduled for May 11--has been postponed.