The Arts Labs project is designed to identify and explore new frontiers of artistic collaboration across a range of media, technologies, and scales. Now in its second phase at the Neubauer Collegium, the project is comprised of five discrete labs: an Opera Lab devoted to preparing the new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in 2028-30, examining the tetralogy’s production history and aesthetic politics (on hiatus during the 2025–2026 academic year); a Motion Theory Lab studying theories and practices of embodiment in dance through a variety of conceptual perspectives and choreographic workshops; the Embodied Adaptation Lab, a partnership with Lucky Plush Productions to create a dance-theater production inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (FACING); the Un-Musical Lab, exploring the dissolution and recomposition of a family told through the dissolution and recomposition of musical theater form; the New Directions in Contemporary Publishing Lab, which convenes editors and writers from distinguished literary publications to collaborate on identifying emerging futures for translation and publishing; and an Arts Labs seminar, which meets regularly to workshop the concepts undergirding the larger initiative.

Three interdisciplinary groups—Awi’nakola, Gulf South Open School, and Untidy Objects—come together to share land-based research and speculative art developed in response to their distinct North American contexts. How can such approaches offer new models for rights discourse in environmental politics based on interconnection rather than autonomy? Powerful recent efforts to protect lands and waters have involved the extension of legal rights, obligations, and protections under law to those other than human beings, using liberal and neoliberal legal frameworks where the political subject is specifically autonomous. Yet such conceptual separation—whether of people from land, or species from one another—runs counter to the three groups’ perspectives, methodologies, and political propositions. The researchers collectively argue that drawing boundaries between things through the language of rights, and offering similar autonomy to non-human beings, can only be a short-term measure and not a sustaining political practice. The three groups will learn from each other’s distinct practices and contexts, and consider how interdisciplinary art- and land-based research might help reshape rights discourse in environmental politics. This temporary, geographically dispersed “collective of collectives” will test methods to co-learn across distance; share strategies to protect lands, waters, and beings based on interconnection rather than autonomy; explore art’s potential and limitations within this larger work; and write a synthesis of their methodologies and beliefs to support the socio-political transformations needed to address climate catastrophe. This collaboration builds on the Neubauer Collegium’s collaboration with Awi’nakola on a 2023 program; on a 2023–2025 Collegium seed grant supporting Untidy Objects’ creation of a living sculpture and its ongoing co-constitution and annotation with other human and non-human entities; and welcomes Gulf South Open School as a new partner.

Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from differing perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two remains rare. The Case of the Human is an ambitious collaborative project aimed not merely at translating existing theory across humanities and medical epistemologies, but rather at co-producing new, plural knowledge of the human that transcends epistemological boundaries. The project addresses the core questions: “What is the human?” and “What does the category of the human do?” The research team aims to create novel, multidisciplinary, and pluralistic knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We will achieve this goal through three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing novel, plural knowledge on the human through two working conferences (one of which was held during the first phase of the project), with distribution as a case-series in The Lancet; 2) establishing the University of Chicago as a hub in global medical humanities networks through a medical humanities institution-building conference, and convening Visiting Fellows to implement, refine, and disseminate, our novel interdisciplinary methodology; and 3) a visual artistic exploration the human and the case form through student artistic workshops and a graphic medicine exhibition. We seek to advance this project’s innovative scholarship that began with the Neubauer Collegium by scaling up its successes of interdisciplinary collaborations and centering artistic understandings of the human.

Through the long twentieth-century a series of imperial, social, and ecological collapses and reformations have registered in the fabrics and fashions we use to form and transform our bodies and social environments. Textiles and wearable costumes have at once structured imperial formations and their ordering of ecological, racial, and gendered regimes. However, they have also materialized alternate ways of being, refashioning conceptions of identity, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as they transform the shape of the body and our interaction with lived space and environment. Comparing the Soviet and French Orientalist imaginaries of its southern and eastern colonies in North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia exposes a common preoccupation with costume and textiles as both modes of exoticization and imperial capture and revolutionary forms of anti-colonial resistance. This includes the ways in which French orientalist photographs of women in North Africa exoticized dress, bodily ornamentation, and textiles to mediate colonial desires, as well as how costume and textile served the Soviet orientalist creation of distinctive "nationalities" and their assimilation into the multinational imperial project. The collapse of these two empires renders legible how self-fashioning through forms of wearable art and textiles—as indigenous semiotics shared by both regions and interconnected through overlapping migratory histories of textile production and circulation—provided a means of evasion, disguise, and play. This project turns to costumes, textiles, and wearable art as forms of anti-colonial and queer resistance at the interfaces of embodiment, materiality, ecology, and affect. Activities include a series of reading groups, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that will travel from Chicago (2024) to Tbilisi (2025) and Paris (2026). Reinterpreting traditional clothes, parodying uniforms, or queering garments against a backdrop of imperial, social, and ecological collapse, the project addresses the formation of new modes of politics and aesthetics fashioned through wearable art.

The use of dyes extracted from plants and insects has a complex history in multiple communities in Mexico. Organisms such as indigo plants, cochineal insects, and cempazuchitl are ingredients in artisanal practices, local cuisine, and traditional medicine that in many cases predate Spanish contact. Recent international interest in these natural resources is putting pressure on their management, but scientific and educational opportunities would allow local communities to study these culturally significant organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use. We propose an interdisciplinary project to collect histories and taxonomies of the organisms used in natural dye production, addressing their identities, their ecologies, their cultural uses, and their manifold significance to colorant makers. Although the colorant uses have been previously documented, many of these studies rely on partial taxonomic classifications, where only the genus of the plant but not the species has been identified. We hypothesize that scientific documentation of the species used will provide new insights into the uses of these organisms and their dyes. A more precise description of the plants and organisms used for dye extraction will also facilitate the communities’ efforts to manage their own resources; their request for a collaboration is what gave rise to this proposal. In addition to a series of workshops, we will publish our findings in a bilingual general audience book and project website, as well as peer-reviewed journals. We will also organize six conferences in Mexico and twin exhibits in Chicago and Oaxaca.

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the strategy of governing the macro economy primarily through the management of money and financial markets while ceding most of society’s investment to the private sector has been in retreat. Again and again, governments and central banks have aggressively intervened in the economy to backstop runs on financial institutions, prevent the collapse of various asset markets, bolster purchasing power in the economy through direct payments to citizens, maintain the solvency of intensely pandemic-disadvantaged businesses, and stimulate employment (Tooze 2018). Perhaps even more remarkably, this revival of state and fiscal intervention has not simply been an emergency response to a series of crises. The accumulation of longer term economic, social, and environmental externalities, widely believed to be generated by policies privileging private-sector investment and market freedom, also has given rise to impatience with the use of market mechanisms to achieve social goals or redress imbalances. Political demands from society have already generated moves to use the state to redistribute income, forgive specific forms of debt, restructure industry, engineer “energy transitions,” encourage investment in “green tech” and otherwise redirect investment toward ends that appear to be, or are alleged to be, in line with the will of the demos (Allen 2022, Aronoff 2019).

Dramatic in itself, this re-politicization of investment and consumption comes at a time when our confidence in the institutions of liberal democracy is being challenged. The contemporary demos, wherever it is, often feels alienated, underserved, or excluded from the institutions that are there to represent and serve it. With the pursuit of social, economic, and environmental goals intentionally displaced to the market for half a century, the non-market, deliberative, political mechanisms for the democratic transmission of citizen will into investment and consumption policies have atrophied, or, worse, become instruments of economic and social interests favored by the market (Fishkin & Forbath 2022, Philippon 2019). Core institutions in the incumbent order (parliaments, parties, corporations, markets, unions, nonprofit entities) are being attacked, their authority and effectiveness as governors of economic process delegitimized and their claim to be channelers of democratic will called into question. Many once powerful movements and organizations that traditionally represented broad social interests in macroeconomic policy formation, such as those for workers and farmers, have nearly disappeared altogether (Andrias 2016). Other crucial governance institutions that continue to exist – in particular, central banks and corporations – are being continually recomposed by new social, economic, and environmental dynamics in ways that are dramatically recasting their boundaries and forcing a reconsideration of their social roles and the way in which they formulate and pursue investment goals (Omarova 2021; Herrigel 2018, Baldwin 2016,). Old norms, such as an understanding of economic growth as an unadulterated good capable of creating social harmony and overcoming material division and conflict, are losing their appeal in the face of worsening inequality and climate crises (Daly 2007, Kallis et al 2018). To be sure, there is no shortage of new ideas about alternative social ends – involving different ways of relating to nature, to work and production, or to community life and solidarity – but the existing political economic arrangements for converting those ideas into investment seem often inadequate to the task.

We believe that this confluence of mounting state intervention into key social processes of investment and consumption combined with growing disarray and disillusionment with the incumbent political and economic institutions and organizations of will formation and governance is the defining political economic dilemma of our age. Our proposal to the Neubauer Collegium is to convene a series of workshops that gather different groupings of scholars (from an array of disciplines) to discuss the relationship between the market, the state and democracy in both historical and contemporary contexts.

The Entanglements of the Indian Past project aims to make the study of the Indian past more self-conscious of the forces that have shaped it. A three-year series of interdisciplinary workshops will focus on three issues where serious engagement is critical: caste, materiality, and historicality. The project pairs each of these issues with a crossroad moment in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that determined the course that the study of the Indian past would take: Rahul Sankrityayan’s quest for a past that mirrored his commitments to justice and equality in the present, Muni Jinavijaya’s efforts to free Indian thought from the limitations of manuscript textuality, and Georg Bühler’s vision of recovering the history of a country that, according to a commonplace, “has no history.” Each of these moments reveals the intensity of political commitment, and the depth of vision, involved in studying the Indian past. This project will attempt to answer where such scholarship might go in the future.

During the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has been widely adopted throughout the social sciences and humanities to capture the role of societal processes in the transformation of the earth system and in the genesis of contemporary planetary environmental emergencies, including global heating, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification, among others. While questions of periodization remain intensely contested in the Anthropocene literature, considerable emphasis has been placed on the “Great Acceleration,” a period of dramatically intensified energy and resource use after World War II that has also witnessed a massive escalation of global carbon emissions, pollution, deforestation, species extinctions, and other leading indicators of planetary environmental disorder.

Building upon the research team members’ previous and ongoing work in several interconnected fields of critical environmental studies related to these themes and extending it through a two-year collaborative initiative in intensive dialogue with other scholars working in parallel directions, this project seeks to develop an alternative analysis of the Great Acceleration as a conjuncture of geohistorical transformation and environmental crisis intensification. This entails, first, developing a systematic critique of the Great Acceleration narrative due to its problematic conceptualization and periodization of historical and contemporary socioenvironmental change. Second, our work will elaborate an alternative account of the historical genealogy, infrastructural anatomy, and metabolic underpinnings of today’s socioecological tipping points in the planetary biosphere.

Our investigations will explore what we will term the “hidden abodes” of the Great Acceleration—veiled yet essential historical-geographical dynamics associated with capitalism’s relentless appropriation of unpaid reproductive and regenerative work to support the profit-driven, productivity-oriented, and infrastructurally intensive dynamic of accumulation. These hidden abodes of appropriation are constitutive of capital’s constantly intensifying yet chronically unstable metabolism of labor, energy, food, and raw materials; they underpin each wave of productivity growth, embodied in the expansion of fixed capital outlays, during the geohistory of capitalism. Against this theoretical background, which is largely derived from co-applicant Jason W. Moore’s approach to capitalist world-ecology and the Capitalocene, our project aims to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of appropriation and capitalization, closely associated with the generalization of a fossil-fuel based metabolic regime and large-scale, planet-encompassing infrastructural systems, during the post-1870s period up through the present. We hypothesize that the latter laid the foundations for the consequent Great Acceleration of the so-called “Golden Age” of postwar capitalist expansion, and thus have also figured crucially in the climate and nature emergencies of our time.

Through discussions and investigations among the core team members, a series of internal seminars and workshops with several scholars who are developing closely allied research agendas, and a concluding public symposium, this project will illuminate the dramatic global socioenvironmental transformations of the last half-century in a longue durée geohistorical context. We also aim to develop a useful theoretical and historical perspective from which to decipher the cascading climate and nature emergencies of the early twenty-first century and the prospects for counteracting them in ways that support social and environmental justice, and the flourishing of both human and non-human life.

With the emergence of large language and other generative AI models, every field of study is having to wrestle with their impact on its established disciplinary habits and practices. In humanities fields, the task is especially urgent given how rapidly these technologies have embedded themselves in the processes and systems that mediate creative activity and knowledge production. “Humanistic AI” starts from the premise that the most productive response to these technologies is to address them head on. The project will bring together specialists from multiple domains of intellectual inquiry (literature, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, computer science) to collectively identify the challenges generative models present to these domains. Participants will seek to articulate a strategic vision for how to evaluate these models on our own disciplinary terms; to potentially enlist them as collaborators in humanistic research; and to inform their development and deployment beyond academia. In a series of meetings held over two years, we will produce a set of case studies that model this vision, and thus help to lay the conceptual and methodological ground for a rethinking of humanities research and humanistic pursuits in the wake of generative models.