UChicago Medicine doctor's coat with stethoscope

This discussion series, explores healthcare in the context of the pandemic. Featuring frontline doctors and healthcare experts from the University of Chicago Medical Center, these roundtables offer a view on COVID-19 from within the hospital.

COVID-19, Healthcare, and Beyond

Online Open Enrollment

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested, stretched, and challenged the healthcare infrastructure of the United States. Indeed, this disease has been referred to as a ‘canary in the coalmine’ because of the way that it has exposed gaps in healthcare systems and revealed biases in access and care according to race, ethnicity, and class. This healthcare crisis serves as a vivid reminder that achieving healthy bodies and healthy minds requires long-term investments across a spectrum of institutions and activities.

This discussion series, which is free and open to all, explores healthcare in the context of the pandemic. Featuring frontline doctors and healthcare experts from the University of Chicago Medical Center, these roundtables offer a view on COVID-19 from within the hospital. We also investigate the pandemic’s effects on specific diseases, such as diabetes, and assess COVID-19’s impact on mental health and community healthcare initiatives. We furthermore consider the disease from the vantage of global health.

Throughout the series, presenters show how COVID-19 not only deepens the need for creative approaches to research, treatments, and outreach, but also how the pandemic has transformed the foundations upon which these efforts take place.

Offered

This series was offered in February 2021.

Each session consisted of one hour of discussion, followed by thirty minutes of question and answer with audience members.

View Sessions

Our first discussion with Dr. William Parker and Dr. Stephen Weber focuses on COVID-19 and its effects on patient care and hospital operations at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC). As a physician, bioethicist, and data scientist, Dr. Parker speaks to the experience of treating patients on the frontlines of the pandemic. He also discusses research he has conducted on “crisis standards of care,” particularly as they pertain to resource allocation and management. Dr. Weber, as Chief Medical Officer at UCMC, talks about the epidemiology of the virus, the how and when of pandemic preparations, as well as the persistent uncertainties produced by the disease. He further explains the massive new demands the pandemic has placed on various hospital functions, from supply procurement to medical staffing and vaccine delivery.

View the recording

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Background Reading and Viewing

Melanie Evans and Christine Mai-Duc, “COVID-19 Crisis Forces California Hospitals to Plan Who Gets Life-Saving Care,” The Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2021.

"The COVID-19 vaccine's uneven distribution." Salon, January 28, 2021.

Article features Asst. Prof. William Parker's analysis of healthcare disparities and COVID-19 deaths in Chicago

Bianca Martin, "How Can We Ensure Fair Distribution Of The COVID-19 Vaccine?" WBEZ Chicago, 1 February 2021.

Dr. Monica Peek and Dr. Stephen Weber, "COVID-19 Vaccine: Expert Q and A," University of Chicago Medicine, 19 January 2021.

William Parker, Angira Patel, Craig Kulgman, and Gina Piscitello, “Lightfoot must activate phase 1b of COVID-19 vaccination now,” Chicago Tribune, 11 January 2021.

Stephen Weber, “What to know about the COVID-19 vaccine,” University of Chicago Medicine, 12 January 2021.

"'Masks are important and masks are safe': Dr. Emily Landon addresses COVID-19 myths, asks Americans to help flatten the curve again at Illinois governor's press conference.” University of Chicago Medicine, 30 October 2020.

Speakers

COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities, has shone a bright light on a wide range of social and economic inequalities in the United States. In this session, Dr. Daniel Johnson and Dr. Arshiya Baig discuss social determinants of health, as well as the ways that the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities in healthcare. Our panelists also talk about initiatives in which they are involved that seek to serve disadvantaged populations. Dr. Baig, who is a primary care physician and health services expert, draws on her research on diabetes in Latino communities to illuminate the pandemic’s cascading effects among those groups. Dr. Daniel Johnson, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, considers some of the pandemic’s consequences for children, and also describes his work with ECHO-Chicago, an organization devoted to expanding access to care and building primary care capacity among community-based providers.

View the recording

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Background Reading and Viewing

“Exploring the Link Between Unemployment and Poverty,” Chicago Tonight, WTTW, 18 January 2021.

Jeehoon Han, Bruce D. Meyer, James X Sullivan, “Income and Poverty in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Summer 2020.

“Health Inequality Plus Coronavirus Creates Perfect Storm in Chicago’s Black Community,” Chicago Tonight, WTTW, 25 May 2020. 

“Pandemic Exacerbating Existing Health Disparities in Auburn Gresham,” Chicago Tonight, WTTW, 28 April 2020.

“Racism in Health Care: Providers Address a Public Health Crisis,” Chicago Tonight, WTTW, 8 July 2020.

Speakers

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Moderators

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Dr. Doriane Miller

University of Chicago Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine

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Emily Osborn - Headshot

Emily Lynn Osborn

Associate Professor, Department of History

Conversations @Graham
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Engage your curiosity with our free and open-to-all Conversations @ Graham.

Conversations @Graham

Online Basic Program of Liberal Education Master of Liberal Arts Open Enrollment

Conversations @Graham is our free, open-to-all, ongoing series featuring big ideas conversations with the extraordinary scholars and innovators who teach classes in the Graham School’s Open Program. 

To watch recordings of previous Conversations @Graham, be sure to visit our YouTube channel.

Conversations @Graham
Gleacher Center at Night

Monthly from September to June, a Basic Program instructor or guest lecturer discusses texts and ideas from the four-year program or our wider range of course offerings.

First Friday Lecture Series

Online Basic Program of Liberal Education

Offered remotely via Zoom, these free online public lectures complement the curriculum of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. Each month, a Basic Program instructor or guest lecturer discusses texts and ideas from the four-year program or our wider range of course offerings. First Friday Lectures allow the public and our students to hear instructors speak on their own scholarship or interpretation of a text, by contrast to the discussion method of our classrooms. A period of question and answer follows every lecture.

First Friday Lectures are offered at 12:15 p.m. on the first Friday of every month from September to June.

Missed a lecture or interested in learning more? Find past recordings of First Friday Lectures on our YouTube channel.

First Friday Lecture Series
Gleacher Center at Night

Join us for a simple lunch and a thought-provoking lecture given by a UChicago faculty member.

Works of the Mind Luncheons

Online Basic Program of Liberal Education

Conveniently scheduled right after Basic Program morning classes end, these luncheons are offered quarterly and are open to all.

Works of the Mind Luncheons
Gleacher Center at Night

LEDE: This is a short sentence that is the lede.

Travel Series

Online Open Enrollment
Conversations @Graham
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In this series, Michael Rossi, will explore four pandemics—bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, and HIV-AIDS—that have likewise challenged human beings and transformed the ways that we have lived, worked, loved, and clashed.

Pandemics in History

Online Open Enrollment

Today we find ourselves in what seems to be a new historic moment. COVID-19 has not only taken lives, but its menace has spawned profound changes in social and cultural practices across the globe, from wearing facial coverings to social distancing. But coronavirus is not the first pathogen to threaten the human species.

In this series, Michael Rossi, Assistant Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Chicago, will explore four pandemics—bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, and HIV-AIDS—that have likewise challenged human beings and transformed the ways that we have lived, worked, loved, and clashed.

Investigating these historical episodes will offer participants a new vantage point to reflect upon the novelty of our present circumstances, as well as to consider the ways we are traveling well-trodden pathways that have long linked disease to the human experience.

The three plagues that swept across early modern Europe and Asia were not the first instances of epidemic disease in recorded history. But to many observers, they seemed apocalyptic. With their unpredictability, terrible mortality, and devastating economic, social, and cultural impacts, they challenged philosophers and laypeople alike to come up with new explanations for disease, even as society seemed to be collapsing around them. 

Download the pre-reading for the lecture, from Boccaccio’s Decameron

Watch the Recording

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Little known before the nineteenth century, cholera encircled the globe in a series of pandemics that spanned the nineteenth century. In response, communities, municipalities, and nations drew on new medical ideas — not least of all germ theory and sanitation — to defend themselves. This was one of the first times that scientific medicine and political administration had combined to fight epidemic disease, and its practice changed ideas both of “the public” and of “health.”

Download the pre-reading for the lecture

Watch the recording

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By the turn of the twentieth century, the successes of public health and the promises of new vaccines suggested to some observers that modern medicine might, in the not-too-distant future, entirely conquer epidemics. The influenza pandemic of 1918 brought those hopes crashing down, as nations around the world struggled to contain a new, strange, and deadly illness that resonated across the world like a bell. If the 1918 influenza pandemic shattered some naive dreams of medical progress, its deadly passage set the foundation for twentieth century biomedicine.

Download the pre-reading for the lecture

Watch the recording

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The three plagues that swept across early modern Europe and Asia were not the first instances of epidemic disease in recorded history. But to many observers, they seemed apocalyptic. With their unpredictability, terrible mortality, and devastating economic, social, and cultural impacts, they challenged philosophers and laypeople alike to come up with new explanations for disease, even as society seemed to be collapsing around them.

Download the pre-reading for the lecture

Watch the recording

Video Url

Speaker

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Headshot of Michael Rossi, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College at the University of Chicago.

Michael Rossi

Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College at the University of Chicago

Conversations @Graham
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Faculty members, scholars, and staff from disciplines across the University of Chicago will delve into the transcendent power—as well as the mysteries and challenges—of written texts, performative techniques, material objects, and musical soundscapes.

Arts Series Autumn 2021

Online Open Enrollment

One especially notable consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the shuttering of institutions that serve as wellsprings of our shared humanity. Movie houses, museums, theaters, and concert halls—places that offer escape, enlightenment, and provocation—no longer operate as they once did, to nurture and inspire, to instigate and confront, as well as to physically bring us together, in cohorts of common interest.

In an effort to reconnect and reconvene with a rich diversity of expressive forms, we invite you to join us at Arts@Graham, a free public online lecture series. Faculty members, scholars, and staff from disciplines across the University of Chicago will delve into the transcendent power—as well as the mysteries and challenges—of written texts, performative techniques, material objects, and musical soundscapes.

The first pair of lectures will focus on the theater, and specifically explore the works of Tom Stoppard and August Wilson. The second pair of presentations will draw on museum objects from the Oriental Institute Museum and the Smart Museum of Art to consider how material forms serve as evidence of human creativity and communication across time and place. The last lecture will focus on music, and on the creation and effects of musical soundscapes.

Please join us for this online lecture series to learn, reflect, and engage. In so doing, you will gather with scholars, experts, and fellow participants in a world of ideas, expressions, and interpretations.

The renowned playwright Tom Stoppard turns to his own roots in his latest play, Leopoldstadt. This drama, whose title refers to the Jewish quarter in Vienna, traces three generations of a Jewish family through Europe’s searing political upheavals in the first half of the twentieth century. The play testifies, at once, to the allure of assimilation, and to its limits, as well as to the persistent, malleable force of antisemitism. While steeped in grand historical processes, Leopoldstadt also explores the intimate and contradictory manifestations of love and loss, and faith and betrayal. The play has only been staged once, at the Wyndham’s Theater in London’s West End, in early 2020.

In this lecture, Professor David Levin will explore the logic and resonances of Stoppard’s sprawling historical drama. While Leopoldstadt refers to specific times and places, it also transcends that specificity in surprising and exciting ways—drawing us into a dialogue with our contemporary moment. The interaction between then and now, there and here, them and us, and specificity and generalizability is a recurring feature of Stoppard’s work: we will explore its operations in this, his latest—and possibly his last—work for the theater. 

Participants will engage in a close reading of an excerpt from the play. The session will conclude with a conversation with Charles Newell, the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, who has directed no fewer than seven of Stoppard’s pieces over the course of his career. 

Watch the recording

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About the Court Theatre

Court Theatre is the University of Chicago’s professional theater. It is dedicated to innovation, inquiry, intellectual engagement, and community service. Its theatrical productions and audience enrichment and educational programs draw upon, and share, the expertise and insights of practitioners, scholars, and students. Court Theatre was founded in 1955 and took up residence in its current site in 1981. 

The American playwright August Wilson is widely considered one of the most astute and trenchant chroniclers of the twentieth century. His majestic plays illuminate various aspects of the experiences of Black Americans, and vividly render the persistent and ephemeral boundaries that serve to divide and cohere individuals, families, and society at large. Wilson’s corpus of work is rooted by two fundamental commitments, one, to the capacity of theater to serve as a universal truth teller—of theater’s capacity to shed light on the human condition—and two, to the idea that Black artists, and Black people more generally, serve as “the culture custodians of our art, our literature and our lives.”  

In this lecture, Professor Kenneth Warren explores Wilson’s relationship to the theater and to the idea of a shared Black experience. Warren considers the complexities of Wilson’s principles, and their implication for Black theater in particular, and for theater more generally. Warren also explores the predicaments and obligations that Wilson produces for directors, actors, theater companies, and audiences who perform and attend his plays.

Download the pre-reading for the lecture

Watch the recording

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About the Court Theatre

Court Theatre is the University of Chicago’s professional theater. It is dedicated to innovation, inquiry, intellectual engagement, and community service. Its theatrical productions and audience enrichment and educational programs draw upon, and share, the expertise and insights of practitioners, scholars, and students. Court Theatre was founded in 1955 and took up residence in its current site in 1981.

In this lecture, Dr. Foy Scalf draws on objects from the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum to answer the question: who invented the clock and how did people tell time in ancient Egypt, particularly at night?

Around 1500 BC, a man named Amenemhet claims in his tomb biography that he invented a device for measuring the hours of the night, which may have included moving mechanical parts. Five hundred years before Amenemhet’s invention, ancient Egyptian priests were recording the relative positions of groups of stars in large diagonal charts that helped calculate the hour based on their position in the sky relative to each other. Foy will analyze time-keeping devices, including an “astronomical device” of King Tut, to reveal Egyptians’ conception of knowledge formation and scientific discovery. 

Download the pre-reading for the lecture

Watch the recording

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About the Oriental Institute Museum:

The Oriental Institute Museum is a world-renowned showcase for the history, art, and  archaeology of the ancient Middle East. The museum displays objects in permanent galleries devoted to ancient Egypt, Nubia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, and the ancient site of Megiddo, as well as rotating special exhibits.

What are the most fundamental elements of music? Most sources say melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. But to recognize a piece's style, or decode its cultural meaning, requires reliance on another, less explored element: sonority (the intersection of timbre, dynamics, and register).

In this talk, Dr. John Y. Lawrence will explain what sonority is, how it affects your brain as you listen, and how performers manipulate it to make one rendition sound radically different from the next. Using performances of nineteenth-century music, this lecture will explore how sonority shapes the basic features of a musical experience, such as which line is the melody, where sections begin and end, and what images a piece evokes.

Recommended Reading and Listening

Please listen to the duet “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, and also study the translation of the text. Consider the question: How do the colors of the different instrumental background lines reinforce, contradict, or alter the meaning of the words being sung?

Listen to the musical selection

Download the translation of the libretto

Watch the recording

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Conversations @Graham
Image of a winding road.

Many of us may be hesitant to travel at the moment, or even to go to the movies. But we can gather together at this free film discussion series to explore great films that are set on the highways and byways.

On the Road

Online Open Enrollment

As the recent theatrical release of Nomadland testifies, the American road movie has enduring appeal and seems almost endlessly adaptable to different cultural circumstances. In this series, we take a quick survey of the genre. We start with a Hollywood studio classic that establishes the heterosexual couple as the central protagonist and self-determination as a defining force. It concludes with contemporary entry that confronts us with an urgent new perspective on the forces and forms of travel and escape. 

This series is designed to offer an interwoven vantage point from which to analyze “on the road” films. While we encourage participants to join us for each meeting, our discussions will focus on individual movies. Participants are welcome to join us for all or any of the sessions.

How it Works

Participants are asked to watch the assigned film in advance, using the guiding questions to help prepare for the conversation. At the start of each session, which will meet remotely via Zoom, Ms. Fernandez will explain the format for the evening, provide some additional context, and offer a brief introduction of the film. Participants will then be broken out into smaller breakout groups, and Ms. Fernandez will rotate through those rooms. The entire group will then reconvene for a final discussion. Ms. Fernandez will conclude the evening with the entire group and provide some final commentary and points of reflection.

Please note:

  • Guiding questions will be provided at least two weeks in advance, and posted to the individual film registration pages. 
  • Allow yourself time to watch and think about the movie in advance of the meeting. The films are widely available on popular streaming services, such as AmazonPrime, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, YouTube, Vudu, Google Play, and iTunes. Check the registration page for recommendations on where to find each movie.
  • Engage your fellow participants in friendly, respectful discourse. We reserve the right to bar from conversation and participation anyone whose conduct is offensive or disruptive.
  • Registration is required to participate in the group discussions

On a bus, hitch-hiking, on foot, and in a stolen car, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert make their way from Florida to New York City, and from antipathy to a meeting of the minds. It Happened One Night is a pioneering screwball comedy, as well as one of the first American road movies. Filmed and set during the Great Depression, it explores the distance its characters need to travel, and over what kind of ground, to encounter each other.

This iconic “on the lam” movie changed the genre forever. Fusing romance and crime drama, the heavily fictionalized story of the infamous outlaw couple explicitly frames their life on the road as an escape from conventional morality, laying the groundwork for a long string of counter-culture films, such as Easy Rider. The spectacular violence of the finale also pushed the road movie, and the motion picture code, into new territory; and the Great Depression setting helped to develop a topic nascent in It Happened One Night: the production of folk hero icons who speak to the needs of a particular cultural moment.

Responding to the couple-on-the-run subgenre, as well as the (male) buddy road movie that followed in its wake, Thelma & Louise was simultaneously celebrated and denigrated as “feminist manifesto” when it was first released. Thirty years later, some of the terms of that critical debate may be dated, but the enduring relevance of the film seem hardly diminished at all. Friends Thelma and Louise set out on a low-stakes weekend vacation from their constricted lives, only to find themselves committed to a radical rejection of the oppressive confines they have accepted as normal or inevitable for so long.

Although Queen’s uncle refers to them as “the black Bonnie and Clyde,” the protagonists in this re-working of the genre are neither self-defining criminals like the famous outlaw pair, nor self-liberating buddies who “just take to it” (to quote Thelma’s gleeful identification with transgression). After an unpromising Tinder date, Queen and Slim are thrown together when a traffic stop results in the death of a white police officer. Forced to run, they become, as Queen puts it, “accidental activists” and ambivalent icons, whose freedom to choose a life together is cut short by structures that define their very survival as criminal.

Discussion Leader

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Eva Fernandez

Eva Fernandez

Basic Program Instructor

Conversations @Graham

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Please see the step-by-step instructions for registration below.

Register for Basic Program, Open Enrollment, Writer's Studio, and Visual Arts courses through our online student portal.

Event

MLA Faculty Lecture: Greek Drama at the Movies

Join the Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program on June 16 for a sneak peek at an upcoming Autumn Quarter class taught by UChicago Classics Professor David Wray.

Lectures & Panels
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Online
Master of Liberal Arts

Event

Information Session: Master of Liberal Arts

Expand your knowledge from the comfort of your home. Join us on June 23 for an online information session to learn about the Master of Liberal Arts program.

Information Sessions
Date
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Online
Master of Liberal Arts

Event

Application Workshop: Master of Liberal Arts

Join us on June 29 for our online application workshop as we walk you through the process of applying to the University of Chicago Master of Liberal Arts.

Workshops
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Online
Master of Liberal Arts
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Glimpse into our Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) experience through these free public lectures by our pioneering MLA faculty.

MLA Faculty Lectures

Online Master of Liberal Arts

This lecture series showcases the pioneering work of the eminent University of Chicago faculty who teach in our Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) program. Like the MLA itself, these lectures span disciplinary boundaries to rigorously pursue big ideas, providing new insights into timeless questions and the current world around us. Recent topics have included the neurobiology of empathy, the foundations of humanistic inquiry, our evolving understanding of the cosmos, and the role of nationalism in identity formation.

MLA Faculty Lectures

Event

An Ethical Journey with Rats & MLA Students

Join the MLA degree on July 21 for an online discussion as we explore the ethics of attributing helping goodness while condemning addicts.

Lectures & Panels
Date
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Online
Master of Liberal Arts

Course

The Current Crisis of American Democracy

Course

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Poet?