“The Lives and Afterlives of Objects” brings together graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Chicago to discuss the intertwined themes of material culture, life cycles, and the passage of time.

The conference features presentations on diverse time periods, geographies, and disciplines, ranging from contemporary art to classical artifacts, from 1980s Palestine to Song Dynasty China, and from art history to psychology. The symposium is fully virtual and open to the public. Prerecorded video presentations will be released the week of June 14 for attendees to watch in advance of a moderated panel session, which will take place via Zoom on June 25 at 4:30 PM CT.

FREE, please register for the webinar link. 

“The Lives and Afterlives of Objects” is hosted by the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe.

Stream the prerecorded presentations

About the panelists

Emily Kang graduated this year from The College with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and English Literature. Her undergraduate research has focused on early American material culture, and her presentation for this symposium is an excerpt from her thesis. This fall, she will begin a gap year teaching English in Lyon, France before she pursues further graduate work in art history.

Eugene Yu Ji is a PhD candidate working in Leslie Kay Lab in the Department of Psychology. His earlier research in the lab focused on modeling the mammalian olfactory systems and cognitive relationships between human language, smell, and vision. His current thesis research focuses on developing new modeling methodology to study how perception, language cognition, and socio-cultural processes interact with each other.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Madeleine Harris is currently completing the Master of Arts Program in Humanities (MAPH) at UChicago. She is studying Classics with a focus in Greek mythology and religion. 

Honglan Huang is a visiting graduate student in English and TAPS. She is interested in the relationship between reading and performance, books and puppets.

Moderator Stephanie Reitzig is a third-year in The College studying History, with a minor in French. She focuses on early modern Europe, and her present BA thesis project concerns German artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian in seventeenth-century Nuremberg. She was the undergraduate research associate for the exhibit Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe, and has also interned at the Denver Art Museum and the Newberry Library.

Image: Jan Brueghel the Younger and Hendrick van Balen, Venus at the Forge of Vulcan (detail), 1617, Oil on panel. From the Grohmann Museum Collection at Milwaukee School of Engineering.