The Franke Institute for the Humanities

Good things are happening at the Center for Disciplinary Innovation at the Franke Institute for the Humanities!

Course gives students a backstage look at Court Theatre’s award-winning production Court had a banner year at the recent Equity Jeff Awards as ‘Berlin’ took center stage

Come join us October 17-19 at the Logan Center for the Arts for the Opening Symposium of the Year of Games: three days of game makers, writers, and teachers in conversation about games, their past, present, and future, their place on campus, and-most importantly-what we love about them.

Events will kick-off with a Videogame Music Carillon Concert presented by Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Friday and Saturday keynotes will take the form of live tapings of journalist Simon Parkin's My Perfect Console podcast with guests Alex Seropian and Evan Narcisse (the latter session co-presented by the University of Chicago Humanities Day and the Chicago Humanities Festival).

We hope you will join us for this exciting event whether you are already a fan of games or have always wondered what the fuss is all about!

More info / registration here: https://voices.uchicago.edu/yearofgames/symposium/

Kudos to 2024-25 Franke Residential Fellow Jana Matuszak (Middle Eastern Studies), who has "deciphered a forgotten cuneiform tablet that currently resides in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Known as Ni 12501, the 4,400-year-old inscribed clay object was originally found during nineteenth-century excavations at the ancient city of Nippur in present-day southern Iraq, but was given little scholarly attention due to its fragmentary nature. The tablet was mentioned in a publication by esteemed Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer in the 1950s, though it was not fully studied until Matuszak’s recent research." https://archaeology.org/news/2025/07/28/newly-deciphered-cuneiform-tablet-contains-unknown-sumerian-myth/