Leah Feldman appointed Interim Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry for the 2024-25 academic year
Leah Feldman headshot, courtesy of Leah Feldman.
Catriona MacLeod, Special Advisor to the Provost for the Arts and Deputy Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities at The University of Chicago announced today that Leah Feldman, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and The College, has been appointed Interim Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Feldman will serve as Interim Director while Seth Brodsky, Gray Center Director and Associate Professor of Music in the Humanities, is on sabbatical for the 2024–25 academic year.
Professor Feldman received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013; she joined the UChicago faculty in 2015. Her research focuses on critical approaches to ethnicity, gender, and sexuality from the vantage point of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
“I am thrilled that Leah will be serving as Interim Director of the Gray Center,” commented MacLeod. “A past Gray Fellow herself, Leah is a Comparatist with a vibrant interdisciplinary approach that encompasses work in material culture, fashion and costume history, film, and art. She is well poised to lead the Gray Center during Seth Brodsky’s well-deserved research sabbatical.”
“One word that comes forcefully to mind with Leah is intrepid,” Brodsky said. “She is intrepid in tracking the historical and cultural restlessness of her research subjects; intrepid in traversing geographic and disciplinary borders; intrepid in her openness to so many fractious social and aesthetic experiences. She’s technically a scholar of comparative literature, but really, she’s a tracker of limits and borders—a tracker and a crosser!—and in this sense, Leah is a model of what we try to cultivate at the Gray Center. Zach and I first saw this in her Gray Fellowship collaboration with Slavs and Tatars; but I know we’ll see it on another order this year.”
“I’m thrilled to be working with the Gray Center this year exploring arts and academic collaborations that intersect with anticolonial praxis, including highlighting performance and sound experiments in dynamic cultural contact zones across the Caucasus and Central Asia,” commented Feldman.
In her role as Interim Director, Feldman will work closely with the Gray Center’s Faculty Advisory Committee, its Director of Programs and Fellowships, Zachary Cahill, its Associate Director of Fellowships and Operations, Mike Schuh, and the rest of the Gray Center staff and fellows.
“I am really looking forward to working more closely with Leah in her new capacity as Interim Director,” said Cahill, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Gray Center’s biannual publication Portable Gray. “A former fellow herself, she gets the Gray and is super fun to think with. Her Gray Center Mellon Fellowship with the artist collective Slavs and Tatars—which resulted in the soon-to-be-released children’s sound book Azbuka Strikes Back: An Anticolonial ABCs—is a brilliant example of Leah Feldman’s ebullient mind and scholarship.”
Cahill continued, “In addition to planning an unconventional book launch this October, we are going to dig deep into a part of the world we haven’t worked with that much, namely former Soviet States in the Caucusus and Central Asia. It’s really going to open up new worlds for the Center to connect with the arts and culture that drive so much of Leah’s scholarly work.”
Events in the works include an evening of experimental sound to launch Azbuka Strikes Back and an artist-academic residency that will inspire a related forthcoming issue of Portable Gray.
In addition to their fellowship program, the Gray Center’s programs include international conferences, incubator initiatives, salons, and institutional collaborations across divisions, departments, and other programs at UChicago. To learn more about the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, visit graycenter.uchicago.edu.