THE GREAT GATSBY: A WORKING SEMINAR
Saturday, September 20, 1997 from 9:30 am - 3:00 pm
The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and the Chicago Humanities Festival
present
Eric Arnesen: “Social Class in the Roaring Twenties”
Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Eric Arnesen specializes in American labor history. His most recent book is Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politic, 1863-1923. He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1997-98 and is working on a book on labor history in Chicago.
John Binder: “The Twenties: When Machine Guns and the Stock Market Roared”
Formerly Professor of Finance in the Business School, John Binder is now Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A specialist in the financial history of the early twentieth century, he is also an expert on the history of gangsters in Chicago.
Robert Bruegmann: “The Urban Landscape of Gatsbyland”
Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Robert Bruegmann is a specialist in modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism and landscape architecture. He has served as consultant and curator for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society. His forthcoming work is The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chicago 1880-1918.
Judith Kegan Gardiner: “Flappers and Feminists: Women in the 1920s”
Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Judith Gardiner is both a Renaissance scholar and a modernist who has written extensively on feminist theory, the representation of women in literature, and women writers. Her many publications include works on Doris Lessing, Shakespeare’s sonnets and psychoanalysis. Most recently, she edited the book Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in the Theory and Practice.
Christian Messenger: “Great Gatsby and American Sporting Life”
Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Christian Messenger writes on modern American fiction, cultural studies and the theory of sport and play. His book, Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner, received the Carl Sandburg Award for Best Non-Fiction published by a Chicago author.
Howard Reich: “The Jazz Age”
Howard Reich is Arts Critic/Jazz Critic for the Chicago Tribune, where he has been on staff since 1983. His book Van Cliburn received plaudits from the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. He has received writing awards from the Chicago Association of Black Journalists and the Chicago Tribune, and served on the jury for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in music.
