Anastasia Giannakidou is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago.

Giannakidou's broad interests lie in the area of meaning (semantics), and its relation to linguistic form (morphology and syntax). She is also interested in how sentences are used in context (pragmatics) to produce, and enrich, meaning, as well as questions about the foundations of semantics and philosophy of language (mainly questions regarding truth, belief, and context sensitivity). Giannakidou has worked on various topics in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and always within a comparative crosslinguistic perspective, which often includes a lot of typological and variation considerations. Her crosslinguistic orientation is partly due to the fact that she is interested in describing the grammar of Greek, her mother tongue, and partly to the fact that she firmly believes that crosslinguistic comparisons are fundamental to our understanding of how grammar works. Besides Greek, Giannakidou has also worked on Romance (Spanish and Catalan mainly), Germanic languages (German and Dutch), and recently, in joint work, Chinese and Basque. Recently, her interests have also been expanded in two areas: the internal structure (syntax and semantics) of the quantificational noun phrase (which is the source of inspiration for her book, co-edited with Monika Rathert, to appear with Oxford), and psycholinguistics (studying of home sign systems in collaboration with Susan Goldin Meadow and Carolyn Mylander from Psychology).  Together with Diane Brentari and Susan Goldin Meadow she is a founding director of the University of Chicago Center for Gesture Sign and Language (gslcenter.uchicago.edu).  Read more here.

Palestinian-Israeli novelist Sayed Kashua has written three best-selling novels (all three of which have been translated into English). He is the author of a very popular weekly column for Haaretz newspaper, the creator of an award-winning prime-time TV series (“Arab Labor”), and his first feature film is scheduled for release this summer.  Through all of these mediums, Kashua provides Israeli audiences with a frank and often comical picture of the social and cultural dynamics of Israel/Palestine as they are experienced by someone who straddles the two societies (as a Palestinian who is a citizen of Israel and was educated in Hebrew speaking schools and universities). The dynamics of multilingualism are articulated in different forms in different parts of Kashua’s work. His novels are written in Hebrew, but they deal extensively with the traffic between Hebrew and Arabic as both a thematic and a formal question. In his writing for the screen, Kashua mixes the languages – creating a representation of the sociolinguistic phenomenon of code switching. During his residency at the University of Chicago, Kashua will continue to experiment with mixing Hebrew and Arabic in his writing, an endeavor that raises both technical and political questions. Doing so at a distance from the political and cultural pressure cooker that is the city of Jerusalem, his home, and in a setting that prompts him to reflect on the experiment through dialogue with scholars and other practitioners would turn this into an altogether different process, a prospect that Kashua welcomes.

Na'ama Rokem is Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. 

Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose - as a figure of thought, a mode and a medium - played an instrumental role in the literary foundations of the Zionist revolution. She is now writing a book about the encounter between Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai, two bilingual poets, as well as articles on multilingualism and translation in the works of Hannah Arendt and Leah Goldberg, and on the politics of translation in Israel. With Amir Eshel, she coedited a special issue of Prooftexts, on German-Hebrew relations.

Rokem is the organizer of two international conferences at the University of Chicago:  "German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation,"  and "German-Jewish Echoes in the Middle East".

Read more here.