People
Seth Brodsky
Director
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (California, 2017) and has published on such topics as opera, influence, and the music of John Cage and Benjamin Britten.
Brodsky’s scholarly and critical work pursues a number of related lines of inquiry. The first concerns music of the 20th and 21st centuries, in particular the field of “composerly production,” with all the openness this connotes: How is “the composer” constructed, and how does he/she function culturally, discursively, technologically, and mythically? A second line of inquiry involves the role of unconscious processes, particularly as figured in psychoanalytic discourse, in the making and experiencing of music. Current projects revolve around the notoriously slippery concept of repetition.
Brodsky earned his PhD from the Eastman School of Music, and his BA from Wake Forest University.
Leah Feldman
Interim Director (2024)
An associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at The University of Chicago, Leah Feldman’s research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics, and anti-colonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018), winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Prize, exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus, and Western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Feldman is currently writing on the rise of the New Right in late/post-Soviet Eurasia and a book tentatively titled Feeling Collapse on Soviet film, art, and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus amidst the collapsing sensorium of the Soviet Empire. Feldman’s work has appeared in Slavic Review, boundary 2, Ab Imperio, and Global South, and she serves on the editorial collective for boundary 2. Feldman has also co-authored a queer anticolonial communist children’s book with the artist collective Slavs & Tatars.
Zachary Cahill
Director of Programs and Fellowships
Over the last several years, Zachary Cahill has been actively engaged in developing dynamic arts programming at the University of Chicago, particularly in his role as Open Practice Committee Coordinator in the Department of Visual Arts from 2007 to 2016, where he also served as a Lecturer. Cahill is an accomplished interdisciplinary artist. Since 2009, he has been working on the long-term project the USSA, an exhibition-based fictional narrative relating to concepts of nation building. He has had solo exhibitions at sites including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. His writings have appeared in international contemporary art journals such as Afterall (where he also served as a co-editor), Artforum, Artforum.com, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, and Mousse. Cahill earned his BFA in Sculpture from Cornell University in 1995 and his MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago in 2007.
Mike Schuh
Associate Director, Fellowships and Operations
As Associate Director, Mike Schuh is involved in every layer of the Gray Center, with a particular focus on actualizing projects and programs with our various collaborators. Recently, Schuh has been responsible for initiating the Gray Center’s forays into skateboarding through events, journal contributions, and our fellowship program.
In addition to his work with the Gray Center, Schuh is co-founder of Regards, a contemporary art gallery in Chicago known for supporting challenging and under-recognized artists, and has worked in exhibition planning and archiving at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. As an artist, he has participated in exhibitions, screenings, and events across the United States.
Schuh earned his BFA at Syracuse University in 2001 and his MFA at the University of Chicago in Visual Art in 2009.
Naomi Blumberg
Managing Editor of Portable Gray
Naomi Blumberg is the Managing Editor of Portable Gray and Associate Director of the Arts, Science + Culture Initiative. Before coming to UChicago, Blumberg was an editor of arts and culture at Encyclopaedia Britannica, following many years working as a curator and publications manager at art and history museums including the Chicago History Museum, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. She holds a BA from Barnard College in Art History, a master’s from Tufts University in Art History and Museum Studies, and a master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Desiree Foerster
Director
Desiree Foerster studies new media arts and design from a process-relational and critical phenomenology perspective. She is a Senior Research Associate in the Cinema and Media Studies department at the University of Chicago and the director of the Art, Science and Culture Initiative. Previously, Foerster was an Assistant Professor for Digital Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She did her PhD at the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam with her thesis “Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes” and she holds additional degrees in Media Culture Analysis from Duesseldorf (MA) and Comparative Literature and Philosophy (BA) from Bochum. She regularly collaborates with colleagues from the arts and science on projects of research-creation.
Advisory Council
The Gray Center Advisory Council is made up of faculty and staff members selected by the Director of the Gray Center and appointed for two- and three-year terms by the Office of the Provost. The Council advises on curatorial decisions, programming, and devising strategies for achieving the Gray Center mission.