***Guest post from Bill Hutchison (MAPH ’12), editor-in-chief of Colloquium Magazine***
What is Colloquium?
The short answer? It’s MAPH’s online magazine of awesome stuff.
The longer answer? Well, that takes a bit of explaining…
I remember looking around Social Sciences 122, the grand room that marked my first weeks of lecture* at University of Chicago. I swooned at the elaborate wood-paneled walls, the layered chalkboards sliding up and down, the archaic light fixtures. I remember Professor Wray reciting the Big Names who had lectured in SS122, from Hannah Arendt to Slavoj Žižek. I looked around at a room full of strangers, and I wondered if there was an Arendt or a Žižek among us. Toward the end of my MAPH year, I knew the answer to that question….
*also called Colloquium, leading to frequent casual confusion
The answer wasn’t about who was the smartest talker or the best writer or the deepest thinker. It wasn’t about who was going to grow up and get famous. It wasn’t about Arendt and it definitely wasn’t about Žižek. The answer had to do with getting together, building ideas with others, and being part of a conversation that we cared about.
At the University of Chicago and in MAPH in particular, we become part of this community of humanists, world-changers, and fierce question-askers. We chase the ineffable and, in one form or another, we chronicle that pursuit. Those chronicles are how we talk together when we can’t talk together. When we founded Colloquium, it was to give a home to these chronicles-as-conversations.
Colloquium is run entirely by MAPH students and alumni. We launched our first issue in October 2012, and we’re building our Fall 2014 issue now, which will launch in November. We hope we’ll come celebrate with us on November 7th at The Smart Museum. For text submissions, send well-written, thoughtful and polished pieces. Academic articles should be conference paper-length or shorter. Most other submissions should be under 7,500 words, probably significantly. Look at the variety of articles we have published; we want to continue to include a diverse body of work.
Please submit both a pdf and a Word document of all text submissions. The document name should include the author’s surname and the title of the piece. Please also include a brief bio that indicates your relationship to MAPH. If you are submitting visual or auditory work, it can be attached to an email, or you can supply us with a link.
Email submissions to colloquium@uchicago.edu. Please include your name, and the word “Submission” in the subject line.
FAQ:
Why do you use the “Q” as your logo?
Because it is the most badass of all the letters.