News

Choosing Swift Again and Again

By Sarah Hammerschlag, John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions and History of Judaism | April 8, 2026

black and white photo of a woman teaching

The first time I came to Swift Hall, I was there to decide if it was the right place for me. It was early April 1998. Outside, a thin layer of gray slush coated the lawn. Inside, the now-familiar pattern of atonal clangs sounded its irregular rhythm throughout the building’s radiators. I came only for a day and had a series of meetings that felt as enigmatic and mysterious as those in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man. At the end of one long, dark office, behind a heavy desk, sat Mark Krupnick; behind another sat Michael Fishbane; behind a third, Tikva Frimer-Kensky. Intimidated by the setting and the people, I asked, in a whisper, about course offerings. Krupnick leaned over his desk, one hand cupped to his ear, trying to hear me. I told Fishbane I was interested in rabbinic Judaism, but I knew so little that I couldn’t think of an appropriate question, too afraid I would mix up the terminology: “midrash” with “Mishnah,” one Talmud with the other. Honestly, I was not sure what made Swift a Divinity School. Was everyone there studying God? This was not, I thought, an admissible question. The meetings went poorly. In the basement, I found a graduate student xeroxing, the light flashing blue across her face as she turned each page and described her job as a research assistant, explaining why even the task of photocopying was a privilege. At the end of the day, I took the L back to O’Hare and flew home.

The second time I entered the building was in the spring of 1999, just over a year later. I had chosen the University of California, Santa Barbara over the University of Chicago, the commitment of a PhD program over the risk of an MA, and the warmth over the cold. But the promise of Southern California, with its preening Birds of Paradise in blue and orange and lush curtains of bougainvillea, had shown itself to be a mirage. At UCSB, there was one library, and it closed between terms. I missed the seasons and the smell of books. I missed people who stayed up all night reading and smoking cigarettes. This time, I came to Chicago in May for a conference on mysticism. The canopy of maples had spread its leaves over the green space, and graduate students sat in clusters on the Quad. What I remember most was how packed the lecture halls were. I knew enough by then to find conversations on varieties of negative theology mostly comprehensible, the faculty lectures exciting. It turned out people were studying God, or, at least, what one could not say about him. When a student over lunch made an irreverent joke about Jonathan Edwards and everyone in the group laughed uproariously, I looked around and realized I’d found my people. I reactivated my application.

Over the next six years, I listened to David Tracy recite Gerard Manley Hopkins from memory in Swift 106 while the radiators clanged and the windowpanes fogged. I learned philosophy of religions in 200 and studied Biblical Hebrew in 208. I sat many more times in front of those large oak desks, less afraid now because I’d learned to show up with a version of my questions from class already scribbled out in a notebook. In one office hours meeting, Paul Griffiths told me he agreed with Demea in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that submission was the next step when one reached reason’s cliff. And so I discovered that people I profoundly disagreed with could also be brilliant. I sat in the basement lounge before 8 a.m. Hebrew, eating instant oatmeal, and got cornered by “that guy” in class who scoffed when a woman spoke. He buried me with information on Spinoza’s knowledge of medieval Judaism. And so, I developed a suspicion of people who maintain the upper hand by controlling the discourse. I was humbled repeatedly, cried sometimes in the back stairwell, and found friends and mentors who would set the course of my life.

Over the years, I left and came back. There would be a third, fourth, and even a fifth time when I had to decide whether Swift Hall was the place for me. Sometimes, to go elsewhere, I was offered more money, occasionally more security, always better weather. Each time I chose Swift. It is not the architecture that keeps me here, although the third-floor angels are sometimes in my dreams. It is not the coffee shop, although I love eavesdropping on the conversations while waiting for a latte, knowing I could never hear the same exchange elsewhere. It is not the vast library across the way, where the same books I read have been handled by some of the greatest minds of the last century. It is, rather, the joy of Swift’s classrooms, the people in them, even the unlikable ones. It is the chance to talk with others also drawn to this difficult, demanding, enigmatic place. I love their questions, their sometimes open and often powerful minds, their willingness to return and ask again, read again (relegere), and reconsider. Some of Swift’s classrooms have replaced chalkboards with whiteboards. They have screens and projectors that I don’t know how to use. I am still a little scared before I teach, but excited each time I get to listen. I am aware, now more than ever, that even as it might sometimes remind me of the village at the foot of Kafka’s The Castle, Swift is a utopia: it is a place where undergrads do their reading no matter how much you assign, where graduate students have chosen a life of near poverty because it gives them space and time to think, where, twenty-five years in, my job is still to think and learn.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: