ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Past Lunch Colloquia

2023-2024 Kaplan Conversations

2022-2023 Kaplan Conversations

Fall 2022

September 28 - Welcome KC

October 12 - Faculty Fellow
Dissonant Coalitions: Julius Eastman’s New York City, 1968–1990
Ryan Dohoney (Associate Professor of Musicology; Core Faculty, Program in Critical Theory and Comparative Literary Studies; Affiliate Faculty, Gender and Sexuality Studies)

November 2 - Postdoctoral Fellows
Chandana Anusha (Postdoctoral Fellow of Environment, Race, and Ethnicity)
Mega-Port Projects and Coastal Ecologies in 21st-Century Western India
and
Trish Breder (Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Humanities)
Walking Women: Mobilities of Independence and Care in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

November 16 - Faculty Fellow
Jews, Animals, and Jewish Animals in Medieval Europe
David Shyovitz (Associate Professor, Departments of History and Religious Studies, and Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies)

Winter 2023

February 1 - Faculty Fellow
Molecular Race 
Michelle N. Huang (Assistant Professor, Department of English and Asian American Studies Program)

February 15 - Faculty Fellow
Refinements of Cruelty: Enslavement, Enfreakment, and the Performance Archive
Danielle Bainbridge (Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre)

March 1 - Faculty Fellow
Power Over the Land: Race, Colonialism, and the American Midwest
Doug Kiel (Assistant Professor, Department of History and Kaplan Humanities Institute; Faculty Affiliate, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research [CNAIR]) 

Spring 2023

April 12 - Faculty Fellow
Political Life After Civil War: A Longitudinal Study of War Zones in Colombia
Ana Arjona (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science)

April 26 - Faculty Fellow
Fictions of Judgment: Empiricism, Aesthetics, and the End of Ends
Vivasvan Soni (Associate Professor, Department of English)

May 3 - Faculty Fellow
Black girls speak: Anti-blackness, fugitivity, and refusal in education
kihana miraya ross (Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies)

May 17 - Library Fellow
Crate & Barrel Case Study, 1962-1970
Dana Lamparello (Head of Public Services, McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives)

2021-2022 Kaplan Conversations

Fall 2021

September 29 - Welcome KC

October 13 - Faculty Fellow
Criminal Testimonial Injustice
Jennifer Lackey, Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor, Department of Philosophy; Director, Northwestern Prison Education Program

October 27 - Faculty Fellow
Not Just a Matter of Taste: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Scottish Aesthetics
Rachel Zuckert, Professor, Department of Philosophy; Affiliate Faculty, Department of German

November 10 - Faculty Fellow
Inventories of Ruin. Act 2: Memorializing the Mexican Dead
J. Michelle Molina, Associate Professor, Departments of Religious Studies and History

November 17 - Postdoctoral Fellow
#Explore: Social Media and Indigenous Sovereignty
Joseph Whitson, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Department of History and Kaplan Humanities Institute

Winter 2022

January 12 - Postdoctoral Fellow
Scent Sensibilities: Fragrance, Memory, and the 'Greening' of Imperialist Nostalgia 
Tuyen Le, ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow of the Kaplan Humanities Institute

January 26 - Faculty Fellow
The Designs of Nature, The Ecology of Race
Rebecca Zorach, Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History, Department of Art History

February 9 - Postdoctoral Fellow
Security experts, the Middle East, and Re-Imagining U.S. Empire from the “Center”
Negar Razavi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Kaplan Humanities Institute

February 23 - Faculty Fellow
Contrapuntal Humanism: The Afterlives of Humanism in Holocaust Studies
Anna Parkinson, Associate Professor, Department of German, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and Jewish Studies Program

March 2 - Faculty Fellow
Caste Reinvented: Arains, Islam, and Politics in Twentieth Century South Asia
Ashish Koul, Assistant Professor, Department of History

Spring 2022

April 6 - Faculty Fellow
The Fever Archive: Race, Risk, and Survival in the Wake of Sierra Leone’s Ebola Outbreak
Adia Benton, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Program of African Studies

April 20 - Faculty Fellow
Healing Democracy: A Medical History of Medellín's Cocaine Wars
Lina Britto, Associate Professor, Department of History; Affiliate Faculty, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

April 27 - Library Fellow
Worshipping Buddhalupe and Seeking Liberation with Buddhist Practices
Michelle Guittar, Latin American Studies Librarian, Head of Instruction & Curriculum Support, Northwestern University Libraries

May 4 - Faculty Fellow
Evil Eye (graphic novel)
Ozge Samanci, Associate Professor, Department of Radio/Television/Film, School of Communication

May 11 - Faculty Fellow
Voicing the Possible: Technique, Vocal Sound, and Black Women on the Musical Stage
Masi Asare, Assistant Professor, Departments of Theatre and Performance Studies

2019-2020 Kaplan Conversations

Fall 2019

October 2- Welcome Lunch Colloquium

October 16 - Faculty Fellow
Delusions of Labor: Labor Recruitment and Family Reunification in the Federal Republic of Germany
Lauren Stokes, Assistant Professor, Department of History

October 30 - Faculty Fellow
Culture U: Arts Training in the Modern Research University
Gary Fine, James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology

November 6 - Faculty Fellow
Eldercare
Kyle Henry, Associate Professor of Filmmaking, and Acting Director, MFA in Documentary Media, Department of Radio, TV, Film

November 13 - Faculty Fellow
Before and Behind Us in Time: Ancestry, Denial, and Evolving the American Story
Rachel Jamison Webster, Associate Professor of Instruction, Department of English, Creative Writing

Winter 2020

January 15 - Faculty Fellow
The Justice Gap in Global Forest Governance
Kim Marion Suiseeya, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Environmental Policy and Culture Program, and Center for Native American and Indigenous Research

February 12 - Faculty Fellow
Operas and Politics of Catherine the Great Empress/ario
Inna Naroditskaya, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Bienen School of Music

February 26 - Faculty Fellow
Consuming the Hospital: International Voluntourism in Tanzanian Health Facilities
Noelle Sullivan, Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Lecturer; Associate Professor of Instruction, Global Health Studies

March 4 - Faculty Fellow
Lives of the Machines: Ten Memoirs from the Reign of Technology
Ken Alder, Professor of History and Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities; Director, Science in Human Culture Program

Spring 2020

April 15 - Faculty Fellow
The Traffic with Iranian Pilgrims: Religion, Economy and Territory Across Borders
Emrah Yıldız, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies

April 22 - Faculty Fellow
Travel Writing and the Journey in Modern South Asia
Daniel Majchrowicz, Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

May 6 - Faculty Fellow
Item: Poems
Natasha Trethewey, Board of Trustees Professor of English

May 13 - Library Fellow
Being First Two Times Over
Qiana Johnson, Collection and Organizational Data Analysis Librarian, Assessment and Planning, Northwestern University Libraries

2016–2017 Kaplan Conversations 

Fall 2016

September 28 - Welcome Lunch Colloquium

October 5 - Artists in Residence
Poets TJ Dema and Mayda Del Valle

October 12 - Faculty Fellow
The Paradox of Sexual Identities
Héctor Carillo, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies Program

November 2 - New Faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies/History
Bleeding Out: Histories and Legacies of 'Indian Blood'
Doug Kiel, Assistant Professor, Humanities and Department of History

November 16 - Faculty Fellow
The Black Pacific: Black Hawaiians' Conceptions of Race and Indigeneity
Nitasha Sharma, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and Asian American Studies Program; Affiliate of Performance Studies

Winter 2017

January 11 - Faculty Fellow
Barbarism, Autochthony, and Race in African Thought
Jonathon Glassman, Professor, Department of History

February 8 - Faculty Fellow
Feeling Europe: The Black and African Diaspora in the Heart of Empire
Michelle M. Wright, Professor, Department of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies Program; Faculty Chair of Hobart Women's Residential College

February 15 - Faculty Fellow
Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam
Brannon Ingram, Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

February 22 - Postdoctoral Fellow
Indigenizing Ice: Tasting Cold in Settler Colonial Hawai‘i
Hi‘ilei Hobart (Native American and Indigenous Studies)

Spring 2017

April 19 - Faculty Fellow
Invisible Hands: Print Culture, Class, and US Latino Modernism
John Alba Cutler, Associate Professor, Department of English and Latina/o Studies Program

May 3 - Postdoctoral Fellow
Political Moves: Dance and Power in Revolutionary Cuba
Elizabeth Schwall (Dance Studies)

May 17 - Faculty Fellow
At the Limit of the Obscene: Realism, Aesthetics, Profanation
Erica Weitzman, Assistant Professor, Department of German

Lunch Colloquia 2015-2016

Fall 2015

September 23 - Welcome Lunch Colloquium

October 7 - Faculty Fellow 
Sexual Health as Buzzword: Histories of Emergence and Politics of Proliferation
Steven Epstein, Professor, Dept. of Sociology; John C. Shaffer Professor in the Humanities

October 21 - Postdoctoral Fellow 
The Little Database: A Poetics of Digital Formats
Danny Snelson, Andrew Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities

October 28 - Faculty Fellow 
An Aesthetics of Anti-racism: African-Americans in Soviet Visual Culture
Christina Kiaer, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art History

November 11 - Postdoctoral Fellow 
Amanda Graham, Andrew Mellon Fellow in Dance Studies

Winter 2016

January 27 - Faculty Fellow 
The Development of Roman Intercommunity Trade: Institutional Continuity and Change
Taco Terpstra, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Classics

February 3 - Visiting Scholar
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War
Ari Kelman, Professor of History, Penn State University

February 10 - Faculty Fellow 
Tug of War: Confronting the Imperial Presidency, 1966-1992
Michael Allen, Associate Professor, Dept. of History

February 17 - Faculty Fellow 
Hegel and the Logic of Self-Constitution
Mark Alznauer, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Philosophy

February 24
Peter Erickson, Visiting Resident Scholar
Kevin Boyle, Honorary Fellow

March 9 - New Faculty Chat
Mark McClish (Religious Studies), Mi-Ryong Shim (Asian Languages and Cultures) and Kelly Wisecup (English)

Spring 2016

April 6 - Artist in Residence
Moving Through: Recent Work by Brendan Fernandes
Brendan Fernandes

April 13
Sianne Ngai, Professor of English, Stanford

April 20 - Faculty Fellow 
Religion and Global Politics Beyond Freedom and Violence
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science

April 27 - Faculty Fellow 
Open TV: Developing Art and Community-Based Networked Television
Aymar Jean Christian, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication Studies

May 4
The 'Monograph' in the Age of the Internet: A Progress Report on a Mellon Foundation Initiative
Donald Waters, Senior Program Officer for Scholarly Communications, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

May 11 - Postdoctoral Fellow 
Dru Drury's Collection and Eighteenth-Century Entomology in Practice
Sheila Wille, Andrew Mellon Fellow in Environmental Humanities

May 18 - Library Fellow 
Modibo Keita’s "L’Enfant Sarakolle: Students as Ethnographers in Colonial French West Africa"
Marcia Tiede, Area Studies Cataloger (Africana), Dept. of Metadata and Discovery Services, Northwestern University Library

Lunch Colloquia 2014-2015

Fall 2014

October 8 - Welcome Lunch Colloquium

October 15 - Faculty Fellow
Race-Conscious Affirmative Action in College Admissions from the March on Washington to Bakke
Anthony Chen, Associate Professor, Departments of Sociology and Political Science

October 29 - New Faculty Colloquium
Lina Britto, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Shayna Silverstein, Assistant Professor, Department of Performance Studies

November 5 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
The Humanities in the Age of Ecological Catastrophe
Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair, English, Rice University
Deborah Coen, Associate Professor, History, Barnard College, Columbia University

November 12 - Faculty Fellow
Chinese Translocalism and the South China Sea, 1661-1937                    
Melissa Macauley, Associate Professor, Department of History

November 19 - New Faculty Colloquium
Corey Byrnes, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Erica Weitzman, Assistant Professor, Department of German

Winter 2015

January 14 - New Faculty Colloquium
Sean Hanretta, Associate Professor, Department of History

January 21 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
Crossing Borders
Keller Easterling, Professor, School of Architecture, Yale University
Ramón Saldivar, Professor, English and Comparative Studies, Stanford University

January 28 - Artist in Residence Colloquium
Walter Kitundu

February 4 - Faculty Fellow
The Epistemology of Groups
Jennifer Lackey, Professor, Department of Philosophy

February 11 - Faculty Fellow
Cosmopolitan Spectacles: Latin American culture at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions
Alejandra Uslenghi, Assistant Professor,Department of Spanish and Portuguese

February 25 - Faculty Fellow
Stranger Publics, or Misreading the News: The Newspaper Novel in Arabic
Rebecca Johnson, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

March 4 - Faculty Fellow
"A Green Oasis in the History of My Life": The Culture of Debating Among Free African Americans in 1850s Charleston
Angela Ray, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies

Spring 2015

April 15 - Harris Lecture Lunch Colloquium
David Joselit, Distinguished Professor, Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

April 22 - New Faculty Colloquium
Jun Hu, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
Shaundra Myers, Assistant Professor, Department of English

April 29 - Faculty Fellow
American Expressionism on the Soviet Stage: O’Neill and Treadwell at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre
Dassia Posner, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre

May 6 - Faculty Fellow
The Political Economy of Garbage: Environmental Racism and the New American Suburb
Ana Aparicio, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Latina/Latino Studies Program

May 13 - New Faculty Colloquium
Patrick Noonan, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures 
Ariel Rogers, Assistant Professor, Department of Radio, Television, and Film

May 20 - Faculty Fellow
Signal and Noise in the Art and Teaching of Ed Paschke
Jason Nargis, Manuscript Librarian, Special Collections and Archives, Northwestern University Library

Lunch Colloquia 2013-2014

Fall 2013

October 16 - Fall Artist in Residence
John Neff

October 30 -  Faculty Fellow
Engines of Thought: Experimental Allegory in the Middle Ages
Katharine Breen, Associate Professor, Department of English

November 6 - Faculty Fellow
The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
Krista Thompson, Associate Professor, Department of Art History

November 13 - Distinguished Harris Lecture Lunch Colloquium
Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life: Socrates
John Cooper, Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University

Winter 2014

January 15 - Winter Artist in Residence
The Pursuit of Intimacy
S. Leo Chiang

January 22 - Faculty Fellow
Fear and Rebellion in Syria
Wendy Pearlman, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

January 29 - Faculty Fellow
Liberty's Majesty: Theorizing Monarchy in Postrevolutionary Haiti
Doris Garroway, Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian

February 12 - New Faculty Wednesday: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Kevin Boyle, Professor, Department of History
Paola Zamperini, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

February 19 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
Knowing in the Age of the Virtual University
Vinay Lal, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA
Michael Patrick Lynch, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

March 5 - New Faculty Wednesday: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Taco Terpstra, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics
James Hodge, Assistant Professor, Department of English; Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Spring 2014

April 2 - Spring Artist in Residence
Interrogating Historical Caribbean Moments and Transcultural Themes
Christopher Cozier

April 16 - Faculty Fellow
Traditional Medicine Enters the Global Arena
Helen Tilley, Associate Professor, Department of History

April 30 - New Faculty Wednesday: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Juan Martinez, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Keith Woodhouse, Assistant Professor, Department of History

May 7 - Faculty Fellow
Journeys to Tombs: From Catullus to Seneca
John Schafer, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics

May 14 - New Faculty Wednesday: Interdisciplinary Conversations
Laura Brueck, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
Paul Ramirez, Assistant Professor, Department of History

May 21 - Library Fellow
Don't Throw Anything Away: The Archive of Charlotte Moorman
Scott Krafft, Librarian, Special Collections and Archives

Lunch Colloquia 2012-2013

Fall 2012

October 3 -Distinguished Harris Lecture Lunch Colloquium
Connecting Anjou and Agra: Circulation and Representation Between Bourbon France and Mughal India
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (History, UCLA)

October 10 - Welcome Lunch Colloquium
Jenny Polak (Fall Artist-in-Residence)

October 17 
(N)IMBY

October 31
Othello's Pathologies: Reading Adolfo Caminha with Lombroso
César Braga-Pinto (Spanish & Portuguese)

November 7
Embodying Latinidad: Intralatino/a Subjects in Chicago
Frances Aparicio (Spanish & Portuguese)

November 14 - Faculty Fellow
Building a Ghetto without Walls: The Persecution of Jews in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1941
Ben Frommer (History)

Winter 2013

January 16
Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel
Marco Nereo Rotelli (Winter Artist-in-Residence)

January 23
How to Hide an Empire: The United States and its Insular Territories in the Twentieth Century
Daniel Immerwahr (History)

January 30 - Faculty Fellow
Romanticism as Reading Practice: Seeing Austen through the Keatsian Mist
Emily Rohrbach (English)

February 6 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
Deborah Silverman (UCLA) and Todd Porterfield (University of Montreal)

February 27 - Library Fellow
The Leopold & Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America's Most Famous Crimes
Nina Barrett (Communications Specialist, Northwestern Library)

March 6 - Faculty Fellow
Hamlet's Skin and Yorick's Skull: Shakespearean Resurrections
Kasey Evans (English)

Spring 2013

April 10 - Spring Artist in Residence
Summerstock
Melika Bass 

April 17
Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With
Inigo Manglano-Ovalle (Art Theory & Practice)

April 24
Osato's Complaint: Tellings Off the Hallways of History
Andrew Way Leong (English)

May 1
Of Matter and the Spirit: Afro-Atlantic Religions, Modernity, and the Problem of Materiality
Sylvester Johnson (African American Studies)

May 8 - Faculty Fellow
Hands and Handiwork: Recipe Literacy in Early Modern England
Wendy Wall (English)

May 15 - Faculty Fellow
Illicit Passions: Adultery and Sentimentality in Venezuela in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Nathalie Bouzaglo (Spanish & Portuguese)

May 22
Recruitment in Civil War: An Institutionalist Approach
Ana Arjona (Political Science)

Lunch Colloquia 2011-2012

Fall 2011

September 28 -  Welcome Lunch Colloquium

October 5 - Fall Artist in Residence
War is Trauma
Nicolas Lampert

October 12 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
Corporeality and the Boundaries of the Human
Carl Elliott (Center for Bioethics, University of Minnesota) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Anthropology, UC Berkeley)

October 21 - Distinguished Harris Lecture Lunch Colloquium
Nadar's Photographopolis
Eduardo Cadava (English, Princeton)

October 26 
Mark Kauntze (Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Studies)

November 16 - Visiting Scholar
Mary Roberts (John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art, Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney)

Winter 2012

January 11 - Winter Artist in Residence
Incident Command
Maximilian Goldfarb

January 18 
Postwar Poetry and the Ruins of Inter-Americanism
Harris Feinsod (Weinberg College Fellow, English)

January 25 - Faculty Fellow
The Role of Matter in Aristotle's Natural Science
David Ebrey (Philosophy)

February 1
Still Life: Death and Personhood in Rabbinic Impurity Laws
Mira Balberg (Religious Studies)

February 8
Understanding Bodium Castle
Matthew Johnson (Anthropology)

February 15 - Faculty Fellow
A World Undone: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1912
İpek Yosmaoğlu (History)

February 22 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
The Origins and Disappearance of the Humanities
Caroline Winterer (History, Stanford) and Geoffrey Harpham (President, Director, National Humanities Center)

February 29 - Faculty Fellow
Coherence: The Engine of Jewish Law
Barry Wimpfheimer (Religious Studies)

Spring 2012

April 4 - Spring Artist in Residence
The Insignificant Other: The Very Young and the Very Old in Our Society
Antonio Martorell 

April 11 - Faculty Fellow
City of Heads, City of Rumors: Kyoto in Crisis, 1862-1880
Amy Stanley (History)

April 18 - Faculty Fellow
Visualizing Radicalism: The Book as an Ideological Object in Russian Avante-Garde Culture
Nina Gourianova (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

April 25 - Dialogue Series Lunch Colloquium
The Limits of the Known World
Chandra Mukerji (Sociology and Science Studies, UCSD) and Piotr Michalowski (Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan)

May 2 - Faculty Fellow
Mirror of the Soul: Law, Islam, and Language under the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912-1956)
Katherine Hoffman (Anthropology)

May 9 - Library Fellow
Brought to Light: Light and the Unseen in Contemporary Art
Julie Rudder

May 16
The Black Bolivars: African Americans in an Inter-American World, 1810-1830
Caitlin Fitz (History)