Jessica Winegar named new Kaplan Institute Director
June 11, 2020
We are delighted to announce that Jessica Winegar has been named the new Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities!
Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in cultural politics. She is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Core Faculty in the Program in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern. Her research and teaching draw on a range of disciplines and extend to how U.S. institutions deal with the MENA region.
Winegar's body of work focuses on how people invest social arenas—such as art worlds, education, and political protest—with liberating potential, while re/producing hierarchies of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. Her current book project, Counter-Revolutionary Aesthetics: How Egypt’s Uprising Faltered, examines how aesthetic forms, judgments, and practices play a central role in both delegitimizing revolutionary actions and in producing everyday right-wing attachments.
Winegar has been a key member of the Kaplan community for years. She led our first Global Humanities Lab to Istanbul, has taught twice in the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program, and has served on the Humanities Council. She was also Kaplan’s interim director in 2017-2018.
Winegar will begin her directorship on September 1, 2020.