ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Greetings!

I’m thrilled to join the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities this year as its new Director!

Over the years I’ve benefited tremendously from my engagements with the Institute: doing some of my most innovative teaching with brilliant colleagues and students in the Kaplan Scholars Program, hosting a series of visiting artists from Egypt and India and Pakistan, and steadily expanding my scholarly perspective through my engagement in the close-knit intellectual community that the Institute cultivates in its steadfast support of humanistic inquiry. I cannot wait to continue to take this remarkable Institute forward as I take my turn in a long line of visionary directors who have come before me, and from whom I continue to learn so much.

This year I look forward to stewarding the excellent programs that the Institute already offers that enrich our whole intellectual community from undergraduate and graduate students to faculty, namely the Kaplan Scholars Program, the Franke Fellows Program, the Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, and the Faculty Fellowship Program, not to mention the myriad interdisciplinary research workshops where faculty have the freedom and support to engage in boundary-pushing thinking. I look forward in particular to continuing the work of previous directors to expand the global humanities. While supporting a full range of humanistic inquiry from ancient to modern times and across languages and oceans, I also look forward to inviting guests to our community to have conversations with us about some of the most pressing social, political, and environmental challenges of our time. Finally, I look forward to further developing the Kaplan Institute as a site of exciting undergraduate pedagogical innovation and an expanded source of support for collaborative faculty and graduate student projects large and small.

We welcome everyone in through the glass doors on Kresge Hall’s second floor! We hope that some of our new, smaller initiatives this year — support for reading groups and translation workshops, new faculty lectures and new book celebrations, and Friday morning writing retreats — will bring some new faces to our community. Please join us for our Kaplan Conversations in the Critical Humanities and visit humanities.northwestern.edu for updates on Kaplan initiatives including talks, funding calls, and other opportunities for faculty and students. Please also follow us on Instagram (@KaplanHum). And if you think of something you wish we’d do, please come by and tell us! We can’t wait to see you.