Fellows 2026-2027
May 12, 2026—The Kaplan Humanities Institute is delighted to announce our Faculty Fellows, Library Fellow, and Library Affiliate for 2026-2027!
Kaplan Institute Fellowships enable Northwestern faculty to pursue independent research projects of significance to the humanities within an interdisciplinary community of scholars. Faculty can apply for either a 50% teaching reduction or a full year of supported leave. The Library Fellowship offers a half-time release from regular work in order to pursue an independent research project, and the Library Affiliate serves as Library liaison and ambassador for Northwestern's humanities community.
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Project: Colonial Nationalisms in the Postcolony: Spaniards and Mestizos in Middle-Class Lima
"This project analyzes how Spanish migrants and upwardly mobile Limeños negotiate their competing occupation of urban space and access to labor in Lima, Peru. The focus is on linguistic, discursive, spatial, and economic strategies through which both groups mobilize social and political capital, showing that these practices instrumentalize colonial logics. I propose that nationalisms, both the nationalism of Peruvian elites and that of European arrivals, are built from colonial attachments and expectations and therefore sustain contemporary colonial relationships in the postcolonial world."
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Project: Karma, Commerce, and Conscience: Layman Pang and Moral Responsibility in Vernacular Chinese Buddhism
"This project explores how two related works of Buddhist theater from middle- and late-imperial China staged the classical Buddhist virtue of generosity as a problem that binds human relationships into tangled webs of karmic debt and punishment. My focus on these overlooked works of vernacular Buddhism shows how Buddhist values were negotiated outside the monastery among a wider Chinese Buddhist public."
Authority Metadata Librarian, Northwestern University Libraries
Library Fellow 2026-2027
Project: Unconventional Bookwomen
This project is about the antiquarian book company Hamill & Barker Inc., which opened in 1928 by partners Frances Hamill and Margery Barker. Using Hamill & Barker as a lens to look at themes such as gender, the rare book trade, bibliography, and women in business in the mid-20th century, this project hopes to answer the question: what was owning a business like for women between the first and second waves of feminism?
Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor, Department of Art History
Project: The Draftsmen's Empire: Art and the French Occupation of Egypt
"My project is the first study of draftsmanship as an apparatus of colonialism during the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). It focuses on the French artists tasked with systematically 'drawing' Egypt as part of a colonial effort to transform the Ottoman province into a sister republic, and I show that their drawings register both the limits of French colonial ambition and the many ways Egyptians appropriated and resisted the draftsmen’s pencil."
Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project: Utopian Habitations: Past Urban Futures in Mexican Literature and Architecture
This project examines how radical writers and architects involved in Mexico's urban struggles in the twentieth century turned to utopian forms of writing in futurist magazines, socialist realism novels, architecture projects, and oral history projects. Utopian writing served both to critique capitalist urbanization and propose alternative configurations of urban space. Their ideas on habitational justice led to social housing high-rises and self-built housing cooperatives that today stand as living ruins in Mexico's contemporary urban landscapes.
Professor, Departments of History and Black Studies
Project: Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History
"In Leaving New Orleans, I weave the history of my family into the history of the city, from the city's founding through its uncertain future amidst climate change. Through this 'personal urban history,' I argue that the history and future of New Orleans, often portrayed as exceptional to the United States, poses central questions about the meaning and fate of the nation."
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Project: The Real Housewives of French Louisiana
This project details the role of European women during France’s colonization of Louisiana in the eighteenth century in establishing households and a slave society. Many of these women came from modest or impoverished backgrounds and some were even exiled to the colony as punishment for crimes, but they were able to marry and create wealth once in Louisiana. These women’s material success in Louisiana was built upon the enslavement and racialization of other women, a pathway that was not possible for them in France.
Digital Archivist, Northwestern University Libraries
Library Affiliate 2026-20287
Kelsey O’Connell (she/her) is the Digital Archivist at Northwestern University Libraries where she manages the collection lifecycle of all born-digital and web archives for the McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives. She has a B.A. in History and an M.L.I.S. in Library Science with a Certificate in Archives and Cultural Heritage Resources and Services. Her research interests include digital accessibility, user experience of digital archives, and appraisal of digital records.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Program of African Studies
Project: Islamic Knowledge Unbound: The Islamic Republic of Mauritania and the Making of Transnational Religious Authority (19th-21st Century)
"My book examines how the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has emerged over the last century as a major center of classical Islamic and Arabic higher learning, often portrayed by both local and foreign Islamic knowledge seekers as 'authentically traditional' and 'untainted by modernity.' Drawing on a range of sources and methodologies, the monograph foregrounds the role played in this understudied process by generations of highly mobile, traditionally trained West Saharan Islamic scholars, who leveraged their distinctive education in Saharan religious seminaries to build successful transnational careers and attain religious and political influence across Africa, the Middle East, and beyond."
Audrey Silvestre
Assistant Professor, Program in Latina and Latino Studies
Project: Disobedient Frequencies: Queer Latine Punk in Los Angeles
Distortion, noise, and vibration carry histories often left unheard. Examining Latine auditory cultural production in Los Angeles from 2000 to 2020, the book argues that punk functions as sonic defiance and an anti-assimilationist world-making practice. It introduces “disobedient frequencies” through festivals, vocal distortion, parties, and DIY archives that sustain memory, community, and alternative social worlds.
