Kaplan Scholars Instructors: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Kaplan Scholars Instructors

Learn more about the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program.

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Hannah Feldman

Department of Art History, and Programs in Comparative Literary Studies and Middle East and North African Studies

Hannah Feldman is Associate Professor of Art History and core faculty in Middle Eastern and North African Studies as well as Comparative Literary Studies. Her research, teaching, and advising center on late modern and contemporary art and visual culture. She is the author of From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France (2014). She has published numerous articles about contemporary art and visual culture in publications including Artforum and Art Journal, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. She is presently working on three related projects, based on advanced study in the anthropology of space and governmentality: art and public space in Lebanon during the 1990s; love, temporality, and scale in contemporary art; and artist-imagined and developed arts institutions in the MENAT region between 2001 and 2011.

Rebecca Johnson

Department of English, Kaplan Humanities Institute, and the Programs in Middle East and North African Studies and Comparative Literary Studies

Rebecca C. Johnson is a scholar of comparative literature with a specialization in modern Arabic literature and literary culture. Her research focuses on literary exchanges between Arabic and European languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history and theory of the novel, and studies of transnational literary circulation and translation. Her first book, Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation, 1835-1913 (2020), theorizes a cross-linguistic history of Arabic literary modernity by tracing the production and reception of translated fiction in the first decades of Middle Eastern novelistic production. She is now at work on Visionary Politics: Revolutionary Transnationalism and the Aesthetics of the Arab Avant-Garde, which looks to the history of contemporary Arab literary styles since the 1960s.

Jules Law

Department of English and Program in Comparative Literary Studies

A veteran and fan of the Kaplan Scholars, Jules Law directed the program for many years and has taught in it several times, most recently in a 2019 course on “Empire.” He is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and a specialist in literary theory and Victorian literature. His various essays on Derrida, Joyce, Wittgenstein, and other theoretical topics have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, SIGNS, New Literary History, and other journals. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Empiricism (Cornell 1993) and The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (Cornell 2010). Essays from his current book project, Being There: Technologies of Immediation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, have appeared in ELH, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. He has received numerous teaching and public-service awards, including the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching (2007) and the Centro Romero Community Leadership award (2008).

Juan Martinez

Department of English and Program in Creative Writing

Juan Martinez is a fiction writer and assistant professor of creative writing and contemporary literature. He was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the author of the short story collection Best Worst American: Stories (2017). His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, Huizache, Ecotone, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs, and in the anthology Who Will Speak for America?

Kirsten Scheid

Kaplan Humanities Institute

E-mail: k.scheid@northwestern.edu

Kirsten Scheid is an anthropologist and art historian based in Beirut, Lebanon. After earning her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University (2005) she has taught at the American University of Beirut as an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies. Her research and teaching interests are the anthropology of art, materialities and imaginaries, aesthetics, art historiography and theory, modernization and cosmopolitanism, affect, power, and elites. She has conducted field and archival research since 1992 in Lebanon and Palestine. Kirsten's research has been supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Palestinian American Research Center, the Center for the Arts and Humanities (Beirut), and the EHESS. From 2019-2020, she was the Clark/Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and Williams College. She co-curated "The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener" (Beirut, 2016) and "Jerusalem Actual and Possible: the 9th Jerusalem Show" (Jerusalem, 2018). Kirsten has also contributed to the art community by exhibiting, writing in art journals and popular media, and founding both a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s books line. Her scholarly and popular essays can be accessed at Academia.edu.

Kelly Wisecup

Department of English and Center for Native American and Indigenous Research

Kelly Wisecup is a scholar of Native American literatures, early American literatures, and science and literature in the Atlantic world. She is the author of Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013) and is currently completing Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing, on early Native American literatures and their relations to colonial collections and archive, tracing how Native writers engaged and reconfigured sciences of collecting by repurposing non-narrative genres like lists, catalogs, and scrapbooks. She is directing multiple grant-funded projects, including collaborative archiving and remapping of Native Americans' stories and photographs in Chicago, and examining the shifting environmental, political, economic, and racial climates of Indigenous art and activism along the Mississippi River Valley.