Kaplan Scholars Instructors: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Kaplan Scholars Instructors

Learn more about the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program.

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Michelle N. Huang

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Program in Asian American Studies

Michelle N. Huang is Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, feminist science studies, the environmental humanities, and the medical humanities. Her first book, Racial Beings: Experiments in Asian American New Materialisms, is a study about scientific discourse and experimental literary form in Asian American literature, 1965-present. She is currently working on a second project on Asian American racialization and biomedicine.

Daniel Immerwahr

Professor, Department of History; Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence

Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities. He teaches U.S. and global history. His most recent book, How to Hide an Empire, was a national bestseller. He is a contributor to the New Yorker and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Jacobin. He is now writing a book about fire in American history.

Jules Law

Professor, Department of English; Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence

Jules Law is a Professor in the English department, where he specializes in the Victorian novel, psychoanalysis, gender theory, and literary theory. He is the author of The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel, and has written widely on gothic and detective literature. He is currently writing a book on Victorian virtual-reality theory.

Miriam J. Petty

Associate Professor, Radio/TV/Film; Associate Dean for Academic Programs, The Graduate School; Charles Deering McCormick Chair in Teaching Excellence

Miriam J. Petty writes and teaches about race, stardom, performance, reception, adaptation, and genre and is especially interested in the history of African American representation in Hollywood film. Her first book, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (University of California Press, 2016) seeks a historical recalibration of early Hollywood film stardom via its meditation on Black actors of the era. Could Black performers, who appeared in marginal, stereotyped roles be “movie stars?” If so, what did their stardom look like, how did it function, and to whom did it speak? Petty is currently at work on a book manuscript examining contemporary media mogul Tyler Perry’s productions and his African American audiences' nostalgic investments in such cultural forms as folktales, music, literature, and religious practice.

Shalini Shankar

Professor, Department of Anthropology and Program in Asian American Studies

Shalini Shankar is a sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist. She has conducted ethnographic research with South Asian American youth and communities in Silicon Valley; with advertising agencies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; and with spelling bee participants and producers in various U.S. locations. She is the author of Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal about the New American Childhood, Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Advertising, and Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley.

Tracy Vaughn-Manley

Assistant Professor, Department of Black Studies; Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction

Tracy Vaughn-Manley is an assistant professor and a Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction in the Department of Black Studies. She is also the Director of Undergraduate Engagement for the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Her research interests include the work of Toni Morrison, 20th- and 21st-Century Black women's literature, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and Black quilting traditions. She is also an accomplished quilt artist/scholar. Her current book project, As Large as Life: Toni Morrison, Quilts, and Community (OSU Press), examines the ways in which Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison uses quilts and quilting in her work as an editor, author, and public scholar. Drawing upon current theories of resistance, Black feminism, performance, and cultural aesthetics, Vaughn-Manley demonstrates how these theories intersect and illuminate the importance of quilts, quilt-making, and community building in Morrison’s work.