Kaplan Scholars Instructors: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Kaplan Scholars Instructors

Learn more about the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program.

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Leslie Harris

Professor, Department of History

Prof. Leslie Harris is Professor of History and African American Studies. Her research and teaching has focused on complicating the ideas we all hold about the history of African Americans in the United States, and finding ways to communicate these new ideas to the general public. In her first book, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (2003), she examined the impact of northern and southern slavery on the definitions of class, gender, citizenship, and political activism promulgated by New York’s blacks and whites. Harris is currently at work on a book on New Orleans that uses Hurricane Katrina and her family’s history as a way to interrogate the history of African Americans in the city from the nineteenth century to the present. She also has ongoing research interests in the history of slavery, gender and sexuality in the antebellum U.S. south, and the historiography of U.S. slavery.

Elvia Mendoza

Associate Professor of Instruction, Latina and Latino Studies Program

Elvia Mendoza is Associate Professor of Instruction in Latina and Latino Studies. Her research and visual productions reflect and examine the intersections of intimate forms of state violence, forced migration and displacement, memory, body politics, and representation. She is the Field Producer of Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four, an award-winning documentary film based on the wrongful convictions, incarceration, and eventual exoneration of Anna Vasquez, Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera, and Kristi Mayhugh, four Latina lesbians falsely accused of assaulting two girls. She is also the Producer of Nosotros Tambien Migramos/We too, Migrate, an award-winning documentary short film portraying the everyday uncertainty of Fernando, José, and Diana, two undocumented Mexican gay men and their daughter, as they navigate immigration surveillance regimes in the U.S. Her other works include short film productions, photography, and multimedia installations. Her current work, Conjuring Images of Memory, is a multi-media installation that visually and sonically reflects on what remains in the in-between spaces of memory while confronting death in the context of histories of forced migration. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sherwin Ovid

Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of Art Theory and Practice

Sherwin Ovid is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Art Theory and Practice. He draws from the experience of immigration as a space of contingent exchange channeling concepts of cultural transmission through his use of mixed media. A morphology of forms encompasses the dynamic interplay of materials and forms in his work. Ovid is a visual artist born in Trinidad who earned his Bachelor's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern and University of Illinois at Chicago. His commercial endeavors include collaborations with Lee Daniel’s Netflix feature The Deliverance, Lena Waithe’s Showtime drama The Chi, and Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Studio remake of Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta. Ovid has collaborated with Demon Leg gallery in New York and exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, UIS Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Julius Caesar, Haitian American Museum of Chicago, and Iceberg Projects in Evanston. He was published in New American Painters in 2016 and 2021 as a noteworthy feature and in 2020 listed as one of New City Magazine’s breakout artists.

Tristram Wolff

Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies Program

Tristram Wolff is an Associate Professor of English, where he also teaches in the Programs in Comparative Literary Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture. His first book, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2022), shows how a poetics of naturalized language change in transatlantic romanticism transported the origins of language to an ongoing present, in answer to Enlightenment primitivism. From the “romantic century” (1750-1850) of Wheatley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Thoreau, it retrieves a lost philological chapter in the history of “nature” as a racializing category of humanistic inquiry. His second book, How Not to Feel It: Critical Reading and Affect after Hazlitt shows how Romantic-era writing on the passions, and the historical emergence of the role of the “critic,” have continued to shape contemporary debates about affect and emotion in our habits of critical reading.