ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Kaplan Scholars Instructors

Marquis Bey

Professor, Departments of Black Studies and English, and Programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory

Marquis Bey (they/them) is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, as well as affiliate faculty in Critical Theory. Their work focuses on the intersections between blackness, transness and nonbinariness, and feminism. Bey is interested, then, in questions of nonnormative racialized genders, and the possibilities of imagining other modes of life outside of the rubrics instilled by white supremacy, cisnormativity, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. They have written numerous books, most notably Black Trans Feminism as well as Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, where they attempt to provide a theory of being and living outside of grammars of racialized and gendered violence. Their most recent, forthcoming book is titled: A Nonbinary Life. In addition to teaching within the classrooms of the university, Bey also teaches for the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and has been doing prison education for over seven years.

Laura Brueck

Professor, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Program in Comparative Literary Studies
Director, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Laura Brueck is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies. Her research and teaching cross the fields of caste and race, anti-caste literature, popular South Asian literature and literary publics, postcolonialism, and the theory and practice of translation. Current projects include her book Indian Pulp: The Local and the Global in Indian Detective Fictions, a co-edited anthology of essays on caste and race, and a series of essays on the global lexicon of caste. She is co-editor of the new Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature (2024).

Sarah Jacoby

Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Sarah Jacoby studies Asian Religions with a specialization in Tibetan Buddhism. She received her B.A. from Yale University, majoring in women's studies, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia's Department of Religious Studies. She joined Northwestern in 2009 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her research interests include Indo-Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and ritual in practice, studies in gender and sexuality, Tibetan literature, autobiography studies, Buddhist revelation, the history of emotions, Buddhism in contemporary Tibet, and eastern Tibetan area studies.

S.B. West

Associate Professor of Instruction, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies

The research and intellectual production of S.B. West engages “Latin American” literary and cultural canon hemispherically, with an emphasis on textual production from the Mayan or Yucatán peninsula. Their work is organized around abolitionist, decolonial, and trans feminisms that question and challenge the colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class, and race relations. Their current book-length project, entitled Autonomy and Abolition in the "Caste War", is a rereading of Yucatán’s nineteenth-century textual register that emphasizes how the gender and race war mobilized the transference of colonial oppression into liberal state-building. They also have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya or Maaya T'aan “literature,” U.S. Spanish-language “im/migration” literature, and feminist theory.