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Postdoctoral Fellow

Trish BrederPostdoctoral Fellow in Public Humanities

Director of the Public Humanities Graduate Practicum

Trish Bredar

Ph.D. in English, University of Notre Dame

Trish Bredar oversees the Kaplan Institute’s Public Humanities programming. Her academic research explores the relationship between physical mobility and freedom in British literature of the long nineteenth century. Her current work focuses on narratives of housing insecurity in the Victorian period. Dr. Bredar is an experienced instructor with an investment in expanding access to humanities education. She teaches on Northwestern’s Evanston campus and at Stateville Correctional Center through the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), and she also serves on the advisory board for the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Dr. Bredar has a background in graduate student professional development and fellowship advising. As Director of Kaplan’s Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, she helps doctoral students conceive and execute a variety of publicly engaged projects.

Selected Publications

“‘It was the clothes that wore out the woman’: Fashion, Mobility, and New Constructions of Womanhood in Elizabeth von Arnim.” Trish Bredar and Stacy Sivinski. In Elizabeth von Arnim and Identities. Eds. Jennifer Shepherd and Noreen O’Connor. Clemson University Press. (forthcoming)

“‘A voyage of discovery’: Reimagining the Walking Woman through 19th-Century Diaries.” Victorian Literature and Culture. Volume 50, Issue 4, 2022, pp. 609-638.

“Wild Wanderings: Gender and Pedestrian Travel in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets.” European Romantic Review. Volume 30, Number 2, 2019, pp. 149-164.

“The Possibility of Taking a Walk: Jane Eyre’s Persistent Mobility.” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Volume 132, 2017, pp. 116-129.

 

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The Mellon Kaplan Postdoctoral HERE Program:
Humanities Education, Research, and Engagement

The Kaplan Humanities Institute is home to the Mellon Kaplan HERE Program, a Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences postdoctoral initiative that brings together emerging scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines in the humanities.

HERE postdoctoral fellows play an integral role in the Institute and across Northwestern:

Humanities Education: Fellows develop and teach undergraduate courses and deliver public lectures.

Research: As scholars at the outset of their academic careers, Fellows bring fresh perspectives on cutting edge research to Northwestern. Via weekly colloquia, they engage with Kaplan Faculty Fellows from fields across the humanities and have the opportunity to present their research to receive interdisciplinary feedback on their projects.

Engagement: Within the Kaplan Institute and other departments and programs, Fellows organize campus events (symposia, screenings, performances, etc.), serve on planning committees, and engage in public cultural and scholarly exchanges in Chicago.

Mellon Kaplan HERE fellowships are two-year residencies at the Kaplan Humanities Institute. Fields of study selected for the fellowship reflect emergent areas at Northwestern or areas that bridge between disciplines. Each fellow is selected by an interdisciplinary search committee and jointly appointed within the Kaplan Institute and their disciplinary “home” department. Fellows receive mentorship both within their field and also within the larger university community. 

Funding for the Mellon Kaplan HERE Program is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Past Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellows

Explore the range of research interests of past Kaplan Institute postdoctoral fellows.