Staff: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Staff

Office Location: Kresge 2350
E-mail: hum.director@northwestern.edu
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 crosses 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).

Phone: 847-491-7946
Office Location: Kresge Hall 2350
E-mail: thomas.burke@northwestern.edu
Tom Burke received a B.A. from Union College and an MFA in creative writing from UMass Amherst. In the past, he has worked for the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College, the Summer Literary Seminars in Russia and Kenya, and Words without Borders, which advocates for literature in translation. Tom also teaches creative writing at Northwestern, and his novel, Eastbound into the Cosmos, was published in April 2019 from MadHat Press. www.tsburke.com

Contact Tom for questions regarding the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program, the Faculty Fellowship program, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate assistantships, and public humanities initiatives.

Phone: 847-467-4303
Office Location: Kresge 2350
E-mail: leon.hedstrom@northwestern.edu
Leon Hedstrom received a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has previous experience in everything from graphic design to literary magazine production to tow truck driving. You are likely to find him watching any number of bar bands and/or experimental sound performances across the greater Chicago area.

Phone: 847-467-3970
Office Location: Kresge Hall 2350
E-mail: jill.mannor@northwestern.edu
Jill Mannor has a background in graphic design, marketing, advertising and development. In the nonprofit world, she worked to develop the capabilities, audience, and culture of Chicago Children’s Museum, Kohl Children’s Museum, Lincoln Park Zoo and Imagine Chicago. In the agency space, she managed projects and creative teams for clients in cultural/arts, microfinance, and higher education. Jill's volunteer work has included The Seldoms dance company; EPIC: Engaging Philanthropy, Inspiring Creatives; Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE); Sit Stay Read; and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance. Jill received a B.A. in English from Hope College.
Contact Jill for questions regarding Co-sponsorships, Franke Fellowships (Undergraduate and Graduate), Artist in Residence program, Undergraduate Curriculum, and media requests.

E-mail: r-seligman@northwestern.edu
Rebecca Seligman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. Dr. Seligman’s work focuses on the interactions between individual level vulnerabilities and social meaning processes that can produce mental and/or bodily distress or promote healing. Seligman is interested in how political-economic conditions, ontologies, models of self and personhood, narrative, and practice shape experiences of health and illness. Dr. Seligman’s research investigates these questions in both biomedical and religious contexts. She is currently finishing a monograph based on two years of ethnographic research, entitled From Sensations to Symptoms: The Social Shaping of Functional Illness Experience. Her published works focus on religious devotion and therapeutics, healing and self-transformation, the intersection of mental and physical health, and the anthropology of psychotherapy.

Smith "S." Yarberry (he/they) is a trans poet and scholar. Smith is a PhD candidate in literature at Northwestern, where he holds a Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Poetry and Poetics and is finishing his dissertation, "Trans Impossibilities & the 1790s: The Imaginative Bodies of William Blake." Their articles have been published in European Romantic Review and Studies in Romanticism, while their poems have appeared in Guernica, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and Tin House, among many others. Smith completed a MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of the collection, A Boy in the City (Deep Vellum, 2022) as well as the forthcoming collection, The Robert Poems (Deep Vellum, 2026). He currently serves as the graduate coordinator for the Workshop in Trans Studies (WITS).