ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

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 Humanities Minor, the Faculty Fellowship program, postdoctoral fellowships, graduate assistantships, and public humanities initiatives.

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.

Lina Britto is a journalist and historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. She is an associate professor in the Department of History, affiliated faculty in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and has been twice the Director of Graduate Studies for the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, LACS. Her research situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in Colombia and the Caribbean in the context of a growing articulation between the region and the United States during the Cold War. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020). More recently, she co-edited Histories of Solitude: Colombia 1820s-1970s and Histories of Perplexity: Colombia, 1970s-2010s (2024), two multidisciplinary edited volumes for Routledge Studies in the History of the Americas. Her courses at Northwestern focus on the hemispheric history of the drug trade and the war on drugs, popular culture and nation-state formation, Cold War history and state terror, media representations of illegal drugs and pop culture, and contemporary Latin America in historical perspective.

Kalyan Nadiminti is Assistant Professor of English. They are currently writing a monograph on the formal and institutional contradictions of postcolonial Anglophone literature after 9/11. Reading novels from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and their diaspora, in dialogue with former detainee writing from Guantánamo, the project tracks how postcolonial narrative form negotiates the vexed position between a collective politics of anti-imperial commitment and a possessive individualism of liberal conscription. Their work has appeared in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction,  Humanity Journal, Journal of Asian American Studies, Post45/Contemporaries, Contemporary Literature, LARB, and other venues.