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

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.

Contact Leon for questions regarding Kaplan Institute seminar room availability, Research Workshops, and undergraduate curriculum.

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.

Jayme Collins leads the Public Humanities Graduate Practicum. Her research encompasses topics in literary studies and environmental humanities and appears in academic and public venues. She has two active research projects: A book project called Composing in the Field recovers a genealogy of experimental material poetics since 1960 that engage with discrete transformations in land use and management over the period, and a book and audio documentary project called Archival Ecologies tells stories about how communities are grappling with the endangerment and loss of large and small cultural collections caused by climate change-exacerbated natural disasters. Prior to joining Kaplan, Dr. Collins was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, where she was a project leader at Blue Lab, an environmental storytelling and research group. You can find her work wherever you get your podcasts, as well as in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Wordsworth Circle, and Edge Effects.

Christopher Bush is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and French, whose research focuses on literary modernism in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on European modernisms' relationships to the non-European world, especially East Asia. Another major interest is how, during the same period, writers reinvented the idea of “literature” in response to new technological media, especially cinema. He teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on literary history, film, and theory, including Proust and the Arts, The Surreal World, Writing Cinema between the World Wars, and The Historical Avant-garde (in Theory).

He is currently completing a book on the modernist haiku as world literature in the 1920s (focusing on France, Mexico, and Brazil). Previous publications include Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford) and a collaborative translation and critical edition of Victor Segalen’s French-Chinese poems, Stèles (Wesleyan), as well as essays on such topics as Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, surrealism, japonisme, theories of national art in Asian modernity, and French manga. His research has been supported by the Princeton Society of Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has received prizes from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Ezra Pound Society, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and the Modern Language Association.

Kayla Boyden is a PhD candidate in English at Northwestern whose research interests include Black contemporary poetry and poetics, Black feminist thought, and critical theory. Her dissertation, Interstitial Reading: Uncovering Silence in African American Women’s Literature, examines how Black women’s writing from 1992 to 2024 disarticulates so-called naturalized categories such as the human, gender, and race. She is a fellow in Northwestern’s Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster and has received support for her dissertation through the Dissertation Proposal Development program. Alongside her academic research, she is deeply committed to supporting student success and has served as a Graduate Intern for the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Success. As a graduate student, she has also served as a Group Leader and Graduate Student Lead for Northwestern’s Summer Research Opportunity Program and as a mentor to first-generation and low-income students through the Office of the Provost, among other institutional initiatives.

sarah nisenson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the English department at Northwestern. Her dissertation Contaminated Being, Toxic Feeling: Embodied and Environmental Contamination in Contemporary Transnational American Fiction interrogates the unevenly distributed material realities of environmental harm in the so-called American century. Through its analysis of contaminated environments and toxic social landscapes in speculative fiction, her work reframes disgust as a mode through which the worldling capacity of speculative fiction unfolds. She is a co-founder of the born-digital environmental humanities journal Lime (readlime.org), a former Northwestern Prison Education Program instructor at Logan Correctional Center, and an avid gardener.