Staff

Jessica Winegar | Director

Jessica Winegar
  • Office Location: Kresge 2350
  • E-mail: j-winegar@northwestern.edu
  • Jessica Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in cultural politics. She is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Core Faculty in the Program in Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern. Her research and teaching draw on a range of disciplines and extend to how U.S. institutions deal with the MENA region. Winegar's body of work focuses on how people invest social arenas—such as art worlds, education, and political protest—with liberating potential, while re/producing hierarchies of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. Her current book project, Counter-Revolutionary Aesthetics: How Egypt’s Uprising Faltered, examines how aesthetic forms, judgments, and practices play a central role in both delegitimizing revolutionary actions and in producing everyday right-wing attachments.

Tom Burke | Associate Director

Tom Burke

Megan Skord | Program Assistant 4

Megan Skord

Jill Mannor | Communications Coordinator

Jill Mannor
  • 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 is a board member of The Seldoms, a Chicago dance company whose performances explore pressing social, political, and environmental issues. Her volunteer work has included 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.

Alejandra Uslenghi | Kaplan Scholars Coordinator

Alejandra Uslenghi
  • E-mail: a-uslenghi@northwestern.edu
  • Alejandra Uslenghi is a literary and visual culture scholar specializing in modern Latin America, comparative modernisms, and avant-garde studies. She is associate professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department and core faculty in the Comparative Literary Studies and Critical Theory programs. She is affiliated with the Global Avant-Garde and Modernisms Studies Cluster and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program. Her work spans the intersections between literature and the visual arts, in particular the discursive impact of photography from its origins in the 19th century to its reception and transformation in the 20th century. With a background in critical theory and philosophies of the image, her research questions the ways in which literature and photography revealed, shaped, and have taught us to see the world around us. Uslenghi is the author of Latin America at fin-de-siècle Universal Exhibitions: Modern Cultures of Visuality (Palgrave, 2016); the editor of Walter Benjamin: Culturas de la imagen; and co-editor of La cámara como método: La fotografía moderna de Grete Stern y Horacio Coppola (Eterna Cadencia, Buenos Aires, 2011 and 2021).

Michelle N. Huang | Franke Fellows Coordinator

Michelle N. Huang
  • E-mail: michelle.n.huang@northwestern.edu
  • Michelle N. Huang (she/her/hers; Ph.D. English and Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Asian American Studies. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Her current project, Molecular Race, examines posthumanist aesthetics in post-1965 Asian American literature to trace racial representation and epistemology at nonhuman, minute scales. Molecular Race argues that a rapprochement with scientific discourse is necessary to fully grasp how the formal and aesthetic qualities of Asian American literature unsettle sedimented structures of racial formation. Michelle’s work appears in Twentieth-Century LiteratureJournal of Asian American StudiesAmerasia, and Post 45: Contemporaries, among other venues.

Crystal Camargo | Kaplan Scholars Graduate Assistant

Crystal Camargo
  • Crystal Camargo is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern’s Screen Cultures program in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Her research explores Latinx representation at the intersections of television theory, language ideologies, and critical race and ethnic studies in U.S. English- and Spanish-language television. Her dissertation—Televising Latinidad, Hearing Racial Difference, Translating Whiteness—examines how television forms and aesthetics construct and translate Spanish over time. She has been published in SCMC +, Flow, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Crystal has presented her work at Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Latina/o Studies Association, Flow, Literature/Film Association, and Queertopia and Backward Glances Student Conferences. She received her B.A. in International Studies, Spanish Language and Literature, and Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Denver and her M.A. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern. She has completed a teaching certificate from Searle Center and held a year-long competitively awarded teaching appointment with the Latina/o/x program at Northwestern from 2020-2021. She is currently a Comparative Race and Diaspora Mellon Cluster Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies and an affiliate with the Latinx Digital Media Center. Crystal grew up in the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado with her Mexican immigrant parents. She is an avid traveler in her free time, loves all things chocolate, enjoys dancing, and mentors first-generation college students, students of color, and English-language learners. As the 2023-2024 Kaplan Scholars Graduate Assistant, Crystal is excited to plan, develop, and support events for Kaplan's Humanities Scholars program.

Bridgette Hulse | Humanities Without Walls Graduate Assistant

Bridgette Hulse
  • Bridgette Hulse is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern’s Anthropology Department, focusing on medieval archaeology in England. Her research addresses the ways the medieval and early modern people of England experienced, interacted with, and created elite religious spaces by analyzing the historic graffiti they left behind.  She is particularly interested in the everyday experience of religion, cathedral architecture, and the creation of space. Outside of her studies, Bridgette enjoys taking acting classes through the Piven Theatre Workshop, and uses her anthropological knowledge to analyze media, fandom, and internet culture. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and Spanish from the University of Minnesota–Morris, and her M.A. in Archaeology from Durham University. During her M.A. she studied the graffiti of the Neville Tombs in Durham Cathedral. She developed 3D models of the tombs, used the project to test data techniques, and analyzed the symbols found in the inscriptions. Bridgette is thrilled to work with Kaplan on their Humanities Without Walls project, and is excited  the 2022-2023 Graduate Assistant for the Public Humanities at the Kaplan Institute, Bridgette is excited to advocate for the Public Humanities on campus.

Claudia Kinahan | Public Humanities Graduate Assistant

Claudia Kinahan
  • Claudia is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama program at Northwestern. Her research examines how 'virtual women' like female-gendered robots and avatars and Barbie dolls perform gender and race. Bridging theoretical insights from theatre and performance studies with posthumanism and new media studies, she investigates how ‘virtual women’ are shaped by the environments and structures that they are produced within and play an agential role in producing gendered and racialized bodies both on and offline. She hopes that this attention to ‘virtual women’ will emphasize the ethical stakes of gendering and racializing nonhumans and reveal opportunities for alternative modes of embodiment and human-nonhuman relations. Her work has been presented at venues such as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Volkenburg Symposium at the Chicago International Puppetry Festival. Claudia is the recipient of the Herman Diedrich and Richard Johnson Families Scholarship and the Dissertation Proposal Development  Fellowship at Northwestern and the Arts and Humanities Council Prize from the University of Texas at Dallas. She holds a First Class Hons. BA with a Gold Medal in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College, Dublin. Claudia is passionate about practice-based-research and often bridges her scholarly and artistic pursuits through her creative work. As an award-winning theatre maker, she has directed, written, and performed for numerous stages and companies in her native Ireland and in Chicago (claudiakinahantheatre.com).  As the 2023-24 Graduate Assistant for the Public Humanities at the Kaplan Institute, she looks forward to supporting and nurturing public humanities work through the Graduate Practicum and developing meaningful connections between Northwestern and wider publics.