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 Research Workshops and Kaplan Institute seminar room availability.

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.

Tracy Vaughn-Manley is an assistant professor and a Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern. Her research interests include the work of Toni Morrison, 20th and 21st-Century Black women's literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and Black quilting traditions. She is also an accomplished quilt artist/scholar. Her current book project, Needles and Pen: Toni Morrison, Quilts, and Community (OSU Press), is a study on the ways in which Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison uses quilts and quilting in her work as an editor, author, and public scholar. Drawing upon current theories of resistance, Black feminism, performance, and cultural aesthetics, Vaughn-Manley demonstrates how these theories intersect and illuminate the importance of quilts, quilt-making, and community building in Morrison’s work. 

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. 

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.

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).