2024 Public Humanities Symposium
Join the Kaplan Institute for our annual celebration of the Public Humanities May 9-10, 2024! All events are free and open to the public—drop in any time.
OPENING RECEPTION AND EXHIBIT
Thursday, May 9, 2024
4:30 - 6:00 pm CT
Kaplan Artist Studio (Kresge Hall #2315)
Northwestern Evanston Campus
Join us for an opening reception and interactive exhibit to kick off this year’s Public Humanities Symposium! Guests can explore samples from podcasts, websites, videos, and hands-on learning experiences, all created by Northwestern graduate students who are this year’s Kaplan Public Humanities Fellows. Refreshments will be served. Drop in any time between 4:30 and 6:00 pm!
PUBLIC HUMANITIES SYMPOSIUM
Friday, May 10, 2024
9:30 am - 6:00 pm CT
Kaplan Seminar Room (Kresge Hall #2350)
Northwestern Evanston Campus
Conveners:
Claudia Kinahan (Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama)
Bridgette Hulse (Department of Anthropology)
Trish Bredar (Kaplan Humanities Institute)
Thomas Burke (Kaplan Humanities Institute)
This all-day event seeks to engage members of the Northwestern and wider community in conversation around public scholarship. This year’s symposium will feature:
- Opening Remarks from Dr. Adrian Randolph, Dean of Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
- Roundtable Panels with Kaplan Public Humanities Fellows, Northwestern graduate students who have publicly-engaged projects across a variety of forms, including podcasts, social media accounts, reading groups, performances, recipe books, and more. Learn more about their projects here.
- Keynote Lunch with Lauren M. Pacheco, Co-Creative Director of Chicago Humanities, in conversation with Kaplan Institute Director Jessica Winegar
- Public Humanities Award Ceremony and Reception recognizing Dr. Ashley Cheyemi McNeil, Director of Education and Research at Full Spectrum Features, with remarks from Jason Matsumoto and Dr. Helen Cho
All events are free, open to the public, and designed to be accessible to academic and non-academic audiences alike. Drop in at any time!
Full Symposium Schedule
Thursday, May 9
Opening Reception and Exhibit, 4:30 - 6:00 pm
Kaplan Artist Studio (Kresge Hall 2315)
An interactive showcase of public humanities projects. Food and drinks will be served.
Friday, May 10
All Friday events will take place in the Kaplan Seminar Room (Kresge Hall 2350)
Breakfast, 9:30-10:00 am
Welcome, 10:00-10:30 am
Opening Remarks
Dr. Adrian Randolph, Dean, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Introduction
Dr. Trish Bredar, Director of the Public Humanities Practicum
Roundtable 1, 10:30-11:45 am
Dialogue, Identity, Connection
Moderator: Thomas Burke, Associate Director, Kaplan Humanities Institute
Presenters:
- Bipin Sebastian (Rhetoric and Public Culture), “Majorities and Minorities”
- Jennifer Ligaya Senecal (Performance Studies), “Life in Blasia: A Podcast”
- Kylie Walters (Screen Cultures), “Psychoanalysis and the Climate Crisis”
- Victoria Pham (History), “Mapping Connections: A Vietnamese American Webinar Series”
Keynote Lunch, 12:00-1:30 pm
Creative Futures: New Directions for the Public Humanities
Lunch will be served. Click HERE to learn more and to RSVP.
Lauren M. Pacheco, Co-Creative Director, Chicago Humanities, in conversation with Dr. Jessica Winegar, Director, Kaplan Humanities Institute.
Roundtable 2, 1:45-3:00 pm
Place, Objects, Performance
Moderator: Claudia Kinahan, Co-Convener, Kaplan Public Humanities Graduate Practicum
Presenters:
- Peri Green (Learning Sciences), “Community Crawls TikTok Series”
- Devika Ranjan (Performance Studies), “THIS IS NOT A MEMORIAL: a performance, an act of community care”
- Craig Stevens (Anthropology), “AfriSem: 3D Humanities Speaker and Workshop Series”
- Sreddy Yen (English), “Race from Africa: Four Literary Commentaries”
Roundtable 3, 3:15-4:30 pm
Food, Culture, History
Moderator: Bridgette Hulse, Public Humanities Intern, Kaplan Humanities Institute
Presenters:
- Jen Comerford (English), “The Experiential History Project”
- Lauren Cole (History), “Gender and Medieval Studies: A YouTube Series”
- Clara Lee and Archita Arun (Performance Studies), “Craving Together: A Digital Archive of What We Eat”
Public Humanities Award Ceremony and Reception, 4:30-6:00 pm
Food and drinks will be served.
Honoring Kaplan Public Humanities Award recipient Dr. Ashley Cheyemi McNeil with remarks from Jason Matsumoto, Co-Executive Director and Co-Founder of Full Spectrum Features, and Dr. Helen Cho, Visiting Assistant Professor in Northwestern's Asian American Studies Program.
MEET OUR PUBLIC HUMANITIES FELLOWS 2023-2024
To read full descriptions of the fellows’ projects, please click here.
Archita Arun and Clara Lee, “Craving Together: A Digital Archive of What We Eat”
Archita Arun (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and singer from India. She studies the embodiment of desire, pleasure, and refusal by South Asian femme and queer artists in the diaspora across music, performance art, and visual culture. Her areas of research include sound studies, minoritarian performance theory, and psychoanalysis.
Clara Lee (they/she) is a researcher, writer, and cultural worker from Singapore. Traversing affect theory, media studies, performance studies, and queer of colour critique, in their work, they pursue, what moving/being moved is and does, and under which techno-aesthetic conditions does movement express itself as a particular mode of feeling.
Lauren Cole, “Gender and Medieval Studies: A YouTube Series”
Lauren Cole is a third year PhD student in the Department of History, researching how a 12th century nun created a network of medical knowledge. She is also a public historian on the platform TikTok, where she posts videos about medieval history to over 90,000 followers.
Jennifer Comerford, “The Experiential History Project”
Jen Comerford is a PhD candidate in English. Her dissertation explores how hands and touch structure female experience and knowledge-making practices in the long eighteenth century. Her work has been supported by the Newberry Library and the Jane Austen Society of North America.
Peri Ella Green, “Community Crawls TikTok Series”
Peri Ella Green is a second-year doctoral student in the Learning Sciences program at the School of Education and Social Policy. Hailing from Decatur, Georgia, she now collaborates with high school students in Chicago's South Side to explore and document how young people utilize their time outside of school. Her research examines how individuals navigate both physical spaces (like local neighborhoods) and digital environments (such as online social networks) to engage in informal learning throughout their lives. After completing her degree, she plans to return to Decatur to develop sustainable, lifelong learning opportunities in underserved local neighborhoods and to create a digital tool that supports informal learning across online spaces.
Jennifer Ligaya, “Life in Blasia: A Podcast”
Jennifer Ligaya is an AfroPinay sound & performance composer and artist scholar born and raised in Chicago with an interdisciplinary background in visual art, vocal performance, dance, and theater. Mother to a Scorpio son, and PhD candidate of Performance Studies, her original work includes solo and collaborative performance compositions and sound installations. A sponsored artist, grant recipient, and commissioned multimedia artist, Ligaya has been thankful to have had the opportunity to work with many impactful organizations including Honey Pot Performance and CIRCA-Pintig. Her creative work highlights critical conversations around identity, liberation, ancestral indigenous knowledge systems, and moments of communal healing, through the weaving of traditional and contemporary sound, performance, and personal ancestral folk arts practices. Ligaya’s research interests sit at the intersections of performance, sound, and dance studies, alongside Cultural Studies and Womanist Theory. Her current creative practice explores routes of return through the lens of Afro-Asian feminist subjectivity and speculative arts, indigenous healing and survival practices, and genealogies of anticolonial spiritual-political resistance. Website: www.jenniferligaya.com
Victoria Pham, “Mapping Connections: A Vietnamese American Webinar Series”
Victoria Pham is a doctoral student in History and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Comparative Race and Diaspora. Her interests include memory studies of the Vietnam War, Asian American history, refugee migration, settler colonialism, and queer theory.
Devika Ranjan, “THIS IS NOT A MEMORIAL: a performance, an act of community care”
Devika Ranjan (she/her) is a writer, ethnographer, theater-maker, and educator who tells stories about migration and technology. She creates communities of care through devised immersive performance and has facilitated workshops with migrants worldwide. As a Marshall Scholar, Devika holds degrees from Cambridge, RCSSD, and Georgetown. Devika is currently studying “data doubles” at Northwestern.
Bipin Sebastian, “Minorities and Majorities”
Bipin Sebastian is a PhD candidate with the program of Rhetoric and Public Culture. He studies minoritarian responses to ethno-religious majoritarianism, with a focus on the so-called democracies of South Asia.
Craig Stevens, “AfriSem: 3D Humanities Speaker and Workshop Series”
Craig Stevens is a futurist archeologist and curator. His work seeks to express anthropological and archaeological data through creative processes and immersive products. His archaeological research investigates the placemaking strategies of nineteenth-century Black American and Caribbean Back-to-Africa settlers and their descendants in Liberia. Through the use of 3D digitization and innovative curatorial strategies, Craig seeks to expose broad and diverse audiences to African and African Diasporic material culture. He recently developed and curated the Augmented Curiosities exhibition for the Herskovits Library of African Studies, which leverages Augmented and Virtual Reality technologies to provide opportunities for intimate engagement with African object collections. Craig is completing his doctoral research in the Anthropology Department.
Kylie Walters, “Psychoanalysis and the Climate Crisis”
Kylie Walters is a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures studying the visual culture of oil corporations from the postwar era through the 1973-1974 oil crisis. Her broader interests include architecture, Marxist cultural theory, and psychoanalysis.
Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen: “Race from Africa: Four Literary Commentaries”
Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen is a PhD candidate in English whose research considers the re-enchantment of humanism in contemporary African literature. They received their MA from the University of the Witwatersrand, and post about the books they’re reading on Instagram at @sreddyen.