Events
2025-2026 Events
Events will be added here as they are planned, so please check back often! Events will also be posted on PlanitPurple, Northwestern's event feed.
The Ethics of Community-Engaged Humanities
Fri., November 7, 2025
12:00 - 1:30 pm CT
Zoom webinar (registration required)
Register here:
https://northwestern.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6X945QkBS8mXIuzw8lWQYg
Free and public welcome!
Scholarly work that engages with communities beyond the academy raises ethical questions on both a theoretical and practical level. How can scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences foster meaningful, mutually beneficial community partnerships? Join us for a discussion with three experienced practitioners who will share their perspectives on the challenges and rewards of community-engaged scholarship.
We’re excited to welcome in conversation Noa Michaela Fields (Public Programs Manager at the Poetry Foundation), Kantara Souffrant (Senior Director of Community Dialogue & Adult Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum), and Michael Metzger (Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at Northwestern's Block Museum of Art), with moderator Ruth Martin Curry (Program Administrator of Community-Engaged Teaching, Learning, and Research at Northwestern's Center for Civic Engagement).
About the panelists
Noa Micaela Fields is a trans poet with hearing aids who composes by mishearing. Her debut poetry book E is out this winter from Nightboat Books, and her writing has also recently appeared in Anomaly, Antiphony, Jacket2, Oxford Electronic Music Handbook, Poem-of-the-Day, Sixty Inches from Center, Tripwire, and Tyger Quarterly. She is the recipient of fellowships from Zoeglossia and Disability Lead. She lives in Chicago, where she curates public programs at the Poetry Foundation. (Website: doyounoapoet.com.)
Dr. Kantara Souffrant is the Senior Director of Community Dialogue and Adult Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she oversees art experiences rooted in vulnerability, feeling interconnected, and building sustainable community partnerships. Souffrant is a Haitian-American artist-scholar who brings her passion for community engagement, dialogue, and facilitation to her work as a performer, educator, and community member. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern, with certificates in Critical Theory, African and Diaspora Studies, and Teaching. Her scholarship examines visual and performance art in the Black Atlantic, Black feminist aesthetics, and museum pedagogy. She is co-editor, with Dr. Marianna Pegno, of Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces which demonstrates how museums can enact institutional change by implementing systematic and structural approaches to anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-elitist practices.
Dr. Michael Metzger is the Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum at Northwestern. In his scholarship, critical writing, film programming, and curation, Michael seeks to foster community, knowledge, and experience through the moving image. His curatorial efforts include installations by artists Paul Chan, Isaac Julien, Sky Hopinka, and Dario Robleto. With J.P. Sniadecki (Radio/Television/Film), Michael co-leads the Climate Crisis and Media Arts Working Group, supported by Northwestern's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University, and he has worked as an educator since 2007, teaching courses on the history of images and information and digital media production, and lecturing on environmental media, desktop aesthetics and “imperfect cinema.”
Moderator
Dr. Ruth Martin Curry is a staff member at the Center for Civic Engagement, where she supports graduate students and faculty in their community-engaged teaching, learning, and research. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago and at Northwestern, where she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies. At Northwestern, she’s taught and supported a number of undergraduate and graduate courses connecting humanistic study and civic engagement for Chicago Field Studies, Philosophy, and Asian American Studies.