Events
2024-2025 Events
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KEYNOTE
2025 Public Humanities Symposium
Nicole Fleetwood - Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Thursday, April 17, 2025
5:30-7:00 pm
Harris Hall #108
Free! Public welcome!
Reception to follow (7-8 pm) in Kresge Hall Atrium (2nd floor), where we will award the 2025 Public Humanities Award to artist and activist Dorothy Burge.
Nicole Fleetwood (James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) will be in conversation with Marquis Bey (Professor of Black Studies, Northwestern). This public lecture by Professor Fleetwood is the keynote of the Kaplan Humanities Institute's two-day Public Humanities Symposium. Fleetwood is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) and the curator of a MoMA PS1 exhibition of the same name. Both Fleetwood’s book and exhibition were named as a best book and a best show of the year, respectively, by the New York Times, The National Book Foundation, Smithsonian, and The New Yorker. Fleetwood is a recipient of a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship grant and many other awards and accolades besides.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, which debuted at MoMA PS1 (September 17, 2020-April 5, 2021). The exhibition was listed as “one of the most important art moments in 2020” by The New York Times and among the best shows of the year by The New Yorker and Hyperallergic. Photo of Nicole Fleetwood by Naima Green.
Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, with appointments in English and Critical Theory, at Northwestern. Their writing and teaching concern black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, critical theory, and abolition. They are the author of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published in 2022, and are currently at work on a book entitled A Nonbinary Life.
2025 Public Humanities Symposium
Thursday and Friday, April 17-18, 2025
Various locations, Evanston campus
See the full schedule at https://humanities.northwestern.edu/graduate/ph-grad-practicum/events/pub-hum-symposium.html
Join the Kaplan Humanities Institute on Thursday, April 17 and Friday, April 18 for our annual two-day celebration of publicly engaged humanities work. All events are free and open to the public—drop in any time!
PAST EVENTS—2024-2025
Community Connections: Strategies for Publicly Engaged Pedagogy
Friday, February 28, 2025
2:00-3:30 pm
Harris Hall, Room 108
Free, public event. Food provided.
Registration required: https://bit.ly/4h4Ud77
Community engaged teaching offers powerful opportunities for mutually beneficial collaboration between university students and community organizations. Yet creating an enriching learning environment that meets the needs of everyone involved is a complex task that requires navigating institutional constraints, centering human relationships, and embracing risk. This event brings together experienced facilitators of community engaged teaching—Helen Cho (Asian American Studies), Liz McCabe (Chicago Field Studies), and Ashley Cheyemi McNeil (Full Spectrum Features)—to share their expertise and to speak from their own experience designing a course together. New and experienced instructors alike are invited to join us in community as we explore the ins and outs of this process, from building a sustainable partnership to managing a complex classroom environment.
Panelists
Dr. Helen Cho is a visiting assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Program. Her commitment to community engaged approaches to co-creating knowledge inform her research, pedagogy, and advocacy work. Currently, she is collaborating with grassroots political campaigns to understand how narratives of difference shape the way folks navigate ascribed and avowed racial and ethnic identities in electoral politics and partnering with a local fair housing organization to bring a diverse set of tenant voices together into a conversation that informs housing policy. She has designed and co-taught several community engaged courses on making community media.
Dr. Liz McCabe directs Chicago Field Studies, the internship program in Weinberg College at Northwestern, where she has developed and taught experiential learning courses for over fifteen years. Her teaching includes courses on Chicago-based civic and community engagement, representations of work, and labor history and theory, as well as the immersive Engage Chicago summer program, which places undergraduates in nonprofit community-engaged internships in Chicago while they live and learn together. She has been involved with various arts and education nonprofits and holds a PhD in English from Northwestern.
Dr. Ashley Cheyemi McNeil is the Director of Education and Research at Full Spectrum Features, where she develops cinematic Open Educational Resources and designs community-driven collaboration, development strategy, and fundraising initiatives. With expertise in managing complex, public-facing programs, Dr. McNeil leads from the belief that stories of being and belonging shape individuals and communities, driving her work to uplift marginalized voices through innovative and culturally impactful projects.
Moderator
Trish Bredar is the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Kaplan Humanities Institute. As Director of the Institute's Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, she helps doctoral students design and carry out projects that engage with communities beyond the academy. As a teacher of nineteenth-century literature, Dr. Bredar frequently uses experiential learning opportunities to enliven connections between past and present, most notably while teaching study-abroad courses in London. She is also committed to expanding access to higher education, and has worked with prison education programs in Indiana and Illinois, and serves on the advisory board for The Clemente Course in the Humanities.
The Ethics of Community-Engaged Humanities Work
Fri., November 8, 2024
12:00 - 1:30 pm CT
Zoom Event, Registration Required: bit.ly/4emCpmx
Join us for a discussion of the big questions and practical considerations involved in conducting ethical community-engaged scholarship in the humanities!
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? How can we as collaborators evaluate and address ethical considerations at the level of project design, execution, and outcomes? How can we best manage competing institutional expectations and timelines? This free, virtual panel brings together three experienced public humanities practitioners to share their perspectives on the challenges and rewards of community-engaged scholarship. This discussion is open to the public and will be useful to anyone who is interested in humanistic work that extends beyond the walls of the academy.
Panelists
Asad Ali Jafri is a cultural producer, community organizer, and interdisciplinary artist. Using a grassroots approach and global perspective, Jafri connects artists and communities across imagined boundaries to create meaningful engagements and experiences. He is a co-founder of SpaceShift Collective, a collaborative of artists experimenting with the ways in which we work, live, and create. Jafri is also the Director of Strategy and Innovation at Words Beats & Life—a Washington D.C. based Hip Hop organization.
Aymar Jèan “AJ” Christian is the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern. His research focuses on the political economy of legacy and new media, cultural studies, and community-based research. He regularly engages industry and community as part of his work, including by serving as executive producer of films and series such as Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, Sarah Oberholtzer’s We Call Each Other, and The Cookout with producer Makiah Green and director Sam Bailey. Dr. Christian is also a co-founder of OTV | Open Television, a platform for intersectional television.
Rebekah Coffman is a historian, preservationist, and curator currently serving as curator of religion and community history at the Chicago History Museum where she leads the Chicago Sacred initiative. For CHM, she is co-curator of exhibitions Back Home: Polish Chicago (May 2023-June 2024) and Aquí en Chicago (forthcoming October 2025). Her interdisciplinary work is at the intersection of religious identity and the built environment and explores how to best safeguard tangible and intangible heritages in material and visual culture through place-based, community-centered approaches.
Moderator
Kelly Wisecup is the Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Her public humanities scholarship includes collaborations with scholars and tribal nations on a digital humanities project involving the Literary Voyager or Muzzeniegun (a 19th-century literary magazine edited and created by Ojiwbe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her family); and collaborations around archives, digital humanities, and rivers with the American Indian Center of Chicago and a Humanities Without Walls multi-institution research group.
PAST EVENTS—2023-2024
Public Humanities Symposium 2024
Friday, May 10, 2024
9:30 am - 6:00 pm CT
with Opening Reception and Exhibit
Thursday, May 9, 2024
4:30 - 6:00 pm
FREE! Public welcome; drop in any time!
FULL DETAILS here: https://humanities.northwestern.edu/graduate/ph-grad-practicum/events/2024-public-humanities-symposium.html
This all-day symposium seeks to engage members of the Northwestern community and the broader public in discussions around public and community-based scholarship. This free public event will feature a keynote talk, roundtable discussions with this year’s Kaplan Public Humanities Graduate Fellows, and a presentation of this year’s Kaplan Institute Public Humanities Award. Click here to learn more about this year’s Practicum Fellows.
Public Humanities PhD Careers Panel and Networking Reception
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
5:30 - 6:30 pm
Kresge Hall #2380 (next to the Kaplan Institute)
Registration requested. Register via Handshake: https://northwestern.joinhandshake.com/events/1522026/share_preview
As part of the Industry of the Month Series, join us for a panel discussion and networking co-hosted by Northwestern Career Advancement and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
During the event panelists will share insights into how they transitioned from graduate school into public humanities work, the experiences they felt best prepared them for this work, expectations in their current roles, and general advice and lessons learned from post-graduate experiences (especially any surprises or challenges along the way). After the panel discussion there will be time for students to network with the panelists.
Event Schedule
5:00 – 5:30 pm: Panel Discussion
Dr. Becky Amato, Director of Teaching and Learning with Illinois Humanities and Dr. Tiffany Simons Chan, Senior Director of Strategy Implementation at Chicago Botanic Garden
5:30 – 6:30 pm
Networking Reception (refreshments provided)
Digital Dialogues: Bringing the Public Humanities Online
Friday, February 23, 2024
12:00-1:00pm CT on Zoom
Registration link: bit.ly/DigiPH
How can scholars best engage with audiences across platforms?How might scholars think about reframing their expertise and their work for digital formats?
How should we measure the impact and value of this scholarship?
Pablo J. Boczkowski examines relationships between material culture and cultural material from a comparative perspective. His most recent book, co-authored with Mora Matassi, is To Know is To Compare: Studying Social Media Across Nations, Media and Platforms (MIT Press, 2023). He’s currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Digital Freud: The Refiguration of Inequality, Sociality and Personhood in Clinical Practice.
Raven Schwam-Curtis is a full-time content creator, keynote speaker, and recent Northwestern University graduate. Her research explores intersectional histories with a focus on Black and Jewish relationality. Bringing the expertise of academia to life in digital spaces allows Raven to serve the communities she loves and cherishes. Her work has been featured in Glamour magazine, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Buzzfeed. As Gen Z increasingly turns to digital methods of learning educators need to adapt, and as a member of Gen Z themselves, Raven is up for the challenge!
Neil Verma is an assistant professor in Radio/TV/Film. Verma is author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (Chicago, 2012), co-editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (California, 2016), and co-editor of Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (Michigan, 2020). His awards include a Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Andor Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. His new book, Narrative Podcasting in the Age of Obsession, is forthcoming in June from the University of Michigan Press. Moderator
Helen Cho is a visiting assistant professor in Northwestern’s Asian American Studies Program. Her research and teaching examine the role of mass media in producing and disseminating narratives of sociopolitical difference, and how narratives of difference shape the way people navigate their ascribed and avowed racial and ethnic identities in U.S. and international contexts. Cho’s commitment to community engaged scholarship and pedagogy has led her to design and teach experiential learning courses that bring community-based organizations and students together to co-create knowledge, moving students from theory to practice.
The Ethics of Community-Engaged Humanities Work
Thurs., November 30, 2023
12:00 - 1:00 pm CST
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? How can we as collaborators evaluate and address ethical considerations at the level of project design, execution, and outcomes? How can collaborators best manage competing institutional expectations and timelines? This free, virtual panel brings together three experienced practitioners to share their perspectives on the challenges and rewards of community-engaged humanities scholarship. This discussion is open to the public and will be useful to anyone who is interested in humanistic work that extends beyond the walls of the academy.
Panelists
Dr. Ruth Curry is a staff member at Northwestern's 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 Northwestern University, where she received her PhD in Comparative Literary Studies. At Northwestern, she has 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.
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is Executive Director of Illinois Humanities. She received her BA and MA in history from the University of Chicago and PhD in Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining Illinois Humanities in 2019, she served as Vice President of Education and Experience at the Chicago Architecture Center and as a senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the founding executive director of Project Exploration, a nonprofit dedicated to changing the face of science for youth and girls of color, which was recognized locally and nationally, including with a Presidential Award for Excellence. She has been named a Notable Leader in DEI by Crain's Chicago Business, a National After School Champion by the After School Alliance, Chicagoan of the Year by Chicago Magazine, and a Leadership Fellow with the Chicago Community Trust. Her current research and writing focus on the ways in which participatory humanities experiences bridge civic identities and catalyze social change. Lyon is the author of the graphic novels No Small Plans, and Washington By and By, and served as coeditor for A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools. @LyonGabrielle
Dr. Mérida M. Rúa is a faculty member in the Latina and Latino Studies Program at Northwestern. Her research and teaching focus on urban studies and aging, with an emphasis on communities of color in US cities. She is the author of A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods and co-editor of Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader and a special issue of the journal Latino Studies on “The Art of Latina and Latino Elderhood.” Her current book project, Migrations to Elderhood, examines the everyday lives of Puerto Rican old-timers and offers insight into how they make meaning of their experiences and socio-spatial environments as they age into later life.
Moderator
Dr. Trish Bredar is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Humanities at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She holds a PhD in English, with a graduate minor in Gender Studies, from the University of Notre Dame. She teaches and researches in the field of nineteenth-century British literature, with a particular interest in the socio-political dynamics of physical mobility. At Northwestern, she co-convenes the Kaplan Institute’s Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, which supports PhD students pursuing publicly engaged humanities projects.