Fellows
Each year, the Kaplan Institute's Public Humanities Graduate Practicum supports a cohort of fellows as they develop a public humanities project of their own design. The 2024-2025 fellows and their projects are:
Daniel Atwood (Musicology)
Licks from the Loop: Highlighting Chicago’s Street Musicians
This project, Licks from the Loop, is a series of short videos highlighting street musicians who perform in downtown Chicago and the improvisational strategies they use while making music. Each episode features a different performer sharing a bit about their background and musical style, then demonstrating one or two of their favorite licks or musical techniques. The videos include on-screen sheet music notation and guitar tablature of the music, offering viewers a chance to learn improvisational techniques from the musician; the videos also include download links to accompanying learning materials based on the musical ideas in each video. Blending performance, music education, and storytelling, this series highlights the musical artists who contribute to downtown Chicago's unique soundscape and cultural fabric.
Austin Bryan (Anthropology)
“Stigmatized as ‘Promoting’ with the ‘Duty to Report’”: A Zine
This project is a zine that visualizes research on the stigmas faced by Ugandan public healthcare workers under the country’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which mandates the reporting of LGBTQ+ individuals to the police. The zine explores the ethical dilemmas, key challenges, and coping strategies involved in providing care to HIV key populations in this legal context. Topics include socio-legal stigma, stigma by association, navigating ethical obligations, and building resilience through advocacy. Through visual storytelling, the zine functions as an accessible resource for healthcare professionals and the broader public, fostering awareness of rights and promoting LGBTQ+-affirming care. The project ultimately aims to spark broader conversations and support within the healthcare and development sectors.
Srishti Chatterjee (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics)
Mapping Journeys: Visualizing Community Relationships to Place and Journey
In this project, Srish interviews people who have moved, in pursuit of education, work, safety, and community, embedding their stories in the maps of journeys that form their lives. Additionally, Srish is designing and delivering workshops in the Chicagoland area about participatory mapmaking, i.e, projecting people's narrative histories onto the various maps that make up their lives. Srish has delivered some of these workshops in Senior Living Centres, and is presenting a future one at the Evanston Public Library.
Sophia Elzie (Comparative Literary Studies)
Antigone in Chicago
The Antigone in Chicago project uses the city’s most popular Greek tragedy as a starting point for conversations about translation, the creative challenges and joys of staging ancient tragedy, and the role theater plays in our current moment. As part of this project, I gave a talk to 30 high school students at the Illinois Junior Classical League called “Choose Your Own Antigone.” I gave students an overview of the play and its performance history in Chicago before briefing them on the basics of translation theory. We then read or watched the same scene from four different translations. Using these examples, students were able to articulate their preferences and left with a greater awareness of translation as an interpretive act.
In the last year, three separate productions of Antigone were staged at the Court Theater, Northwestern University, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture. On April 24, I will moderate a panel bringing together members of the creative teams from each of these productions to share parts of their decision-making processes. In the weeks leading up to the panel, I hosted Antigone reading groups at public libraries in Ravenswood and Edegwater. These events provide space to bring together people who are theater professionals or who are interested in theater to gather in community and create connections through their shared interests. Through this project, I have also recirculated 20+ copies of tragedies to high school students and community members.
Bridgette Hulse (Anthropology)
Indiana Jones and the True World of Archaeology
Indiana Jones is the most prominent archaeologist in the public consciousness. His fantastical exploits and world travels are many people's first introduction to archaeology, fostering a public fascination with the field. In my YouTube video essay, “Indiana Jones and the True World of Archaeology,” I utilize the public’s love of Indiana Jones to introduce people to the real field of archaeology, discussing its faults, its successes, and the current state of the field. I discuss the archaeological theories of Indiana’s time, their intellectual history, and the ethical implications of Indie's work. As such, I use Indiana Jones as a vehicle to demystify the real academic work happening in the field. To this end, I aim to expose people to current archaeological theories and methods as the fanciful archaeology portrayed by Indiana Jones feeds into real-world misinformation and pseudo-archaeological narratives.
Dami Kim (History)
A Rememory of Harriet Hayden's Parlor
Building on her undergraduate honors thesis "A Rememory of Harriet Hayden," Dami created a StoryMap of Harriet’s parlor at 66 Phillips Street in Beacon Hill, Boston. Having escaped to freedom from slavery in Kentucky, Harriet ran an Underground Railroad boarding house that provided refuge to fugitives. Her parlor acted as a space of resistance, community, and respectability for herself and her family, as well as for many Black individuals who passed through. The parlor displayed photograph albums of abolitionist friends and allies, pikes from the Harpers Ferry raid, Governor Ames’s quill, Victor Hugo’s artwork, and more. This digital exhibition serves as a visual and accessible memorial to Harriet Hayden.
Jack Langdon (Composition and Music Technology)
Improvised Music for Pipe Organ
In the concert series Improvised Music for Pipe Organ, I invite a variety of musical improvisers to perform alongside myself on the pipe organ. Each event takes place in three parts and lasts a total of ninety minutes: an opening musical performance with myself and my collaborator, a discussion with the collaborator about improvisation and their relationship to religious culture and spirituality, and an open improvisation which invites anyone from the audience to join in a collective performance. We are holding concerts in various churches throughout Chicago—allowing musicians, community members, and improvised music fans to experience the sound of the pipe organ outside of Christian religious ritual. As a member of the improvised music community in Chicago since 2017, I am inviting musicians whose musical culture creates new spaces of engagement and creativity within religious spaces which house pipe organs. Through these performances, the series will demonstrate that the pipe organ can be expanded beyond its foreboding stereotypes as a musical instrument—allowing a much more capacious identity to emerge through improvised performance, community discussion, and public advocacy.
Mariel Melendez Mulero (Theatre and Drama)
Mapping the Cartographies of the BalletRican Imaginary
Through oral history, ethnography, and archival work, this project documents Puerto Rican ballet dancers’ histories into a series of digital maps to trace their trajectories across a transnational cartography. It engages the interdisciplinarity of theater and dance history, anthropology, the body, its corporealities, Caribbeanness and the Latinx experience. The following questions guide inquires: What is the relationship that exists between the island’s modern and contemporary history and the development of ballet as a discipline? What elements of the Puerto Rican diasporic and transnational experience inform ballet as a national and embodied aesthetic? By tracing individual dancers’ experiences, this mapping project visualizes the choreographies of the BalletRican imaginary. It furthers understanding on the role of ballet within the canon of Puerto Rican dance and corporeality, as well as its present-day importance in building community, memory, and belonging across the Rican transnational experience.
Achi Mishra (Technology and Social Behaviors)
Reimagined AI
Reimagined AI’s mission is to provide a creative space for speculative fiction centered around ethical issues within AI systems. Through a seven-part workshop series in partnership with San Diego Writers, Ink., creative writers learn about the harms of AI. Each workshop has a different theme and consists of three AI case studies, a free-writing session, and a discussion devoid of writing critique. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to amplify the voices of creative writers and see the AI future through their eyes. This interdisciplinary approach sheds light on key issues and nuances that might be missed by those developing AI technologies with a siloed approach. Workshop materials and writers’ stories can be found on the project website: www.reimaginedai.org. While the call for online stories is ongoing, a published anthology of select works will be available in the summer.
Uche Okpa-Iroha (Art History)
Danfo Dialogues: Shifts in Nigeria’s Contemporary Photography Landscape
This project aims to amplify the voices of emerging contemporary Nigerian photographers. These photographers have taken center stage to redefine global perceptions of African art by merging local narratives with universal themes, challenging stereotypes through innovative visual storytelling. Their work interrogates Nigeria’s rapid urbanization, the fluidity of postcolonial identities, and the country’s evolving role in global cultural dialogues. The project amplifies these voices through a multifaceted approach: a curated exhibition showcases striking imagery of urban transformation and grassroots activism; an artist-talk session in Chicago to foster cross-cultural exchange; website to contextualize the photographers’ work within Nigeria’s socio-political fabric; and a video presentation to trace their creative journeys. By bridging Nigerian visual culture with international audiences, the project sparks critical conversations about place, cultural identity, and the power of photography to reshape narratives. The project positions Nigeria as both a hub of creativity and a vital contributor to contemporary global art discourse, underscoring photography’s capacity to transcend borders and redefine cultural identity.
Sofia Sanchez (Spanish and Portuguese)
Stages of Reparation: Theater Practices for Healing and Restorative Justice with Juvenile Former Offenders in Colombia
This project aims to publish “Stages of Reparation,” a manual featuring five writing and body exploration exercises rooted in theatrical principles that have proven effective when working with young offenders in juvenile detention facilities in Medellín, Colombia. Developed in collaboration with La Parla—an organization committed to play creation in prison settings to foster Restorative Justice—this manual seeks to disseminate tools emerging from a local artistic practice to educators, social workers, therapists, and others engaged with communities affected by violence and experiences of trauma. The manual will open with a critical introduction outlining La Parla's approach and its contributions to rethinking justice models for minors. Each of the five exercises will include step-by-step instructions and visual documentation to guide facilitators through processes that promote reflection on personal histories, accountability, and transformation. The project recognizes the complex realities of these young people, many of whom carry the compounded trauma of being both victims and perpetrators—frequently due to forced recruitment by armed groups during Colombia’s internal conflict. By sharing these practices, “Stages of Reparation” aims to support restorative methodologies that affirm the dignity, agency, and creative potential of youth affected by cycles of violence and incarceration.
Previous Fellows
Project descriptions for previous Public Humanities Graduate Practicum fellows are here: graduate/ph-research-workshop/participants/past-participants-pubhum-rw