Current 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 2023-2024 fellows and their projects are listed below.
Archita Arun • Performance Studies
Clara Lee • Performance Studies
Craving Together
Craving Together explores diasporic, immigrant, and refugee food cultures and cooking as community care practices. The project involves creating an online recipe index that compiles recipes sourced from the diasporic, immigrant, and refugee communities in Chicago. We imagine the index to serve as an ongoing archive that documents the stories of the individuals who are brought together by these recipes and the foods that they crave. In doing so, we hope to organize a public activation that will bring together members of the community as well as volunteers together to share their recipes and stories.
Lauren Cole • History
Medicine and Gender in Medieval Europe: A YouTube Series
This six-part series of YouTube videos encourages viewers to critically examine their assumptions about the medieval past, and how these assumptions underpin oppressive structures in the present moment. The series is themed around medicine and gender in medieval Europe as these are common areas of stereotyping with long legacies today. Video topics will include: women’s large involvement in medieval medicine beyond the essentialist assumption that healing was women’s knowledge; connections between medieval European medicine and Indigenous medicines and ecologies today; how medieval medical texts survive and how to read them; and why medieval medical knowledge is so often dismissed today, despite it offering several previously unknown antibiotics that treat antibiotic-resistant superbugs such as MRSA.
Jennifer Comerford • English
Presenting the Past through Eighteenth-Century Recipes
Because global trade and national cuisine were rapidly expanding in eighteenth-century Britain, eighteenth-century makers were confronted with many of the same concerns that we’re reflecting on today. In this limited video series, I recreate eighteenth-century recipes like the first recipe printed in English for curry as a way of not only gaining insight into eighteenth-century practices, but also demonstrating how these practices can inform our present concerns around food culture, production, and appropriation. As this series will demonstrate, eighteenth-century recipe books are rich sites for interrogating these concerns because they are at once strikingly familiar and persistently estranging to us in critically productive ways. In addition to the video series, I will also partner with Chawton House, based in Hampshire, England, to offer additional virtual programming.
Peri Green • Learning Sciences
Youth Landscape Biographies of South Side, Chicago
In Chicago, communities’ learning opportunities have been made visible through platforms like My CHI. My Future. Still, for residents, especially youth, there remains a mysterious essence about Chicago that can be challenging to capture, make sense of, and convey. Seeking meaningful connections, today’s youth turn to social media platforms to create their realities and understand themselves. Recognizing this, I collaborate with young people in South Side Chicago to produce a TikTok series spotlighting how their identities intertwine with their environments. Drawing inspiration from Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake, who eloquently stated, “Some people think that surfing is a relationship with the sea, when it's really a relationship between you and yourself. The sea is gonna do whatever it wants” (p. 375), I aspire to capture a similar essence in exploring the profound impact of environmental affordances on shaping one's identity.
Victoria Pham • History
Mapping Connections: A Vietnamese American Webinar Series
Utilizing a relational approach, this webinar series highlights the convergences of Vietnamese resettlement with other communities of color, demonstrating the intimacy of these connections that cannot be written off as coincidental. In this series, each webinar will highlight Vietnamese relations with other communities during that given historical period, allowing participants to build consciousness of U.S. racial formation and reflect on their identity in tandem with intersecting factors of gender, class, sexuality, and etc. The historical focus in these webinars will allow participants to acquire meaningful knowledge that helps contextualize how contemporary circumstances, narratives, and politics of the Vietnamese diaspora came to be. Open to all ages, this webinar series encourages intergenerational conversations and connections.
Devika Ranjan • Performance Studies
A YEAR OF ROBOT DEATH
A YEAR OF ROBOT DEATH is a cyborgian storytelling project that will engage the everyday technologies that shape our understandings of self-worth, analyzing wellness culture and ritual from a feminist and decolonial perspective. Drawing on anthropological observation, autoethnography, and critical and creative storytelling, this project will conceptualize how technology has redefined our relationships with ourselves, holiness, and duality. Through reflections on objects like the Hot Girl Walk, the Rotimatic, the Big Bollywood Wedding, and Airport Terminals, this project will center diasporic South Asian narratives and Hindu structures of circular time. A YEAR OF ROBOT DEATH explores the idea that misplacing holiness leads to ordinary acts of violence of the body, society, and ecosystem. Over the year, A YEAR OF ROBOT DEATH will experiment with multiple means of storytelling and culminate in a chapbook of essays as well as performances in and around Chicago.
Bipin Sebastian • Rhetoric, Media, and Publics
Majorities and Minorities
This podcast project will engage with the diverse histories and politics of modern nation states, and multi-nation states, with a focus on majorities and minorities. The contemporary rise of ethno-religious majoritarianism around the world has made the majority-minority question fraught again, especially for the modern multicultural democracies. In this populist context, minoritized identity is the result of the majority group’s attempts to appropriate the state for itself, rather than a self-conscious formation by those marked as minorities. Based mostly on their religious, ethnic, or linguistic identities, minorities in modern history have been met with varying degrees of pluralism, assimilation, ghettoization, exile, population transfer, and even extermination. This project examines the varied histories and futures of the majority-minority question in conversation with experts addressing contexts globally.
Jennifer Ligaya Senecal • Performance Studies
Speaking Blasian Oral Histories Podcast
This project is a podcast that aims to explore and amplify voices within the "Blasian" community, addressing the historical intersections of Black and Asian identities in America by delving into the lived experiences of individuals with one Black and one Asian parent. Through these narratives, the podcast seeks to provide a platform for critical dialogue, exploring the impact of American imperialism, militarism, and racialized labor on the formation of identities and fostering understanding and recognition of the unique contributions of the mixed Black and Asian heritage.
Craig Stevens • Anthropology
Traveling Treasures
Traveling Treasures is a public humanities and digitization project led by the National Museum of Liberia (NMOL) and the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology (BAHA) Research Project, which allows Liberians to intimately engage 3D models of Liberian material culture within U.S. collections (Gabel Museum, Penn Museum, Herskovits Library of African Studies) through Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences. In collaboration with this material cultural diplomacy project, the African Graduate Student Association (AGSA) will host a Traveling Treasures Northwestern Speaker and Workshop Series that aims to bring together Northwestern's African Studies and Digital Humanities communities. Through this, we hope to provoke conversations and experiences that engage the legacies of shared African heritage and material culture, the future of museums, and the potentials enabled through emerging digitization technologies.
Kylie Walters • Radio/Television/Film
Psychoanalysis and the Climate Crisis
As “an art of listening to what remains shrouded but insistent,” what can psychoanalytic theory offer us in thinking about climate change? This public humanities seminar will gather a small group of Chicagoans over readings at the intersection of psychoanalysis and climate change from late winter through spring. It aims both to provisionally orient participants to psychoanalytic theory and to ask how psychoanalysis might expand and sharpen the formation of climate politics. The project seeks to provide participants with a social space in which to discuss a pressing but widely and diversely disavowed issue and to offer, through community, rigorous thought.
Sreddy Yen • English
Race from Africa: Four Literary Commentaries
In this series of four Instagram Lives, we will hear from African writers working in various genres on how they engage and negotiate race and racialisation in their work. Given these Afropolitan (as some might say) writers’ situation across both the African continent and the diaspora, and given the many academic theorisations of race (most often from the U.S.), this project aims to foreground what “blackness” means to these literary voices who have spent a formative portion of their lives on the continent and/or whose literary practices are critically grounded in Africa. By opening up the Live to questions from the audience, this project also hopes to make space for conversations in the African and diasporic #Bookstagram communities about what solidarity-building might look like.
Previous Fellows
Project descriptions for previous Public Humanities Graduate Practicum fellows are here: graduate/ph-research-workshop/participants/past-participants-pubhum-rw