Research Workshops
Kaplan Research Workshops foster interdisciplinary inquiry and scholarly exchange on promising avenues of humanities and humanistic social science research. With financial support from Kaplan, faculty workshop leaders invite scholars from across campus (including graduate students) to participate in a multi-year set of conversations and/or projects on a particular theme. Research Workshop funds may be used for activity that furthers knowledge on the theme, including but not limited to: convening discussions of new research and works-in-progress; inviting outside speakers; hosting symposia; launching publications; holding public humanities events; and sponsoring collaborative workshops.
2024-2025 Research Workshops
Art, Community, and Environment
Conveners: Rebecca Zorach (Art History) and Hollyamber Kennedy (Art History)
Coordinator: Risa Puleo (PhD Candidate, Art History)
This research workshop brings together faculty and graduate students interested in intersections among art and architectural practice, environmental studies, and communities. We seek to broaden definitions of knowledge production beyond the academic to Indigenous and oppositional knowledge, collaborative practice, reparative design, and activist research.
Colloquium for Global Iran Studies
Conveners: Elham Hoominfar (Global Health Studies), Shirin Vossoughi (Learning Sciences), and Emrah Yıldız (Anthropology & Middle East and North African Studies; on leave 2024-2025)
Click HERE for the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies web page.
The Colloquium for Global Iran Studies (CoGIS) provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars, intellectuals, artists, public figures, faculty, and students committed to deepening our knowledge and understanding of modern Iran in its global, regional, and historical contexts. Through a series of roundtables, public lectures, and events, as well as a sustained research and writing group, CoGIS supports the Northwestern community to consider the productivity of a global framework in the study of Iran and its diverse diasporas and peoples. CoGIS sets out to build the analytical and pedagogical tools necessary to un-learn persistent misconceptions and prevalent oversimplifications that explain away modern Iran and its diasporas and learn from those voices committed to rigorous and imaginative inquiry.
Global Antiquities
Conveners: Ryan Platte (Classics; primary contact), Mark McClish (Religious Studies), and Taco Terpstra (Classics)
Coordinator: Yannick Lambert (PhD Candidate, Religious Studies)
Click HERE for the Global Antiquities web page
The Global Antiquities research group brings together Northwestern scholars who specialize in the study of the literatures, histories, and cultures of the ancient world, regardless of discipline or regional specialty. Our interests range from Mesopotamian art to Greek philosophy, from classical Latin poetry to Hindu law, and from Tang dynasty China to Syriac and Coptic Christianity. The group (formed in the summer of 2017) gets together once or twice a quarter for colloquia, field trips, or invited talks. The group's goal is to enliven both the scholarship and the teaching of its members, and to offer a fresh and exciting take – interdisciplinary and global in essence – on antiquity more broadly, in order to make a significant contribution to the humanities within the university and beyond it.
Workshop in Trans Studies
Conveners: Marquis Bey (Black Studies) and Sarah Schulman (English)
Coordinator: S. Yarberry (PhD Candidate, English; Mellon Cluster Fellow in Poetry & Poetics)
The Workshop in Trans Studies, WiTS, aims to constellate the many different intellectual frameworks and disciplines within the field of trans studies—from poetics to affect theory, from gender studies to the history of science. Through a series of lectures, artist talks, workshops, and reading groups, we will convene a group of Northwestern community members that considers the history of trans studies alongside the many new contributions to how the field defines itself as well as the many possibilities it brings to the humanities and beyond. As trans studies consistently reminds us, research is an art form reliant on community and we are excited to foster time and space for those interested in experimenting with the new research methods and materials that trans writers, artists, and scholars are offering to our current field formations.