The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities promotes expansive, interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The Institute cultivates ideas that transform into cutting-edge research and dynamic courses. Each year the Institute invites faculty members working in the humanities and humanistic social sciences at Northwestern to apply to become Kaplan Institute Fellows. The Institute’s Faculty Fellowship Program offers faculty course reductions so that they can develop research projects within an interdisciplinary community. Additionally, Kaplan Institute Fellows, who are selected by an external team of reviewers, present work at weekly lunchtime colloquia, participate in Institute events, and develop a course to offer in the Institute in the year after their fellowship.
This year the Institute has selected 10 fellows to join the 2021-2022 cohort. These fellows are Professors Masi Asare, Adia Benton, Lina Britto, Ashish Koul, Jennifer Lackey, J. Michelle Molina, Anna Parkinson, Ozge Samanci, Rebecca Zorach, and Rachel Zukert.
Dr. Masi Asare is a professor in the School of Communications and her project is titled Voicing the Possible: Technique, Vocal Sound, and Black Women on the Musical Stage.
“My book project examines the transmission of singing techniques and the impact of black women singers in U.S. musical theatre from 1900 to 1970. I trace a line of historical singing lessons locating blues singers in the lineage of Broadway belters. Contesting the narrative that black women who performed on the musical stage during the blues era and beyond possessed ‘untrained’ voices, I study the ways that singing is sonic citational practice. As singers, we always cite our teachers, the ones from whom we have learned the song.”
Dr. Adia Benton, professor in the Department of Anthropology and Program of African Studies, will work on a book project titled The Fever Archive: Race, Risk and Survival in the Wake of Sierra Leone’s Ebola Outbreak.
“My book, The Fever Archive, is an account of the 2013-16 West African Ebola epidemic, focusing not on simply evaluating or assessing the success or failure of the interventions mobilized by international actors, but also on the cultural and institutional logics of these interventions.”
Dr. Lina Britto, professor in the Departments of History and Spanish and Portuguese, will work on a book titled Healing Democracy: A Medical History of Medellín’s Cocaine Wars.
“My next book examines a vanguard of scientists, doctors, and medical practitioners that made Medellín, Colombia, one of Latin America’s premier centers of medical research and clinical practice at a moment of ascent of a new service economy whose dynamism increasingly depended on cocaine exportation. Healing Democracy recasts a paradigmatic case of illegality and criminality in the Americas by reconstructing the violent defeat of alternative visions for the future of a city in crisis, and analyzing how medicine and public health became central battlegrounds of democracy in a country at war.”
Dr. Ashish Koul, professor in the Department of History, will be working on a project called Caste Reinvented: Arains, Islam, and Politics in Twentieth Century South Asia.
“This project is a history of caste, Islam, and politics among South Asian Muslims between the 1890s and 1980s. The book reveals the intertwining of caste and Islam among the Arains, a South Asian Muslim caste, and its ramifications for the Arains’ political selfhood first in British India and later in independent Pakistan.”
Dr. Jennifer Lackey, Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor in the Department of Philosophy and director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, will work on her project Criminal Testimonial Injustice. Read more about Professor Lackey on her website.
“In this project, I explore how testimony is extracted from individuals in the criminal legal system in the United States through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive, and is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. I show that this practice is powerfully vivid with respect to four distinct phenomena: confession evidence, eyewitness testimony, plea deals, and the recantations of sexual assault survivors. The result will be a book at the intersection of philosophy and criminal law that shows how extracted testimony that bypasses or undermines agency inflicts a unique and pernicious form of injustice on testifiers.”
Dr. J. Michelle Molina, professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and History, will work on her project Inventories of Ruin.
“Adapting a micro-historical approach to the story of people, books, and things in motion, Inventories of Ruin draws upon such varied perspectives as the Spanish Crown, members of freed-black Jesuit confraternities, a Swede entangled with Jesuit refugees en route to exile, and a single Jesuit who scribbled 379 mini-biographies of deceased Mexican Jesuits. Spanning a period of 50 years, this intimate story of demise is anchored in three types of inventories that catalyze our historical understanding of ‘inventorying’ as a humanistic practice of making order out of disorder, even chaos.”
Dr. Anna Parkinson, professor in the Department of German, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and Jewish Studies Program, will work on her project titled Contrapuntal Humanism: The Afterlives of Humanism in Holocaust Studies.
“My project puts into dialogue the modernist fiction and social scientific writings of two exiled German-language authors and Jewish Holocaust survivors: psychoanalyst Hans Keilson and historian H.G. Adler. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, their postwar interdisciplinary writing cleaves to a paradigm of humanism, even as it exposes its fragility, paradoxes and limitations. Contrapuntal Humanism examines the ongoing political and ethical practices we engage in, especially in moments of heightened social and historical crisis that challenge the axiomatic ontology of humanism.”
Dr. Ozge Samanci, professor in the School of Communication, will work on a graphic novel titled Evil Eye.
“The graphic novel, Evil Eye, explores the tactics right-wing populist leaders are using throughout the world: planting seeds of fear, celebrating binary thinking, ‘othering’ marginalized groups, and using anger and hostility to increase divisions. Evil Eye uses the murder mystery genre, lived anecdotes, humor, and suspense as narrative devices to explore questions about the rise of authoritarianism in non-didactic ways.”
Dr. Rebecca Zorach, professor in the Department of Art History, will work on two projects: The Designs of Nature and Temporary Monuments.
I’m pursuing two projects that address political implications of the ways art has been defined historically in relation to nature. The first project, The Designs of Nature, studies how in the European Renaissance, the personified figure of Nature acted ‘like an artist’ in producing natural images thought to rival the products of human artistry. The second project, tentatively entitled Temporary Monuments, studies how the very idea of art in the United States hinges inevitably on concepts of nature, territory, and race.
Dr. Rachel Zuckert, professor in the Department of Philosophy, will work on her project Not Just a Matter of Taste: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Scottish Aesthetics.
“The project aims to broaden discussion of Scottish Enlightenment aesthetics by attending to transformative theories of beauty, sublimity, artistic imitation, and the paradox of tragedy, presented in now-neglected, but historically influential texts. The book also treats the role of aesthetics within larger Scottish Enlightenment projects: natural-scientific investigation; the defusion of religious enthusiasm; and politically emancipatory education.”