Current Institute Fellows

Institute Fellowships are for a full year of leave or a two-course teaching reduction. Applicants' projects are subject to a competition and evaluated by outside reviewers. Fellows work on their projects, conduct an Institute colloquium to present their research, take part in Institute events, and--a year later--design and teach an Institute class that reflects their research. The Kaplan Institute also offers with the University Library a Library Fellowship for one Library staff member per year.

Announcing 2012-2013 Institute Fellows!

Nathalie Bouzaglo

Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese

“Adulterated Nation: Illicit Passions in the Venezuelan Fin de Siècle”

Nathalie Bouzaglo (Ph.D. New York University, 2007) focuses on nineteenth-century Venezuelan and Latin American literary and cultural production. She is currently working on a book manuscript, "Illicit Passions: Nation and Adulteration in the Venezuelan Fin de Siècle," in which she focuses on the practice, narrativization and theorization of adultery in late nineteenth-century Venezuela to argue that representations of adultery are crucial to the construction of the Venezuelan nation. She envisions adultery as a counterintuitively productive event: although it would seem to undermine the national foundations, adultery diverts attention from a far more dangerous threat to the nation, namely, any questioning of the Law that constitutes the nation. She also co-edited the volume Excesos del cuerpo: Ficciones de contagio y enfermedad en América Latina [Excesses of the Body: Fictions of Contagion and Illness in Latin America] (2009, reprinted 2011).

Benjamin Frommer

Associate Professor, Department of History

“The Road to Theresienstadt: The Persecution of Bohemian and Moravian Jews, 1938-1945”

Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1999) specializes in the history of Central Europe, with a focus on the periods of Nazi and Communist rule. He is primarily interested in collaboration and resistance under repressive regimes, ethnic cleansing, transitional justice, and nationalism. Frommer is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was published in Czech translation by Academia Publishers, Prague. His current book project focuses on the persecution of Jews in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Frommer's research and writing have been supported by the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the US Department of Education, and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna). Frommer is a recipient of the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and has taught for the Kaplan Scholars Humanities Program (2012).

Emily Rohrbach

Assistant Professor, Department of English

“Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation”

Emily Rohrbach (Ph.D. Boston University, 2007) teaches and writes about British Romanticism and aesthetic theory.  Her research focuses on concepts of time and on moments in literature when semantic meanings appear out of joint with aesthetic experience—in other words, moments when a text does something different from what it says.  Her book manuscript argues that, in its jarring relations between aesthetics and semantics, Romantic literature provides a distinctive way of imagining the present as a future memory.  Her essays have been published in European Romantic Review, The Keats-Shelley Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, and Studies in Romanticism.  She recently co-edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on the topic “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics,” which appeared in summer 2011.

Wendy Wall

Professor, Department of English

"Strange Kitchens: Knowledge and Taste in Early Modern English Recipe Books”

Wendy Wall, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, works on early modern English literature and culture. In her publications, she has delved into a wide range of topics including Renaissance poetry, cookbooks, Shakespeare, editorial theory, gender, national identity, the history of authorship, women's writing, and theatrical practice. Her books include The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (1993) and Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (2002), which was a finalist for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the MLA and a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Winner. Professor Wall gives public lecturers in conjunction with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and with the Newberry Library in Chicago, and has served as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is currently working on a book entitled Strange Kitchens: Knowledge and Taste in Early English Recipe Books.

Library Fellow

Nina Barrett

Communication Specialist, Northwestern University Library

“The Leopold & Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Famous Crimes”

Nina Barrett is a journalist and author who serves as the Communications Specialist at University Library, where she works on publications and exhibits. In 2009 she curated an exhibit called The Murder That Wouldn’t Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction based on the Library’s extraordinary collections of original source materials related to the crime. She is currently working on a book for Northwestern University Press, The Leopold & Loeb Files, which aims to excavate the case and its protagonists from the layers of myth that have buried it in the past eight decades, constructing a narrative from the original documents. Nina has also written several books on motherhood and women’s issues, and regularly contributes food feature stories to Chicago’s NPR affiliate station WBEZ. Her series of stories on kitchen anxiety “Fear of Frying” won the 2012 James Beard Award for Radio Show/Audio Webcast. She earned her B.A. in English from Yale, a master’s degree in Print Journalism from Medill, and a professional chef’s degree from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago.

 

2011-2012 Institute Fellows

David Ebrey

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
"The Role of Matter in Aristotle's Natural Science"

David Ebrey's (Ph.D., UCLA, 2007) main interests are in ancient philosophy. His dissertation, Aristotle's Motivation for Matter, focuses on issues in ancient metaphysics and the foundations of natural science. He is in the process of revising and expanding this material to turn it into a book. He also has strong interests in ancient epistemology and ethics. In recent years he has taught a survey course on ancient philosophy, a freshman seminar on Socratic dialogues, and graduate seminars on Plato’s Meno, Plato's Phaedo, Aristotle’s Physics II, and Aristotle's Metaphysics Beta.

Nina Gourianova

Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures
"Visualizing Radicalism: The Aesthetics and the Ideological Paradigms of the Twenties"

Nina Gourianova (Gurianova), who holds Ph.D.s in both Russian Literature (Columbia University) and Art History (Moscow Lomonosov University), is a literature and art historian and specializes in both Russian and European modernism, with a specific emphasis on twentieth-century avant-garde movements, and contemporary culture. She is the author of several books and albums on the art and literature of the Russian Avant-garde, published in Russia, Europe, and the United States. She served as the primary curatorial consultant to the Museum of Modern Art on the exhibition of Russian Futurist and Constructivist books in 2002, and she participated in the organization and catalogues of "Amazons of the Avant-garde: A. Exter, N. Goncharova, L. Popova, O. Rozanova, V. Stepanova, N. Udaltsova" (1998-99) and "Kazimir Malevich" (2002-2003) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Katherine Hoffman

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
"Mirror of the Soul:  Law, Islam, and Language under the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912-1956)"

Katherine E. Hoffman (Ph.D. Columbia, 2000) is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in the relationship between expressive culture, ethnicity, and political economy.  Her research explores this nexus in North Africa, and particularly Morocco, from the late 19th c. to the present, particularly as it has been shaped by the processes of French colonialism, anti-imperialism, nationalism, and postnationalism.  Her book We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco book (2008) is an ethnographic account of the ways in which political economy and migration have shaped rural ethnolinguistic repertoires in both talk and song, and in Arabic and Tashelhit Berber languages, among the Ishelhin Berbers of southwestern Morocco. Hoffman also co-edited with Susan Gilson Miller the interdisciplinary volume Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (2010). Hoffman has been awarded numerous fellowships and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and American Anthropologist.

Amy Stanley

Assistant Professor, Department of History
"Revolutionary Kyoto:  The Everyday Politics of Rebellion, Restoration, and Enlightenment in Japan's Imperial City, 1860-1890"

Amy Stanley (Ph.D. Harvard, 2007) specializes in the history of early modern Japan. She is particularly interested in women’s history, the history of gangsters and the underworld, and the formation of social policy in early modern cities and towns. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation, and she has studied at Kansai University in Osaka and Waseda University in Tokyo. Her dissertation, which she is currently revising for publication, explores official and popular attitudes toward the sex trade in provincial Japan between 1600 and 1868. Other recent work includes an article on adultery and punishment in Tokugawa Japan and research on education for geisha during the Meiji period.

Barry Wimpfheimer

Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
"Coherence: The Engine of Jewish Law"

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer (Ph.D., Columbia, 2005) specializes in the Talmud and other Rabbinic Literature. His doctoral dissertation, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud,” was awarded the Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies in 2007. Wimpfheimer spent Spring 2006 at Harvard University as a Harry Starr Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies. Wimpfheimer’s work focuses on the Babylonian Talmud as a work of law and literature. His book Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories implicates a new methodology of reading talmudic law thickly by incorporating oft-ignored cultural concerns within its understanding of the law. The result of such an expansion is a textured description of Jewish law and an illuminating window onto rabbinic Judaism in Babylonia. 

İpek Yosmaoğlu

Assistant Professor, History
"A World Undone: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1912"

İpek Yosmaoğlu (Ph.D. Princeton, 2005) is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the history department at Northwestern in 2010. Her research interests include nationalism, violence, political legitimacy and state modernization. She is currently completing a book on "Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia," which focuses on the final decades of Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe. Her research has been supported by the Onassis Foundation, the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library Fellow
Julie Rudder

Outreach and Training Specialist, Department of Digital Collections
"Light and the Unseen: The Role of Light in Contemporary Visual Arts Practice"

Julie Rudder (MFA, Northwestern University, 2007) is a Chicago-based artist and independent curator whose work explores and interprets belief and doubt within experiences of power, especially as they relate to a visual experience. Along with collaborator Roxane Hopper, she founded and curated the project space Vega Estates from 2007-2009. Her work has been exhibited at FLAT 7, Rowland Contemporary Gallery, Livebox Gallery, BEN RUSSELL, The 22nd International Festival Sarajevo, and she is a founding member of the Danny Think Tank artist collective. Since 2007, she has helped faculty and students integrate digital media and tools into teaching and research while working at the Northwestern University Library.

 

Past Fellows