Our Faculty and Staff
Email our Program Coordinator if you'd like to schedule a visit to the program
Program Co-Directors
David J. Levin
David J. Levin is Associate Professor in the Committees on Cinema & Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and in the Dept of Germanic Studies. In 1994, he edited Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press); his Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal was published by Princeton University Press in 1998. His latest book Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Professor Levin has also worked extensively as a dramaturg for various opera houses in Germany and the United States and for William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet. He recently assumed the executive editorship of the Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. Under his stewardship, the journal now focuses on the intersection of performance, theory, and history. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at the University of Chicago, he regularly teaches at German universities, including the University of Konstanz (where he has, for the past three years, team-taught seminars in theater & performance studies with Christopher Wild and Juliane Vogel), the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Mainz.
Mark Miller
Mark Miller is Associate Professor in the Department of English, where he specializes in late medieval literature and culture. His work and teaching occupies the intersections of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory with ethics, theory of action, and philosophical psychology. Within medieval studies, he teaches courses on medieval gender and sexuality, the theory, practice, and phenomenology of bodiliness and ensoulment, perfectionism and utopianism in fourteenth-century England, and Chaucer. He also teaches more conceptually focused courses on theories of sexuality, on psychoanalytic theory, and on literature's forms of philosophical work. He is the author of Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge UP, 2004).
Program Staff
Hilary Strang
Associate Director
Hilary Strang came to the MAPH Associate Director position after 4 years of preceptoring in the program. She has degrees in cultural studies and critical theory from Brown University and Carnegie Mellon, and completed her Ph.D. in English at Chicago in 2009. She has taught college-level courses since 1995, in the nineteenth century novel, Romantic poetry, and critical theory, among other things. Her research interests include nineteenth century British literature, the novel, radical culture, and Marxism. In addition to working for MAPH, Hilary teaches in a liberal arts program for low-income adults. Her office is always open to students, and she is happy to share her knowledge of MAPH, critical theory, public transportation, television, and/or the mysteries of Hyde Park.
Maren Robinson
Program Coordinator
Maren will be joining the MAPH staff in December, and looks forward to working with current and prospective students, as well as her fellow MAPH alumni. In the meantime feel free to contact us in the maph office by email,ma-humanities@uchicago.edu, or by phone at 773-834-1201.
Jeff McMahon
Writing Advisor
Jeff McMahon was a newspaper reporter and columnist in California and Arizona before he completed MAPH in 2002. His articles and commentaries have been honored as the best in the nation by several journalism associations, including the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In addition to serving as MAPH's writing advisor, he has survived as a freelance writer in Chicago, worked as a lector for the University Writing Program, and taught creative nonfiction as a lecturer for the Committee on Creative Writing.
Program Mentors
Liz Blake
After graduating from Reed College in 2004 with a BA in English, Liz spent a few years outside of academia, writing marketing materials for a small online flower company. Her return to academia (in the form of MAPH) brought with it a change in focus, from experimental contemporary fiction and creative writing to the study of modernism, avant-gardes, and the history of the book. She hopes to continue pursuing these interests as a graduate student next year, but in the meantime she's busy enjoying Chicago's vegetarian restaurants, swimming in Lake Michigan, and buying far too many books.
Julie Gafney
Julie graduated from Tufts University in 2008 with degrees in English and Spanish. She came to MAPH to try out comparative studies, and immersed herself in medieval literature in Middle English, Old English and Spanish. She is happy to be in Chicago for another year and currently spends her time cooking brunch, hanging out at the lake, and starting more books than she can possibly finish.
Drew Kyser
Drew Kyser graduated with a B.A. in English from George Mason University in 2008, after leaving art school because he missed writing papers. Somewhere in the middle of this, he spent a year in Americorps teaching fourth and fifth grade in Minneapolis and practiced the fine art of mixology in various and sundry houses of ill-repute wherever he landed to underwrite his education habit.
In MAPH, Drew spent much of his time taking "big theory" courses, and applied this work (especially his study of Cultural Marxism) in writing his thesis, "Familiar Quotations and False Democracy: The Participation of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in Structures of Cultural Elitism and Class Dominance" dealing particularly with the shift to educational goals and middlebrow sensibilities with the eleventh edition of 1937. Drew lives in Uptown with his partner, Kate, and his dog, Sophie. He also really, really loves dinosaurs.
Preceptors
Kristin Boyce
Kristin Boyce is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in mathematics and religious studies. She received an A.M. from the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Her research interests are primarily in aesthetics and early analytic philosophy. She is currently finishing a dissertation, Wander into Fiction? Analytic Philosophy and the Case Study of Henry James. Part of the dissertation is forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Research in an article titled “Literature, Logic and the Liberating Word: The Elucidation of Confusion in Henry James.” She divides her time between the philosophy department, the dance studio, the Southwest shuttle to Pittsburgh and her pet rabbit, Felix.
Laura-Zoe Humphreys
Laura-Zoe Humphreys is a Joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and in the Department of Anthropology. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies and Anthropology from McGill University. Her dissertation addresses how Cuban filmmakers negotiate state censorship and their own wavering commitment to socialism to make films that criticize contemporary Cuban social problems. She focuses on the period following the collapse of the socialist bloc, when faith in the political and economic future of the socialist project has been on the wane. Laura-Zoe has been interviewing, hanging out with, and observing filmmakers in Havana, Cuba, since October 2007. Recently returned to Chicago, she is analyzing this data and writing the dissertation, reacquainting herself with the English language, and enjoying this amazing city.
Adam Jernigan
Adam Jernigan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1997. Recently, his work has focused on how socioeconomic structures and feeling structures mediate people's experience of their everyday lives. He is finishing a dissertation which examines the ways in which mid-20th century American realist novelists represented the dynamics between socioeconomic conditions, social integuments, and the sensorium.
Katie Kirtland
Katie Kirtland is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the U of C, currently finishing a dissertation on Jean Epstein’s film theory. Her areas of study include film and photography, and 20th-century art and the avant-garde. Katie spent six years working in the art world between Princeton and finally hearing the call to academia, and she still likes to make things.
Joshua Kotin
Joshua Kotin is a PhD candidate in the English department. He received a B.A. in English literature from McGill University in 2002. His research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, theories of the lyric, the American renaissance, and innovation in the arts. He is currently finishing a dissertation on ambitious literary projects, entitled Writing Utopia, with chapters on Thoreau, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Akhmatova, Stevens, and Pound and J.H. Prynne. He was the Editor of Chicago Review from 2005–2008.
Thomas Land
Thomas Land is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. Before coming to Chicago, he studied philosophy and German literature in Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests include metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of action, both contemporary and historical. He is currently working on a dissertation, which examines some of the central concepts in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Charles Todd
Charles Norman Todd is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. His dissertation examines akrasia, the defect of practical reasoning often translated as weakness of will. His research interests include Philosophy of Action, 20th Century Anglo-American Ethics, Philosophy of Perception, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. Prior to Chicago, Charles lived for many years in the Middle East, earned an MA in Philosophy from Tufts University, and even found himself on an archaeological dig.
Nathan Wolff
Nate Wolff received his B.A. from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is writing a dissertation on the late 19th century American “political romance”: an eclectic genre notable for its sinister lobbyists, corrupt senators, pious hypocrites, and pliant masses. He has taught courses for the English Department, the Center for Gender Studies, and the Committee on Media Studies. He used to design video games in Canada.
Abigail Zitin
Abigail Zitin is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago. The focus of her research is *The Analysis of Beauty*, a 1753 treatise by the artist William Hogarth, and her broader specialty is British literature of the eighteenth century. Abigail was born and raised in the Boston area. Before Chicago, she studied at Columbia and Cambridge Universities, receiving degrees in gender studies and English literature. She has also worked as an editor, writing entries for the *Oxford English Dictionary* and checking footnotes in Critical Inquiry.
