Our Faculty and Staff
Program Co-Directors
David J. Levin
David J. Levin is Associate Professor in the Dept of Germanic Studies, in the Committee on Cinema/Media Studies, and in the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies (a division of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities). From 1992-98, he was Assistant Professor of German, Gender Studies, and Theater Studies at Columbia University. 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 just published by the University of Chicago Press this summer. 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.
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 focussed 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
Joan Wellman
Associate Director
Joan Wellman managed the administrative and clerical staff of the University of Kansas School of Law for five years before going back to college as a nontraditional undergraduate. Her two girls grew up as she earned the BA in philosophy at KU and the MA at the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught ethics, feminist theory, and modern philosophy at Pitt, Chatham College, Indiana University, and several community colleges. She currently teaches the intensive summer logic course for U of C. As MAPH's chief administrator, she manages the office and staff, advises and tracks students, deals with budget and payroll, and runs the summer internship program.
Braden Grams
Program Coordinator
Braden came to Chicago, and MAPH, in 2004 from the frozen North of Saint Peter, Minnesota after doing a BA in English at Gustavus Adolphus College, and graduate course work in English Language and Literature at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Not surprisingly, he spent most of his time during MAPH in the English department with forays into cinema and composition pedagogy. Professionally, Braden also makes appearances as a Lecturer for Harold Washington College and the Chicago City Colleges' Center for Distance Learning. Outside the office, Braden can be found trying to spend some time with his five feline roommates, as well as tinkering with computers.
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
Margaret Fink
Margaret Fink graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A. in English and Art History. After teaching 8th and 9th grade English to an energetic group of students in Camden, New Jersey, she found that she had left her heart in the stacks. She came to MAPH hoping to continue her undergraduate work on the abject body in modernist poet Mina Loy's work, but shifted her focus to the embodied identity politics of disability studies. She wrote her thesis on Chris Ware's comic strip Building Stories and its idiosyncratic representation of a woman with a prosthetic leg. She enjoys back-porch gardening, playing the guitar, indulging her inner foodie, French film (esp. Nouvelle Vague), and breaking it down.
Linda Smith
Linda received her BA in English with a minor in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2005. After staying in Ann Arbor an extra year and working for Aveda, Linda moved to Chicago and entered MAPH. She continued her studies in English Literature with a focus on American Modernism and Gertrude Stein, composing her thesis on Stein's use of repetition and portrayal of literary affect. Outside of her academic interests, Linda can and will talk to you for hours about food (meat and dairy free), music, and Aveda products. She also has a strong affinity for crossword puzzles, Bikram yoga, and Bravo reality TV shows.
R. Alex Wilson
Alex Wilson graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2002 with a BA in Music, after which he let his musical interests simmer while beginning an apprenticeship as a carpenter. Finding the work rewarding, he spent the next four years improving his carpentry skills and starting his own business as an independent contractor. Although his tool bags were a good fit, looming questions about music brought him to MAPH where the approaches offered by ethnomusicology propelled his interests in contemporary classical composers (and, well, pretty much all music and music-makers). Alex enjoys swimming in Lake Michigan, exploring Chicago, and continuing to improve his homemade washtub bass.
Preceptors
Robert Devendorf
Robert Devendorf is currently working on his dissertation in the English Department on the role of the English country house in the production of authoritative subjects in Victorian fiction. Though his BA is in English from the University of Chicago, he assures readers that he has seen something of the wide world outside of Hyde Park. Robert has an MA in Art History from UIC, and has taught extensively: returning dropouts in Wicker Park, gifted East Coast high schoolers, film students at Columbia College, a lone child in a vast Kenwood mansion, tiny darlings at the Lab School, and U of C undergraduates as well as MAPHers. Having lived in Chicago since 1981, he is an excellent resource for all things Chicago. Yes, he is tan, but be assured that he is not frivolous, he merely lives next to the beach.
Kathleen Frederickson
Kathleen Frederickson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, working on a dissertation on Victorian sexuality and the politics of discourses around "instinct." Her other interests include feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the history of the social sciences. She teaches in English and Gender Studies.
Erin Hazard
Erin Hazard received her BA and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is a PhD candidate in Art History at U of C. In 2002–2003, she co-edited the Chicago Art Journal. She is currently writing a dissertation on nineteenth-century writers’ houses as tourist sites titled “‘Realized Day-dreams’: Excursions to Authors’ Homes.” Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural history, the history of museums and collecting, and the relationships between place and the visual arts.
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. Since arriving at Chicago, Adam has been compelled by the question of how economic and feeling structures come to organize experience in modern societies. His dissertation, entitled "Somatic Realism: Economies of Feeling in Postwar American Fiction," examines the ways in which contemporary American novelists represent the dynamic between economic conditions and emotional life.
Jennifer Johnson
Jennifer Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from Grinnell College (Iowa) in biology and philosophy. She is interested in ethics broadly construed, sometimes contemporary, sometimes ancient, occasionally political, and always social. She is currently working on a dissertation on intimacy, gift giving, and virtue ethics.
Heather Keenleyside
Heather Keenleyside is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, where she is working on a dissertation about the role of nonhuman animals in eighteenth- century literature and philosophy. She received a BA in English from McGill University and a Masters of Research in Humanities and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College, London. Before coming to Chicago, she also worked as a film researcher and production manager.
Bill Martin
Bill Martin is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where he is writing a dissertation on film comedy in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. He has a BA from The University of Iowa and an MA from UT Austin, has worked as a bookseller, barista, and temp slave in San Francisco and as a freelance translator in Berlin, taught German at the University of Chicago and translation workshops at the School of the Art Institute, and was Fiction Editor of Chicago Review from 1999-2004. He has written on film and contemporary poetry and fiction, is currently translating the novel Lubiewo by Polish writer Michal Witkowski, and has recently been awarded a 2008 NEA Fellowship for Translation.
Matthias Regan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago, and is finishing his dissertation on twentieth-century populist American poetry and politics at the U of C. Alongside poetry, his scholarly interests include genre fiction and leftist politics. Matthias grew up in New Hampshire and lived in Portland, OR, and Oakland, CA, before settling in Chicago in 1995. He received a BA from Connecticut College and an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. In the past he has served as nonfiction editor of the Chicago Review and managing editor of Modernism/Modernity. He currently teaches poetry writing in Chicago public schools and writes and publishes poetry and political arts.
Will Small
Will Small is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from the University of Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Wadham College. He is interested in philosophy of mind and action, as well as related topics in metaphysics and epistemology. His current research is on features of human mindedness that he thinks can't be adequately represented as patterns of reasoning, such as exercises of skills and emotional behaviour.
Eirik Steinhoff
Eirik Steinhoff has a BA from Bard College and an MA from the University of Chicago. He's writing a dissertation about poetry and chance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and has also written on twentieth-century technology (bicycles and cinema) and on contemporary poetry. He edited Chicago Review from 2000 to 2005; special issues include "Stan Brakhage: Correspondences," "Edward Dorn, American Heretic," "New Polish Writing," and "New Writing in German." He is an Associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, where he teaches periodically.
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.
