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 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 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
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 non-traditional 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
Alicia Bleuer
Alicia came to the University of Chicago from St. Mary’s College of California where she completed her MFA in nonfiction writing in 2007. After those two years of creative work, she decided to spend her MAPH year working through some of the academic concerns she developed as an undergraduate in English at the University of Iowa. In MAPH, her areas of focus shifted from post-colonial theory and American Modernism, to 18th-century novels and the history of literary epistolarity, but she was able to wed the old and the new interests in her MA thesis, which discussed epistolarity in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. In her off-campus time, Alicia scours Chicago for California-comparable burritos and sushi, wanders the halls of the Art Institute, and accumulates far,,,,, more used books than she has shelves to hold.
Dan Gross
Daniel Gross graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Northwestern University in 2007. Having focused more on writing obscurantist poetry than clear philosophy, he came to MAPH as a way to improve his academic writing, as well as learn how to do analytic philosophy. This year is the first since Daniel was 6 that he has not been enrolled in school, but hopefully he will return to school next year as a graduate student in philosophy. Outside of academics, Daniel still reads poetry, cheers for the Brewers and Packers, and smokes a pipe.
Monica Westin
Monica graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in English. After teaching English at an all-girls school in Los Angeles, she traveled to an even more alien environment, the Xinjiang region of China bordering Kazakstan, where she taught and helped develop an English curriculum. While in MAPH, Monica continued her studies in English with an eye towards rhetoric and composition. Her thesis compared the Surrealist self-presentation of the Diary of Anais Nin with the visual rhetoric of Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion designs. When she’s not MAPH’ing or writing theater reviews, Monica enjoys long walks, cheese, and spreading the word that Bridgeport is the new Pilsen.
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. She research interests are primarily in aesthetics and early analytic philosophy. She is currently finishing a dissertation, Literature, Logic and the Liberating Word, which re-examines the philosophical significance of Henry James. She divides her time between the philosophy department, the dance studio, the Southwest shuttle to Pittsburgh and her pet rabbit, Felix.
Neil Chudgar
Neil Chudgar is a Ph.D. candidate in English and an Affiliated Doctoral Fellow of the Franke Institute at the University of Chicago. In his academic work, he studies the ways in which books and poems (and other structures of faith) can keep modern people in contact with the objects that surround us. He is finishing a dissertation about the sense of touch in early eighteenth-century British literature and philosophy, and he has given papers on affection in Defoe's novels, Wordsworth and the history of kitsch, the textures of Augustan poetry, and the ethics of gentleness in Swift's satire. His next project will be a study of late eighteenth- century aesthetics called On the Origin of our Idea of the Cute. Before coming to MAPH, he taught courses in the Department of English, the Graham School of General Studies, and the College. Neil received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He was born and raised near Reading, Pennsylvania.
Robert Devendorf
Robert Devendorf is currently working on his dissertation in the Department of English. He is researching the figure of the misfit in the English country house in Victorian fiction, and the manner in which this figuration acts as part of the social dynamic, first in the English experience of itself as a democratizing, industrializing nation, and later as part of educational institutions that conceive of themselves as other than functionaries of capitalism. He has a BA in English from the University of Chicago, but assures readers that he has known more of the world than what resides inside the happy boundaries of Hyde Park.
Robert also has an MA in Art History from UIC where he explored all things Pompadour, has taught extensively, from literature to film aesthetics to algebra, and has run two ersatz schools, one for returning dropouts, one for gifted teens. Having lived in Chicago since 1981, he is an excellent resource for all things Chicago. This is his fourth year as a MAPH Preceptor. He also has an almost unnatural fondness for the beach, and can be found there scribbling at sunrise on most warm days.
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.
Matthias Regan
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.
Christa Robbins
Christa Robbins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. Her area of study is 20th century American art, with an emphasis on the art and politics of the postwar moment. She is currently working on a dissertation that addresses the re-valuation of privacy in the overlapping discourses of modernist abstraction, theories of perception, and cold war politics in the 1950s and 1960s.
Salomé Skvirsky
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky is a PhD candidate in the English Department, at the University of Pittsburgh. After completing her BA in English at the University of Pennsylvania, she worked as a filmmaker in New York. She wrote, produced, and directed the documentary, Stealing Home: The Case of Contemporary Cuban Baseball, which aired on PBS in 2001. She is currently writing a dissertation on race in the political cinema of Brazil, Cuba and U.S. One chapter of this appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Cinema Journal.
Hilary Strang
Hilary Strang is currently finishing her dissertation on leveling as a figure for democratic equality in early- to mid-nineteenth century England in the English Department here. She has a BA from Brown and an MA from Carnegie Mellon, both degrees in cultural studies and critical theory. In addition to grad studenting and preceptoring, she teaches in a college credit liberal arts program for low-income adults run by Bard College and the Illinois Humanities Council. Hilary was born and raised in Hyde Park but now lives on the near northwest side and counts the CTA and hair-raising tales of Chicago in the 1970s among her areas of expertise.
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.
