The Teaching Fellow program is designed to enhance pedagogical skills and extend research training for recent graduates of the Arts & Humanities Division’s PhD programs. Fellows participate in a two-year program of professional development under the joint supervision of the Chicago Center for Teaching (CCT) and a faculty mentor in a relevant Divisional department. Fellows teach four courses—including at least two courses in the Humanities or Arts Core—while working to advance their own research, and are active members of the University’s intellectual community.

Thomaz Amancio

Thomaz Amancio received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. He specializes on the written archive of the countryside in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Dwelling on the intersection of aesthetics and social science, this corpus defines a throughline of Brazilian intellectual and cultural history in the 20th century, cementing core ideas about racial and cultural identity, nature and landscape, and political and economic organization. Amancio’s current book project, entitled “Field Work: Labor and Culture in Rural Brazil,” explores the use of field research as a tool to know and represent the countryside. It argues that practice was deeply informed by class, making the emerging scientific and cultural institutions of the modern nation extensions of the plantation. His research interests also extend to the representation of animals, plants, and nature, especially as it pertains to contemporary environmental concerns. His work has been and will be published in Philia, Revista Porto Alegre, Topoi, the Journal of Lusophone Studies, and the forthcoming volume Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultures (University Press of Florida).

Devon J. Borowski

Devon J. Borowski received his PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 2023. His research investigates 18th-century singing cultures and colonial discourses of voice, humanity, and history in late Georgian Britain. His current book project explores how marginal actors engaged with song and the musical voice to inform nascent constructions of whiteness across the British Empire. Borowski’s research has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale’s LGBT Studies program. Prior to his doctoral work, he completed graduate degrees at the Johns Hopkins University Peabody Conservatory in Early Music Performance (Voice) and in Musicology. In addition to the history of music in the modern West, Devon offers a course on queer singing practices across the globe. 

Greg Brown

Greg Brown received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2024. His work is primarily in the philosophy of action and in ethics. He is interested especially in the nature of practical reasoning and the revival of virtue ethics. In his dissertation, “The Use of Reason: An Essay on Practical Wisdom,” he develops a neo-Aristotelian account of practical rationality that is indebted to the work of G. E. M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot. His research and teaching interests extend to various other areas, especially to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Aquinas, (meta)ontology, the history of analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.

Laura Colaneri

Laura Colaneri received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023 and holds certificates from the University of Chicago in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation, entitled “The Sinister Southern Cone: Mood, Affect, and Horror in the Cultural Imaginary of Argentine and Brazilian State Terror,” examined the narrative strategies that Argentine and Brazilian authors, filmmakers, and artists have used to respond to 20th-century dictatorships, particularly the use of conventions of the horror genre in novels, a film, an experimental play, an experimental artwork, and archival sources. It argued that these conventions are used to create the sinister mood, defined as a pervasive sense of fear and apprehension in response to ominous but shadowy threats of violence and death to make political violence more legible in the cultural imaginary of dictatorship; inspire an affective response in the reader or viewer that can help them approach the experience of state terror; and ultimately resist the shadowy nature of authoritarian power. Her research interests further include Southern Cone literature; dictatorship, authoritarianism, and political violence; cultural studies; horror and Gothic literature and film; and women's literature and gender and sexuality studies. Colaneri’s current book project, provisionally titled “Las Fuerzas del Mal: Esoteric Imaginaries amid the Occult Necropolitics of Latin American State Terror,” examines depictions of Latin American state-sponsored violence as akin to occult practices in 20th- and 21st-century literature and film.

Supurna Dasgupta

Supurna Dasgupta completed her PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023. She was named the Lindsay Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago for 2023–25. As a feminist literary historian and cultural analyst of modern South Asia, she focuses on the interplay between gender, world literature, aesthetic experimentalism, and transnationalism. Her book project, “Intimate Revolutions: Gender and Counterculture in the Postcolony,” combs through South Asian literature of the global 1960s to trace transformations in discourses about gender and sexuality on the one hand and to foreground new dynamics between postcolonial multilingualism and the global anglophone on the other. Supurna taught English literature at the University of Delhi before moving to the United States. At the University of Chicago, Supurna teaches a wide range of classes in the College Core, in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and in Gender and Sexuality. 

Titas De Sarkar

Titas De Sarkar received his PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2024. His dissertation focused on the figure of the Bengali elder brother —referred to as the Dādā—and how the kinship form of address has come to attain an overwhelming range of meanings in the public and political domains in colonial and postcolonial India. More broadly, his intellectual interests lie at the intersection of cultural history, youth culture, gender studies, and media studies. At the University of Chicago, he has taught a self-designed course titled ‘Coming of Age: Youth Cultures in Postcolonial India,’ course assisted for ‘Media Wars,’ and was a writing intern for ‘Language and the Human’ and ‘Media Aesthetics.’

Tanya Desai

Tanya Desai received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2023. Previously, she completed her MA and MPhil in English Literature at the University of Delhi. She works on the philosophy of film, particularly on topics of language, time, narrative, and gender. Her current book project is on Bombay cinema of the 1950s, examining the convergence of film and poetry in its iconic songs and exploring the philosophical issues these songs raise about the relation between body and voice, between the self and the world, and between words and lives. Apart from Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy and South Asian cinema, her other research and teaching interests include gender and skepticism in literature and film, global classical cinema, aesthetic theory, film comedy, animal studies, moral philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Ömer Eren

Ömer Eren received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2023. Previously, he completed his BA in Foreign Language Education and Pedagogy and his MA in Linguistics at Boğaziçi University, Türkiye. His research interests lie in the interface of morphology (word-structure) and syntax (sentence structure) in heritage languages, specifically South Caucasian and Turkic. His dissertation documents and investigates the linguistic structure and variation of the Laz language through making a cross-generational comparison between three different generations of Laz speakers. In addition to Eren’s academic studies, he also took part in several teaching-oriented projects for the education and revitalization of endangered languages in collaboration with non-governmental and non-profit organizations and language institutes. Eren also has considerable experience in teaching Turkish and English as a foreign language to non-native speakers.  

Beatrice Fazio

Beatrice Fazio received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. She specializes in Renaissance Italian literature and Early Modern studies, with a particular focus on humanism, lyric and epic poetry, gender and sexuality, geo-criticism, and the history of cartography. Her other research interests include Dante Studies and early 19th-century literature. Her teaching explores Renaissance texts from both Italian and transnational perspectives, as well as the history and evolution of literary themes and theoretical frameworks. She is currently working on two book projects. The first project explores how Giacomo Leopardi (1798‒1837)—who remains strikingly understudied in the English-speaking world of Italian studies—revitalized and transformed the Renaissance and early modern legacy during the Risorgimento, a period marked by a desire for moral, political, and intellectual renewal. The second manuscript in progress examines how human and non-human environments are depicted, interpreted, and contested in early modern Italian texts of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Christina Filippaki

Christina Filippaki received her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2024. Previously, she completed her BA in Classical Philology at the University of Athens. She specializes in Greek tragedy, focusing on questions of genre, fictionality, intertextuality, and metapoetics. Her broader interests include drama, Greek poetry, performance, myth and modern Greek reception. Her current book project uses theory of fiction to show that Euripides’s Atreidai plays as a multiverse narrative: a set of alternate, complementary, or contradicting timelines that are to be understood in the context of each other. By framing the plays as connected but mutually incompatible realities, it argues that the tragic is the result of a complex cognitive process that involves a continuously expanding intellectual relationship between the poet and his audience. 

Melina Garibovic

Melina Garibovic received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2023. She works in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, though she also has interests in moral psychology, phenomenology, and aesthetics. Her dissertation, “The Reality of Persons,” proposes a way to rethink the traditional problem of other minds and introduces a solution to the problem that draws on phenomenological empathy. Building on that, Garibovic’s current research focuses on our understanding and knowledge of other persons, and the significance this sort of understanding has for our lives. 

Dana Glaser

Dana Glaser is a Fellow in the Humanities and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD in English Language and Literature in 2024. She researches and teaches in feminist theory and 20th/21st century American literature. Her research is interested in thinking about the 20th century political and intellectual history of gender, race, and sex in terms of aesthetics, and the history of 20th century literary concepts, such as “nonfiction,” testimony, and propaganda, in terms of epistemology and intellectual history. Her first book project, “Abstract, Literal, Reductive: How Feminism Thought” takes up the ambivalent persistence of the “Second Wave” as an object of reference for contemporary debate around gender and sex. It argues for a new understanding of 20th century genealogy of gender politics, and the conceptual problems that fall out of it, by reading our habitual descriptions of what is, in a word, bad about midcentury feminist thought—its excessive literalness, its totalizing reductions—as aesthetic judgments that respond not to explicit positions or assertions but to style.

Chris Gortmaker

Chris Gortmaker received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2024. His primary area of research and teaching is Anglo-American fiction from the late-19th century to the present, with a focus on modernism as an expansive artistic movement. He has related expertise in African American literature, international concrete poetry, political-economic social theory, and continuities between romantic and modernist philosophies of art. His current book project, “The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction,” argues that a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernism spans the 20th century and persists today by internalizing and turning to its own ends the market logic of capitalist modernity. The project explores how a modernist principle of aesthetic autonomy emerges in antagonism to fin-de-siècle processes of marketization and persists, across the twentieth century and into our present, within market-exposed fiction. His work has been published in Nonsite and JMMLA and is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity and Mediations.

Sam Gray

Sam Gray received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2023. His work spans the fields of phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on how phonetic features vary between human social groups. His most recent projects have looked at how acoustic properties in the voice vary depending on speaker gender. His approach to research emphasizes a pairing of quantitative statistical analyses of linguistic data, laboratory studies, and experimental work with more qualitative, interview-focused work with individual speakers. Additionally, Gray is interested in constructed languages, both as an art form and long-time hobby as well as a means of introducing others to the breadth of variation possible in human speech. 

Kirsten (Kai) Ihns

Kirsten (Kai) Ihns received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2023. Previously, she completed an MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a post-baccalaureate certificate in visual art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University. Her research sits at the intersection of film studies, aesthetic theory, and poetics, focusing on work after 1970 influenced or informed by conceptual art and structural film. Her dissertation theorizes and situates a novel form of attentional/cognitive prosody she calls "aspect choreography" in long-form contemporary poems and some recent experimental films (1970–2023).  Ihns teaches freestanding courses on expectation structures in time/forms, dialectically modulated tone, and also teaches in the Poetry and the Human Core Sequence.

Kevin Irakoze

Kevin Irakoze received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2024. He also earned graduate certificates in gender and sexuality studies, as well as college teaching. He works primarily in practical philosophy at the nexus of ethics and political philosophy. His general guiding question is on how to live well amid severely adverse political situations. His dissertation, “Transfigurative Imagination: Reclaiming Meaning and Agency in African Political Life,” clarified the ethical, existential, and political implications of the reality of political failure and argued for forms of imagination and agency that best fit the context. How can a transfigurative imagination with an ability to open new ways of seeing reality and a protest attitude that exceeds the limits of political inertia? On the foundation of this scholarship, one of his current research projects is about political virtues, offering a critique of a functional view in which individual character serves the ends of specific forms of government and building an alternative view which asserts the priority of an individual ethical perspective on politics. Two other current research projects are in race and sexuality: a conception of hope in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and a meditation on anti-queer violence in Africa through the perspective of human personhood.

Leland Jasperse

Leland Jasperse received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2023. Broadly, his research and teaching focus on the aesthetic mediation of historical shifts in embodiment and embodied norms, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, disability, and racialization. His current book project takes up fin-de-siècle texts that fail to achieve erotic and narrative drive in an historical moment that saw the compulsorization of sexuality, arguing that even as these texts fueled eugenic anxieties of depopulation and white racial enervation, they provocatively position asexuality as radically disruptive of prevailing social and literary forms. Emerging from this work is a second project examining how queer illness writing grapples with the paradox of aesthetically rendering anaesthetic experience (e.g., chronic fatigue, chemotherapy, losses of appetite, and sex drive), complexly navigating, on the one hand, liberal visibility-oriented disability paradigms, and, on the other, queer theory's political and generic fetishization of limitless drives. Jasperse teaches in the Humanities Core (Media Aesthetics) and the Department of English Language and Literature. 

Yueling Ji

Yueling Ji received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023. She studies modern Chinese literature. Her current research focuses on the methodology of Chinese literary criticism and the political history of the development of this methodology. In 2023–24, Yueling is teaching in the Media Aesthetics sequence of the Humanities Core and helping undergraduate thesis writers in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. 

Gary Kafer

Gary Kafer received his doctorate from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in 2023. He specializes in digital media studies, with broader interests in surveillance studies, visual studies, critical data studies, video game studies, science and technology studies, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how the media concept of ubiquity obscures the different forms of visibility and violence made possible by surveillance systems and how digital technologies reproduce existing power relations. Kafer teaches Film and the Moving Image and Intro to Film in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, as well as specialty topic seminars in digital media studies. 

Peadar Kavanagh

Peadar Kavanagh received his PhD in French and Francophone studies at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago in 2024. For his dissertation, he investigated the function of satire during the consolidation of power in the early reign of Louis XIV (1661–1685). His research returns to satire, both as a mode of intervention in 17th-century France and as a concept in modern French and Francophone cultures. Alongside this research, Kavanagh is currently translating Cyrano de Bergerac’s short works in prose (Œuvres diverses [Lettres diverses, satiriques et amoureuses], 1654) toward critical and pedagogical editions. In the future, he hopes to treat this collection of fictional letters of praise and blame as a case study, to reconsider the relationship between the practices instituted at Jesuit secondary schools (collèges), and the production of literature during the long Counter-Reformation. As an instructor, Kavanagh seeks to guide students in the range of critical practices that inquiries like this demand.

Sanghee Kim

Sanghee Kim received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2024. As a psycholinguist, she investigates the way humans understand and use language, particularly in discourse and dialogue settings. She conducts behavioral experiments and uses computational methods to understand the underlying cognitive mechanism of human language processing.

Stephanie Kraver

Stephanie Kraver received her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023. She is a scholar of modern Arabic literature and Arabic and Hebrew poetry and poetics from the 20th century to the present. Her research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of Palestinian/Israeli literature and film, constructions of memory after loss, anticolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies. At the University of Chicago, Kraver served as a doctoral fellow in the Pozen Center for Human Rights and an affiliated fellow in the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Her current book project identifies how poetic verse creates imaginative and political possibilities beyond the limits of ethno-national borders and separatist ideologies. The monograph tells the story of two poets: the celebrated Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish and the renowned Israeli writer and peace activist Dahlia Ravikovitch. By tracing their relationship and poetry during the course of two decades, the project locates the hopeful potential of poetry amid everyday violence and the politics of poetic form. Kraver underscores acts of translation and transmission between the writers, as well as nodes of transnational solidarity, centering points of encounter and citation. She spotlights how Darwish and Ravikovitch use prolepsis, or a forward-facing gaze, to demand an alternative to the dislocation of Palestinians surrounding protracted warfare in the region.

Naomi Kurtz

Naomi Kurtz received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2023. The primary focus of her research is on the syntax and morphology of Romance languages, in particular minority languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Her dissertation documents and investigates patterns of syntactic microvariation in Galician, while also arguing for a shared underlying syntax between Galician and Zulu, two unrelated languages. She is also an experienced fieldworker, who has conducted original fieldwork with speakers of a range of languages. Her approach to linguistics is twofold: Kurtz believes that formal syntactic analysis can be enriched by also examining the historical, social, and political contexts surrounding a language, particularly a minority language. Finally, she is also an experienced teacher, who has taught broadly at the University of Chicago in Linguistics, Humanities, and writing pedagogy. 

Darren Kusar

Darren Kusar received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. In his dissertation, “Text, Voice, Image: Staging the Diabolical in Early Modern Italian Musical Theater,” he investigated how belief embeds itself in physical experience and penetrates the rational mind, thereby distorting senses of reality. His analysis focused on the interplay between spectacle, particularly within the sonic domain, and the demonic during the Italian Counter-Reformation. Kusar examined the intricate interplay among textual, sonic, and visual representations of the diabolical by scrutinizing depictions of sound-based spectacle through the prism of Renaissance demonological understandings of perception and audition. His research interests include early modern poetry, opera, voice studies, Renaissance demonology, phenomenology, and wonder tales. Kurtz is also a classically trained tenor who frequently performs solo and in ensembles in the Chicago area.

Sarah-Gray Lesley

Sarah-Gray Lesley received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2024. Her research and teaching interests include early modern British literature, premodern critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Her current book project is tentatively titled, “Consuming Womanhood: Reproduction, Consumption, and the Formation of White Femininity in Early Modern England.” In it, she argues that the cultural category of “white womanhood” emerged through early modern English representational strategies that collapsed women’s gestational and digestive capacities. This recurring paradigm in fiction came about in dynamic conversation with England’s increased involvement in global capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. Lesley’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Renaissance Drama and Restoration Studies, as well as several edited collections.

Cooper Long

Cooper Long received his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2023. His research and teaching focuses on the relations between film and other media, with an emphasis on questions of aesthetics and technology. Drawing on archival research, his dissertation “John Frankenheimer’s Untimely Media” argues that the films, television programs, web videos, and other moving images directed by John Frankenheimer enable us to look differently at crucial turning points in media history between the 1950s and the 2000s. An excerpt from this project, on the history of body-mounted camerawork across media, is forthcoming in Film History: An International Journal. In addition to teaching Film and the Moving Image and Introduction Film Analysis, he also offers a course on the theory and practice of special effects.

Luis Madrigal

Luis Madrigal is a writer and scholar of contemporary Mexico. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago in 2024. His current book project explores the intersection of politics and aesthetics during Mexico City’s transition to democracy, and the transformation of the capital’s contemporary image within and beyond Mexico. His research and teaching focuses on 20th and 21st century Mexican literature, photography, and film, but his interests include Latin American and Spanish cultural production, literary sociology, urban studies, spatial criticism, and aesthetic theory. He has received the George Watt Prize (ALBA, 2022), the Young Writers’ Essay Award (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016), and has been shortlisted for the Latin American Literature Today Literary Essay Award (2023), and the Nuevas Plumas Prize (2017) in narrative non-fiction. 

Gina Marich

Gina Marich’s research addresses the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in German language literature, with an emphasis on the 19th and early 20th centuries. She received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago in 2024. Her dissertation, “Absolute Form: Overcoming Nihilism in German Modernist Literature,” investigated how prose writers of the interwar period developed and employed different form concepts in response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical challenges to traditional conceptions of moral and religious authority. She argues that a formalist aesthetics could originate in response to anxieties about the loss of certainty with regards to social values and norms. Her current project investigates the presence and shifting meaning of visual art in novels of moral and intellectual development (Bildungsroman, in German). This year, she is teaching in the Readings in World Literature sequence as well as courses on German film and on fairy tales (Märchen). 

Sarah McDaniel

Sarah McDaniel received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2023. Her research and teaching interests center upon gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and modern and contemporary LGBTQ+ life-writing, with a particular interest in correspondence. Her current book project, “Queer Correspondence: Epistolary Form and LGBTQ+ Life-Writing,” argues for “queer correspondence” both as a genre of queer life-writing operative across the long 20th century and as an interpretive methodology. Her new projects explore parent-child epistolarity (through a study of contemporary published “open letters”) and queer “endurance” (in the context of queerness and sport).  

Peter Metzel

Peter Metzel received his PhD from the Germanic Studies Department at the University of Chicago in 2023. His research employs anthropological modes of inquiry to generate new readings of 19th-century German literary, philosophical, and political discourses. His dissertation conceptualizes civil war as an imaginative category that puts literary worlds into motion to experiment with different forms of social life. Bringing together various anthropological and theoretical approaches to civil strife, the dissertation explores 19th-century German theater as a site for imagining the possibilities for human cooperation at the moment of social disintegration. Additional areas of interest include the interplay of description and poeticity in lyric poetry as well as work in the conceptual history of collective violence. 

Rivky Mondal

Rivky Mondal received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2023. She is a recipient of the Stuart Tave Course Design Award for innovative and inclusive graduate teaching. Her research and teaching focus on post-1900 novels and narrative fiction; art practices of opacity and self-mediation in feminist and queer avant-gardism; the sociology of conflict in the everyday; and philosophical hermeneutics and histories of interpretation. Mondal’s dissertation uncovers ingenious modernist devices that record the recording of human difference and its evaluation on a microsocial scale. Through readings of Henry James, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner, as well as Sally Rooney and Raven Leilani, the project examines what it calls “mean difference”—that is, the capacity of the “minor,” the contingent, and the petty to crystallize asymmetrical realities—and the challenge of securing meaning to difference’s most latent signs. Mondal’s writing appears in The Henry James Review, Post45 Contemporaries, The Journal of Modern Literature, and 3:AM Magazine. Mondal teaches in the Humanities Core (“Human Being and Citizen”) and in the Department of English Language and Literature. She is a postdoctoral affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. 

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and a scholar of gay men’s literary and media cultures. He received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2024. His research focuses on how literature and pornography contour gay identity in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is currently at work on a monograph, The Gender of Gay Men: Identification, Sexual Cultures, and the Afterlives of the Inversion Model, which traces how gay male sexuality has provoked gendered positions, identifications, conflicts, and allegiances in the 20th and 21st centuries. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the journal Porn Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and is forthcoming in the volume The Sex Scene: Space, Place, Industry from Edinburgh University Press. As a poet, his most recent book is Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022). 

Pablo Ottonello

Pablo Ottonello holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2023. He specializes in diaries from contemporary Latin American authors. He studied the concept of “failure” as a system that nourishes these vast writing projects. Ottonello published seven books of fiction: Quiero ser artista (2015), El verano de los peces muertos (2018), Veteranos de la guerra del día (2018), El vello álmico (2019), La breve luz de nuestros días (2020), Satisfaction (2021), and Match (2023). He teaches Spanish language and contemporary literature courses with a focus in Latin America and the Southern Cone. Ottonello writes films, television series and articles in the Argentinan press and is working on a novel about mass shootings in the United States.

Nory Peters

Nory Peters received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2023. Her research interests include human rights, literary theory, the history of science, social and political philosophy, and the history of emotions. Her current book project is based on her doctoral dissertation and draws on a diverse archive of aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and legal texts to explore the philosophical frameworks, aesthetic representations, institutional foundations, and politics of human rights in the 20th and 21st centuries. Peters teaches courses on global human rights history and literature. Her research has been supported by the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, and the Mellon Foundation. 

Ermioni Prokopaki

Ermioni Prokopaki received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2023, and her BA from Vassar College in 2015. She works primarily in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy with a focus on Plato's epistemology and Plato's epistemic psychology. She has advocated for a dynamic conception of knowledge, according to which the knower is defined by her ongoing commitment to the value of truth. In her present work, Prokopaki examines whether the practice of knowledge and philosophy may be fruitfully compared to the practice of mathematical commensuration. Her other major philosophical interest lies in the history of analytic philosophy and, in particular, the work of Wittgenstein and Ryle. She teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Greece and Rome: Texts, Traditions, and Transformations sequence of the Humanities Core. 

Laurenz Ramsauer

Laurenz Ramsauer received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2024. His primary areas of research are Kant, ethics, and philosophy of law. In addition, he has a strong interest in post-Kantian German philosophy through Marx and social philosophy. Ramsauer is currently working on two long-term projects: the first is an interpretation of the practical purpose of moral philosophy in Kant, which he argues is best understood as therapeutic; the second is an account of the relation between epistemic and action-guiding norms in law. His work has been published in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Kantian Review, the Journal of Legal Philosophy, and Manuscrito. 

Taimur Reza

Taimur Reza received his PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023. His research delves into the territorial identity and sense of belonging among Muslims in modern South Asia by focusing on colonial Bengal, emphasizing concepts such as toleration, syncretism, and multiculturalism. His current book project, titled "Muslim Homeland: Bengali Muslims' Belonging in a Transnational Horizon," explores the role of some origin myths in shaping Muslim political belonging in South Asia. It examines how these myths defined the boundaries of what was possible or impossible in Muslim politics and fostered a uniquely Muslim idea of homeland there. Reza teaches courses on South Asian Islam, South Asian political thought, and Modern Western political theory.

Zeinab Sellami

Zeineb Sellami received their PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2024. Their research revolves around the syntax of Arabic, and particularly the Tunisian dialect. Their dissertation documents the properties of agreement and clitic doubling in Tunisian and Palestinian Arabic and investigates their syntax, focusing on the difference between these two phenomena. In their previous research projects, they have looked at Arabic dialects through the lens of different subfields, including dialect documentation, historical linguistics, language typology, and more. In addition to their theoretical research pursuits, Sellami has a wide range of academic and educational interests, particularly language learning and teaching, as well as literature. He teaches courses in the Department of Linguistics and in the Humanities Core (Readings in World Literature).

Matias A. Spector

Matias A. Spector received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2024. His dissertation examined the interaction between literature and surveillance mechanisms in early modern Spanish cities. His research interests further include the relationship between literary works, crime, and the law and the reception of classical literature and philosophy.

Will Thompson

Will Thompson received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2024. His research and teaching are focused on romanticism and 18th-century British literature, with a particular interest in the history of the novel, the relation between literature and early science (natural philosophy), and the development of the concept of the every day. His current book project investigates how Romantic-era writers invented new literary genres—gothic farce, historical romance, and poetic realism—to account for the vertiginous experience of everyday life at the onset of industrial modernity. Thompson teaches in the Humanities Core (Human Being and Citizen) and in the Department of English Language and Literature. 

Rebeca Velasquez

Rebeca Velasquez was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, earning a B.A. at the University of Texas-Pan American and an M.A. at the University of Houston. In 2023, Rebeca graduated with her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Colonized Futures: Law, Inheritance, and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,” examines the relationship between metropolitan fiction and colonial law during the second half of the nineteenth-century.

Florian Walch

Florian Walch received his PhD in Music from the University of Chicago in 2023. His research and teaching interests include the history and analysis of popular music, media and genre theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of tonality. His dissertation, “Extreme Metal Across the Digital Divide,” analyzes extreme metal’s present technostalgia as its means of stabilizing subgenres that resolved conflicts of the protracted analog-digital transition. He is expanding this research into a book manuscript that compares how the digital turn figured into the codification of sub- and micro-genres across extreme metal, hip hop, and electronic dance music. In addition to presenting papers at national and international conferences, Walch has published on chromatic passages in Mozart that challenge canonical analytical technologies and lines of influence in black metal music. 

Ella Wilhelm

Ella Wilhelm received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago in 2023. She is currently working on a project that analyzes the function and significance of the terms “world” and “universe” around 1800 to describe aesthetic experience (as entry into a new world, relation to the universe) and to theorize aesthetic form by way of different cosmic metaphors. Her wider areas of interest include the environmental humanities, specifically questions of planetarity and world systems, and the role of aesthetics in religious and philosophical controversies from the Reformation to the 19th century. In Germanic Studies, Wilhelm currently teaches classes on fairy tales, the Romantic conception of nature, and critical university studies. In the Humanities Core, she teaches in the Media Aesthetics sequence.