Teaching Fellows 2021-2022
The Teaching Fellow program is designed to enhance pedagogical skills and extend research training for recent graduates of the 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.
Michael Allemana
Michael Allemana received his PhD in Music from the University of Chicago in 2020, focusing on Ethnomusicology. His dissertation investigates the ways in which geography and segregation have shaped and continue to shape the jazz scene on Chicago’s South Side. In particular, his work examines elder musicians’ relationship to the urban environment, how diverse audiences participate in musical practice, and the ways in which the late saxophonist Von Freeman mentored many musicians of diverse locales and social backgrounds. For his research, Allemana draws upon more than two decades as a professional guitarist, including fifteen years in Von Freeman’s quartet at the New Apartment Lounge. Allemana also is a member of the Chicago Jazz Festival’s programming committee.
Beatrice Bradley
Beatrice Bradley received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago in 2020. Her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, gender and sexuality studies, classical reception, and the medical humanities. Currently, she focuses on the relationship between waste and identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. She explores in particular how early modern authors make meaning out of and/or assign value to human waste. Before coming to Chicago, Bradley received her BA in English and Classical Languages from Vanderbilt University and her MA in English from Brooklyn College. Her research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies; her published work includes essays in Milton Studies and English Literary Renaissance.
Timothy Clark
Timothy Clark received his PhD in Classics at the University of Chicago in 2020. His research interests center on the articulation and negotiation of political power and cultural identity between Rome and the peoples, cultures, and polities on its eastern frontier, especially the Parthians, Armenians, and Sasanians. He also examines the use of urban spectacles and space to disseminate and articulate political ideology across the long history of the Roman empire. His dissertation examined how Roman officials used ceremony, art, and coinage to reaffirm Roman dominance over Parthia and Armenia while continually adjusting the definition of imperial victory based on the circumstances of Roman relations with these eastern states.
Ge
rónimo Sarmiento Cruz
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz received his PhD from English Department at the University of Chicago. He works on and teaches US poetry and poetics with an emphasis on contemporary minor and minority writing in its intersection with historical and theoretical accounts of the nation state. His current book project, "Anational Poetics," focuses on contemporary US minority poets, proposing and elaborating the concept of the anational as an attempt to chart and constellate poetic articulations of collectivities independent from the nation.
Emily Dreyfus
Emily Dreyfus received her PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago in 2020, with a dissertation on the role of music in emotional address and political self-understanding in twentieth-century German film and mass culture. Integrating analytical approaches from Cinema and Media Studies, Musicology, and History, her work takes up the question of what moves an audience in a literal and figurative sense. Dreyfus examines the aesthetics of feeling in the motion picture of the film reel and the unfolding of music in time and the historical contingencies of cultural production. She teaches courses both in German and visual culture in the Humanities core, including the feminist and transnational history of the graphic novel as an expressive medium.
Silvia Francesco Guslandi
Silvia Guslandi received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2020. She specializes in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Italian literature, with a focus on transnational modernism, migration, and translation. More broadly, her research and teaching interests include Italian American studies, post-colonialism, multi-lingualism, disability theory, gender studies, and critical race theory. She also holds a Ph.D. in Euro-American Comparative literature from the University of Genoa and has published peer-reviewed articles on Elio Vittorini, John Steinbeck, Maria Luisa Spaziani, and Emanuel Carnevali, as well as translations from English to Italian and from Italian to English. Her book project examines the role played by cross-national, cross-lingual, and cross-cultural exchanges in the development of Italian literature in the early twentieth century.
Jacob Harris
Jacob Harris received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in August 2020. His research focuses on the intersections between aesthetic, administrative, and political-economic discourses across several cultural contexts of the late British Empire, circa 1880‒1940. His current article projects in progress include an essay on the place of primitivism in the late novels of Ronald Firbank and another on the complex discursive circumstances surrounding the government-sponsored commission of monumental murals in early twentieth-century British India. His writing can be found as a collaborator in Grey Room and as a reviewer in the Journal of Modern Literature and Make Magazine.
Caroline Heller
Caroline Heller received her PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2020, with a dissertation that examines the prevalence of seasons in eighteenth-century British literature and, in particular, how seasons helped writers and readers discern climate change. Although her teaching and research focuses primarily on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, she is also interested in contemporary concerns of ecological crisis and care as well as feminists of the 1790s, 1890s, and 1990s.
Jessica Kantarovich
Jessica Kantarovich received her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 2020. She works mainly on language change, with a focus on ongoing change in situations of language endangerment. Kantarovich is interested in the application of formal and experimental approaches, typically reserved for majority languages, to communities heavily affected by language loss and unbalanced bilingualism. She has conducted fieldwork in Siberia and the Russian Far East since 2017, working primarily with speakers of Chukchi and Sakha. Her dissertation on Chukchi focuses on the ways that non-normative speakers of a heavily endangered language—those with disrupted acquisition due to social turmoil—continue to speak a systematic, proper language, even if it differs markedly from that of the oldest speakers (those who are usually and somewhat prematurely regarded as "the last speakers").
John Lawrence
John Y. Lawrence received his PhD in Music at the University of Chicago in 2020, focusing on Music History and Theory. He previously served as an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago. His primary research focuses on performance analysis, theories of meaning, and Formenlehre in music of the long nineteenth century. Additionally, he writes on American popular music of the early twentieth century, especially Tin Pan Alley. His article “Toward a Predictive Theory of Theme Types” was published in the April 2020 issue of the Journal of Music Theory. His current book project, “Listening in Color,” investigates the use of instrumental sonority as an expressive tool for composers, listeners, and performers of early Romantic music.
Joseph Maurer
Joseph Maurer received his PhD in Music at the University of Chicago in 2020, focusing on Ethnomusicology. His current research examines music education in Chicago immigrant communities; other research interests include maritime music revivalism and the nonprofit arts sector. Maurer’s published work includes a forthcoming essay on arts education and social-emotional learning and the “Folk and Folk Revival” entry in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation. His public and nonprofit-sector work includes adolescent mentoring as well as research, strategic planning, and program evaluation for Chicago arts education organizations.
Steven Maye
Steven Maye received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2020. His current book project examines how postwar poets have converted the deficiencies of lyric poetry, as a means of representation, into assets for reimagining the media publics in which they and their readers are embedded. He also writes and teaches in the fields of media and television studies, with a focus on how the form of television dramas mediates between industry norms and the conditions governing contemporary life. Maye teaches in the Poetry and the Human sequence in the Humanities Core and its creative-writing offshoot in the Arts Core. He was a Chicago Center for Teaching Fellow in 2019–2020 and is the poetry editor of Chicago Review.
Robert Marineau
Robert Marineau received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2020, with a focus on ethnomusicology, ancient Hittite and Anatolian languages, and society from the second millennium BCE. His dissertation, “The Literary Effects of Discourse Patterns in Hittite Texts,” describes multi-sentence discourse structural patterns with an emphasis on discourse cohesion. It analyzes these patterns for the presence of linguistic features that conform to what literary theorists claim create literary effects that are experienced as aesthetic. He is broadly interested in both the linguistic and visual style of ancient texts, whether cuneiform tablets or monumental wall inscriptions, and the role these texts play in representing and shaping these societies. To these ends, he has work in progress and submitted for publication that explore how various aspects of language and writing are used in text composition to create works, which are experienced as both aesthetic and rhetorical.
Noa Merkin
noa@uchicago.edu
Noa Merkin received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and recently served as a doctoral fellow at the Franke Institute of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include aesthetics, film and media theory, affect and emotion studies, film and philosophy, Hollywood genres, and Ernst Lubitsch.
Chiara Nifosi
Chiara Nifosi received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2020. In addition to teaching, she is working on revising her dissertation, entitled “Expérience de l’espace et pensée de la métaphore chez Marcel Proust,” into a book. This project explores the philosophical potential of Proust’s rhetorical strategies for describing space in his literary output through an interdisciplinary approach, which also involves contemporary theories on landscape in art history and geography. More broadly, her research interests range from comparative European modernisms to the emergence of female voices in nineteenth-century French poetry, to the intersection between philosophy, social sciences, and literature in the construction of the French national identity. Additionally, she is the co-director of an online editorial project, “Nouvelle Fribourg,” centered on modern and contemporary French literature.
Tyler Schroeder
Tyler Schroeder received his Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in 2020. His dissertation studied media cultures of public health education with a guiding focus on the moving image, taking its case studies from Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. His work has been published in New German Critique. His other intellectual interests run throughout literary, media, and cultural studies based in, but not restricted to, German-speaking Europe; the confluences between technology, work, and domesticity; the histories and philosophies of science and medicine; and the cinematic and literary modes of comedy and melodrama.
Bradley Spiers
Bradley Spiers received his PhD in Music at the University of Chicago in 2020, specializing in Music History and Music Theory. His current book project, “Things that Sing: Music and the Genesis of Artificial Life,” explores how the mechanical reproduction of music inspired, validated, and rebuked the quest for mechanical life after Descartes. Spiers focuses on musical technologies like automata, music boxes, automatic instruments, artificial intelligence, and neural networks, which were perceived to model cognition. He teaches courses in music history and analysis in the Arts Core and Media Aesthetics sequence in the Humanities Core.
Elizabeth Tavella
Elizabeth Tavella received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago in 2020, where she defended her dissertation “Seeking Interspecies Justice: Spaces of Animal Confinement in Italian Literature.” Her research and teaching interests focus on comparative studies of literature and critical animal studies, and more broadly on the environmental humanities within intersectional frameworks. She has chapters in these areas forthcoming in two edited volumes and has recently embarked on a larger project on reproductive justice and bodily autonomy across species. Given her academic background in manuscript studies and philology, she also incorporates these fields of study into her teaching practice. She currently serves on the editorial board of Sloth—A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies and the Journal for Critical Animal Studies.
Brandon Truett
Brandon Truett received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2020. He researches at the intersection of transnational literary studies, art history, and media studies, pursuing questions that broadly attend to the relation between politics and aesthetics. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Grey Room, Twentieth-Century Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Hyperallergic. Truett is working on a book project, “Art War: The Transnational Imaginary of the Spanish Civil War, 1936‒2019” in which he examines the myriad ways that artists, writers, and activists in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have responded to that war since 1936. Truett also teaches the Media Aesthetics sequence in the Humanities Core, as well as other courses on twentieth- and twenty-first century global literature, art, and visual culture.
Jacqueline Victor
Jacqueline Victor received her PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago in 2020. As a scholar of medieval French literature, she is working on a book project exploring female adventure and subjectivity in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Old French romance, as well as a separate, collaborative project to create an English-language translation and critical edition of an early fifteenth century text, The Book Called the Canarian. These two projects center on questions of knightliness and adventure, in relation to gender, on the one hand, and proto-colonial narratives of travel and conquest, on the other. Victor also has a forthcoming article on an influential thirteenth-century romance, “Time and the Reader of the Roman de la Rose.” She has primarily taught French language and literature, including a course of her own design on the Medieval Mediterranean and has also taught in the Core (Reading Cultures) and the Chicago Writing Program. She
MAPH Teaching Fellows
Rowan Bayne
Rowan Bayne received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2020. He teaches in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the College. His current project, “On the Spectrum: Form and Difference in the Long Twentieth Century,” accounts for the spectrum’s role in classifying sexuality, race, and gender in the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries in the United States. This research gathers an interdisciplinary archive from narrative fiction, sexology, psychometrics, and the sociology of race. At UChicago, Bayne has also worked as a preceptor with MAPH and a teaching consultant with the Chicago Center for Teaching.
Bill Hutchison
Bill Hutchison received his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago in 2020. He is interested in technology and intimacy, theories and figures of the nonhuman, and theories and practices of kinship and care. His dissertation, Love Among the Robots: Non-Biological Consciousness and the Pursuit of Kinship, examines how the prospect of non-biological consciousness in technology and culture affects related notions of intimacy, kinship, and personhood. His work has been supported by the Nicholson Center for British Studies and the Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative. Hutchison teaches in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities where he advises students in literature, new media, and creative writing.
Center for Middle Eastern Studies Teaching Fellow
Brendan Hainline
Brendan Hainline received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2020 and his bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Brown University in 2012. He is an Egyptologist whose research focuses on diachronic change in the Egyptian language, the Old Kingdom, the development of early writing, and the relationship between Egyptian and the other Afro-Asiatic languages. His dissertation, “Linguistic Variation in the Pyramid Texts,” examines the linguistic diversity present in the corpus of Egyptian Old Kingdom mortuary literature known as the Pyramid Texts. Hainline explores what the study of linguistics and philology can reveal about the dynamic relationships between history, power, and religious beliefs in ancient Egypt.