Faculty staff and Fellows
What are Fellows?
A Fellow is a faculty member of Northwestern that is affiliated with a residential college. All of our Fellows hail from different disciplines and departments, allowing students of any major or interest to make a connection. Featured below are faculty that volunteer their time to participate in the Chapin community and host events like Firesides and Fellows Lunches. Having access to Fellows is a unique feature of the Residential College system that provides students with the opportunity to build closer relationships with professors and mentors outside of classrooms and lectures. We appreciate their commitment to our community!
Faculty Staff
Tom Burke is Associate Director of the Kaplan Humanities Institute, Senior Administrator of American Studies and Science in Human Culture, and Faculty Chair for Chapin Humanities Residential College. He received a B.A. from Union College and an MFA in creative writing from UMass Amherst. In the past, he has worked for the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College, the Summer Literary Seminars in Russia and Kenya, and Words without Borders, which advocates for literature in translation. Tom also teaches creative writing, and his first novel is novel is titled Eastbound into the Cosmos. www.tsburke.com
Contact him at [email protected]
Contact him at [email protected]
Jason Kelly Roberts is the associate chair for Chapin, where he is the founder and host of Chapin Cinema Club. In 2017, Jason received the T. William Heyck Award for his contributions to Chapin. Jason is also an assistant director at Northwestern's Office of Fellowships, where he works primarily with first- and second-year students, and with applicants for awards in the United States. In summer 2016, he co-organized the first-ever Midwest Fellowships Advising Symposium, which considered the topic of inclusive advising practices. Jason received his PhD in screen cultures from Northwestern and wrote his dissertation on the history of film criticism across several moments of major technological change; a portion of this research, entitled “So Meaninglessly Present: Pauline Kael Watches Movies on TV,” appears in Talking About Pauline Kael: Critics, Filmmakers, and Scholars Remember an Icon. When he isn’t at school, Jason is either watching a movie, reading college football blogs, forcing himself to exercise, or hanging out with his wife, Elizabeth. Contact him at [email protected]
Courtney Rabada is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies, specializing in contemporary American religions, black and white feminist theory, gender/sexuality/women's studies, and ethnography. Graduate school is her fourth career and Evanston is the ninth city she’s called home (some of the others are San Francisco, London, Atlanta, and Los Angeles). Before starting at Northwestern, she took an amazing, eight-month-long roadtrip with her dog, Huckleberry, so it goes without saying that she likes to travel! She also likes hiking, board games (Clue!), and true crime television shows.
Contact her at [email protected]
Contact her at [email protected]
Fellows
Sean Ebels-Duggan is a lecturer in philosophy. He specializes in logic and philosophy of mathematics, but likes to think about and discuss topics about which he knows little or nothing. In addition to courses in logic of all kinds, he has taught (or is teaching) courses on religious experience, morality, cultural devastation, philosophy of race, moral psychology, the Zen challenge to modern (Western) philosophy of mind, being resigned to one's fate (even if that fate is unjust execution), female philosophers of mind in early modern Europe, Ghanaian concepts of personhood, and Confucianism. Instead of watching television he wonders what it would be like to be a Welsh rebel fighting for Owain Glyndwr in the 14th century. Contact him at [email protected]
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch has been involved with Chapin for years and loves its traditions, especially Frivolous Readings. Until last year she was the faculty advisor to HELICON, NU’s premier undergraduate literary and arts journal, which was first established at Chapin. Elzbieta is a literary historian whose current research focuses on the reception of classical mythology and antiquity in American culture. She is the Assistant Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, which she helped establish. Other interests include detective fiction, on the subject of which she leads literary seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Contact her at [email protected]
Erik Gernand is a playwright and filmmaker whose award-winning short films have screened at more than 100 film festivals around the world, including SXSW, Mix Milan (Italy), Cinequest, and Outfest LGBT Film Festival, as well as being broadcast on IFC, PBS, and the Logo Channel, and distributed by First Run Features and Strand Releasing. His plays have been in development and production across the country. Erik is a senior lecturer in RTVF and is a recipient of a Galbut Outstanding Faculty Award and a Charles Deering McCormick Lectureship. Contact him at [email protected]
Matthew Grayson is an associate professor in Northwestern’s electrical engineering and computer science department. He joined Northwestern in 2007 and specializes in quantum electronic materials and device physics. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Matthew describes himself as having a “soft spot for performance artists and humanists who need to know that engineers are warm and fuzzy, too.” He enjoys teaching the physics of music and produces an annual play for ETOPiA, McCormick’s transdisciplinary theater outreach project.
Contact him at [email protected]
Contact him at [email protected]
Liz McCabe is a Lecturer in Chicago Field Studies, as well as Lead Instructor in the program, where she has taught a range of courses quarterly since 2009. Currently she teaches Field Studies in Humanities—on the cultural history of office work and representations of white-collar labor—and Field Studies in Civic Engagement, a course that explores civic life through the lenses of Chicago history, political theory, social justice, and non-profit work. She’s also a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Contact her at [email protected]
Denise Meuser is a distinguished senior lecturer in the Department of German. She coordinates the beginning German program and teaches intermediate-level German courses, with a focus on building conversation and reading skills. Her professional interests are in second-language acquisition and the use of technology in foreign-language teaching. In her free time she enjoys baking, gardening, and sports. Her kids play volleyball and baseball, and they all enjoy attending NU football games. She loves reading, musicals, and art history, and even some TV, too. She is currently hooked on Modern Family and The Daily Show. She enjoys spending her Sundays with a thick newspaper or being inspired by the lovely choir at Alice Millar Chapel. Contact her at [email protected]
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is a Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish History; Jews in Poland and Russia; Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah; history and culture of Ukraine; and Slavic-Jewish Literatures. In addition to his teaching and research, he is also an amateur artist whose conceptualist figurative artwork appeared in a bunch of museums! When he’s not painting or lecturing, you can find him in Chapin giving firesides on cool things like the history of laughter. Contact him at [email protected]
Elizabeth Son is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, with courtesy appointments in the American Studies Program, Asian American Studies Program, and the Department of Performance Studies. Her research focuses on the relationship between histories of gender violence and social justice in contemporary performance in South Korea and the United States. She teaches courses on theatre and social change; race and performance; and violence, memory, and performance in a U.S. and global context with particular attention to Asian and Asian American performance practices. When she’s not researching or teaching, she loves to spend time making art and exploring nature with her two kids, cooking with her husband for friends, and visiting museums and gardens. Contact her at [email protected]
Ingrid Zeller is a distinguished senior lecturer in the German department. Her teaching and research interests include the engagement with film, cities, architecture, and music in the context of language acquisition. She teaches German courses on all levels, including Berlin: Faces of the Metropolis, Intensive German through Musical Journeys in Vienna, Chicago and Architecture: German Influences on the Skyline, and a freshman seminar entitled Music, Magic, and the Mysteries of Language. She also directs the German Department Writing Center. She loves traveling, going on excursions, cinema, exploring good restaurants, animals, and all kinds of music. Contact her at [email protected]
Ricardo Court is the Assistant Dean for Academic Integrity in Weinberg College and a Senior Lecturer in Political Science. He works on the language of trust and the culture of trustworthiness in early modern long-distance trade networks. He received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, completed master’s graduate study in Political Science at the University of Bologna, and two Fulbright Fellowships at the University of Genoa in Italy. Court is a dedicated Italophile, cyclist, petrolhead, and artistic dabbler. Before coming to Northwestern, Court ran undergraduate programs in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was an Assistant Professor of History at the Jesuit liberal-arts college in Fairfield Connecticut. Court’s most recent scholarship explores the “spontaneous generation” of the concept of the Renaissance among guilded-age conspicuous consumers, Anglo-American expats, art speculators and swindlers, and newly arrived bureaucrats when Florence became the capital of Italy in 1864. Court argues that the concept is nowhere nearly as old as we think, and that this view explains the period’s enduring popular esteem, despite being abandoned by scholars. Contact him at [email protected]
Ezra Getzler
Ezra is an Australian Mathematician who studied at the Australian National University in Canberra and then at Harvard, where he recieved his PhD in 1986 under Arthur Jaffe with his thesis Degree theory for Wiener maps supersymmetric quantum mechanics. You can contact him at [email protected].
Ezra is an Australian Mathematician who studied at the Australian National University in Canberra and then at Harvard, where he recieved his PhD in 1986 under Arthur Jaffe with his thesis Degree theory for Wiener maps supersymmetric quantum mechanics. You can contact him at [email protected].
Mark D'Arienzo
Mark is the Senior Associate Director for Operations and Services, where he oversees occupancy management for the graduate and undergraduate residence halls. In this role, Mark supervises the assignment process, room management, and billing for all residential students within University housing. He holds a B.S. in Communication (Theater) and an M.S. in Communication (emphasis on Mass and Organizational Communication), both from Northwestern University. You can contact him at [email protected].
Mark is the Senior Associate Director for Operations and Services, where he oversees occupancy management for the graduate and undergraduate residence halls. In this role, Mark supervises the assignment process, room management, and billing for all residential students within University housing. He holds a B.S. in Communication (Theater) and an M.S. in Communication (emphasis on Mass and Organizational Communication), both from Northwestern University. You can contact him at [email protected].
Addie Shrodes
Addie is a Graduate Student and Research Assistant, who studies Everyday Learning and Identity Development on Social Media, with a focus on literacy learning and identity in LGBTQ+ youth digital culture. You can contact her at [email protected].
Addie is a Graduate Student and Research Assistant, who studies Everyday Learning and Identity Development on Social Media, with a focus on literacy learning and identity in LGBTQ+ youth digital culture. You can contact her at [email protected].
Julia A. Chapin Humanities Residential College
726 University Place, Evanston IL 60201 | [email protected]
726 University Place, Evanston IL 60201 | [email protected]