2020 CSI Faculty & Research Mentors

Research Mentorship Team: 

Dr. Sabina Shaikh is the Director of the Program on the Global Environment and a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies and Urban Studies in the College; Faculty in the Committee on Geographical Sciences in the Social Sciences Division; and Faculty Director of the Chicago Studies Program at the University of Chicago. She also serves as the co-lead for the Environmental Frontiers Initiative at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, and one of the mentors for the undergraduate research experience on sustainable development in the Galapagos Islands.

Her research and teaching focuses on the economics of environmental policy and natural resource management, the valuation of ecosystem services, urban environments, and global sustainable development.  She currently leads the social science team on a collaborative research project on water sustainability, migration and urbanization in the Mekong Basin of Cambodia. Her field work includes qualitative data collection (focus groups, interviews) with rural villages and urban migrants in cities of Cambodia, as well as the design of large-scale household surveys for quantitative analysis. Her research interests in Cambodia include the investigation of how hydrological changes caused by large-scale dam construction, urbanization and climate affect rural livelihoods; the role of microcredit and migration to cities for work in garment factories and construction; and what it means to become urban. Her other collaborative research in Chicago and the U.S. focuses on environment-health relationships, specifically how exposure to contaminants affects diabetes rates in rural and urban contexts. She is also currently working with students on case studies related to water and human behavior, including visualizations of water use on campus, and data collection to calculate virtual water footprints.

Nora Titone is Resident Dramaturg at Court Theatre and the author of the Civil War history My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth (Simon & Schuster, 2010). As a dramaturg, writer and historical researcher, Titone has collaborated with a range of artists and scholars including playwright Anna Deavere Smith and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She also contributes to projects in television, film, theatre, and commercial publishing, working with PBS, DreamWorks Studios, Arena Stage, Simon & Schuster, and others. Titone lectures at the University of Chicago in History, English, and Theatre and Performance Studies. She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century American history and biography with a focus on the Civil War period, the institution of the Presidency. the American West and the history of American theatre. She served as principal researcher on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 presidential biography, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, working with the papers of Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, John G. Nicolay and other Civil War figures at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, Harvard University, the Newberry Library, the Lincoln Presidential Library and other archives. Titone based My Thoughts Be Bloody, her multi-generational biography of the Booth theatrical family, on previously undiscovered manuscript diaries, letters and personal reminiscences from the same institutions. She has expertise as an oral historian, having created a documentary history of the 1996 Presidential elections through interviews with hundreds of political leaders, journalists, campaign staffers and delegates to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Interviewees included President Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Bush, FOX News CEO Roger Ailes, Colin Powell, former Texas Governor Ann Richards and television host George Stephanapoulos. Titone studied history at Harvard University and UC Berkeley, and is represented by ICM Partners.

Stephanie Soileau is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. Her collection of short stories Last One Shut Out the Lights is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Co. in July 2020. Her work has also appeared in Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA in English from the University of Chicago. As a fiction writer from Louisiana, she writes mainly about Louisiana -- as a place emblematic of global environmental change and decay, of the ambivalent relationship between the oil industry and the people whose land gives up the oil, of the moral, social, and ecological dilemmas provoked by water management, and of “solastalgia,” a neologism for the psychic ache that comes from living in a home-place that has undergone an irreversible transformation. Her novel-in-progress, SILT, also under contract with Little, Brown & Co., is set on the eve of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and follows a family across four centuries from France, to Acadia, to the bayous of Louisiana, where land disputes and environmental catastrophes echo down through the generations. Research -- especially oral accounts and archival documents like court records and plat maps -- informs much of her fiction. She has worked with students on theses and independent projects primarily in fiction (both short and long forms), but also in nonfiction, visual narrative, and digital literature. These projects have included coming-of-age stories, experimental flash fiction, historical fiction, literary horror, spiritual and lyric essays, and even a narrative video game.

Victoria Saramago is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work covers twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literatures with a focus on environmental studies and studies of fiction and fictionality. She holds a doctoral degree in Iberian and Latin American Cultures from Stanford University, as well as BA and MA degrees from the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, is forthcoming in 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Fictional Environments explores how novels can help us make sense of environmental change. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization. Fictional Environments shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. Saramago is also the author of O duplo do pai: o filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (É Realizações, 2013), as well as a number of articles and essays, some of which explore the role of rivers in poems and novels in the backlands of Brazil. Rivers and water management have been increasingly present in her research and teaching interests. The course she offered in the Fall of 2019, “Ecocriticial Perspectives in Latin American Literature and Film,” approached, for example, the role of rivers in Latin American imagination and the pollution of oceans in contemporary literature. In the spring of 2020 she will offer the signature course “The Amazon: Culture, History, Environment,” which will discuss the presence of water in Amazonian life and history, including the way hydroelectric plants have been reshaping the region and cultural responses to these changes.

Laura Colaneri is a Ph.D. candidate in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies program of the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She received both her B.A. in English and Spanish literature and her M.A. in Spanish literature from the State University of New York, University at Albany. Her dissertation research focuses on the sinister and political terror in the cultural imaginary of the Southern Cone dictatorships. Her research interests further include gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and horror and gothic literature and film.


College Summer Institute Leadership:

Faculty Director, Christopher J. Wild is Professor of Germanic Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Collegiate Master of the Humanities in the College; he is also Associated Faculty in the Divinity School and Deputy Dean of the Humanities Division. Professor Wild is the author of Theater der Keuschheit - Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach: Freiburg, 2003), which traces the profound historical transformation of theatricality that takes place in German theater from the Baroque to Classicism. His current projects examine the ways in which theology and religion inform developments that are generally considered genuinely modern. Most immediately, he is working on a book that asks the seemingly simple question why Descartes’ founding text of modern philosophy was titled Meditations on First Philosophy in order to take its generic affiliation seriously. 

Program Director, Dr. Nichole J. Fazio, is Associate Dean of Students and Executive Director of the College Center for Research and Fellowships (CCRF). She completed her doctorate in the History of Art at the University of Oxford, where she was a postgraduate fellow at Trinity College and supported by an Oxford Overseas Research Award fellowship (ORSAS/Clarendon Bursary). Nichole's current scholarship focuses on 19th-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as Paul Strand's "water pictures", particularly his Tir A'Mhurain images of the Outer Hebrides and Sicily. Nichole is also currently working on Julia Margaret Cameron: A Poetry of Photography, a publication that celebrates the Cameron photographs held at the Bodleian Library and the University of Oxford (forthcoming, Bodleian Library Publishing, 2021). Additional teaching and research interests include the Pre-Raphaelites, 19th-century material and visual culture, and early British Symbolism.